Another interesting thing SpaceX is doing is to use consumer-grade chips in triple redundancy configurations instead of using $100,000+ radiation-hardened aerospace/defense grade chips.

They used trios of regular consumer grade disks/servers etc as a cluster and it looked like a single node.

They had to replace a LOT of hardware but this was still cheaper than big iron industrial grades servers.

By their very nature model predictive controllers operate in a world where not everything is perfectly modelled. Engineers do their best and whatever is left is the "error" the controller is trying to deal with.

Sort of like how you can balance a few pitchers of beer on a tray in your hand by remaining aware of the weight, even when people remove one! hahaha :)

If it's no stronger than a sudden wind gust, it's just something the controller has to be able to take care of without a heads-up.

Then the next launch crashed due to slosh induced oscillation - and the one rocket after that had anti-slosh baffles. ;-)

More fluid dynamics

Which is why we use wind tunnels, for example.

These are indeed heavy computations. What I meant is that VoF is one additional equation to be solved besides the N-S equations (either filtered as in LES or Reynolds-averaged as in RANS), the energy equation, your turbulence model equations, and so on. Certainly, not instantaneous at all, but simply an additional "simple" model that we can hook into our current way of doing CFD.

So, my point was, sloshing is a problem that we know how to simulate, although certainly you need HPC resources. Though, looking at those 100k NVIDIA H100 Elon has, I guess they have them! :P

I think it's a huge problem when re-lighting the engines in orbit, though.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor

Even a real-time simulation should have some measurements to self correct to some degree. Otherwise it'll diverge.

Bug tanks make sense there & they might not be always full. So I can imagine all kind of interesting ways you can work with the fuel in zero go to avoid not only slosh but also the need for ullage thrusters. Eq. some programmable nozzles using in-tank gas to nudge liquid fuel blobs to move in the right direction. Or even some nets or bags that herd in the fuel in the middle of the tank + prevent it from directly touching the side, reducing boil-off or refrigeration requirements. :)

This has been known in the high availability and safety systems industry for a while and a good book to learn these reliability engineering techniques is "Reliability Evaluation of Engineering Systems".

The book is available on amazon: https://a.co/d/1nH824K

https://www.epa.gov/radiation/radiation-basics#:~:text=Gamma....

(Though likely not of course ;)

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=+lead+cube+with+side+le...

So something might be off with your assumption of 1500 usd / kg.

I can't decide if I'm joking or not.

Maybe you could improve the system availability considerably by a bit of gamma radiation protection combined with some more parallelism of the components ..

A second layer blockage for the secondary particles wouldn't have to be as dense or am I missing important physics?

(I guess a lot of gamma radiation would still reach this second layer so please ignore my question :)

But would using redundant systems separated in space connected with each other not offset the chance that they all would be affected at the same time? This is actually not rocket science .. just hard engineering and hardware/software design for redundant systems which is also usable on the ground.

"Hollman also found that creativity got him a long way. He discovered, for example, that changing the seals on some readily available car wash valves made them good enough to be used with rocket fuel."

"Elon Musk" by Vance pg 123

I doubt any Lowes parts made it to space, but you know some went into test articles

Perhaps the key is to be relentless, and resourceful.

The Fukushima and Deepwater Horizon disasters show that this knowledge has not penetrated other industries.

But it turns out, it doesn't matter how many redundant backup diesel generators you've got if a 45-foot wave comes along and they're all left underwater.

the orbital and planetary mechanics kind of suck. They're meant to provide a decent 'arcade realism' for the sake of player/player interactions and pvp/pve.

if you want to experience fuel slosh/weight during a vertical ascent/descent go with kerbal. It models a lot of that stuff without mods -- and mods can make the model even more accurate.

http://cse.lab.imtlucca.it/~bemporad/publications/papers/ecc...

Algorithms can be faulty as well.

Which was never claimed.

That paper is a little bit about Erlang and a whole lot about OTP and other methodology and design technique.

It is still, very much "the paper" for distributed systems, though its applicability to this particular problem is limited.

Does anyone know (or have educated speculation on) what kind of hardware is running these algorithms? Like, do they have a linux machine that's running the control loops? Are we talking megabytes, gigabytes of SRAM?

I would think no -- you would definitely need hard real time for something like this. But my only experience with real time systems is in tiny MCUs with kb of SRAM. That's definitely too small for a controller like this.

Really curious about the nuts and bolts of this.

When you build something like this, you're torn between having a big model that represents everything and a smaller model that is easier to validate and reason about. Based on simulation, you might go for a smaller model that "knows" to stay away from operating areas where hidden variables (like really complicated tank slosh) invalidate the small model.

I doubt the actual control loop is too much processing, but it's certainly possible to build controllers with SDRAM, millions of variables of state, and hard realtime processing, though I wouldn't build it on top of preempt-rt. ;)

  >probably involve some kind of fast numerical fluid simulation

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19700023342/downloads/19... (search for "slosh" or "shaping network")

My stepfather worked as a programmer on the Apollo program, and the thing he always talked about as his biggest accomplishment was working on the "slosh problem" -- so yeah, props to the SpaceX team for managing that landing. And props to my stepdad for managing it on hardware that was... a billion times less capable? :-)

I am curious but clueless about these problems, can you expand more?

Well, that makes perfect sense considering that both the spaceport infrastructure, and the booster need to do their calculation on the ground level instead of the highly radiated environment that is space. However, for the rockets themselves, which happen to reach that harsh environment, they may use more resilient and expensive hardware in the future, after passing over the current "let it splash in the Indian Ocean" development and testing phases.

Surely this isn't necessary with a small enough sensor granularity or whatever the terminology is. You can have very dumb software if it reacts quickly enough to changes in perception.

Instead, it's more common to use gasses injected at the top of the tank to push the liquid to the bottom. Falcon 9 uses helium. Starship uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogenous_pressurization as well as small header tanks for the landing propellants.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048

They’re still going [1] and it appears to be a common thread across their recent commenting.

But they’re getting flagged, so no need to continue. (EDIT: It’s still getting traction.) It’s a tempting (and in my opinion mean-spiritedly preyful) conspiracy theory on an ephemeral topic. I always appreciate folks with domain experience similarly flagging nonsense in other threads.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828380

If you want to discuss this, consider putting forward better sources or at least new thoughts. Just because it’s wrong doesn’t make it not worth discussing.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828468

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828616

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828032

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828151

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828468

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41828048

Does Starship enable brilliant pebbles? Sure. But that’s because it provides easy access to space. Starlink could be described as a network of communication ‘pebbles’, as could Starshield, SpaceX’s actual military contract [1].

(Starship provides a technology platform for rapid launch. That’s more valuable for missile defence than orbital nonsense for intercepting warheads by way of predictable and observable plane-change manoeuvres.)

