I think these videos and the fact that this rockets actually works is one of the inspirational things in my life (and I am almost 40). I grew up loving everything about space (sci fi books and movies, astronomy in school, etc), and it was very bewildering not to see any progress basically for the first half of my life. Now it seems that humanity is back in the game, and it is amazing!
Perhaps kids of my kids would be able to travel to the moon.
Very clean flight, almost all the way through, despite the intentional missing tiles and new flight pattern. No flap burn through, no issues with simulated Starlink deploy, I don't think they even lost any engines.
They're clearly almost ready to scale this thing, if the next block version doesn't add a ton of problems back on. I'm not sure they're quite at the point of rapid reuse looking feasible, since tiles did come loose near the end of flight; not a problem for stage return, but definitely bad enough to warrant a meaningful correction before a (counterfactual) reflight.
The thing Elon does well I feel, is he takes real experts with know-how and talent, and puts them on the cool project they want to work on and just lets them cook.
It sounds like a no-brainer management strategy, but it's surprisingly rare in practice. People will lend on random teams and projects, projects won't try to push any envelope but just be the next thing marketing or product came up with to boost some metrics or acquire some new customer, etc.
Now I might be entirely wrong as I never worked at one of his companies, but it's the impression I get and most of his success, Tesla and SpaceX, I think he really managed to snatch the experts away from where they worked because of that.
At least I think this holds for bootstrapping. And then that top talent left, and now since the major innovations have already landed, probably you can just churn our grunt out-of-schoolers to iterate and keep the lights on.
This isn't really the case. For Falcon 1 he hired a bunch experts but a pretty small handful. Then he hired a lot of really young hungry engineers.
And its also hard to say that 'top talent left'. Because arguable some of the achievements after some of those people left is bigger then before. Tom Mueller for example build the Merlin engine, but claims to be more proud of the team he build that then went on to build Raptor. So clearly even while some talented people left, many others joined.
SpaceX is not 'iterating and keeping the lights on' they are always going for something harder in the next iteration.
That and the other thing I think he does that's just as important is go get things unstuck. When there is bureaucracy and managers getting in the way he gets it through. Very under appreciated IMO.
Counterpoint: I dislike Musk because he's narcissist (subtypes: strongly communal, somewhat grandiose) but I don't wanna see spaceX fail. I just don't want abusive individuals in positions of power to have so much influence and to be given credit for the technical achievements of others.
He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision. Books documenting SpaceX's early days make it pretty clear that Musk had a pretty significant role in putting in place the kind of thinking that has allowed SpaceX to blow open the commercial space market.
Both also have at least some understanding of what they're paying for considering the tours and testimony from former employees. They also frequently thank the employees for their successes.
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
Musk was worth ~$300M when he started SpaceX and Tesla, and he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire. His big share of SpaceX makes up like half of his wealth, so from today's perspective he's not putting his wealth into a vision, he's wealthy because of that vision. That's different from Bezos, who made his big money from Amazon and then started putting billions into Blue Origin (which was rather inspired by SpaceX success). That said, Blue Origin was actually founded before SpaceX, but they were very slowly working on their suborbital rocket for a decade before Bezos gave them big cash, while SpaceX started sending satellites to space and supplying the ISS in that time. SpaceX has made 500+ orbital flights so far, while Blue Origin just one.
By putting his wealth into a vision, I mean all the test flights, being much more tolerant of failure, betting everything on Starlink. We're at flight 13, and likely at least flight 16 before anything orbital, likely into the upper 20s before reliable refueling and non-Starlink payloads. Most other rich people haven't done much besides minimally funding small startups or dead end joyrides.
Bezos has been somewhat similar, he has been pouring billions into BO, and while BO has moved at a slower pace, he's clearly committed for the long term too, considering all the investments into things that only make sense if New Glenn acheives reliable booster reuse (the giant futuristic rocket factory, Project Jarvis, the lunar cargo lander).
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
As much as I love space exploration, I think it's actually a problem that so few people get to decide where so much money goes. Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation so that the downstream effect is a society with many more aerospace engineers and astrophysicist, who dont have to instead focus on working corporate jobs just to afford housing.
We might foster a society where space exploration is an ongoing societal goal instead of a playground for the elite.
