An always cool Falcon 9 launch (and other Space News)

[Uttamattamakin]

7 hours ago, manikyath said:

you havent launched yet, you have no way of claiming your timeline is more precise until it is in orbit and working.

 

also - you're comparing a launch on mature (enough) hardware to a radically new launch design where many cogs need to come together in the same machine.. and then blaming one of those cogs despite all of them being on the same 'delay timeline'.

 

Of course we want to launch on a known safe reliable system*

Arianne 6 is kidna new.  Arianne 5 is the one ESA is famous for using.  NASA even uses it when they want to be 10,000% sure it will not blow up.  6 we'll see about.  

The ground breaking, world changing thing isn't getting to space.  Anyone can do that.  Constructing a triangle of light over 2 million km on a side and measuring gravitational waves with a space probe is something else.   

[manikyath]

4 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

The ground breaking, world changing thing isn't getting to space.  Anyone can do that.  Constructing a triangle of light over 2 million km on a side and measuring gravitational waves with a space probe is something else.   

similarly, getting a literal block of flats worth of payload bay up in space is "something else".

similarly, RTLS is "something else".

 

and again.. you're comparing the complexity of rocketry to a science experiment. simply the claim that "anyone" can get something to space is such an incredibly disgusting statement, you're essentially reducing all the work thousands engineers have done over the past 70 years to make your project even possible at all, to lighting a candle.

 

i could similarly dumb down your science experiment to "just measuring delays in light transfer, anyone can do that", and praise the engineers that made a rocket that can place said satalites for said experiment in orbit at a precise enough location for your experiment to work. would that upset you at all? if the answer is yes, your post should upset every single rocket engineer.

 

with every post you make, i get more and more convinced that you are in no position what so ever to make an opinion about rocket design, because it really appears you are -what we refer to in IT as- "just smart enough to be dangerous". you know just enough about it to think you know what you're on about, but you *really* dont. (referring back to the plumbing statements here)

 

stop comparing things that are vastly different concepts, and stop dumbing down everything that is not your own field to "just lighting candles". as it turns out, if you want people to respect your work, disrespecting the work of others doesnt help.

[Uttamattamakin]

14 hours ago, manikyath said:

similarly, getting a literal block of flats worth of payload bay up in space is "something else".

similarly, RTLS is "something else".

 

14 hours ago, manikyath said:

stop comparing things that are vastly different concepts, and stop dumbing down everything that is not your own field to "just lighting candles".

I'm not dumbing it down.  I mean Launching a bigger version of something is nice.   One could say we are launching a bigger version of LIGO.  (Ignoring that we are using time delay interferometry) 

14 hours ago, manikyath said:

as it turns out, if you want people to respect your work, disrespecting the work of others doesn't help.

My failure to self deprecate is not putting anyone else down.  What I'm doing will get a Nobel prize awarded to the top people involved by name for all of our work.  That's not a put down.  I do the same thing as Newton, Einstein, Richard Feynman LISA will test theories I work on, as well as many others.  More than likely I'll be wrong which is how it usually goes.  Don't playa hate celebrate.   I worked really hard to get what I have and I will not put on false humility. 

[manikyath]

4 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

My failure to self deprecate is not putting anyone else down.  What I'm doing will get a Nobel prize awarded to the top people involved by name for all of our work.  That's not a put down.  I do the same thing as Newton, Einstein, Richard Feynman LISA will test theories I work on, as well as many others.  More than likely I'll be wrong which is how it usually goes.  Don't playa hate celebrate.   I worked really hard to get what I have and I will not put on false humility. 

all of this is so far beside the point...

 

it has nothing to do with self deprecation or what the LISA project will achieve, it's about not acting as if you're somehow the only project out there doing important work.

4 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

I'm not dumbing it down.  I mean Launching a bigger version of something is nice. 

and yet..

23 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

The ground breaking, world changing thing isn't getting to space.  Anyone can do that.

your project, for all the scientists that work on it, would be on the ground if not for the engineers that make it possible to put it up there. your complete and utter inability to see how shallow of a statement that is shows just how close minded you're acting around the topic of rocketry.

 

and also;

4 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

I mean Launching a bigger version of something is nice.

starship is *not* "a bigger version of something" - that has been my exact point for half a douzen pages, while you were claiming that that is what they *should* be doing. they are doing very new things with their launch vehicle, to be able to do very new things in space.

