Starship Flight 7
(spacex.com)678 points by chinathrow 6 months ago
678 points by chinathrow 6 months ago
You have perfectly described the feeling I had regarding the first belly flop demo (at least I think it was the first one?)
https://youtu.be/gA6ppby3JC8?si=wY7TQsbR_wxoud75&t=70 (ten seconds from the timestamp)
As another commenter pointed out, it's down to better cameras; higher resolution and framerates than "traditional" cameras used in this kind of recording. But it could be better still, the camera setup in the clip still gets a lot of shaking from the blasts.
IIRC they use regular off the shelf gopro cameras to mount on the ones going into space. Granted, the mount is ruggedized metal else the cameras wouldn't survive, lol [0].
I'm also reminded of NASA's cameras which were mounted on the mechanisms of an anti-air gun, great for slow and precise movements. I'm sure they still use that today but I couldn't find a good source. I did find an article about NASA's ruggedized cameras for use on spacecraft and the like though [1].
[0] https://www.quora.com/Was-the-GoPro-camera-modified-for-the-... [1] https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Redefining_the_Rugged_Video_Camera
> it's down to better cameras; higher resolution and framerates than "traditional" cameras used in this kind of recording
It looks cool because of the angle and framing though, someone knew exactly what they were doing. Without the angle/framing, you can have all the resolution and framerates in the world, it still wouldn't look as cool. It's a cinematographic choice that made that shot.
> But it could be better still, the camera setup in the clip still gets a lot of shaking from the blasts.
I'd love to hear ideas how you'd prevent the shaking. Forget gimbals or similar semi-pro setups as they wouldn't be nearly enough. What are you attaching it to, in your better setup? A drone would be blown away, and anything attached to the ground would likely start to shake regardless of your setup.
If cutting edge engineering with conventional physics looks fake to you folks imagine what a hard time you’re going to have with real videos of actual UFOs.
It's not twisted and not ad hominem. No attack on a person, just a statement of the relative difficulty of appreciating something truly new when cutting edge looks fake.
You’re not being attacked. The comment is in reply not just to your, but to all similar sentiments here. Your ‘ability to classify videos as real or fake’ (heh, funny AI tech phrase
-- but also why assume our ‘ability’ would be the same? We are different people, made different, with different prior data, we would feel differently about it, right? Why would you think not, heh? You’d be wrong if you assumed people react in the same way. Back to the point:) --
your ‘ability’ is also not somehow being judged.
You expressed a feeling in response to it. Okay, good. Now imagine how much harder a time you will have with real videos of UFOs when even cutting conventional engineering looks fake.
That’s the point. Are we clear?
IIRC, the grid fins are not strong enough to support the rocket, and reinforcing them would add too much weight to the vehicle.
The plan is to catch the second stage the same way, and the starship in flight now is the first to have mockup pins to test the aerodynamics and see if they cause issues during reentry.
I found the same when the first Falcon Heavy executed the simultaneous booster landing. Watching them both come down, within moments of each other at neighbouring pads was incredibly cool.
Its sad that Gerry Anderson never got to see this. It's like something from a Thunderbirds episode.
The clearance is amazing -- probably bigger IRL than it looked on the camera, but it looked like only a foot or two between the chopsticks arm and the top of the rocket! The control algorithms on the gimballed engines must be insanely precise.
First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon.
To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew.
Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
i guess you didn't follow the falcon 9 failures right? here's two minutes of failures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone.
NASA (with the shuttle and saturn V) had a completely different idea on rocket development (and blue origin seems to follow their mindset), which is fine. but to say that this is "failure fetish" when spacex has an amazing track record is just hating for the sake of hating.
i would recommend, if you have the time, the book liftoff, by eric berger https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac... -- it was the book that opened my eyes to why spacex works like they do.
SpaceX’s track record is too fetishized by the Musk fanboys. Falcon 9 has some weird Demi god status even though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz.
Part of why it has "weird Demi god status" is that it is not only so reliable but also so cheap. Soyuz is not reusable. Falcon 9 is. That is why Falcon 9 is so celebrated. No other rocket company or state-sponsored space agency comes close to its track record of cheap, reliable, reusable rockets.
Soyuz? an expendable rocket with 40% less payload capacity? How is that a competitor to falcon 9? More like a competitor to rocketlab's current generation.
It's been so weird to see people say willfully ignorant shit just because they don't like Elon Musk.
