This either works and will be a sight to behold or it blows up, which most definitely will be a sight to behold. In any case much to look forward to (though I’m firmly in the ’hope it works’ camp ;))
I think some people are having wrong expectations heading in to this. If it explodes 30 seconds after leaving the launch pad it's still a huge success. Anything beyond exploding on the launch site is a success. They have a bunch more vehicles lined up behind this one as failure is highly expected, almost to the point of intention.
I'll be legitimately happy if it doesn't explode on the launch pad and at least gets any debris into the ocean instead of on land. This is just the beginning.
You are right, and expecting the first launch of a rocket platform to be anything but a bomb is a little unrealistic.
But wouldn’t it be amazing if it did make max Q, then coast, then ORBIT on the first try? It’s never happened before. But imagining the possibility gives my imagination a little bit of awe.
Starship would be the first system to run purely on our optimism! ;p
It won't go into orbit, just achieve orbital velocity. Going into orbit would require it going over land that they don't want to go over on the initial flight out of a abundance of caution.
Twitter files show that there's a MASSIVE disinformation and censorship industry in the US government. It looks like they use shady NGO's to push government sponsored disinformation and to censor civilians:
do you suppose that is the real reason Elon bought Twitter? To gain insight into that?
it's a bit fun to imagine that is the case. It is reminiscent of the "buy the whole farm" scam discussed in the film "Django Unchained". In which a huge outlandish performance is made with the stated intent to buy one seemingly desirable (in the eyes of the seller) item, but buyer's the real item of interest is disguised as just something that comes as part of the sale.
He's stated multiple times he bought it because of freedom of speech.
Whether or not he suspected NGOs were involved in the censorship on the governments behalf is uncertain, but the goal of a global communication medium that embraced freedom of speech were his main stated goals.
It sounds like you never saw Django. The stated goal of the heros was to buy a slave from his owner to use for brutal boxing matches, but what they really wanted to buy was the freedom of Django's wife. The purchase of the boxing slave was a ruse because there was no way the slaver would have even met with the heros if they just asked to buy the wife on her own.
My original comment was just to imagine if Elon Musk was running the same scam as in the movie when he bought Twitter. I'm not saying he did the scam, just that it would be fun if he did.
By way of support for my silly imagination: there was a bit of theatrics with the purchase and the law suit. And it's not impossible to imagine that he may have lied about the freedom of speech reason.
Yeah, that's why he has a Ukrainian "Crisis" category in his algorithm alongside misinformation, antivaxxers, criminals and porn. Amazing freedom of information, except when it is inconvenient for his alt-right friends like Trump, or himself personally.
I'm not quite aware about the govenment overreach, I'll check it later, but so far Shitter has been a dumpster fire of misinformation and spam, and Musk is keeping it that way.
This is how the US interfere in others countries' affairs through layers of NGOs, foundations, offering sabbaticals, fellowships, etc. Good to see that they can apply same techniques to their own population.
As person from "other-country" I'm all for USA so called "interference" in any form and size. Because alternative is an occupation by shitholes like China, Russia and so on. USA so called "interference" usually brings progress and civilization, while quite real interference of anti-americans brings conservatism, corruption, slavery and general degradation. This works like a clockwork, all across the globe.
Starship is a massive two stage rocket/ship. Most powerful rocket in history. This is the first attempt at launching the full stack. To reach orbit, a rocket needs to be highly optimised, with little room for error. If errors occur, it could explode. Errors are most likely to happen the first time you try something.
I am aware it's not strictly aiming to reach orbit
In rocketry, the failure of any one part often results in total system collapse. This rocket has far more such parts than most. And it is a very big system. Any collapse will be spectacular. But if all goes well, that too will be a sight to see. Rocketry is about explosions: either you direct the explosion downwards as thrust or it overtakes you and goes omnidirectional. Either way, an explosion will happen.
It's a rocket so there is always a non-zero risk of explosion. This one is also a new, not-yet-launched rocket, making it extra non-zero chance of explosion.
Its and apples and oranges comparison of combustion chambers. For purposes of combustion, the relavant pressure is the exaust of the rocket engine where combusion is complete. The burning gas within an ic engine is, at the point of combusion, at a very higher pressure. The ic equivalent of a rocket combusion chamber would be the blast wave starting at the spark, which then moves through the fuel. This difference become more important when discussing the new tech of pulse detonation rocket engines.
Pegasus (company's first try overall), Antares, all of the Minotaurs, Atlas 3 and 5 might count as new... Epsilon, H-2 (new?), Vega, Ariane 1, 3 & 4... And the Ariane 1 is both totally new on a systems level and an institution's first attempt at building one. Long March 5, 6 & 7.
