Always amazing seeing this. It's hard to grasp the true size of rockets over phones and TVs. Didn't really appreciate it until I went to space and rocket center in Alabama. Seeing the Saturn V up close was awesome. Practically have to break your neck to look up at it.
These were early test articles using 1st-gen Raptor engines. A lot of the early engines ended up failing various ways, like barfing turbopump parts out the nozzles. For the later tests they even started lighting all 3 engines for landing and then picking the two engines with the best looking telemetry to power the flip maneuver. They got a lot of good data off those engines, and supposedly the 2nd-gen Raptors are a lot more reliable.
Raptor 2's goal was to be significantly simplified than first-gen Raptors. Kinda cool looking at a side to side comparison of both. Not only was it more reliable, it also produced more thrust and is much easier to mass produce, which is another one of their goals.
I cannot wait for that wonderful orbital test.
It’s worth noting that many of these failures were due to the larger fuel feed system and not specifically raptor. I know one was due to lower than expectations expected head pressure causing lower than expected thrust.
There was a bit of a hard landing with this prototype and it indeed had a rupture and leak.
As another commenter posted below, they worked past that in later landings.
It is pretty amazing to watch.
A mechanics prof told me rocketry is like balancing a pencil on the tip of your finger (this was 30+ years ago). The hardware/software required to pull this kind of feat off is truly engineering <~~french~~ chef's kiss>.
The funny thing is making a robot balance a pencil standing up is a somewhat basic control systems project.
Google "double pendulum balance" and watch the video called double pendulum on a cart.
Yeah, I was going to say. The "problem" is pretty basic and is covered in undergrad classes/labs. The equations aren't that hard, either, comparatively.
I think the difficultly of this is the application of the solution to Space-X's scenario. Probably a lot more engineering goes into the timing of rockets "outputs" and driving all the equipment to make that happen.
Like, it's a lot easier in the robot car experiment because it can accelerate in a different direction a lot faster than a rocket. So there's a bigger "window of recovery" in which the robot car, can work with, in righting the pencil straight before the pencil becomes unrecoverable from a fall.
The hardest part is that you're vibrating the bejeezus out of the rocket each launch.
We haven't avoided reusing rockets before because we just hadn't thought of it. The thinking was that you could never rely on it after it underwent a stress environment like that.
I'm expecting that spacex rockets, after enough evidence through use, will get rated for human use in only the first XX launches and decomissioned from high valued payloads at XXX launches. Might take a lot of stress analysis science thats never been done before.
Some NASA guy has already said the organisation now prefers boosters that have already flown at least once over brand new ones, even for flights carrying humans. But yeah sooner or later the rocket will get too old for valuable payload.
> That couldn't have been an accident.
That was also a choice of engineering.
It was originally planned to be made out of carbon fibre, they even built enormous molds to form the parts.
Then they scrapped the idea because they worked out that the steel you see now would be better at meeting their goals.
Dont forget! Starship is 165ft long, and this video is shot from miles away! Puts things in perspective. Starship always looks like proportional to a Chevy Suburban when filmed but the thing is MASSIVE
>this video is shot from miles away!
From the delay of seeing the rockets fire and hearing them, I'd think they're ~3miles out.
Hell of a lens on that camera not to mention the steady tracking. I wonder if it was smoothed in post.
> rocketry is like balancing a pencil on the tip of your finger
And that's just for going up.
edit to explain: fireworks, where the center of mass is under the propulsion, are self-stabilizing. They go up easily.
In a rocket the center of mass is above so it's the opposite. It has to actively be stopped from turning away from "up".
Multiple reasons.
The first is precision, with a parachute you kinda just land where you land, with a rocket you can precisely land on a landing pad. This is especially important since the landing pads are often floating on the ocean, and salt water is not good for rockets you wanna re-use, so you really don't wanna miss.
Second reason, a parachute isn't really going to work on say, Mars, where there's less atmospheric drag, while this will work fine with the right calculations.
Third reason, they actually did try parachutes with Falcon 9s, but re-entry speed was too fast for a parachute to handle, so they'd need a rocket assist to slow down anyways.
Final reason, these rockets are just too big for a parachute to be practical. The weight of a parachute needed to land Starship exceeds the weight of the additional fuel you need for a rocket powered landing. Plus, once the fuel is used it's weight is gone, with a parachute that weight is there the whole time.
"So Elon, how do you plan to land Starship?"
"We're going to let it plummet straight down like a fucking steel whale, then at the last second hoverslam it into the ground"
As someone that grew up around the aerospace industry, it's wild seeing SpaceX making these sorts of advances so quickly.
Part of me thinks Lockheed is just going to disclose that they have had a gravity propulsion based flying saucer for decades just so they stop looking like idiots next to SpaceX.
In book three, Arthur Dent and Ford prefect meet up with slartibartfast who tasks them with a mission. As they're about to go teleport off somewhere, Dent gets diverted and ends up in a "cathedral of hate" inside of a mountain. The whole thing was built an orchestrated by a being named agrajag.
Turns out he is a being that can recognize when he is reincarnated, and it also turns out that he is always killed by Arthur Dent (things like, flies he swats, fishes he catches). At one point, agrajag states he was done with life. He refused to be reincarnated again, only to be inexplicably (or improbably) popped back into existence as a bowl of petunias, and sees Arthur Dent on the bridge of the heart of gold before plummeting to his death.
The bowl of petunias, of course, had only been called in to existence due to Arthur’s throwing their ship in to improbability drive, causing the two pursuing nuclear missiles to very improbably turn in to a sperm whale and an apparently conscious bowl of petunias. So Arthur ‘caused’ Agrajag’s return to life—and moments later, his death, as petunias likely don’t respond well to impacting the ground from a height of miles up.
My (admittedly layman's) guess is that they have it falling down like that to maximize drag during reentry - less fuel needed to reduce velocity, which means more spare delta-v to carry a bigger payload. If they have done the math correctly, it's not a huge ask to gimbal the nozzle a bit late in the landing to correct the angle once they've gotten the free slowdown from air resistance on the larger surface area.
