RyanRising

Doesn't say what terms they left on, just that they did leave. Haven't seen anything that would suggest the engineers are at fault for BE-4, though.

There have been quite a few updates on the repository, just apparently nothing that warrants a release. But from that evidence, work is still progressing on this.

Sure, but wouldn't you expect them to have jobs related to that contract? Only one or two of these people appear to have had anything to do with HLS - the job titles mentioned in the article are: New Shepard senior vice president chief of mission assurance national security sales director New Glenn senior director New Glenn senior finance manager senior manager of production testing New Shepard technical project manager senior propulsion design engineer senior HLS human factors engineer (clearly HLS related) BE-4 controller lead integration and testing engineer New Shepard lead avionics software engineer BE-7 avionics hardware engineer (possibly HLS related? That was one of the applications for those) propulsion engineer rocket engine development engineer Now, a few more of those could have been tied to HLS and just didn't mention relevant components in the titles, but a substantial number of them are definitely unrelated - as much as two positions in the same aerospace company can be at least, that is.

I would like to know why we saw the boron shenanigans' signature at the end of the burn as well as the beginning. Perhaps they just wanted to get the stuff out of the rocket?

You say there are a few advantages to embedded nozzles, but the only one I see mentioned is reentry/aerodynamic shielding. That is a practical purpose for them, and, for example, is why RCS thrusters in reentry vehicles are sunken into the hull. But covering main engines would require more mass, and for questionable utility if you can just keep those engines out of the airflow by more sparse shielding - the winds of reentry should only come from one direction, after all.

I get what you’re going for with Giga Bay, but I don’t think it follows the pattern. We’ve called the ones that exist “mid bay” and “high bay,” so I think a natural extension of that would be to call this new one the “wide bay.” Or maybe they’ve actually called it that at some point, and I’m far too late and up against far too much with this criticism.

Unfortunately, looks like he hasn’t gotten to that yet. He did do Life on Mars, though! (I’d say something about how bad it is, but if you clicked that link you knew exactly what you were in for.) As for me, I’m just gonna listen to the commentary, whatever rocket audio they give, and presumably the cheers or groans of the team. They’ll probably have something by Test Shot Starfish playing during the orbit* anyway. *Not really in orbit, or maybe it is, whatever.

Oh shoot, I was under the impression the conditions were much more similar than that - SpaceX coming in with a bunch of rockets to this wildlife preserve and the local authorities were welcoming that for the same reason wildlife tends to do well near KSC - what human in their right mind would go over there? If that's not the case, it's a totally valid criticism and i retract my joke. I have also seen the points about their takeover of Boca Chica and the closures before, and I do agree that they make for a pretty awful place to live near by. (At Boca Chica, anyway. I do live close to their HQ, but they haven't tried flying a rocket from there yet.) This deal is getting worse all the time. I mean, I get the reasoning for it, and engineers would hang a dead possum off a plane if it made it fly faster, but ew. Still better than the trifin design though.

It's not needed - you might not even notice that the sounds are playing over each other. If you don't, don't bother with it. If you do, you'll need to put :NEEDS[!RocketSoundEnhancement] in the Waterfall configuration files or as a patch on your own where the sounds are applied.

Sure, but no reason not to fry a few at once. Just cause there are bigger problems doesn't mean we shouldn't work on the others if there's no restriction on doing both. I don't think SpaceX qualifies as a monopoly on anything just yet, though. Wait til these guys find out about the Meritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. They're gonna have a fit. (Also, I replaced the link with a non-AMP one, in case anyone decides to click it.)

I'm confused - why do you need to send that many people?

This is caused by the JNSQ configurations. It can be addressed by setting the extinctionThickness parameter in each planet's atmo.cfg to something other than 0.

They actually did show some tracking shots of the rocket this time! But still mostly animation and talking heads.

I again disagree with the first part. I think you want to minimise every risk you can. Address the riskiest bits first, of course, but that doesn't mean you should ignore the less significant risks. And this is one of those risks we know how to mitigate. The other stuff you mention later on may not have such a clear solution. But I've said before, and will say again, I agree that it's okay to eventually launch crew on a Staship with no escape system- if and only if it has practically validated some extremely low failure rate, by flying several hundred successful missions for every single launch failure. Until it reaches that point, launch is still a risky endeavour, and one we know how to reduce the risk of. I want to be clear: nowhere have I said this launch escape system should come at the cost of other safety systems. I'm only saying that flying crew in a Starship, without an LES, before it has practically validated its reliability, is incredibly irresponsible and needlessly dangerous. If any of those conditions changes, so does my opinion. If the rocket is blowing up behind me, I'll try firing the LES. You can stay behind if you think that's safer.