Of the investor-backed launch startups, I think it's either no company got it first try... or Orbital Sciences counts as making it first try with Pegasus. Not sure if they count as an investor backed startup.
SLS? It not only made orbit but also got it's payload around the moon. While it used many previously proven technologies (and it even previously flown engines), those were either modified or combined in previously untried ways, enough that I'd call it a new vehicle for the purposes of a flight test.
Speaking of previously proven technologies... the Space Shuttle made it to orbit on it's first launch attempt as well... with crew.
I think it is no company has reached orbit on first attempt. But they have been successful on later rockets. This includes SpaceX which was blowing up rockets phase with Falcon 1 but were successful with Falcon 9.
> "I think it looks so ridiculous and impossible, and you can tell it's real because it looks so fake, honestly," Musk said at a press conference Tuesday. "We have way better CGI (computer-generated imagery)" than that.
As a gamedevs my explanation is it hits the following points:
1. Shiny metal, easy in video games but rare in real life. Metal is usually painted or protected in some way.
2. Large panels. Beginner artists don't know how to represent a sense of scale and often put too large details making the object feel small. Starship is giant, yet has panels which imply it is a toy to the eye.
3. Lots of reflections. Early 3d tried to impress by using lots of ray traced reflections. It helps that reflective surfaces are easier to make look realistic than complex surfaces which requires more accurate lighting. Thus early cgi relied on reflections a bunch. Hence why the famous t Rex scene in Jurassic Park took place in the rain, so they could justify making the t Rex reflective.
You do want to blow up (not deliberately though) this thing once though. If no prototype ever blows up before you start going into production, you never know some pieces of information you’d gave gotten from monitoring the failure process.
They really don't want it to blow up on the launch pad. They've put a lot of work into the ground service equipment, and depending on how bad the damage is, blowing up on the pad could set them back months. It also isn't clear if they will have completely finished all the protections on the launch equipment (cladding, deluge, etc) before this test flight, so blowing up on the pad this time around might actually be worse than if it happened in some future test instead.
Once it is well-clear of the pad – blowing up is a lot less bad. But still, ideally they want it to make at as far through the flight plan as possible. If it blows up early in the flight, there's a lot of stuff that happens later they won't even get the chance to test this time around. Sure, they'll get the chance to test it next time around – but that'll be another delay in an already delayed project.
Always curious what sort of monitoring is used here, pressure valves, temperature, could we assume there's ultra-high-FPS cameras at every useful vantage point? Would there be any vantage point you could put a camera(or other sensor) that wouldn't get destroyed in a catastrophic unplanned disassembly?
The simplest sensor is the eyeball - "oh shit it exploded, it wasn't supposed to do that" tells you that something somewhere was calculated incorrectly or wasn't planned for.
Probably not many high FPS cameras, but a large number of the tiles, especially in the most interesting areas probably have lots of temperature and pressure sensors.
Similarly probably one regular camera in each tank and similar pressure and temperature sensing. With the engines, IIRC these are refined Raptors which don't have the "christmas tree" of instrumentation, so probably just pressure and temperature in all the key areas.
It is both unlikely to either launch or explode. Much more likely is a boring launch abort due to some technical issues, and another try in a few weeks. The opposite of a "sight to behold".
A thing I find mind-blowing is that if this concept succeeds, that I and everyone reading this will be able to afford to go to low earth orbit on a relatively modest salary within the next ~20 years (conservatively).
This feels like quite a difficult reality to internalise given we all grew up seeing only a select few exceptional people, with the stars aligning in their career, be able to do that.
Long before heading to orbit, I'm excited to just get a front row seat for the launch of a fully loaded Starship. Apparently, being in the NASA guest stands for a Saturn V launch was mind-blowing and this would be double that.
Hopefully, SpaceX will set up some kind of excursion package where you get a Starbase tour, a primo front row seat to a launch and a limited edition T-shirt. Forget Taylor Swift tickets for >$1K when Starship can literally rock my world.
Spectators were kept about 3 miles from Saturn V launches, so you could build a REALLY WIDE stadium for Starship launches. The Circus Maximus wouldn't have ANYTHING on it.
We might be less than 50 years out from Starship or similar launches being as boring as a plane taking off or a train passing by.
I'm hoping it's more like 5 years to Starship launches being 'routine'. Maybe I'm an irredeemable optimist but that would at least be more similar to the curve of Falcon launches being 'routine' (I concede that to some of us, orbital launches will never be considered routine – no matter how frequent).