I would love such a society, but I think the way space funding has been in most parts of the world shows that most people are just not good judges of what is and is not worth spending on.
It seems very few people actually understand the importance of funding R&D that isn't directly improving their life, such that it takes some stubborn rich people to actually show that something is worth doing. Kind of like other countries all working on Falcon and Starship inspired rockets after seeing that the concepts can work.
As other examples, we have particle accelerators (everyone knows about the colliders like LHC and assumes they're luxury projects with no relevance to improving lives, yet they led to the development and side-by-side refinement of synchrotron light sources, which are very important for modern science) and medical tech like what led up to mRNA vaccines and Ozempic.
I would say we need a society that trusts experts and also holds said experts accountable, but then again, most of SpaceX's founding employees were not conventional aerospace experts, which was part of why they were able to question a lot of the corrupt/inefficient practices that traditional aerospace people dismissed as being standard and necessary practice.
We put far more money into healthcare and education, by a literal order of magnitude.
US spends 1.75 trillion on education per year, and 2.12 trillion on healthcare. People make it out like we aren't putting a ton of money into this stuff when those are literally are two biggest expenses. Space X is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
> Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation
The amount of money we already spend on thos problems absolutely dwarfs the amount of money that SpaceX has raised. Spending a fraction of a percent more on any of those things isn't going to move the needle much.
On the flip side, space access is one of those great economic accelerators and making that access dramatically more affordable will open up new realms of possibility.
>considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
Sometimes I wonder if the peasants got exited watching the European crowns compete to survey trade routes around Africa the way we get exited about space.
The person above you is not wrong. Objectively people who fawn over Musks wealth and achievements without commenting on his nefarious qualities and blatant illegal behaviour recently need a reality check.
Not every mention of Musk needs to be accompanied by a disclaimer of not supporting his idiotic self-defeating politics. This isn't reddit.
Speaking of politics though, it was a bit jarring to see the "USA! USA!" chanting. I get the intent (disliking the government doesn't mean disliking America), but it's kind of awkward to see a large crowd of immigrants doing it as the admin their boss supports is pretty blatantly harassing immigrants regardless of citizenship.
Slowly? It's always been "reddit, but more people with jobs" demographics.
So whatever Reddit is at any one time HN is a slightly more adult version of that. HN isn't "becoming reddit" any more than the airspace above a septic tank is becoming poo. It's always an approximately fixed distance from it.
Yes, you need to break some eggs to make an omelette, but you do not need to spend more than a quarter-Billion dollars to help elect an administration working to end democracy in order to build a new spacecraft. In fact the spacecraft development would likely go better without any political intervention at all; it is widely seen as a distraction, and rightly so.
As one of the aforementioned, yes I don't mind seeing his projects blow up.
I'm sure Starship will make it to orbit, but I'm betting that the claim of 100 tons to orbit is where it will miss the mark. And that is the crux of the issue IMO -- because getting the new rocket engines to be reliable enough can always be accomplished by dialing back on its efficiency and overall thrust capabilities. I'm waiting to see if they will be able to deliver on its claims.
A bunch of info came out a few years ago. Shotwell is widely known to be effective and a great leader, and to insulate most people at SpaceX from Musk. She's the reason the Falcon program works so well.
However things changed with Starlink, as it was an org controlled by a Musk loyalist and apparently got a lot of control very quickly internally. They prioritised loyalty over experience and capability and forced out some long term SpaceX folks who had made Falcon a success. Starlink was mostly ex Tesla and Boring people at the beginning I think.
I think Starship is somewhere in the middle. It started as a Musk hobby project but has now got contracts and is the future of the company so Shotwell is involved.
> A bunch of info came out a few years ago. Shotwell is widely known to be effective and a great leader, and to insulate most people at SpaceX from Musk.
> She's the reason the Falcon program works so well.
A bunch of rumors and heresay is an unreasonable basis for making these kinds of claims with such confidence. The reality is the public does not know much about how Musk's companies and projects are run, and most people are emotionally ill equipped to have a rational discussion about it no matter how much we know of it.
my favorite part of these has gone from liftoff to the purple plasma glow on re-entry. The glow is so perfect and beautiful it looks like an "artist's rendition" of what re-entry plasma would look like. I think the chopsticks catch still takes the cake just for the absurdity of it. It is a little depressing to realize some people pull things like this off yet i can't get my team to load a csv of records into a database correctly...