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield

  v0.9: 227 kg (500 lb)
  v1: 260 kg (570 lb)
  v1.5: ~306 kg (675 lb)
  v2 mini: ~740 kg (1,630 lb)
  v2: ~1,250 kg (2,760 lb)

It’s definitely nonsense. As in if they are attempting it it’s virtually fraud on the American taxpayer.

Barring a sci-fi breakthrough in propulsion technology (or vacuum directed energy weapons), it cannot work. (And even if you have that propulsion technology, its existence obsoletes the concept again. You’d need to rewrite orbital physics to make plane changes a better idea than new launch from the ground. It’s just a phenomenally fucked idea.)

> the latest versions of the starlink satellite are significantly heavier than prior generations

This is in the same calibre of evidence as that for more planes meaning chemtrails are real.

So, any secret military project is effectively fraud?

No. A project based on bunk science is a fraud.

To be clear, space-based boost interception isn't impossible. You can do it. But in practically every case it's inferior to ground-based systems (with space-based early detection). The only case where it has merit is in containing a specific, small adversary with very few missiles, e.g. North Korea or Iran. But even there, a ground-based solution is superior in stealth, numbers and cost.

Space-based missile intercept is a political project. That doesn't mean it won't be done. But it's not something SpaceX is working on, or would work on without first cashing a substantial cheque.

Namely, the plane change from the pre-positioned orbit to one that intersects with the target? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is it really that bad? No way to get the loitering orbits closer to an interception than launching from the ground? (Ed: well, those definitely wouldn't be the orbits starlink is on, I think I can see that at least)

(The guy you're responding to has mostly deleted their posts, so I'm missing context, but I did get as far as the wiki page for brilliant pebbles.)

Yes. The closer you get to the surface the faster the orbit which means while you have less orbital energy to kill on approach you need more birds to cover a given area. (To communicate how unintuitive orbital mechanics can be, consider that thrusing "up" or "down" (radial in or out) doesn't actual increase or decrease your mean altitude [1]. You have to fire retrograde, which means a long, swooping, predictable, observable (and thus avoidable) approach to intercept unless you're Project Orioning it [2].)

> guy your responding to has mostly deleted their posts

They were repeating a conspiracy theory around SpaceX's actual purpose being to create a space-based missile defence system. The proof being there are senior people who were involved with the latter who have been around SpaceX. It's total nonsense somewhat orthogonal to why space-based missile defence is between difficult and stupid.

The core concept of boost-stage (i.e. in the atmosphere) space-based intercept isn't physically fucked. It's just that every case where one presents it, ground-based interception--including at the boost phase--does better. You can hide your interceptors better. For any given cost, you can deploy more of them (and more early-warning/targeting satellites). And even primitive ASAT can reliably punch a hole in it.

The only benefit is political/PR, because it sounds cool--that doesn't rule it out. But it isn't something SpaceX is working on much less was founded for.

(Space-based midcourse (i.e. in vacuum, while the warhead coasts) interception is stupid on all levels. It's a slightly more difficult version of blanketing the skies in drones for intercept--except you have more volume to cover and have planes which send off a screaming signal every time they change course.)

[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/44608/what-happens...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

Nope. And I can say this with more authority than almost anything on HN.

> Trump & Elon literally discussed it on X a few weeks ago

One, they discussed a lot of things. Two, they discussed capability. As I said, any launch system provides this capability theoretically. But (a) the capability is based on the faulty premise that pre-positioned orbital interceptors are superior to stealthy ground-based ones. And (b) it’s going to be true for any cheap space-launch system. (I say cheap because economies of scale mean cheap and frequent are virtually redundant.)

This entire theory comes out of people with no military background, no political experience and no aerospace engineering training wanting to feel special about being “in the know.”

You're presuming a lot there.

If you can do orbital math, you can verify the plane-change economics. If you’ve even talked to anyone in ABM, which granted requires clearance, you understand why the actual spending in ABM—globally—goes into ground-based interceptors.

This is a tailor-made conspiracy theory for someone who substitutes doing the damning math for connecting bits of string between people and tweets. If you have any domain experience or connections, it’s trivially excludable. That’s why I can shoot it down (hehe) with unique confidence.

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/13189/chapter/4?term=...

Your question about delta-V is answered in that same report a few pages above.

That’s how you read “in principle” and “in theory”? The cost of launch is used, in the third bullet, to justify not analysing the idea further. Not as the “only…limitation.”

As your source says, even a working space-based boost-phase interceptor is trivially defeat-able with “primitive” ASAT capabilities.

Brilliant pebbles are a fucked concept. You’re citing a no-math NAS paper for good reason—it’s good to speculate about it in case we learn something new about how gravity works. Barring that, it’s well-recognised nonsense.

Boost phase interception using a constellation of several thousand hypersonic glide vehicles circumvents the plane-change problem; I'm sure you know that. I'm sure you also know that the reason nobody has seriously pursued such a solution before is because putting tens of thousands of interceptors into orbit is absurd.

Was absurd.

It also mentioned a team called "Castelion" working on space weapons, is that really conspiracy ?

Is it the mods on HN hiding it or just people involved into it ?

Got intrigued as it's rare to see much motivation to hide things.

It's like if Snowden posted his PDFs, and then suddenly was flagged.

Genuinely curious if you find an answer.

My first thought was nuclear anxiety; it’s nice to feel like we have a secret shield in space. Then I saw Trump talked about it, so my current hypothesis is the partisan parroting that happens on both sides. (Or if someone doesn’t like military spending, maybe it’s an anti-Musk thing?)

That said, the three accounts that have been posting about it seem to really like this topic [1][2][3], so maybe it’s a niche thing. They all seem to really like one Reddit thread.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=forgot-im-old

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tbone902

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=georgeg23

The last part of the live stream they showed footage from a different angle and there it didn't look too bad though! For sure controlled.

Scott Manley put out a tweet that they went down towards a non-tower position until they were at three engine controlled burn, and only then did the side shift.

Going by the telemetry of the seconds before the landing burn and noting the speed vs time, it seems drag was around 40 m/s^2 when it was going at around 3000 km/h. Since drag depends on velocity squared though, it had reduced to just above 10 m/s^2 just before the engines lit at 1250 km/h, and so would quickly become negligible once the engines lit.

Going by Wikipedia, the Super Heavy[1] has 3400000 kg of fuel at launch, so 3% of that is about 102000 kg. For the landing burn, it used 13 Raptor v3 engines[2] to scrub speed. Each Raptor flows about 650 kg/s max, so 3% fuel is enough for about 12 seconds for the 13 engines.

The empty mass of the Super Heavy is about 275000 kg, so about 377000 kg before the landing burn with 3% fuel.

Using the sea-level vs vacuum performance of the Raptor v2 engines, one can estimate that each Raptor v3 produces about 2.45 NM of force at sea-level. So 13 of them would produce about 31.85 MN of force.