I'd even lay 50%-ish odds that they'll do back to back payload launches in 30 days or less by the end of next year. That'll of course depend on things going very well over the next few months so they manage to get a Starship to orbit and back on the ground at the launch site this year.
I saw an Atlas V launch at KSC in January 2017, from the LC-39 observation gantry, and it was incredible. Highly recommend seeing a launch – any launch! – if you have the means and opportunity.
> When it comes to the G-Forces being pushed on you, many roller coasters have peak G’s at or above these limits. Most people are probably familiar with the different rides at Walt Disney World so let’s use those for examples. At EPCOT, Mission Space is a centrifuge-based ride where you go through a simulated launch and landing on Mars. The sustained G’s on that ride is 2.5 G’s, close to how many G’s New Shepard will experience during launch.
> For the descent, Blue Origin says you must be able to withstand 5.5 G’s, if you ever rode Rock ‘n Roller Coaster at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, you would have experienced up to 5 G’s during the initial launch of the ride.
Epcot Mission Space (the "Orange" version) is pretty intense as it's really sustained G-forces, but manageable. During the ride, you have to reach in front of you to press some buttons, and that's when you feel the G-forces most. But for SpaceX/BlueOrigin, passengers do nothing.
Rock n Roller Coaster itself for the peak G is done by kids, not a big deal.
This is slightly misleading - what matters isn't the peak G force experienced, but moreso the integral of force over time. In a roller coaster you might experience 5Gs, but only for a moment. Astronauts experience 3G, but for up to 5 minutes continuously
On the Gravitron, a centrifuge carnival ride in the shape of a flying saucer, riders experience 3Gs for minutes. Best carnival ride as a kid, we rode it continuously for ages.
Oh god, I will never forget that ride. I was at a carnival when I was around 13 or 14 and rode that ride, and midway through it had a malfunction. They stopped it to address the issue, and then decided to give us an extra long ride to compensate for the problem. When it was finally over and I was about ready to stagger off of it, the operator got on the mic and said, “who wants more?!?” Seemingly everyone but me screamed for more. At that point I was too sick to make any sounds at all.
That night, hours later, as I lay on the floor of my friend’s bedroom (it was a sleepover), trying to fall asleep, I still remember feeling like the room was spinning. I never went back on that ride.
Funny, something really similar happened to me! 14 years old, at a friend's birthday party at Magic Mountain. The Superman ride was new. That's where you get into a bullet shaped gondola and get shot up a vertical tower, with a giant statue of Superman at its apex, go briefly weightless and then freefall backwards until you curve flat and brake to a stop. Never big on roller coasters, I got peer pressured into this one.
I didn't like it all that much. But what scared the hell out of me was when, on descent, the brakes malfunctioned. This caused the gondola to go screaming backwards past the platform where the next riders were lined up, fly through some butcher curtains and go crashing into a padded wall in a hidden cinder block cell at the end of the track.
We all sat there for a minute pretty stunned, and then some goofy employee came running out and jumped up on the front of the car. "Whoops! That wasn't supposed to happen!" He said. "But I have some great news for you! Who wants to go again??"
My brother and me tried this ~4 years ago (we are adults, but still, carnival is fun). I handled it well, but my brother was traumatized. I think you ought to check each future passenger if the sensation of being compressed and having troubles breathing won't trigger a phobia.
The area under the curve doesn't matter if the peak isn't big enough.
A physically fit person can probably live normally at 2g all day with no problems other than feeling tired af until you get used to it and all farts being dangerous.
I know it's not exactly the same as living in a 2g environment, but many people seem to live surprisingly long lives with a body weight that is several times what it should be.
I rode Epcot Mission Space Orange, and I didn't realize it was a centrifuge. I thought it just cleverly tipped you on your back to simulate G-forces. It certainly felt real, so it's neat to know that it was.
You can absolutely use engineering to limit the g forces. It's just a matter throttling back the engines near the end of a stage and/or staging sooner. For example, Gemini peeked at 6.4g, Apollo peeked at 4g and the Space Shuttle peeked at 3g.
3g is low enough that most humans shouldn't black out, even without training.
I'll also point out that professional astronauts are expected to remain functional for the entire assent (including emergencies, where g forces might peek much higher), which is not required for passengers.
I remember reading that the Titan 2 pushed so hard that even the astronauts, who were pretty tough test pilots back then, were happy when the engine finally shut off.
Astronauts also need to be able to survive 1) high g reentrues (apollo reached 7 gs on reentry) and abort modes, which can be very high acceleration indeed
For example, the space shuttle uses it's wings (and body) to generate quite a bit of lift and spread the reentry over a much longer period. the g-forces during re-entry. It's 10min at 1.7g.
