Starship successfully launches.....

Yep. Apollo needed learning from Gemini. Gemini needed the leaning from Mercury.

And Space X needed the knowledge from all that came before.

A better comparison on development performance would be between Space X and SLS. Or Dragon vs Orion.

Starliner on the other hand seems to be the worse combination of over spending, missed timelines, and very poor results. What is wrong with Boeing?
 
WDD said:
...A better comparison on development performance would be between Space X and SLS. Or Dragon vs Orion.

Starliner on the other hand seems to be the worse combination of over spending, missed timelines, and very poor results. What is wrong with Boeing?
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McDonnell Douglas.
 
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Katamarino said:
John Insprucker is the Chief Integration Engineer, and is on the wall of honour at the National Air and Space museum. What exactly is your definition of an amateur?
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I didn't mean to say that they ARE amateur.... clearly they are doing incredible stuff! I wrote "amateurish commentary style"...keyword style... I'm just commenting on the outward presentation of the "telecast". It was teh same or even worse a few years ago when Spacex along with Blue Origin were doing the celebrity launches...Bill Shatner and the rest...
WDD said:
Another POV is Starship vs SLS. SLS had a flawless test launch. And is decades late and 10s of billions over budget.
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I'm not so sure I would say flawless exactly.... well I guess once it finally did light, it went...so yeah, maybe so....but man what a lot of false starts! I took off work and drove down for two (or was it three?) of those. Sure do wish I could've seen it go!
Domenick said:
Wreckage all fell into the Atlantic Ocean. Given the second stage experienced a RUD only eight minutes into the flight at an altitude of 148 km (92 sm, 80 nm), it couldn't have been more than a few hundred miles offshore. The downrange distance was not displayed.

The flight plan profile was suborbital. I'm not sure if the goal was to attain orbital velocity on a suborbital flight, but the maximum speed was 24,124 kph (14,991 mph). Minimum orbital velocity for low Earth orbit is about 17,000 mph.

I too believe SpaceX will be successful.
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Being a Florida resident, I kinda wonder about them launching from TX... and shooting these things over "my house"
 
Brad W said:
Being a Florida resident, I kinda wonder about them launching from TX... and shooting these things over "my house"
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Kinda wonder about that myself, but theoretically anyone could be in the path of a truly catastrophic directional failure.
 
Flight path not over FL - if it veered that much left it would self destruct I would guess.

IMG_4122.jpeg
BTW - what is the escape plan for the eventual Starship crew? There is no escape tower, etc.
 
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As I stated earlier, I finished the Musk biography this weekend. If you really want to know the philosophy behind SpaceX, go read it

It is the antithesis of NASA and their bloated cost plus contracts. The idiot principle of making things as cheaply and simple as possible. Then you find out what you need to add back and then do that. Like the cooling beneath the rocket.

It is an amazing read, if just for that part of the book. And, Elon and his dad are pilots. He even had him a jet fighter trainer for a while
 
GaryM said:
Reboot
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Eh…….

Space shuttle had no escape system, because it was to be so reliable. Challenger proved that wrong.

A year or so ago even the ultra reliable proton and Soyuz had a failure and used its abort process.

Space flight (even Starship) is not going to be as safe as airline passenger service, or even GA.
 
I don’t know why everyone is so scared of calling it a “failure.” So typical of today’s generation they don’t want to admit something didn’t go as planned.

If I say I’m going to fly my plane from the east coast to the west coast but certain events prevent that from happening, it’s a failure. I wasn’t able to achieve my objective. The objective for the last two flight was the second stage (Starship) was suppose to go into orbit and splash down in the Pacific. Hello, they didn’t meet their ultimate objective. It’s a failure. If you don’t want to call it a failure, just proclaim your objective is to clear the tower. Anything after that is exceeding the flight plan.

And it ain’t like NASA hasn’t had failures along the way. The whole saying that NASA’s mantra was “failure is not an option” is complete BS. Failure is always an option and there were many individual failures in Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Shuttle, etc.

Having a flight failure, doesn’t mean Space X as a whole is a failure. It’s not defining for the company. It’s just a bump in the road; a learning bump.
 
