I remember watching the Tesla going into space and the rockets landing on the platform. I remember thinking "Wow this man has restarted the space race for my generation." It was a hopeful and wonderful feeling, I figured with the budget cuts, the politics, and the general "been there done that" attitude that was prominent for much of my life space was closed.
To see it opened again, gives me some sort of hope, some idea that there are things bigger than our squabbles, we took one giant leap for mankind when we stepped on the moon, but it's time for the next step to see what we can do after a leap.
As a young person (21), I feel the same way. Space exploration and a beautiful future suddenly seems achievable with hard work and a lot of engineering instead of just feeling impossible.
> As a young person (21), I feel the same way. Space exploration and a beautiful future suddenly seems achievable with hard work and a lot of engineering instead of just feeling impossible.
That is the goal for me, I'm not going to Mars and I knew that as soon as I went to the MDRS. I also made it an effort to make the director (commander on several mission) to realize how important it is motivate the younger generation and not just the future astronauts that come aborad for analogue missions.
SpaceX doesn't pay much, and you have to make a ton of sacrifices to even be considered, but I can tell you that being there you get this 'I wouldn't be any where else' feeling that I think is far superior to any monetary value.
Unfortunately, many of this year's missions at the MDRS are postponed due to COVID, but the robot challenge (mainly comprised of college aged students) is the one I really felt felt disappointed about. I was going to try and make it out this year to help out with that.
I hope you decide to get involved in this space (pun intended); I know if I was in my 20s, I'd do it all over again.
I'm only half joking, kopeng mi. One of the startups I currently have on the back-burner is a space resource commodity market and mining claim exchange, to jumpstart an investment market for asteroid and lunar mining startups.
I was in JPL’s SFOF building watching Armstrong and Aldrin step out onto the moon. Today’s SN8 mission gave me reasonable hope I’ll live to see somebody set foot on Mars.
At your age, I had a similar feeling as the pictures from Spirit and Opportunity started rolling in. Quit my cushy but relatively dead-end web dev job, and went back to school. Busted my ass, got the grades, and found a love for math, but eventually found my way back to high tech. It's not what I set out to do, but absolutely worth the effort.
An amazing future is within your grasp. It might not be what you're picturing, but an education in math, physics, engineering, mechatronics, whatever... will open doors to a brilliant future. Go get em!
I'd really think a bit more about it. We have so many problems here and none are solved by leaving. Climate change, wealth inequality, hungry, poor. None of the billionaires (Musk/Bezos) building rockets treat their workers terribly well now, and their end game will just be exploiting workers around the solar system. Coming as a past fan of space exploration is was pretty devastating to realize...
What would be your standard in treating employees terribly well?
And it is strange to mention Musk and Bezos side by side. Their mode of employment is very different.
In Amazon, you are a preprogrammed cog in a spinning retail machine, micromanaged and followed everywhere by algorithms that seek to squeeze maximal output from you and punish you for slight deviations from the script (such as "not having your hand on a railing if you go upstairs"). They even encourage other workers to report you if you do something frowned upon. Human robots - which corresponds well to the nature of Bezos, who is often described as a way-too-rational, aloof man.
This is not what happens around Musk, who is a very different type of personality. In SpaceX, young engineers do overtime voluntarily because they are working on interesting unsolved problems, precisely the thing that you want to take part in at least once in your life. And it is understood that once they leave for a workplace with less driven culture, their stint at SpaceX will be considered very valuble.
Edit: If you are a youngish creative engineering type, you want to have a go at something that is both difficult and world changing. Most people will never have a chance to do so. So if you really become a part of a team that designs Starship etc., no wonder you will spend hours and hours there.
From my personal experience, chasing a difficult bug in my program means that the day flies by and suddenly, the streetlamps are lit. But the victorious feeling is worth it. And my software products are nothing like Starship.
I think with SpaceX there are people who leave and tell people they were expected to work long, hard hours, as though not having a 7.5 hour days is a crime against employment. There are jobs out there for folks who want 7.5 hour days, but these will not be jobs where you're putting feet on Mars.
There will be people who want to work long, hard hours on complex problems, and for them, somewhere like SpaceX will be perfect. Just because it doesn't fit the ideals of others doesn't mean that it's bad.
The key is choice. I doubt anyone is forced to work at SpaceX. I'm sure they could leave if they had enough, or not join if they didn't like the deal.
If anything, having it available for people who /do/ want to dedicate themselves to something is a good thing. I think some folks could do to remember that. There are enough easy jobs.
I think there is a certain discrepancy between how progressive Musk is in technological terms, and how he behaves like any other billionaire in social terms. Look for example how he pushed for the reopening of the Tesla factories despite covid lockdowns, potentially putting the workers lives at risk. Or how he recently tweeted against the US stimulus package while Tesla is receiving billions in corporate aid.
This discrepancy is preventing me from fully cheering for the man, and I guess it causes a certain cognitive dissonance and an irrational defense of everything the man does by his fans.
Earth's problems are largely political, bureaucratic, and cultural. The people who love and are good at those areas have very little overlap with people who love and are good at tech, science, or space. The best we can do is provide something that magnifies our aspirations as a species, so that we and others will be inspired to improve our lot.
Eh, I’d say he’s a fine example. Musk may be trying to help the environment but he’s not going to save it, that’s for sure, and his future dream doesn’t involve treating his workers any better than he is now.
Is this about the environment or about labor rights?
And if Elon "solar panels, electric cars and in-house batteries" Musk doesn't contribute enough to save the environment, what exactly are you hoping for instead?
So because he can't fix the climate by himself, fuck him. And his workers are treated pretty well, his companies often rank on top of places people want to work.
His factory workers a payed like factory workers, better then most factory workers, less then some, he is not running a charity.
And the short-seller meme of Tesla factory being a death trap is just nonsense. In the first couple of years, Tesla as a company had somewhat more injuries then companies that have literally existed for 100 years but not really by much. How horrible, the company wasn't perfect from day 1.
Additionally Tesla is in the by far most regulated place in the US in terms health reporting and regulation. Why do you think every other car company has left California?
