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Starship’s second flight test
- nativeit 3y agoRocket reusability is overhyped nonsense that we could have had decades ago except we only just recently produced the billionaire narcissist class that think that reusing the thin metal shell on a booster is somehow “game changing”. It’s not. It will never be.
- Multiplayer 3y agoThe musk biography made me believe that I should have gotten a physics degree. Or at least taken physics. Can anyone recommend any online physics?
- alex_young 3y agohttps://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
- somenameforme 3y agoWas just about to recommend this. I have to add that this is one amazing resource. The only thing missing is a lack of practical problem sets.
- r721 3y agoRelated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37200615 (and a few of older ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37202736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37202736)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- gammarator 3y agohttps://www.susanrigetti.com/physics https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics is aimed at learners who aren’t enrolled in a degree program.
- justrealist 3y agoThey seem to be increasingly confident about the Fish & Wildlife approval. Wonder what kind of internal messaging is happening there (F&W just saying "we're still signing it but it's fine" or something).
- junofan 3y agoI don’t think the Fish & Wildlife Service approves spacecraft launches. They just need to amend their opinion within 135 days AFAIK.
- pavon 3y agoThe FAA won't issue a launch license until the environmental review of the last launch is complete, part of which is performed by the Fish & Wildlife Service.
- anonymousiam 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- peder 3y agoOr maybe they'll just go for it and see if this was a bluff by the govt
- jiggawatts 3y agoDid Fisheries and Wildlife finally figure out the areal density of whales in the ocean for impact probability estimation? https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?t=4742 https://youtu.be/JN3KPFbWCy8?t=4742
- iandanforth 3y agoI recommend the above link because it gets even weirder than you might surmise from the parent's comment.
- rkagerer 3y agoSeconded, definitely need to watch or listen to a few minutes of that link.
- jiggawatts 3y agoI loved the bit where Fisheries and Wildlife refused to provide the shark density information because they didn't trust their own department with it! Apparently SpaceX must wait patiently to take humanity to the stars because sharkfin poachers have infiltrated spies into a wildly unrelated government agency. I feel like SpaceX should just launch the damned rocket and then if anyone from the government takes issue just demand a public explanation. As in, literally, get the busybody bureaucrat from Fisheries and Wildlife to stand up behind a podium and explain themselves on live, national television. "Err... you see, Mr Musk was clearly in the wrong here because... umm... we couldn't... umm... share information internally to complete the appropriate paperwork, so... umm..." It would be glorious.
- philwelch 3y agoIf it turned out the federal government was just dicking around out of some unrelated grudge towards Elon Musk, half the country would still support them. Some days most of HN would too.
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- cryptoz 3y agoI can’t wait for the time when Starship is proven and launching frequently - though there is a lot to be said about the excitement of right now, when it hasn’t yet had a successful launch. Really got my fingers crossed for a true rapid drop in cost to launch mass to orbit.
- tornato7 3y agoI just looked it up and was stunned to see a target of $13/kg cost to orbit. That's insane. A human could go to space for under $1,000 (hand waving away the life support systems)
- nativeit 3y agoJust like how Concorde made air travel 10x cheaper! Oh, wait…
- solarkraft 3y agoThose are still Musk numbers. But even 10x of that would be quite good. Pretty crazy how nobody seems to even try to compete.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoI’m excited to watch 350,000 gallons of water sprayed at fire.
- zeroping 3y agoI'm excited to watch 3,400,000 kg of fire sprayed at water, concrete, and hopefully open air.
- maxlin 3y agoI'm more interested in what that will make the rocket do, like move, though.
- new_user_final 3y agoI am waiting to see the reaction of the different groups of human.
- 93po 3y agoI believe some people will react to 11 million pounds going three times the speed of sound, but I also believe more people react to someone who says dumb stuff on twitter
- mdorazio 3y ago"...pending final regulatory approval." I'm highly skeptical that will happen before Thanksgiving, but would love to be proven wrong.
- modeless 3y agoIf Starship meets its reusability goals it's going to be absolutely nuts. Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner or something, carrying more than the entire habitable volume of ISS every time. It's impossible to overstate how much that would change access to space, and how much of an advantage it would give SpaceX over its competitors (even other nations).