 

your viewpoints in this topic are about as shallow as this retired old NASA phart that suggested they should ditch the commercial partners, and *essentially just do a worse apollo to go to the moon*.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/01/former-nasa-administrator-hates-artemis-wants-to-party-like-its-2008/

(btw, props to the writer for that title, because it's a killer title.)

 

he states

Quote

 the Artemis Program is excessively complex, unrealistically priced, compromises crew safety, poses very high mission risk of completion, and is highly unlikely to be completed in a timely manner even if successful.

which might in a lot of ways be fairly correct, but the alternative he porposes is..

- based on technology that is on NASA's roadmap, but not developed yet.

- more expensive, by many orders of magnitude

- given most aspects of this plan are combined from apollo derived technology, and the man's own imagination... of questionable benefit to crew safety compared to commercial offerings.

- based on a horrendously unrealistic timeframe

 

basicly.. he took a plan that was conceived of in 2005, but dropped due to cost and complexity reasons.. and then just re-proposed this to go against the new plan which:

- reduces the cost for NASA by relying on commercial partners that are inherently better at cost optimizing.

- shifts the complexity to commercial solutions which can be developed and tested without NASA budget.

 

i particularly like this quote;

Quote

The problem with Griffin's plan is that it failed miserably 15 years ago. The independent Augustine Commission, which reviewed NASA's human spaceflight plans in 2009, found that “[t]he US human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practices of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources." And that is probably putting it politely.

or in human language:

"we dont have the money to keep doing this, we set goals we cant afford, shyte will break if we keep  doing this."

 

 

----

on a positive note...

SpaceX is doing lots of work, presumably in preparation of IFT-3

[Uttamattamakin]

41 minutes ago, manikyath said:

all of this is so far beside the point...

 

it has nothing to do with self deprecation or what the LISA project will achieve, it's about not acting as if you're somehow the only project out there doing important work.

Never said LISAs work is the only important work.  It's just fundamental science and as such stands to greatly influence what we are able to do for ever more.  

 

At one point people were doing very basic science on electricity and magnetism.  It was academic and found no application for 100's of years latter.  (One of the fathers of E and M was Ben Franklin.  He defined what makes a charge positive or negative. )    Other things are of course important.   That's why I write about them and talk about them and you know became a scientist so I could study them.  

[manikyath]

18 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Never said LISAs work is the only important work. 

 

On 1/28/2024 at 7:37 PM, Uttamattamakin said:

world changing thing isn't getting to space.  Anyone can do that.

 

[Uttamattamakin]

27 minutes ago, manikyath said:

 

 

Because that's true.  Lots of people put things in space.  Not that many do fundamental physics through astrophysical observations.  You know I'm not the one that named it fundamental physics.   That's just what its called. 

https://science.nasa.gov/biological-physical/focus-areas/fundamental-physics/

https://breakthroughprize.org/Prize/1

 

[manikyath]

26 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Because that's true.  Lots of people put things in space.  Not that many do fundamental physics through astrophysical observations.  You know I'm not the one that named it fundamental physics.   That's just what its called. 

https://science.nasa.gov/biological-physical/focus-areas/fundamental-physics/

https://breakthroughprize.org/Prize/1

 

lots of people study fundamental physics, that means it's easy right, everyone can do it.

[Uttamattamakin]

2 hours ago, manikyath said:

lots of people study fundamental physics, that means it's easy right, everyone can do it.

Sure.  I'd love to have more people in the field.  Who knows what good ideas we might get.   

[manikyath]

17 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Sure.  I'd love to have more people in the field.  Who knows what good ideas we might get.   

i took my time replying to this one, because that reply really is a case of "i like peanut butter, do you swim?"

 

so.. i'll share a story. when i first started working in IT, two of our biggest customers were in the medical field, each in a field where a LOT of pathologists were on staff. these pathologists had done 8 years of university to get their stamp of "pathologist", and most of them added on at least one more specialization, at 4 more years of studies..

the reason i know this so well, is because this was explained to me by a colleague, who also explained how dealing with support issues from these pathologists was... "different". For a lot of them this just meant they used funny words like "cerebral hernia" instead of "my neck hurts", but some of them genuinely were unable to communicate like a normal human being. 

 

to me, it's obvious that this "symptom" also explains elon's inability to reason like a more average human.

 

now.. why do i say this? maybe because i feel like it applies to you to some degree, maybe not.. who knows?