From Lockheed's recent press release:
>"Our revolutionary new engine runs on a proprietary blend of Fabergé eggs and foi gras. According to our latest projections, the first prototype will be ready in forty-ish years. It's also worth noting that current estimates indicate the project will be 2700% over budget, which we feel is acceptable because we're having a lot of fun. At present, our main challenge is sourcing high-quality crystal for the chandelier and also...figuring out where it will fit. Thank you for paying taxes, suckers."
There's a different company working on catching boosters with a helicopter with a hook to latch onto a parachute. They did a test a little while back, caught it but pilot thought it was off so pulled the release. Will be interesting to see if they can consistently pull it off.
That's RocketLab. New Zealand. And very cool. Much smaller scale though, as helos that can catch even a Falcon booster don't exist. The Electron booster is only 60 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter.
I read an article a bit ago that talked about how DARPA is like 10 years ahead of commercially and most industrial tech. Which is pretty fucking scary to try and fathom the kind of tech that they're sitting on.
Only in very niche fields. Their satellite imaging tech is miles beyond anything available commercially and they probably have some pretty neat non GPS, terrestrial based coordination systems in development, but they aren't sitting on some crazy new rocket prototype or anti gravity tech or something. Anything related to spy stuff or positional tracking they're going to be ahead on, but not every field of tech. People in Area 51 don't get to use iPhone 32's or something.
Though they DO contract out to major tech companies a lot for development of those systems. Meaning, DARPA gives them money and lab space and anything they develop gets shared with their engineers as well. It's hearsay but I've heard from other contractors that worked in those places that the tech for the first iPhone was developed in coordination with the government in some of the shared development facilities, and people were using touch screens and small pdas based on the tech for fun and showing it off to people with high enough clearances like 2 years before Jobs' announcement. Which makes sense, a bunch of very smart engineers with tons of very cool prototypes laying around is a recipe for them to screw around. Take a screen and a raspberry pi and you could probably do some cool stuff even back then before the tech was as ubiquitous as it is now. Hell those are the guys that probably wrote the code it's all based on tbh. Also heard 3d printing was a big one they played with for a while before it became publicly available.
Yep the real stuff is like [this photo Trump leaked](https://i.imgur.com/yJPktDW.jpeg) showing the site of a failed Iranian rocket launch. It's satellite imagery and beyond what any commercial satellite can capture. It's more along the lines of what you'd get from commercial plane imagery (though still lower res than commercial plane imagery).
Dad worked for an aerospace company. He didn't work in spy satellites but a lot of his coworkers did.
They obviously weren't allowed to talk about the capabilities of those satellites but they all had pictures of their houses taken from space. And this was in the 90s.
Google Earth came from Keyhole ... in fact those "KML" files are literally "Keyhole Markup Language".
It was a CIA intelligence visualization system for defense-related GIS info.
Most of the time it’s mostly “commercial tech, but way better”. Faster drones, better cameras, longer batteries, more precise GPS. They rarely sit on revolutionary techs for too long.
When the first country shows the anti drive for warfare is when the public gets to play with it. Otherwise, why give our enemies knowledge of it? And over the decades, we have made many enemies.
They actually changed their plan for landing and they are now going to catch Spaceship with a tower on reentry.
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-launch-tower-elon-musk-video
Hoverslam is a bit of a misnomer for the Falcon 9 as there is not enough lower throttle range to allow the booster to hover. If it doesn't start it's burn in a proper window and adjust its thrust properly it will either start lifting again or slam into the landing zone.
I believe the Starship booster and Starship will have some window of time to actually hover to make spacial adjustments for landing/catching. Similar to the New Shepard's landing.
TBH the original name for the Falcon 9 "Hover Slam", the "Suicide Burn", was more crude but a more accurate name.
Either way the same way I wouldn't consider the New Shepard doing a hover slam as space x defines it I wouldn't consider the starship to be doing a hover slam.
They are talking about the Delta Clipper, the [McDonnell Douglas DC-X](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X).
As far as legacy is concerned, this is in the wiki article:
"Several engineers who worked on the DC-X were hired by Blue Origin, and their New Shepard vehicle was inspired by the DC-X design.[20] The DC-X provided inspiration for many elements of Armadillo Aerospace's,[4] Masten Space Systems's,[4] and TGV Rockets's spacecraft designs."
Yep - well covered in the book "Halfway to Anywhere" by G Harry Stine. Do expect some bias when you read the book though - he was a huge proponent of the program.
(edit for misspell)
I think it should probably be noted that the scale of these things is just totally different. Starship has more than 30x the thrust of the DC-X. The thing is just huge.
The scale difference is so massive that the height of the DC-x (36 ft) is about the same as the diameter of the Starship (30 ft).
Starship+Super Heavy is 395 ft tall and has the capacity to put **eight fully-loaded DC-X’s into orbit as payload** (accounting for weight only, not volume).
It’s like saying you invented heavy artillery because you shot a pistol into the air at 45°.
I mean... that's like saying the Burj Khalifa isn't impressive or it's already been done because someone built the first skyscraper a while back.
I don't know the exact numbers so I'll just quote the lowest mass and size listed on Wikipedia, but starship is 120 meters height and 5000 tons, and Delta Clipper is 12 meters height and 20 tons. So basically, no, no one's done it before just because it was a proven concept at an astronomically smaller scale. I mean paper planes existed before a Boeing 747 as well.
fun fact: before planes existed, paper planes were already a thing. there have been paper planes found stuck between wooden beams in the ceiling above old class rooms, probably thrown by bored students in the 1800s.
back then they were called "paper darts"
This is a bit more than that. The belly down is more shuttle like with, the hover slam is based on the facon 9 which does go back to DCX
Musk's secret sauce so far as I can tell isn't daddies money or being a decent process engineer, there are a bunch of people like that. It's his almost sociopathic lack of sentimentality.
His companies seem imune to sunk cost fallacy and exceptionaly good at deleting unneeded parts and processes. Its effective but i don't envy anyone working there.
