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150 Meter SpaceX Starhopper Test [video]
- anorphirith 7y agoThat was glorious. I love the chrome
- kristianp 7y agoGlorious indeed. The shape reminds me of Boba-fett's ship from starwars. Notice the flame turning red before landing? Did the mix become rich, or the flame cooler?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- londons_explore 7y agoPresumably they need to run at a very low throttle to land. My guess is the engine doesn't run well at such a low throttle, and in fact they might have to deliberately make the mix very rich to keep the combustion stable.
- hansthehorse 7y agoSee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T29ybqjv8-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T29ybqjv8-U Manley goes over the exhaust color changes at the end.
- hcrisp 7y agoLooks like a flying grain bin. On the other hand, it has very nice thrust vector control!
- chasd00 7y agoiirc it was built by a company that makes water towers so not too far off.
- abakus 7y agoOne step closer to the mars.
- Florin_Andrei 7y ago> the mars The one and only.
- new_realist 7y agoMars is a shithole. Do you think alcoholism on Antarctic stations is bad? Wait for your very own Martian bunker. Porn vids alone are going to choke the Internet connection to that colony.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- new_realist 7y agoFetal development in the low gravity environment of Mars might result in some interesting babies. But will it rise to the level of child abuse?
- erikpukinskis 7y agoWhat constitutes child abuse varies from state to state, I don’t see why it wouldn’t vary from planet to planet.
- Retric 7y agoGravity might not be irrelevant, but several experiments point in that direction. https://www.popsci.com/mammal-embryos-can-develop-normally-in-space/ https://www.popsci.com/mammal-embryos-can-develop-normally-i... Fetal development is effectively already a low gravity environment as it’s effectively floating in water. Cells use chemical delusion to determine orientation not gravity. PS: Low gravity ‘simulations’ have demonstrated issues, but it’s not clear they do a good job of replicating low or micro gravity.
- 7y ago
- B_Throwaway 7y agoFor a moment I thought it was Boca Chica, Dominican Republic, and was a bit confused.
- jiggawatts 7y agoCongratulations to the SpaceX team for once again spectacularly succeeding at actual rocket science!
- irjustin 7y agoLove itttttt!!! Congrats to the team and am the hard work!!
- cryptoz 7y agoThis is the best prototyping I've ever seen. Small, 1 of 31 engines in the final config, water-tower contract, built in the open fields in south Texas, the whole thing. The end game of this line of rockets is hundreds of Mars trips launching daily, carrying people and supplies to the Mars colony.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thecopy 7y ago> hundreds of Mars trips launching daily Not realistic. The minimum-energy launch windows for a Martian expedition occur at intervals of approximately two years and two months. Worst-case is four times the distance.
- monk_e_boy 7y agoThat was really amazing. I've been following it closely on YouTube but to see it actually fly - mind boggling! Not quite clean room facilities. The nose blew over in a storm. Locals streaming video from cameras mounted on telegraph poles. When it landed various parts came shooting off spraying gas as they tumbled away. Full-flow engine - first to ever fly. And boy did it fly! I love it. Back yard hacking hardware. Summary - SpaceX are the first people to land rockets for reuse. Then they go and do the same thing with a different engine design, different fuel, in a water tower controlled with Falcon 9 reaction control system. Quick question for the experts: 1 - how do they measure altitude? GPS is notoriously poor at this. 2 - any idea of how the control software was written for a flying water tower? Could they use the Falcon 9 software?
- cryptoz 7y agoI'm no rocket expert, but I have some ideas about altitude. > 1 - how do they measure altitude? GPS is notoriously poor at this. GPS is indeed notoriously terrible. They might have better luck with it though, given they can buy high-quality receivers and always have a good view of the sky. However I think I read (or hope at least) that they use barometers. Even cheap smartphones have barometers for relative altitudes these days, and while the barometer data is influenced by the atmosphere and weather of the day (the focus of like all my startups [1]), the rocket could easily know about the differences in the weather and create MSLP (mean sea level pressure) numbers that would allow for excellent precision at landing. Your phone barometer can tell the difference in altitude between your head and your feet. [1] My latest go at this is https://www.allclearweather.com https://www.allclearweather.com (US, Android) with a goal of eliminating the altitude part of barometer data so that the remaining data can be QC'd, summarized with statistics and eventually hopefully included in weather models for increased forecast accuracy
- bdamm 7y agoI think they do also have a radar for distance to pad information but I couldn't cite that. I believe they have a form of instrument landing system, similar to how it is done at major airports but oriented for the rocket of course, and the distance calculating "radar" could be part of that (using signal timing) but I am not sure exactly how they did it.
