9 ms·

SpaceX launches Starlink sats in record 10th liftoff, landing of reused rocket

97 points by _Microft 5y ago

garciasn 5y ago
I watched the train go overhead with my wife, son and neighbor on Friday night. While I’ve seen them before, it was exciting to share my 11 year old son’s awe. I know there’s concern about these LEO sats, but we still enjoyed counting the train as it streamed almost directly overhead from West to East.
- _Microft 5y ago
  As much as I understand astronomers' apprehension of satellite internet constellations but the first Starlink 'train' we saw from the top of a hill was absolutely captivating. I cannot begin to describe the beauty of a line of sparkling dots, moving unerringly but silently over the sky.
  - AprilArcus 5y ago
    More beautiful than the stars and galaxies they're blotting out? I hear this and it's like someone admiring the engineering of a cloverleaf exchange running over a buried river.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > More beautiful than the stars and galaxies they're blotting out? Very much yes! Stars and galaxies are. They are as they always[0] were, and always will be. Blobs of fusing hydrogen very far away. As beautiful as they may be if we could see them better, from where we are, they're just points of light. (Also, wait a few seconds, the satellites will pass, and you're back to watching the stars behind.) A constellation of satellites in the sky is also just a bunch of points of light. But it's more than that. It means something. Humans have put it there. Those satellites serve a purpose, and their appearance on the night sky reminds us of the great discoveries and feats of engineering that were necessary to put them there. They're a testament to the ingenuity and potential of mankind, and the promise that one day, our descendants will travel among them. That's what I see when I see a satellite passing overhead. > it's like someone admiring the engineering of a cloverleaf exchange running over a buried river Sure, it's exactly that. A cloverleaf exchange is interesting. It's not something that just happens, and its shape is not random. A river is boring. Also full of insects that try to feast on your blood. I'm totally serious, by the way. Ever since a kid, I've found nature boring. This actually changed for me in my adulthood - my interest in biology sparked when I realized that life is just molecular nanotechnology that wasn't designed by humans, but could still be eventually understood and controlled. -- [0] - On human-relevant timescales.
      - AprilArcus 5y ago
        > A cloverleaf exchange is interesting. It's not something that just happens, and its shape is not random. A river is boring. Also full of insects that try to feast on your blood. The universe of knowledge one could obtain from studying the organisms and ecological connections in a healthy wetland ecosystem or the physics of stars and galaxies and supernovas and black holes and brown dwarfs is vaster by orders of magnitude than what could be won by marveling at highways and satellite trains.
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        That's correct and I agree. But you were asking about watching things, not studying them in depth :).
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        >Stars and galaxies are. They are as they always[0] were, and always will be >[0] - On human-relevant timescales. This was once orthodoxy, but it was overturned ~450 years ago, at least from a Eurocentric perspective. - If you look at millions of objects, then something that only happens to each one, once in X million years, will be happening to one of them right now. Like a nova. - If you look at millions of objects, then you will see the one-in-a-million rare one which is doing something on a human timescale. Like a pulsar.
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        Fair enough. Not something you can spot with a naked eye, though. In this sense, when I'm looking at the night sky, I find satellites more interesting than stars. (My favorite thing to spot were always Iridium flares. I miss those.)
        perl4ever 5y ago
        Visible supernovas are rare, but there was one in 1987. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A Here is the Wikipedia page for the star that died over 30 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanduleak_-69_202 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanduleak_-69_202 You can see meteors all the time. A bit of trivia I read somewhere is that your spot on the earth is facing more "into the wind" the later it gets after midnight, so that's when it's best to look for them. Usually meteors are just streaks of light, but once I went partway up a mountain for a forecasted meteor shower and I saw one just like people render it for an illustration (except much smaller because of the distance) - you could see it was a white hot fireball, shading to red, shading to blue, with a long bluish tail.
    - bryanlarsen 5y ago
      The trains are only visible within a half hour of sunrise & sunset, when those stars and galaxies aren't particularly visible due to incident sunlight. If you want to see the stars and galaxies, look up at midnight when Starlink isn't illuminated by the sun. It was the best view before & after Starlink.
      - garciasn 5y ago
        Naw. Sunset was 8:35 PM and the sat trains were overhead after 10 PM.
        bryanlarsen 5y ago
        The half an hour is an approximation depending on latitude and season. The point is that Starlink is not visible to the naked eye without illumination, and being so close to the Earth they are shadowed by the earth most of the night. What's your latitude?
        garciasn 5y ago
        N44/45.
    - _Microft 5y ago
