Why do morons act like this piece of shit is some huge achievement? It's literally designed like an old, Soviet ICBM. Just put lots of smaller engines on it unlit it flies, any moron can design a rocket like this. Why do people treat that moron Musk like he just invented a rocket? Those morons were so incompetent they couldn't even manage to separate the parts, something that should have been the easiest task.
Why do morons not understand the concept of agile development?
it is vatniks and wumaos trying to undermine it. If this was the supposed ITS OVER doomer failure then this thing is absolutely getting to orbit
>Why do morons not understand the concept of agile development?
because agile is utter bullshit for morons who have as a generation produced no innovation of note, no tech, no cures, no music, no poetry, no art, np plays no literature, no novels, just billions of narcisstic selfies and endless streams of them doing nothing
>wahh millennials don't do anything
>millennials do something
>NO NOT LIKE THAT
Not that I disagree with you, and the anon you replied to is a moron, but Agile was developed into the Agile Manifesto in the late 90s and early 2000s by dudes mostly born in the 40s, 50s, and 60s who had been in the industry for decades, and they were describing techniques and practices that themselves stretched back into the 80s in certain sectors.
So while Agile is very popular today, especially among younger workers, its origins and development dates back some 50 years. Essentially, engineers have realized waterfall was a shit tier design paradigm for half a century now.
yeah i was just making fun of him because that's clearly where he was coming from. agile development if anything seems more like a rediscovery of what always used to work before bureaucracies blew up
If you look at, say, firearm designers of the late 1800s and early 1900s you see an industry rife with Agile development, hence so many prototype designs. Work it out on paper, make it, see why it isn't working, then redesign and make another.
You see it in the Wright brothers' work as well (And of their engineer who developed their engine). In order to make their wings and prop they had to create their own test apparatuses, create dozens of failed designs rapidly, and alter them regularly trying to achieve the lift/thrust they needed. It is actually a prime example of Agile development. Waterfall development was producing the kinds of designs that came before, since they were produced as a full design, tested, and failed, but were too expensive to produce new ones from the ground up, and too complex to understand exactly where they were failing.
perfect, salty boomer tears for my rocket fuel electrolysis machine.
Probably because it can land? Or at least, theoretically could be reusable. That's it.
I mean morons act like this thing just taking off was a huge achievement.
https://history-computer.com/saturn-v-vs-space-x-starship-compared/
Something that was possible in 1960s.
it was. It's the first flight of 33 staged-combustion full-flow methane-lox engines; that they got through startup at all is already a milestone.
Other then that, this was the highest-thrust rocket ever; the largest rocket ever; the first full-stack test launch of the program, the first test launch of a fully reusable orbital launch system, etc
it doesnt get much larger achievement-wise.
>; that they got through startup at all is already a milestone.
almost all of them did start, but the assessment from footage is that a fraction of the engines did not start and this uneven thrust may have caused the failure to separate/death spiral
No, the loss of hydraulics literally sent it out of control. It can perform nominally with like 5 or 6 engines off
highest-thurst rocket ever
> twice as much thrust as the saturn 5 well being bigger.
Fair. I've been concerned about their engine reliability for the last two years, and it turns out I was right.
I am still concerned, if not more so now.
It shouldn't have had so many fail. But I am at least waiting till the second test to see if it's a reoccurring issue.
The main issue from what I see is the inability for the rocket to flip and seperate, but that could have been a rocket failure specific issue, but realistically they should have tried to seperate anyway even with the spin to see if they couldn't control it and land the top half.
I do agree the tards going "but we got valuable data worth more than the rocket itself!!!" crowd are moronic, as if rockets failing can somehow magically make all the future iterations failure proof lmao.
They can literally test rocket failures on the ground, they don't need to be in flight "to gain valuable data".
It was a failing, they will try again. But trying to spin it as a win is moronic.
They had three engines out at liftoff. According to their neat public facing diagram showing which engines were still working nominally, them including that in the stream shows me that they were expecting some engine failures. They didn’t install a deluge water system or flame trench to save time and costs, I have a feeling the massive fricking hole the engines dug damaged the engines.
They’ll have to rectify that next time.
Personally, I would have liked to see Starship make a re-entry, that’s another critical part. Hopefully we’ll see that next time.
I wouldn't trust their onboard sensors at all.
As for "not installing a flame trench", that concerns me more if anything for future landings and takeoffs on the moon causing irreparable damage. I know the rocket thrust needed is an order of magnitude less but still it's concerning to me.
>I wouldn't trust their onboard sensors at all.
Your opinion is worthless, especially when you couldn't even bother to google why it the following is wrong.
>As for "not installing a flame trench", that concerns me more if anything for future landings and takeoffs on the moon causing irreparable damage. I know the rocket thrust needed is an order of magnitude less but still it's concerning to me.
Ah yes, let us trust the sensors when our eyes exist lmao
The sensors which correctly listed which engines were out?
But yes they probably weren’t perfectly correct near the end of the launch.
>Near the end of the launch
You mean before it exploded.
The end of the launch would have been where it theoretically landed.
What a completely worthless post to make tbqh. Shan’t reply
>Shan't reply
>Replies
>You mean before it exploded.
yes, when the on-board, automatic FTS (AFTS) detected it's trajectory was going to go out of the determined box. Which it's sensors detected, and then issued a working FTS signal, puncturing the bulkheads on superheavy+starship.
That picture is not from liftoff or even the first 20 seconds, now is it anon? You know, when their sensors showed three engines down? They report more failures as the flight progresses.
I'll give you a hint anon, starship HLS isn't the same hardware configuration as the base model. It does relate to the massively decreased thrust you need kn the moon though.
Don't be disingenuous, the landing configuration isn't that much different at all. It's likely to have similar issues.
>Distributed thrusters 30m up in a vacuum will have no effect on plume impingement and are not that different at all to the base model
Lol well that's one way to confirm you know nothing about what you're opining on.
Yes.
I fully expect moon dust to be dumped into the main thruster core and disable some of the rockets.
Are the astronauts going to shovel it in? Because that's the only way it's going to happen. The raptors aren't used near the surface.
Anon, go look at the moon landing footage and come back.
Well I suppose they could take off from the moon at full thrust for maximum efficiency but would they?
Stop posting.
You say this pretending that this isn't standard across the entire industry. You budget for what you need it to do, you do the work to ensure it can get that one result, and everything else you get is gravy. You don't waste the chance to try for more when it costs you nothing, but you also don't put in the extra work to guarantee the secondary goal because its not worth the money and you've already budgeted for the primary goal.
NASA has been doing this with missions forever - they determined that if Opportunity lasted its original 90 days, it would be worth the price. They gave lasting longer the best chance they could, but that doesn't mean that they planed it lasting 5498, nor that it's a failure that it didn't last 5500.
Don't be moronic. This sets back nothing.
>Ah yes, this graphic showing the rockets that will blow dust right into the center wil totally prove that it won't shove dust under starship
Lmao
Not that guy but it was a failure anon. I don't know why this is so hard for you to accept. You seem far too emotionally invested.
>the rockets that will blow dust right into the center wil totally prove that it won't shove dust under starship
what did he mean by this?
How will midbody thrusters radially oriented blow into the center, especially when their expansion mean they do frick all to disturb anything from 100 ft away.
Or is this you getting purposefully more moronic so you can pretend you were shitposting all along?
>They do frick all to disturb anything from 100 ft away
Do you think the moon has no atmosphere, anon.
The moon has an atmosphere*
uck sake
I meant to mock the fact that rockets expanding in a vacuum do not slow down due to lack of atmosphere.
Except he's right because the moon DOESN'T have an atmosphere.
Vacuum = more expansion = more area = less effect per area
Add on to that the shape, the number of thrusters, the height, and the fact the top layer of loose regolith isn't the main risk to the rocket itself (it'll sandblast anything around it though, so build berms) but the exhaust hitting the rock under it.
You seem far too mentally ill to be discussing things outside of how to improve your mental health.
>they don't need to be in flight "to gain valuable data".
Meaning: I have never done integration testing before.
>Something that was possible in 1960s.
not really
material science and alloys that could withstand pressures and combustion chemistry in Raptor were simply not there (let alone withstand it more than once)
landing rocket on its ass was (probably) not possible either due to limits in analog control
if it did not obliterate the pad, I'd consider it a real success
this test easily could have nuked the whole facility if the shrapnel punctured any of the methane tanks on rocket or tank farm
>Something that was possible in 1960s.
post 1960 full combustion, full flow engine. Go ahead. You have even no clue what that means, do you?
>biggest rocket launch since 1973
I have no idea why this would draw media attention.
The reality is SpaceX designed the first reliable 1st stage rocket reuse (with the X-15 having the first non-rocket first stage reuse), and now they are working on the 4th rocket to have second stage reuse (Shuttle, Buran & X-37).
If they are successful with both stages being resued at this scale it will be both a huge cost saving to LEO and the first time a super-heavy LV has been developed before payloads that require it. This will change space development with companies being able to launch huge payloads without needing to fund LV development to do it.
the fact that you posted these questions indicate you don't understand a flying frick about rockets & development.
Doesn’t that land? Did Soviet icbms land?
>Did Soviet icbms land
Unfortunately they were never fired.
>Did Soviet icbms land?
Yeah, once.