WDD said:
BTW - what is the escape plan for the eventual Starship crew? There is no escape tower, etc.
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DavidWhite said:
The same fate shared by sailing captains of old
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Well...many of those sailing captains did remarkably well. The mutineers put Captain Bligh and eighteen crewmen into a 23-foot boat so heavily loaded that the gunwales were four inches above the water. They had food and fresh water for a week. He sailed them to rescue 3,600 miles, landing almost 50 days later, losing only one man on the way.

The whaling ship Essex was sunk by a sperm whale and twenty men took to a boat. The survivors spent three months at sea, but four were rescued, due to some questionable culinary decisions.

Sure, a lot of people were lost without a trace, but there are a number of cases of hardy sailors making their way home after losing their ships.

Key point is to put the survivors into a survivable environment (e.g., out of the water), then they can go ~3 days without water, ~2 weeks without food, etc.

However, this is where space differs. Survivors will need a pressurized environment or they're dead in minutes; they need fresh air as well or they're dead in hours (or less). Just not available for run-of-the-mill space travel. The Space Station keeps a "lifeboat" available, but beyond that, any other space travelers are out of luck. Sure, a launch tower/etc. may help if the disaster occurs in the first few minutes of flight, but that's a minuscule proportion of any flight. Even if they manage to stay alive, they're still facing the heat of re-entry.

Space is one case where ALL victims of a disaster have to face the Birkenhead Drill.

Ron "A damn tough bullet to chew" Wanttaja
 
Lift off and re entry are the dangerous times of space flight. Hence the escape tower and preference for the simpler blunt heat shield and parachutes vs shuttle type landing.
 
WDD said:
Eh…….

Space shuttle had no escape system, because it was to be so reliable. Challenger proved that wrong.
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What escape system would have been possible in the first phase of boost with the SRBs lit?
 
WDD said:
Lift off and re entry are the dangerous times of space flight. Hence the escape tower and preference for the simpler blunt heat shield and parachutes vs shuttle type landing.
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Lift off, re-entry, and the period in between when you're in the oxygen-deprived cold vacuum of space, lol.
 
Bob Noel said:
What escape system would have been possible in the first phase of boost with the SRBs lit?
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None, given the way it was designed. Which was the problem.

It was a marvel of engineering - but not a great design. It was not cost effective, had inherent dangers in the design , etc. which is why they went back to blunt capsules and parachutes.
 
SoonerAviator said:
Lift off, re-entry, and the period in between when you're in the oxygen-deprived cold vacuum of space, lol.
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Yep - not club med, but the losses we’ve had so far (US and Russia) have all been during launch and re entry.
 
Jeff767 said:
Based on what? The Saturn V designed 60 years ago had a 100% success rate.
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are you unfamiliar with the flight of Apollo 6? It didn’t blowed up, but solely by luck. The first stage had problems with fuel pressurization, then they lost two of the five F-1 engines. If they had been next to each other rather than across, the rocket would have tumbled. At one point, the rocket was pointed straight back at earth and eventually entered orbit backwards. But instead of an orbit at 100 miles, they entered orbit at 230 miles altitude.

I wouldn’t call that a success. Deke Slayton said if there had been people aboard, they would have fired the CM escape rocket shortly after launch.
 
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Yep - had problems. The second stage lost 2 engines. One engine started to have problems, and computer commands a shutdown. But they had installed the control cables wrong - and the shutdown command went to another engine - which was working perfectly. The failing engine eventually stopped working as well.
 
WDD said:
Yep - not club med, but the losses we’ve had so far (US and Russia) have all been during launch and re entry.
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And as you say..."So far." We've had dramatic TV on a couple, but so far no live video from space as astronauts realize they're stuck up there. When THAT eventually happens, you're going to see a media circus that overshadows any that had gone before.

Ron Wanttaja
 
WDD said:
None, given the way it was designed. Which was the problem.

It was a marvel of engineering - but not a great design. It was not cost effective, had inherent dangers in the design , etc. which is why they went back to blunt capsules and parachutes.
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Think back to why NASA went with SRBs in the first place. The SRBs wouldn't have been needed in they were able to get sufficient thrust from the Shuttle's main engines. And less thrust would have been needed if the Shuttle was lighter - but in order to get funding there needed to be let's say extra stuff on board the shuttle in order to satisify non-civilian mission needs.