Maybe ask the workers in the city if the would rather the car plant be closed, like every other car plant or not.
You just hate him based on the political philosophy you have clearly adopted, so you need to find reasons to justify your hate to fit it in your framework. You have to re-frame the whole story into some sort of dystopian future space based slave society in order to justify shitting on the progress.
Irrational optimism is far more likely to lead to irrationally optimistic outcomes. Today is a good example. Space exploration gives people hope for what is possible. That is very, very important.
The fact that SpaceX's President and COO is a woman seems to get surprisingly little publicity, especially given that she seems like the more qualified engineer out of Musk and herself as well.
I think CEOs tend to be publicly assigned most credit for what their companies do, for some reason.
This also happened to Jobs.
People talk about "Elon Musk is building rockets to go to Mars". While not strictly incorrect, the insane numbers of people working long, hard hours for years on end is the reason these rockets are getting built, despite the indelible fact that Musk has served as a nucleation site that allowed and facilitated so many incredibly talented people to come together around a shared dream. Zubrin tried for decades and failed, and yet Musk succeeded.
Anyway, Jobs would usually get pretty much full credit for just about anything that came out of Apple, too. He accomplished a lot, to be sure, but I always tell those people the iPod fishtank story, or the details of the wage pricefixing scam he masterminded that successfully stole billions of dollars from his staff.
I think people just really really need to personify large groups into a person or facsimile, so that they can fit large entities into narrative structures in their heads (whether true or false). The same thing happens to nations, too: the political result of tens of thousands of people working very long hours is assigned singularly to Xi, or Putin, or Trump.
I actually believe that the fact that spaceX has a leadership qualified to make technical decisions is the reason they are the ones pushing the envelope.
First, I didn't make that claim. I do think, however, that the contributions of others must necessarily far outshadow his own considering that he is dividing his time between at least four companies. Even someone of equal competence (to say nothing of greater) working full time on just spacex would likely have a greater impact.
Then again, the thing would not have happened without him, so credit where credit is due.
You're right that figurehead probably isn't exactly the right word.
Probably one said it is both. But in real life the direction especially in firm and totalitarian countries are really affected much more by the leader.
Not sure about trump. You look at the way hus sect of state work abd you wonder whether it is trump or in spite of trump sometimes.
And he gave you a good example of migrating from California to Texas, not because of Trump or Biden.
But I would blame xi for all the human violations in Hong Kong and U and T etc. It is not a democracy. So is firm or many firms.
> The fact that SpaceX's President and COO is a woman seems to get surprisingly little publicity
How much publicity do COOs of other companies get? Hardly none.
Shotwell is all over media. She has given tons of interviews that are on youtube/social media as well. Most of them are great so feel free to watch them at your leisure. She's also in the 2020 Time's 100 most influential list.
For a COO, she's gets surprising too much publicity rather than too litte.
> especially given that she seems like the more qualified engineer out of Musk and herself as well.
Why does she seem like it? Just because she's a woman? She's mostly worked on the business side at spacex.
Are you as concerned that the male COO of tesla is getting no publicity? It's a trick rhetorical question so you needn't answer it.
She's a mechanical engineer who worked in aerospace before joining SpaceX (and was considering leaving the industry because old space sucks), so technically she is more qualified than Musk (a physicist and economist who worked on supercapacitors and non-realtime not-highly-reliable software before founding SpaceX).
That’s a very male oriented statement to make. Somehow it’s sexist to applaud the fact that she’s a role model for women everywhere. It’s really hard to express how incredible for the chief executive at one of the most ambitious and innovative company of our time is a woman. I’ve met her personally and she is an incredibly inspirational person that I hope will inspire more women to become engineers.
No, "the chief executive" refers to the CEO, and it's particularly likely to mislead people in this case since one of her titles is "president", which can be the top position at some companies.
Given how many cultural biases exist that inform young girls that their value is directly proportional to their beauty, it's helpful to draw attention to women who are successful for other reasons.
This is a good point. It got me wondering how effective it would be to try and get rid of those biases in the first place, e.g. by eliminating certain TV shows, or fixing Instagram culture, and why this idea doesn't seem to get much traction.
The race for gov contracts is definitely on. We’re on the cusp of seeing these companies fight it out over who can start exploiting space first. Sure might be years out still.
It seems people are giving way too much credit to Blue Origin; they haven't even sent hardware to orbit yet. They have a bunch of cool paper rockets, but they haven't achieved much beyond New Shepard (and that rocket has only done test flights). They are not even in the same league.
ULA on the other hand is much more accomplished. Tory Bruno seems like a cool dude (he even comments on /r/SpaceXMasterRace!), and his factory tour with SmarterEveryDay (on YouTube) was very instructive. However, they seem to have absolutely no regard for costs. You can see it in the factory tour; they machine huge aluminium blocks down into panels for the rocket sides, removing ~90% of the material in the process. How is that cost-effective in terms of time or materials? They send back the chips for recycling, but still. And that's not even starting on the reusability angle; SpaceX is currently working on a fully-reusable rocket (and has flown hardware!) when ULA only has vague plans to save the engines at some point on their next rocket.
I think the only launch company that could credibly compete on innovation would be Rocket Labs, but I fear they're too small and too late to compete commercially; they'll probably end up in the "very small sats in weird orbits" niche, as ridesharing on Starship will eat the rest of the small-sat market.
Lmao at all the people hating on a test launch. If this was even 10 years ago, you wouldn't even get a live stream of the launch and attempted landing. Perhaps Elon shouldn't even live stream this, so negative trolls wouldn't be able to assert and express their chair philosopher opinions.
The fact that there are another 8-9 SN vehicles being readied at this time for testing tells you exactly what is happening. Slow progress, until they get all the data and metrics to slowly and incrementally making improvements.
To all the haters, go find somewhere else to spread your negativity.
Except that the progress is not at all slow. It's the opposite, particularly when compared to the usual development speeds the worlds space program and aerospace contractors.
Someone asked a question on one of the live feeds. Would SpaceX learn more from a successful landing or from a failure. I can't answer that, but it seems they proved the concept.