Though that's from LEO. Apollo came in directly from the moon at a much higher velocity, resulting in ~7g; For the Apollo missions that never left earth orbit, reentry was more like 3.5g.
A space ship aiming to carry untrained passengers will pick designs and mission profiles that are within their passengers abilities to withstand for both launch and reentry. Apollo picked a design and mission profiles with 7g reentry acceleration because they knew their trained astronauts could withstand it.
As for abort.. it's only limited spikes of high-g you only need it to be survivable for the passengers, while the pilots need to be able to control it.
Most are. If you have certain heart conditions, you might not know you have them, and then die. That's why it's likely that they'd require an ECG (and maybe have an age limit and require generally reasonable health/fitness), but if you're a reasonably healthy adult, it should be fine.
Forces depend a lot of the specific vehicle. The space shuttle peaks at 3 G, I've seen numbers from 3.6 to 4.5 (again peak) for Crew Dragon on the way up, 3-5 on the way back. Soyuz seems to be 4 on a good day and 10 on a bad one, plus the momentary forces during landing.
Since we put anyone willing to pay a few bucks on carnival rides that sustain (!) up to 3 G for minutes, and the profile can likely be adjusted at the expense of reduced payload capacity, I don't expect this to be a big problem.
If William Shatner can do it in his 80s, I'm pretty sure that a substantial fraction of the population can do it.
Don't get me wrong, Shatner has worked hard to keep himself in shape. And he didn't get to orbit. But if you keep in shape (and are rich or famous) it may be an option.
Will Shatner was 90 when he was on a suborbital launch with Blue Origin. Given his wealth and access to quality healthcare etc. he was probably a decent amount healthier than the median 90 year old, but given that he was able to do it without issue I imagine the vast majority of humans under the age of ~60 or so can definitely manage.
Perhaps a lot of people wouldn't agree and I admit I'm stirring up debate a bit to see what other people think.
To me it seems if we see orbital success in the next 5 yrs, mass production of starship thereafter and SpaceX sticking to their Earth-to-Earth transport idea - this seems plausible. Airliners developed about as quick, but then again its a far harder environment - it's nice to dream.
Airliners also developed in the context of a state supported system that used regulated high ticket prices and mail route subsidies to keep the industry alive for any needed pivot to military aircraft. I don’t know that there is the stomach for such a system today.
The C-5 Galaxy can transport 127 tons and land at normal airports with at least one order of magnitude lower per kg prices. A C-17 can transport 77 tons. More importantly they can actually unload their cargo once they land. A Starship would need either special facilities or an as-yet undersigned integral crane to unload cargo.
I remember reading that that use case doesn’t really exist, especially for the US military. Stuff they need a lot of, they pre-stage, and an airborne invasion requires massive logistics, including the entire follow on ground invasion. It’s not just a matter of getting the paratroopers there quickly.
Pretty much the only airborne assaults considered still viable are airfield seizures. There is quite a bit of risk from ferrying troops to the drop zone and the time they are in the air (under canopies after exiting the aircraft). So, if the assault force can basically come "out of nowhere" and be on the ground in seconds rather than minutes, then much of the risk is reduced. Logistics can be brought in to the seized airfield in short order once secured.
I could see potential US Army interest in this concept. I think they would want the Starship to land horizontal rather than vertical for rapid disembarking though. I.e.: A ramp drops from the nose cone or similar. That doesn't seem very feasible.
While that's a good point, there are some situations they can't really pre-stage in without that in itself causing serious problems. Taiwan springs to mind.
So if some magical way is developed to have Starship land and offload it's entire cargo in <super short time>, before it's shot out of the sky, I wonder if that would be useful. Perhaps even as part of an effective deterrent strategy?
That doesn't include the cost of a vehicle that can support you for a week and re-enter and land safely, and does not include cost of ground systems to support the mission and recover you. Nor training or regulatory compliance costs. It's just the mass to orbit.
Even if Starship delivers everything promised, I doubt orbit would be within reach of wage earners. Similarly we could afford to pay for a ship to drop a few tons of rock off Guam, but going to the bottom of the Mariana trench and returning alive would be a different kettle of fish.
Every kilogram of mass added to the return trip increases the required deceleration, fuel, etc. Not cheap. At some point you can't reach orbit with the required fuel to get everything back. The Falcon 9 boosters are nearly empty when they come back. As a matter of fact, at least one of their early landing failures was because they cut the fuel load too close and ran out of fuel just before reaching the ground. Minimizing weight on the return landing is critical.
If a single one of those bridges is anything like launching astronauts to the space station in a reusable private spacecraft and launch system from american soil, it's worth buying.
