CatastrophicFailure

You saw the bit about the dance-off, right?

IFT-3 should have a race with Vulcan-1. Or a dance-off.

Yeah but just imagine the flambés…

In all fairness a lot of people from the 60s don’t remember the 60s…

Or feed it after midnight. er, wait a sec…

It’s all about finding that balance point. SH started its flip almost immediately after separating, much closer, relatively, than an F9 booster. My own theory is it got kicked around faster than expected by the blast from SS, which just amplified the issues with slosh, “water hammer,” turbines, etc. If the solution really is to just wait a few more seconds, with a bit more throttle, before beginning the flip, that seems preferable to adding more mass with baffles or other structural changes. As always, they have the data, we just have armchairs. IIRC SS/SH is figured to be cheaper to manufacture than F9, or cheaper per kilo even expended, or something like that. Wouldn’t work, without a ground-up redesign. Superheavy can’t go horizontal, ever, it’s not designed for it. And wings, especially big wings, are heavy. SpaceX are the raining champs of propulsive booster landing, they’ll figure this out. And likely already have.

I just tried this in RSS, not surprisingly it confirms reality. On a less-lofted trajectory (AP=156km), destructive reentry began about 3500km downrange. Puerto Rico is about 3300km from Boca, and Starship AP=250-ish km at FTSECO. So, Math=KSP_Confirmed.

I'm betting the first "true orbit" flight is S27 as a cryo-transfer demonstrator, snag some quick contract payouts. Starship was around 3000kph/830m/s short of orbital speed. Doesn't seem like much on the surface but that's a LOT of difference in the shape of an orbit. Gonna plug this into RSS right now out of curiosity.

So those of us getting up at zero-dark-fifty-five on a weekend to watch this can just roll over and go back to sleep when it scrubs instead of waiting for a reset.

That’s an awful lot of extra delta-V there… could an X-37 survive reentry from medium/high orbit?

And if there’s even a chance of that, they’d have to have some kind of recovery/scuttling power on standby, far from their usual areas of operations. That’s a pretty significant expense for nothing if Starship never even gets that far, which is still extremely likely.

Very Kerbal. But that begs the question, why not just launch in the 1L? Not the first time the Soviets launched with no abort ability…

Why is there a separate “descent module” at the forward end, or does the Vostok not go along for the ride? I don’t believe so, certainly not with Skylab and pretty sure on the ISS. Wasn’t much need, since they all had crew tunnels, and seems very high risk.

Wait Vostok-derived lunar flyby?? Also I didn’t an early Soyuz do an EVA transfer between two craft?

Spent entirely too long today canning up some homemade filling for apple… π … We now have 13 pints of the stuff. And I don’t even like apple pie that much. But, with that, the year’s canning is finally done. Still have some lingering peppers to dry but when WWIII breaks out tomorrow and brings nuclear Armageddon, we might die of terminal diabeetus but we certainly won’t starve.

Just strap enough Protons to it to get it out of the atmosphere before lighting that nuclear candle. Simple.

Raptor Vacuum durability testing at Starbase.

This is the dual-drone ship landing too, right?

In short, no. That site is for operational flights, not test flights. As in, once the bugs have been largely worked out. And even then NASA is concerned enough that SpaceX needs to build an entirely new crew access arm at Pad 40 specifically because of the risk to 39A from having Starship right there. Back in the Falcon 1 days, SpaceX had to launch all the way out at Kwajalein because the Air Force wouldn’t let them near the existing facilities at Vandenburg, too many unknowns at the time. So no, it can’t just move to an existing facility, and in all likelihood they’d still be facing the same bureaucratic issues there. The process. Hasn’t. Even. Started. The FAA has done their thing already, so why hasn’t the DFW even started? And if they have, why so opaque about it? That’s not conspiracy, that’s accountability. It’s not an accusation, it’s an IF/THEN. Since the DFW has been against this project from the get go, yes, I question the motives of those pulling the strings, again because of the complete lack of transparency and accountability. No one is saying, “don’t regulate.” No one is saying, “just light that candle!” We’re saying do so in a timely and open manner, specifically to avoid this very nonsense! It’s not a “mistake,” it’s a cheap shot. He’s better than that.

No. Incorrect. Wrong. Unless you think building a launch site in, say, the middle of downtown Corpus Christi is somehow a valid choice. As others have pointed out, there is literally nowhere else in the US they could have placed a launch site without ruffling SOMEone’s feathers. The lesser of evils really isn’t much of a choice. No. The thing people are complaining about is, very specifically, regulators NOT doing their jobs. As in, for reasons yet unknown, they haven’t even started. That is an entirely valid thing to complain about, especially if the FDW is intentionally using the situation as some sort of pocket veto. I’m sorry bud, I really am, but you just show your true colors here. Your comments are usually lucid and insightful but this just stinks of sour grapes. Bad form.

That’s how the printer companies (infamously) make their money, sell you the printer for cheap then bilk you for ink endlessly. The original subscription model. Wait is that even legal? They can force you to use their own crap?

Not worth the investment, financial and every other sense. Remember, they nixed plans to recover second stages already because they just can’t justify the effort needed for any kind of recovery. Space debris is a real concern also. The answer to most “they should just…” or “why don’t they..?” questions is STARSHIP. That’s it. That’s the solution. That’s the end result of a couple decades of rocket-building experience as to how to do everything better.