I think they're holding off on going fully orbital until the Ship engines are relatively stable (they try out different things with them almost every flight, and V3 has a significantly improved engine design too), tile losses are relatively under control and they're either ready to start testing Ship catches, or have tested them.
Right now they're in a comfortable testing regime, getting up to near-orbital speed to be able to verify reentry in realistic conditions, while having the freedom to test dummy payload deployments and freedom to risk losing tiles since they will all definitely burn up or splash down within minutes of the ship reentry rather than floating around in orbit for some time.
If they go orbital, they had better be sure they won't leave a ton of tiles behind, and that they will be able to perform a controlled deorbit.
I think they'll start launching starlink v3 satellites pretty soon, before perfecting reentry let alone rapid reuse. They've demonstrated a zero-gravity engine re-light several times and deployed dummy sats twice, that's all they need to put real satellites in orbit. We could see it on the second or third launch of the block 3 rockets.
I think the tile loss rate will still be important to them before that. Even in such low orbits, any tiles lost would take some time to come down (and might even survive all the way down).
If they can make it so they only lose tiles when in a suborbital trajectory, they may be safe to begin deploying real Starlinks as soon as V3 has proven engine relight.
Yes, as after it leaves the atmosphere and achieves that 98% of orbital speed, its trajectory wouldn't change much even if it exploded - its engines are turned off after ascent that takes ~9 minutes, then it free-falls for an hour to the other side of the Earth. They target a spot in the Indian Ocean near the west coast of Australia (it's coming from the west). In case of explosion debris would fall to the ocean sooner, farther to the west from Australia. More dangerous part of the flight is ascent (when it gains that speed), as its ground path is near some Caribbean islands, and it can cause problems like on flight 7:
> Around three minutes later, Ship 33 exploded over the Turks and Caicos Islands, causing debris to litter the Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands. While no injuries were reported, the debris caused minimal damage to infrastructure in Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands, and prompted airspace closures in the region for over an hour. The FAA ordered SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the breakup, grounding Starship until the inquiry was complete.
I think it depends on which specific step fails. The farther into flight it happens, the narrower the area over which the debris is spread. But, I think being over the entire ocean is unlikely, since the trajectory intersects with the planet, and that intersection point would also have to be in the ocean.
Correction: the trajectory only intersects with the planet prior to engine relight testing. After that it's at ~50km [1] (though to be fair, if they make it safely through the relight, all testing so far shows they're likely to make it through most of reentry)
There’s a very short period of time where if it exploded debris would fall on the African continent which is an unavoidable risk of orbital flight out of the US. Other than that it’ll either fall in the Atlantic or Indian Ocean.
They're testing specific things with no need for full orbit, although I think they reach verrrry close to orbital velocity. They want the payload dummies to 'de-orbit' quickly (from a suborbital trajectory). They could easily have gone orbital if they wanted to. I guess we'll see orbital demonstrations after a few splashdowns of v3 stack early next year.
Another smashing success. It is cool that they've started adding more explanations and nice footage leading up to the launch. Explaining some of the improvements they are testing out like the crunchwrap heat tiles, I enjoyed the "Live Mas" joke he snuck in there.
Just incredible overall to watch and very inspiring. Few things give me hope for the future like these videos do.
Despite Elon's perpetual over promises, starship is the closest thing humanity has to getting to Mars, and it is an impressive feat of engineering. Elon can be an asshole and also own the best piece of space hardware out there
There is also a big difference between cant get orbital and won't (yet) get orbital. They pretty clearly can get orbital because their current route gets 99% of the way they. They actively choose not to because it's a test vehicle and if something goes wrong they don't want to have uncontrolled reentry.
Also the hydrocarbons you mention are not even a rounding error in any sort of count that matters, so there is no real destruction of ecosystems
I think greekrich92 when talking about "destroying the South TX ecosystem" meant their huge rocket production and launch site right next to some protected ecologically valuable areas in south Texas. The extent of the damage is debatable, they are of course legally required to minimize impacts, and even to do things like monitoring the state of the wildlife in the area, and they passed environmental reviews under both Biden's and Trump's administrations. Anyway, if anyone would want to build a new launch site, it must be on the coast, as near the equator as possible (for launch efficiency because of Earth's rotation), and as far from populated areas as possible, and that correlates with ecologically valuable regions. So that's the cost of progress.