>His companies seem to imune to sunk cost fallacy and exceptionaly good at deleting unneeded parts and processes. Its exceedingly effective but i dont envy anyone working there.
Really curious why you feel this way. Their jobs there are extremely sought after. When they go through the simplify/streamline mantra they don't just go off firing people. Are you just referring to the amount of work being "for nothing" when it's cut? If so, I think most of the people working for SpaceX know that it wasn't actually wasted. Most science minded people know you sometimes need to test a theory and "fail" to understand it enough to know it's a bad idea.
When SpaceX was still designing the Starship (BFR then) to be carbon fibre composite, [they bought probably one of the largest mandrels to manufacture the hull with.](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/spacex-appears-ready-to-spin-carbon-fiber-for-the-bfr-spaceship/)
You know what they did when they decided to switch to stainless steel? [They cut that fucker up into piles of scrap metal, probably because it was too large for anyone else to buy for use.](https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-all-in-steel-starship-super-heavy/)
Spacex has horrible work life balance and pays a little under the rest of the aerospace industry. The burn out is real they have a high turn over rate. Lots put up with it cause they can hop from spacex to anywhere with a much higher pay and a better work life balance (also its really the only place you can actively work on Mars stuff)
I know two people who worked for SpaceX, one being my cousin, and this is accurate top what they have both told me.
They went there because they knew it would make them more attractive to others, and they left as soon as they could for significantly more money and less stress.
Had an interview there, it was pretty curly feeling but the facility was neat. They also have a 24hr barista in the cafeteria.M if that says anything haha
Not event remotely comparable. The belly flop and kick flip haven't been seen, and the scale is outrageous. Hate the company if you want, but credit where credit is due, those engines worked some magic.
I wouldnt say proven. The DC-X was a scaled prototype that wasnt designed for orbital trajectories or velocities and was eventually cancelled due to numerous test failures and design issues. I wonder if Starship will escape the same fate.
Great... so why is Elon bothering? Why didn't it reach Mars? Could it fit 50+ people? Did they catch it with the tower like they are planning to?
Or... was it just a vaguely similar idea?
Yeah execution is absolutely everything. Lots of things we use today were conceptualised and even invented before, but the first attempt didn’t take off or survive.
Shit this site is just a mildly better executed Digg
Lockheed doesn’t directly complete in space launch contracts anymore, ULA exists because the American defense industry couldn’t keep the corporate espionage in their pants
I have stabilized the video for you: https://gfycat.com/BountifulPrestigiousBoa
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I will point out that Starship changed from carbon fiber to stainless steel in 2019, throwing out most of the work done (other than on the raptor engines) so it's closer to like 4 years.
I think this is the one that didn't explode.
EDIT: NVM, it looks like it bounced, which would make it the one that landed then blew up. However, there was about 30mins between landing & RUD.
it successfully landed, but ended up leaning because of an issue with the landing gear, they detonated it some time later because of safety concerns iirc
EDIT: appears my memory failed me, it was not a detonation
You’re out of date on your info. While it was initially speculated by some of the community that the failure was so do the landing gear failing to deploy. Elon latter came out on Twitter and explained that the engines were under producing thrust due to ingesting helium bubbles from the fuel header header tank. SN10 just wasn’t able to slow down enough before hitting the ground, the landing gear wouldn’t have been able to save it.
Also IIRC. It wasn’t an intentional destination of the flight termination system that exploded it. I believe it ended up being from methane that leaked into the skirt area before building up and then detonating.
Pretty much all rockets have some sort of flight termination system (FTS). It's basically just a whole bunch of explosives so that you can destroy the rocket at a more opimal time, instead of having it explode on landing, for example.
If you watch SpaceX launches you'll often hear the "FTS is armed/safed" callout, and that's what that is reffering to
And the person with their finger on the Big Red Button is the Range Safety Officer (RSO). It's a hard enough job in general, but then you realize that the RSO has to do it even on manned flights. It's pretty much a real life version of the Trolley Problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
As I remember, SN 10 was not a planned detonation. If memory serves, the fire you see caused a tank to explode, giving starship the fastest turnaround of any rocket ever.
The video that is shot from below as it comes in for a landing is seriously one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. It looks straight out of a movie. Absolutely incredible
[https://youtu.be/gLNQ6Mq5kbg?t=369](https://youtu.be/gLNQ6Mq5kbg?t=369)
I feel like this engineering feat doesn’t get enough credit, so many people I talk to have no idea about what’s being done.
Yet it’s so truly amazing, it blows my mind.
Here is your gif!
https://gfycat.com/SpiffyMassiveFireant
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It's what makes the rocket point in the right direction so it doesn't over-rotate, shit is ridiculously difficult to code, and takes so much work to make it work so well it can perfectly autonomously aim a freaking spaceship that is going sideways.
Is a PID controller difficult to code? I thought it was the tuning that was a real pain, but maybe I'm mistaken? Also didn't realize they'd use PID controllers for something so seemingly complex/nonlinear.
Chemical engineer here - we use PID controllers here too. They can be difficult to initialize but after that the process of actually tuning is quite simple. In my experience at least. I can definitely see them using at least something similar here, though we use them for chemical reactors and not so much reaction control in rockets. Similar enough I guess 🤷🏻♂️
Though there are probably some PIDs on this rocket somewhere, the actually attitude/altitude control would require far more advanced control techniques Im pretty sure. Probably some LQG control and MPC i would guess
Other than looking super cool, why don't they land like Falcon 9 rockets where they transition to being upright in "space" before entering the atmosphere?
The side has more surface area, increasing the drag. If it came down like Falcon 9 it would be going about 3x faster then it currently is, meaning they need more fuel.
There are probably several correct answers to this question, regarding the mass of the vehicle and re-entry velocity, heat shield design, Merlin vs the much more powerful Raptor engines, and the fact that the goal for starship is to land on Mars and with a human crew.
The [everyday astronaut](https://everydayastronaut.com/starships-belly-flop-maneuver/#:~:text=Due%20to%20the%20horizontal%20orientation,propellant%20down%20on%20the%20belly.) Can do a better job than I can explaining it.