"looks like marginal cost of launch will be less than $1M for more than 100 tons to orbit, so it’s mostly about fixed costs divided by launches per year"
Not trying to nitpick you here. Just hoping to correct some of the confusion that results from playing Telephone with secondary and tertiary sources.
I used to think that being born a millenial was a curse for realising those kinds of dreams. But as someone who's not an influencer and who's not interested in overpriced suborbital carnival rides I'm more than happy to be proven wrong.
> I don't think going to "fake space" for a minute is really going to be interesting by the end of the decade.
Not sure what you're referring to as "fake" here. LEO? Is the ISS fake space? If Starship fully succeeds it should make trips to and from the Moon and Mars.
I think they are referring to the sub-LEO suborbital hops that are being advertised as "a trip to space". Just high enough to clearly see the famous "blue marble" but nowhere close to being able to sustain an orbit or actually classify as being "in space".
Well kind of but speed isn't a really useful metric until you have a circular orbit.
Knowing speed won't be able to tell you whether you are suborbital (but it will tell you if you are on an escape orbit). However knowing your periapsis (elevation at lowest point in orbit) will tell you whether you are suborbital. It's only at the point where your periapsis is close to your apoapsis that speed is actually useful.
Any metric other than periapsis will require 2 components to describe that the orbit isn't suborbital. Periapsis only gets away with it by implying that the second component is at least as high up as it is (apoapsis is always higher). The other useful metric would be velocity (speed + direction) but while that's something you can easily and immediately measure, periapsis & apoapsis (aka height) are far easier to visualize.
There usually are reasons for real estate prices that you can’t know from basic stats.
Also about the point of being unaffordable, your first listing basically doubled since the last sale a few years ago, so in relative terms things aren’t looking too good. The second one’s estimate seems to have gone down recently, which tbh in this environment makes me think there is something very wrong with the house or the area and I would research the crap out of it before even considering looking at it.
There are thousands of homes in this price range on Zillow across the country.
Hell is most of the US you could buy a trailer and some land, bit of solar and batteries, build out a cesspit and start building something piece by piece.
Of course you can’t be 20 minutes from Times Square if you do that. But 100 million people want to live in Manhattan, and they can’t all do
If you are used to U.K. standards, living in Quitman GA might be a bit of a shock.
Why not take a vacation there? Looks like there's a regional airport in Thomasville only a 30-minute drive away, but it looks like it's too small to serve passenger planes. You might need to fly into Jacksonville FL, and drive ~2 hours from there.
People seem willing enough to allow enough lack of housing that thousands are needlessly homeless now. What's a few hundred thousands more? So many people already don't consider anyone to be real people once they are homeless.
> "After it launches, the Super Heavy rocket will fly from SpaceX's Starbase launch site eastward, over the Gulf of Mexico. For this test, the booster will not attempt a landing. After stage separation, the Starship upper vehicle is intended to reach orbital velocity before attempting a reentry into Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean. If all goes well, it will make a controlled descent and landing into the ocean just north of the Hawaiian islands."
A shame we won't get to see the booster land. And it sounds like they aren't trying to capture the upper stage either, unless they have a really big drone ship.
They most likely want or need to prove that they can reliably bring these things down in a controlled manner to a soft landing.
They did the same thing with the early Falcon 9 landings, bringing them in to a "soft" landing over a set of GPS coordinates in the ocean. Once they can demonstrate this process to a certain degree, they can start working through the permitting process to try actually bringing them in over land.
Lots of speculation that SpaceX will likely try to "soft land" the booster in the ocean, just like the did with Falcon 9 first stage the first ~handful of times they were trying to land it (or, more accurately, learn how to land it).
Possibly similar with the upper stage too, just so they can practice and learn.
SpaceX does have one without the aerosurfaces and heat tiles, but that isn't the one lined up for the first launch. Ship 24 should be able to attempt the reentry flop-and-flip maneuvers, assuming the test gets that far. Last I heard, Elon was only giving the first test a 50% chance of getting to orbit.
The upper stage uses the belly flop maneuver and it has the fins for that. So they could go through the whole process as far as the vehicle is concerned.
SpaceX has one upper stage that they built without those fins. I was under the impression it might be used for the first flight, but someone else clarified that one is expected to fly another time, and the first flight is expected to use a normal ship capable of belly flop.
Yeah, there is some speculation on the no-fins starship - either it's a prototype for the nasa moon starship (which would need no fins as it's never going to be in the atmosphere again), or it will be a disposable one to deliver the first set of v2 starling satellites to orbit, with a better chance of success and payload as it won't have the weight of all that stuff.