>Every Saturn 5 was successful
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure
Subassemblies that made up Saturn V went through several hundred (inflation adjusted) billion dollars' worth of iterative failure before the Apollo program was announced.
The only reason it WAS announced was all of the iterative failure that had been paying off.
The day JFK uttered "shall go to the moon in this deck-aid", the F-1 engine had already been exploding and failing for three years.
My memory is hazy, from a brown bag I went to at work 15 years ago, but they blew up around 50 F-1s before one worked right.
And while the Saturn isn't an upgraded Jupiter it is EXTREMELY closely related to Jupiter and Jupiter had a shit-ton of failures before they got it right, turned around, and used all of that knowledge to build Saturn.
Apollo WAS an impressive achievement
Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data
New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time
Per wiki on Apollo
> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $182 billion in 2023 US dollars)[22] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[23]
Different budget, different number of people working on this stuff and different mindset. Actually the Apollo program was also iterative and it paid off.
The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers.
SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.
this doesn't even scratch the surface. Slow motion cameras and real time sensors for debugging hardware issues, computer simulations, 3d printing.
Apollo program directors would advocate to start a nuclear war with ussr if they could get hands on that kind of tech.
But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??
> Every Saturn 5 was successful
Do you not count the Saturn 1B rocket capsule that caught on fire on the pad and burnt the Apollo 1 astronauts alive?
What about Apollo 13?
> but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land
The "promise land" in this analogy is visible past the desert. What's not known is what route to get there.
In your tortured analogy, the people who "are really fetishizing iterative failure" are not doing that; they're fetishizing the fact that the person walking through this desert is trying, and if they hit a barrier, they iterate and try again until they reach the promise land. Along the way they are accomplishing what was once thought to be impossible.
Congratulations for neatly excluding Apollo 1, Columbia and Challenger's crews, may their memories rest heavy on your conscience.
Your supposed excellent programs killed people.
NASA put people on the first flight of the shuttle to space, which turned out after the fact to have 1 in 12 chance of killing the crew. Can't do that in 2025.
As others have pointed out: Compare the budgets.
That “first success” was actually on the back of a long series of related rockets with technology and engines inherited from a huge missile program. Those NASA eggheads didn’t start from zero on a shoestring budget and make things work on the first try! The Saturn V was just a stretched version of the Saturn series of rockets. These all cost hundreds of billions in today’s money to develop!
Second, they’re not “the same thing”. A single-use piece of technology has very different design constraints and engineering considerations as a reusable piece of technology.
A single-use weapon is a bomb. A reusable weapon is a sword. Just because you can shove a fuse into some explosives doesn’t mean you can forge a sword that won’t shatter on first use.
An equivalent example from space technology are explosive bolts. NASA uses them extensively, SpaceX never does… because they’re not reusable and not up-front testable. They’re expensive too. So instead they iterated (and iterated!) on vacuum-rated actuators that can serve the same role. This is a non-trivial exercise that resulted in a few RUDs. This is why NASA didn’t even try! It’s harder and not needed if reusability was a non-goal.
The shuttle programme was signed off in 1972, had it's first flight in 1977, and it's first crewed flight in 1981. Starship has been going for 5 years (albeit on the back of lots of other SpaceX work.) It's getting to orbit in the same time that Shuttle took to 'fly' on the back of a 747. A few lost ships is a pretty small price to pay for going twice as fast on delivery.
So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?
A Mars cargo mission, according to the timeline spacex set for themselves. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F2HFqsVkiZc/YT9bPpXSKDI/AAAAAAAAG...
A lot of people have been shitting on SLS for being too expensive over the last 5 years, but it's worth noting that the Artemis program has been completely fucked due to SpaceX massively missing its milestones on Starship. So many people believe that Elon Musk is going to bring humanity back to the Moon, but he is largely the reason that humanity is not back on the moon already.
The GAO put out a report on this a few months ago, pointing out the failures of SpaceX here (including massive cost overruns) much more than the supposed cost overruns of SLS. Incidentally, after this GAO report came out, Elon Musk became very interested in being in charge of managing "government waste."
Maybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.
Decreasing price of a launch by multiple orders of magnitude and increased cadence is also an achievement that hasn't been achieved previously.
That's a 60billion government program I guess to match the program you need to match that as well, starship is doing what it's doing at a tenth of a cost so far.
Go to the moon, land a rover, wander about, come back with everyone alive... should be easy right?, I mean, it's already been done... RIGHT????