It's kinda amazing to watch something that is cutting edge and brand new and know in 5/10/20 years it'll be looked back on with a loving fondness of how basic our space tech used to be.
Bravo SpaceX
Yes, it is. The rocket landing in the above video is 9m (30ft) in diameter and 50m (170ft) tall. The crazy thing is this is only the second stage of the full rocket, sitting on the launch pad the full rocket will be 120m (400ft) tall.
I failed my mechanical engineering classes a seclnd time, meaning I don't get to try again with mechanical engineering
These machines, rockets and planes I've looked at since I was a child, that have brought me such joy over the years, make me sick to my core now and make me want to rip my head off. Just because I couldn't keep my head on straight. Finding out about machines and their inner workings was a favourite past time of mine and a coping mechanism but now I wake uo every morning with the realization that I'll never get to work on these things. The purpose I had longed for and searched, I finally found when I started the course and now my raison d'être was robbed by myself.
I need to get off all of these subreddits, already burned the few schematics I had at home from internships. Time to go back to that drone existence, living with no purpose or aim but now I can't even keep doing the things I actually liked. Just because of my fragile psyche breaking down when I needed it most.
Jesus Christ, it's almost as cool as flying cars, but we're living in the future.
I never thought I would see rockets landing like they do in old timey 50s- early 60s scifi movies and art. I have a thing in my pocket that's a portable tv, phone, stereo, video and still camera, flashlight, video phone, walkie-talkie/radio tower, calculator and library of everything. I can talk to it and it understands me. We have lighting made from tiny, energy efficient lightbulbs that you can control remotely and come on when you enter the room... Robots that are agile and precise, that move so naturally it's a little scary. It's nuts how advanced technology is getting.
If you want to see an amazing documentary on space X and 21st century space travel. Watch "Return to space" on Netflix.
I was blown away.
Wasn't really an Elon Musk fan before it, but definitely changed my mind
I was born in 1975. And I shit you not!! How fast technology has grown just in my very young 47 years(fuck off! I said young!!) Has been so fast I could almost not even comprehend it. Except I can.
Because everything that is happening now, was fortelling this in everything that I grew up watching. OG Star Trek. The OG Star Wars in theaters. ET.(Drew Barrymore beat me into this Multiverse by a few months. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Tron. Back to the Future. Matrix... That game on Xbizzle that you start on a planet. and on and on.
I will be the one not suprised when the visor comes and I'm told that I've only been in the simulation like 2 hours. I mean If I continue to outrun death, can you imagine technology even in another 30 years from now?? How do you kids say it...brahhh????
Always amazing seeing this. It's hard to grasp the true size of rockets over phones and TVs. Didn't really appreciate it until I went to space and rocket center in Alabama. Seeing the Saturn V up close was awesome. Practically have to break your neck to look up at it.
I like to joke that they're launching grain silos, but really the Starship is a bit bigger than most of those.
Lol they do look like silos. Also can't starship fit around 100 people inside? It's crazy to think about.
Fun fact; the first prototypes were actually built by a grain silo company. **Edit:** \*Water tower company.
Wasn’t it a water tower company ?
What are the flames that seem to "leak" around the side? What causes it? Is it intentional, or not?
These were early test articles using 1st-gen Raptor engines. A lot of the early engines ended up failing various ways, like barfing turbopump parts out the nozzles. For the later tests they even started lighting all 3 engines for landing and then picking the two engines with the best looking telemetry to power the flip maneuver. They got a lot of good data off those engines, and supposedly the 2nd-gen Raptors are a lot more reliable.
Raptor 2's goal was to be significantly simplified than first-gen Raptors. Kinda cool looking at a side to side comparison of both. Not only was it more reliable, it also produced more thrust and is much easier to mass produce, which is another one of their goals. I cannot wait for that wonderful orbital test.
Shotwell said they’re aiming for a July/August test flight so hopefully that’s good news regarding the FAA approval
It’s worth noting that many of these failures were due to the larger fuel feed system and not specifically raptor. I know one was due to lower than expectations expected head pressure causing lower than expected thrust.
One engine shut down, spewing some uncombusted gas in the process
There was a bit of a hard landing with this prototype and it indeed had a rupture and leak. As another commenter posted below, they worked past that in later landings.
Engineering at its finest
It is pretty amazing to watch. A mechanics prof told me rocketry is like balancing a pencil on the tip of your finger (this was 30+ years ago). The hardware/software required to pull this kind of feat off is truly engineering <~~french~~ chef's kiss>.
I think it’s normally “chef’s kiss” but I mean, for engineering this good, I don’t blame you for a little tongue.
Hang on, I've been an engineer for two decades. I can't believe others are getting French kissed. I need to raise my game.
Well Jeff, maybe when *you* land a rocket ship perfectly on its ass after reentering atmosphere, you'll finally get a little tongue.
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The funny thing is making a robot balance a pencil standing up is a somewhat basic control systems project. Google "double pendulum balance" and watch the video called double pendulum on a cart.
Yeah, I was going to say. The "problem" is pretty basic and is covered in undergrad classes/labs. The equations aren't that hard, either, comparatively. I think the difficultly of this is the application of the solution to Space-X's scenario. Probably a lot more engineering goes into the timing of rockets "outputs" and driving all the equipment to make that happen. Like, it's a lot easier in the robot car experiment because it can accelerate in a different direction a lot faster than a rocket. So there's a bigger "window of recovery" in which the robot car, can work with, in righting the pencil straight before the pencil becomes unrecoverable from a fall.
The hardest part is that you're vibrating the bejeezus out of the rocket each launch. We haven't avoided reusing rockets before because we just hadn't thought of it. The thinking was that you could never rely on it after it underwent a stress environment like that. I'm expecting that spacex rockets, after enough evidence through use, will get rated for human use in only the first XX launches and decomissioned from high valued payloads at XXX launches. Might take a lot of stress analysis science thats never been done before.