[Uttamattamakin]

4 hours ago, manikyath said:

now.. why do i say this? maybe because i feel like it applies to you to some degree, maybe not.. who knows?

Probably.  Theoretical Physicists are not known for having the most common sense. h
.........

(Maybe these last two post should be a DM so I reply to this in a DM)

Edited January 30 by Uttamattamakin
This is more of a DM's sort of direction for discussion. :)

[Uttamattamakin]

Space X Launches a Cygnus cargo ship on a Falcon 9 to the ISS.   (By the by if others want to post space news under here post it up I'll mark it the solution.  Space is one of the most interesting applications of computer technology.    What would be very interesting is an answer to this question.  How do you "ground" a computer that is 100's or 1000's or Millions of km's from a planet?)

 

https://apnews.com/video/aerospace-technology-space-exploration-florida-national-national-1fdd54fe1303482596471b99a4a5bdaf

 

Quote

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a cargo resupply mission Tuesday to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. (Jan. 30)

 Falcon 9 has matured into a reliable, dependable, well tested platform.  Hopefully space X can someday in about 10-20 years time say the same about Starship.    Meanwhile China is doing this. 

https://spacenews.com/chinas-change-7-moon-mission-to-target-shackleton-crater/

 

Quote

HELSINKI — China will attempt to land on the illuminated rim of Shackleton crater near the lunar south pole with its 2026 Chang’e-7 mission.

Chang’e-7 will target one of a handful of sites thought to offer exceptionally long periods of illumination at the lunar south pole, according to a recently-published journal article.

The area, stated to be the illuminated rim of Shackleton crater, possibly corresponds to a candidate landing site for NASA’s Artemis 3 crewed mission named Peak Near Shackleton.

Such a site could offer favorable illumination while also being close to permanently shadowed regions which could host volatiles such as water-ice.

 

[Needfuldoer]

1 hour ago, Uttamattamakin said:

What would be very interesting is an answer to this question.  How do you "ground" a computer that is 100's or 1000's or Millions of km's from a planet?

Easy!

Spoiler

 

(It's probably just 'chassis ground', like the body of a car.)

 

[manikyath]

3 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

How do you "ground" a computer that is 100's or 1000's or Millions of km's from a planet?

you do and you dont. grounding is a strange thing when you detach yourself from the earth (even in airplanes, yachts to a degree, and some cases of ground isolation outside of that)

 

the entire craft still has a common "ground", in stuff that is tied to earth we agree that earth is our common ground (hence, "earthing" depending on which set of terminology you prefer.) on stuff that isnt tied to earth as a reference, you simply set up a reference of your own. as long as everything on a craft "agrees" what ground is, that will be ground, and everything else will be reference to that.

 

i presume the issue is several orders of magnitude greater in space, but the same theory still largely applies, except in space you can have stuff like ball bearings arcing over from static buildup.

 

also - the reason you have to "earth" a computer down here is because everything else is reference to that earth, so if your computer's reference floats up, it will cause weird interactions with things that dont have their ground floating around.

[Uttamattamakin]

44 minutes ago, manikyath said:

you do and you dont. grounding is a strange thing when you detach yourself from the earth (even in airplanes, yachts to a degree, and some cases of ground isolation outside of that)

 

the entire craft still has a common "ground", in stuff that is tied to earth we agree that earth is our common ground (hence, "earthing" depending on which set of terminology you prefer.) on stuff that isnt tied to earth as a reference, you simply set up a reference of your own. as long as everything on a craft "agrees" what ground is, that will be ground, and everything else will be reference to that.

More or less true.  One thing we talked about in LISA a lot is the charge management system for the satellites.  Charges build up on them, and if they build up on the test masses inside them they can muck up our data.  So a lot of thought has been put into this for that specific case.  I'm just wondering in general,  and I'm sure many would like to know how does say ... a starlink satellite keep those same charges from frying the electronics?  

 

Since charges build up over time as charged particles impact the satellites.  Eventually they will cause a problem. 

 

44 minutes ago, manikyath said:

i presume the issue is several orders of magnitude greater in space, but the same theory still largely applies, except in space you can have stuff like ball bearings arcing over from static buildup.

