in an earlier thread i half joked going to Matamoros and paying a fisherman $50 to take you out to see the launch. just for the record, that boat in the area is not me! ;)
In terms of boats encroaching into the exclusion zone it should be fuck around and find out IMO. Crazy to cancel a huge and expensive launch just because one idiot can't follow the rules.
Then launch and issue severe fines to discourage them.
Or just let them. The sea is big, it's not going to hit that many. Not everything needs to be 100% safe. We let people chase storms, or fly wingsuits (1 death per 500 jumps, according to [1]). We also have ways to deal with parents who endanger their children past what we as society consider acceptable.
Back in the days rockets were more or less unique, because the tech was new and every bit of efficiency mattered. But the common trope among the designers was always "launch on a modular rocket, assembly from pieces in LEO, depart anywhere". And orbital assembly and modular launchers have followed in 1980s/90s, when the extreme optimization didn't matter so much anymore.
It's interesting to see SpaceX taking the path of a custom-tailored launcher again, trying to integrate everything as tightly as possible (especially speaking of their direct Mars flight concept). This would probably be impossible to scale without designing a new system from scratch, so they have to get everything right. Kind of the Amiga of the spaceflight.
The heavy booster can be the same, and any mission beyond LEO will require refuelling, and the tankers can be standardised.
I think the terminal mission component is always going to have to be customised to the mission type. A Lunar lander and Mars lander are very different beasts, but even just basing those on a basic Starship hull is a big win over completely custom from scratch systems such as the Blue Origin lunar lander.
The big idea with Starship, at least for missions going beyond LEO is to drop upper stages in LEO as fuel tanks and use them to fuel the "payload" Starship. In the Artemis mission, it is supposed to take astronauts from the Orion capsule, land them on the moon and back to Orion, with talks about a "gateway" space station. So Starship definitely follows the modular / orbital assembly principle.
The idea of purely modular launchers (like OTRAG) never really took of. Armadillo Aerospace tried to capitalize on that idea, but they never really went beyond John Carmack's hobby project. All attempts at anything but "extreme optimization" failed, including the other end of the spectrum with the humongous Sea Dragon. That's because of the so called "tyranny of the rocket equation" and considerations like the square-cube law.
What I meant is not things like OTRAG (which was an abomination indeed), but practical configurable launchers unified to the certain degree into a family. Think Delta IV, Atlas V, Angara, or even Falcon 9, which is the only surviving rocket from the family that was originally planned.
The reason modularity of that kind wasn't especially successful isn't the tyranny of the rocket equation, but the economy. Turned out the launch market is too small to capitalize on fringe cases, and the added flexibility simply haven't outweighed the loss in efficiency. When the modularity was starting to pick up steam, most thought that the market will expand much faster, and few people expected Iridium to be a miserable failure, for example.
> But the common trope among the designers was always "launch on a modular rocket, assembly from pieces in LEO, depart anywhere".
It’s a design constraint imposed by the reality of launching from Earth. It puts an upper bound on how much weight you can send at one time. That’s pretty much the only choice until we can manufacture directly in space.
The tyranny of the rocket equation means it starts to get crazy if you can't improve the payload fraction and want to send up more mass. I don't think there is a literal upper limit, but you very quickly get to the point where a few extra kilograms means you have to double the size of your rocket.
Isn't Starship planned to launch 100 tons into LEO, just with a two stage rocket, and with both stages being reusable? I don't know the numbers but this seems to suggest efficiency (cost per ton to orbit) improves with increasingly large rockets.
(Though I imagine there could be a size sweet spot beyond which efficiency shrinks again.)
And it needs to refuel to get to Mars despite being the largest rocket ever built and an incredible feet of engineering. The limits are height and space to put engines under it.
But that doesn't limit the rocket size in any way, only the fraction of its mass that can be used for payload. That limit does not depend on total mass of the rocket. Is there something that makes larger rockets less feasible than smaller rockets with the same payload mass fraction?
