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SpaceX's fourth Starship launch approved for Thursday
- xixixao 2y agoThe most interesting part of the announcement is the agreed failure modes which won’t require the lengthy FAA mishap investigation afterwards (if they occurred).
- Culonavirus 2y agoSeems reasonable. FAA is like: Do no damage to people or property. Don't deviate from the specified corridors and times. Don't have anomalies/fts before you get to that nominal (slightly-sub)orbital insertion. Tell us beforehand if you're going for controlled or uncontrolled reentry. GLHF with the rest.
- trollied 2y agoThe reentry videos during the 3rd launch were unreal. Live images of plasma dancing. Just looking at the 2 vehicles stacked also looks sci-fi. It's great being part of another space age, having missed the first one when it was at its peak. Exciting times.
- BHSPitMonkey 2y agoThe tumbling sure made the footage a lot more spectacular than straight-and-level flight would have :) It's still pretty stunning that we could watch it live, in that quality, nearly uninterrupted.
- dr_dshiv 2y agoWould love to know if the reentry ship vibrations might make patterns in the plasma akin to the cymatic patterns on a chladni plate or faraday waves in a dish of water. Maybe it would be useful… but maybe it would just look cool!
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoThat footage is the coolest thing to come out of this so far.
- 93po 2y agoSeeing starship in person, both it being stacked and also taking off, was the most "I live in the future" experience of my life. It genuinely felt like science fiction and I was grinning so hard as I was driving towards Starbase and seeing the stacked Starship off in the distance for the first time. I car camped on the beach directly outside the base (thankfully AC all night in a Tesla) and it was also a really fun experience waking up in the middle of the night, and again later at sunrise, and seeing Starship immediately outside my window
- xnx 2y ago11 hours ago. 11 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40578585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40578585
- choeger 2y agoLet's hope they continue making progress. Expected failures are fine. Unexpected failures have the potential to derail such a program for years.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> Unexpected failures have the potential to derail such a program for years Catastrophic ones, sure. But not just the unexpected. If you aren’t unexpectedly failing in such an endeavour, you’re not pushing hard enough.
- panick21_ 2y agoNot really. Anything other then outright shooting a rocket at an inhabited area, years of derail is incredibly unlikely.
- Culonavirus 2y ago> Unexpected failures That's literally why SpaceX tests the way it does. Unexpected failures are this program's M.O... It's a test program and Starship, unlike Falcon, is not operational (let alone human rated). They can -and do- retrofit fixes to the new vehicles they already had at the time of an anomaly and are now capable of going SN to SN pretty fast (months). An unexpected failure in a program like Vulcan or SLS would -maybe- derail it for years. I say maybe because Vulcan's upper stage's tank exploded during testing and it barely moved its schedule. SLS is a different beast, precisely because they simulate and ground-test every single little detail and possibility and building another SLS with fixes would probably be a multi-year project.
- jojobas 2y agoIt has the capacity to derail it forever as SpaceX has largely burned through their NASA cash already.
- bryanlarsen 2y agoSpaceX is not cash constrained. Every offering they do is extremely limited in terms of who they let invest, yet is still always massively oversubscribed. They're spending multiple billions per year on both Starship and Starlink but haven't been tapping the capital markets -- IOW internal cash flow is also massive.
- ETH_start 2y agoSpaceX's advances are one of the biggest sources of excitement about humanity's future for me.
- parker-3461 2y agoSame. Really looking forward to this and also the subsequent launches
- starspangled 2y agoCertainly better than the same old new adtech, fintech, programming language, AI, crypto, techbro drudgery that is common, uh, in a lot of sites.
- ETH_start 2y agoI don't want to denigrate those subjects, but yes, this is much more inspiring.
- __m 2y agoWhy? Without speed of light or faster than speed of light travel we are stuck with uninhabitable planets (and we can't even fix our own)
- Paradigma11 2y agoWho cares about planets. Space stations like big ONeil cylinders is where it is at. Why succumb to another gravity well after we successfully fled the first one.
- me_me_me 2y agolol, sure. Those work in sci-fi movies, unless you want vertigo every time you stand up. Or require to have ungodly amount of resources, as those things need massive radius to actually work like earth's gravity
- 2y ago
- baggy_trough 2y agoStarliner or Starship launch next?
- kuschkufan 2y agoit's 50/50
- tim333 2y agoStarliner made liftoff at last.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoHopefully they make it to orbit this time.
- aejm 2y agoThey are attempting the same just below orbital trajectory as last flight. They will not be attempting an in orbit-ish deorbit burn, as they have stated that their primary goals are getting the ship through peak reentry, and the booster to a simulated soft landing burn.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoSo they still aren't getting to orbit?
- avmich 2y agoNot because they can't, but because they need to stay suborbital.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoStarship hasn't been to orbit yet.
- matthewfelgate 2y agoI get the feeling it's going take several attempts before re-entry is a success. I have a feeling this launch will end exactly as the last one did. Just a personal opinion.
- friend_and_foe 2y agoI dunno, if you followed the falcon 9 test launches, each launch made progress and often surprised everyone. I expect that this system is bigger, more complicated and so that iterative success will be a little slower, but generally I think it will continue as it has been: each launch is an improvement over the previous one.
- matthewfelgate 2y agoI was wrong pretty quickly! lol
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 2y ago[dupe] Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40578585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40578585
- avmich 2y agoElon suggested SpaceX is going to have ~5-6 launches of Starship this year. It's interesting where we could expect the next launch, if everything goes reasonably well with this one.