Oh yes.  Searching my memory when watching the old Shuttle dock with a satellite or even for a Dragon or Soyuz docking at ISS equalizing the charges between them is part of the process.   At least for ISS there is a document about thishttp://everyspec.com/NASA/NASA-JSC/NASA-SSP-PUBS/SSP_30240C_50316/ and it works the way one would think.  A lot like here on Earth.  A ground is referenced to the conductive structure of the station, which is huge.  So that's not likelty to be a problem. 

 

IT can't be that simple though for the average satelite  can it?  Much like a door knob that tends to shock people  they will build up charge and boom.  There goes your computers. Where does the excess charge eventually go?  I can make guesses at what is done, and likely there is more than one solution for this. 

 

44 minutes ago, manikyath said:

 

also - the reason you have to "earth" a computer down here is because everything else is reference to that earth, so if your computer's reference floats up, it will cause weird interactions with things that dont have their ground floating around.

Then you see magic blue smoke from very expensive parts IF the discharge is large enough. 

[Uttamattamakin]

Hey spacefans.  Space X used a Falcon 9 to send the lander IM-1 made by intuitive machines to the Moon.  Launch looked good so far so good.    This new probe is the first lander to use a cryogenic methalox based engine.  

 

 

SpaceX launches Intuitive Machines IM-1 mission from Florida - NASASpaceFlight.com

 

 

This follows the failed attempt by a Blue Origin launched probe made by Astrobotic.  While the Vulcan Centuar did deliver it on trajectory for the Moon.  A faulty valve on the probe caused an explosion which did not destroy the probe but which did lead to it not having propulsion to reliably manuver. 

[Uttamattamakin]

Success  

 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/02/22/odysseus-lunar-lander-makes-history-moon-spacex-launch/72660310007/

 

 

Quote

A week after launching aboard a SpaceX rocket, the uncrewed Odysseus spacecraft gently touched down on the surface of the moon Thursday, ushering in a historic moon landing.

The lander – designed and operated by Houston-based Intuitive Machines – is now the first commercial spacecraft to ever land on the moon. The lunar landing is also the first by an American-built spacecraft since NASA's final Apollo mission in 1972.

 

This follows the unsuccessful mission of Astrobotics' Peregrine lander.  That lander also carried a rover and other experiments but failed shortly after separation from the Vulcan Centuar booster due to a propulsion issue in the lander. 

 

[CarlBar]

@Uttamattamakin Meant to get round to this thread again but the Hyperloop thread took all my energy. needed a breather after that but will try to get this written up quickly.

 

Let me start with the "why didn't Space X build off an enlarged Falcon 9".

 

There's several factors.

 

First and foremost you cannot literally scaleup somthing and expect it to work perfectly, and when your pushing the limits of what is physically possibble with the technology your working with, (which Falcon 9 absolutely is doing), it adds a lot of risk factors. Thats why a lot of design upgrades over the years in other rocket programs have seen a failure or two in their first few flights of an upgraded stage. Upscaling or otherwise significantly modifying a stage can be almost as tricky even on a conventional rocket as designing something completely new from the ground up. Thats why traditional US rocket development has focused on a single stage being modified at once, (the Arianne series ha also done the same at times AFAIK). It reduces the risk factors to a single stage making troubleshooting and improvement easier as your not fighting two different sources of failure at the same time.

 

But of course Faclon 9 isn't a conventional rocket, it's lower stage is reusable. When you upscale a lower stage without significant modifications to the upper stage you pretty much allways end up with the upper stage separating at a higher speed and/or altitude. It has to otherwise your throw weight to orbit wouldn't increase. Falcon 9 simply can't handle returning from those higher speeds and altitude without major design modifications, (which carries extra risks). And even with all that they probably wouldn't get any increase without first building a bigger barge to land on as return to launch site would rob them of most of their extra payload.

 

The superheavy booster in terms of performance really is just the Falcon 9 concept scaled up and modified to address all of this, yes there's Methlox and catch instead of landing legs as well, but i'll get back to those. Ignore them for a moment to look at the rest of the design and it really is them doing all the modifications needed to make a really enlarged falcon 9 style booster work. Even the change to stainless steel is heavily driven by it. With Falcon 9 style construction they'd have had to add a thermal coating to the exterior of the rocket to handle the higher thermal loads on the return, stainless steel handles the heat better so they can avoid that. Even some of the other changes to the thrust characteristic, grid fins, e.t.c. are to address area's where a scaled falcon 9 would run into structural or other issues because of how loads would scale too much with an increased design size. But then why the new upper stage you ask? Well thats where we get to the meat and potatoes of why they went with a clean sheet design.