Using Newton's second law, F=ma, this gives an initial deceleration of about 84 m/s^2 and about 104 m/s^2 when empty. If we do a rough spreadsheet integration, we get that a burn of roughly 4 seconds is needed to scrub the speed assuming no other forces.

Now, comparing this with reality, the full 13 engines were lit for a little over 5 seconds.

In my simplified calculations I was assuming full throttle the whole way, which obviously isn't realistic, and I also assumed 3% fuel. So over all I think that's a pretty decent estimation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Engines

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Raptor

Long ago though so rusty, $dayjob doesn't involve any advanced math at all.

That should of course be 13 * 650 * dt.

So, 34M kg of fuel has to be burned (in this booster alone) to facilitate a flight ... and I see that the propellant is CH4 / LOX[1].

Burning methane is much, much better than simply releasing methane but the release becomes CO2 instead ...

What is the back-of-the-envelope conversion of 34M kg CH4 vs., for instance, 34M kg of kerosene/JP ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy#Engines

[1] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-emission-fuels-d_1085... [2] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1298426245991063554?lang=en

IIRC there's a tradeoff between efficiency and thrust as well. Heavier fuels aren't quite as energy-efficient, but it's easier for them to develop a lot of thrust, which is important for the initial stages of launch. If I'm remembering events described in Ignition! correctly this led to "thrust density" being something that was optimized for - to the point that there were experiments with mixing mercury into the fuel!

[0]: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figu...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerosene

Anyway, plugging in the Raptor V2 thrust numbers the approximation increases to 4.25 seconds. This is in line with the thrust I used for the V3 being ~8% higher than the V2 thrust figures.

Fuel is the vast majority of the vehicle weight at launch, kind of like an empty vs full can of soda.

They ignite a subset of engines just a few seconds before landing for the final slowdown and maneuvering.

Edit: here is a video from further away that shows the rocket gliding in under control of the grid fins before the engines light and execute the final landing maneuver:

https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694

They sure made it look easy...

Surprising to see this work first time though - I don't recall them doing any hover and lateral movement tests, but I assume they must have done.

What's also wild is that the booster isn't being caught/supported by those giant grid fins, but rather by small lifting pins just below them, and seems to only have two of these (one on either side), so it also has to get it's rotational position right so those pins engage with (are supported by) the arms.

Watching the video, it looked like the bottom of the rocket was glowing hot, but the engines were cool. I imagine that means they were probably running some amount of methane through the engine bells to cool them.

Also I don't think the telemetry on the feed is that accurate, so with all of the atmospheric braking, it was probably going a bit slower than the 1200km/h at engine reignition.

Had flashbacks to playing Jupiter Landing on the C64!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Lander

Edit: SpaceX should create a simple 'catch' the rocket game. Play in browser style. Just for kicks and marketing.

They did: https://starshipthegame.spacex.com/

there is, it was discussed in the FAA thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41821220

lunar.unnecessarymodification.com

Check Steve Brunton youtube channel, he is one of the leaders in this area: https://youtu.be/gb_C9LcjDSI?si=xUjqUZ9-0MIFohX6

Where his vision hit a lot of speed bumps is second stage reusability. Starship is a beautiful second stage to throw in the ocean. They’ll probably get it landing but the heat tiles will require a lot of refurbishment between flights. They’re going to have to figure something else out.

This likely means they are targeting 10 flights in a day at least. They've mentioned 1000 trips to Mars during one transit window, which means ~10000 Earth launches within 3 months, or >100 per day.

The question is whether they will use hypersonic interceptors: https://breakingdefense.com/2018/08/space-based-missile-defe...

such as the SpaceX employees at Castelion are building: https://www.castelion.com/team

Or megawatt lasers.. https://breakingdefense.com/2014/05/laser-weapons-lower-expe...

Hopefully not of the eschaton, though. Because that trick never works, Bullwinkle.

"Is there a word for that - something out of fiction becoming mundane?"

Musking?

But I lump both these together as the *"Wiseass Movable Feast"*

It assumes that decision makers elsewhere in the world can’t get forewarning.

But it’s impossible to hide any project development on that scale from spies, or even just plain corruption, so now that decision makers across the world know that at least the launch mechanisms are possible… the moment such program preparations are detected on a scale that can’t be explained away as noise will result in them activating every panic button they have.

https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiLeaks/comments/1fy10k1/comment/...

does anyone have any literature about how the Rocket localized itself with respect to the chopstick arms? It must've been some combination of GPS and Radar pings to the arms?

And then the onboard IMU to make sure it hits it straight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVSPCPoc8hs&t=373

To speculate more, they could also be using something like ultra-wide band positioning. This relies on the same time-of-flight principle as GPS but instead of using satellites in orbit to provide the precise time information you rely on various nearby ground stations. Would only be useful right at the final approach, the last couple hundred meters, but it's another way they could get very very precise position information. (fun fact: Ultra Wide band positioning is also how iPhones can locate AirTags with centimeter accuracy)

In the wide open sky, I’m guessing it’s pretty reliable.

Vision systems would be pretty useless with the low visibility of the smoke and fire. So I thought maybe it was some kind of radar configuration.

Anyways, I’d pay a lot of money to pick the brain of the GNC team here.

https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694

Absolutely impressive accuracy and precision.

> Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster!

https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011

Historic viewing :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC87WmFN_As&t=3h25m14s

> Holy flying fuck, look at that thing!

Gold.

For example, prototype number 10 exploded 8 minutes after landing [1] because of a seemingly insignificant fire at the bottom.

After today's flight there was a long lasting fire in the engine section, with occasional flaming pieces of plumbing raining down from the rocket. Examining the aftermath should help SpaceX to understand what improvements need to be made to prevent this from happening.

[1] https://youtu.be/XOQkk3ojNfM?t=38346

It's an object lesson in rapid engineering development. If everything goes perfectly in a development test, it's a sign you're not moving fast enough (meaning not taking enough risk per increment to maximize learning). As valuable as Falcon, Starlink and Starship are, the biggest near-term value of SpaceX may be providing such a clear demonstration of well-executed "fail fast, learn fast" engineering that even politicians and bureaucrats can understand it.

The vent out the side before touchdown didn’t look right, though. Something blew, but non-critically.

I bet SpaceX does. They've solved the big problems, now it's time to solve the small problems and make reuse a reality.

Obviously the primary mission was successful, in spite of anomalies (good system design!), but people are and should be curious about this aspect.

100% with you. The teams I’ve worked with would be celebrating and trying to figure out what’s burning at the same time. And especially trying to figure out if there’s anything that they need to do to collect evidence for that investigation (eg zooming the remote PTZ cameras in on specific areas or things like that)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[1] https://x.com/Cosmo_556/status/1845554958604657051

Thats like a 747 to space.