      > More beautiful than the stars and galaxies they're blotting out? At that moment, yes, absolutely. As I said, I understand the concerns and as with everything else, too much of it is going to be bad but during this moment I talked about it was absolutely wonderful.
aurizon 5y ago
It is quite apparent that the NASA/Government space industry has milked the public for 50+ years. We could have had re-useable first and higher stages decades ago. Then along came Spacex and revealed this scandal.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  I don't think I'd frame it that way. SpaceX is taking advantage of technologies that weren't available until recently. Of course, now that they are available, we should see SpaceX's competition adopting them.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
    Something very much like an expendable F9 could have been made decades ago. Simply evolving the Saturn 1B might have done it. But no, Nixon needed pork in California to ensure his reelection.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      > Something very much like an expendable F9 could have been made decades ago. We've made non-reusable rockets for quite some time pre-F9.
    - bodhiandphysics 5y ago
      Not really. Falcon 9 is more sophisticated than it looks at first glance. Merlin has extremely high performance when compared to earlier gas generators... it has a t/w of 200 compared to the ra-27s 100 or the f-1s 95. The alluminum lithium alloys that give the rocket such a low dry mass date from the 90s. The avionics in falcon are revolutionary, and couldn’t have been possible before the early 2000s... a lot of little things like that.
      - pfdietz 5y ago
        That's why I said "evolving". Making engines better, introducing FSW when it was introduced, and so on. The F9-like boosters that could have been made around 1972 would still have been much better than the shuttle turned out to be. What one should object to in this scenario is the idea that the conventional aerospace companies, and NASA, would have done anything like this, when their internal incentive structures pushed them away from it.
mabbo 5y ago
My wife was watching a show about plane spotters, and them watching the last 747 flight from the UK. I was making some flippant comment, like, come on this is such a weird hobby. She then pointed out that I know the ID of every active SpaceX booster, including prototypes, and watch nearly every launch live. Oh no. I'm a rocket spotter.
- m463 5y ago
  The saying I remember is... "When you point a finger at someone, your other fingers are pointing back at you" :)
- HPsquared 5y ago
  I suppose there was a time when planes were as rare and special as rockets are today.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    To me, planes are still mesmerizing, as they are so big that it doesn't seem like they move fast enough to achieve lift off. It's magic.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
_Microft 5y ago
So, does anyone wanna guess how many reuses SpaceX will get out of a booster?
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  They replace broken and worn parts, so at some point this becomes the Booster of Theseus problem. How many parts can you replace before it is not the same booster anymore.
  - foobarbecue 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's when you replace the big metal tube part.
  - nine_k 5y ago
    I suppose the central section with tanks cannot be replaced piecemeal, and cannot be excessively patched because it's a structural part. You can consider it an airframe. So it must be mostly the same boosters all the way, even if engines, valves, electronics, etc have been replaced multiple times.
  - matthewfelgate 5y ago
    Booster of Theseus. Love it!
- perlgeek 5y ago
  I don't think anybody really knows; there simply isn't any data with > 10. Back in the days when boosters were recovered, I remember hearing somewhere that SpaceX was confident that they would be able to fly them 10x, and hoped for 100x
- grecy 5y ago
  Elon said they'll keep reusing them and pushing their luck until they have a failure on a starlink launch... so we're almost certainly going to find out.
  - 5y ago
trompetenaccoun 5y ago
Is there any realistic estimate for how much cheaper SpaceX will be, compared to bringing cargo up on traditional rockets? I've seen Musk claim something ridiculous like it's 1% of the cost of legacy systems but guess that should be taken with a grain of salt.
- bodhiandphysics 5y ago
  Let’s compare how much cheaper spacex is. For a 5 ton geo bird, spacex is about 2/3 the price of its competition. This however is price not cost. The best estimate for starlink is that SpaceX’s cost per satellite is about 500 thousand. This compares to oneweb’s 2 million per sat, for says that weigh half as much. Starship could have a cost (not a price) that is very low indeed.
- Veedrac 5y ago
  Falcon 9 is about half the price of competitors right now, though the internal cost is under half that again; a lack of competition has prevented SpaceX from needing to lower prices further. Starship doesn't have an unambiguous cost because it's dependent so heavily on factors like market size, whether the Mars thing happens, and reliability. A marginal cost of a few million dollars is an explicit goal, but a more short-term rough goal is about Falcon 9 prices, or $50m/launch. That's both a very reasonable number, and also still more than 10x better than the competition. https://youtu.be/GomoD0rYhJ8?t=1285 https://youtu.be/GomoD0rYhJ8?t=1285
  - imglorp 5y ago
    > whether the Mars thing happens Plus $2.9B for the moon contract doesn't hurt either. It will go back into developing more starship features.
    - Veedrac 5y ago
      There's a good chance for a lot more than that to come their way. Congress has spent almost $50B on SLS+Orion for Artemis, which Moonship would make totally redundant.