 

 

And that brings us to the second reason to go with a clean sheet design. Yes, they probably could have made a scaled up Falcon 9 booster work with some compromises along the way. But it wouldn't have solved the other reasons they had for building starship. And no i'm not talking Mars. Mars is mostly Elon PR speak again. Yes it's an aspirational goal, but at best it's third or fourth tier priority for SpaceX right now. They'll include Mars relevant stuff, but not at the expense of their other priorities. Their first major Priority is getting Starlink fully built out. Despite what they've managed to do with Falcon 9 so far it just isn't capable enough for doing the whole thing. The full capabilities are going to require larger individual satellites in some parts of the network, and the cost per satellite with falcon 9 is too high even with the smaller less capable V1.5 and V2 Mini types they're launching on Falcon 9. Their Second more understated goal is t open up space ventures to even more private entities, thus allowing them to make money from a wider array of customers increasing both the absolute size of the revenue stream, but also how stable that revenue stream is.

 

And thats why they didn't just do a clean sheet for the booster, they also developed a new and much more ambitious upper stage to pair with it. There's a limit to how far you can scale the booster without also scaling the upper stage, and the existing upper stage from Falcon 9 is very weedy compared to the Booster. There's just a limit to how low cost they could get things on a per launch basis with it.

 

 

Now i did mention i'd come back to the Methalox and the Catch System. I'll address the Methalox first as it's the bigger and more complicated part to explain.

 

First things first, the reason they're going to MethLox really has nothing do with mars. It's a nice thing to have as an aspirational goal helper, but any version thats actually going to land and take off from mars is going to have to be a custom model, (like HLS), so it's not a requirement on the base starship, it just eases things a bit when designing the modified version.  The real reason they moved to it is just how much better a propellent it is than the alternatives.

 

The main reason it's taken this long to become a thing is entirely down to the fact that as i've noted a huge amount of rocket designs throughout history have been the same as the previous one with one stage modified or occasionally changed out. RP-1/LOX and H2/LOX where good enough, (without being the best they could do in a given stage most of the time), that switching away from them never felt justified from a risk PoV.

 

You can see just how good the propellent is from just how much of an improvement Vulcan Centaur  is over preceding designs despite the BE-4 engine being effectively 2 generations or rocket engine tech behind in some respects. Despite such a hyper conservative design its still dramatically better than preceding engines for a first stage booster.

 

There are some additional factors beyond that, for example the steady shift from 3 stage to 2 stage designs, where the benefits of MethaLox as a first stage propellent become more pronounced.

 

 

The catch system is a whole other thing though, i get why they're going for it, one of the biggest problems for Electron and Falcon 9 is the turn around time of transporting the boosters from wherever they land back to the launch pad, and catching it in mid air also lets you lose weight you'd need in the form of landing legs. But of all the things they're doing this is the one i'm most sceptical of. It's a cool concept with a lot of very practical benefits, but it's also doing something really ambitious. I think it's completely  plausible they could do it, it's certainly not forbidden in any way, i'm just not confident enough in their ability to turn possability into reality to not feel a large amount of concern over it. Someone at some point in the future WILL make it work, but i'm not sure it's going to be SpaceX with Starship.

 

Before i continue on to my last point of this post, (which has now taken way too long), i want to point somthing out. I can't remember if it's somthing you've said, so don;t take it as aimed at you if you haven't, but i see it often enough i want to address it. Specifically i see a lot of claims that SpaceX haven't even started on the modifications they need to make for HLS. This isn't strictly true. we haven't seen a full scale HLS mockup or anything, but several modified sections with features that only really make sense for HLS have been spotted. SpaceX doesn't just prototype Starship stuff with full size ships, somtimes they'll buiold a small segment like a nosecone, or a couple fo barrel sections, or a thrustpuck with new features they want to experiment with. We haven't seen anything that is likely HLS related since they moved production into the starfactory, but that might just be because they're keeping it all indoors away from prying eyes.