The orbital tanker would likely come back, no? Just like the ships ferrying up the fuel to it. Once it's moved the fuel to the lunar ship, there's no reason to splash it in the ocean if SpaceX is already capable of landing Starships.
Upper stage has more control ability than the falcon 9. The belly flop testing proved this. They'll be able to bring it down for a controlled soft touchdown in the ocean.
What I meant is that they have one upper stage in their lot which is missing some parts, some of the important aerodynamic control surfaces for controlled reentry. But another comment suggests that while this ship could be flown soon, it probably won’t be flown on the first test. Instead, a ship with all of the control surfaces will be flown, and that one can do the bellyflop.
Depending on availability, there are a couple of NASA assets that may capture the flight of the booster and the re-entry and descent of the second stage.
> "More than days away, but hopefully not many weeks away"
I find it amusing how close this sounds to your average run-of-the-mill Early Access steam game. "Next patch will be more than days. And more than weeks. But not more than many weeks! Probably... We hope...I think"
To be fair any time Elon gives an estimate, people retcon it as a concrete promise and then bitch when things shift less than his competitors' estimates.
People need to make sure to maintain their expectations. This launch is not a failure if the rocket blows up soon after take off. They have an assembly facility built to build these vehicles quicker and quicker and every new vehicle is modified from the last.
The only thing that would be a failure is if it blows up on/near the pad and damages the facilities they've built over the last two years or so that would put another delay in the testing regime. This rocket is significantly more "slapped together" than past rockets and has been designed in a way to minimize cost as much as possible. It would be extremely surprising in fact for this flight to be a complete success.
I'd agree with this. When I need to take "look away" breaks from work, I check some of the streams focused on the SpaceX facilities in Boca Chica; so I've stayed pretty current with the happenings there and the progress with the program. I think I'd characterize the possible test launch results like this:
1) Significant failure: the rocket catastrophically fails on the pad, damaging the ground equipment significantly.
2) Program setback: the rocket clears the pad, but fails to reach Max Q and requires significant redesigns (we might see some built prototypes scrapped if that's the case) or if the ground equipment needs significant redesign or repair after launch; I exclude the addition of deluge from that since it probably won't be there for first launch, but is already planned for installation.
3) Somewhat successful: the rocket gets off the pad and fails to reach Max Q, but the failure is the result of some less fundamental issue such as valves getting stuck, etc. causing termination of the flight.
4) Success: the rocket gets past Max Q without significant issue.
5) Very successful: Ship achieves planned trajectory.
And everything thereafter is just gravy (soft landings, tiles not falling off, etc).
Though you forgot the option where the launch is scrubbed due to technical problems and nothing happens. For example, SLS launched only on its third attempt, which was associated with a delay of 2.5 months.
Not forgotten, intentionally excluded. Aborts/scrubs are almost certainly going to happen and, in the vast majority of cases, the ability to correctly identify abort/scrub a launch attempt is part of success criteria: not a failure. Failing to abort when it should have aborted ends up in one of my other categories related to failure modes.
All rockets, including those well out of their testing programs, will abort/scrub at some point. Just this past week a Falcon 9 mission out of Vandenberg AFB was automatically aborted at 3 seconds and then rescheduled a couple of times before successfully delivering its payload to orbit. I would count that a success: they didn't destroy the rocket, they didn't destroy the payload, and they got the payload to where it was suppose to go. Successful despite the abort.
The only case I can think of where an abort would indicate a failure would be if they have to pull the rocket off the OLM and do extensive modifications or redesign on something. I don't anticipate that... that kind of problem almost certainly will end in some flight anomaly rather than an on-pad abort. We could say that the SLS rollback to the VAB was this kind of failure, but it was relatively minor... they fixed some stuff that they couldn't do so at the pad, but didn't really do any significant redesign or rebuild. I don't expect that sort of scenario for Starship. Starship isn't dealing with finicky liquid hydrogen and appears to be overall much more serviceable than SLS.
If it does make it to the planned apogee, I am curious what percentage of heat shield tiles will remain attached all the way to splash. My uninformed gut tells me that this might be a problem area.
Yeah, how the heat shield holds up seems one of the most interesting topics. But they only have very limited options of investigating damages on their first attempt, since they won't recover the upper stage. So they have to rely on sensor data and possibly photo/video. More recent prototypes don't even have a heat shield anymore. The heat shield will probably come into focus when they try to recover the upper stage. But initially their focus will be on recovering the lower stage, since it has way more engines, which makes it more expensive.
For the partly reusable Starship, which will be used for orbital satellite launches well before Artemis 3. It seems they first just go for reusing the lower stage, similar to Falcon 9.