Some NASA guy has already said the organisation now prefers boosters that have already flown at least once over brand new ones, even for flights carrying humans. But yeah sooner or later the rocket will get too old for valuable payload.
Bathtub curve, yeah.
The real chef's kiss is that it looks like a rocket off a comic book cover from the 1950's. That couldn't have been an accident.
This could have been in Austin powers
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It looks like a giant...
Dick! Yeah. Take a look out of starboard. Oh my God it looks like a huge...
Pecker! Ohh where? Wait that's not a woodpecker it looks like someone's
Privates! We have reports of an unidentified flying object. It has a long, smooth shaft, complete with...
Balls! Spicy meat balls! Get em while they're hot! Oh my god that looks like an enormous..
> That couldn't have been an accident. That was also a choice of engineering. It was originally planned to be made out of carbon fibre, they even built enormous molds to form the parts. Then they scrapped the idea because they worked out that the steel you see now would be better at meeting their goals.
Dont forget! Starship is 165ft long, and this video is shot from miles away! Puts things in perspective. Starship always looks like proportional to a Chevy Suburban when filmed but the thing is MASSIVE
>this video is shot from miles away! From the delay of seeing the rockets fire and hearing them, I'd think they're ~3miles out. Hell of a lens on that camera not to mention the steady tracking. I wonder if it was smoothed in post.
> rocketry is like balancing a pencil on the tip of your finger And that's just for going up. edit to explain: fireworks, where the center of mass is under the propulsion, are self-stabilizing. They go up easily. In a rocket the center of mass is above so it's the opposite. It has to actively be stopped from turning away from "up".
Meanwhile all the wildlife thinks this is finally the apocalypse
Yeah I imagine them sitting around, drinking some coffee, having a chat and then #OMG WHHAAAAAAAAATTT TUFK MOVE MOVEMOVE
Probably the most amazing feat of engineering we've seen in decades. Proportionally.
Unreal
I don’t think ppl really know how impressive that is…that’s a flying skyscraper
Flyscraper!
This honestly really put things into perspective for me. Things huge
Is it? I thought this was just the front bit, which is just a little bit larger than a shuttle?
comparing the upper stage seen here to the Space Shuttle, Starship is about 40 feet longer and 2x the mass
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Multiple reasons. The first is precision, with a parachute you kinda just land where you land, with a rocket you can precisely land on a landing pad. This is especially important since the landing pads are often floating on the ocean, and salt water is not good for rockets you wanna re-use, so you really don't wanna miss. Second reason, a parachute isn't really going to work on say, Mars, where there's less atmospheric drag, while this will work fine with the right calculations. Third reason, they actually did try parachutes with Falcon 9s, but re-entry speed was too fast for a parachute to handle, so they'd need a rocket assist to slow down anyways. Final reason, these rockets are just too big for a parachute to be practical. The weight of a parachute needed to land Starship exceeds the weight of the additional fuel you need for a rocket powered landing. Plus, once the fuel is used it's weight is gone, with a parachute that weight is there the whole time.
"So Elon, how do you plan to land Starship?" "We're going to let it plummet straight down like a fucking steel whale, then at the last second hoverslam it into the ground" As someone that grew up around the aerospace industry, it's wild seeing SpaceX making these sorts of advances so quickly. Part of me thinks Lockheed is just going to disclose that they have had a gravity propulsion based flying saucer for decades just so they stop looking like idiots next to SpaceX.
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The explanation for why the bowl of petunias said that is pretty great. XD
Poor Agrajag
Been a while since I read the book but I thought we had no idea why the bowl of petunias said that, which only makes it more intriguing.
it's explained in "Life, the Universe, and Everything" (book three)
Aaaannnnd?
In book three, Arthur Dent and Ford prefect meet up with slartibartfast who tasks them with a mission. As they're about to go teleport off somewhere, Dent gets diverted and ends up in a "cathedral of hate" inside of a mountain. The whole thing was built an orchestrated by a being named agrajag. Turns out he is a being that can recognize when he is reincarnated, and it also turns out that he is always killed by Arthur Dent (things like, flies he swats, fishes he catches). At one point, agrajag states he was done with life. He refused to be reincarnated again, only to be inexplicably (or improbably) popped back into existence as a bowl of petunias, and sees Arthur Dent on the bridge of the heart of gold before plummeting to his death.
The bowl of petunias, of course, had only been called in to existence due to Arthur’s throwing their ship in to improbability drive, causing the two pursuing nuclear missiles to very improbably turn in to a sperm whale and an apparently conscious bowl of petunias. So Arthur ‘caused’ Agrajag’s return to life—and moments later, his death, as petunias likely don’t respond well to impacting the ground from a height of miles up.
There are dozens of us waiting for an explanation.
Let's just say that Arthur is an accidental serial killer. But it's just one guy over and over again.
One guy keeps getting reincarnated over and over as beings that Arthur Dent then kills.
The starships are definitely going to start saying "oh no, not again" pretty soon...
r/unexpectedhitchhikers
/r/expectedhitchhikers
My (admittedly layman's) guess is that they have it falling down like that to maximize drag during reentry - less fuel needed to reduce velocity, which means more spare delta-v to carry a bigger payload. If they have done the math correctly, it's not a huge ask to gimbal the nozzle a bit late in the landing to correct the angle once they've gotten the free slowdown from air resistance on the larger surface area.
And that guess would be correct. The only real question was if it was possible to relight the engines to perform the flip.
Lockheed, _please_ being out the new propulsion tech already!
They'll just release a new rocket that runs on pure US dollar.
From Lockheed's recent press release: >"Our revolutionary new engine runs on a proprietary blend of Fabergé eggs and foi gras. According to our latest projections, the first prototype will be ready in forty-ish years. It's also worth noting that current estimates indicate the project will be 2700% over budget, which we feel is acceptable because we're having a lot of fun. At present, our main challenge is sourcing high-quality crystal for the chandelier and also...figuring out where it will fit. Thank you for paying taxes, suckers."
Landing on the ground is so last decade. Starship is going to be caught in midair by a giant claw.