> "launch on a modular rocket, assembly from pieces in LEO, depart anywhere"
That's still what they are doing, its just that the pieces are fuel.
> This would probably be impossible to scale without designing a new system from scratch
Its not like the amiga of space flight, its like cloud. Instead of horizontal scaling, its vertical scaling. Instead of of building bigger, you just build more and scale that way.
They will add like 10m to the Starship, there is some horizontal scale left.
> The Amiga had a litany of custom chips to achieve its incredible performance.
Exactly, and with PC technology rapidly catching up, updating them to a level on par with the latest VGA and sound cards was an enormous effort that didn't kill Commodore (internal mismanagement did) but came too late to save them. First prototypes of the AAA chipset are mentioned and visible in the famous "Deathbed Vigil" video shot by Dave Haynie himself at the C= headquarters in West Chester PA when the company was already belly up. I would highly recommend watching it also to non ex Amiga users, also for interesting vintage technical content, but keep tissues ready in case you were.
When the Amiga launched in 1985 its hardware was unquestionably the state of the art in microcomputers. Macs didn't have color yet, and the best consumer PCs had 16-color EGA graphics and a beeper speaker (or 16-color Tandy graphics and 3-voice sound).
While Amiga stood still, IBM in 1987 introduced 256-color VGA, which the industry rapidly expanded to Super VGA with higher resolutions and more colors. By 1990, it was easy to buy a clone PC with Super VGA and sound card, both from a variety of third-party vendors and both exceeding Amiga's capabilities. While Amiga still had a theoretical advantage in terms of hardware sprites, in practice PC horsepower increased so quickly that its lack of same didn't matter.
To put another way, there is no way a single company with a relatively small customer base can compete against a gigantic ecosystem of many dozens of vendors, all battling to serve a customer base ten times as large by constantly lowering prices and improving capabilities.
You're more or less on point, but the conclusion doesn't follow the premise. It is not a good analogy.
When the original Amiga team left Commodore, they left a finished new chipset (Ranger), with very competitive specs.
However, Commodore discarded it as too expensive, not attributing any value to being first to market or having the best product.
Management systematically acted against the engineers, such as when they unilaterally decided not to have a DSP and forbid the engineers to use the A3000 prototype boards with DSP on them that they had made.
There's multiple books about the story of the Amiga and its mismanagement by Commodore, as it extends much further than that. Lots of cancelled projects, many of which finished like Ranger was.
NASASpaceFlight is not affiliated with and does not represent the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA initials used with NASA’s permission.
For those who don't know, Starship is the first fully-reusable orbital rocket.
If they manage to get it working as designed, it would radically change the economics of going to space. You can imagine the savings from not having to rebuild your vehicle after every use.
This would be a paradigm-shift and would likely cause a massive boom in human space activity. Space tourism and in-orbit manufacturing are two commonly discussed use cases that would become far more economical. Existing use cases such as remote sensing and communication would expand.
All this could cause positive feedback loops of innovation, cost reduction, induced demand, and so on. A new era of human space activity. That's what all the hubbub is about.
P.S. Not to mention the slightly more far-fetched possibility of human settlements on Mars…
I wrote this 5 years ago, but it's still relevant:
The Falcon 9 is $62 million, or $2,719 per kg to LEO. The Falcon Heavy is $2,351 per kg when expendable or $1,411 when reused.
The BFR is supposed to have 2.5x the payload for 8% of the cost: $46 per kilogram. Even fully expendable it's $2,233 per kg. That's INSANE. It's space elevator money:
> [For a space elevator, the cost varies according to the design. Bradley C. Edwards received funding from NIAC from 2001 to 2003 to write a paper,[8] describing a space elevator design. In it he stated that: "The first space elevator would reduce lift costs immediately to $100 per pound" ($220/kg).](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator_economics)
If the BFR actually becomes reality it turns a journey to orbit into an airplane ride. A $10,000 airplane ride that will shake your fillings loose, but make no mistake: that completely changes everything about space. It makes putting satellites in orbit around Jupiter as hard as visiting the north pole. Fucking TV hosts will be able to go for a quick jaunt around the moon.