If it works as advertised it will significantly reduce the cost of sending stuff to space. Which opens a lot of interesting opportunities.
if it manages to eventually be rapidly reusable it will pretty much be the biggest development in rocketry since sputnik first launched
>some huge achievement
literally the largest rocket humans have made. It is huge, at least in terms of size.
>noooo it doesnt count if you use many engines to generate enough lift
such a weird cope. not only is it more of an achievement (if / when they can get it to work) to get a large number of engines working together properly, but its also, i repeat, literally the largest rocket ever built.
progress towards ever larger rockets means ever larger and more complex systems, whether they be propulsion or any other aspect. get used to it.
>literally the largest rocket humans have made.
So what moron? People made big rockets since 1960s.
>not only is it more of an achievement (if / when they can get it to work) to get a large number of engines working together properly,
no, that's wrong. the achievement is in designing powerful engines, because that's the hard part. one massive engine is much more difficult to make work than 30 shitty engines.
>"but it's really fricking hard to make 30 shitty engines work together"
indeed, which is why you would only attempt that approach if you failed to make one massive engine.
every additional engine is another complete system that needs to work perfectly. it's more parts, more failure points, more problems. yes, it is more COMPLEX, and that's why it's a BAD solution. and you only go with the bad options when you can't use the good ones.
the reason why larger engines are harder is because you reach the limits of materials science and have to basically invent whole new materials, or new ways of using old ones, or new designs that are wildly different from how things are conventionally done so that existing materials don't fail. using 30 engines means making 30 perfect, identical machines that never fail. using one massive engine means inventing a new kind of metal. one is very hard, the other is so difficult you can't even conceive of how difficult it is because you don't even know where to begin.
>its also, i repeat, literally the largest rocket ever built.
indeed, and maybe there's a reason why nobody bothered building rockets that large.
it's the reusability that makes it good, not the size. and what you will find is with thirty fricking engines reusability is a complete pipe dream. look at this fricking shit. you're going to need to tear the whole rocket apart just to inspect it. imagine a car where you need to pull the engine after every trip to the shop. that's how "reusable" this thing is. is it cheaper than building a whole new rocket? probably, but that's only because every rocket needs THIRTY FRICKING ENGINES.
Except you don't. They don't even inspect the engines on F9's anymore after every flight. They just inspect the welds on the booster because, turns out, you can do the math to figure out the odds of an engine failure occurring after you've had enough launches and then use that to determine when you should bother checking the engines. Engine reliability over time + plus engine out capability means no, you do not in fact have to inspect the engines. Also, the R2's are being simplified all the time. What you posted isn't even an R2. It's an old ass R1. May as well post fricking telephone lines from the 1800's and whine about how it'll never be simplified.
>my genius idea for a business model is to occasionally destroy the million dollar one-of-a-kind payloads irreplaceable payloads that my customers entrust me with through a system of planned detonations of my own rockets
b r i l l i a n t
spaceX is not the us postal service, lost packages are going to be a big deal. blowing up rockets when testing is fine, blowing up rockets in service is not. space flight is not a very big business so it might take a while for the shit to pile up but once the first few enormous irreplaceable losses have occurred people are gonna stop flying with the company that randomly explodes from time to time.
and then spaceX will have to go back to inspecting their rockets.
and then it won't be so cheap anymore.
what you space nerds fail to understand is that this business model literally has been tried before, where you come in and replace a product with a cut price option that skimps on safety and uses brute force solutions. and you know what you get? you get fricking air malaysia, or air indonesia, or air mongolia, or every other fricking tin shed airline that nobody flies with if they can possibly avoid it because the excel spreadsheet might say only one in every 100 rockets explodes but that doesn't help you very much if it's the rocket you're on.
wtf are you talking about, ignorant moron? the spaceX bussiness model is already a proven success since years ago, well beyond the expectations of everyone and safe as frick. This new Falcon Heavy is just the latest iteration of the same formula.
>the spaceX bussiness model is already a proven success
falcon heavy has launched 5 times lmao
like i said, space is a small business. even if i'm right, it will take time for the shit to pile up. for people to worry about failures there have to BE failures first.
i think people are going to be even less willing to tolerate accidents with spaceflight than they are with air travel.
>falcon heavy has launched 5 times lmao
I guarantee you have no idea why this is. I should ignore you, go, "Wow, look at that fricking brain dead turdie." But I actually won't this time because someone else might read your post and think you're right.
The reason why SpaceX has "only" launched Falcon Heavy five times is because the payloads that would ordinarily have needed Falcon Heavy were shifted over to Falcon 9. Falcon Heavy heavy was created for one reason and one reason only: heavy lift DoD contracts that required very specific orbital inclinations. Falcon 9 at the time could not qualify for these contracts because it didn't have the capability to perform them. So, SpaceX developed Falcon Heavy for this very specific purpose because if they won said contracts it would amount to several billion dollars. What ended up happening was that Falcon 9 became so good with Block V, that by the time Falcon Heavy launched for the first time it was already outmoded. Because, while. yeah, it can hurl far heavier payloads into orbit than F9 (while remaining reusable), Block V and FH share the exact same fairing design. Meaning, that if it will fit in F9 but requires the lift capability of FH, you had better hope that this payload can still fit in said fairing. In almost every case either one of two things happen:
>It can fit in the fairing, but the FH isn't required because the F9 is so good, so the customer and SpaceX decide to use F9 since it's cheaper for both parties.
>It cannot fit in the fairing, and so the customer has to go to a different launcher who has a larger fairing. This has classically been ULA or Ariane.
Now, could SpaceX make a larger fairing? Yes, but doing so would be extremely expensive and they have already said that if the customer wants a larger fairing, they can have a larger fairing, so long as they're willing to foot the bill; which no one will do.
I don’t get it. Did the DoD gear need the FH’s payload capacity, or not? If not why was the FH built?
It needed more payload capacity than the F9 could offer (at the time), with the ability to hurl objects into very specific inclinations that the F9 couldn't (at the time, and still can't if the payload is too heavy). The problem was, again - at the time, SpaceX couldn't just magically add more engines to the booster. You can't put in more than 9, there isn't enough room. So that means if you want to get great capacity you need to make a better engine, or make the engine better. They made Merlin extremely powerful. To give you an idea of just what I mean. Merlin 1C had a thrust of roughly 78,000 lbf on its sea level config. Merlin 1D (the current engine) is 190,000 lbf. So, simply by making the engine better they more than doubled their total payload capacity, and in doing so - nullified why you would need Falcon Heavy in 9/10 scenarios.
you misunderstand my point.
anon attempts to argue that the frickloads of engines configuration has proven reliable because muh falcon heavy.
but muh falcon heavy has launched a handful of times.
not great proof.
i appreciate your autistic diatribe about your favourite space penis, though.
>anon attempts to argue that the frickloads of engines configuration has proven reliable because muh falcon heavy.
That was proven with Falcon 9. Falcon 9 proved you can mass produce engines and not lose out capability or reliability. It's the most successful engine ever because of this. It turns out that when you allow your engineers to constantly improve and iterate on a design due to having the ability to create them quickly and cheaply, you end up with a much better engine. Artisanal construction is a meme now. Further, this launch validated the design. If it wasn't going to work, it would have exploded during any of the static fires, or would have exploded when they pushed the engine power to 100%.
>inb4 but they lost engines
Yes, because a gravel machine was firing debris into them, and despite this they didn't lose enough to cause a loss of the vehicle. All you're saying is: "Lots of engines bad because... there's a lot of them!" It's not an actual argument since, ideally, you'd always want multiple engines due to engine out capacity. I'll put it to you this way. A single F9 engine failure would need 4 Raptor 2 failures. On the SLS, a single RS-25 failure is equivalent to 9 engines dying. But what's funny, is that the SLS cannot get to orbit with one engine out depending on where it happens, but the booster of Starship can deliver it to orbit with 10 engines out.
>your favourite space penis, though.
Silence, turdy. My favorite rocket is the Mercury-Redstone.
>Mercury-Redstone
Positively patrician taste.
>That was proven with Falcon 9
the average falcon 9 engine has flown like 4 times, and you need 3 and a half falcon launches to equal the engine density of a starship launch too.
the point is not that engine kabooms are common. the point is that they don't need to be common.
furthermore, you can mass produce big engines too lmao. in fact it would probably be more efficient if you could only design the fricking things. all of the benefits you ascribe as being unique to the frickloads of engines model are not - using two engines instead of 9 on the falcon 9 wouldn't really materially diminish the economies of scale.
>All you're saying is: "Lots of engines bad because... there's a lot of them!"
what i'm saying is that there's a reason jet liners don't use 30 turbines. every additional engine just creates more fricking work and doesn't add any benefit. yeah, there's also a reason jet liners don't use ONE turbine either, so it's not like your arguments are wholly wrong. you've just constructed a ridiculous strawman.
the reason the starship has thirty fricking engines is because they couldn't design an engine that would let them do the job with fewer. i mean, it's not like 32 is a magic number. if more engines is so great why not say frick it and go up to 50? 100? why not have four engines in my car, one for each wheel? (yes i know this is what electric cars do). just think about what you're saying for 10 fricking seconds instead of slurping musk wiener.
Apply yourself next time.