Pretty much everybody know that launch site and exclusion zones for human are great for wildlife. Turns out, what is destroying the environment is humans living in places, large areas with few humans usually do pretty well.
But instead of focusing on that, we need to test if dolphins get hearing damage from rockets.
> So that's the cost of progress
Its actually the benefit of progress. The cost of progress is having to close the beach and having to relocate a small village.
It's obvious that before SpaceX moved in, 6 permanent residents of that little village weren't damaging that environment more than today's thousands of people working on a huge industrial site built in place of that village (and now 500 people are actually living in Starbase). SpaceX activity in that area obviously has some environmental costs, like every other industrial activity or any human settlement. The cost of human progress.
Please don't fulminate or sneer on HN, no matter what it's about. It's against the guidelines and it makes the place miserable. Substantive criticism is fine.
I think these videos and the fact that this rockets actually works is one of the inspirational things in my life (and I am almost 40). I grew up loving everything about space (sci fi books and movies, astronomy in school, etc), and it was very bewildering not to see any progress basically for the first half of my life. Now it seems that humanity is back in the game, and it is amazing!
Perhaps kids of my kids would be able to travel to the moon.
I'll never forget watching SpaceX launches during the COVID lockdowns. A beacon of hope in troubled times.
Honestly the most surprising thing isn’t that they’re doing all this stuff - they’re live-streaming it; failures and all.
It’s so refreshing in a glossy PR-coated world.
Very clean flight, almost all the way through, despite the intentional missing tiles and new flight pattern. No flap burn through, no issues with simulated Starlink deploy, I don't think they even lost any engines.
They're clearly almost ready to scale this thing, if the next block version doesn't add a ton of problems back on. I'm not sure they're quite at the point of rapid reuse looking feasible, since tiles did come loose near the end of flight; not a problem for stage return, but definitely bad enough to warrant a meaningful correction before a (counterfactual) reflight.
Overall they've clearly proven the recipe works.
SpaceX got so good that even test flights that go well aren't news anymore.
because people that hate elon love to see spacex failure so they can shove it to elon face
The thing Elon does well I feel, is he takes real experts with know-how and talent, and puts them on the cool project they want to work on and just lets them cook.
It sounds like a no-brainer management strategy, but it's surprisingly rare in practice. People will lend on random teams and projects, projects won't try to push any envelope but just be the next thing marketing or product came up with to boost some metrics or acquire some new customer, etc.
Now I might be entirely wrong as I never worked at one of his companies, but it's the impression I get and most of his success, Tesla and SpaceX, I think he really managed to snatch the experts away from where they worked because of that.
At least I think this holds for bootstrapping. And then that top talent left, and now since the major innovations have already landed, probably you can just churn our grunt out-of-schoolers to iterate and keep the lights on.
This isn't really the case. For Falcon 1 he hired a bunch experts but a pretty small handful. Then he hired a lot of really young hungry engineers.
And its also hard to say that 'top talent left'. Because arguable some of the achievements after some of those people left is bigger then before. Tom Mueller for example build the Merlin engine, but claims to be more proud of the team he build that then went on to build Raptor. So clearly even while some talented people left, many others joined.
SpaceX is not 'iterating and keeping the lights on' they are always going for something harder in the next iteration.
That and the other thing I think he does that's just as important is go get things unstuck. When there is bureaucracy and managers getting in the way he gets it through. Very under appreciated IMO.
Counterpoint: I dislike Musk because he's narcissist (subtypes: strongly communal, somewhat grandiose) but I don't wanna see spaceX fail. I just don't want abusive individuals in positions of power to have so much influence and to be given credit for the technical achievements of others.
He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision. Books documenting SpaceX's early days make it pretty clear that Musk had a pretty significant role in putting in place the kind of thinking that has allowed SpaceX to blow open the commercial space market.
Both also have at least some understanding of what they're paying for considering the tours and testimony from former employees. They also frequently thank the employees for their successes.