If the BFR happens, we'll have a mars base just because it would be so cheap it's a no-brainer. Building a new ISS would be about as hard as building a new Sealab.
If Starship flies as often as Musk says, one Starship would take one year to bring as much mass into orbit as everything ever launched before. Something like that or so I heard.
It’s a medium-sized if. So many people said they couldn’t land the Falcon-9 booster.
Ignoring the mars stuff, the vision isn’t that crazy, given their track record.
Biggest questions in my mind are: how rapidly reusable will it actually be (e.g. refurbishment costs), how expensive will it be to scale up the ground systems and launch infrastructure, and what the induced demand will actually look like.
I’m taking for granted that they will be able to land the Super Heavy booster. It doesn’t seem that much of a leap from what they have done before.
I agree with you about the technical aspects; what I'm being skeptical about here is the promised radical (100x+) reduction in cost, multiple launches a day, the usual Muskiana.
I don't doubt theres potential savings, I'm dubious that we'll see order of magnitude cost reductions. Escaping earth's gravity is always going to be hard.
Falcon 9 never promised full reusability, only first stage reuse, and it did cause a large reduction in launch costs, as well as pretty obviously representing a paradigm shift considering all the other reusable rockets in development, the surge in funding for space tech startups and megaconstellations becoming practical for private entities.
To emphasize that last point, on the back of Falcon 9, Starlink represents over half of all satellites in orbit and Falcon 9 itself accounts for nearly half of all orbital launches in the past 2-3 years. The lower costs are also evident from the fact that many lower budget NASA missions which would have previously had to rideshare ended up just getting a dedicated F9 for less than the rideshare would've cost.
imagine the meme of two button options to press with the dude sweating over which to choose, and one is "tesla released FSD too fast" and the other is "tesla is keeping FSD in beta forever"
Though it should be mentioned that SpaceX currently no longer pursues Starship upper stage reusability, as the upcoming upper stage prototypes do no longer have a heat shield. Is seems likely that they want to first finalize lower stage reuse, as it is likely much more expensive to produce.
Without a heat shield, Starship wouldn't be able to bring a crew back from orbit (or higher), regardless of reuse.
Starship HLS, the planned lunar landing version, probably won't need a heat shield, but they'll definitely need shielding on any version meant to bring a crew back to Earth. They're just not bothering with heat shielding for tests that don't need it.
(I don't know what kind of shielding the Starship that was supposed to launch today has.)
Starship launching and landing humans on Earth seems quite far away, if it happens at all. Of course they need the heat shield until then, but the much more immediate benefit of the heat shield comes from reducing cost of cargo flights by allowing for reusability of the upper stage. For ordinary non-human payloads, mainly satellites.
The Delta Heavy is $12,340 per kg to LEO. Saturn V was ~$8,800 in current costs. Falcon Heavy is $1,411 per kg when reused.
For a $10 million launch, Starship would cost $67 per kg. Musk has said costs could come down to 1-2 million, although I would disregard that given the cost of the fuel is ~$1 million.
Musk is absolutely utterly dismissive of marginal costs like support and maintenance, but $20-30 million per amortized launch ($134-$200 per kg) does not seem that crazy. The structure and materials of the rocket are absurdly cheaper than the Falcon Heavy, and the cost of getting all that on a pad is pretty much constant. The Heavy has 27 Merlin engines, Starship has 33 Raptor engines. If it really is that much cheaper and that much cheaper to refly, a 10x reduction is definitely possible.