>the average falcon 9 engine has flown like 4 times
may i see your source?
i made it the frick up.
spacex has like 220 launches and like 40 falcons. they have to keep making more falcons because some big customers won't accept reused rockets (e.g. department of defence)
>there are hard physical limits that stop you from throttling below about 40% of total thrust that are literally impossible to circumvent
yeah, which is why it's harder to design a rocket that only uses a few big engines that can still land on its main engines
you
fricking
moron
do you see now? have you arrived at the place i started at? so arrogant and it took you this fricking long to get here but that's okay, i'm just glad you made it. some people never do.
actually even department of defense will slowly turn around on this, NASA was scared of using re-used boosters on manned flights at first, and their tune changed pretty quickly.
>yeah which is why it's harder to design a rocket that only uses a few big engines-
No.
It's
Literally
Not
Physically
Fricking
Possible
you do not get to do re-use on five engines with a large rocket, look at every fricking future design out there, you moronic fricking monkey, why won't you just listen, my whole point is that your dream of using traditional engine architecture on rockets that need to land is a fricking non-starter.
you can stop feigning smugness now and admit that you just wanted to be part of the conversation despite knowing the bare minimum. nobody else is replying to you anymore because they're embarrassed for you and just want you to stop posting.
>your dream of using traditional engine architecture on rockets that need to land is a fricking non-starter.
and what if rockets could land without being under power?
kinda blows your whole copefest out of the water, doesn't it?
and now you will say NO NO THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE TOO as if your lack of imagination is an equally hard law as the physical law you thought was an epic gotcha.
see what i mean? the more you insist it's impossible the more you prove my point lol. using a frickload of engines just means taking something you already have and using lots of it to make a really fricking complex version of shit that already exists. figuring out a way to get fewer, bigger engines to work requires changing what's possible.
you have now had it explained to you twice. continued failure to accept that you were wrong beyond this point becomes a moral failure, not an intellectual one.
look that's definitely fair enough and it's not like i'm saying starship's design is dogshit or anything. all i'm saying is that if they could have built starship with fewer engines that failed less, they would have. for obvious reasons. because 30 engines is a lot of engines, and there's no advantage to having that many which is greater than the complexity engendered.
as i said earlier, it's like planes. they don't have 30 engines, and they don't have 1 engine either. single engine planes are notoriously dangerous, but the massive sky-liner planes of the past were never built either because the frickloads of engines required made the whole concept moronic. rockets aren't planes but the same principle applies. but if the best plane engines we could build were shitty 1920s prop engines then hey, maybe the airbus a380 would have a lot more engines. you make do with what you've got.
i'm not hostile to the starship or anything, i just made (what i thought) was a relatively innocuous correction to someone's mistake and got this whole thread for some reason out of it.
>single engine planes are notoriously dangerous, but the massive sky-liner planes of the past were never built either because the frickloads of engines required made the whole concept moronic
Airplanes get free redundancy. You can't glide a space rocket, you can't fly it on great amounts of assymetric thrust, you can't get where you want to go or break afterward without enough total thrust, etc. The optimal number of engines will always be higher.
you've cracked the code actually,
keeps hammering on about his moronic less engines argument because he is more knowledgeable about aircraft than he is at all about rockets and thinks engine out capacity carries the same lack of importance in modern rocketry as it does in modern aviation. he is a fricking jetsniffer pretending he knows jack shit about spaceflight.
Also samegay
here and I'll add that the necessity of a powered landing ALSO means lots of engines are a NECESSITY, because another thing prop/jetfriends don't get is the combination of extreme changes in TWR rockets under go and the incredible difficulty of throttling turbopump engines. It's a real feat to have a rocket be able to throttle to even 50%, and Raptor apparently being able to go down to 30% IIRC is one of the underappreciated other amazing aspects of its design. But Starship like most rockets is almost all fuel. My recollection is of total weight at launch it's about 300 tons dry, 150 tons of cargo, and then remaining 4600 tons or something like that is fuel. And that's weighted against superheavy too, which doesn't have the cargo or fins. It's like, 5% of its starting mass on landing or something. It's fricking impossible to get one or two or three rocket engines down enough to get TWR low enough to land. The ONLY way is to have lots of engines so you can just plain shut most of them off. 29 engines means that it's possible to get effectively down to 0.3*(1/29) or 1-2% takeoff thrust. That's why it could use a few and even hover, allowing use of tower catch on top. F9 has to use the hoverslam because a mere 1/9 engines with Merlin at 50% is STILL twr>1.
so tl;dr: tons of engines are a rock solid hard requirement for serious reusability. Period. Any whining anyone wants to do about it being hard or difficulties just doesn't matter. It has to be solved. It's the only approach. If you don't do it you won't reuse, and if you're not reusing you're obsolete vs those that figure it out.
Anyone who tries to argue against lots of small engines in 2023 is a fricking moron who has no idea what they're talking about or an old space fudd or somehow STILL thinks Falcon 9 is some sort of temporary aberration and surely everyone will go back to SRBs and expended costplus everything... any day now...
bro you could just use a landing engine.
>"but it wouldn't be as good"
once again treating your failure of imagination as a physical law.
>bro you could just use a landing engine.
>>"but it wouldn't be as good"
>once again treating your failure of imagination as a physical law.
Anon it's not imagination its economics. A dedicated landing engine or multiple engines is then worthless dead weight and additional dedicated plumbing and complexity at take off, and that won't see the benefits of commonality or mass production. Having them all be the same gives you landing redundancy and everything else "for free".
You can come up with other, worse solutions that will still "rocket goes up, rocket comes down" but if they cost much more money that's the problem. What Starship ushers in isn't an entirely fundamental different technical capability (though even vs Apollo V it has some good qualities), but rather an entirely new economic capability. So everything has to be evaluated in light of economics.
>just strap more useless mass to your rocket bro
you explained perfectly what i've been trying to tell him, but dunning-kruger is in full effect and
is absolutely convinced that you could magically get the TWR low enough on a big engine if you just tried hard enough, what a tool.
Thanks for point that out, haven't been following this thread, it's worse than the other two from the start. But can stop bothering with that guy then.
>The optimal number of engines will always be higher.
sure, but will it be 30? and as you pointed out, the answer is probably not. the answer is probably that you can achieve sufficient redundancy with fewer engines, if only you could build better engines. and if you could do that, if you could only use fewer, better engines, you would almost certainly improve the economics and other characteristics of the vehicle because that's what happens everywhere else for all the same reasons.
sometimes bigger is not better. i'm hesitant to provide further analogies lest i be accused of knowing too much, but there's a reason car engines don't just have one giant cylinder. but they also don't have thirty cylinders.
i'm making a very narrow point here and always have been. i recognise that it's annoying to have such a narrow argument, but that's what people objected to so that's the argument we're stuck with.
Redundancy really is just a side bonus anon of throttling. You need to figure out a way to get empty TWR below 1, or damn close to 1 and accept the challenges and expenses of hover slam, or you're non-competitive. All while still having plenty of thrust for full launch mass. The end. Take your engines, their thrust, how deep they can throttle, and do the math, that's your absolute minimum number of engines. You'll find the answer doesn't come out to single digits on heavy rockets unless you're doing something else wrong (stupid high dry mass fraction murdering your actual payload margin).
wow anon that sounds really hard. in fact it sounds much harder than just using a frickload of engines.
why are we still here when all you do is agree with me?
>lack of imagination
alright anons lets all drop our lack of imagination for the sake of mr big engine here.
let's imagine a magical world where you could get a rocket to space and back by just pretending to pick it up with between your fingers from a distance and throwing it upwards, then doing the same as it comes down and putting it gently down on the ground, now it won't need ANY engines.
anons who disagree with me and say that this is BY THE VERY LAWS OF PHYSICS IMPOSSIBLE are just morons who lack imagination and actually agree with me that it's more difficult to do than something that is actually possible outside of fantasy land.
>and what if rockets could land without being underpower
cope and a dodge from your previous being BTFO but i'll humor it.
you have two options:
A. parachutes, which are not rapidly-reuseable and just not an option on rockets the size of starship or even falcon 9 which make fast re-useablity with large payload capacity possible.
B. Wings, which requires not just the dead weight of wings throughout the operation, but all of the supporting structures inside the hull that keep the wings attached to the fricking craft and allow it to exert force on them. this gives you a massive weight penality, seriously circumsizing your ability to launch mass to LEO by a significant factor, and completely cucking you from ANYTHING higher than medium earth orbit.
you can keep fricking around with this hypothetical of
>HURR DURR WHAT IF THE IMPOSSIBLE WAS POSSIBLE HUH?
but the reality is starship works because it's physically possible and it always was, whether the technological maturity was there for it is a different matter, your analogue argument is not fricking functional because you are talking about shit that is just physically speaking not viable instead of technologically challenging.
>A. parachutes, which are not rapidly-reuseable and just not an option on rockets the size of starship or even falcon 9 which make fast re-useablity with large payload capacity possible.
They also cost a ton of mass and are also inherently a chaotic system, hard to model. Plus they can't actually do a SOFT touch down, they work ok if you can land in water or on airbags, but aren't a great choice vs powered landing.
>B. Wings
Yeah nothing to add to what you wrote on that front and I responded in other threads anyway. Wings are one of those ideas that seems cool but the physics suck.
>cope and a dodge
or, y'know, literally the essence of the entire argument. let me phrase this another way: if fewer engines is easier than more engines then why didn't starship just go with fewer engines?