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
Musk was worth ~$300M when he started SpaceX and Tesla, and he bet nearly all of that money on SpaceX and Tesla, and that's why he's a billionaire. His big share of SpaceX makes up like half of his wealth, so from today's perspective he's not putting his wealth into a vision, he's wealthy because of that vision. That's different from Bezos, who made his big money from Amazon and then started putting billions into Blue Origin (which was rather inspired by SpaceX success). That said, Blue Origin was actually founded before SpaceX, but they were very slowly working on their suborbital rocket for a decade before Bezos gave them big cash, while SpaceX started sending satellites to space and supplying the ISS in that time. SpaceX has made 500+ orbital flights so far, while Blue Origin just one.
By putting his wealth into a vision, I mean all the test flights, being much more tolerant of failure, betting everything on Starlink. We're at flight 13, and likely at least flight 16 before anything orbital, likely into the upper 20s before reliable refueling and non-Starlink payloads. Most other rich people haven't done much besides minimally funding small startups or dead end joyrides.
Bezos has been somewhat similar, he has been pouring billions into BO, and while BO has moved at a slower pace, he's clearly committed for the long term too, considering all the investments into things that only make sense if New Glenn acheives reliable booster reuse (the giant futuristic rocket factory, Project Jarvis, the lunar cargo lander).
> He deserves at least some credit, considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
As much as I love space exploration, I think it's actually a problem that so few people get to decide where so much money goes. Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation so that the downstream effect is a society with many more aerospace engineers and astrophysicist, who dont have to instead focus on working corporate jobs just to afford housing.
We might foster a society where space exploration is an ongoing societal goal instead of a playground for the elite.
I would love such a society, but I think the way space funding has been in most parts of the world shows that most people are just not good judges of what is and is not worth spending on.
It seems very few people actually understand the importance of funding R&D that isn't directly improving their life, such that it takes some stubborn rich people to actually show that something is worth doing. Kind of like other countries all working on Falcon and Starship inspired rockets after seeing that the concepts can work.
As other examples, we have particle accelerators (everyone knows about the colliders like LHC and assumes they're luxury projects with no relevance to improving lives, yet they led to the development and side-by-side refinement of synchrotron light sources, which are very important for modern science) and medical tech like what led up to mRNA vaccines and Ozempic.
I would say we need a society that trusts experts and also holds said experts accountable, but then again, most of SpaceX's founding employees were not conventional aerospace experts, which was part of why they were able to question a lot of the corrupt/inefficient practices that traditional aerospace people dismissed as being standard and necessary practice.
We put far more money into healthcare and education, by a literal order of magnitude.
US spends 1.75 trillion on education per year, and 2.12 trillion on healthcare. People make it out like we aren't putting a ton of money into this stuff when those are literally are two biggest expenses. Space X is a drop in the bucket compared to that.
> Imagine if instead we as a society could put it towards better education, healthcare, public transportation
The amount of money we already spend on thos problems absolutely dwarfs the amount of money that SpaceX has raised. Spending a fraction of a percent more on any of those things isn't going to move the needle much.
On the flip side, space access is one of those great economic accelerators and making that access dramatically more affordable will open up new realms of possibility.
>considering that he and Bezos are the only billionaires actually willing to put their wealth into chasing a vision.
Sometimes I wonder if the peasants got exited watching the European crowns compete to survey trade routes around Africa the way we get exited about space.
My advice to you is go touch grass.
The person above you is not wrong. Objectively people who fawn over Musks wealth and achievements without commenting on his nefarious qualities and blatant illegal behaviour recently need a reality check.
Not every mention of Musk needs to be accompanied by a disclaimer of not supporting his idiotic self-defeating politics. This isn't reddit.
Speaking of politics though, it was a bit jarring to see the "USA! USA!" chanting. I get the intent (disliking the government doesn't mean disliking America), but it's kind of awkward to see a large crowd of immigrants doing it as the admin their boss supports is pretty blatantly harassing immigrants regardless of citizenship.
this is a great point, and in some ways, HN is slowly becoming reddit, especially when Musk or a Musk-founded company are the link.
“ Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. ”
Link: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Slowly? It's always been "reddit, but more people with jobs" demographics.