It depends also on how often they can reuse the lower and upper stage, and how large the difference between launch cost and launch price will be. As far as I know, only China is currently developing a rocket comparable to Starship (Long March 9) and it will not compete with Starship for customers. So if there are indeed large internal cost cuts for Starship, large price cuts seem to be wishful thinking.
All that assumes a market for a rocket as big as starship though.
If you're still stuck launching the same kind of payloads as smaller rockets then the benefit will be smaller.
For a rocket like starship to make sense you need an ~ order of magnitude increase in the market which isn't a given.
If you look at large jets, that wasn't the future. On the other hand cargo shipping seems to be heading that way, so I'll accept it could go either way, I'm just not convinced.
I just have a feeling this is more akin to musk buying Twitter, than musk landing a first stage falcon for the first time.
What's the driver of satellite size? Is it the size of current rockets? Cube says etc would tend to point the other way.
What the total cost of a satellite? Fine sending a 1 tonne satellite to space costs $300k but if it still costs $x million to build the thing you're still looking at a select group who can afford it.
Taking those 2 things together how many organisations will opt for the absolute cheapest option giving up the ability to get a dedicated launch to a given orbit?
What are these new markets? Is asteroid mining going to become economically viable? Is lunar exploration going to be profitable? It's cheap to get to the middle of the Atlantic, it isn't exactly a hive of economic activity though. Yes there's starlink, but that has downsides relative to wired alternatives so the market is always going to be limited. Yes starlink is a massive expansion of the space economy, but that just highlights how small the space economy was and is, which just raises the question of whether such a massive rocket like starship will be able to be supported.
'build it and they will come' sounds nice, but it isn't a given.
Part of the insane costs of satellites comes from the launch cost: If the launch is expensive, the satellite needs to work, and it needs to last. If every kg you launch is $$$, it's worth using much more expensive materials to make it lighter.
If the launch is closer to the price of shipping a parcel internationally, you can cut a lot of corners. No more specially optimized titanium parts where cheap sheet metal will do. No more space-rated parts at 100x markup, launch with off the shelf parts, see what fails, and iterate based on that.
No more designing for super redundancy and quintuple-checking everything, if it fails let it fall out of orbit and send up a new one (LEO satellites deorbit reasonably quickly, so not a major "orbital waste" concern).
That was not promised from Falcon. The upper stage is not reusable and is 20% of the hardware cost, so at best Falcon could reduce costs by a factor of five. Plus it runs a dirtier fuel so it needs more refurbishment. What they did expect from Falcon is to be significantly cheaper than any other major launch provider, and they achieved that, but there's only so far you can go when you're building a whole new upper stage for every launch.
Orbit is hard but the actual fuel cost is not all that high. If you have a rocket that's cheap to build, and you can amortize that cost over a large number of launches, you're mostly just paying fuel and ground services.
Just playing devil's advocate, literally everyone is worried about the tiles so surely they aren't launching without massive confidence that they are working properly? Or have the team said that there are still issues with the tiling?
Their upcoming upper stage prototypes don't have a heat shield anymore, and the FAA launch license mentions that they won't survive reentry. So reentry of the upper stage doesn't seem to be their focus in the foreseeable future. They are probably more interested in making the lower stage reusable, since it has many more (expensive) engines than the upper stage.
The next two prototypes already being built for a while now do not have tiling in them , that doesn’t suggest there is confidence in the design is final and stable .
The addition delay and opportunity cost [1] [2] in perfecting re-entry is probably not worth it , I.e. better to launch now without second stage reentry than get it perfect and then launch
[1] Starlinks on F9
[2] not being able to launch full v2 higher mass and volume on current gen
There might be a point where they get cost low enough to trade some of those savings for things like simplifying engineering and increasing launch cadence.
They are not required for making orbit I suppose, only for safe reentry. But can't know how well it all works without trying, so going even if confidence is not perfect.
The part that seems to be unexpectedly really hard is getting to and successful at ignition of stage 2.