SpaceX builds vehicles. The Shuttle was “reusable” because they needed a term between the default for transportation capital expenditures (e.g. trains, planes, cars and ships) and the modified missiles that defined post-War spaceflight. “Reusable” in the Shuttle’s context meant months of specialist overhaul time and the cost of a Falcon 9 launch in SRB booster replacements alone [0].

At the end of the day, in 2010, “the incremental cost per flight of the Space Shuttle was $409 million, or $14,186 per kilogram” [1]. ($591mm and $20,512 in 2024 dollars, respectively [2].) SpaceX’s prices per kg are around $3,170 on Falcon 9 [3] and $1,520 for Falcon Heavy [4]. Starship should bring those costs below $1000.

[0] https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=51959.0

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program

[2] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

[3] https://www.spacex.com/media/Capabilities&Services.pdf LEO

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy LEO, theoretical

It might even bring the costs below $100/kg.

(My guess is the economics are fine, but the politics would kill it on earth, so the moon or mars will get one, but that's just an interested amateur opinion).

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...

But yes, eventually things decay.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orbital_Debris_Lifet...

(I may be misremembering or getting confused with a thing specific to tidal locking?)

I suppose the same effect is there with satellites much smaller than the moon, but it would be tiny.

But on a more technical level. I think the vertical landing is the main difference. Vertical landing was obviously known and done by NASA, this is how the lunar modules landed on the Moon. But doing it on Earth, with vehicles weighing hundreds of times more, I don't think the world had that technical readiness a few decades ago, when the space shuttle was designed.

And another major difference is the mass manufacturing idea. From the start SpaceX planned for getting to mass manufacture its rockets. The Falcon rockets are much cheaper than any other alternatives even if you remove the reusability.

Then it's the methane burning engines. This was pure old fashioned engineering progress. SpaceX's engines are miracles of rocket engineering. Aside from that, the fuel choice is extremely smart. Methane is better than all other fuels, except for hydrogen. Hydrogen was the fuel of the space shuttle, but it's very tricky to work with. It has very low volumetric density, so the tank of the space shuttle was absolutely humongous. Hydrogen needs to be stored at an absurdly low cryogenic temperature, so this adds to the complexity. And that tank was not reusable, so it adds to the cost.

Partially. They have a fixed-price contract to land humans on the Moon, and notably got that contract because they severely undercut the other bids and were the only bid that actually fit within the available budget: they bid $2.94B, while Blue Origin bid $5.99B and Dynetics $9.08B.

That 3 billion is also much less than what they're spending on the project.

It also allows for launching individual space station modules that have almost the same volume as the entire ISS in one launch.

Their plans for refuelling on orbit with tanker versions of the starship open up the entire solar system to unmanned missions with much shorter timelines and much higher payload size and weight.

The fact the entire system is re-usable will make it both cheaper and faster to use than any other launch system.

All of this combined mean that it won't just be countries and space programs bidding for space on launches, it puts space within reach of many corporations and some private individuals. This isn't conjecture, it's already happening with the Falcon 9. Starship will make it even more accessible.

Of course, that means you could also fit a James Webb-folded telescope except make it a lot bigger :-)

My favorite related thing is that the Starship itself could serve as a large space or moon station.

About 10% funded by NASA. Starship is a >$10B program; SpaceX is getting $3B for Artemis of which >2/3 is for operational tasks and moon-specific stuff that SpaceX aren't relevant for SpaceX's goals of LEO and Mars.

Now personally I’m looking forward to NASA, ESA and JAXA to launch outer solar system probes like new horizons but with tons of fuel left in the tank to safely make orbit around there.

So was the space shuttle, so that's not a difference between the launch costs of the two vehicles.

Now taxpayers have a 10x return on investment.

But it's high cost was the end of it.

The high cost should have killed the project before it ever flew, but that's not how governments behave.

All of that adds tremendous weight, complexity, and cost.

There are better fuels in terms of Isp and density. They have some downsides such as being corrosive or having highly toxic exhaust.

https://x.com/ToughSf/status/1453391050681327622

And unbreathable and full of sulphuric acid. You may as well just stay in orbit.

On Venus, a puncture doesn't immediately destroy anything - because of equal pressure on each sides of the balloon wall. You have more than enough time to put on a protective coat and fix it.

And building more living space is much easier + you could source the material (carbon) on site.

Yes, both systems are reusable, but there are key differences in the refurbishment of the systems that partly explains the cost difference. It took more labor, resources and time to refurbish the shuttle. Also consider rapid reusability was a stretch goal when it was being designed, but we have come a loooong way since, spacex in particular has had it as a driving competitive differentiator for years now.

Another big difference is that NASA post Cold War was a skilled jobs program, with an incentive to do distributed, high overhead work to appease their bosses (congress), while SpaceX has the opposite.

Starship uses essentially the same ceramic heat shield tiles as the Space Shuttle, so the fact the Shuttle had so much trouble with refurbishment doesn't mean that SpaceX has solved these refurbishment issues with the Starship upper stage.

Though the Starship lower stage, which contains the most expensive engines, doesn't have this problem. So partial reusability should be pretty realistic.

> In terms of shapes, the tiles were not uniform. In fact, there were over 17,000 different shapes used to fit specific areas of the shuttle's body. Each tile had to be individually manufactured and shaped to fit a precise location due to the complex curvature of the shuttle's surface. The unique shapes were necessary to ensure that every part of the shuttle received the proper protection against the extreme temperatures during re-entry.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b&sca_esv=11e08...

This gives a direct answer (24,300) while citing a NASA source.

Note that the question here is how many uniquely shaped tiles there was, not the total number.

This is interesting because if you have to manufacture and keep in stock 17,000 separate tile shapes, that will be vastly more expensive than SpaceX who, from what I hear, only uses a singe hex shaped tile everywhere.

The difference is that they have already proven to be the lowest cost and most reliable launcher due to reuse. This is them lapping the industry with second stage reusability.

Material: stainless steel is much cheaper

Percentage of reusability: boosters of shuttle cannot be reused, maintenance of shuttle itself is also very expensive (heat shields were pricey). whereas the starship stack has higher reuse percentage and allegedly cheaper to maintain.

They did [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_retirement

StarShip consists of the Super Heavy booster that we saw "caught" today, and the StarShip (orbiter) itself. Having the booster return to launch site vs requiring ocean recovery should potentially increase cadence and reduce cost of reuse. StarShip is also meant to be reusable, although it remains to be seen how that will pan out. On the previous flight there was burn through from inadequate heat shielding - maybe we'll see an improvement with today's vehicle. I'd expect SpaceX to iteratively arrive at a quicker and more cost effective orbiter reuse procedure than NASA had with the shuttle, but how quick remains to be seen. Of course they are planning many of these to go on one-way trips to Mars rather than being reused.