And there was schedule pressure but the money idiots in congress "saved" money by stretching out the funding over additional years without increaseing the total.

It wasn't like the engineers started out to use SRBs.
 
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Velocity173 said:
I don’t know why everyone is so scared of calling it a “failure.” So typical of today’s generation they don’t want to admit something didn’t go as planned.
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By today's generation you mean boomers right? Because the Millenials (who are today's aerospace engineers btw) are saying it's all part of the process.
 
The entire shuttle program is a great lesson for management MBA classes. It was for mine.

Mission Creep. The process became the priority over the objective. Key focus was really supposed to be a large space station. Shuttle was just supposed to be a way to get there. Then cancelled space station, but momentum on space shuttle build was already in place. Then as you said DOD wanted it bigger. Money was cut so they added SRBs instead of …….

Development by Bean Counters: As Bob said, it actually got more expensive because of underfunding and development became a mess.
 
Mtns2Skies said:
By today's generation you mean boomers right? Because the Millenials (who are today's aerospace engineers btw) are saying it's all part of the process.
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I don’t know, no specific generation I guess. Just people today in general. The article linked said it was part of the process but failed to call it what it was…a failure. It’s almost like they don’t want that word to creep into their psyche. As if it’s deemed a failure, then they’re a failure.
 
Velocity173 said:
I don’t know, no specific generation I guess. Just people today in general. The article linked said it was part of the process but failed to call it what it was…a failure. It’s almost like they don’t want that word to creep into their psyche. As if it’s deemed a failure, then they’re a failure.
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I think you may be oversimplifying a touch and maybe putting a bit too much emphasis on a word. What matters is data and moving forward. Who gives a **** what anyone calls it?
 
Mtns2Skies said:
I think you may be oversimplifying a touch and maybe putting a bit too much emphasis on a word. What matters is data and moving forward. Who gives a **** what anyone calls it?
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I’m doing the exact opposite. The person (Eric Berger) who wrote the article is putting too much emphasis on a word. Obviously he has a problem with it because he refers to them as so-called “doubters.”
 
Q: for this latest installment of As the Rocket Burns, what was the predetermined measure of success?
 
TCABM said:
Q: for this latest installment of As the Rocket Burns, what was the predetermined measure of success?
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Getting into orbit and splashing down into the Pacific. Anything less is a FAILURE! :biggrin: Oh, and both stages have to be recovered without significant damage. ;)
 
The first stage apparently suffered unported fuel inlets, with subsequent engine failures, and was coming apart before the FTS was initiated. This problem showed up with early Starship low altitude testing, and they seem to have had it fixed, but it had not been tested on the booster.
The second stage lost telemetry, so it autodestructed, as the rules dictate. It may have been fine, or hit a Chinese weather balloon. SpaceX knows more than we do, and they are fairly open about it.
 
TCABM said:
Q: for this latest installment of As the Rocket Burns, what was the predetermined measure of success?
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A major goal was making through staging to test the new hot-staging method, which was flying for the first time.

These are test flights. The goal of test flights is to find out what works and what doesn't. It is the same method that was used in the development of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9. They both had incomplete test launches/landings during the testing phase. There are a few good video compilations of the RUD events during those test flights on YouTube. Their operational results with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are excellent. Their process works.

Both vehicles were going to end up in the ocean, even if all test adjectives were accomplished. There was no intention of reusing any components.
 
Slightly off topic but along the lines of RUD, just got done watching The Challenger Disaster (2013). I had already seen the other one produced last year but this one was centered on The Rogers Commission. While the acting isn’t the best in the 2022 one, both movies give good insights to the pressures to launch. Also demonstrate the disconnect between the engineers and management.
 
What is the point and advantage to "hot-staging"?
Maintenance of forward acceleration?
 
Domenick said:
What is the point and advantage to "hot-staging"?
Maintenance of forward acceleration?
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My understanding is that's basically right. SpaceX stated that they predict a 10% increase in maximum payload to orbit by using hot staging.
 
There needs to be some way to settle the liquid fuel to make sure the pumps don't suck air...

It's my understanding that small solid rocket motors have been used after separation.

But I'm not a rocket scientist...
 
Bob Noel said:
There needs to be some way to settle the liquid fuel to make sure the pumps don't suck air....
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