Relativity Space recently had a failure with their Terran 1 launcher on its first and only test fight because stage 2 failed to correctly ignite. Virgin Orbital (RIP) had a similar second stage failure. Astra lost their rocket 3 last year when the second stage failed to separate from the first stage correctly.
Those companies had good engineers who had thought they had every edge case covered.
Yeah, that test was really about proving that their 3D printed rocket components could withstand the forces of launch. Once they got past Max Q successfully, that test was completed successfully... anything else would have been gravy.
Here's a countdown to 13h00 UTC, which is when the launch window opens. I assume the YouTube will have some commentary etc in the 45 minutes leading up to that
I'm just recognizing the facts of the planet we live in. Lots of interested parties are in the US, so it makes sense to also simply add US times. Especially considering its a US company (hopefully) launching from US soil.
Going back, I have a clear memory of big events with global viewership being typically advertised with multiple time zones at a time. It was almost a bit of a marketing gag even for financial firms to have a ton of clocks up with labels displaying many different time zones.
So yes, no reason to chose 1 time zone and force readers to do mental math. Just list “London: , Tokyo: , Sydney: , LA: , NYC: , Lagos: , Singapore: , Mumbai: “ etc.
I’m so surprised that a country who still clings to the imperial system would have any clue about UTC, the time standard that the rest of the world uses.
The launch is scheduled to 1300 UTC, for us engineering folks.
Because that's a country that doesn't use the imperial system and still insists its the same time as the eastern capital no matter where else in the country people happen to be.
Lets also mention that China is almost the same width as the US, probably larger to be fair.
I was gonna say it must be weird to see solar noon at 3pm, or live in one of the western provinces and have sunrise at 4:30pm / sunset at 9-10pm for part of the year, but that describes life in the Netherlands too.
> I'm just recognizing the facts of the planet we live in.
I think you will find, with absolutely no supporting evidence to back this up, that there will be more people outside of the US watching than from the US.
Nobody elsewhere does either but everyone knows their offset, or at least should around here... this is clearly an event of worldwide importance, so adding a few more timestamps wouldn't hurt
Which is maddening because most of the year it’s EDT & PDT but people still reference them wrong, even in marketing and corporate communications where they really should know better.
Yeah fair enough. I'm kinda getting concerned that my original comment is generating any discussion at all. Like, I just posted US-centric time zones. I'm not sure why this is a topic for argument or discussion.
But 100% of the launch is an American company out of American territory. And the majority of the users of Hacker News are also based in the US.
So for this audience, considering the other facts, I don't see why people are having a problem with an extra comment that simply posts the relevant launch times in terms easier to understand at a glance for an American audience.
> And the majority of the users of Hacker News are also based in the US.
Is this really the case?
Even if it’s true, I wouldn’t say this is anything to be proud of or something to uphold. Why not use international standards to make the place more welcoming the the majority of the world?
@ta1243 its 2:40am PST. Sorry I can't reply to you directly, apparently HN has some comment thread depth limits. (Who knew?) Yeah sorry I forgot to include all of the time zones covering the entire country and its possessions.
Post edit. I'm not sure what you want. All I did was post the 4 standard American time zones that affect most of the somewhat 330 million Americans living in the continental part of the country.
Why is the original timezone post generating any conversation at all? This is insane.
from what i understand when there's a leak in a valve the pressure drop causes ice to form on the outside near the leak. If the ice gets so thick as to impact the actuator it can get stuck in its current position. The motor/hydraulics or whatever is used to physically turn the valve can't break the ice so it's just stuck.
so someone probably needs to go find the valve and figure out what's leaking and either put in a new one or tighten the bolts a bit more :)
It's an orbital test in that it tests the capability of the system to reach orbit. It is not an orbital test in that it does not actually achieve orbit.
There are some tests that are not orbital tests because there is a lack of technical capability of the launch article.