It's just cause the Scatterer lens flare is better sized to the sun you see, and the sun is a lot smaller in JNSQ Kerbin's sky than it is in stock Kerbin's. The Unity sunflare kinda obscures that fact.

True, but that Earth launch variant should still exist and be separate from the Mars trip ship. It wouldn't replace one of the tankers, but 11 launches seems plausible if 10 does.

Those hybrids would have a very hard time failing, leaking, or exploding. Their fuel is solid, so it's not going anywhere, but cannot ignite without its oxidiser, which is stored in the LOX header - something that will be developed and present regardless of this system. Adding crew launch capabilities to Starship is going to be a massive amount of work whether or not you have an LES, an LES is just an added safety measure. In this guise, and in all other implementations of launch escape systems (most that do use solid propellant, mind you) this adds to crew safety, not reduces it. You are most certainly not going to iterate as rapidly with crewed Starships as they do with uncrewed, because you need to be more careful flying meat. That means development delays due to this system would be proportionally less significant than they would on the uncrewed Starships, which they will likely still iterate with at breakneck speed while crew development is happening. You're totally right that this reduces margins and decreases performance. But this would only be implemented once they're looking at flying crew, at which point they will have margin to spare on little things like accident survivability and crew accommodations. Basically, I don't agree that adding a failsafe increases risk. Here's a post that details the incidents with Soyuz where a launch abort was performed. 2/3 cases, the launch abort system helped. 1/3 it was not needed. There is indeed one case in which the launch abort system caused a disaster, killing three people. It still saved six later on its life, and I'd say that proves it was a worthwhile development. Just as a numbers game, and admittedly specific to that rocket, the launch abort system was a worthwhile development.

I think managing to prove it out like that before flying crew is the best solution. I just worry they’ll try to put people on it before it’s had enough time to do those >270* successful flights for every launch failure. *or whatever number you find acceptable for flights between accidents. Doesn’t have to be that one, just has to be high.

I don’t believe the crewed Mars version of Starship and the crewed Earth version of Starship are going to be the same, no matter if we choose to include an LES on the Earth version or not. That’s plenty of iteration, which is great for optimising and improving the design, but it doesn’t help with proving reliability through flight rate. We can’t just make one that works to do that, we have to make one that works and then fly its design a couple hundred times successfully with only one or two failures to be able to responsibly claim it’s safe enough for crew without an escape system. The first flight of Starship design iteration 58 has exactly as much proven reliability as the first flight of Starship design iteration 3.

Their engineers seem to believe its lineage can. But maybe they’ve been fooled by the grand conspiracy too. I’ve been partial to the idea of a smaller separable crew section at the top of the ship, where the crew would sit for launch. Should be within the range of what we can bring down on parachutes, if cramped (I think they managed to cram 10 people into an Orion test article in a useable launch config), and would use a hybrid motor with the header tank’s LOX as oxidiser and some kind of rubber or paraffin for fuel. Very hard to have ignite mistakenly, weighs less than SRBs would, but should have comparable thrust. Should be useful in case of pad abort, in-flight, and maybe even landing burn issues - you’d have the capsule pitch up during its escape burn and the high TWR + low ship terminal velocity means it should be able to get out of that situation too. The main issues with developing something like that would probably be the hybrid motors (tricky beasts, those are the mechanism to separate the launch module from the rest of the crew section cleanly, and of course the chutes. I haven’t run the numbers on this construction, though - I need to do that to work out the extra mass for hybrid motor + casing and see if we’ve developed any parachutes that could feasibly handle something more massive than Orion. Still unnecessary mass for something like a Mars mission, but I imagine the ship for landing on Mars would not be the same one used to launch the crew, so no need for it to be installed there. EDIT: Hmm, Orion weighs 20,500 pounds (ew, pounds) and JPADS was seen as having a clear path to airdrop stuff up to 60,000 pounds. Dunno what the impact velocity of that would be, though, so it might not be relevant. Orion’s parachutes are 1,144 pounds, though I’m not sure if that’s counted in its landing weight. Probably not, but if they are, that tells me parachutes will have to be ~5.6% of the capsule’s mass. Orion only seats four, but that’s cause it has to take them all the way to the moon and back. Our abort capsule is probably going to be cramped and comparable to the Soyuz descent module, which is 2.9 tonnes for three people. They can use the rest of the ship to stretch their legs once they get to orbit. Using the same ratio for the ten I was imagining for Starship (cause 100 people is ridiculous. dearMoon is supposed to have 10 people), that’s just 9.7 tonnes. Call it 10. As for the structure of that section of the ship, the LOX header tank should weigh about 640 kg, and I’m going to approximate the section we’re chopping off for our capsule to be a come 6 m tall and 7 m wide, made of 4mm stainless. For that cone, including the base, that works out to ~0.417 m^3 (does this forum do superscriptes?), which at 7930 kg/^3 is 3.32 tonnes. I have no idea how much the heat shield will weigh, on that section of the ship, so I’m gonna call it half a ton, bringing us up to 14460 kg. I have no idea what the dry mass of hybrids is like, especially ones optimised for thrust rather than impulse. Probably similar to solids? A GEM-63XL would have a dry mass of 5,400 kg, bringing our dry mass to 19,860. (Orion seems like a bad comparison here, seeing how its LAS is able to be thrown off the vehicle and includes that fairing.) Add 5.6% for parachutes, and what our LAS needs to pull away from the ship is 20,972 kg, plus whatever’s left of the LOX header’s 21,300 kg. Also, I’m going to assume a similar mixture ratio for hybrids as there is for kerosene - 2.7. Most hybrid fuels I know of are hydrocarbons, so that seems reasonable. Put those numbers into the rocket equation, you get 280 = 250 * 9.8 * ln((20,972 +21,300 +MFuel)/(20,972 + 21,300 - 2.7MFuel), which works out to a fuel mass of about 1,270 kg. All told, this 10-person hybrid Starship escape module should weigh about 22,250 kg, including the chutes, capsule, structure around it, hybrid fuel and motors, but not the LOX in the header tank. I’ve tried to make sure all my errors trend towards overestimating the mass rather than underestimating it, but that still leaves ~77,000 kg of payload for the orbital accommodations and the actual mission. And if your ship blows up the crew gets to live and fly another day. Seems like a good trade to me. P.S. I just noticed: after all that waffling about, we’re at ~2.2 tons per person. Pretty close to Orion’s 2.3 tons per person. Our capsule has an integrated abort system, theirs has appropriate space and heatshielding for lunar flights and reentry, both are for wildly different purposes, but that one number came out pretty close. Weird.