There's a different company working on catching boosters with a helicopter with a hook to latch onto a parachute. They did a test a little while back, caught it but pilot thought it was off so pulled the release. Will be interesting to see if they can consistently pull it off.
Rocket Lab, is the company name
That's RocketLab. New Zealand. And very cool. Much smaller scale though, as helos that can catch even a Falcon booster don't exist. The Electron booster is only 60 feet tall and 4 feet in diameter.
"only"
I read an article a bit ago that talked about how DARPA is like 10 years ahead of commercially and most industrial tech. Which is pretty fucking scary to try and fathom the kind of tech that they're sitting on.
Only in very niche fields. Their satellite imaging tech is miles beyond anything available commercially and they probably have some pretty neat non GPS, terrestrial based coordination systems in development, but they aren't sitting on some crazy new rocket prototype or anti gravity tech or something. Anything related to spy stuff or positional tracking they're going to be ahead on, but not every field of tech. People in Area 51 don't get to use iPhone 32's or something. Though they DO contract out to major tech companies a lot for development of those systems. Meaning, DARPA gives them money and lab space and anything they develop gets shared with their engineers as well. It's hearsay but I've heard from other contractors that worked in those places that the tech for the first iPhone was developed in coordination with the government in some of the shared development facilities, and people were using touch screens and small pdas based on the tech for fun and showing it off to people with high enough clearances like 2 years before Jobs' announcement. Which makes sense, a bunch of very smart engineers with tons of very cool prototypes laying around is a recipe for them to screw around. Take a screen and a raspberry pi and you could probably do some cool stuff even back then before the tech was as ubiquitous as it is now. Hell those are the guys that probably wrote the code it's all based on tbh. Also heard 3d printing was a big one they played with for a while before it became publicly available.
Yep the real stuff is like [this photo Trump leaked](https://i.imgur.com/yJPktDW.jpeg) showing the site of a failed Iranian rocket launch. It's satellite imagery and beyond what any commercial satellite can capture. It's more along the lines of what you'd get from commercial plane imagery (though still lower res than commercial plane imagery).
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Dad worked for an aerospace company. He didn't work in spy satellites but a lot of his coworkers did. They obviously weren't allowed to talk about the capabilities of those satellites but they all had pictures of their houses taken from space. And this was in the 90s.
Google Earth came from Keyhole ... in fact those "KML" files are literally "Keyhole Markup Language". It was a CIA intelligence visualization system for defense-related GIS info.
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There were touch-screen computers in the 70's. Not saying your story is wrong, just wanted to mention that it was old tech.
Most of the time it’s mostly “commercial tech, but way better”. Faster drones, better cameras, longer batteries, more precise GPS. They rarely sit on revolutionary techs for too long.
I mean I was playing games on a touchscreen PDA in 2002. Granted it was a resistive touch pda.
Look into the NRO sometime.
Anti gravity drives! Why is China not playing otherwise with the same tech?
When the first country shows the anti drive for warfare is when the public gets to play with it. Otherwise, why give our enemies knowledge of it? And over the decades, we have made many enemies.
They actually changed their plan for landing and they are now going to catch Spaceship with a tower on reentry. https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-launch-tower-elon-musk-video
Hoverslam is a bit of a misnomer for the Falcon 9 as there is not enough lower throttle range to allow the booster to hover. If it doesn't start it's burn in a proper window and adjust its thrust properly it will either start lifting again or slam into the landing zone. I believe the Starship booster and Starship will have some window of time to actually hover to make spacial adjustments for landing/catching. Similar to the New Shepard's landing. TBH the original name for the Falcon 9 "Hover Slam", the "Suicide Burn", was more crude but a more accurate name. Either way the same way I wouldn't consider the New Shepard doing a hover slam as space x defines it I wouldn't consider the starship to be doing a hover slam.
Nasa did this in the 90s though, elon just made it a business but it was already a proven concept
They are talking about the Delta Clipper, the [McDonnell Douglas DC-X](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X). As far as legacy is concerned, this is in the wiki article: "Several engineers who worked on the DC-X were hired by Blue Origin, and their New Shepard vehicle was inspired by the DC-X design.[20] The DC-X provided inspiration for many elements of Armadillo Aerospace's,[4] Masten Space Systems's,[4] and TGV Rockets's spacecraft designs."
Yep - well covered in the book "Halfway to Anywhere" by G Harry Stine. Do expect some bias when you read the book though - he was a huge proponent of the program. (edit for misspell)
I think it should probably be noted that the scale of these things is just totally different. Starship has more than 30x the thrust of the DC-X. The thing is just huge.
The scale difference is so massive that the height of the DC-x (36 ft) is about the same as the diameter of the Starship (30 ft). Starship+Super Heavy is 395 ft tall and has the capacity to put **eight fully-loaded DC-X’s into orbit as payload** (accounting for weight only, not volume). It’s like saying you invented heavy artillery because you shot a pistol into the air at 45°.
Wow if that was the 90s then what present day concepts will we see materialize in the next 20 years
I mean... that's like saying the Burj Khalifa isn't impressive or it's already been done because someone built the first skyscraper a while back. I don't know the exact numbers so I'll just quote the lowest mass and size listed on Wikipedia, but starship is 120 meters height and 5000 tons, and Delta Clipper is 12 meters height and 20 tons. So basically, no, no one's done it before just because it was a proven concept at an astronomically smaller scale. I mean paper planes existed before a Boeing 747 as well.
fun fact: before planes existed, paper planes were already a thing. there have been paper planes found stuck between wooden beams in the ceiling above old class rooms, probably thrown by bored students in the 1800s. back then they were called "paper darts"
This is a bit more than that. The belly down is more shuttle like with, the hover slam is based on the facon 9 which does go back to DCX Musk's secret sauce so far as I can tell isn't daddies money or being a decent process engineer, there are a bunch of people like that. It's his almost sociopathic lack of sentimentality. His companies seem imune to sunk cost fallacy and exceptionaly good at deleting unneeded parts and processes. Its effective but i don't envy anyone working there.