>"because it wouldn't have been as good"
oh, so it was too hard to get fewer engines to work?
there's no need to reply to this question, i already know the answer.
the point that other anon made, that aircraft are inherently safer, does not then inevitably translate into 30 engines being the minimum safe number of engines for a rocket ship anon.
you misunderstand anon's point, which anon articulated by describing engine numbers as a graph. in fact you have also ignored the fact that i have, multiple times, acknowledged the importance of redundancy including in the section anon literally quoted where i pointed out how single engine airplanes do not have redundancy.
it's not enough to say "redundancy important" because for that argument to justify thirty engines it would have to be true that only thirty engines have enough redundancy regardless of the engines used, i.e. that even if you could copy-paste the existing starship engines but with double the safety you'd still need to have thirty of them.
it's time for you to stop posting. your arguments have devolved from attempting to make a central point into bitter and desperate sniping. this is why it's so important to not get all smug and condescending in your arguments, anon. you climb up trees that you can't climb down. i'm gonna have mercy on you and stop responding now so you can pretend you've won and go do other things.
NTA, but it seems like Elon Musk's brute force approach here
>Why build one good electric car battery when you can have thousands of shitty 18650s?
>Oh no, it is now a chain reaction
>Why spend the time developing one good rocket engine when you can spam a bunch of small ones
>Oh no, kaboom
>Why spend the time to invest in a platform to counter hate speech and russian disinfo when you can allow attacks on democracy to drive ad revenue
>Oh no, Congress is forcing the sale of twitter due to failure to contain chinese influence after they invaded Taiwan
yeah despite their reputation for innovation what private companies are actually good at is taking technologies developed by government research and then squeezing value out of them.
>attacks on democracy
Lmao. There it is. You're just a seething leftist.
Not all leftists hate Musk, but if you hate Musk you're definitely a leftist.
>>Why build one good electric car battery when you can have thousands of shitty 18650s?
First of all no one does "one big battery" and if they did it would be hilariously MORE dangerous. Second all the companies that laughed at filling a car with laptop batteries now all do the exact same thing
>>Why spend the time developing one good rocket engine when you can spam a bunch of small ones
Making raptor larger wouldn't make it safer it would make it require material science no one will have for another XX years. FFSC is unironically hard.
>Why spend the time to invest in a platform to counter hate speech
Black person
You can't make engines that big you absolute moron; even if you could it would be a terrible idea for other reasons.
God why do so many people with absolutely zero subject knowledge decide to chime in with their completely inane opinions, and why do they act so smug about it at the same time.
It's not like the number of engines was even the problem!! The problem was that the launch plume obliterated the concrete pad below, sending shrapnel into the thrust mount and the plumbing.
You do realise the Falcon Heavy uses 27 engines and all launches have been successful so far?
You’re just the same type of moron that claimed that reusability was a pipe dream. Absolute bucket crab mentality.
>what you will find is with thirty fricking engines reusability is a complete pipe dream.
Wrong. The point of 30 engines is hitting reaching economies of scale, with hundreds of those engines being built, and with room for even half of them to fail and the rocket still be able to function.
Do you really think they've not done the math for this? It may not be an elegant solution, but you can bet is going to be more cost effective and safe vs. 1-6 monstrously bigger engines able to lift the same.
>posts engine that isn't even used anymore
Curious.
nta btw
>he achievement is in designing powerful engines,
No it isn't homosexual. All you need to get a powerful engine is a lot of mass flowing through at non-zero ISP. SRBs are used as a crutch for underpowered rockets all the time, they're powerful and totally braindead.
What's challenging is designing an engine that provides good performance across all important metrics. Thrust per weight, thrust per area, thrust per dollar, ISP. When you look at the synthesis of those factors Raptor outperforms anything. The scale literally doesn't matter except insofar as you set your scale appropriately to satisfy those metrics.
>every additional engine is another complete system that needs to work perfectly. it's more parts, more failure points, more problems
Less engines means progressively less engine out capability trending to zero. The less engine out capability you have, the more 9s you need at the end of 99.9..% engine reliability in order to have a safe system. There are tradeoffs for any arrangement.
>the reason why larger engines are harder is because you reach the limits of materials science and have to basically invent whole new materials,
Designing a methalox FFSC already basically went beyond the capabilities of material science when it was made.
>ndeed, and maybe there's a reason why nobody bothered building rockets that large.
>it's the reusability that makes it good, not the size
It's the size that makes reusability feasible. You need the final stage to have sufficient spare capacity to accomplish a reusable misdion profile which means you need it to be big and you need a big booster to launch it.
>SRBs are used as a crutch for underpowered rockets all the time, they're powerful and totally braindead.
sure but we're not talking about SRBs.
>What's challenging is designing an engine that provides good performance across all important metrics
yeah and one of the metrics is "how many of these fricking things do i need to strap to my ass"
>Less engines means progressively less engine out capability trending to zero
relying on all of your engine out events to not cause an explosion is a dumb plan. they won't all be so benign. "we will just tank the failures" never really works out in the long run even when sometimes you can't avoid it.
>It's the size that makes reusability feasible.
yeah maybe. obviously you can make things reusable at any scale, but the economics could be different. i haven't bothered looking into that and it's not like i'm against big rockets. i'm just saying that the bigness isn't the part that matters per se. if it was the same size but not reusable it wouldn't be equally as important.
>sure but we're not talking about SRBs.
It's an example of a powerful engine which is dead simple to design which renders what you just said null and void. You can rerun that with keralox and get the same answer. Making powerful engine is easy, making powerful engines with top of the line performance across the board is hard.
>yeah and one of the metrics is "how many of these fricking things do i need to strap to my ass"
No, it's really not. I pretty much named the core metrics that matter already.
>relying on all of your engine out events to not cause an explosion is a dumb plan. they won't all be so benign. "we will just tank the failures" never really works out in the long run even when sometimes you can't avoid it.
It's not about "tanking the failures" as if you expect the engines to fail every other launch, it's a matter of your core tolerances. F9/FH very rarely experiences engine failures, but it has, and has maintained a high reliability for a rocket system because engine out capability prevents most of them from being mission kills. Again, what engine out capability allows you to do is shave some 9s off of your safety margin. It's just objectively better and safer to have more margin.
> i'm just saying that the bigness isn't the part that matters per se. if it was the same size but not reusable it wouldn't be equally as important.
And if an engine is bigger but doesn't provide an improvement on thrust relative to all given metrics without sacrificing other features like ISP and safety margin then it's not an improvement
>Making powerful engine is easy, making powerful engines with top of the line performance across the board is hard.
holy frick you are so pedantic lmao.
i don't care about this pedantry. whether it's hard to make the bigger engines because it's hard to make them powerful or hard to make them 'top of the line across the board', it doesn't affect the point at all. like all space nerds you are simply incapable of communicating in anything less than a 200 page report with footnotes no matter the context.
i am aware that it's quite easy to get a lot of raw power. in fact you could just strap an enormous fricking bomb to your payload and nuke it into space. but we aren't talking about that because it's not fricking useful, in the same way that SRBs don't achieve the goals of a first stage reusable engine, in the same way that the hypothetical "powerful but literally nothing else" engine that you imagine i am talking about doesn't.
i get that you're not required to assume the best possible construction of my argument and are free to insist that i be more specific. and in that vein, i'm also not required to indulge your insistence on it. you fricking pedant.
>It's not about "tanking the failures" as if you expect the engines to fail every other launch
it is literally about tanking the failures and hoping that those failures aren't the kind that explode. engine out capability does indeed theoretically allow you to achieve more reliability, but only if you assume that every engine out is benign. consider, rocket 1 has 1 engine that fails 50% of the time so half the missions fail. rocket 2 has 2 engines, each of which fails 60% of the time, but the rocket only needs one engine to fly so only 1 in 3 missions fail, except half of the failures are explosions that destroy the rocket, so now 2 in 3 missions fail
my theory is that the rate of catastrophic failures will overwhelm the engine out capability. it's the same reason airplanes don't use 30 small turbines.
>pedantry
moron translator: i am not knowledgable on the subject and have been consistenty wrong throughout this thread, so i'm going to ignore anyone's response and call people a nerd as a projection of my own lack of knowledge.
>i am not knowledgable on the subject
i am so knowledgeable on the subject that i have discarded the details distinctions that i know are meaningless, which is what i explained in everything you decided not to quote.
also i managed to spell knowledgeable correctly
you're not, someone gave you an example as to why your argument about big engines was stupid using SRB's and you discarded it because
>HURR SRB's ARE NOT LIQUID FUELD
you fricking pedantic hypocrite. you have been fricking BTFO throughout this entire thread and the only response you've given is repeating your dumb argument about engine reliability and calling people nerds while simultanitously claiming to be more *knowledgeable on the subject.
>you're not, someone gave you an example as to why your argument about big engines was stupid using SRB's and you discarded it because
>>HURR SRB's ARE NOT LIQUID FUELD
bruh, solid propellants are not suitable as a main engine and that's why SRBs are not relevant lol. do you need me to explain why solid propellants are not suitable for main engines? because that would be a strange thing to fail to understand for someone who claims to know so much more than me. my point has always been that strapping a frickload of engines to your rocket is a cope for not being able to build a smaller number of bigger engines to replace them. SRBs cannot replace those main engines which is why it's not relevant to my point.
you are hyperfixated on the fact that i said 'powerful engine' instead of providing some essay-length definition of a main engine and it's pure autism.
now that i have thoroughly explained everything for your chimp brain, i am willing to accept your apology.