So whatever Reddit is at any one time HN is a slightly more adult version of that. HN isn't "becoming reddit" any more than the airspace above a septic tank is becoming poo. It's always an approximately fixed distance from it.
you need to break some eggs to make an omelette. it's not a coincidence that he is landing skyscrapers while you're talking shit about him on HN.
Yes, you need to break some eggs to make an omelette, but you do not need to spend more than a quarter-Billion dollars to help elect an administration working to end democracy in order to build a new spacecraft. In fact the spacecraft development would likely go better without any political intervention at all; it is widely seen as a distraction, and rightly so.
As one of the aforementioned, yes I don't mind seeing his projects blow up.
I'm sure Starship will make it to orbit, but I'm betting that the claim of 100 tons to orbit is where it will miss the mark. And that is the crux of the issue IMO -- because getting the new rocket engines to be reliable enough can always be accomplished by dialing back on its efficiency and overall thrust capabilities. I'm waiting to see if they will be able to deliver on its claims.
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Snarky comment that adds nothing to the conversation.
Tell that to the parent, I'm the one trying to make actionable suggestions out here.
Do you have some insider information how SpaceX is managed?
A bunch of info came out a few years ago. Shotwell is widely known to be effective and a great leader, and to insulate most people at SpaceX from Musk. She's the reason the Falcon program works so well.
However things changed with Starlink, as it was an org controlled by a Musk loyalist and apparently got a lot of control very quickly internally. They prioritised loyalty over experience and capability and forced out some long term SpaceX folks who had made Falcon a success. Starlink was mostly ex Tesla and Boring people at the beginning I think.
I think Starship is somewhere in the middle. It started as a Musk hobby project but has now got contracts and is the future of the company so Shotwell is involved.
> A bunch of info came out a few years ago. Shotwell is widely known to be effective and a great leader, and to insulate most people at SpaceX from Musk. > She's the reason the Falcon program works so well.
A bunch of rumors and heresay is an unreasonable basis for making these kinds of claims with such confidence. The reality is the public does not know much about how Musk's companies and projects are run, and most people are emotionally ill equipped to have a rational discussion about it no matter how much we know of it.
Mission success, apparently. Next flight (in 2026) will launch next generation of Starship.
my favorite part of these has gone from liftoff to the purple plasma glow on re-entry. The glow is so perfect and beautiful it looks like an "artist's rendition" of what re-entry plasma would look like. I think the chopsticks catch still takes the cake just for the absurdity of it. It is a little depressing to realize some people pull things like this off yet i can't get my team to load a csv of records into a database correctly...
Still not orbital?
Well done, of course, props and snaps. But I'm looking forward to it getting up to full speed, and being able to get down from that.
I think they're holding off on going fully orbital until the Ship engines are relatively stable (they try out different things with them almost every flight, and V3 has a significantly improved engine design too), tile losses are relatively under control and they're either ready to start testing Ship catches, or have tested them.
Right now they're in a comfortable testing regime, getting up to near-orbital speed to be able to verify reentry in realistic conditions, while having the freedom to test dummy payload deployments and freedom to risk losing tiles since they will all definitely burn up or splash down within minutes of the ship reentry rather than floating around in orbit for some time.
If they go orbital, they had better be sure they won't leave a ton of tiles behind, and that they will be able to perform a controlled deorbit.
I think they'll start launching starlink v3 satellites pretty soon, before perfecting reentry let alone rapid reuse. They've demonstrated a zero-gravity engine re-light several times and deployed dummy sats twice, that's all they need to put real satellites in orbit. We could see it on the second or third launch of the block 3 rockets.
I think the tile loss rate will still be important to them before that. Even in such low orbits, any tiles lost would take some time to come down (and might even survive all the way down).
If they can make it so they only lose tiles when in a suborbital trajectory, they may be safe to begin deploying real Starlinks as soon as V3 has proven engine relight.
They go up to 98% of orbital velocity on purpose to ensure they don’t create space junk if something goes wrong.
If it gets up to that speed and something goes wrong, is the entire possible crash trajectory over the ocean?