Apollo 6 (2nd Satun V launch) was "less than nominal" and warranted a congressional hearing. It did succeed, but luck played a part. George Mueller declared later that Apollo 6 was a failure for NASA.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080120112115/http://www.hq.nas...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080227133401/http://www.hq.nas...
It’s pretty weird to get any engineering thing right on the first test, no? The entire development strategy would have to be based around that goal. I think the standard engineering strategy would be to test early and often.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but, especially during the Cold War, the US government had a big incentive to appear infallible that SpaceX doesn’t have. Are we sure there weren’t more tests in secret? USG also has access to huge tracts of land that is off limits, and rocket tests are easily ‘national security issue’ enough to justify being conducted in secret. Just a thought.
I will say, though, that booster catch is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
I think wandering in the desert is done because there is a promised land. Yes, it doesn't mean that it exists.
But if you don't wander, you'll never find out. You gotta believe
I mean, yeah, it's a lot easier to build a rocket that only goes up.
> First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components.
There were 16 taxi and flight tests with Enterprise before the launch in 1981 (Approach and Landing Tests - Enterprise) where the first 8 were uncrewed. Just saying there were prior test flights using it.
There was something like 4 years of testing before the proper launch.
Oh no they lost the ship after the booster landed! Seems like they lost an engine, then I saw fire around the rear flap hinges in the last images before they cut out, and then the telemetry showed more engines shutting down until it froze.
During ascent I also noticed a panel near the front fins that seemed to be loose and flapping. Probably not related but who knows.
Edit: Here's a video of the aftermath. Strangely beautiful. https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662
> fire around the rear flap hinges
I believe it's pretty hard to have a fire at that altitude. You need a leak of both methane and oxygen, and an ignition source.
I wonder if perhaps one of the engines split open and the exhaust wasn't going into the engine bell?
At atmospheric pressure, yes.
But up at 140km altitude, the pressure is so low that I don't think even pure oxygen would lead to combustion.
View of previous catch (flight 5) from a very distant vantage point was even more incredible for me. You can see the scale of things right there
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694
Anyone has similar view of this landing?
Edit: distant view of flight 7 by the same person
This is version 2 of Starship, with some upgrades, such as longer starship.
"Upgrades include a redesigned upper-stage propulsion system that can carry 25 per cent more propellant, along with slimmer, repositioned forward flaps to reduce exposure to heat during re-entry.
For the first time, Starship will deploy 10 Starlink simulators" [1].
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/heres-what-nasa-would-...
[1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/musks-starship-ready-...
I found an article from earlier in the week about the changes for this version of the upper stage: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/a-taller-heavier-smart...
Back a few years ago. This was the starship that in 2024 would reach Mars with humans, with so much space taken by crew and materials, and almost no fuel, and "10 times cheaper". And currently is an empty shell. Nice fireworks and show, but no meaningful payload yet. Not even LO. And this will be ready for 2026 artemis mission?
I’m not a big fan of Elon Musk, but this is just the typical executive talking up their product and to some extent being overly optimistic about timelines. You’d think with the quantity of software engineers in HN this would be obvious, but the (rightful IMO) disdain for Elon Musk is resetting people’s brains.
Guy is a serial liar and you are making excuses on his behalf.
He is a serial liar, but we can also actually see the engineering progress which is remarkable regardless of his overinflated timelines.
His lying doesn't change the incredible work by those engineers and other employees of SpaceX.
What does he have to do with the incredible work though ? Shit posting his way to mars ?
I don't think that's a useful framing.
If not SpaceX, it would be all NASA. NASA lies about their budget all the time, with massive overruns. For example, the Artemis overrun exceeds the entire cost of Starship development so far [1].
[1] https://www.space.com/nasa-sls-megarocket-cost-delays-report
Not to mention that each Artemis launch is of the same order of magnitude cost as the entire Starship program. Each engine is about the same cost as Falcon 9 launch!
Will be interesting to hear the postmortem on the second stage. The booster part seemed to work pretty flawlessly with the exception of a non-firing engine on boost back which then did fire during the landing burn.
If the person doing their on-screen graphics is reading this, I wonder if you have considered showing tank LOX/CH4 remaining as a log graph. I believe it decreases logrithmically when being used (well it would if you keep 'thrust' constant) so that would create a linear sweep to the 'fuel level' status.