Failures point out flaws to be fixed but also stop you from gathering more data through the rest of the experiment. The earlier SN5 had a huge list of failures but at least landed in one piece which meant they could extract data from their equipment, tear down systems to understand how they handled the stresses and strains of the launch, and then they could launch it again to see how their fixes worked.
Thankfully this failure was at the very end instead of, say, twenty seconds into flight or exploding on the launchpad. This way they got to test every subsystem which is phenomenal and about as good of a result as they could have expected. However, the landing system didn’t trigger and they’ll never know exactly why. The engines ate themselves alive and it would have been great to study how it performed in that scenario but now they’re in pieces. The header tank failed to provide enough pressure and it would have been great to test it further. Now they have to comb through the pieces and piece things together like a detective. They learned A TON but it’s definitely better to get it home in one piece.
As I understand it the landing legs didn't deploy because velocity was too high and angle was wrong. All this stuff gets reported by telemetry because they know exactly how likely it is that a first attempt flight will fail catastrophically (very). So these test rockets are heavily instrumented and networked. Watching it the first time I also thought one of the engines had failed but then that engine had a successful relight and another did not, and the fuel mix ratio appeared to be wrong on one of the engines. This is all consistent with loss of propellant (there was a quite significant leak after the first fire in engine bay) and not consistent with "engines ate themselves alive".
Your greater point about it being better to land than not land stands, but these are experimental rockets. They're expected to fail catastrophically and you plan accordingly.
The video shows us the wreck site at the end. The rocket is mostly one piece though damaged by hitting the ground too fast and from a (relatively minor) explosion.
It must be possible to find most pieces, and certainly check the engines, even deformed, for overburn signs.
Indeed, which in turn is an espected outcome if the engine is running oxygen rich, and hence much hotter than the design point. Pretty likely the low fuel tank pressure was the cause of this, and I'm sure SpaceX will have the telemetry data to know for sure if this was the case, irrespective of what pieces remain after the landing.
The haters create conversation. Smarter people come along and correct them. And most people who read it and the response will take the side of this being a great test.
This is an incredible bit of footage. It's so cool to see the engines looking sideways like a chameleon.
Raises a question: I suppose they fired 2/3 engines not because of a failure, but because 3 engines would produce too much thrust.
That does mean that in a high stakes situation (landing) you can't afford to lose an engine. I wonder if there's any margin there for lighting the third engine in case of engine failure.
A variation of that question is: in the event of a hard landing like the one today, will there be some means for humans to survive?
(Googling the question led me to an article about how Starship does not have a crew abort system, which seems like an unfortunate limitation. I suppose in theory maybe the landing is slow enough that if you know, say, a minute or in advance that something is wrong you could possibly just exit the vehicle out a door and parachute down. I'd guess that's easier said than done...)
I think their goal is to make the Spacecraft reliable enough that it wouldn't need the abort system. In the same way that 737s don't have one. However I think crew is a long way away for now. If they are launching 100 passengers it may be hard to do an abort system that isn't just the entire Starship itself. Maybe for smaller crew launches they will have ejection seats like Soyuz?
The timing of relight probably means there is a zero-tolerance to a flame-out like this when going from two to one engine. A heavier ship might be able to run more at minimum throttle so if one flames out there might(?) still time to throttle up one of survivors that is already lit, from three near mimimum to two near maximum or some combination. These things are moving literally tonnnes of fuel per second so even throttle-up inertia might lag too much unless they can predict failure really early.
One engine didn't have the grunt required(?) but SN8 might have been doomed due to fuel supplying both lit engines. Ho hum.
This was as much a test of the Raptor engines as it was the bellyflop and landing manoeuvre, perhaps more so. They've got data from literally hundreds of Merlin engines regarding failure modes etc. A long way to go with Raptor and many more explosions to be livestreamed!
Not at all sure, but some of the Falcon 9/Heavy failures seem to suggest that SpaceX's thinking on landing is "don't give up, fly it all the way to the ground," when there's an issue.
Especially with the fact that Starship is eventually supposed to fly humans and doesn't have a limit on relights since the Raptors are electrically ignited, I would bet that the software will/does include the ability to light up extra engines in an emergency.
The starship (what we saw yesterday) should have 3 sea level and 3 vacuum Raptors. The booster is currently scheduled to have 28 Raptors (some of which are fixed and some which can gimbal) although these numbers are subject to change depending on what kind of performance they can achieve in the end.
I think the 'looks like a render' effect is multiple factors; there's some distortion and the like due to distance and heat (you can sorta tell it's on a very long zoom?), high frame rate and high resolution. I think a lot of people aren't yet used to high frame rate video. I mean movies were 23 frames per second for a long time, and the reactions to 60fps films was... averse. The Hobbit was one of the first that tried that I believe, and it seriously messed with the suspension of disbelief.
edit: another comment mentions it may be 120 frames per second footage.
I know, right?! As they were cutting the first two engines off in sequence during ascent they were giving little pre-twitches to adjust the centre of gravity, like an acrobat holding another acrobat aloft hand-to-hand, switching from two hands to one. Amazing.
There was also a substantial green flame coming from the raptor engine used for landing. Group consensus over on /r/SpaceX is that it was copper burning. We're amazed the engine didn't explode sooner.
I’m a great fan of all of the “this is fine” sort of phrases for engineering failures. “engine rich” is a new one for me today, joining things like letting the magic blue smoke out of electronics and rapid unplanned disassembly.
While it isn't humorous, "delta P event" is so dryly understated that IMO it belongs (when not involving human tragedy). Delta P events would be explosions if they happened in air. As violent as an atmospheric shockwave is, the speed of sound is >4x higher underwater, in a medium that is >800x heavier. The amount of casual violence implied in a "delta P event" is profoundly unnerving.
Oh yes, today I learned that RUD (rapid unscheduled disassembly) is apparently an established term, but I didn't get what "engine rich" means until now.
> Fuel header tank pressure was low during landing burn, causing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD, but we got all the data we needed! Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!!
RUD is very much a euphemism that has I guess drifted a bit from it's initialism; I'm pretty sure in this case the disassembly was planned and the survival case would have been unplanned.