Yes, as after it leaves the atmosphere and achieves that 98% of orbital speed, its trajectory wouldn't change much even if it exploded - its engines are turned off after ascent that takes ~9 minutes, then it free-falls for an hour to the other side of the Earth. They target a spot in the Indian Ocean near the west coast of Australia (it's coming from the west). In case of explosion debris would fall to the ocean sooner, farther to the west from Australia. More dangerous part of the flight is ascent (when it gains that speed), as its ground path is near some Caribbean islands, and it can cause problems like on flight 7:
> Around three minutes later, Ship 33 exploded over the Turks and Caicos Islands, causing debris to litter the Caribbean islands, Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands. While no injuries were reported, the debris caused minimal damage to infrastructure in Puerto Rico and the British Virgin Islands, and prompted airspace closures in the region for over an hour. The FAA ordered SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the breakup, grounding Starship until the inquiry was complete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_7#Mission...
I think it depends on which specific step fails. The farther into flight it happens, the narrower the area over which the debris is spread. But, I think being over the entire ocean is unlikely, since the trajectory intersects with the planet, and that intersection point would also have to be in the ocean.
Correction: the trajectory only intersects with the planet prior to engine relight testing. After that it's at ~50km [1] (though to be fair, if they make it safely through the relight, all testing so far shows they're likely to make it through most of reentry)
[1] https://x.com/planet4589/status/1977917833825730792
There’s a very short period of time where if it exploded debris would fall on the African continent which is an unavoidable risk of orbital flight out of the US. Other than that it’ll either fall in the Atlantic or Indian Ocean.
Are you going to say the same thing about their 500th suborbital test?
They're testing specific things with no need for full orbit, although I think they reach verrrry close to orbital velocity. They want the payload dummies to 'de-orbit' quickly (from a suborbital trajectory). They could easily have gone orbital if they wanted to. I guess we'll see orbital demonstrations after a few splashdowns of v3 stack early next year.
The video and info: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-11
(Liftoff is around 33 mins in)
Another smashing success. It is cool that they've started adding more explanations and nice footage leading up to the launch. Explaining some of the improvements they are testing out like the crunchwrap heat tiles, I enjoyed the "Live Mas" joke he snuck in there.
Just incredible overall to watch and very inspiring. Few things give me hope for the future like these videos do.
Taco bell, taco bell, product placement for taco bell
Nacho, burrito, and enchirito, taco bell...
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Despite Elon's perpetual over promises, starship is the closest thing humanity has to getting to Mars, and it is an impressive feat of engineering. Elon can be an asshole and also own the best piece of space hardware out there
There is also a big difference between cant get orbital and won't (yet) get orbital. They pretty clearly can get orbital because their current route gets 99% of the way they. They actively choose not to because it's a test vehicle and if something goes wrong they don't want to have uncontrolled reentry.
Also the hydrocarbons you mention are not even a rounding error in any sort of count that matters, so there is no real destruction of ecosystems
I think greekrich92 when talking about "destroying the South TX ecosystem" meant their huge rocket production and launch site right next to some protected ecologically valuable areas in south Texas. The extent of the damage is debatable, they are of course legally required to minimize impacts, and even to do things like monitoring the state of the wildlife in the area, and they passed environmental reviews under both Biden's and Trump's administrations. Anyway, if anyone would want to build a new launch site, it must be on the coast, as near the equator as possible (for launch efficiency because of Earth's rotation), and as far from populated areas as possible, and that correlates with ecologically valuable regions. So that's the cost of progress.
Pretty much everybody know that launch site and exclusion zones for human are great for wildlife. Turns out, what is destroying the environment is humans living in places, large areas with few humans usually do pretty well.
But instead of focusing on that, we need to test if dolphins get hearing damage from rockets.
> So that's the cost of progress
Its actually the benefit of progress. The cost of progress is having to close the beach and having to relocate a small village.
It's obvious that before SpaceX moved in, 6 permanent residents of that little village weren't damaging that environment more than today's thousands of people working on a huge industrial site built in place of that village (and now 500 people are actually living in Starbase). SpaceX activity in that area obviously has some environmental costs, like every other industrial activity or any human settlement. The cost of human progress.
Please don't fulminate or sneer on HN, no matter what it's about. It's against the guidelines and it makes the place miserable. Substantive criticism is fine.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Why are we going into space? Don't we already know what's there?
We also know what isn't there, and thus we plan to put it there.
Nuclear weapons right?