I don't believe they throttle the engines up or down much during the second stage burn. Fuel decreases ~linearly and thrust is relatively constant. Acceleration increases as fuel mass decreases.
I would be surprised if that was the case, my reasoning to that is that computing where a thing is going, when it's under going with changing acceleration AND changing mass, is pretty complicated. Especially if you already have the capability to throttle the engines and keep 'a' constant.
They might, I'm not saying your wrong, I'm just saying that I cannot imagine how you would justify the added complexity of doing it that way.
The computations are complicated but not that complicated relative to everything else SpaceX is doing. It's much more important to optimize the propellant mass by using it most efficiently than to simplify some computations. And it's probably most efficient to burn the propellant as fast as possible.
Any extra time spent during a burn is wasted fuel. Intuitively, any time before the rocket is in orbit, some part of the rocket thrust is resisting the force of gravity or else it would fall back down to earth. The longer that time is, the more thrust (and thus fuel) was spent negating that force. It's the main reason why the Falcon 9 boosters do a 'hoverslam' on return and land at close to full throttle - any extra time during that burn is less fuel efficient.
Better fuel efficiency = more payload to orbit = plenty of justification for the extra complexity.
Admittedly gravity losses are more significant at the beginning when the booster/ship are ascending purely vertically than later in second stage flight which is mostly horizontal, but definitely still a factor.
reminds me of the classic joke: a man walking down a street, stops and asks another person if they know what time it is. The person responds: I'm sorry as I don't have a watch on me, but you see that car parked over there? when it explodes, it should be 5pm
Yeah, I prefer this "when this comment is XY old" format the most when communicating internationally. Closely followed by UTC, of course.
I hate having to convert from some time zone which I don't know by heart; with the additional risk of getting daylight savings or something wrong and missing the event.
Yes, very much looks like it.
I wonder how much of the second stage flight is autonomous and if they need to continually need to give it a go to continue, or if it aborts automatically after some time of lost telemetry. But maybe it already exploded anyways.
The flight control loops are strongly latched. They are constantly checking the state of discretes, control surfaces, and intended guidance. If any critical parameter gets out of range for a period of time or if any group of standard parameters gets out of range the vehicle will simply cease powered flight.
In the Space Shuttle, given that it was human rated, the "Range Safety" system was completely manual. It was controlled by a pair of individuals and they manually made the call to send the ARM/FIRE sequence to the range safety detonators.
The automated FTS is triggered if it leaves a pre-defined corridor (which is wider than the flight plan - substantially so in some places).
The AFTS has independent, hardened, validated inertial measurement systems.
That could have been kinda sorta intentional. No big deal.
I miss the time before X broke so many things, like official streams being on Twitch where I've already paid for ad free viewing.
Load it in Chrome and cast the tab. Sucks that you have to involve your computer for the duration, but that's the most reliable way to do it IMO.
Space.com's YouTube channel always has a mirror of the official SpaceX livestream:
https://www.youtube.com/@VideoFromSpace/streams
Or if you would like additional commentary and extra camera views, there are independent channels such as Everyday Astronaut, NASASpaceFlight, Spaceflight Now, etc.
There is an Android TV App apparently: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.x.xtv
I'm glad it's not on Twitch. I don't like it being on X but twitch is worse since it's extremely hard to get any working Adblock on there.
Couldn't you make a twitch stream of it? X isn't injecting ads into the video, so just open it on X and stream it to twitch.
I wonder if the second stage failure was related to the metal flap seen here on the very left of the image: https://imgur.com/a/VS8IPdv
I watched this with my very young daughter and she pointed that out, she will be fascinated if that is the case!
What worries me about space innovation is the fact that there is such little margin for error. Materials are being stressed so much while trying to defy the laws of physics that the smallest angle error, the smallest pressure mismatch, smallest timing error, and boom. This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes. Now imagine these risks, while you're halfway to mars. Is it possible that we just have no found/invented the right materials or the right fuel/propulsion mechanism to de-risk this, and that is where we should be allocating a lot more resources?
It definitely happened with planes, we have a century of improvements that made them much much safer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_(material)#de_Havillan...
> This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes.
Cars are small, and they still go up in flames routinely all on their own (for older cars, aged fuel lines rupturing is a top cause, for newer cars shit with the turbocharger), it just doesn't make more news than a line in the local advertisement rag because usually all it needs is five minutes work for a firefighter truck.
Trains had quite the deadly period until it was figured out how to deal with steam safely - and yet, in Germany we had the last explosion of a steam train in 1977, killing nine people [1].