Worth noting that Starship's heat shield is very similar to the one of the Shuttle. They actually got the manufacturing method from NASA.

a. Cheaper, more durable material (stainless steel).

b. Cheaper, easier to manufacture engines.

c. Easier to use fuel (methane is much "tamer" than hydrogen).

d. Standardized heat shield with much smaller requirements for manual work.

We'll have to see how it works out.

Contrast that to the Space Shuttle which required a human crew to flight test anything.

The other big difference, an elephant in the room grade difference I think, is that SpaceX reliability was developed with memories of a reusable vehicle failing mostly due to turnaround costs and risks on everyone's minds. That clearly wasn't the case when the space shuttle was designed, they were the first and enjoyed the privilege of making all the beginner mistakes.

He emailed back that he agreed with my reasons and had argued that case with NASA in the early stages of the shuttle program.

So NASA was aware of this at the time.

Same thing for SLS.

The need to codify what work is to be done in contacts is antithetical to SpaceX's rapid development processes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm

Starship is supposed to be (and clearly well on the way to being) fully rapidly re-usable. That means all stages (in this case two) are re-usable, and that the capital and time required to get either stage flight ready again after a flight should be minimal.

Said another way – it is cheaper for SpaceX to build an entirely new Starship + Booster than it was to refurbish a Shuttle between flights, by a factor of about 4x ($90M for a Starship+Booster / $400m for Shuttle refurb).

Let's start with the fact that it was designed in the 1970's. If you had a Cadillac DeVille from 1970 it would get 8-12 miles per gallon. Just the mere fact that the design is about 70 years old makes that vehicle too expensive to operate, and that's before we even start talking about other issues with the design (performance, safety, reliability, etc).

One of the design goals of Starship is for the booster and ship to relaunch with zero refurbishment. To literally land over the launchpad, refuel, and go back to orbit within hours without people even approaching them. The heat shield is the biggest risk to that goal IMO, and we saw today that it definitely sustained serious damage despite improvements. But if they ever get there then per-launch costs will be a tiny fraction of the Shuttle with 6x the payload.

This is in contrast to something like the falcon, which has a very standardized mfg process and components, which allows for really rapid iteration

The shuttle would have been much, much, cheaper per launch if it had flown more often. The expected costs for the shuttle included a range based on how often it flew which turned out to be reasonably accurate. They were much worse at predicting which end of the range they would be flying in. At the rate they ended up flying they had the extra costs of reusability without any of the benefits.

Starship is ludicrously expensive, but still much cheaper than even the best case for the Shuttle, and it has a guaranteed source of launches to help it benefit from resuability.

It actually would have been a lot cheaper if they had gone for serialized, mass assembly line production of Saturn V class disposable rockets to launch piece of space stations, satellites and manned missions into low earth orbit.

More than 40 years and many lessons learned.

SpaceX took advantage of tech from both the US and Russia, including the experience with the Space Shuttle. They have better computers, better metallurgy, advanced 3D printing and their own experience with the Falcon 9.

There is no guarantee that it will reduce the costs that much, but will all that experience, the chances are success are higher than with the Space Shuttle.

One big issue that isn't talked about much and that SpaceX takes very seriously is simply a lack of demand. There is only so much stuff you want to put in space. Satellites are expensive, and even with disposable rockets, the launch is only a smaller fraction of the cost. It is already a problem with the Falcon 9 as they have a bunch of rockets and not much to do with them. Starlink, orbital refueling, and crazy ideas like earth to earth transport are all ways to address this problem.

It was a problem for the Space Shuttle too, they couldn't achieve the economies of scale they planned it for. It was supposed to fly for routine maintenance missions but it didn't work out.

What this also means is that if you want to get into the space economy, work on things to do in space, not yet another launch vehicle startup.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua

Also, while 150t is the target payload capacity, the current test vehicles are closer to 50t in payload capacity, there are revisions in the pipeline based on data from these test flights which will bring it up to 150t.

The dumping of this excess propellant actually caused an explosion and loss of vehicle on the second test flight.

Whatever that means is what it means, the ship was out of control and I don't know whether or not the mission requiring that payload was successful, but the fact is that it did carry the payload.

A modern airliner on a long flight might burn around 80 tons of kerosene. It's slightly cheaper than methane. Call it 75-80K$.

Am I mistaken, or are there distance/payload combinations for which Starship is cheaper per pound on a point-to-point basis than air transport, even setting aside 30 minutes versus 12 hours? Isn't that the non-intuitive outcome of ballistic trajectories?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

It's quite possible that SpaceX has access to some cheaper methane source. Texas produces a lot of it.

And SpaceX has speculated about eventually switching to some renewable source by e.g. synthesizing methane. In which case that would boil down to cost of electricity and carbon. I don't see that becoming cheaper short term but that could happen long term.

No idea about the other costs.

Is their timeline too optimistic? Yeah, but if the industry still catches up with F9 and they are close to having something a lot more advanced it really doesn't matter.

Even without reusability nothing comes close to Starship's cargo capacity. If you don't have to put a lot of engineering into getting things as small and light as possible you can put things in space a lot faster.

You're way too optimistic. Starship will deliver commercial payloads, with SpaceX phasing out Falcon 9 outside of ISS launches, before anyone has a reusable Falcon 9 equivalent.

It pains me to say this, but SpaceX is in a class all its own.

Blue Origin plans to launch New Glenn in a month, with landing planned. They are a wild card.

SpaceX is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, private technology company in history.

and coincidentally he makes cars and rockets too!

Trump may well win this election. But there’s no scenario under which he’s going to also win the popular vote while doing it, at least none that I’ve heard of. If you have credible information that says otherwise I would be interested in reading it.

Even when millions are suckers for it and think others will be the ones to suffer.

Musk is getting something from Trump: most likely protection from some legal issue.

You mean that time that the FCC removed Starlink from the broadband problem when they couldn't deliver the speeds that they had committed to, as defined very explicitly in the program?

This manufactured, polarized "us vs them" thing on the internet is toxic corrosive goop. People are complex and that is fine.

- He called some guy who worked for him a pedo for no reason, which he was sued over

- Took over Twitter and promoted right wing tweets to everybody, unbanned far right accounts and sued critics who said he did so

- Started promoting far right ideas, like when he retweeted "Interesting" to some tweet of a 4chan post saying that high-status, high-testosterone males are the only ones who can think freely and should be the only ones who can vote

- Took the side of the right-wing rioters who attacked mosques in the UK, saying civil war is inevitable

- Just seems to insult companies for little reason - advertisers who leave him, and Apple

There has been kind of a slow back and forth. Some people who liked him were miffed about the pedo thing, but they didn't hate him. But he has just kept doing things that some people hate.