 

 

Now i want to come back to the Methalox and a general point regarding spaceflight risk management. Yes Methlox represents a significant risk factor, (alongside a number of other risk factors in Starship), but that doesn't mean the old way of doing things wasn't also high risk, they just moved the majority of the risk from the launch vehicle to the payload. Harsh volume and mass limitations mean payload have to be either very low capability or very harshly engineered with all the risks that came with it and often large cost and time factors. The Ultimate example to date was of course the James Webb telescope. They had to make everything fold up so much whilst keeping the weight extremly low and it made several aspects fairly high risk as a result. Getting it to the point where they were willing to launch it took enormous amounts of time effort nad money as well because of how much they had to do to keep the size and mass down.

 

Starship represents such a huge increase in payload volume and mass, (both are going to be at least 5 times that of existing launchers, and may well be even greater), thats it going to make an enormous amount of things possibble that were impractical previously because of either the risk or the sheer cost to develop of the payload. Building a telescope with greater capabilities and a lower cost than the Webb will be relatively straightforward once Starship is functional.

 

The launch vehicle is going to be higher risk till it proves itself, but it's going to allow for very conservative and safe payload as a result of the enormous jump in capabilities. And that even if the cost per KG to orbit wasn't lower would have a dramatic effect on the ability of various entities to do stuff in space.

 

 

Before i vanish, found this in the time i've been working on this post, (about a month, took some big breaks), try not to start laughing at the failure sound :p.

 

[Uttamattamakin]

The Moon lander has tipped over and the stock that was sky high has fallen. 

Moon Stock Plummets After Odysseus Lunar Lander Tips Over. NASA Calls Landing a Success.

 

Quote

Intuitive and NASA held a news conference on Friday evening. The lander “is stable, near or at the intended landing site,” said Intuitive CEO Steve Altemus. One hiccup though—the lander is on its side.

 

Altemus said the craft was going 25,000 miles an hour in orbit and landed at about 6 miles an hour, with a horizontal speed of about 2 miles an hour—a comfortable walking pace. The company believes one of the lander’s feet caught on something on the way down, causing it to trip.

 

NASA’s associate administrator for space technology, Dr. Prasun Desai, still called the landing a success. “Congratulations to the Intuitive machines. An amazing successful landing,” he said.

First JAXA had this problem now NASA yet the landers are still working.   Interesting.  

[Uttamattamakin]

5 hours ago, CarlBar said:

@Uttamattamakin Meant to get round to this thread again but the Hyperloop thread took all my energy. needed a breather after that but will try to get this written up quickly.

 

Let me start with the "why didn't Space X build off an enlarged Falcon 9".

 

There's several factors.

 

First and foremost you cannot literally scaleup somthing and expect it to work perfectly, and when your pushing the limits of what is physically possibble with the technology your working with, (which Falcon 9 absolutely is doing), it adds a lot of risk factors.

I mention several times that it would not be just taking all the dimensions of it and multiplying by 2.  What I proposed is that Space X take the internal design of several Falcon 9's and bundle them together to make a larger rocket.  This means it would have multiple fuel tanks rather than two big ones.

But that makes things more expensive and heavier and less payload!? you say. 

Right now Starship has not gotten on gram to orbit.  This is because of fuel sloshing around in that huge tank.  That has been the underlying physical issue.  Masses tend to want to continue in motion on a straight line unless a force acts on them so that fuel will slosh.  One way to stop it from causing damage is to keep the fuel in 3-4 or more smaller tanks.    You know so perhaps it won't explode?   

 

5 hours ago, CarlBar said:

And that brings us to the second reason to go with a clean sheet design. Yes, they probably could have made a scaled up Falcon 9 booster work with some compromises along the way. But it wouldn't have solved the other reasons they had for building starship. And no i'm not talking Mars. Mars is mostly Elon PR speak again. Yes it's an aspirational goal, but at best it's third or fourth tier priority for SpaceX right now. They'll include Mars relevant stuff, but not at the expense of their other priorities. Their first major Priority is getting Starlink fully built out. Despite what they've managed to do with Falcon 9 so far it just isn't capable enough for doing the whole thing. The full capabilities are going to require larger individual satellites in some parts of the network, and the cost per satellite with falcon 9 is too high even with the smaller less capable V1.5 and V2 Mini types they're launching on Falcon 9. Their Second more understated goal is t open up space ventures to even more private entities, thus allowing them to make money from a wider array of customers increasing both the absolute size of the revenue stream, but also how stable that revenue stream is.

This is true but they got a lot of money for Artemis.  So far Starship is AWFUL for Artemis.    If starship works in 5-6 more years that's fine for Space X.  Artemis needs it to work and Land on the Moon with people in it in no more than two years. 