I like reading Musk's tweets when he talks about something he knows (e.g. engineering). I don't much like them when they're ignorant and irresponsible commentary on Covid-19 (something he knows less about than even most ordinary but interested people, seeing as he wouldn't have the time to follow much expert commentary), or when he's sharing his puerile taste in humour or music or literature etc (although, to be fair, it's his personal account so he can share what he likes).
I think it was purging leftover hypergolic fuel, which is used to ignite the engines. Or, maybe the engine sensed the engine was abnormal (because of low fuel), so it tried to re-ignite.
TEA-TEB is not used on Starship. What you saw was an oxygen rich burn due to the low pressures in the header tank, the engine was eating itself and burning copper in the process. Copper burns green.
Yo what's going on here? Is this some sort of misinformation campaign? To what end?? There's been a number of comments making this claim even though there's no reason to suggest this was the case.
Definitely not misinformation, just misinformed armchair enthusiasts. SpaceX did the hard thing using spark ignition which goes against the industry norms. Even the everyday astronaut YouTube guy said tea tab on his stream and he’s a space nerd.
Definitely not a miss. They got telemetry data (3000 signals) covering the entire flight from start to landing -- which would've been impossible if it went RUD mid-flight. Plus they've located the bug (low pressure in the header fuel tanks) -- and the bug is plain and clear, with no uncertainty.
It says something about what they have done for rocketry when crashes on landing are note worthy. No one else even tries what they do normally without issue.
Very few rocket launches end with any kind of soft landing, let alone main boosters.
Soft-landing a small payload, or in the case of the shuttle, a winged reentry vehicle, is the exception. (And yes, the Shuttle also soft-ish watered its SRBs underr chutes.)
Retrorocket-soft-landing intact boosters from production launches fully upright was science fiction until four years ago.
I think they're saying we've come to expect SpaceX rockets to successfully land, so much so that one not doing so is noteworthy. Something nigh unfathomable 10yrs ago
The person who posted the grandparent comment (beginning "It says something...") to the person (ansible) who mentioned their name, and also the poster of the the great-great grandparent to this comment.
For whatever reason, Wired preferred the clickbait title, but the opening sentence of the article is: "On Wednesday afternoon, SpaceX successfully launched—and nearly landed—a fully-assembled prototype of its next generation Starship rocket on a suborbital flight from its facility in south Texas."
The Wired article was full of misleading information (implying that the rocket failed to reach space, when that was never a mission objective) and outright lies (stating that the Starship is a scaled-up Falcon 9, the name of the Starship+SuperHeavy combo, the number of engines that the system will have, etc, etc).
Headlines are usually written by an editor, not the writer, and chosen to generate clicks. That’s why there’s often such a contrast between the headline and the article.
To add to my comment-- I think the CNN headline got it better without the softening euphemism by pointing out it was a success: "A SpaceX Mars rocket prototype just exploded. It was still a success"
I don’t think it exploded. It broke up by hitting the ground (not by exploding) which caused fuel and oxygen to leak out, which then ignited in a large fireball. But maybe this is splitting hairs. It sure looked like an explosion.
Landing safely was
an unexpected outcome, so it’s remarkable (thus making it into the headline) that it came close to doing so. The right wording is highly context dependent. Here the “nearly landed” phrasing appropriately acknowledges the realistic expectations for the launch by those most in the know, the SpaceX team.
“Crash” would be totally appropriate in a different context with different expectations. But it would make less sense in this case.
Definitely planned. If you look closely at the SpaceX stream, the first two engines that were shut down were the ones restarted during the landing flip maneuver.
Too bad about the loss of fuel pressure from the header tank. SN8 wasn't quite on the landing pad, but it was close.
We also didn't see the landing legs deploy, not sure why that didn't happen.
If you watch the last few frames, it looks like the ship indeed landed. From the perspective that for a split second the entire vehicle was upright and in touch with the ground, that is. I’m not one to be a pedant, but you can claim a landing if you squint at it long enough.
Well, it wouldn't really be 'topping' it would it?
I don't think its really possible to fly any lower. The dead sea is the lowest place on earth, and -422m is even pushing that as it must have been a very dry season when they did the flight. Unless the dead sea evaporates even lower, flying below -422m is going to be pretty hard.
This was incredible to see. My wife was fairly concerned about the fast descent at the very end, but I explained how this was merely the first test of this scheme, and that the rocket came extremely close to actually landing. The entire SpaceX team should feel proud of this, from Elon on down. Hell, I'm proud of them.
As someone who's not knowledgeable about this...will SpaceX or a private space company ever begin sending satellites, probes, rovers to planets besides NASA's current planning or does the reduced cost of the reusable rockets not help that much given the lack of financial payoffs and amount of time needed to maintain.
Always bums me out that we aren't sending probes off to all the inner and outer planets every year given the length of time it takes for them to even get to their destination.
It gave me flashbacks to playing the jetpack on SNES Pilot Wings to watch that part at the end where it just missed the landing with a bit too much speed.
As an industry term, "suborbital" implies space flight, which means crossing the Karman line (100km). Fast enough to exit the atmosphere, but not fast enough to achieve orbit.
The 12-ish km of this test is within the operating ceiling of most commercial jet liners. This was an atmospheric test of an orbital-class rocket.
I make efforts to add to discussions instead of subtracting with negativity. Recently, I've broken my rule quite a few times, fretting over the future of general compute. I'd vowed to not break it again, but the discussion about Starship lacks a vital perspective.
.
I don't understand the hype behind Starship. It's confusing to me. It is touching and nice; it's great to see people excited about space. However, the expectations and projections seem misaligned with reality. It seems that people are assuming that this is the vehicle itself, or at least an earlier version of it. That is likely to not be the case. This isn't anywhere close to the finished vehicle and several key technological problems remain. Yet, they've explicitly shaped it like the final version, and hyped it.
In certain ways, SpaceX seems to be leaning into the hype, leading to a gross mismatch between expectations and reality. For example, the current headline is inaccurate as the flight cannot be categorized as sub-orbital. The vehicle did not cross the Kármán line. These issues will detract from the meat of what has been achieved today.
