zolotiyeruki

Bingo. Falcon 9 dropped launch costs by 2/3 to 3/4. A fully-laden SS/SH could drop it by another order of magnitude. If you're only paying $100/kg to get something into orbit, every high school in the developed world is gonna want to send up their own senior capstone project. Some brilliant, evil marketer is going to figure out how to get a constellation of satellites to fly in formation with bright LEDs and fill the night sky with advertisements. A gazillion satellite internet companies will spring up. NRO is going to launch ma-hoo-ssive spy satellites. There'll be a ton of new weather observation satellites, heck, even road-traffic-monitoring satellites. The economics of beamed power shift dramatically. Maybe we could even launch a pile of solar sails to shade the earth and regulate global warming. This is one of those "supply creates its own demand" situations IMO. Make something cheap, and people will find a use for it.

Why would a LES require a heat shield? Are you expecting that it might be used all the way to near-orbit? My impression is that LES is jettisoned well before the craft gets up to the kind of velocities that would require a heat shield for re-entry.

I'm sure the NRO would *love* the ability to put a spy satellite in orbit with an 8-meter primary mirror.

If that's the case, though, then there'd be no need for hexagonal tiles at all--they could just use rows of rectangular tiles, and stagger the longitudinal gaps. Or used trapezoidal tiles, which could be used for both straight rows (alternate them up/down) and the nose cone (point all the trapezoids up).

Even in that situation, though, both parties (buyer and seller) win--the buyer pays less than they otherwise would, and the seller gets more than they otherwise would.

Uh, correct me if I'm wrong about this, but isn't the whole point of the sealed bid process to encourage the bidders to put forth their last, best offer? Is BO basically admitting they could have submitted a lower bid, but thought they could pad the cost and still win? If so, then they deserve a big fat Nelson "ha ha!" and a public shaming.

Holy toledo, that looks like something out of The Expanse.

Keep in mind there's a header tank in the nose of SS, which may explain why the door doesn't extend closer to the nose.

I think the idea is that if you had a common shaft, you could accomplish different "gearing" by using one pitch for the fuel impeller and a different pitch for the oxidizer impeller

I have to say that I'm extremely impressed with the packaging, i.e. how small they've been able to make the whole assembly. I say this because at my last job I dealt with moving fluids through pipes, measuring flow, actuating vales, etc. Valve actuators are big, and fast-acting actuators are really big. Accurately measuring steady state fluid flow through a long, straight pipe is more difficult than you'd expect, and measuring rapidly-changing fluid flow through curved pipes in close proximity to pumps and turbines is simply an absurd problem. And doing it in an extremely hot and violently vibrating tail end of a rocket? Fuggetaboutit. Seriously, my hat is off to those engine designers (and not just SpaceX's!)

I suppose that shouldn't be a surprise. It doesn't need to get all the way into the corners. It only needs to get within 4.5 meters of each side.

That was some awesome landing footage. Maybe I never noticed it before, but it was super easy to see what appeared to be a 1-3-1 entry burn. And dang, that is one sooty booster.

Just a bump today: I've tested it in 1.12, and it works fine. When I get around to it, I'll get it updated for CKAN. Until then, you can still use the Github link in the first post.

That's a good question, and I don't have any definitely-true answers, but a couple things come to mind: 1) the space shuttle was moved to the pad with two 300 Ton solid rocket boosters strapped to it. That's a lot of mass SH/SS won't have 2) as I understand it, SS/SH will be integrated on the pad, so you're only moving half the launch stack at a time 3) SS/SH are each tail-heavy when unfuelled (less tip-over risk) 4) normal semi trucks are limited to 40 tons for a full-length trailer (roughly 10T per axle, 2.5T/wheel). If SS is 100T dry, you'd only need 40 wheels to meet that same standard. SuperHeavy may be somewhat heavier, but in a similar ballpark.

Realistically, I see Starship as a way to more economically implement Rods from the Gods.

If raptor is only $250k apiece and all the tanks and plumbing are only a few tens of thousands, an emergency supply drop might well be a lot cheaper than one might expect. It makes SS almost disposable.

I'm having trouble understanding what you're looking for here. Can you elaborate a bit more?

Hard? Actually, no. It just takes beefier equipment. Really big hydraulic rams, with really big pumps behind them. I'm reminded of a job I had several years ago, where a large work barge (probably 100x250ft) was next to a big oil platform. The barge's thrusters kept it quite precisely aligned with the mostly-stationary oil platform, despite the motion of the waves.

What we'all are saying is that SpaceX have a history of taking ideas that sound a bit on the far side of crazy to doubters like you, and then making them happen, while you consistently post doubts that appear to be founded on nothing but intuition. The shoulder analogy fails on even a superficial level. It'll be a hinge, not a ball and socket joint. It'll be made from steel or titanium, not bone and cartilage. Super heavy can hover, or nearly hover, when empty, while the human body does not have that ability. The catching tower will have shock absorption, if not outright active suspension, while the steel beams in your analogy do not.

I wanna see a SH painted as a kerbal!

I can answer that. Airliners are typically pressurized to about 8,000 feet. That's a high enough pressure to keep everyone alive and cogent (10,000 ft is where some people start getting hypoxia), while decreasing how much pressure the fuselage has to maintain. Atmospheric pressure at 35,000 ft is about 3.5 psi, at 8,000 ft it's about 10.9, and at sea level, 14.8. Instead of withstanding (14.8-3.5 = ) 11.3psi, the fuselage only has to hold up to (10.9-3.5=) 7.4psi.

I would argue that catching fairings in a net *did* work. SpaceX just came to the conclusion that making the fairings water-tolerant was a better approach. Even if the Merlin engine wasn't originally designed for relight, I'd be shocked if its design hasn't evolved to better facilitate relight. And Raptor's failures on landing have generally been the fault of the fuel tanks, rather than Raptor itself.

You're right that ULA would likely have to do a whole bunch of redesign in order to recover their boosters, but I wouldn't call SpaceX "lucky." Reusability was a primary goal from Day 1 for Falcon, and a whole lot of engineering (and money, and explosions) went into making that happen. As a disposable launch vehicle, F9 has been pretty doggone reliable from the beginning.

When engaging in this sort of debate, it's helpful if you have a similar historical situation to refer to by comparison. ...and we do, at Cape Canaveral, where the ecosystem doesn't seem to be terribly bothered by the presence of the world's largest rocket launch complex. Also, six acres is a drop in the bucket compared the size of the area it's in. Pull it up in Google Earth, and you can see just how small a footprint the SpaceX facilities are. Also also, if SpaceX blow up a starship prototype, they scatter liquid oxygen, liquid methane, (or maybe a whole lot of CO2 and straight carbon), and stainless steel, plus a tiny fraction of other materials. With the exception of the "other materials," the local ecosystem isn't going to care--methane and oxygen evaporate, stainless steel isn't going to taint the environment, and the rest of the stuff is generally at the back of the rocket and stays on or near the crash landing pad.

It reminds me of the short story Superiority by Arthur C Clarke.