 

This video also answers to much of what you have written. 

 

 

 

5 hours ago, CarlBar said:

You can see just how good the propellent is from just how much of an improvement Vulcan Centaur  is over preceding designs despite the BE-4 engine being effectively 2 generations or rocket engine tech behind in some respects. Despite such a hyper conservative design its still dramatically better than preceding engines for a first stage booster.

2 Generations behind who?  BE4 works.  The generational improvement of Space X engines doesn't count until they get some mass in orbit.    

 

 

5 hours ago, CarlBar said:

The catch system is a whole other thing though, i get why they're going for it, one of the biggest problems for Electron and Falcon 9 is the turn around time of transporting the boosters from wherever they land back to the launch pad, and catching it in mid air also lets you lose weight you'd need in the form of landing legs. But of all the things they're doing this is the one i'm most sceptical of. It's a cool concept with a lot of very practical benefits, but it's also doing something really ambitious. I think it's completely  plausible they could do it, it's certainly not forbidden in any way, i'm just not confident enough in their ability to turn possability into reality to not feel a large amount of concern over it. Someone at some point in the future WILL make it work, but i'm not sure it's going to be SpaceX with Starship.

 

The catch system is one of those things which while not "forbidden" by the laws of physics it pushes them in a way that tends towards the vehicle being destroyed if anything goes wrong.  It either works 110% or it does not work at all.    They are a long LONG way from being able to catch one of these things.   This again is where I think scaling this down and trying to catch a Falcon 9 Booster in this manner would be a good idea.  We know Falcon 9 works well.  So, the rocket itself wouldn't be much of a wild card.  

 

5 hours ago, CarlBar said:

Now i want to come back to the Methalox and a general point regarding spaceflight risk management. Yes Methlox represents a significant risk factor, (alongside a number of other risk factors in Starship), but that doesn't mean the old way of doing things wasn't also high risk, they just moved the majority of the risk from the launch vehicle to the payload. Harsh volume and mass limitations mean payload have to be either very low capability or very harshly engineered with all the risks that came with it and often large cost and time factors. The Ultimate example to date was of course the James Webb telescope. They had to make everything fold up so much whilst keeping the weight extremly low and it made several aspects fairly high risk as a result. Getting it to the point where they were willing to launch it took enormous amounts of time effort nad money as well because of how much they had to do to keep the size and mass down.

That's an interesting way of looking at it. 

 

JWST being designed to not be serviceable by humans is also and mostly a product of being put into an orbit where no human rated space craft at the time could go.  It is WAY out of reach for the Space Shuttle.  It is going to be out at Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2.  There was talk that the Constellation program's capsule, which became Boeing Starliner would have as part of it's mission profile to be able to visit the Lagrange points.  The thing is they don't have much that is of interest (at best there might be some space rocks that get trapped there to study.   Point being ... way WAY out there no human hand could touch it to fix anything.   

Granted if Starship or something with that fairing size was available it would've been easier to at least get the payload to orbit.  

 

 

5 hours ago, CarlBar said:

Before i vanish, found this in the time i've been working on this post, (about a month, took some big breaks), try not to start laughing at the failure sound :p.

 

I'd give it a 3.6/4   So that's an A.   

5 hours ago, CarlBar said:

Lets hope that Artemis isn't a failure.  

[Uttamattamakin]

A nice news story about the LISA mission.   We have some hardware under construction (have for a while) mainly the charge management system for it.  The computing infrastructure exist now more in the form of code,  since by the time this thing launches whatever computer we could build now would be 10 + years old.  

 

https://www.wcjb.com/2024/02/22/uf-engineers-develop-hardware-with-nasa-esa-lisa-space-mission/

 

UF engineers develop hardware with NASA, ESA for ‘LISA’ space mission

Quote

 

GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) - The University of Florida is the only academic institution in the country selected to design hardware for an upcoming space mission in partnership with NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

The University of Florida’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering is developing equipment that will launch on the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission in the next decade.

The mission involves launching three spacecraft that together are designed to detect gravitational waves, fluctuations in spacetime caused by massive objects. The spacecraft will orbit the sun in a triangle formation 2.5 million kilometers (about 1.5 million miles) apart.

