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Booster may eventually be reusable a dozen times a day.

Ship 1000 times a year. Many more ships than boosters.

Wow. That sounds like a big ask. But it sure would be something. That's 440,000 tons to LEO a year per booster btw.

 

Edited by RCgothic
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18 minutes ago, RCgothic said:

Booster may eventually be reusable 1000 times a day.

This does not sound reasonable. There is 86400 seconds in a day. That would need launch every 86 seconds. Even powered flight is much longer. Also 100 times per day is not credible. It takes about 500 seconds from pad to pad and it is clearly impossible to refill booster and install new Starship and make all safety checks and countdown in 6 minutes. Practically one launch per day would be incredible pace.

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Did I completely miss something, post in the wrong place, or watch the wrong video, or is Crew-2 in progress right as we speak with no activity in this thread whatsoever? 

EDIT: Looks like somebody else shares my delusion, if nothing else.

EDIT2: Booster landed safely, second stage still flying nominally. Yay.

EDIT3: Dragon separated. I guess it's smooth sailing to the ISS from here on.

Edited by Codraroll
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That seemed like an awful lot of debris. Maybe it's lighting, maybe it's something else.

At T+6:08, there's a rather large ring of something floating around, somewhere in between the lower CGTs and the thrust section.

They landed the booster and orbited the crew nominally, so a moot point, but I wonder why this happened?

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54 minutes ago, Clamp-o-Tron said:

That seemed like an awful lot of debris. Maybe it's lighting, maybe it's something else.

Yes it's the lighting, the rocket was in full sunlight, but earth wasn't in the shot so the camera exposure was high.
Secretly all rocket launches shed a lot of ice.

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2 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Did I completely miss something, post in the wrong place, or watch the wrong video, or is Crew-2 in progress right as we speak with no activity in this thread whatsoever? 

EDIT: Looks like somebody else shares my delusion, if nothing else.

EDIT2: Booster landed safely, second stage still flying nominally. Yay.

EDIT3: Dragon separated. I guess it's smooth sailing to the ISS from here on.

This is the true mark of SX's success: their launches are so common and routine that even we don't make an event out of it 

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2 hours ago, munlander1 said:

The exhaust clouds seems to have separated into two different clouds. One is white just like any cloud but the other one is blue. Why blue?

 

 

2 hours ago, Clamp-o-Tron said:

That seemed like an awful lot of debris. Maybe it's lighting, maybe it's something else

I'm with you guys on this - the booster video looks like something is going on, but I'll take @kedrednael 's answer. 

 

Was the exhaust blue b/c high atmosphere vs lower (yellower)? 

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39 minutes ago, RCgothic said:

Wow. Genuinely thought HLS was going to be the critical path. Boeing better step up.

[snip]

That article sums it up pretty well. It's become harder and harder for old space to ignore the existence of Starship and what it represents, more so now that it's won a major NASA contract.

I genuinely think that Musk's vision of a multiplanetary future is just within reach. If Starship works, everything changes.

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38 minutes ago, RealKerbal3x said:

That article sums it up pretty well. It's become harder and harder for old space to ignore the existence of Starship and what it represents, more so now that it's won a major NASA contract.

I genuinely think that Musk's vision of a multiplanetary future is just within reach. If Starship works, everything changes.

See no reason why starship would not work. Yes the flip cause issue with fuel flow and reentry is an harder problem to solve but both should be solvable. 
Now I doubt an city on mars within 50 years because of economic. 
But in orbit absolutely, here I agree more with Bezos, 

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2 hours ago, RealKerbal3x said:

That article sums it up pretty well. It's become harder and harder for old space to ignore the existence of Starship and what it represents, more so now that it's won a major NASA contract.

I genuinely think that Musk's vision of a multiplanetary future is just within reach. If Starship works, everything changes.

Using Starship, 100 tons of payload on Mars requires ~700 tons wet in LEO (100t payload, 100t stage, 500t props).

A colony on Mars is widely estimated to need about a million kg of downmass, therefore 7 million tons to LEO.

If a booster is reused 12 times a day for a year with 5 flights putting up 500t of props and the 6th putting up 100t payload plus 100t starship, then each booster puts up over half a million tons every year. A single booster could downmass enough for a Mars colony in 14 years.

 

Miss that goal by a factor of 10, but with 4 launch pads/boosters  (39A, Starbase, Phobos + Deimos), and it's still only 35 years.

 

Wow.

Edited by RCgothic
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1 hour ago, RCgothic said:

Wow. Genuinely thought HLS was going to be the critical path. Boeing better step up.

 

 

I'm reading this... and my first thought is, 'Here's why SX has been pushing out (and almost landing / crashing) so many Starships, so fast.' 

The general public may not recognize that an 'almost land' and a 'did land, but blew up' is an amazing technical feat... but NASA engineers certainly do.  So by getting so ever-freaking close to pulling off the miracle they're aiming for (as merely a stepping stone), along with their proven ability to reuse Falcon... the subconscious / unpublished reason SX got chosen wasn't merely cost, or reusability, or 'failed to comply with requirements' - it was belief that they could do what they offer.

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1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I'm reading this... and my first thought is, 'Here's why SX has been pushing out (and almost landing / crashing) so many Starships, so fast.' 

The general public may not recognize that an 'almost land' and a 'did land, but blew up' is an amazing technical feat... but NASA engineers certainly do.  So by getting so ever-freaking close to pulling off the miracle they're aiming for (as merely a stepping stone), along with their proven ability to reuse Falcon... the subconscious / unpublished reason SX got chosen wasn't merely cost, or reusability, or 'failed to comply with requirements' - it was belief that they could do what they offer.

"so ever-freaking close" is right.  Honestly, the engines are doing pretty well, as long as they're properly fed.  Sure, one caught fire on SN11, but SpaceX are iterating so rapidly that they can handle failures and slipstream the fixes into later models.  Contrast this to SLS, where it absolutely has to work perfectly the very first time.

That rapid iteration really synergizes well with their design--welded sheet metal tanks/fuselages are cheap.  Their goal is $250k per Raptor.  Let's say they're at $2m right now.  For a couple dozen million dollars, tops, they're getting to basically test the entire spacecraft through just about every regime, from launch to hover to flop to descent to flip to hover to landing, all in actual real space under real conditions.

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43 minutes ago, StrandedonEarth said:

It occurs to me that Starship has the size to  capture a small asteroid all on its own, bring it back, and provide a shirtsleeve environment to examine it....  Dv requirements are another matter...

Which will be delivered to Earth first? The sample tubes on Perseverance, or 100 tons of excavated Martian rock on Starship? It seems kind of close.

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