>actually wants to have a functioning spine post-launch
Coward.
as kennedy said to NASA about the moon landing: there are levels of paralysis we are prepared to accept.
it's what's funny is that it's actually irrelevant whether he was talking about large SRB's or large Kerosine open cycle engines, yet you had to make an issue out of it you fricking moron. please have a nice day already, you're way out of your depth and you're trying to sound smart but it just makes you look like a stubborn moron instead.
You say I'm being pedantic but you don't have any metric to measure your conceptualization of a good engine against except that more engines is bad. Since that's exactly what your argument is trying to establish, the argument is entirely circular.
>it is literally about tanking the failures and hoping that those failures aren't the kind that explode
Most engine outs aren't mission kills. Just now with SS there were multiple engine outs, at least one spicy, and it handled launch to stage sep. Since having just 1, 2 or 3 engines generally means any engine out becomes a mission kill regardless of how spicy it is, it's always safer to have more wiggle room.
>You say I'm being pedantic but you don't have any metric to measure your conceptualization of a good engine against except that more engines is bad
i literally (not figuratively) gave you the metric in that post and literally (not figuratively) math'd it out for you.
>Most engine outs aren't mission kills
it doesn't have to be most. hell, it doesn't even have to be many. the boeing max flew millions of hours and still got grounded for a tiny handful of incidents.
that's my point. it's not about the reality of costs and benefits. if it was we would have won the space race by just building a pile of corpses that reached the moon, who cares if the rockets fail we just need one to get through. but that's never been acceptable for space flight, or indeed for anything dangerous.
if things are dangerous, we expect people to take precautions. if the precautions don't work then, well, what the frick were you doing? how can we trust you if you can't get it right? i'm not going to do something dangerous with someone i don't trust!
that's why air travel, which is so dangerous, is safer than driving. when things are dangerous, our expectations for safety go up, not down.
SCIENCE CANNOT MOVE FORWARD WITHOUT HEAPS (Of dead humans)
>i literally (not figuratively) gave you the metric in that post and literally (not figuratively) math'd it out for you.
If you're trying to place all the weight of your analysis on engine outs destroying the entire vehicle that's a pretty tenuous stance. You're so much more likely to experience any engine out at all (which, again, is infinitely worse if you can't continue the mission afterward) than you are to experience a spontaneous deflagration as a direct result of an engine going out.
sure, but the risk is always gonna go up the more engines you have until you hit the limits of your technology that means you're pushing the size of your engines past your limits.
this whole argument is because anon said "using more engines is actually harder than using fewer engines" which of course is obviously wrong. nobody chooses to use more engines if they can avoid it in almost any application. using more engines isn't easy, but it's certainly easier. that's why the soviets did it, that's why musk is doing it.
i'm not sure why anyone expects a budget airline to be on the cutting edge of R&D anyway lol.
>sure, but the risk is always gonna go up the more engines
Sure, but it's not a case of less engines good either. The risk of an engine out happening at all is generally going to be much higher than the chance of an engine out rendering the vehicle inoperable. Most probably risk vs. engine # starts at the highest point at small numbers, bottoms out at 1-2 engine out tolerance and then slowly climbs again.
>this whole argument is because anon said "using more engines is actually harder than using fewer engines" which of course is obviously wrong.
Using more or less engines isn't really inherently more or less difficult. There's challenges to both. I would say it's not as though God set the perfect number of booster stage engines at 33 and it is indeed a bit high, but the combination of the fact that raptor is already operating at the limit of feasibility combined with the logistics of having both stages use the same engine for everything means it makes more sense than it doesn't.
buddy, this talking point might've made sense before spacex started launching regularly but it just looks kinda silly now, literally the only instance where an engine out happened during a falcon 9 flight, it ended up succeeding the mission regardless, not to mention the fact that large singular engines or even five engines on a vehicle are fricking stupid for re-use vehicles. you realize rockets usually can't throttle very deep right? because starship splits up it's thrust between so many engines, it means it can hover during descent, which the falcon 9 can't even do with it's multitude of engines.
>this talking point might've made sense before spacex started launching regularly
you don't even know what the talking point is.
fewer components > more components. you only do the latter when you can't get the results you need from the former. bolting more shit on until it works creates plenty of problems, sure, and it's hard to make it work when you're bolted all the shit onto it, but that doesn't mean it's harder than inventing an entirely new, more elegant solution that doesn't require all of the extra shit.
everything else that has been said in this thread is different ways of explaining this to morons.
>you realize rockets usually can't throttle very deep right?
YEAH WHICH IS WHY IT'S EASIER TO USE A FRICKTONNE OF ENGINES THAN IT IS TO DESIGN ONE BIG ENGINE WITH A DEEP THROTTLE.
fricking christ anon, READ.
>YEAH WHICH IS WHY IT'S EASIER TO USE A FRICKTONNE OF ENGINES THAN IT IS TO DESIGN ONE BIG ENGINE WITH A DEEP THROTTLE
jesus fricking christ you're such a fricking midwit, anon, i don't know how to tell you this, but there are hard physical limits that stop you from throttling below about 40% of total thrust that are literally impossible to circumvent, and even if you got that low 40% still wouldn't be enough for a controlled landing of a 1st stage booster when it's returning and has almost no fuel in it anymore, thus weighing almost nothing compared to when it took off.
you know why nobody else in this thread has told you this yet? because they expect you to know, you fricking cretin.
i find it hilarious that it blew up because i predicted it would in a thread the other day. it wasn't that bad and the mission was technically a success but i still think it was funny.
>i find it hilarious that it blew up because i predicted it would in a thread the other day.
so did literally everyone else homosexual. you arent special
but i was racist about it so i win HA
It was never not going to blow up.
It was intentionally remote detonated.
>It's literally designed like an old, Soviet ICBM. Just put lots of smaller engines on it unlit it flies,
>Soviet rocket. One engine fail rocket explodes
>Super Heavy. 3 engines crushed by concrete plates flying back - engage inertia driftu!!! *Deja Vu track starts playing*
So is it just thirdies and vatniks seething over spacex kek
It's nothing special you moron.
Yeah so it is thirdies
>thirdies
Yes, the Chinese especially. It's kind of hard to pretend to be implessive when the US in all its supposed decline and destruction is doing this shit.
These things alone threw a wrench onto dish/direct tv. Theres no point of satellite TV anymore when starlink is $110 and gets 100mb/s with 20 ping
absolutely. To test it mention memes like their ancient sojuz derived long marches which are better at killing their own with uncontrolled boosters falling on top of them then delivering anything cheap to orbit
The west won't let them on their toys when the settling and mining of the solar system starts and their prices of shit will just result in their deaths.
You try firing 40 rockets in parallel and see if you don't get 40 different thrust vectors OP.
fricking shitty stupid combustion engines,
SOMEBODY MAKE A NUCLEAR THERMAL ROCKET RIGHT NAO
Soldi state nuke rocket are not so cool as you may think. They only have good ISP with Hydrogen and Hydrogen is shit because of it minuscule density and all problems with it's storage and handling. Also nuke rockets are too low thrust for first stage.
Theoretically
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_core_reactor_rocket
Would be cool but practical emplemention is questionable.
skyhooks when?
>40 rockets successfully cooperating
>Largest and heaviest rocket ever to lift off
>Two stages, yet despite its gargantuan mass did not come apart when it started spinning uncontrollably
People are not giving that last point enough credit. Do you have any idea of the forces acting on the rocket as it was spinning? And yet it didn't fall apart until it was explicitly detonated by mission control.
>yet despite its gargantuan mass did not come apart when it started spinning uncontrollably
But it was supposed to separate.
He means that it didn't disintegrate under the stresses of flipping around at supersonic speeds.
I mean, the things are pressurised and designed to flip and land. I would be concerned if it did.
yes, but not while attached to each other. The loads are much heavier.
Are they? I don't think it's much different since most force would be along the whole body, the leading edge would have the same pressure as if it was seperated.
KSP is terrible at modelling bending bodies if that's where you're getting your ideas from.
yes. the bending loads on the almost-empty tanks on the superheavy from having a fully-loaded, attached starship through it while doing flips - multiple - are insane. the CoM and CoP are totally out of design space as well. AFTS only triggered when the ship detected it was going to fly out of the corridor; there was no breaking apart from aero-forces.
I don't think it's all that much different "empty" (it wasn't completely till just seconds before explosion) or not. The forces on the empty tank would be similar to when it would have had to manouver solo anyway.
If you are saying you are surprised at how strong the joint between them is, like I said this isn't KSP.
It's definitely not intended to spin around at Mach 1.5 or so like it did.
It's intended to be side on at Mach 1.5 though anon, which would be the most stressful position would it not.
The booster section is made of the same materials effectively correct? So there shouldn't be a problem.
Am I being trolled?
For a more serious answer: no, I'm pretty sure no full rocket stack is designed specifically to handle flying sideways at supersonic velocities during the initial ascent through the atmosphere, which is why it's impressive that the Starship apparently survived it for quite aw while before the FTS was triggered. Shows the strength of stainless steel, I suppose.
Starship full stack is literally designed to flip anon.
No, only the upper stage, and at a much lower velocity.
The lower stage literally needs to flip so it can slow down and land anon are you high.
Are you talking about the boostback maneuver for Super Heavy? That's nowhere near a full-on 360 degree spin, and it's supposed to happen after stage separation, not to mention happening at very high altitude. It's definitely not like the fully-integrated stack spinning around at about 30km while going at supersonic speeds.