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesselzerknall_in_Bitterfeld
What makes you think this didn't happen in other industries? See the first iteration of the de Havilland Comet for a great example.
The Space Industry to date has killed many fewer people than planes, trains, or automobiles.
Because people rarely go to space, and it was much more dangerous when the last person died than it is today. The vast majority of flights are unmanned, just like this test was.
If you want to continue playing apples to oranges though, nobody has died on a spaceflight in the last twenty years. How many have died on airplanes in that timeframe?
[correction: there was one additional fatal flight in 2014 with the destruction of SpaceShipTwo. I would argue that one doesn't count, though, as it was more akin to a relatively mundane aircraft accident than anything else.]
The requirements of orbital launch are unyielding. If you make a car 50% heavier, it will have worse mileage and handling, but it will still get you where you need to go. If you make a spacecraft 50% heavier, it will never reach orbit.
Tim Dodd is live as well:
of course, no space x event is complete without the scam fake streams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1VbZoYSyzA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMG8BbUjwRk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-uQNSxqQHY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYuUj777a0
It is incredibly to me that Google doesn't seem to give a shit about this. It would be so easy to fix.
Feels like one SpaceX could and should deal with by DMCAing the channels. Even if getting people watching their official channel instead isn't that important to them, stopping people rebroadcasting their content whilst faking their brand identity to scam people feels like the most legitimate reason for sending takedowns going...
People really under-value the credentials for such things and I think it's part of the same problem as when streamers who aren't used to this life yet forget about privacy considerations and end up with a phone number or worse home address known to fans.
If you have a meaningful Youtube income, you need to spend some of your next Youtube check on say two Security Keys. If you like them, buy some more for everything else, but since Youtube is your income, step one lock Youtube with Security Keys.
Once that's required, errors of judgement possible through limited understanding or sleep deprivation cease to be a problem. Baby didn't sleep properly all week, some idiot screwed up your banking, and now Youtube keeps sending emails. You get another stupid Youtube email or at least you think so and either
1. You give Bad Guys your password and maybe OTP, so they steal the account and maybe in 5-10 days you and your fans can seize back control, meanwhile it's used to run scams
OR
2. Even sleep-deprived, confused and bewildered you will not post your physical Security Keys to Some Russian Guy's PO Box, Somewhere else, 12345. Your account remains in your hands because without that physical object they can't get in.
to be clear, it seems like the feed on some of these are scraped from official ones, but include links to crypto "giveaway" scams.
at least some do, but they are also inserting links to crypto scams.
Video of the breakup - https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE52_hVSeQz/
This NASASpaceflight stream is up now: https://www.youtube.com/live/3nM3vGdanpw
As is Tim Dodd’s
https://www.youtube.com/live/6Px_b5eSzsA
Aside from coding, this is my favorite use of multiple screens.
...which has nothing to do with NASA the US government organization, or the NSF (FYI). It's just some independent streamers who apparently know you can't get trademark claims against you by the federal government.
NASA allows them to place cameras as media on nasa property some are even permanent. and are credentialed media for launches. so I am guessing NASA is okay with it.
If you're referring to NSF streams from Starbase (Starship program), all of the cameras are installed on public land. There's no law prohibiting you setting up a Web cam (with autonomous power supply) in the middle of the forest, or on a riverbank, or on a dune 1400 feet from the OLM.
They started doing it when SpaceX was launching their first fuel tanks literally in the middle of nowhere, you can just sit on a side of the road a few hundred feet away and record (or even stream) everything from a basic Webcam. Eventually more and more people liked it and started contributing, then came branded T-Shirts, etc.
Now there's whole cottage industry in Boca with people spending weeks and months there, setting up and streaming from the cameras, they have trailers/control rooms, high quality equipment, daily and weekly updates, 24x7 streams, etc. NSF is a big player, Tim Dodd is another one, there's quite a few smaller players too.
NSF DOES seem to have some sort of agreement with SpaceX on streaming some of SpaceX's livestreams (ie when Ship goes out of visible range and SpaceX is the only place you can get video and of course telemetry). They didn't use to that until shortly after SpaceX streams moved to X (and immediately got replaced on YT by AI generated Elon peddling bitcoins).