SpaceX has achieved many milestones including demonstrating groundbreaking GNC (Guidance, Navigation and Control) capability today. Today's most impressive achievement is a high performant, stable Liquid-Methane engine. Prior investigations and projects found notable instability during ignition as well as low frequency instability. Another historical issue has been the need for a high pre-burner chamber pressure for a LCH4 engine.
> During the rest of March 2014 the ALHAT hardware was inserted again permitting a successful tethered test of the assembly on March 27, 2014. Tether Test 34 flight trajectory was similar to TT33 and TT29 with two hovers and a 3 m (9.8 ft) translation during a 3.25 m (10.7 ft) ascent.[97] Free Flight 10 (FF10) took place on April 2, 2014 with the ALHAT in open loop mode. The ALHAT imaged the Hazard Field and calculating navigation solutions in real time. Morpheus ascended to a maximum altitude of about 804 feet (245 m), then flew forward and downward initially at a 30-degree glideslope, then levelling out, covering a total of about 1334 feet (406.5 m) horizontally in 50 seconds while diverting to a landing site ___location 78 feet (23.8 m) from its initial target, before descending and landing on a dedicated landing pad at the front (south) of the ALHAT Hazard Field. The total flight time was ~96 sec, the longest flight to date.[98] Free Flight 11 on April 24, 2014 was a repeat of Free Flight 10 with some changes to the ALHAT.[99] April 30, 2014 Free Flight 12 was a repeat of FF10 but with the ALHAT choosing the landing ___location.[100]
The engine was designed for moon operation, and demonstrated dynamic hazard avoidance and translation to a previously unknown "safe" landing area. The technology has found its way to the Nova-C lander which is slated for 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova-C
NASA also has some fairly detailed technical reports on the subjects from earlier experimentation,
The key impressive element over here is a reusable, throttleable, stable LCH4/LOX engine that seems to be capable of reignition (at least in the atmosphere). This is a significant achievement and one that SpaceX should be lauded for. However, an engine does not a starship make.
A proper comparison would be the Space Transportation System, or the Shuttle. As Starship has Raptor, the Shuttle had the RS-25, a high efficiency, highly manoeuvrable and performant marvel of engineering. It is perhaps the only engine that could be re-used over a dozen times. A claim unmatched until the development of the past few blocks of Merlin engines. The STS also had superior GNC, for its time, and could autonomously land in flying brick mode all the way from orbit.
However, that wasn't enough. The real issue turned out to be the thermal protection system, operational temperature ranges and the cost of refurbishing these machines.
The STS may look like a bad bet right now, but if you were sitting in the 1970s, watching the RS-25 perform, seeing the GNC work, and watching NASA nail the first test flight with two humans on top in a single go, it would have seemed like the future.
However, much of what makes rocket science hard is in the details. And those details simply haven't been filled in yet for Starship. These hops are excellent tests, but once again, an engine and GNC do not a starship make.
In light of this, I am unable to understand the excitement for this vehicle. Several people assume that they're close to sending an orbital vehicle. Perhaps, but it wouldn't be reusable. And it would be quite mass inefficient for a one-way trip due to the construction techniques used.
Starship isn't anywhere close to the primetime. It's at least half-a-decade to a decade away from initial reusable testflights, and perhaps more given the under funding of the Artemis program. It is worth remembering that early on in SpaceX's history, Musk made a dummy rocket and took it to DC to convince politicians to help allocate COTS & CRS funding to SpaceX. His gambit succeeded. My personal perception and worry is that SpaceX is repeating the tactic at scale, creating a sense that they're further along than they are. This perception is mixed with a more dangerous one that the Starship is in a league of its own. It's not. Blue Origin's work and approach may be superior in the long run, as they're designing mission specific vehicles that are optimised to their context.
It is hard to convey to the public what realistic milestones look like in rocketry, but for context Raptor has been in development since 2009. The LCH4/LOX variant since 2012. It has taken nearly a decade to near the (limited) flight readiness stage. It is likely that the other components will take longer. I am worried that this early excitement will sour as the program takes longer than anticipated. The space program is highly dependent on public funding, there would be serious repercussions if public perception sours. I am worried about a rocketry winter.
.
Edit. Re: Artemis & NASA
The Artemis program and other contracts now fund the bulk of Starship development. More broadly, NASA has poured billions into SpaceX and they're SpaceX's largest "investor" by far, except NASA doesn't take equity and treats it as "pre-funding" an eventual contract (which would also pay per launch).
Starship is (likely) to be mostly (up to 60% to 70% or so) NASA funded.
I'm a SpaceX fan, and I hear your arguments so let me give one aspect of the other side:
I think you and I are in a bet about whether progress for Starship is going to be roughly linear or exponential. Obviously I'm betting emotionally on the latter. Granted I could go on and on about the facts that I think back up my assessment, but in the end I think you and I both know it really comes down to hunches, doesn't it?
My hunch is that your argument is the equivalent of Steve Ballmer's famous •shrug* about the iPhone. But I could be wrong, of course.
This scenario has played out before, with Faster, Better, Cheaper from the 90s, and kind-of/loosely with STS.
> Missions marked with an asterisk were considered failures (5 spacecraft failed in space; 1 project was canceled), putting the overall FBC success rate at a paltry 63%. This low success rate—and the fact that 4 of them occurred in one year, 1999—are what linger in the space community’s memory.
> For example, an examination of the timeline reveals an often-missed observation: the first 9 of 10 missions were successful, a 90% success rate. The FBC approach broke when proposed missions began getting more ambitious without a change in schedule and cost cap. The early successes made everyone overconfident and the missions became too aggressive for their constraints, leading to failures (Launius and McCurdy 2005):
>
> “In hindsight, it becomes apparent that [NASA’s] success in the nineties had led the review and selection committees to accept very ambitious and complex proposals with a very high science return on budgets and schedules that were quite optimistic.”
Pathfinder and Sojourner demonstrated new technologies and were done on a budget smaller than one of Viking's experiments. The failures soured the public memory, lead to congressional hearings, and funding cuts.