It was literally at seperation height you low IQ mongoloid. Did you not notice the fuel gauge on the bottom. It failed to seperate.
Sure it's only meant to do a 180, but that's literally the full stress effect of a 360 in that style of atmosphere, think about it for more than a second for the love of god.
You seriously think staging was supposed to happen at less than 40km? Also, you said earlier that the full stack is designed to flip around, which is patently untrue. The rocket isn't supposed to flip around like it did while both stages are still together.
Look, all I'm saying is that it's impressive that Starship survived that for so long when it's very likely that many other rockets would not have, were they in that same situation.
>The rocket isn't supposed to flip around like it did while both stages are still together.
Does the rocket not separate its stages with the flip? Wasn't that half the point?
I think I see where the confusion is. From what I remember reading, I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be more of a spin, like a top, to separate the stages, rather than flipping around like a propeller. The flipping that it did end up doing looked like it had lost stability, the announcer even stated that it was obviously not nominal performance. I think perhaps it tried to do the spin-separation maneuver but the underperformance of the booster due to all the engines out, the hydraulic TVC having failed earlier and possibly being at the wrong altitude caused it to lose control. We'll hopefully know more about exactly what happened when SpaceX releases a more detailed report.
He's a moron. Just ignore him. Obviously ESL too since he can't read long paragraphs without forgetting the first sentence.
Yeah that was the most impressive part. That’s a 150 m rocket weighing over 400 tons doing 5 flips at 2000 km/h and staying in one piece.
No wonder they blew the range safety charges.
>Do you have any idea of the forces acting on the rocket as it was spinning?
anon they cant even name any rocket outside of better known ones like starship and falcon, much less know about how fragile every single other design is in the world
Rogozin hands typed this post.
The ISS is surprisingly small when you look at it like that.
More like Starship is stupidly large. Remember that it integrates an entire second stage.
It's bigger than a football field
And one of them doesnt work. You can draw all kinds of ideas but lets talk when it delivers. Or else by your metric soviets beat US to moon.
>And one of them doesnt work.
Yeah. The middle one. LOL.
Bros... a cubic kilometer....
no it's not. 1km^3= 1'000'000'000m^3
it's one cubic dekameter (not that that's a unit anyone uses)
lmao, you npcs will act like you never said shit when it works. Just like people like you acted about Falcon 9.
And no it is nothing like an ICBM, at least no more like an ICBM than it is like any other rocket. You don't even know what full flow staged combustion means.
>lmao grasshopper is stupid, reusable rockets are dumb
>lmao falcon 1 will never work
>lmao falcon 9 will never work
>lmao falcon heavy will never work
>lmao starship will never work
It's all so tiresome
If it's so easy then why don't you do it mr smartass?
spacex is the greatest proof of westeren superiority and the superiority of the free-trade capitalist system (that white europeans invented) thus making capitalism the greatest weapon ever developed
How many tsar bombas could you make that thing carry?
>Why do morons do moronic things?
Flight of full-flow staged combustion cycle engine is an achievement in itself.
I sure do love the guaranteed cope that accompanies successful American rocket launches
the turdie doomers thinking a partially successful megarocket launch is a huge loss of face memory hole anything successful coming after it and pretend it does not matter. Because they are dishonest fricks with a massive agenda
We have been down this road in living memory with the Falcon saga. I am sure if the net existed back in the 60s you would have gotten vatnik and wumao simps shitting on failed american test launches getting plastered all over the net
I hate resentful people like you, like you wouldn't believe.
Yeah it's a fricking achievement. It's fricking big and has the ability to land again. That's not easy.
Sounds like cope.
As complexity increases, so does risk and problems. This is a well known factor in manufacturing.
It's not unreasonable to think that the most difficult parts of rocketry will be difficult for spaceX.
Just ignore how their previous rockets went through the same process of ever-improving test flights like this, only to become the most successful and effective methods of getting cargo into space in history.
>most successful and effective methods of getting cargo into space in history.
That's still Ariane 5.
It's still the R-7 family but the F9 is catching up.
>want to use most effective method to get cargo into space
>it's sold out
Feels bad. Guess I'll have to settle for the much cheaper option that flies like once a week at this point.
as a Euro I too like Ariane 5
but this is just not true anymore
>That's still Ariane 5.
No, Falcon 9 passed everything else in consecutive successful flights over 1 year ago, and has added to the margin since. Sorry anon:
>https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/spacexs-falcon-9-rocket-has-set-a-record-for-most-consecutive-successes/
Also Ariane 5 was never in the running anyway.
Thirdie and commie seethe at starship is nothing short of hilarious
Fact is, spacex has killed the Russian and Chinese launch industries with arianespace hanging on by the skin of its teeth, and that only thanks to its rockets being very good at putting satellites into very high orbit.
Its agile development model produced a rocket (falcon 9) which has fricked every other player in the industry. Now they're going through the exact same process to develop a rocket that promises another order of magnitude scale improvement in thirdie rocket mogging, and the same morons who hooted like chimps at every falcon 9 test launch have come out the woodwork once again to seethe and mald until starship inevitably succeeds and they have to slink back to their telegram hugboxes
This whole process is indicative of the fundamental superiority of the western, free and capitalist system, which prizes getting shit done, over the Russo-Asiatic "save face at all costs" model. The average russian serf sees a test launch that doesn't look like one of their governments propaganda videos and cannot fathom that this is what r&d actually looks like - you design, test, adjust and eventually produce something great.
Arianne would never collapse anyway because Europe would never stop funding it. Being overreliant on US rockets would never happen. I expect direct landing competitors in the future.
Except they’ve run out of A5 and A6 is late so they’re gonna have to ride on the broomstick and pay the funny doge man
Filling capability gaps during development, with a competitor doesn't disprove my point anon.
True, but their leadership of the A6 program had been a disaster from conception and they continue to mismanage it. You’d think having the market pulled out from under them by spacex and then losing access to soyuz would have shaken them up but nope. Yuro complacency knows no limits
Meh, they were behind for decades yet they still exist. Your "new paradigm" will just lead to further European development eventually.
Luckily Europe is our ally, and thus It's only really important if the Russoids and Chinkese fail.
Agreed, and tbh eurospace is prolly the closest to creating working reusable rockets, but it'll still take them a decade to catch up to spacex
Its the only other part of the world with the economy and know-how to pull it off
There's a big push for euro reusable going on rn, see Miura 5 rocket
Im >57927714 btw
I wonder what would the SX crew say when euros would swallow down their pride and make them an offer to create a dedicated launch corridor & production area in their spaceport where they can launch as many rockets they want as many times whenever. No loicense boomer in sight. In exchange for a joint euro-SX venture that makes Falcon rockets (and eventually SS) under license so euro engineers can catch up faster by learning how the americans are making and operating them.
A pipe dream given euro space is primarily frenchy centric and their ego can never allow it
Id imagine SX would be more than happy to sell launch vehicles to the euros
Their business model is probably gonna morph from being an all in one shop to get shit into space to being a vehicle manufacturer a la boing/airbus
Specialization breeds efficiency
on the other hand it was contractor based oldspace that breed extreme amounts of inefficiency. Most notably Shuttle and its forever son Senat Launch System
It would probably be difficult to export what would be considered weapons technology even to allies anon. I know the F35 existed but half of those already had fingers in that pie for development.
ITER keeps Americana aerospace companies from selling tech to other nations
but the Euro's are more than welcome to send their satellites and astronauts here to launch out of America :3
can't do it, ITAR restrictions
Most launches were paid by state funding. Market share doesn't matter
????
moron
this anon gets it. Frick the backwards and degenerate lawless turdie kingdoms and their simps. Western civilization is superior in every way with now being on the brink of industrialized space thanks to pioneers facilitated by a rule of law based society that protects and allows them to proliferate in a traditionally state-mil sector
They need to highten their launch chair by 3 times and put water cooled steel plates underneath.
yeah the milkstool idea has been floating around. Thing is they will go with the water deluge and hardened padding try first before resorting to major builds like flame trench or milk stool. Keep in mind the tower is already as its limits as they used the biggest crane in the world to make it. One upping it requires making a even bigger crane
Can't you just like... build a giant underground silo to launch it from? Just remember to add enough horizontal tunnels to channel away the exhaust so it won't go up the sides of the rocket.
thing is it is sitting in a swampland right next to the ocean. That is why they dodged the flame channel in the first place. Building it is ass with the soft clay and flooding problem. On top of the bureocrats and beetle hugging hippies kveching about the local wildlife
Add ISRO, Boeing, and Transporter missions destroying small sat. Worst part is competitors don't even look like they are trying to keep up. ESA is already designing space stations to be launched by StarShip.
Because its the start of a new era in low cost spaceflight.
I'm not even anglo and I hate Musk, but the fact that 80% of comments in this thread shit on this magnificent machine tells you all you need to now about "PrepHole".
>90%
Actually read the thread.
Being critical of a failure is not "shitting on spaceX" homosexual there is no need to be so emotional.
>critical of a failure
This was not a failure, that's the thing. This is a completely normal part of R&D. This was the first test flight, with multiple rockets already waiting for the next tests.
See now this is the main reason why I'm really fed up with elonshills. And you are shills by the way.
It was a fricking failure. Accept it. They will learn sure. But this WAS absolutely 100% a failure no matter how you cope about it.
No other system would you defend this.
