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Fuck space and going into space and talking about space and making space
The Incredible SpaceX Starship and a New Golden Age in Space
- Thread starter jvett77
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That was the video time. I should have mentioned that. Landing occurred 8:24 after liftoff as indicated in the timeline and sequence of events shown before the video starts.
Yeah. You could tell that I hadn’t watched the video in the link. Just watched now. That booster has been up and back eight times now. Just ridiculous.
A must read if you are impressed with the success of SpaceX, is Liftoff by Eric Berger, an exhilarating history of Elon Musk's startup company from its beginning in 2002 and it's development of the Falcon 1 rocket that achieved orbit after six years of hard work, and $100 million of Musk's money, through it success with the Falcon 9 rocket which achieved the first rocket landing in history on its 21st attempt in 2015.
It's all about Musk's vision, his leadership and ability to select people to key positions at the company, and his drive that had no room for failure. He fought with the air force for launch room at Vandenberg and when they delayed his plans, he moved his launch team to Qwajalein in the Marshall Islands and built his own launch facility. Amazing!
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When they put a magnetic plasma shield around that bitch, let me know.
This is super interesting.
Though I have to say it….18 billion mega watt hours…..
If a firm like SpaceX isn’t thinking about things like this, they will be soon. And I’m sure they are. NASA might be experimenting in the theoretical, but they won’t be able to innovate and get something like this out anymore.
Mars can be reached with what’s there or being built now. Shouldn’t need a warp drive for that. Though I can’t see too much more than “flag and footsteps” missions, as much as someone like Elon doesn’t want to just do that. Actual human exploration on a decent scale will likely need another leap in hardware.
Something like this would be perfect to really stretch our legs and get out of the solar system. But, the big challenge is how you go about getting equipment off the earth that can build this and drive generation of 18 billion megawatt hours.
Reading this now. It’s super interesting.
Finished this book last night. Fantastic story telling and amazing stories from the pioneering early days of SpaceX. I never really realized how close they came to being another failed space company littering the side of the road.
They literally were down to the last rocket they had left and no more money to keep going like that. They almost lost the rocket on transporting it for the last try at orbit. To be fair….if they were launching from Vandenberg or Cape Canaveral with that last rocket after the transport damage they would have not been allowed to light it and been sunk.
Huge last chance and they nailed it. Right on the back end was $1 billion to supply the ISS and coming off this Hail Mary they got the contract and could swing right into Falcon 9.
And boy did they make right from there.
I remembered reading this why I’ve followed all that SpaceX has done so intently….why I got the chills seeing them perfecting landing boosters and FINALLY coming up with a way to make access to space much cheaper. This all leads to Starship and Mars. This all leads to colonizing space and opening it up to so many more humans.
A lot left to accomplish…..but I will say this. I grew up reading the fascinating history of NASA. Of the guys with the right stuff and the can-do of Apollo. Even the “finest hour” of saving Apollo 13. They read like ancient hero stories. The early days of SpaceX read a lot like this too. They have shown the right stuff.
Cool summary of the book. Amazing also is that SpaceX is able launch rockets for one-third or so the cost of NASA due to its reusable boosters. Easy to see why their revenue took off.
I won’t spoil too much of the book if you want to read it….but one anecdote that amused me. They always knew the cornerstone to cost reductions was reusability. With Falcon 1 they insisted on putting a parachute on the first stage to attempt to get it back.
Elon admits candidly how dumb they were on this. The forces at play with the first stage separated could never be handled by a chute. Plus, the first one failed right after launch and came down on the launch site. They learned first hand just how horrible salt water infiltration was….but they kept blindly putting a chute on it.
With Falcon 9 readability was built in from the start. How they quickly came through figuring this booster return out, and how consistent it’s been since is just amazing.
It’s this very thing that makes me think it’s not totally a pipe dream to put Starship on Mars. Since they are just about there on the Raptor engine this could be huge. Raptor uses methane instead of kerosene as fuel. It’s more powerful and more efficient.
They can get to Mars and work to figure out how to pick oxygen and methane out of the Mars environment and refuel the Starship to return back and be reused.
Lots of things to learn there….but the footprints have been there all along. Way back on the Pacific island with Falcon 1 they bought a machine and were making liquid Oxygen out of the air to fuel the rocket.
I did read the book a few weeks ago.
These guys do things in a hurry. They have the Falcon Heavy booster ready for a test in Texas. In July they're shooting for the first orbital Starship test. These are recent links but I wouldn't be surprised if these are too optimistic but who knows.
SpaceX rolls giant Super Heavy rocket to launch pad for testing (video)
SpaceX aims to launch first orbital Starship flight in July, company president says
Ah. You’ve read it too. Cool.
Yeah…..I love the “test and learn from failures” philosophy. Legacy contractors are incented to fill up servers and reams of paper with plans and contingencies before even trying to light hardware. It’s boring. And it gets us no where. We’ve been stuck in LEO about 50 years now.
I love the philosophy since the start of this company to test and find out. We see things in the past like the second stage blowing its tank, or the Falcon 9 that disintegrated on the pad. In the NASA circles where every year of funding and changes of administrations is so grueling these failures are magnified.
Commercial companies can learn and adapt and keep testing. And they’ve clearly shown they can vet a system out fully before they put lives at stake.
I’m eager to see this super heavy (something like 30+ engines just on the booster!) and the Starship combo take off and see what it can do.
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Yeah, Berger emphasized Musk's iterative development methodology vs the traditional. Iterative process is designing, prototyping, and testing different versions (iterations) of a product in repeating cycles which saves time in the long run and is more cost effective. Traditional methods as you basically indicated above where engineers get locked into one design on reams of paper, hoping generally to get it right the first time. I hope SpaceX can maintain the same philosophy even as they grow larger.
They are remaining iterative with the Starship so far….I imagine they will stay that way.
SpaceX launching four civilians into space on a 3-day orbital trip aboard the Falcon-9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. Nothing scientifically challenging here. One goal is to promote and raise money for the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. And to continue the objective of sending civilians into space.
The Dragon spacecraft's docking adapter, normally used to dock with the International Space Station, has been replaced for this mission by a single monolithic domed glass window 2.5 feet across inspired by the Cupola module, allowing 360° views outside spacecraft's nose. It will be the largest single-piece window ever flown to space.
The Dragon spacecraft's docking adapter, normally used to dock with the International Space Station, has been replaced for this mission by a single monolithic domed glass window 2.5 feet across inspired by the Cupola module, allowing 360° views outside spacecraft's nose. It will be the largest single-piece window ever flown to space.
Just watched the launch from here. I’m about 60 miles from the launch site. Got a good view of it going up. Once it was high enough the sunlight caught all the smoke. Amazing view.
Brother got video from only about 15 miles away. You can see the first stage coming down out of that cloud. Every burst of the retro rockets lays out ripples in the cloud. It was amazing.
Didn’t turn into a good pic but this shows the cloud that formed in the remaining sunlight high up
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It will be a bit until they get the Cupola open fully but I’m interested to see this. Ingenious engineering at SpaceX again.
“Let’s see….we won’t need the big, bulky docking mechanism up top….how about we put a huge window there?”
Also….don’t miss the middle finger from Elon to Bezos and Branson. “Oh, you’re taking people the (almost) technical edge of space for a few minutes? Here’s four civilians going up for 3 days….and getting wide panorama views.”
PT Barnum lives on in this guy.
will they attempt to land vertically?