97 points by _Microft 5y ago

I watched the train go overhead with my wife, son and neighbor on Friday night. While I’ve seen them before, it was exciting to share my 11 year old son’s awe. I know there’s concern about these LEO sats, but we still enjoyed counting the train as it streamed almost directly overhead from West to East.

_Microft 5y ago
As much as I understand astronomers' apprehension of satellite internet constellations but the first Starlink 'train' we saw from the top of a hill was absolutely captivating. I cannot begin to describe the beauty of a line of sparkling dots, moving unerringly but silently over the sky.
- AprilArcus 5y ago
  More beautiful than the stars and galaxies they're blotting out? I hear this and it's like someone admiring the engineering of a cloverleaf exchange running over a buried river.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > More beautiful than the stars and galaxies they're blotting out? Very much yes! Stars and galaxies are. They are as they always[0] were, and always will be. Blobs of fusing hydrogen very far away. As beautiful as they may be if we could see them better, from where we are, they're just points of light. (Also, wait a few seconds, the satellites will pass, and you're back to watching the stars behind.) A constellation of satellites in the sky is also just a bunch of points of light. But it's more than that. It means something. Humans have put it there. Those satellites serve a purpose, and their appearance on the night sky reminds us of the great discoveries and feats of engineering that were necessary to put them there. They're a testament to the ingenuity and potential of mankind, and the promise that one day, our descendants will travel among them. That's what I see when I see a satellite passing overhead. > it's like someone admiring the engineering of a cloverleaf exchange running over a buried river Sure, it's exactly that. A cloverleaf exchange is interesting. It's not something that just happens, and its shape is not random. A river is boring. Also full of insects that try to feast on your blood. I'm totally serious, by the way. Ever since a kid, I've found nature boring. This actually changed for me in my adulthood - my interest in biology sparked when I realized that life is just molecular nanotechnology that wasn't designed by humans, but could still be eventually understood and controlled. -- [0] - On human-relevant timescales.
    - AprilArcus 5y ago
      > A cloverleaf exchange is interesting. It's not something that just happens, and its shape is not random. A river is boring. Also full of insects that try to feast on your blood. The universe of knowledge one could obtain from studying the organisms and ecological connections in a healthy wetland ecosystem or the physics of stars and galaxies and supernovas and black holes and brown dwarfs is vaster by orders of magnitude than what could be won by marveling at highways and satellite trains.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        That's correct and I agree. But you were asking about watching things, not studying them in depth :).
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      >Stars and galaxies are. They are as they always[0] were, and always will be >[0] - On human-relevant timescales. This was once orthodoxy, but it was overturned ~450 years ago, at least from a Eurocentric perspective. - If you look at millions of objects, then something that only happens to each one, once in X million years, will be happening to one of them right now. Like a nova. - If you look at millions of objects, then you will see the one-in-a-million rare one which is doing something on a human timescale. Like a pulsar.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        Fair enough. Not something you can spot with a naked eye, though. In this sense, when I'm looking at the night sky, I find satellites more interesting than stars. (My favorite thing to spot were always Iridium flares. I miss those.)
        perl4ever 5y ago
        Visible supernovas are rare, but there was one in 1987. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A Here is the Wikipedia page for the star that died over 30 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanduleak_-69_202 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanduleak_-69_202 You can see meteors all the time. A bit of trivia I read somewhere is that your spot on the earth is facing more "into the wind" the later it gets after midnight, so that's when it's best to look for them. Usually meteors are just streaks of light, but once I went partway up a mountain for a forecasted meteor shower and I saw one just like people render it for an illustration (except much smaller because of the distance) - you could see it was a white hot fireball, shading to red, shading to blue, with a long bluish tail.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    The trains are only visible within a half hour of sunrise & sunset, when those stars and galaxies aren't particularly visible due to incident sunlight. If you want to see the stars and galaxies, look up at midnight when Starlink isn't illuminated by the sun. It was the best view before & after Starlink.
    - garciasn 5y ago
      Naw. Sunset was 8:35 PM and the sat trains were overhead after 10 PM.
      - bryanlarsen 5y ago
        The half an hour is an approximation depending on latitude and season. The point is that Starlink is not visible to the naked eye without illumination, and being so close to the Earth they are shadowed by the earth most of the night. What's your latitude?
        garciasn 5y ago
        N44/45.
  - _Microft 5y ago
    > More beautiful than the stars and galaxies they're blotting out? At that moment, yes, absolutely. As I said, I understand the concerns and as with everything else, too much of it is going to be bad but during this moment I talked about it was absolutely wonderful.