Every US hypersonic test failure is a failure "Chinese test" failure is a failure.
But oh no, SpaceX can't have failure, j-just b-because OK.
If you can't say "it's a failure that they will learn from" because of your fragile sensibilities then I'm convinced you're a fanboy shill.
>No other system would you defend this.
Every other system has gone through the same kind of tests. Any novel engineering project will go through this same process.
>Every US hypersonic test failure is a failure "Chinese test" failure is a failure.
Maybe stop assuming we're all the same morons?
Nah, consistency homosexual. It was a failure by any sense of the word. They will try again, but the launch was a failure.
Prefacing failure with "we consider failures acceptable" in our long term strategy doesn't stop it being a failure.
>Nah, consistency homosexual.
You are consistently being an actual moron.
A test concluding as expected is not a failure.
>As expected
>Prepare a full flight plan
>Test fails to do full plan
>I-its not a f-failure we expected it to not work
You are the exact type of shill homosexual I was talking about in my original post.
As opposed to what? Showing the viewers a graphic of it exploding at the launch pad? Is that really what you would do?
Me:
>"My goal is to frick your mom."
>I proceed to penetrate your mom
>I proceed to frick your mom for a while
>I proceed to cum inside your mom
>however she doesn't get pregnant
You:
>"lmao fricking failure she didn't even get pregnant."
Cope and seethe. I still fricked your mom.
>it is a failure
sure, but its a failure that occured during an early developmental flight test, something that happens all the fricking time in every space program and every new rocket design.
show me a space program that was able to make a giant rocket work perfectly the first time.
for reference:
delicious turdie seethe
You can really tell they're panicking, shill volume really goes up when they sense an imminent btfo
You are dumb as shit.
>Emotionposting shills seething at being called out
You were the gays I was targeting, thanks for showing up.
At least the posters before you had didn't have brain damage and argued fair points. Shills like you should die.
You are just moronic and everybody is telling you to stop being moronic. Seriously when will you morons learn? When they will be landing on Moon you will still be shitposting the same crap?
Yes but it will be about the next thing instead.
Nothing can ever be done and when it is done the next step is literally impossible.
>It was a fricking failure
A rocket not blowing up on the launchpad on the first go is considered a success by engineers, sir moron.
If Russia launched a new rocket and told everyone over and over that it would be a success JUST to take off and everything beyond that was a bonus — and then it blew up after failed to enter its 2nd phase…WHAT would you do, /k/? You’d LAUGH at them, non-stop. Anyone who tried to argue that it was a success because it left the launch pad would be called a copium-huffing shill.
But, Starship blowing up after failing to enter the 2nd phase? UNIRONICALLY A SUCCESS.
If they launched anything other than copies of copies of the soviet soyuz that by itself would be impressive
Russia hasn't recently failed any tests because they haven't done any tests because they havent designed anything new in forty years
See all the "failures" they had in the golden age of their space programme
We all know it won't happen because russians are not making any new rocket designs and are using a 50 year old one.
esl monkey quit it
you stupid Black folk never believed the booster is even possible in a dream and now it flew on 6 or 7 busted engines and asphalt shrapnel up it's ass like a dronebombed vatnik pidor, and than it made 3 spins and stayed intact until getting remote detonated. it's not only a success but a fricking miracle
What a bunch of sour, pathetic people you all are.
This is great stuff.
SpaceX will launch 10x more mass into space this year than your entire space program. Seethe more vatnik.
You are so fricking dumb it's unreal.
Falcon 9 is already half the price of closest competition this thing will be 10x cheaper. It's a complete game changer.
>He unironically thinks the reason elon managed to get the cost down is some sort of advanced tech he developed instead of just underpaying his engineers
Anon, i....
F9 has been the most successful rocket flying for the better part of a decade now. Anyone's paying more than Elon is to do less they are overpaying by definition.
>
Reusable craft set back space travel as much as the end of the cold war did. It's like that reddit athiest 'Christian Dark Ages" graph but for spaceships and real.
are you simple?
The Space Shuttle was built on lies and never delivered a tenth the efficiency it promised. It was so expensive it sucked up funding for all disposable LVs to the point it was Soyuz or nothing for the longest fricking time. As the cherry on top their notable and expensive disasters soured normies on space travel for over a decade.
the real blame lies in people like clinton and obama for sucking out all the funding to build urban youth centers
>Clinton's quest for an actual balanced budget will only be remembered by 'fiscal conservatives' as 'helping Black folk'
Without the soviet union, the US couldn't give a single frick about big science. Everything from particle accelerators to the space program was slashed. Bushes I&II did the exact same shit, it's only China rising as a (potential) technological rival that's caused anyone in Washington to get off their ass.
Blaming the space shittle on reusability as a concept and not govt mismanagement is like getting food poisoning at a restaurant and blaming the concept of farming and distributing food itself instead of the Black folk behind the counter
No, just contrarian.
my guess is the mechanical seperators failed and there is a reason everyone else uses simplistic pyrothecnical seperators that are non reusable - much simpler to perfect
>Why do morons act like this piece of shit is some huge achievement?
post yours
Wrong board
No, this is the right board for Starship discussion. Cheap, heavy orbital lift capabilities make things like Brilliant Pebbles and Project Thor not a meme. It also makes degrading GPS constellations during a peer conflict much more difficult.
>It also makes degrading GPS constellations during a peer conflict much more difficult.
Or do they make it easier, muahahahhahahaha
We can only hope. Unironic orbital combat within our lifetime, anon.
you will live to see james bond be real
Brilliant Pebbles are already feasible with Falcon 9.
Though in the year 2023 with all progress of lasers Brilliant Pebbles are not enticing anymore.
>Brilliant Pebbles and Project Thor
frick these memes where is project orion prototype mark I ready to be lifted to orbit for testing?
>Cheap, heavy orbital lift capabilities make things like Brilliant Pebbles and Project Thor not a meme. It also makes degrading GPS constellations during a peer conflict much more difficult.
It also makes launching large strike packages of ASAT missiles easier.
>commercial development - blow up obviously unready prototype to keep the hype alive
>public funded development - waste years overpreparing for practical tests because you’re one failure away from budget being slashed
Is there a middle way?
How much time did it take to build it ? Older rockets took 10+ years to develop.
Started development in 2017. if they keep to the pattern of how many launches it takes to perfect their designs, it'll be flying missions sometime next year,
Shareholder copium
it's not publicly traded moron
If it's so easy a moron could do it why didn't you huh?
>ate shit on the first lap
>but look at how fast he was running!
I'm tired of participation medals. Take your National Defense Service Medal and gtfo
New starship hypevid just dropped
The engines are made in a factory that can produce them in series.
I believe they can soon reach one rocket engine a day.
It's a massive change in cost and speed.
They are also much simplified engines yet they can both take off and land.
Elon's could outproduce the whole Russian national industry in missile manufacturing just with his factory alone.
>I believe they can soon reach one rocket engine a day.
They hit that last year. They are going to dozens a day once the factories are up and running.
>Elon's could outproduce the whole Russian national industry in missile manufacturing just with his factory alone.
Which is even funnier when you know at the very beginning he wanted to start by buying some old vatnik rockets for testing and learning. Which the perpetually angry&nihilistic vatniks responded by spitting on him and upping the price 10x on the spot for no fricking reason
spacex seems to be 90% millenials, are we infact capable?
Age breakdown has it like 20% Boomers (Gen X'ers and like single digit percent actual Ex-NASA Boomers), 60% Millennials, and 20% Zoomers. There will be more Zoomers over time just because recruitment can never stop, and people constantly leave.
I wonder how big of a percentage are former Nasa staff that actually wanted to accomplish something more then the occasional probe with its multi year transition windows
>Why do morons act like this piece of shit is some huge achievement?
This is what the people look like who start these threads.
it's uhh a big fricking rocket. developed for profit theoretically.
if they can get it to work it'll be pretty neat but i'm not sure of the weapon applications
it can deliver the equivalent of one ISS to orbit with one launch. I am sure they will figure something out with it
>blows up
>government employees clap
Yeah
>government employees
where?
Everywhere.
>it has 17Mlbf the next nearest is the N1 with 11Mlbf
>it maintained structural integrity with that much thrust
>the N1 failed on every attempted launch attempt
>Starship only failed because the two stages failed to separate (which was assumed a potential issue)
>it's goal is to go to Mars not the Moon but Mars
scaling things is harder than you think - materials have their limitations...
>soviet icbms were reusable
>soviet icbms landed themselves
>soviet icbms could transport 150-250 tons of cargo
Yeah, people trying to dismiss this are delusional. Elon is a c**t, but Space X are doing science fiction shit in real life, finally ending the stagnation of the space race since the 80s
No they aren’t. They’re doing production streamlining on existing theory to drive down costs. Not exactly what most people think of when they hear "science fiction".
>Not exactly what most people think of when they hear "science fiction".
We aren't talking about Star Wars here. Making reusable spaceships was literally science fiction until SpaceX.
>ib4 the space shuttle
no
>Not exactly what most people think of when they hear "science fiction".
Most peoples idea of sci-fi is Star Wars or Star Trek which is basically space fantasy (especially for star wars) with some science thrown in.
Sometimes I wonder what its like to go through life so stupid and seething that, after seeing the multiple past successes of a rocket launch company you say "There's no way they succeed this time" when seeing the first test launch of a rocket of its type and size actually take off and complete roughly half of its total mission (of which just getting off the launch pad without exploding was all that was expected of it).