In this case they are shutting off the rocket early so they don't reach orbital speeds in the case they lose contact with starship (in the very unlikely case it makes it to space) as it circles the Earth. This avoids a second burn on the test unit to pull it out of orbit where you could possibly end up with an out of control descent in to places not of your choosing.
It's almost an orbital test. It's so close that in theory they could accidentally make it an orbital test if they fired the engines for a tiny bit extra.
and me, in NZ, trying to tell a friend exactly when the launch window opened: 12:00 UTC on 2023-04-17 translates to midnight on the night between 17/4/2023 and 18/4/2023 NZ time. I ended up telling the friend that the window opened 00:01 2023-04-18 NZT, because that got rid of the 00:00 ambiguity
If a person demonstrates the ability to spend $43 billion for what could essentially be boiled down to a long running gag, is 3 day pause really that much more?
Meh. The Saturn V rocket wasn't a literal god either, nor are the Falcon 9 rockets made out of actual falcons. People have been calling their vessels fanciful and/or aspirational names for centuries, it's fine. Nobody thinks the "unsinkable 2" is actually unsinkable.
Starship seems kind of unique in that it's an extraordinarily utilitarian name compared to most launch system names.[0] It expressly doesn't try to evoke ancient human mythology, birds (which often have their own cultural and mythological ties i.e. Falcon, etc.). And perhaps therein lies the aspirational element of the name. Starship suggests a sort of banality, something so common that there's no point in dressing it up in a fanciful name. That's a dream in itself, though I think it's a given that individual Starship spacecraft will get named once they start carrying humans.
Anyhow, I think the GP's thoughts were along the lines that Starship isn't actually a starship as neither the spacecraft nor the super heavy-lift rocket will ever visit another star. Which is a valid point, but not one that I think matters much either way.
> And perhaps therein lies the aspirational element of the name.
Very possible. It mirrors the naming convention of fictional spaceship in the Culture novel series. A series Musk is a professed admirer of. They even named two of their drone ships after fictional spacecraft from the series.
In that series it is a running gag that other aliens find the Culture's naming convention lacking a certain gravitas. When you have one super weapon you might be tempted to call it "Death Star" or something. But when you have millions you let the warship AIs pick their own names and that is how you end up with a mighty warship named "All Through With This Niceness And Negotiation Stuff" or "Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints". That is a real flex, I would say.
So all in all Musk is familiar with the concept you are talking about here. I can't say for certain if that is going on here or not though. Most likely a Culture spacecraft's AI would roll their eyes over a crude space dingy which can barely reach orbit called "Starship" though. :) So who knows.
There’s a gestalt to the word in the US. If the words are parsed or translated literally, particularly for esl, I can see how it would seem very plain. But speaking as a kid from the American eighties, I don’t think “starship” is banal - anything but! It evokes for me all sorts of wonder and fantasy, probably tied to the media consumed - movies like The Last Starfighter, old Trek reruns, and books and comics.
Starship is both the name of the full rocket and the name of the upper stage, the lower stage is called "super heavy", which is as generic as you can get.
Personally, I still like to call the full rocket BFR, as it was called before being named Starship.
The boat removal requirement seems open to abuse of people attempting to 'protest' Musk, especially considering his post twitter profile these days where they might conflate unrelated grievances with him to SpaceX.
I wonder if they need to change the rules so 'a reasonable attempt' to remove and inform people needs to be made only.
No doubt some people involved have discussed this one.
I really don’t see that happening. Perhaps an environmentalist group could think of doing that if they decide to take issue with these launches—that would definitely be in character.
I suspect it would. Off the cuff, one or more jet skis sitting outside of limited zone til ~10min before then goes for it. Would be hard to round up fast, especially if a handful of them.
Im sure if people put their heads to it and knew the area they could do something.
T-2: New launch attempt in min 48h
T-8: Launch scrubbed (pressurization issue), still proceeding on some things for rehearsal
T-15: Pressurization issue on stage 1, but the countdown continues. Still one boat to remove from area