NASA is a public institution and has been beholden to the Senate's irrational whims for it's entire life.
SpaceX is a private company. They receive public grants, sure, but they have a profitable launch business with the Falcon 9. Their requirement is that they can sustain themselves, not that they can keep their own internal project from being cancelled by directive of the US government.
On some level what the public (and really, it's space nerds like us) think doesn't really matter. The public would in fact be hard pressed to stop them getting contracts from the US government provided they can underbid Boeing at this point.
Wow, for such an expert you sure get a lot of things wrong and wrapped up in minor issues if no consequence.
1. Project Morpheus was a mostly inconsequential project just retreading the same areas pioneered by the DC-X.
2. Other than propellant, it has nothing to do with Raptor, likely the most advanced rocket engine ever made. The Raptor is the first successful full flowed staged combustion engine ever. This test alone demonstrates how robust it is in actual use across actual restarts.
3) The RS-25 was not reusable, every single one required many months and full rebuilds between flights. SpaceX has flown the same engines to space within a month with minimal maintenance.
4) The STS could not land autonomously, which is why two Astronauts has to risk their lives on that first launch. The Soviet Buran could and did land autonomously on its first flight.
5) BO isn’t even in the space flight business, it’s never out anything into orbit or even flown a single person or paid payload in its miniature sub-orbital rocket. BO is 15 years behind SpaceX in actual accomplishments.
6) Also you clearly aren’t qualified to judge Starship construction techniques. It’s payload and performance targets have been widely discussed and vetted.
Lastly NASA funded Falcon 9 development with the COTs contract, and got massive launch saving out of it. Far better deal than their Boeing contract. NASA has contributed almost nothing to Starship development other than jumping in late with a small Artemis contract and a tiny in orbit refueling contract.
Great summary, but there’s also this fundamental misunderstanding of what this test was about:
> This isn't anywhere close to the finished vehicle and several key technological problems remain. Yet, they've explicitly shaped it like the final version...
One of the primary objectives of this test was to verify the aerodynamics of the vehicle. How could they test the aerodynamics if it was a different shape from the final version? Someone’s not paying attention, like at all.
Almost none of that screed was actually criticising specific aspects of the vehicle itself, it’s mostly discussion of irrelevant aspects of past vehicles as a smoke screen for actually not having much pertinent to say, and what is relevant is just plain wrong.
I appreciate and respect your enthusiasm. I wish more people were as passionate about spaceflight as you.
Raptor shares the pintle-type injector, which was designed for the LEM and was part of the technology transfer to SpaceX as a part of their participation in the overarching COTS/CRS programs. The engine's design was partly funded by the USAF, and is a part of a rich history of alternate engine designs that all learn/share from one another.
Raptor is one of the few advanced engine concepts that have gone from the test stand to near-use, and that's an amazing achievement.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Raptor wasn't the first full flowed staged combustion engine. Being the first doesn't change what Raptor has done, taken several technologies from the test-stand phase to flight testing.
Autoland was de-emphasized due to demands for greater control by the astronaut corps. There was also the incident with STS-3. However, the Shuttle was designed from the ground up with GNC that was meant for full-scale autopilot, including landing. They were hoping for long-term space habitation and to send vehicles uncrewed and then return with crews from the Moon, Mars, and perhaps beyond. It was felt that the astronauts would be rusty and weak after continued microgravity exposure so autoland was emphasized during the design process. For its time, the STS had extremely advanced GNC and displayed mission capabilities that hadn't been displayed before. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19760024058
BO has performed multiple suborbital flights using the same booster, and have taken scientific payloads for these flights.
Steel is heavier than Al and most other aerospace materials. It was chosen for Starship as a part of a novel Thermal Protection System, without that mission role, it is mass inefficient.
I am happy to hear your palpable excitement. I hope this comment helps you adjust your mental model to a better picture of the industry.
All of these points are well known and understood. Frankly, so what? Musk has been effusive in his praise of NASA’s help at SpaceX and many times has said he couldn’t have done any of it without their help. We know that. What actual point are you trying to make, other than list mainly irrelevant facts.
Yes some Musk fans ridicule NASA for past failures or lost opportunities and that’s a shame. It’s also widely understood in the community that this is mainly due to political interference and constraints forced on the organisation. But none of that has anything to do with your ‘criticisms’.
Take the points about steel. That matters on a non reusable system because you’re wasting weight for no mission relevant purpose, but if it allows you to reuse the vehicle rather than not, is it really still an inefficient choice? What point are you even trying to make? If that even is a criticism, it’s just not relevant. If you genuinely think it’s a bad choice, just say so and say why. But you don’t actually give any explanation of why any of these points matter.
>I hope this comment helps you adjust your mental model to a better picture of the industry.
I hope you realize that not only are you getting downvoted for factual inaccuracies, style of writing etc, but this passive aggressive coda at the end does you no favors...
I could also appreciate your enthusiasm if you could get your facts right.
1. Raptor does not use Pintle injectors (invented at Caltech), it uses coaxial swirl injectors.
2. Raptor was designed and developed completely by SpaceX for six years before the USAF gave it small contracts to develop specific versions for their potential needs.
3. Raptor is the first full-flow staged combustion rocket engine ever flown. Flying is a lot more important than the lab. And a lot harder given vibration and acceleration effects.
4. The Shuttle autoland system was incomplete when first implemented, it could not land the Shuttle. Even when “completed” NASA never trusted it or allowed its use . The Russians did land Buran with their system.
5. While it’s technically true that RS-25 engines were re-used, they were also required to be completely torn down and rebuilt between flights. At some point you’ve replaced so many parts it’s basically a new engine, and it was an extremely expensive maintenance requirement that entirely negated the value of reuse.
6. BO has never made an orbital flight, which is the key first step for any space travel. It’s never risked a human life in its mini rocket, nor ever flown a paid cargo. It’s still behind the 2006 version of SpaceX, which was attempting orbital flights and succeeding in 2009.
7. Without a thermal protection system your flights are one way and everything is “mass inefficient”. The inefficiency of throwing away a complete launch system every flight is the only inefficiency that matters.