It makes sense when you realize that thirdies are so afraid of failure that they won't try anything unless its guaranteed to work the first time, for fear of their betters ruining their lives or disappearing them. They are too stupid and beaten down by their masters to understand the western concept of agile development, where failing fast and often in sequentially better steps until you start succeeding is preferable to failing slowly in giant expensive efforts until you give up.
But its okay, we've seen this same song and dance thousands of times. Brownoids post seething shit, say its a failure, then go quiet once its succeeds and starts regular missions, only to be back again later saying the same thing about the next effort. Falcon 9 was done this same way, and now its got a launches using 7 times used boosters, and has broken 200+ launches as of January.
Nope. Nobody builds a full-scale rocket until they think they’ve solved all the key problems. So, either SpaceX failed to solve all problems, they knew it, and thus had to CONSTANTLY repeat "lift-off is all we need for a win" narrative to control expectations — OR they wanted to control expectations just in case unforeseen happened. They failed, that’s all. They’re trying something hard to do so failures are expected, but there’s no need to re-invent logic and the English language to go with a damage-control narrative. Think for yourself, don’t be controlled.
That's so wrong it isn't even funny.
Why did the USAF just drop a hypersonic program after just a couple of failures? If failures aren’t failures but are rather successful development steps, then why did this program get dropped in favor of another one?
Not all failures are created equal. Some failures indicate enough potential to warrant further investment, and some failures indicate that a design concept is not viable and should not be pursued further.
because we had like 6 fricking hypersonic programs and the others got it right, you colossal gaytard
You've never worked in an engineering or sofware project and it shows. Failures are part of the process and expected.
With his understanding he probably works in a warehouse or mans a fryalator. Even the crayon eaters understand you can learn from failure.
This is what shizo thinks day to day. I can bet my left nut that this cretin didn't even know that there was Super Heavy test after it happened
>Nobody makes anything expecting failures
And yet your parents made you, didn't they?
>Nobody builds a full-scale rocket until they think they’ve solved all the key problems.
Nobody in the old and dying aerospace industry, you mean. This is how we get utter trash like the SLS that is insanely expensive, cannot be reused, and test rockets cost billions of dollars.
Meanwhile during Falcon 9 testing they were cranking out rockets, exploding them, crashing them, etc and had another one on the test stand within weeks. Now they're pushing dozens of launches a year with a 99.1% mission success rate and 94.4% landing rate.
? No one is arguing that failed tests means SpaceX is a failure. We’re just not on-board with the silly damage-control narrative. The rocket failed to complete its second stage and blew up. That is called a failed test, not a success. If the purpose of the launch was to only test the first stage then you wouldn’t build a full rocket for flying all its phases. You build the full deal after you’ve tested everything else and feel like you’ve solved the key problems and are ready for full-scale testing.
>he doesn't know anything about the specific rocket that was used.
Without googling it. How many times did this rocket in particular almost destroy itself prior to this launch?
>That is called a failed test, not a success.
You don't set the terms of that, it's entirely internal. SpaceX clearly indicated that getting off the pad would be a success at this stage. That's why the employees were happy rather than disappointed when it exploded.
>You build the full deal after you’ve tested everything else and feel like you’ve solved the key problems and are ready for full-scale testing.
You really don't fricking get it, do you? You build the FULL thing, launch, get as far as you can, fail, then see why you failed, go to fix it, then launch again. You don't care about failures because you already have multiple rockets being built in various stages of development, so you slip in to the development, change the parts up for the ones that failed (in this case it was the release mechanism for the second stage), send it, then see if you do better.
The style you're talking about is called waterfall development, and has been literally proven time and again to suck shit through a straw. It is the worst form of development you can do because engineers cannot understand the full picture before actually doing something. It is more expensive because failures become a post-development fix instead of an in-process fix. You run into the inevitable issue of on-paper calculations versus real world performance. You run into the issue of not having full data because you're perhaps doing something that's never been done before so no such data exists.
Waterfall is fricked. Its a dead design paradigm that Agile development has surpassed.
Fail fast, fail often, iterate quickly, and succeed faster and cheaper.
>everyone else doesn't do it like that, so it's bad
Reminder NASA said designing F9 would have cost them 40x what they invested in SpaceX to do it. Ariane has been talking about an F9 copy for years (no delivery). Russia has one rocket and will only ever have one rocket.
>Nobody builds a full-scale rocket until they think they’ve solved all the key problems
known unknowns
unknown unknowns
you solve the first
you plan for the second
the way that they planned for the second was by not having people on the rocket when they launched it 🙂
The other way would have been to take all that time they spent unable to fire the rocket making sure it didn't fail when it launched
Their current FAA certification limits them to 15 flights per booster. They've got two boosters in inventory that have launched and landed 15 times each, and plan to launch them even more after extending the cert. The shortest launch->landing->launch turnaround for a booster they've managed is 21 days, which is wild.
Falcon 9 had same miniscule launch constraints per year when it started out. Loicense limits are simple papers which numbers can be changed
>7 times used boosters
old news actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_boosters
two boosters have already reached 15 flights, and many of them are already above 10 flights or rapidly getting there.
launch cadence is continually increasing as well, they're gonna try for 100 launches this year alone. i'm not even american but i struggle to understand why so many smarmy shitskins and vatnikkers are gleefully smugposting about this test launch given what this style has testing has done for falcon 9.
ziggers and other curiousity-deprived anti space subhumans should see this as the beginning of the end for all of your stupid fricking arguments, you'll pipe the frick and backtrack on everything you've said when starship or some other ambitious project reaches it's full potential, and you'll like it you filthy animals.
see
to prove my point, feels like all of these newbies weren't around for the development of falcon 1, falcon 9, electron or the starship upper stage. you c**ts defend the F35's development failures and then shit on the spacex mindset as damage control when both of them learn from failure to improve the design.
How many F35s crashed during development anon
we probably won't know, but considering it has happened with literally any other fighter development program it wouldn't surprise me. how many F35's have crashed AFTER development? because those were also useful lessons to draw from for lockheed.
>Plane works well, runs for hundreds of thousands of hours with some of the least incidents of nearly any aircraft per flight hour
>He thinks this is somewhat comparible to Elons wiener rocket
Anon please.
>They are too stupid and beaten down by their masters to understand the western concept of agile development, where failing fast and often in sequentially better steps until you start succeeding is preferable to failing slowly in giant expensive efforts until you give up.
To be really fricking fair this is exactly oppostie to the old dominant oldspace mentality. On both euro and US side which is as western civ as you can get. Where face saving was paramount as every single small setback immediately meant congress canceling your budget. SX is an anomaly but it is true that iteration design should be very familiar to anybody who has ever worked with modifying or even just repairing machines. It is basic common sense
>bro this tech is from '60s/'70s/'80s
chinkposters are here
Its funny how they'll say that at the same time that China doesn't have any such rockets. So which is it? Is it decades old tech and the Chinese can't even reproduce that? Or is it actually cutting edge tech?
Muskrats just be like that. They live to suck the musky dick.
Youre so fricking stupid its unbelievable. Like who are you? A israelite? A reptilian? A Black person? Nobody seethes this hard over innovation unless they thenselves are incapable of innovating. I understand you likeley have brain worms seeing as you clearly have zero grasp on research, development, fabrication, design, rocketry or physics. So go crawl back to your moron chamber (mothers womb) and develop a few more cranial folds before you open your moronic frickhole again
I really wanted to get in here and explain to you why, but then I realized if you can't draw that from all the knowledge out there, then it is entirely pointless for me to try. All the best anon, and my you shake that biterness one day
Might have something to do with it being the biggest launch in fifty years? At a fraction of the cost of previous projects capable of putting similar payloads into orbit. At a private enterprise, with private funding at that. Or maybe it is because this looks like the first earnest attempt at getting back to the moon or maybe even Mars since the end of the Apollo program. You know, that achievement that defined an entire generation? Mankind's first steps to the stars?
Can't really imagine why people might be excited for that. I bet they all collect funko pops.
I mean elon musk is just one american billionaire moron but I can't name any russian billionaires who are doing anything interesting with their money let alone advantageous to human innovation. elon has yachts and mansions but at least he bankrolls actual intelligent people to create things
>which he takes credit for
Why is /k/ full of anti-intellectuals and debbie downers?
>I'm going to completely generalize motivations of development and people's reactions to it and call them morons from my built up generalizations!
ENOUGH.
i trust this concludes the debate. goodnight, gentlemen.
i concede that you posted a funny high effort meme, the problem is that chad vs virgin memes are meant to be ironic, which means the virgin in this meme is actually right, and the chad is a funny pants-on-head extremefication of something that makes no sense in reality.
The whole stack might well have cost the same at the ULA Centaur V upper stage that popped the other day.
No shortage of test articles. DAB on those that saving face over testing.
https://twitter.com/RingWatchers/status/1648838574110916609
Raptor 2 is very good and very cheap
Union plate bending cant keep up
China is at least trying
ESA is not
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/europes-ariane-6-rocket-is-turning-into-a-space-policy-disaster/
i want to tickle the vulcan feet
Who is this artist? None of the image search tools are coming up with anything but these other two pieces that also don't track back to a source.
>USA publication
>EU keeps working on its stuff ignoring Americans showboating as per usual
Always the way.
Elon is moron for not making proper pad, it will set them back a year to make new proper one.