Leave out the part where the riots were started because someone with an immigrant background killed a bunch of kids at a Taylor Swift concert and police were withholding the identity. Along with your other 'anecdotes', can you make your political position any more transparent?

> because someone with an immigrant background killed a bunch of kids at a Taylor Swift concert and police were withholding the identity.

It might be somewhat justified if they burnt the house down of the murderer, or those who assisted him. They didn't - they burnt down houses, shops, and mosques, because they wrongly assumed the guy was Muslim and decided that was just cause to target any Muslim. His identity was hidden because he was a minor at the time of the attack.

because Internet People feel they are in a existential struggle with anyone who disagrees with them even slightly

Maybe they will have to sacrifice more payload mass for active or passive shielding or more fuel for powered deceleration. That would yield a less impressive lifter but with full reusability.

It was one of the technological breakthroughs of von Braun's team with the V2.

Supposedly they’re working on both a reusable and cost optimised non-reusable second stage at the same time. And they don’t really know yet which one will end up being cheaper.

You also see this kind of thinking with Rocket Labs neutron rocket. Where they focus on making the reusable booster do more, while making the second stage smaller, cheaper and simpler.

I think if it wasn’t for the rocket engine this wouldn’t be a question at all. The tank doesn’t have much value. It’s just a thin shell and probably a fraction of the cost of the fuel.

So I’m thinking, perhaps the optimal solution is something like this: the bottom part of the second stage with the engines separates, and a small engine and fuel tanks places the engines in a stable orbit. The tank itself is deorbited and burns up.

At some point later something like the Starship collects several second stage engines and deorbits them safely to be reused.

Or perhaps just the engines can be immediately deorbited with an inflatable heat shield and parachutes.

Sure, SpaceX has been doing first stage reuse for a long time now. But they have demonstrated landing the second stage successfully at sea twice now with the same sort of smoothness that they demonstrated once for the booster before they then caught the booster on the first real try.

A partial list of unbelievably hard things that SpaceX has so far made seem easy:

  - building a rocket from scratch
  - landing Falcon 9 boosters
  - landing Falcon 9 boosters *reliably*
  - 3x weekly launch cadence (Falcon)
  - the bellyflop manoeuver
  - mass manufacturing(!) a rocket engine
  - catching the booster
  - simulated landings of the ship

Anyways, if they can do all those things then it's pretty clear that they can catch-land the ship.

There's still a huge list of crazy-difficult things that SpaceX say they want to do that are hard to believe are possible, except for the fact that SpaceX has already done so many unbelievably difficult things already.

They could do the same thing with S2 recovery here.

But I imagine that by IFT6 they'll have nailed the flap burn through problem.

IMO a better use for it might be to ferry up large pieces of purpose built craft with less excess dry weight. A single reusable Starship launch can put the entire mass of the Apollo craft needed to make it from LEO to the Moon and back into LEO. Put a craft in two launches and dock it in orbit and you've got a huge capability to put a lot of mass onto the moon and still use the cheap cost to orbit Super Heavy gives.

The tiles in combination with ablative materials and the insane robustness of a steel vehicle is sufficient to get Starship through re-entry and soft land in the ocean. We know ceramic thermal tiles worked on Shuttle and X37B and presumably will on Dreamchaser so while the success was an awesome achievement it wasn't unlikely given time to refine their methods.

SpaceX are limited by the properties of real materials, not their ambitions, and we still don't know if rapidly reusability is possible with ceramic tiles or if their fragility will require inspections and refurbishment. They can't do it with ablatives and there aren't many other options. I am optimistic but also realistic about the difficulties of what they are attempting. Sometimes risky projects run into brick walls and you don't know what is possible until you try.

Note that the booster is not really being "caught" although this is the word it seems we're stuck with. It's really more like landing on the arms, since it throttles to a hover at that point.

Not necessarily for reusability, but it helps significantly for rapid reusability: it eliminates the need to transport the booster from the landing site to the launch site. Given that it's 9m x 70m and weighs 270 tonnes, that's not an easy process.

That was the exact reason they went this way.

She's not an enthusiast; she's got an impression from SciFi that going to mars shouldn't be that hard.

Seeing Starship get burnthrough on these suborbital launches really shows how hard it'll be to do Mars return entry with a fair few extra km/s.

Other countries have sent satellites to orbit around Mars, which is not the same thing.

Pedant mode: the USSR did land softly on Mars, but the lander got caught in a dust storm and was not able to transmit back the data ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3 ).

But other than that, yeah, there are two Schiaparelli craters now on Mars. :P

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schiaparelli_EDM)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars

she got me a while back with ink solvents. Monks may have been more illuminated making those pretty manuscripts than we appreciated.

I’m sure it still didn’t do the article justice, though.

People say 200$/kg just with booster reuse, and 20$/kg with full reuse. Of course this might be too optimistic, but I truly believe we might reach under 50$ in this decade.

There is a lot of possibilities to make a trip to the moon cheaper though. If we make LEO that cheap, we can build a lot of infrastructure in the space that would make the tourism to moon more affordable. Like keeping a few starships always in orbit as some kind of space-hotel-metro system.

This will probably take a few more decades, though.

All we can say is under $1,000/kg. Which is conservative, that limit being about two thirds that of Falcon Heavy’s theoretical cost to LEO in a reüsable configuration.

On the civilian side, SpaceX saved NASA $2 billion for just one payload, Europa Clipper <https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/a-year-from-launch-the...>, so who knows how many billions more from other launches.

The FAA manages more flights and space launch operations than it did in the 1980s, when it had a budget more than quadruple the size.

To put it bluntly: you get what you pay for.

Our risk-to-regulatory oversight cost benefit analysis seems extremely off - we overregulate small things that do not have large-scale meaningful impact while basically grandfather in stuff like depleting the Great Salt Lake, coal emissions, etc. which have vastly less regulatory $ spend per environmental impact.

Ideally, if we could quantify all environmental impacts into a single number (ie. CO2 emissions but also wildlife impact, etc.), the $/impact spent across different fields would be equal.

Currently, however, we are likely spending 100x+ on a per-impact basis on SpaceX regulation.

Gee, almost as if decades of austerity politics, lobbying by financial interests, and regulatory capture has malformed a well intentioned regulatory apparatus? Seems like we need more regulation that's less interested in what "united citizens" have to say. (read lobbyists)

How are you arriving at that assessment of regulation of spaceX? i'd be interested in reading more.

> How are you arriving at that assessment of regulation of spaceX?

I mean, SpaceX launches simply do not have a large impact on the environment compared to say, all cumulative coal emissions in the US. The FAA AST budget (which is for SpaceX launches) is about 60 million. Total EPA budget is about 9 billion. That’s about 160x the size of the FAA launch regulatory budget, but the environmental impact of things the EPA covers (and mostly fails to cover) is much much much more than 160x the impact of spacex launches.