NSF was started by Chris Bergen, a meteorologist by trade and a space exploration enthusiast, in early 2000s as a hobby forum (good old phBB) for people to chat about space and rocketry. I'm sure he couldn't even dream about becoming so popular so he didn't spend too much time coming up with a name (ie to protect himself against copyright infringement lawsuits). In fact I'm sure he would love to change the name now as they try to cover space programs all over the world (it's too late as people know them as NSF).
I’m not sure about the NASA name itself, but apparently the graphic stuff is protected by a special law:
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-V/part-1221
So you wouldn’t exactly get a copyright claim when abusing the NASA logo but it’s still illegal.
I couldn’t find anything about the NASA word itself though, just some articles reciting guidelines by NASA not to imply an endorsement by NASA. I don’t know how that’s enforced though.
You cannot _misuse_ any official government logo or seal. Which effectively means creating a fake document with a real seal and then publishing it. The concern is fraud not sharing content.
You are allowed to basically reproduce the work without any worries whatsoever.
Spoken like someone who is generating their opinion from their channel name alone.
Those "independent streamers" provide live launch streams with multiple feeds using their own equipment and to top it off they have numerous very knowledgeable hosts for all their streams. At this point I suspect they are covering every US based launch from all the major players. Hell, today they broadcasted both the New Glenn and Starship launches less than 24h apart.
But yeah, let's get hung up on an organization name that originated as an Internet forum for discussing all things....... NASA!
I didn't watch the official stream from Blue Origin (watched that one from my phone in bed so no multistreams that time lol) but it wouldn't surprise me one bit.
Sure, you'll get better telemetry info and the onboard views from the ships that these companies launch in their streams, but the commentary is sub-par at best (they are always sounding so "corporate official" to me) and they just don't provide the best views for watching it live.
I love that these space flight companies have opened up their development process to let the public follow along, I just think they aren't as good at producing live streams as some of these channels that have taken off over the last 5+ years.
Anyone able to do some quick math to guess where the pieces might land based on the velocity+altitude?
Bits might end up in africa on land somewhere...
It is amazing to see the number of fairly significant changes they tested in this launch. I guess that is the advantage of private space flights and rocket launches where the speed of development is must faster than in a place like Nasa or any government run space program.
I am not surprised that stage 2 failed because they were testing with a lot of the thermal tiles removed.
It didn't get to the point of testing the thermal protection system.
I noticed a strange debris at https://www.youtube.com/live/6Px_b5eSzsA?si=1hAiLjTrb7KUVaW7...
thought it was ice from the outside but now i'm curious
Can someone please please PLEASE tell SpaceX PR/Streaming team that the speed (per SI system) is measured in meters per second, not kilometers per hour? The speed of sound is approx 300 m/s, orbital velocity is approx 8,0000 m/s (depending on altitude), free fall acceleration on Earth is 9.81m/s, 1.63m/s on the Moon, the speed of light is apporx 300,000,000 m/s, people learn these numbers in middle school. It's not 1000 km/h, or 28,000 km/h, it just looks so weird.
Edit: ok, acceleration is meters per second per second, but my point stands.
The problem is with the "hours" part. Which, not accidentally, is not even part of the SI.
In the official BIPM brochure, hours are technically classified as "Non-SI units accepted for use with SI." This puts them in the same category as liters, hectares, tonnes, decibels, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-SI_units_mentioned_in_the_...
They are likely appealing to the common population who mostly think of speed in mi/h or km/h due to car speeds
Coders who require at least 7 iterations to properly implement a data entry form here grousing over a spaceship failure on the 7th iteration.
Failure of an entirely new, previously thought to be impossible combination of technologies.
This is like complaining that your first attempt at new programming language paradigm resulted in a compiler that is slow and sometimes has internal errors!
RUD is in fact an old joke in rocketry, I believe invented by engineers to poke fun at marketing "innovation".
Congratulations to the 14,000 SpaceX employees for their accomplishments.
What happens if the ship has exploded? Is there any kind of danger?
What happens if it doesn't explode and they just lost control over it? I'm mostly curios of the risks at that altitude.
The launch license requires them to build in a "flight termination system" which makes it explode if they lose control over it.
There's an autonomous flight termination system which triggers if it strays outside the planned flight corridor; any debris that survives reentry should then land in the advertised safety zone.
If it doesn't explode it might be light enough to survive reentry, after sailing on for a short while. In that case a large chunk of metal will come down either off the coast of South Africa or if continues on in its orbit potentially off the coast of Australia.
[1] has the planned flight path, as well as the impact zones.