Even supposedly skeptical people are expecting too much, including the rocket exploding, and the launch attempt not being boring. More likely is a launch abort without anything interesting happening.
How is SpaceX able to undertake such incredible projects when established agencies such as Nasa cannot. I am awestruck. I feel so small compared to people who are able accomplish extraordinary things.
One difference is that spreading a NASA project to multiple contractors in multiple states makes projects much more expensive but it does insure that the project is very unlikely to be cancelled when it is time to pass a budget, which is the intent. SpaceX doesn't have that issue to deal with.
Yes this is a big part of it. NASA's budget is often micromanaged by congress.
Rather than giving them a budget of $X to accomplish goal Y, specific rocket designs and decisions are written into the budget to try to ensure facilities and contractors in various states are given a slice of the pie.
SpaceX's success has come with direct partnership with NASA, within specific projects where those inside NASA fought to run the development as an open bid for commercial services, rather than as NASA-engineered projects with work doled out to cost-plus defense industry contractors. SpaceX is not the only beneficiary of these projects, the goal is to try to cultivate multiple successful service providers that can sustain their own businesses.
There has been plenty of opposition to these commercial bid projects within congress, but the success and efficiency of these projects so far have made them hard to argue against.
NASA is part of this project. They are writing SpaceX a check to develop Starship and use it as part of the Artemis program.
NASA also wrote SpaceX checks for the development of Falcon 9, the Dragon cargo capsule for space station resupply missions, the Dragon crew capsule for space station crew missions, and various other probe and satellite launches along the way.
I think these were good contracts that benefited both organizations massively, let SpaceX survive, and let NASA contract for services without paying the entire development cost since that was shared with SpaceX's own investment and other customers.
But it's definitely not a situation that can be boiled down to SpaceX vs NASA, it's been SpaceX and NASA together since the Falcon 9 development program began.
The most coherent answer I've had when asking this before is it basically comes down to capitalist theory.
SpaceX want (and need) to deliver the best viable product to market as soon as possible, everyone involved is focused on this singular vision.
NASA will have its funding cut or expanded on a 4-8 year basis. Politicians, agencies, states and other companies will lobby to get investment in their preferred areas. Even scientists/departments/entire universities will lobby to get their personal pet projects on to a mission to further their own agendas.
Frankly im unsure how a public space program can even operate most the time.
I have heard at least one reason NASA doesn't work as well as it should is because its methods are dictated by politicians who know nothing. I think the shuttle program is the common example of this - it was selected by the VP at the time and there were a lot of detractors in the industry saying it was a bad decision. In retrospect the detractors were proven correct.
That is one of the reasons that important government projects often involve multiple contractors in multiple states; it ensures that the project won't be cut during the next budget talks. It's not efficient but it is expedient.
The development of Falcon 9, Dragon Cargo, Dragon Crew, and now Starship have all been partially funded as Government Programs.
The difference is that a faction within NASA has been fighting to run these and other projects as open-bid commercial service contracts, where NASA can provide detailed requirements but not dictate specifically where and how the vehicles are built, and this has encouraged diversity and competition in these markets.
Traditional NASA development projects (like the SLS rocket) are micromanaged by congress in the budget, where congress dictates specifics of rocket design to ensure specific contractors in specific states receive a slice of the pie in defense-industry style cost-plus contracts.
Eh? It's litterally designed to ferry people back and fourth from mars. Just because it can also launch satellites it doesn't stop it being an interplanetary vehicle.
Then the name "Planetship" would be appropriate, not "Starship". Maybe they should have kept BFR (Big Falcon Rocket), where the "F" can be interpreted creatively.
The way "starship" was used so far is that it is a spaceship which flies to the stars, that is, to other star systems, not just inside the solar system. They probably should have called it "Spaceship".
AI would likely be a first-class participant or citizen in any early human colony in space. Our perception of risk-to-civilization changes significantly for off-world events. Just like the plan to build nuclear reactors on the Moon, the threat from AI isn't deemed serious if the plan is to have AI bots on another celestial body.
If that were to play out, that would mean the demand for building the AI ecosystem would only increase, and even if it were for off-world deployment, it would still disrupt industries and economies on Earth.
This is actually a really great point. Practically speaking, the internet "lives" on Earth and the communication latency grows the further away from it you travel.
24 minutes between Earth and Mars isn't horrible (although that is a 48 minute round trip to get an answer) but if people were living in a colony then even the current generation of LLM AIs could significantly improve daily life.
AIs or Super-intelligence wiping out their creators is not a great filter (at least in the context of the fermi paradox), unless you are making the claim that ALL said AI or SI will then shutdown and not attempt to use the rest of the galaxy/universe for resources.