- Animats 3y ago"Flying to orbit and back multiple times in a day like an airliner." Probably not. It takes 85 days, on average, to turn a Falcon 9 around.
- maxlin 3y agoStarship is designed with way faster turnaround time. Falcon 9 had optional reuse, while Starship aims to be the 747 of space access. Elon said in 2020: > Starship is being designed to be relaunched an hour after landing, with zero nominal work Now while that might take some time to reach, before that the pad itself is likely going to be capable of many launches every day given there's more ships. Starships seems to be made to be way more economical to manufacture per-ship than the shuttles or Saturns so I don't see a bottleneck in that.
- davely 3y ago> Elon said in 2020… To be fair, Elon has said _a lot_ of things about his various projects and not all of them are based in reality.
- maxlin 3y agoEveryone knows that, but Falcon 9 is extremely successful and Starship is the main project that's been in the making doing good strides once in a while, and the whole "chopstick" lift tower has already been built, with the clear idea of ultimately landing Starships right in to it. And Starship seems to really be the main focus of Elon where he doesn't just lead but is in the weeds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY73exaVpyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY73exaVpyw
- hoyd 3y ago01:30:00 An exciting landing!
- HenryMulligan 3y agoIt is interesting that T-0 says "Excitement guaranteed" instead of "launch" or something. Besides being funny, it seems like they are officially accepting the reality that it may not go as planned (even at so early a stage), but will be thrilling nevertheless!
- IshKebab 3y agoThey said that for the first one too.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- satvikpendem 3y agoI finished reading the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, and, for all his faults, Musk really knows how to get shit done. I was constantly amazed by his ability to strip a process to its essentials before embarking on its construction. SpaceX single-handedly* brought down the cost of space flight by using off-the-shelf and custom-created-from-metal components, where they only had to pay for the raw cost rather than the markups by others (the "idiot tax" as mentioned in the biography). Generally, I simply don't give a shit about what a founder says, I have a Toyota in addition to a Tesla, and I don't care what the CEO of Toyota says at all, so I always find it puzzling when people talk about their dislike of Musk in particular, as if that should matter when buying their products. *for some definition of the theoretical hand of a company
- XorNot 3y agoElon Musk's biggest problem is his chronic inability to shut the hell up. No one would care who he was as a person if he just let his media people do their jobs, and stuck to corporate press releases to respond to things. Plenty of people say they dislike Jeff Bezos, but barely anyone even thinks about Jeff Bezos or knows what he sounds like.
- radu_floricica 3y agoI mean, what's the point of getting where he is and shutting up just to make random people happy?
- thrillgore 3y agoCounterpoint: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-musk-safety/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/spacex-m...
- inemesitaffia 3y agoStatistics are visibly wrong
- 3seashells 3y agoCan't wait to have Isis in space.. We kicked the problem of growing up as a species down the road for so long, now it's time for a nuke for everyone (who is not in a gravity well). Let's get this over with by bribing us out of today's problems into even bigger tomorrow's problems with the tools of yesterday to handle internal crisis. Sure downvote reality, that will make it go away. The sort of points I want to see, the bankruptcy of "I have no plan".
- maxlin 3y agoAre you on drugs? What the hell are you even trying to say? Something something if Elon instead worked in a charity we'd be better off just with no EV's, SpaceX, OpenAI etc... ? I'm downvoting you because you're wasting everyone's time and being demotivational about a great thing. The only true progress is technological.
- 93po 3y agoHe seems very much under the influence or otherwise ill
- Aerbil313 3y agoI understand his point. He refers to the shortsightedness of human race in terms of handling new technologies which bring a lot of risks.
- pasabagi 3y agoIt's basically a line out of the Expanse series: if you make getting into orbit trivial, and if doing things in space becomes trivial, it becomes conceivable to redirect asteroids so they hit the planet, which would be bad for the people living there. I don't know if it's a realistic problem, my guess is it probably is, but not significantly worse than what we already have with nuclear proliferation. The basic problem is pretty real, though: we're at a stage of technical development where it's really easy to render the planet uninhabitable, while we're at an uninspiring level of cultural development that makes it really hard to produce sensible policy.
- solarkraft 3y agoAny idea what they mean by "recursive improvement"?
- jules-jules 3y agoThis will make solar radiation management a serious proposition.