- wcoenen 7y agoAn RCS tank fell off during landing and went flying :-) (if not visible, rewind a bit. It's only clear when the video is shown in the highest resolution, which might not be the case during the initial buffering.) https://youtu.be/m0MTtqzzf-U?t=8518 https://youtu.be/m0MTtqzzf-U?t=8518
- colinthompson 7y agoYou can see it a little bit better in the feed from Everyday Astronaut: https://youtu.be/m0MTtqzzf-U?t=8520 https://youtu.be/m0MTtqzzf-U?t=8520
- wcoenen 7y agoLink broke, other one with slowmo: https://youtu.be/lsoS6C0uzGY?t=659 https://youtu.be/lsoS6C0uzGY?t=659
- xiphias2 7y agoWhat is special/hard to make for Starhopper compared to Falcon 9? Hm..I think I found it on the net: The Raptor engines are the same size but are about twice as powerful as the existing Merlin engines.
- dwaltrip 7y agoThe Raptor engine is the first full-flow staged combustion cycle engine to every fly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_combustion_cycle#Full-flow_staged_combustion_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_combustion_cycle#Full-f...
- anticensor 7y agoThe word you have looked for is ever, not every.
- colordrops 7y agoIt's clearly an unintentional typo, and also not possible to confuse for something else.
- justAnotherNET 7y agoA few things from a non-expert: -Raptor is operating at previously unheard of pressure, and uses advanced new materials and heavily utilized GPU-powered flow simulations during design. -it's super efficient. It's the first operational full flow staged combustion engine AFAIK. High thrust + High efficiency == a good time. -it uses METHALOX fuel, which can be made on various celestial bodies somewhat easily (importantly: mars). Water + solar energy + CO2 == methane-oxygen fuel -uses more difficult spark ignition w/unlimited restarts instead of more reliable but "cartridge" based TEA-TEB (sp?) igniters that rely on mixing volatile complex to manufacture toxic chemicals to start. The test hopper has 1 engine. The orbital prototype will have 3. The production booster will have 31 of these bad boys and put out 2.0-2.7x the thrust of a saturn V
- zaroth 7y ago
- mabbo 7y agoFor some context for those who aren't SpaceX fanboys (card carrying member here)... Starship is a new two stage rocket SpaceX is building. It's going to have similar launch capabilities to the Saturn V Moon rocket, but be 100% reusable. The upper stage is planned to be able to take people to Mars and back. The test today is a very early prototype. It's just the upper stage, just a mock up of it (literally built by a company that makes steel water towers, I've heard) and it had just one of their new "Raptor" Engines. The test was basically "Can we hover 150m in the air and safely land?". It passed almost perfectly. Why do this? Because the Raptor is a really complex and new design and SpaceX need to test the hell out of it. Next after this will be two higher quality prototypes of the upper stage, probably with more engines, and probably to go high enough to test reentry. And then eventually a test of Stage 1, which will be a massive reusable booster (like Falcon 9 but many times larger). The whole thing is designed for rapid reusability. No refurbishment between launches and no new hardware needed (100% reusable) means very low variable cost per launch.
- JshWright 7y agoCalling Raptor "really complex" still manages to undersell it a bit, in my opinion. It's pushing the state of the art in rocket engine design pretty significantly. It's the first full flow closed cycle engine to fly. For folks who are interested in learning more about rocket engines, Scott Manley is a great resource: https://youtu.be/4QXZ2RzN_Oo https://youtu.be/4QXZ2RzN_Oo
- _ph_ 7y agoIt is also worth noting that the first two prototypes (they are building 2 in parallel on different sites in Texas and Florida) are already quite progressed and planned to do their first testing soon (according to Elon possibly in September even, but that is likely to be optimistic).
- woodandsteel 7y agoBesides being 100% reusable, the second stage will be able to be refueled in orbit. That means it can take off to Mars with a full load of fuel, and carry about a hundred times as much cargo there as a Saturn V sized rocket could.
- throwaway808080 7y agoThis was just a single raptor engine. I was quite amazed at how stable it’s thrust control was. Truly remarkable. SpaceX definitely keeps on making me think I’m doing jack shit with my life. Here are people prototyping and pushing frontiers in rocket technology, and all I do day in and out is pump out CRUD UIs.