Reagen's and thatcher's whole agenda can be summed up by: "the biggest lie is 'i'm from the government and I'm here to help'"

Have you not paid much attention to politics since Reagan and Thatcher? Their whole objective was to hollow out the government piece by piece, then point to its declining performance as justification for getting rid completely, or to gut further. Repeat. This has been the modus operandi for conservative parties since at LEAST thatcher and Reagan.

>we have record spending as a percentage of gdp and are approaching a sovereign debt crisis

Yeah, it's those pesky regulatory agencies riding up that tally I'm sure, not the almost 1 trillion we spend a year perpetuating apartheid states or our military bases all over the world while 3 americans hoard more wealth than 50% of all americans combined. Silly, patently false defense for an already silly position.

Couldn't be the trillions we spent on the war on "terror". Or the trillions we spend on futile measures like the war on drugs. It's def the ftc and the epa. Those lot. That's who's causing our problems. Yep. That makes sense.

Are you serious? Either you're not a student of history or we have drastically different readings of the past 40 years of american government.

>We never really had an austerity movement

Patently false, dishonest rewriting of history. Did you not pay attention to Reagan actually did?

Reagan's whole thing was the whole govt helping is a lie.

Reagan cut food stamps and almost all other spending while drastically increasing the military budget, cut taxes on the wealthy, deregulated in the name of austerity, got the war on drugs going to villainize his political opponents.

You simply can not be serious. Maybe read Reagan's wiki page before writing such demonstrably revisionist history.

Business: when it fails, cut off the funding. When it succeeds, increase the funding.

>when it succeeds, cut funding

is a ridiculously plain falsity.

It's well known in government that if you don't spend all your budget (meaning you were successful), your budget gets cut.

It is indeed ridiculous, but true.

Yup. Which one is your favorite?

Have you ever read "Road to Serfdom" by Hayek? How about "Free to Choose" by Friedman? Anything by C. Northcote Parkinson? "Nothing Like It In The World" by Ambrose? "Monetary History of the United States" by Friedman?

I haven't read those, I've mostly read stuff like Piketty and Sunkara, or smaller more focused stuff like Zuboff's surveillance capitalism or Rifkin's green new deal , caste, Harvey's history of neoliberalism, or Hannah Arendt's work that generally rebukes capitalism more than it does fundamentally bolster the ideas of socialism - You do make me reflect I haven't read much that's meant to be anything other than stuff from my side though

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Where did I do that? I tried to discredit an example of that which you are lamenting. Seems odd to reply this to my comment, though I understand flagging it.

What was the correct behavior when the notion I replied to is posed? Report it? Ignore it? Is there any reply to that comment you would not have flagged? Earnest questions.

As anyone can hopefully see from my follow up comments in this thread, I have no desire to be nasty nor any intention to degrade the quality of discussion here.

Yes the correct behavior would be to not feed it by replying, but instead to flag it as off topic.

I definitely believe you that you don't intend to be nasty and I don't think I saw any nastiness in your posts, so that's great! But your comments (in this thread at least) have definitely been in the "generic ideological battle" category. Examples:

"Gee, almost as if decades of austerity politics, lobbying by financial interests, and regulatory capture" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41832880)

"Have you not paid much attention to politics since Reagan and Thatcher? Their whole objective was to hollow out the government" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41840936)

I'm not saying you're wrong or disagreeing with you—it's just that this sort of generic ideological argument isn't the intellectually curious conversation we're looking for here, and we can't have both.

Do you have a concrete advice on how to deal with ideological tangents like the "late stage capitalism" meme? Flagging obviously doesn't work. Answering it is frowned upon (it's "feeding it").

Finally just ignoring it would leave a HN full of leftist ideas and anti-capitalism snark. They are already here, heavily upvoted. Is that something you want? HN is a gathering place for hackers but it also educates and inspires. An HN where businesses are the bad guys and capitalism evil is not an HN that inspires startups and founders. So my question is: what do you want and recommend?

Thank you!

I know it's super hard to disengage from the latter, but we should, because (a) it spoils this site for its intended purpose, and (b) it's really an illusion—it's not true that the world will be a worse place if you don't conduct ideological battles on internet forums. In fact it will be a better place and HN itself will be a better place.

I don't think you need to worry about the effect on HN of focusing on the delights of curious conversation. The distribution of commenters who come to that (happy) choice is pretty random across the ideological spectrum, in my experience. You needn't worry about ceding HN to the socialists or whoever.

The distribution of commenters who get stuck in the embattled state is also randomly distributed ideologically, in my experience. I don't know if it counts as ironic or not but the commenters who argue with each other most fiercely actually resemble each other much more than they resemble anyone else.

Of course, if other commenters continue to break the site guidelines by posting generic ideological battle-style comments, you can downvote and/or flag those comments and move on. In egregious cases, you can email us at [email protected] and we'll be happy to take a look.

But please don't just flag or report the cases you disagree with—people tend to do this a lot (i.e. report cases where their enemies are misbehaving), which is really just a way to weaponize HN against their opponents. That's not using the site as intended, either—it just shifts the same problem to a different level.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41827736.

Every fucking time we don't need to increase the size of the Government. It only gets bigger. Never smaller.

They need to die off and get replaced by better competition when they mess up. And their market centralization ground to a halt instead of encouraged by the gov because of jobs and total risk aversion.

A prime example is the environmental impact stuff. They have already done that multiple times. Nothing really changed. If it succeed and doesn't blow up the impact is X, if it blows up the impact is Y. Yet these approvals take weeks and months.

There are also multiple agencies that put their foot down. Famously fish and wildlife was worried starship would crash in the water and hit a shark/whale. No seriously. https://youtu.be/kS8G5D9fg3g?t=21

Then there is the story that at Vandenburg air base, they had to strap a seal to a board and play rocket noises through headphones to see if it was distressed. Keep in mind Vandenburg has been a military rocket launch site for decades. But only now when its SpaceX do these agencies put up road blocks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SvJP5wfN4k

Not one of which ever returned to base with a sonic boom.

I assure you, the folks who tried to kill goats via mental powers and staring at them have required weirder tests than the seal.

Like that famous quote, Show me a man and I’ll find a crime

Why are the American progressives against progress?

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/10/california-reject-m...

I cannot remember a more explicit case of authoritarian government abuse in a developed nation in recent memory, and it’s especially infuriating given SpaceX and Musk are one of the most important and innovative companies and leaders of all time. No other country would think to look at such accomplishments and try to undermine themselves through petty politics and lawfare.

Ideally, the commission will withdraw its objections and allow the launches; SpaceX obviously chose this site both for its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and for redundancy in case of poor weather in Florida (like this past week for example).

But then, there may be military missions that require launching from an air force base.

