SpaceX Tuesday...

[fiatpower]

I never realised that SpaceX are looking at using the Starship for Earth to Earth transport. Being able to get anywhere on earth in around 30 minutes would be simply incredible. Possibly a bit uncomfortable but no worse than Ryanair i'm sure. If they nail everything they are working on they really could be a massive company.

[eharding]

fiatpower said:

I never realised that SpaceX are looking at using the Starship for Earth to Earth transport. Being able to get anywhere on earth in around 30 minutes would be simply incredible. Possibly a bit uncomfortable but no worse than Ryanair i'm sure. If they nail everything they are working on they really could be a massive company.

Not sure it would be a human-rated thing at first, or even ever, but Musk at one point was talking about $10/kg to low earth orbit with Starship scale launch economics - if they can facilitate a same-sub-day global cargo service with that as a baseline cost, fronted by the likes of UPS and Fedex, they could probably charge ten times that per kilo to the end customer. Nice little earner, probably. Small mass, high value cargo like finished semiconductors or pharmaceuticals, where the urgency is very, very high, but the cargo is not ultimately irreplaceable.

[fiatpower]

At first they would do cargo I guess but after a while you have to imagine they would plan on transporting passengers. Seems a logical next step after transporting cargo assuming all goes well.

[Beati Dogu]

I just don’t see it. Too scary, too unreliable, too expensive.

[fiatpower]

Beati Dogu said:

I just don’t see it. Too scary, too unreliable, too expensive.

Flying was to begin with i'm sure. They wouldn't be able to do it now but if they had years of launches and hundreds of flights to perfect things then I can see it. I'd happily fly that way if it was proved out.

[anonymous-user]

S6PNJ said:

Fab!
Right up to the last moment of landing, it still looked to be at a 'fair' angle before it sat down fully. Might just have been a trick of the camera position or might just be 'carrying momentum' to straighten up at the last moment perhaps?

Yep you’re right. It did come in at quite and angle. It can be seen from other camera views. There are/were skid marks on the landing pad from the legs...

[annodomini2]

F20CN16 said:

S6PNJ said:

Fab!
Right up to the last moment of landing, it still looked to be at a 'fair' angle before it sat down fully. Might just have been a trick of the camera position or might just be 'carrying momentum' to straighten up at the last moment perhaps?

Yep you’re right. It did come in at quite and angle. It can be seen from other camera views. There are/were skid marks on the landing pad from the legs...

I think there was either a control system or actuation problem with one of the Raptors, hence why it was at the edge of the landing pad

[shalmaneser]

Legmaster said:

Space X have released a short recap video of the SN15 Test

That shot at 0.36 looks like science fiction. Incredible.

[Beati Dogu]

It actually touched down quite gently really. With some proper legs and a bit of dampening it'll be quite a soft landing. Watching the two Raptors working together to make that happen is what sticks in my mind. That definitely seems like the way to go.

Unfortunately they don't seem to have added any extra footage. Just edited out the loss of signal parts from the live broadcast. Maybe they haven't had time to collect the SD cards from the onboard cameras yet. I'd be surprised if there isn't a local backup too.

[MiniMan64]

They really ought to paint one of these with a red nose cone, a blue stripe and a white number....

[CraigyMc]

Beati Dogu said:

It actually touched down quite gently really. With some proper legs and a bit of dampening it'll be quite a soft landing. Watching the two Raptors working together to make that happen is what sticks in my mind. That definitely seems like the way to go.

Unfortunately they don't seem to have added any extra footage. Just edited out the loss of signal parts from the live broadcast. Maybe they haven't had time to collect the SD cards from the onboard cameras yet. I'd be surprised if there isn't a local backup too.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_9FZDnCaoU

[Dog Star]

Beati Dogu said:

Unfortunately they don't seem to have added any extra footage. Just edited out the loss of signal parts from the live broadcast. Maybe they haven't had time to collect the SD cards from the onboard cameras yet. I'd be surprised if there isn't a local backup too.

