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> The fully integrated Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle will be approximately 400 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter. For reference, the Saturn V rocket from
by mabbo 6y ago
> The fully integrated Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle will be approximately 400 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter.
For reference, the Saturn V rocket from the Apollo program was 363 feet tall. It was 33 ft wide at the first stage, while Starship is 30 ft wide all the way to the top.
It's just massive. And it's fully reusable. What a game changer.
- gibolt 6y agoIt is approximately a 30 storey building. The majority of it is filled with extremely dense liquid fuel. The ability to lift that into orbit (minus most fuel and booster) with both halves still able to land is an insane feat.
- avmich 6y agoYou mean, extremely cold. Not particularly dense, methane is about half of water density, oxygen is about 10% more.
- wolfram74 6y agoGiven most buildings are upwards of 90% air by volume, that's still quite dense.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoWanted to argue with you but apparently concrete is only 2.5g/cm3 so not that much different from water.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stjohnswarts 6y agoThere have been ships made of concrete which I always found interesting. Ferrocement (I believe) is a form of boatcraft that can be done in your backyard without any special tools.
- garmaine 6y agoWhen supercooled they’re a bit more dense than that. But as the sibling comment said, most 30 story buildings aren’t filled with water.
- Sheldon777 6y agothe supercooling system and its nitrate gasses will freeze the core of the space ship
- MertsA 6y agoPresumably they mean compared to hydrolox like Delta IV or the Space Shuttle.
- doomlaser 6y agoI'm really interested in seeing how it will perform its "belly flop" landing. Seems like a high risk maneuver https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdTYMry7fq0#t=1m17s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdTYMry7fq0#t=1m17s
- zlsa 6y agoThey've already done it[0], and it was a complete success until a propellant pressure issue resulted in lower than needed thrust, and a hard impact on the pad. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qwLHlVjRyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qwLHlVjRyw
- doomlaser 6y agoIt oriented almost perfectly. I'm truly amazed at what SpaceX has accomplished so far. Just need to stick that landing a few dozen more times. It's quite a reorientation.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- systemvoltage 6y agoCurious why does it need to wait so long to reorient? I thought it was going to crash and in last few hundred feet, it flipped! Can it orient straight - way up in the air like Falcon boosters?
- SECProto 6y agoReorienting requires the use of main engines. You want to relight them only once, to ensure that the header tanks and the "downcomer" remain full. Additionally you want to burn off as much speed as possible with the bellyflop, so flipping vertical as late as possible. All combined this means combining the landing burn with the flip is best, as close to landing as possible.
- 6y ago
- divbzero 6y agoThis factoid [1] may soon need an update. [1]: https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-rocket https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/largest-r... "Largest rocket"
- ubertoop 6y agoNice use of "factoid". Most people use this world incorrectly.
- ramraj07 6y agoReminds me of Norm's use of the word when reciting a joke about Danny Devito (and Norm's a stickler for proper usage of words)
- garmaine 6y agoProbably because most of the world has a different definition.
- neuromanser 6y ago1 : an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print 2 : a briefly stated and usually trivial fact https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/factoid
- garmaine 6y agoNote that these are OPPOSITES.
- dorkwood 6y agoIf most people are using a word to mean something different, doesn't that mean the meaning of the word has changed?
- alasdair_ 6y ago
- fnord77 6y agoconsidering this is over 50 years after Saturn V, I don't feel this is such a huge feat.
- ramraj07 6y ago2001 predicted we'd be permanently living in the moon with orbital space hotels two decades ago, and no one ever thought they were being unreasonable if we kept the same momentum as the 60s, so yes it's sad. But we have to take things for what they are and what spacex is doing is definitely progress.
- WalterBright 6y agoWith the amount of money NASA was spending at the time, doing those things was not feasible.
- mcv 6y agoI grew up in the 1980s. Back then, the year 2000 was a magical year where we'd have flying cars and live on the moon. I've adjusted my expectations quite a bit due to the lack of mobility progress since then.
- noveltyaccount 6y agoYeah in some ways the Saturn program is the more amazing. Technology finally caught up to the amazing accomplishment of the Saturn rocket program, if that makes sense.
- electriclove 6y agoThe Apollo program was indeed amazing. Government bureaucracy and mediocrity is responsible for 50 years of regression. What SpaceX is doing with Starship is also amazing on so many levels (Raptor engine, reusable, goal of Mars, etc).
- mempko 6y agoIsn't the current government bureaucracy paying for starship development?
- hourislate 6y agoI've walked along the length of the rocket at NASA in Houston. It's massive and to think it took all that power to get that tiny capsule to the moon with a few men. Pretty amazing... The Starship is designed to carry 100 people. SpaceX will be able to send more people to the moon in one mission than all the moon landings ever sent. Wow...
- randallsquared 6y agoI believe it requires a refuel in orbit to get to the moon. So, two missions, but still super impressive.
- simonh 6y agoMore than that actually, it takes I think 3 tankers to fully top up a Starship in orbit, and the Lunar model needs to go into an elliptical orbit towards the moon and have at least one more top up again before having enough fuel for the rest of the mission.
- throwaway316943 6y agoI thought the full refuel was only necessary for a Mars mission?
- simonh 6y agoIt’s interesting. Going to the moon, propulsive my landing, and propulsively taking off and returning to Earth takes more dV than just a boost to Mars. If you think about it boosting to Luna and Mars aren’t much different in dV, but then you have lunar landing and takeoff again to do. Even with a very thin atmosphere, you can still shed the vast majority of your interplanetary velocity with aero braking at Mars. As a result the Lunar variant actually needs a lot more fuel delivered to it than the Mars version. Even one full refuel in LEO isn’t enough, and it needs to boost part way to an intermediate elliptical orbit and get another top up.
- beaner 6y ago
- walkingolof 6y ago400 feet = 121.9 meters, 30 feet = 9.1 meters
- sgt 6y agoFeet, not feets.
- walkingolof 6y agoThanks!
- ehnto 6y agoNot foot?
- dempseye 6y agoI never noticed this, but after thinking about it for a few minutes it seems that in standard usage there is a difference between attributive adjectives and predicative adjectives. As an attributive adjective, "foot" is indeed correct, e.g. "a 130 foot yacht." As a predicative adjective, "feet" is correct, e.g. "the yacht was 130 feet long." Occasionally, in certain regional variations, you may hear "foot" used in the second case: "the yacht was 130 foot long."
- inglor_cz 6y ago"Feets" evokes a vision of Gollum, looking at gleaming Starship and hissing "What a sssstrange fisssssh!" A nice combination of SF and fantasy in one picture :-)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- inglor_cz 6y agoI live on a partly forested hill that towers about 250 ft over the river valley where the railway is. When I go to the railway station and wait for a train, the hill is really dominant on the near horizon. And whenever I realize that the full Starship + SuperHeavy stack is going to be much taller than that hill, I am just speechless. That is one big freaking rocket, one big trampoline for mankind, so to say.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoYes it is. Starship, the part that will end up in orbit is longer than the truss section, which is the longest section of the ISS and has the solar panels on it. At the crash sight of SN8 watching the people walk around the wreckage, it gave a good indication of scale.
- fbender 6y agoStarship alone (the orbiter) is 50m. The truss of the ISS is 109m[1] long. While massive, Starship will still be dwarfed by the station (other than planned habitable volume or individual modules/elements). [1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/facts-and-figures https://www.nasa.gov/feature/facts-and-figures