Maybe the IAs that destroyed civilizations were just misaligned and didn't desire to survive after the achievement of their goal? Maybe all around the universe, millions of IAs have just killed everyone and stop their execution with the return message: World peace achieved.
It's a lot easier for me to believe maybe there's an intelligence where everyone just agrees. Like maybe they have full knowledge and things just... Are.
This has been my biggest gripe with all this great filter and alien talk. It always seems people personify whatever intelligent beings are out there with human characteristics.
Why is it that they have to war? Why is it they have to have economies? Why is it they have to do anything we do here?
AIs or SIs may well have optimization functions that don't permit them past the "Destroy all humans" phase into the "Harvest resources of nearby starsystems to make more paperclips" phase - They may well reach a local maxima, be unable to proceed, and burn out long before then. I would assume that most AI with a sufficiently bad optimization function as to destroy their creators would fall into that hole.
Super Intelligence would expand at near the speed of light, reaching us extremely fast. It would be unlikely for the window of time that we have telescopes and the window that the aliens are expanding towards us to overlap.
Intelligence is consistent with the laws of physics but given our rudimentary understanding of it we have no idea if super-intelligence is. I'm defining super-intelligence as at least an order of magnitude increase in intelligence, not just "high IQ".
Intelligence is correlated with brain size, not just in humans, but also between species. No physical law prevents us from building the equivalent to a house sized brain. Perhaps not even a moon-sized brain. The only real limit seems to be mass (we don't want the whole thing collapse under its own weight) and signal delay due to the speed of light.
> No physical law prevents us from building the equivalent to a house sized brain
I think you'll find the speed of thought is much lower than the speed of light, I believe nerve impulses max out at about 120 m/s. The difficulty of supporting such a large mass of nerve tissue is also a problem. There is also the trouble of whether intelligence is purely electrically mediated or if it relies on the soup of hormones and molecular machinery of DNA and proteins for some of its functions. We also need to specifically consider the neocortex here since it is the only differentiating brain structure in animals with human intelligence. Other animals have much larger brains but no signs of human like abilities.
If you are suggesting we build an artificial brain then we need to wait at least a few more years if not decades to find out if that is possible. The current transformer models are quite advanced at language production and seem to have some simple reasoning abilities but they are very far from being intelligent.
I mean, we don't need to call our house or Moon sized AI "brain", but it seems clear that no laws of physics are preventing us from building something so intelligent that we are mere ants in comparison. The old Gods, while powerful, would pale in the light of its intelligence. A true God, hopefully a benevolent one. It doesn't seem many decades away.
Different. Super-intelligence is a plausibly reachable thing, a question of engineering. TIL is an uncertain thing, requires entirely new physics, and completely unknown tech.
while we are in the AI stack, ie they are dependent on humans for power, hardware, maintenance etc. we will be fine. when the robots can do those though...
If you turn it around, all three could also be argued to be solutions to "filters". High yield weapons ensure MAD which prevents large scale wars between superpowers which would bleed civilization until it collapsed. AI can easily accelerate technological development in areas that solve major problems holding us back. Low cost to orbit is obviously beneficial but I'm assuming that's the opposite of what you were proposing i.e. costs stay high forever which is a filter in itself.
I interpreted that to mean the opposite: an inability to leave your planet means you have little resilience to planetary-scale destructive events, and no resilience to planetary destruction. Alternatively, we're less likely to identify or recognize an intelligent civilization on a single planet, as opposed to one across multiple planets or systems.
I wonder if being multiplanetary actually makes a civilization more vulnerable rather than less? The thing about nuclear war on Earth is that it's basically unwinnable because of mutually assured destruction, and the threat of nuclear winter. Even if you win, you lose.
On the other hand, it might be a lot more possible for a civilization on one planet to win a nuclear war against a civilization on another planet. Same with bioweapons: on Earth it would be stupid to try to use an "enhanced" ebola or COVID or bird flu as a weapon because you'd infect your own people as well as your adversary. But if you're separated by a great distance, that's less of a concern.
In a way, the "dark forest" interpretation is too optimistic. The assumption is that one species will always try to destroy another independent alien species if they find one. But I wonder if it's even worse among members of the /same/ species but different cultures that are separated by a great distance.
Because additional grams in orbit are equivalent to additional joules of energy released as weaponry, e.g. dropping rocks. I fear that our ability to use space to destroy ourselves will come before we can use it to launch a diaspora.
Doesn’t rock dropping as a weapon seem a bit redundant when we already have the ability to make lots of 20+ megaton fusion bombs? I guess non-proliferation is harder.