I've been thinking the same thing and hoping we would get some super-duper 4K external stuff of the hover etc. They must surely have it.

[Clive Milk]

Donald Musk ... Americans on the moon in 2024.....

Elon Trump ... Americans on Mars in 2024

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starship-mars-lan...


Interestingly Elon has two things to chase for.

People on Mars in 2024
People on the Moon in 2024 or earlier ...

At least the landing side. If it does not work out blame the boosters !

He's got his work cut out.

[anonymous-user]

SN15 now back on the launch pad B

[MiniMan64]

Full booster sub orbital test in June?

[Beati Dogu]

Beati Dogu said:

Looks like there will be another Starlink launch this weekend. Probably using booster B1058, which will make this its 8th flight. This is Starlink-26 which comes after last Sunday’s Starlink-27 for some reason. It’ll probably have some rideshare sats onboard, which may explain why it got bumped.

Launch time is likely to be about midnight on Saturday UK time though.

Confirmed by SpaceX now - Falcon 9 will send to orbit 52 Starlink satellites, a Capella Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite, and Tyvak-0130

Launch time is Saturday 15th at 6:54 pm EDT, or 11.54 pm UK time. Next day is the backup.

[Flooble]

F20CN16 said:

SN15 now back on the launch pad B

I can imagine that's where you would put it even if you just wanted to take the Raptors off. Save trailing it all the way back to the production site and getting in the way of the other work being done there.

So do we think this means they'll launch it again, or just dismantle it while they finish off SN16?

[annodomini2]

Flooble said:

F20CN16 said:

SN15 now back on the launch pad B

I can imagine that's where you would put it even if you just wanted to take the Raptors off. Save trailing it all the way back to the production site and getting in the way of the other work being done there.

So do we think this means they'll launch it again, or just dismantle it while they finish off SN16?

I think they'll be inspecting it, to determine if it's worthwhile fixing it after the fire.

[MartG]

I wouldn't be surprised if they swap out the engines, so the ones which have gone through an actual flight can be stripped down and inspected

[Flooble]

Beati Dogu said:

I just don’t see it. Too scary, too unreliable, too expensive.

I remember reading Ernest K Gann's book ("Fate is the Hunter") years ago. It's not quite the earliest years of aviation - he started about 10 years after passenger flights (people actually buying a ticket to travel from A to B, not just going for a ride for fun) became a "thing".

From his description it wasn't that dangerous to catch a flight even by the 1930s. And even with extremely limited-to-non-existent instrument flying, they were also not too limited by weather or mechanical malfunctions. Plus quite importantly even if the aircraft was delayed for many hours it was still much quicker than any other form of travel. I've tried to dig up some statistics but it's proven quite difficult to locate. However, if Wiki is correct, the worst year in US histories for aircraft crashes was 1929 when they had 51 crashes killing 61 people.

I'm not sure how reliable this site is: https://www.daileyint.com/flying/flywar1.htm but it suggests that there were 42 scheduled flights per day in 1929; it's difficult to know how many chartered/experimental/private/military flights went on but it would not be unreasonable to imagine perhaps 200 flights per day to give rise to those 51 crashes. That's one crash every 1431 flights.

Crewed spacecraft have to date had four fatal in-flight accidents and I think there have been three launch aborts which would presumably also count as a "crash" for comparison with the aviation accidents. There have been plenty of other incidents (e.g. the Progress crashing into Mir) but even excluding them that means that, since there have only been 345 crewed flights, the rate is just under one crash every fifty flights. Granted, that is counting every spaceflight including the ones that by a straight comparison to aviation would be in the 1903-1920 "development" period, which arguably we are still in since almost anyone who flies into space is a fully trained astronaut - even the "tourists" undergo a lot of training by comparison to a 1920s pilot, let alone a straight passenger!

Those numbers do suggest that there is no way space travel will ever be as routine as aviation had become even by the 1920s.