aurizon 5y ago

It is quite apparent that the NASA/Government space industry has milked the public for 50+ years. We could have had re-useable first and higher stages decades ago. Then along came Spacex and revealed this scandal.

shadowgovt 5y ago
I don't think I'd frame it that way. SpaceX is taking advantage of technologies that weren't available until recently. Of course, now that they are available, we should see SpaceX's competition adopting them.
- pfdietz 5y ago
  Something very much like an expendable F9 could have been made decades ago. Simply evolving the Saturn 1B might have done it. But no, Nixon needed pork in California to ensure his reelection.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    > Something very much like an expendable F9 could have been made decades ago. We've made non-reusable rockets for quite some time pre-F9.
  - bodhiandphysics 5y ago
    Not really. Falcon 9 is more sophisticated than it looks at first glance. Merlin has extremely high performance when compared to earlier gas generators... it has a t/w of 200 compared to the ra-27s 100 or the f-1s 95. The alluminum lithium alloys that give the rocket such a low dry mass date from the 90s. The avionics in falcon are revolutionary, and couldn’t have been possible before the early 2000s... a lot of little things like that.
    - pfdietz 5y ago
      That's why I said "evolving". Making engines better, introducing FSW when it was introduced, and so on. The F9-like boosters that could have been made around 1972 would still have been much better than the shuttle turned out to be. What one should object to in this scenario is the idea that the conventional aerospace companies, and NASA, would have done anything like this, when their internal incentive structures pushed them away from it.

mabbo 5y ago

My wife was watching a show about plane spotters, and them watching the last 747 flight from the UK. I was making some flippant comment, like, come on this is such a weird hobby. She then pointed out that I know the ID of every active SpaceX booster, including prototypes, and watch nearly every launch live. Oh no. I'm a rocket spotter.

m463 5y ago
The saying I remember is... "When you point a finger at someone, your other fingers are pointing back at you" :)
HPsquared 5y ago
I suppose there was a time when planes were as rare and special as rockets are today.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  To me, planes are still mesmerizing, as they are so big that it doesn't seem like they move fast enough to achieve lift off. It's magic.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

_Microft 5y ago

So, does anyone wanna guess how many reuses SpaceX will get out of a booster?

LeoPanthera 5y ago
They replace broken and worn parts, so at some point this becomes the Booster of Theseus problem. How many parts can you replace before it is not the same booster anymore.
- foobarbecue 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure it's when you replace the big metal tube part.
- nine_k 5y ago
  I suppose the central section with tanks cannot be replaced piecemeal, and cannot be excessively patched because it's a structural part. You can consider it an airframe. So it must be mostly the same boosters all the way, even if engines, valves, electronics, etc have been replaced multiple times.
- matthewfelgate 5y ago
  Booster of Theseus. Love it!
perlgeek 5y ago
I don't think anybody really knows; there simply isn't any data with > 10. Back in the days when boosters were recovered, I remember hearing somewhere that SpaceX was confident that they would be able to fly them 10x, and hoped for 100x
grecy 5y ago
Elon said they'll keep reusing them and pushing their luck until they have a failure on a starlink launch... so we're almost certainly going to find out.
- 5y ago

trompetenaccoun 5y ago

Is there any realistic estimate for how much cheaper SpaceX will be, compared to bringing cargo up on traditional rockets? I've seen Musk claim something ridiculous like it's 1% of the cost of legacy systems but guess that should be taken with a grain of salt.

bodhiandphysics 5y ago
Let’s compare how much cheaper spacex is. For a 5 ton geo bird, spacex is about 2/3 the price of its competition. This however is price not cost. The best estimate for starlink is that SpaceX’s cost per satellite is about 500 thousand. This compares to oneweb’s 2 million per sat, for says that weigh half as much. Starship could have a cost (not a price) that is very low indeed.
Veedrac 5y ago
Falcon 9 is about half the price of competitors right now, though the internal cost is under half that again; a lack of competition has prevented SpaceX from needing to lower prices further. Starship doesn't have an unambiguous cost because it's dependent so heavily on factors like market size, whether the Mars thing happens, and reliability. A marginal cost of a few million dollars is an explicit goal, but a more short-term rough goal is about Falcon 9 prices, or $50m/launch. That's both a very reasonable number, and also still more than 10x better than the competition. https://youtu.be/GomoD0rYhJ8?t=1285 https://youtu.be/GomoD0rYhJ8?t=1285
- imglorp 5y ago
  > whether the Mars thing happens Plus $2.9B for the moon contract doesn't hurt either. It will go back into developing more starship features.
  - Veedrac 5y ago
    There's a good chance for a lot more than that to come their way. Congress has spent almost $50B on SLS+Orion for Artemis, which Moonship would make totally redundant.