“The concept is pretty simple, the execution is very hard,” said John W. Conklin, Ph.D., the principal investigator at UF’s Precision Space Systems Laboratory. “The execution is hard because the signals are extremely weak, that’s a good thing because there are gravitational waves passing through us right now, all the time, but they are so weak we can’t detect the distortion of spacetime.”

 

@AlexTheGreatish I know you have some interest in this sort of thing.  If LTT is interested in creating some content around this specifically...in particular how we are planning our computing pipelines  we'd love to help out any way we can.  I can put you in contact with someone local.  As LISA Canada is based in Vancouver.    Hardware that's in like FL TX and the EU.   The thing we have a HUGE problem with... on main let me just say people who are good at physics are not necessarily good with computers.  We need interest from people who are good at computers. 

[Beerzerker]

I'd call the mission a success too when you think about all the flights to place a lander on the moon that failed.
The fact things went wrong and it's STILL operational makes this one an "Above average success" to me.
 
I can't think of a single mission launched that had some kind of hiccup to happen that left a lander or probe fully functional after the fact.

Because of how it came to rest on the moon's surface, capability to perform is diminished but all the hardware and electronics seems to be in working order so it's not a disaster like some others have been before like, for example when the Japanese had their "Houston - We have a problem" moment just a couple of years ago with their lander that didn't land at all, instead it just flatout crashed (Dropped) due to a software issue they didn't foresee.

It's too bad you can't "Pilot" one down in real time from Earth or maybe this probrably could have been avoided like it was when Apollo 11 landed:
Apollo 11 - Wikipedia

Had a few scary moments, had to change the landing site/spot on the fly but pulled it off anyway which is what counts.

[wanderingfool2]

7 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Right now Starship has not gotten on gram to orbit.  This is because of fuel sloshing around in that huge tank.  That has been the underlying physical issue.  Masses tend to want to continue in motion on a straight line unless a force acts on them so that fuel will slosh.  One way to stop it from causing damage is to keep the fuel in 3-4 or more smaller tanks.    You know so perhaps it won't explode?   

You ignorant biased clueless person.  Stop with all the utter lying and presentation as if it's "facts".

 

Are you so inept that you can't understand.  FUEL SLOSHING IS NOT WHAT CAUSE IFT-2 TO FAIL TO REACH ORBIT.

 

It has already been stated by SpaceX (well Elon during the SpaceX meeting), that the cause was because they dumped LOX to try matching the propellent they would have had had they have a payload.  And LOX being LOX set a chain reaction of fire.

 

This has already been mentioned multiple times.  Fuel slosh might have been a contributing factor for the booster loss, but that hasn't been released (it could have in theory been an engine failure that caused a chain reaction or a pipe collapse due to a hammer effect)

 

 

And yet you are acting like it exploding is somehow a giant failure, yet you label the NASA one where they lost their LIDAR because they forgot to take out the safety on it, didn't deploy the imaging stuff, and had it fall over as a success

[CarlBar]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

You ignorant biased clueless person.  Stop with all the utter lying and presentation as if it's "facts".

 

Are you so inept that you can't understand.  FUEL SLOSHING IS NOT WHAT CAUSE IFT-2 TO FAIL TO REACH ORBIT.

 

It has already been stated by SpaceX (well Elon during the SpaceX meeting), that the cause was because they dumped LOX to try matching the propellent they would have had had they have a payload.  And LOX being LOX set a chain reaction of fire.

 

This has already been mentioned multiple times.  Fuel slosh might have been a contributing factor for the booster loss, but that hasn't been released (it could have in theory been an engine failure that caused a chain reaction or a pipe collapse due to a hammer effect)

 

 

And yet you are acting like it exploding is somehow a giant failure, yet you label the NASA one where they lost their LIDAR because they forgot to take out the safety on it, didn't deploy the imaging stuff, and had it fall over as a success

 

 

Cool your jets, i get the frustration but getting angry won't help. I'll be doing my own big reply at some point, but too unwell to focus that long atm. Ughhh stomach bug:(.

[manikyath]

1 hour ago, wanderingfool2 said:

You ignorant biased clueless person.  Stop with all the utter lying and presentation as if it's "facts".

 

Are you so inept that you can't understand.  FUEL SLOSHING IS NOT WHAT CAUSE IFT-2 TO FAIL TO REACH ORBIT.

we're on page 11, and still stuck on page 1. i've brought up actual historical record on N1 to disprove their arguments regarding that.. it's not worth your energy.