1: https://flightclub.io/result/3d?llId=c5566f6e-606e-4250-b8f4...
the onboard control system and flight termination system are programmed to explode if it deviates from a specific and allowed path of trajectory/speed/functional engine thrust. The last thing anyone wants is a partially broken starship going into an uncontrolled suborbital velocity that lands on a city in Africa.
They have a bunch of explosives strapped on the rocket and can give a radio command to blow the ship up. It can even decide to explode itself if the readings go haywire.
It is called the Flight Termination System and it is very common on non-manned flights now.
Saturn 5 was landing on the moon for the second time on its seventh flight. We have access to everything that program learned and taught for free. It’s all 60 year old tech. People shouldn’t forget how shockingly tardy and poorly designed Starship is by comparison.
7 flights in and it’s still exploding in a system that will require more than 10 launches for a single lunar flight.
I am sure Musk’s groupies will assemble but the facts don’t care about your fandom.
SpaceX started Starship development in 2012. Despite 12 years of work, its best test flight reached space but not orbit, sending a banana to the Indian Ocean.
While NASA's SLS began in 2011 and successfully flew around the Moon in 2022.
Blue Origin's New Glenn also started development in 2012 and reached orbit on it's first flight with an actual payload.
When they say SpaceX is fast, what do they mean exactly?
The last SLS launch was in November 2022. The next one is in April 2026. That is 42 months between launches.
Starship may not go 42 days before the next launch. SpaceX's Falcon 9 + Heavy has launched on average once every 12 days since 2010.
And while Starship was "in development" since 2012, that doesn't mean it was prioritized. The first prototypes were only made in 2018.
Productivity is waste. A lot of us here build software and have this perverse idea that refactoring is value instead of waste.
There is an old saying "Redo in design creates value, redo in production creates waste". SpaceX is deciding to just YOLO in production instead of doing good design.
The first Falcon 9 landing happened after 8 attempts at controlled splashdown or landing. Time from the first attempt to the first successful landing was a little over 2 years. In the year after their first successful landing, they succeeded in 5 out of 8 attempts. This wikipedia article has details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_first-stage_landing_t...
Starship has had 7 tests in the past 20 months. The first test barely got off the pad due to engine failures. The stages failed to separate, so it was blown up shortly after liftoff. The second test did separate, but the booster blew up shortly after stage separation and the ship blew up shortly before engine shutdown, raining debris across the Atlantic similar to today. The third test got to space, but the booster landing burn failed and the booster impacted the ocean at close to the speed of sound. The ship couldn't maintain orientation and burned up on reentry. The fourth test succeeded at all goals (soft booster splashdown and successful reentry, though the flap did burn through). The fifth test was a success (booster catch and soft ship splashdown, though again with some flap burnthrough). The sixth test aborted the booster landing due to antennas on the tower being damaged by the rocket exhaust at launch, but did splash down softly offshore. The ship also reentered and splashed down on target.
Today's ship failure is a setback, as it will likely take a few months for the FAA investigation to be completed. That said, SpaceX still seems likely to recover a ship intact this year, and at that point it will only be a matter of time before they can launch an order of magnitude more stuff into orbit than they can with the Falcon 9 fleet (and at much lower cost).
Speaking of exploding rockets, watch the hypnotic ending of Koyaanisqatsi with haunting music by Philip Glass:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OacVy8_nJi0
According to the comments, the footage in this scene is a Saturn V on a launchpad and then an Atlas-Centaur Missile.
It seems like they have the chopsticks catch down pretty well, but the ship exploded over the Atlantic so there's gonna have to be more tests before the ship can think about an RTLS test.
More generally, getting the ship to work reusably seems like it will be a considerably greater challenge than reusing the boosters.
Ikr, they’re testing 1 vehicle a month people, I’ve seen software projects tested slower
i still can't believe they can actually catch that first stage. it makes no sense, but works!
Waiting for the day when they can load more than a banana. But I fear, the planet will be uninhabitable before that's a thing.
They had some Starlink simulators they were planning to deploy (to a suborbital trajectory, to re-enter along with the ship) this launch.
That "landing" (is it still considered a landing if it's chopsticked a few meters before it touches the ground?) is so unnatural it almost looks fake. So big and unimaginable that it feels like watching fx on a movie!
The close-up camera right after was interesting, I thought it captured on the grid fins, but it looks like there are two small purpose-built knobs for that.
The times we live in!