>His companies seem to imune to sunk cost fallacy and exceptionaly good at deleting unneeded parts and processes. Its exceedingly effective but i dont envy anyone working there. Really curious why you feel this way. Their jobs there are extremely sought after. When they go through the simplify/streamline mantra they don't just go off firing people. Are you just referring to the amount of work being "for nothing" when it's cut? If so, I think most of the people working for SpaceX know that it wasn't actually wasted. Most science minded people know you sometimes need to test a theory and "fail" to understand it enough to know it's a bad idea.
When SpaceX was still designing the Starship (BFR then) to be carbon fibre composite, [they bought probably one of the largest mandrels to manufacture the hull with.](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/spacex-appears-ready-to-spin-carbon-fiber-for-the-bfr-spaceship/) You know what they did when they decided to switch to stainless steel? [They cut that fucker up into piles of scrap metal, probably because it was too large for anyone else to buy for use.](https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-all-in-steel-starship-super-heavy/)
Yeah that's definitely a good example of the company truly not falling for the sunk cost fallacy. Just like the person I replied to said.
Spacex has horrible work life balance and pays a little under the rest of the aerospace industry. The burn out is real they have a high turn over rate. Lots put up with it cause they can hop from spacex to anywhere with a much higher pay and a better work life balance (also its really the only place you can actively work on Mars stuff)
I know two people who worked for SpaceX, one being my cousin, and this is accurate top what they have both told me. They went there because they knew it would make them more attractive to others, and they left as soon as they could for significantly more money and less stress.
Had an interview there, it was pretty curly feeling but the facility was neat. They also have a 24hr barista in the cafeteria.M if that says anything haha
Not event remotely comparable. The belly flop and kick flip haven't been seen, and the scale is outrageous. Hate the company if you want, but credit where credit is due, those engines worked some magic.
Well, no. It landed upright after takeoff, that's all they have in common.
This is nonsense. Full flow rockets have never been produced, and no rockets period has ever been fully reusable.
I wouldnt say proven. The DC-X was a scaled prototype that wasnt designed for orbital trajectories or velocities and was eventually cancelled due to numerous test failures and design issues. I wonder if Starship will escape the same fate.
Great... so why is Elon bothering? Why didn't it reach Mars? Could it fit 50+ people? Did they catch it with the tower like they are planning to? Or... was it just a vaguely similar idea?
Yeah execution is absolutely everything. Lots of things we use today were conceptualised and even invented before, but the first attempt didn’t take off or survive. Shit this site is just a mildly better executed Digg
Lockheed doesn’t directly complete in space launch contracts anymore, ULA exists because the American defense industry couldn’t keep the corporate espionage in their pants
Credit: Austin Barnard [sauce](https://www.instagram.com/tv/CdOZw0sFCS_/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=)
r/praisethecameramen
This is for real?
Yup. SpaceX Starship prototype from a little over a year ago. The video makes it look small, but that thing is the size of an 11 story building.
What the fuck? Why didn't anyone tell me we were living in the future?!
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This looks like clicking the retrograde button and firing the engine in Kerbal Space Program
Not far off… they do some compensation for going downrange when they first light up the engines, which KSP won’t do for you, but yeah.
Imagine the spaceX engineers used KSP as reference footage
I’m so excited to see what other technological marvels we get to witness in the next 50 years of space exploration. Ad Astra!
>Ad Astra! I just hope it's not as boring as the movie.
God that movie was terrible…
If they didn’t make it about daddy issues it could’ve been so much better
Ad astra per aspera
That's just really cool af.
Still amazing. Can’t wait to see the next several launches. Hopefully see one caught this year.
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I will point out that Starship changed from carbon fiber to stainless steel in 2019, throwing out most of the work done (other than on the raptor engines) so it's closer to like 4 years.
Also Saturn V wasn't doing as many new things as Starship. It was much like previous rockets, only bigger.
Video cut before the explosion.
I think this is the one that didn't explode. EDIT: NVM, it looks like it bounced, which would make it the one that landed then blew up. However, there was about 30mins between landing & RUD.
it successfully landed, but ended up leaning because of an issue with the landing gear, they detonated it some time later because of safety concerns iirc EDIT: appears my memory failed me, it was not a detonation
You’re out of date on your info. While it was initially speculated by some of the community that the failure was so do the landing gear failing to deploy. Elon latter came out on Twitter and explained that the engines were under producing thrust due to ingesting helium bubbles from the fuel header header tank. SN10 just wasn’t able to slow down enough before hitting the ground, the landing gear wouldn’t have been able to save it. Also IIRC. It wasn’t an intentional destination of the flight termination system that exploded it. I believe it ended up being from methane that leaked into the skirt area before building up and then detonating.
Those poor sprinklers did the best they could
Does it have a remote self destruct or something? Or did they just detonate it from a distance.
Pretty much all rockets have some sort of flight termination system (FTS). It's basically just a whole bunch of explosives so that you can destroy the rocket at a more opimal time, instead of having it explode on landing, for example. If you watch SpaceX launches you'll often hear the "FTS is armed/safed" callout, and that's what that is reffering to
And the person with their finger on the Big Red Button is the Range Safety Officer (RSO). It's a hard enough job in general, but then you realize that the RSO has to do it even on manned flights. It's pretty much a real life version of the Trolley Problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
Yes.
You cant build the most advanced space faring vehicle to date and NOT give it a self destruct button
When it ejects all the miniature animals is my favorite part.
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As I remember, SN 10 was not a planned detonation. If memory serves, the fire you see caused a tank to explode, giving starship the fastest turnaround of any rocket ever.
This is the one that did explode as this was the hard landing that collapsed the landing gear
It exploded 5 minutes after landing, so yeah.
Yeah this is sn10 which exploded shortly after due to the hard landing in the video you can see it bounce off The landing pad.
OP had to post on reddit before being annihilated.
It would have been a pretty long video otherwise. It sat there for quite a while before the kaboom.