SLS is designed to put 100 tons of payload in orbit. Not including development costs, each launch will cost roughly $1B, with development costs it will be over to $4B per launch. Every bit of that hardware will be destroyed every launch. It’s payload cost per pound will be over $40,000.
The Starship stack is designed to put 110+ tons of cargo in orbit, inside a 120 ton Starship. It’s launch mass will be nearly double the SLS. So on paper it’s actual payload mass percentage is about half the SLS.
But none of the Starship stack is destroyed at launch, it’s all reused. Cost of fuel for each flight is around $500K. It’s launch cost will be less than $50M, eventually maybe $5M. That means it’s payload cost per pound starts at $200/lb and could drop as low as $20/lb.
Sure, build a Starship out of aluminum or carbon fiber if you never want to be able to land it on earth again, or want to land on Mars with far smaller payloads without the massive fuel savings from Aerobraking.
NASA isn’t paying SpaceX to develop Starship. SpaceX is actually getting paid to design a lunar only version of Starship that won’t need thermal protection. Perhaps they’ll custom build NASAs versions out of lighter materials to increase their lunar landing payloads.
But they won’t do that for Starships in general because it makes them too inefficient for their planned missions. Starships efficiency cones from in-orbit refueling, which is how the same Starship can take the same 110+ ton payload to earth orbit, and on to land it on Mars.
"Starship isn't anywhere close to the primetime. It's at least half-a-decade to a decade away from initial reusable testflights, and perhaps more given the under funding of the Artemis program."
What would be the reason to believe it's that far from being usable? How would Artemis funding have anything to do with Starship?
"It is worth remembering that early on in SpaceX's history, Musk made a dummy rocket and took it to DC to convince politicians to help allocate COTS & CRS funding to SpaceX."
The Artemis program and other contracts fund the bulk of Starship development. NASA has poured billions into SpaceX and they're SpaceX's largest "investor" by far, except NASA doesn't take equity and treats it as "pre-funding" an eventual contract (which would also pay per launch).
Starship is (likely) to be mostly (up to 60% to 70% or so) NASA funded.
Now you are just making things up. SpaceX definitely needed the COTS contract to build the Falcon 9, but NASA got a massive cut in launch costs out of it.
NASA has contributed very little to Starship development. The in orbit refueling experiment contract is tiny, as is their Artemis contract.
And Musk used a Falcon to promote SpaceX in Washington DC, what’s your point?
I agree with basically everything you said except for your assumption of what people are excited about. To be fair you lead with saying you don’t understand it if course, but where you’re landing isn’t anywhere close to what interests me about it.
For me the excitement is in the try, in the front row seat in failure and success. It’s not that it couldn’t be done, or that it hasn’t been done, but that somebody is doing it and we get to see it warts and all. The flight today is a perfect example. It was a lot of fun to watch. I’m sure there’s lots of amazing innovation happening at Blue Origin, but there’s nothing to really talk about because they don’t share it. If Bezos started some mad max bullshit and it felt like a legit race with giant explosions the whole damn world would be tuning into these things.
SpaceX has lots of new fans, but there are lots of old fans that have been around for a decade and are still excited. Elon time is what it is, two years or five it’s still progress. They nailed their first barge landing five years ago. If the first time we see the giant streak of a white hot Starship re-entering the atmosphere is 2025, it’ll still be worth the wait.
Perhaps the key to success truely is "over promise under deliver"
He's picked a target of Mars! It's going to be _decades_ of failure until it happens. The current status: successful steps of key component test required for sustainable future price.
Building the hype train for a 20 year goal is hard I don't know many companies that can sell "it takes a year".
Humanity has already sent an object to Mars. The next goal is "human on Mars", and golly if we can we'll bring them back!
The secondary goal "cheaply"
At my current weight i cost 1,700,000 minimum to get into space. Getting that down to 170,000 means I could actually afford it (and written into my marriage is the understanding that if I ever get the chance to go Mars I'm willing to divorce to make that happen)
Or: It's not the ship. It's the mission. The ship is just an visible process towards that goal.
>people are assuming that this is the vehicle itself
>Yet, they've explicitly shaped it like the final version, and hyped it.
> It's at least half-a-decade to a decade away from initial reusable testflights, and perhaps more given the under funding of the Artemis program
SpaceX is not dependent on Artemis funding other than lunar Starship. Yusaku Maezawa's Dear Moon also provides $500 million in Starship funding (presumably tranches get released for successful milestones including this test).
SpaceX are otherwise self-funding the Starship test program so far. It might become easier as Starlink satellite internet system comes out of beta and generates large cash flow.
Elon Musk estimated the entire Starship program to cost a mere $10 billion. Taxpayer money helps (especially for moon and Mars missions), but SpaceX needs to create a next generation rocket (both stages fully-and-rapidly re-usable) to stave off future competition (though Blue Origin is very far behind).
Even without government funding for Mars and the moon, low-earth orbit provides ample incentives: commercial, government (ISS etc) and military (reconnaissance sats) for SpaceX to slowly and steadly develop Starship. A few billion for Starship development for moon missions would definitely accelerate the otherwise self-funded schedule to land unmanned payloads on Mars from 12+ years to 5 years.
Also Starship is not 5 years away from orbital flight but less than 18 months away. Super Heavy is built on exactly technologies as Starship (mass-manufacturing stainless-steel rings then rapidly stacking them): the first test articles are already being assembled using the same equipment that Starship uses. The Starship re-entry heat shield tiles are the biggest unknown at the moment, but future test flights of SN9 and beyond will figure this out.
The bulk of Starship funding is not coming from NASA. Well maybe if you consider SpaceX re-investing the profits generated from the International Space Station crew and cargo resupply contracts as "NASA funding" (but I don't).
SpaceX has received some development funding for the Raptor engine ("In January 2016, the US Air Force awarded a US$33.6 million development contract to SpaceX to develop a prototype version of its methane-fueled reusable Raptor engine for use on the upper stage of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles, which required double-matching funding by SpaceX of at least US$67.3 million.").