I don't think a plastic ruler can be evolved into a Saturn orbital station. But that Tintin rocket can be evolved into a Mars lander - at least, it's a little more plausible, wouldn't you say? But that's still kinda avoiding my point. Whoever gave you that ruler did not claim it would take you to Saturn. The person showing us this rocket claims it, or something like it, will take people to Mars. I can get that you don't believe it, but to say that guy's knowingly lying and there are bigwigs behind the scenes doing the "real" planning for the rocket for some other purposes is, indeed, a conspiracy theory. And so it does have something to do with what SOXBLOX said?

Well, of course you can't mitigate other failure modes with a launch escape system. Clue's in the name: It's for escaping the launch. Something I think will be incredibly important until Starship launches have a level of risk comparable to... maybe we could use that oft-quoted 1/270 LOC ComCrew metric - I think that was including the LES, right? To empirically prove that out, you'd need 270 flights without a failure for each one with. They could probably make that work in a reasonable timeline if they launched a Starship a day for several years. But until they have flown that much, it would be needlessly risky to launch crew without an escape system. The other risks are still there, and by no means made safer by it, but they're risks you do need to take to make the mission work. This one isn't. I'm not sure what that second point is trying to make - Soyuz does a similar thing, but that didn't stop those three launch aborts from happening, it just means there are other launches that could fail. As for the breakdown of failure modes, it seems to show just as much that the Soyuz escape system isn't necessary as it does to show the Starship one isn't. MS-10 probably could have tried firing the second stage to get them out of there, in 18a it wasn't used, and T-10a... well, could redundancies on the tower have provided an alternate means of escaping? Perhaps. But I don't see anyone clamoring to try that. You claim it's not for Mars, but instead the "real investors," separate from Musk, are putting billions of money towards something else. While the outward show of the program is a cover-up, "making you believe that the painting is real." Sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory to me, which is exactly what SOXBLOX described.

How about Soyuz? It's flown a lot, so there's lots of data on it, and should be understood extremely well. It's had changes and upgrades made to it over the years, yet still has an escape system. Needs it, too.

The Apollo moon landings also had a lot of stuff going on that wasn't ascent, and could have easily killed the astronauts, yet they still put an LES on the Saturn V cause it was something that could be ameliorated with it. The existence of other failure modes does not mean you shouldn't mitigate those you have. And I very much doubt they'll be able to prove out an airliner-like safety record by the time they want to launch crew on Starship, whether for Mars or other purposes. They'll be able to do a ridiculous amount of launches, sure, but you need millions of flights to show a safety record like that. For context, there have been about six thousand orbital launches ever attempted.

Is there a good place to get started learning about what knobs there are to tweak with getting cloud layers and city lights to look "right"? Great work has been done with this mod, but I can't find where people learned how to do that great work.