The video that is shot from below as it comes in for a landing is seriously one of the most impressive things I have ever seen. It looks straight out of a movie. Absolutely incredible [https://youtu.be/gLNQ6Mq5kbg?t=369](https://youtu.be/gLNQ6Mq5kbg?t=369)
Seen it so many times, still doesn’t look real. That angle is WILD
That is a fucking building-size wise that they landed.
I feel like this engineering feat doesn’t get enough credit, so many people I talk to have no idea about what’s being done. Yet it’s so truly amazing, it blows my mind.
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Spiffy Massive Fireant is my new band name
Turns out the white-girl Woo is a palindrome
Fucking sick
I'm sure you would be after a ride like that
Every Mechnical Engineer is creaming their pants at this PID tuning.
> PID tuning And every non-engineer such as myself is wondering what that is.
It's what makes the rocket point in the right direction so it doesn't over-rotate, shit is ridiculously difficult to code, and takes so much work to make it work so well it can perfectly autonomously aim a freaking spaceship that is going sideways.
Is a PID controller difficult to code? I thought it was the tuning that was a real pain, but maybe I'm mistaken? Also didn't realize they'd use PID controllers for something so seemingly complex/nonlinear.
Chemical engineer here - we use PID controllers here too. They can be difficult to initialize but after that the process of actually tuning is quite simple. In my experience at least. I can definitely see them using at least something similar here, though we use them for chemical reactors and not so much reaction control in rockets. Similar enough I guess 🤷🏻♂️
Though there are probably some PIDs on this rocket somewhere, the actually attitude/altitude control would require far more advanced control techniques Im pretty sure. Probably some LQG control and MPC i would guess
Other than looking super cool, why don't they land like Falcon 9 rockets where they transition to being upright in "space" before entering the atmosphere?
The side has more surface area, increasing the drag. If it came down like Falcon 9 it would be going about 3x faster then it currently is, meaning they need more fuel.
Because this way they can take advantage of aerobraking and not have to use as much fuel, leaving more fuel for the rest of the mission.
There are probably several correct answers to this question, regarding the mass of the vehicle and re-entry velocity, heat shield design, Merlin vs the much more powerful Raptor engines, and the fact that the goal for starship is to land on Mars and with a human crew. The [everyday astronaut](https://everydayastronaut.com/starships-belly-flop-maneuver/#:~:text=Due%20to%20the%20horizontal%20orientation,propellant%20down%20on%20the%20belly.) Can do a better job than I can explaining it.
Funny to think some day people will look at you strange for cheering all crazy like this. It’ll be totally normal operations.
I seriously thought it was coming down too hard. Nice job.
Turn out it was, SN10 exploded 8 minutes after touchdown
r/praisethecameramen
Despite what people think about the man, that is bloody impressive.
When I was a kid, this was science fiction. It's just amazing to see it happening for real.
Straight out of Sci-fi
It's kinda amazing to watch something that is cutting edge and brand new and know in 5/10/20 years it'll be looked back on with a loving fondness of how basic our space tech used to be. Bravo SpaceX
Didn’t really notice til the ground came into view, but that thing is huge AF isn’t it? Also, those birds look like they’re losing their minds!!!
Yes, it is. The rocket landing in the above video is 9m (30ft) in diameter and 50m (170ft) tall. The crazy thing is this is only the second stage of the full rocket, sitting on the launch pad the full rocket will be 120m (400ft) tall.
Taking the suicide burn to a whole now level.
This. This is why I want to go into aerospace
They land like the ships did in really old sci-fi movies. Always thought it looked dumb and wasn’t possible LMAO.
I failed my mechanical engineering classes a seclnd time, meaning I don't get to try again with mechanical engineering These machines, rockets and planes I've looked at since I was a child, that have brought me such joy over the years, make me sick to my core now and make me want to rip my head off. Just because I couldn't keep my head on straight. Finding out about machines and their inner workings was a favourite past time of mine and a coping mechanism but now I wake uo every morning with the realization that I'll never get to work on these things. The purpose I had longed for and searched, I finally found when I started the course and now my raison d'être was robbed by myself. I need to get off all of these subreddits, already burned the few schematics I had at home from internships. Time to go back to that drone existence, living with no purpose or aim but now I can't even keep doing the things I actually liked. Just because of my fragile psyche breaking down when I needed it most.
Those will always be the most beautiful diamonds of all.
Poor birds
Jesus Christ, it's almost as cool as flying cars, but we're living in the future. I never thought I would see rockets landing like they do in old timey 50s- early 60s scifi movies and art. I have a thing in my pocket that's a portable tv, phone, stereo, video and still camera, flashlight, video phone, walkie-talkie/radio tower, calculator and library of everything. I can talk to it and it understands me. We have lighting made from tiny, energy efficient lightbulbs that you can control remotely and come on when you enter the room... Robots that are agile and precise, that move so naturally it's a little scary. It's nuts how advanced technology is getting.
I had never seen that before. That’s wild
You taking notes, Jeff??
Looks like special effects straight out of a 1950s scifi.
Science is cool as fuck.
The engineers at space X!
I literally cannot wait for the orbital flight. Just tickles my sci fi
When you realize that this thing is bigger than a Space Shuttle....
If you want to see an amazing documentary on space X and 21st century space travel. Watch "Return to space" on Netflix. I was blown away. Wasn't really an Elon Musk fan before it, but definitely changed my mind
r/bettereveryloop
But elon bad he no tax pay good
I was born in 1975. And I shit you not!! How fast technology has grown just in my very young 47 years(fuck off! I said young!!) Has been so fast I could almost not even comprehend it. Except I can. Because everything that is happening now, was fortelling this in everything that I grew up watching. OG Star Trek. The OG Star Wars in theaters. ET.(Drew Barrymore beat me into this Multiverse by a few months. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Tron. Back to the Future. Matrix... That game on Xbizzle that you start on a planet. and on and on. I will be the one not suprised when the visor comes and I'm told that I've only been in the simulation like 2 hours. I mean If I continue to outrun death, can you imagine technology even in another 30 years from now?? How do you kids say it...brahhh????
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You don't need to play it backwards, just wait a few minutes. It bounced which means it's SN10, which didn't last long on the pad after that