EDIT: As far as funding goes, I believe the direct Starship funding is NASA's Human Landing System: Funding $135 million of DESIGN WORK as part of the Artemis program over (10-month period ends in Feb 2021) for the Lunar Starship variant. The Air Force did provide $40.7 million for developing the Raptor engine a few years ago though. It would appear that a significant amount of Starship investment so far as been re-invested profit, external investment and funding for the private "Dear Moon" mission.
In September 2018 Elon Musk estimated that the total cost of Starship will be $5 billion, and no more than $10 billion but no less than $2 billion. In that same presentation Yusaku Maezawa later seems to confirm that he is paying 5% of the Starship development costs [1], but it could be something lost in translation.
5% of $5 billion is $250 million (and of $10 billion is $500 million). Maezawa’s contributions are all going directly toward [developing Starship into an operational system] [2]
Given he's taking himself and 6-8 artists plus 1-2 crew members. It's hard to believe he's paid just $250 million. That would probably make NASA very angry given they're paying $400 million per launch for Crew Dragon to carry 4 people.
I know its not a direct source, but the above analysis suggests he's paying several hundred million dollars for the Dear Moon project. $500 million is a reasonable estimate. Though I suspect that's on the low side.
What is the actual point of telling people to not be excited about watching technological progress happening in front of their very eyes..? It's certainly not to temper expectations that things may take longer than people expect (because it certainly shouldn't take _that_ many words to say something so simple).. does it just make you feel smart or something?
> This perception is mixed with a more dangerous one that the Starship is in a league of its own. It's not. Blue Origin's work and approach may be superior in the long run, as they're designing mission specific vehicles that are optimised to their context.
Has Blue Origin even gotten a rocket into orbit yet?
I agree that we should be tempering our expectations, but it says "suborbital flight" and not "suborbital spaceflight" so the headline at least is correct.
My hope is that Starlink and Starship enable each other to succeed long enough for the technology to develop to the point where the flights and reuse are truly routine.
Yes, absolute success. All primary mission objectives achieved successfully AND all but one secondary objective achieved. Launch, ascent, MECO, controlled descent, turn and re-orient with nose thrusters, fire engines, decelerate, position over landing pad, in correct orientation, AND, most importantly, capture all mission telemetry and data until after ground contact.
As a mere spectator, I'll add they achieved ALL my additional personal objectives, including: end-to-end live video/audio transmission from multiple onboard and ground tracking cameras, conveniently streamed in the late afternoon for free, near-instant pre and post-test insights direct from Elon via Twitter, AND a perfectly-framed SPECTACULAR live explosion in HD to cap it all off. From my (somewhat self-centered) perspective, how could it have been any more successful?
As for your "losing money" question, I'm not sure that's much of a factor with SN8 because it was a test article not expected to probably survive. It didn't even have final or complete flight systems. If it had remained more intact after landing, perhaps they could have reused some raw materials eventually for future test articles but that also requires extensive inspection to re-validate, disassemble and integrate - all of which would consume scarce schedule time, assembly space and the limited time of skilled personnel able to build final Starships. IHMO, SpaceX wisely prioritizes speed and learning over testing costs or PR optics.
The biggest unexpected cost may just be the "cleanup on aisle SN8" but they probably didn't expect SN8 would reach the landing pad as on-target as it did and may have budgeted even more time/money for clean-up than they'll need since it was pretty dang tidy for a RUD. I guess an over-water loss might be a bit faster/cheaper to reset but then they would have lost higher priority objectives and we wouldn't have had such a SWEET front-row ticket to the finale :-).
It's not just "cleanup" - they would probably reuse the raptors and maybe batteries/ other stuff too. Losing 3 raptors is probably what hurts the most at this point (but it wasn't unexpected). All in all, the test was most definitely a success.
I'm not sure they'd even reuse them, they're still tweaking the design. The Raptors that flew yesterday were probably already outdated; the ones on SN9 are improved versions already.
It is a great success. They launched the Starship on 3 Raptors, most importantly perfectly controlled the descend and correctly executed the flip and vertical landing. If the fuel pressure had been correct, even the landing would have worked, but that is a really small thing to correct.
The main thing, and that is why it was a success, was the in-flight control, especially on the descent and before the landing. Only real loss was 3 engines they might have reused otherwise. But as the Starships themselves are extremely cheap to build - the next one is already mostly finished - it was basically considered expendable for the test.
Beyond understanding and fixing the fuel pressure issue, they just can proceed with their testing plans as scheduled.
Huge Success. This is a prototype. It was going to be thrown away next week regardless. Obviously long term the landing is very important. Just not today.
SN 9 is ready for testing in the next few weeks and has more design changes they need to test, so SN 8 is no longer needed. On the other hand the loss of the engines is a shame. They are by far the most expensive part of the vehicle and could have been used in later vehicles.
They could do more part verification, but it might take twice the time and 3 times the money for the same insights. Just launch some prototypes and see what happens.
I'm pretty sure a successful landing was one of the goals. It just might have been a "nice to have"-kind of goal.
During prototyping there's only one type of test that isn't a success: a test that fails for a previously known reason (e.g. repeating a known mistake or some external factor like earthquakes, flooding or weather) and that you learned nothing from.
Fair question, I think one of their goals is to maximize the lessons/takeaways they get from minor failures like this and be able to recalibrate effectively on the next launches.
Just like bare scientific method of trial and error.
“Fail early, fail often” may actually be cheaper in the long run than never running actual tests until you’ve run enough simulations and analysis to satisfy yourself the test will not fail. If you accept that premise, this test can definitely be viewed as a complete success, since they got telemetry from every phase of operation and know exactly what to improve for the next test.
That's something entirely different, though. Test to destruction/failure is done to check or verify the limits of a systems.
This test on the other hand was a test with a low change of complete success and thus failure was an expected and acceptable - but not the intended - outcome.
I take your point but if this flight had landed they would have probably kept test flying SN-8 until it did crash. There is really no other use for it.
I'm sure there's some cost in cleaning up the scrap and repairing any damage to the facility. But it's a prototype, and I think this was the only flight planned for this one.