An orbit from there is useless for a mission profile that was slated for Florida. It costs more fuel and has completely different ground tracks.

The sats that spacex launches for Starlink, which are about as interchangeable as you can get, are less valuable in polar orbits because they spend significantly less time over population.

  Congress shall make no law respecting
  an establishment of religion, or
  prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
  or abridging the freedom of speech, or
  of the press; or the right of the
  people peaceably to assemble, and to
  petition the government for a redress
  of grievances.

Therefore, for a California state government agency to punish SpaceX for its founder's speech is unconstitutional.

Title 18 USC section 232 lays out criminal penalties for violating a citizens civil rights, thus unconstitutional acts can be and often are criminal acts.

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1845131546501734440...

This one's for you. Hit it Perry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VJlHWESyLI

Even just one engine in minimum thrust would make the rocket go up when empty.. so the computer lights the engine at the precise right moment so it will have 0 velocity at 0 altitude, then it cuts off the engine. "Hoverslam".

The Starship booster is different, it can actually hover.

Point is it always seems like you’re coming in too fast

Daily trips to space likely also mean more debris in space and falling to earth.

I hope there is a balance that includes the lives of people near these sites and all of us sharing the same atmosphere.

ChatGPT says each launch burns 1,200 tons of methane which results in 3,300 tons of CO2.

So 1,000 starship launches means the same CO2 as about 600,000 cars driving for a year.

Given that there are something like 275 million cars on the road in just the USA, this would equate to approximately 0.25% of CO2 produced by cars.

Considering the safety and prosperity that can be brought online from 1,000 launches / 150,000 tons in orbit, that’s the deal of the century.

Debris is an absolutely non-issue.

I like the “balance” where every human has high speed internet and mobile connectivity everywhere on the planet.

The level of human safety and prosperity brought about by this level of access to outer space is beyond incredible. There is zero environmental downside, only Luddite foot stomping.

Regardless of the (in)accuracy of ChatGPT, you're assuming a lot can be accomplished with those flights. I strongly suspect 600K cars getting people where they need to go has far more utility than 1K flights of anything into / out of NEO.

> Debris is an absolutely non-issue.

Astronomers probably don't want 1000x (or even 10x) as many satelites obstructing their view.

> There is zero environmental downside, only Luddite foot stomping.

Name calling isn't going to help your cause. And the luddites had a good point, they didn't mind innovation. They minded being cut out of the benefits of innovation without any say in the matter.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe a future architecture with more redundancy could get there someday.

What cameras do they have that can look at something 30 KM up in the air that well?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xig3sL_rRH8

It's an amazing material that is not used as much as it should be.

https://open.spotify.com/track/7wFmJxJfGCN6DM5913y7pr?si=-Uo...

In The Expanse (which I highly recommend), they give a new lease on life to that quote attributed to Einstein "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones" - hurling asteroids towards a planet. I really hope humanity's real future will play out in accordance with some of the more optimistic elements in The Expanse.

It's always funny seeing people pretend they live in a world where small issues like land or food don't affect them, even though they only have that privilege because a larger military says they should.

Earth to moon without Aerobraking is a delta v of around 13k/s, mars is 13.3

As a complete lay person with little to no physics knowledge: what stops the use of something dumb like a parachute, or even wings and landing gear, to "land" the booster? I assume it is impractical (since they don't do it), but what are the actual particulars that stop it from working? While super cool to watch, it seems crazy that plucking it out of the air like that is the best way to preserve the booster for reuse.

The main advantage is that you don't need to spend any of your payload mass budget on a parachute, or wings and landing gear. The secondary advantage over a parachute is that you don't need to fish it out of seawater and make your refurbishment process more of a pain in the ass.

Wings, parachute, etc... All very easy to break or burn at hypersonic speeds, and very chaotic to control. It probably (very probably) wouldn't be possible to land back exactly where the rocket launched on wings or chutes - that would probably need an extremely long and wide runway, but compare the size of Starship to the Space Shuttle... It's like braking a toy car vs braking an actual truck.

Wings and landing gear are useless extra weight during launch, and excess weight on the booster has a super-linear reduction weight delivered to orbit. (the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation)

During the 1960s, NASA investigated using inflatable Rogallo Wings (basically hang gliders) to land the Gemini capsule. It worked fine, but was more complicated than parachutes, and re-use was not one of the goals of the Gemini or Apollo programs.

None of those give much margin for error on landing. Without any kind of propulsion, there's no option to come to a hover or do another go-around if the landing isn't going well. Space Shuttle pilots had to do extensive training in simulators for the landing because they only got one shot at it during the mission.

Propulsive landing doesn't require any hardware that isn't already on the launch vehicle, only a little excess propellant. (And it is a small amount; Super Heavy is like a soda can that's full of liquid at launch and only has a swig at the bottom during landing.) Propulsive landing gives Falcon 9 and Super Heavy the ability to overcome wind and other weather conditions to make pinpoint landings. Engine throttling gives Super Heavy the ability to hover, so it has a huge margin for error when coming in for a landing.

Super Heavy could have had legs, like Falcon 9, but it has such a huge payload capacity that they can simply choose to always launch with enough propellant to come back to the tower, and it saves a lot of flying weight and complexity by simply not having them. The arms on the tower can be massively overbuilt to ensure however much reliability SpaceX wants.

(I mean I still think it's mind blowing, because I think landing a rocket is also mind blowing)

Plus it's really big https://images-bonnier.imgix.net/files/ill/production/Starsh...

The big advantage of catching it with the tower is that it'll (eventually) allow them to put another Starship on top, refuel and launch again within hours, as opposed to the weeks it currently takes for Falcon 9.

Super heavy can hover and even go down by throttling down more. This gives them more control for the landing and don’t have to time it exactly perfectly

Which means that the weight savings are nontrivial with the "catch the rocket!" landing method.

but things would have to get pretty extreme in the "routine" dimension for that to be very useful. If there are 20 first stages and 5 land/launch towers, for a first stage that only spends an hour in flight in between inspections.... well are you going to keep them parked on a scarce launch tower for maintenance? The towers with fill/launch infrastructure (such as reinforced concrete, fuel tanks, cold filling system, deluge water system) become the bottleneck. It's more likely then that the 1st stage lands, is safed, then is taken a couple hundred yards away for inspection and maintenance while the next in line is moved to be stacked for the next launch. The inspection / maintenance would have to be truly minimal (think airliner) to keep it right there on its own relaunch tower.

"No landing gear" is more key, compared to Falcon 9 - because of the aim toward minimal launch cost.

That's what they are aiming for, eventually.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/SuperHea...

Landing via tower catch versus on a pad is advantageous because the weight of adding retractable landing legs to such a large rocket would be significant.

This video goes into details pretty well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OYvWYp0--bQ&t=832s