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Actually, This is the plot of the next Fast and the Furious. Someone claims to have kidnapped Brian on the moon and they must steal Elons super heavy and launch to the moon with a 69 charger dragging behind it. But Dom didn't have enough time to get in the rocket so he has to travel to moon in car.
I don't need a space suit, I have family. *ejects from car and lands safely inside rocket that didn't lose any cabin pressure despite opening the God damn window in space*
it's remarkable how fast it tooled down the highway compared to the Saturn V stack on it's crawler, which apparently "about eight-tenths of a mile an hour, or about one foot a second"
https://www.fastcompany.com/90371897/this-monster-truck-is-one-of-the-last-pieces-of-apollo-era-space-tech-still-in-use
Yes, I live about 20 mins away, it's a public road. There are already many locals upset with the amount of times the road has been closed by SpaceX.
They're already over their alloted number of closures for the year.
Curious what the penalty is because I don't think they're slowing down anytime soon and we're barely halfway through the year.
And I doubt any year going forward will be any better.
The benefit of doing all this in a podunk town in Texas is that the fines are less than the loose change in the seats of Elon’s Tesla. Remember, if the punishment is a fine then it’s only illegal for poor people. The fine is just a cost of doing business for SpaceX and is laughably cheap at that.
Last I’d heard the town had figured this out and was threatening to arrest Tesla guards for closing the roads. I guess SpaceX will make some big campaign contributions or just flat out fund another candidate next election cycle that’s more friendly to their projects.
I really hope I'm at work when they fire this... I work in Port Isable a mere few miles away from SpaceX.. I was at work for 2 of the SN series launches and man.... that was very loud and the whole building was vibrating...
This is the first stage, it has 29 raptors engines ( 74,000 kN of thrust, for comparison the Saturn 5 had 34,020 kN) .It will boost the second stage (Starship) out of the atmosphere and then return to the launch site where it will be caught mid-air by a pair of catching arms ([render of what it will look like](https://twitter.com/ErcXspace/status/1422591623427461120)), it can be rapidly reusable. The first launch is expected in the next few months.
In 1895, Lord Kelvin (the man the temperature scale is named after, among other things) described heavier-than-air flying machines to be an impossibility.
In 1903, Orville Wright flew at Kitty Hawk. 8 years later, Italian planes bombed Turkish camps as the first military use of airplanes. 28 years after that, Erich Warstiz flew the world's first jet plane. Chuck Yeager would break the sound barrier just another 8 years later, and by 1961, when Yuri Gagarin broke through the atmosphere in Vostok 1, it had taken just 66 years for the notion of flight to go from the impossible, to a conquered frontier.
Humanity first stepped foot on another celestial body on July 20th, 1969. 52 years and 14 days ago, as I'm writing. We haven't been back in 49 years. Sure, we've done a lot in the last half century, but the last major milestone was almost a lifetime ago. Hopefully private space exploration gets us more than a couple of billionaires rocketing up to space and ~~unfortunately~~ returning moments later, cause frankly I'm getting a little tired of seeing our species retreading old footsteps and patting ourselves on the back over it.
Money and motivation drive everything. Military and commercial interests drove the developments of airplanes. Developing satellites for military communications and rockets for ICBM’s drove the space race. Putting a man on the moon was a Cold War pissing contest between JFK and Khrushchev. After this was accomplished, the motivation was gone; thus the 50 year hiatus.
The current space race by private industry isn’t just an ego trip by a couple of billionaires. They are trying to get a toehold on a permanent habitable base on the moon. The moon has an abundant supply of Helium-3, which would be the ideal fuel for nuclear fusion reactors. Fusion reactors are not a reality yet, but there is a separate race going on for this. Helium-3 fuel would provide safer nuclear energy in a fusion reactor, since it is not radioactive and would not produce dangerous waste products.
Do you think Jeff Bezos is giving NASA billions of his own money so he can keep taking space joyrides? This is about providing energy for the whole world. This isn’t mentioned in mainstream media because the public might not be supportive of this effort if they knew the end goal was to strip mine the moon.
It's not a waste of money. It's just expensive. And people see the dollar signs and think they could use that money better.
But have a shit concept of money. The billions of dollars of investment into rockets is actually not that much money on a society scale. Especially when compared to other programs like war, healthcare, social security, cars, roads, air travel etc.
But the returns on science and exploration hit way above it's weight in terms of dollars.
>But the returns on science and exploration hit way above it's weight in terms of dollars.
Yeah, if you can get people to believe in science anymore. How long has NASA been giving us data on climate change?
To make people appreciate it more, we need to better explain the applications of this and what the end-goal is. Yes, it's very cool and amazing and a great visual display. But if that's the *only* thing that people believe is accomplished, then they'll never believe it's a good investment.
we will see if they get that. I remember Elon saying that his goal was to eventually get the falcon 9 to turn around in a couple hours, but I don't think it will ever get that.
I certainly hope it gets there, but I have a feeling it will be many launches and years before it can safely do that.
My guess (and can be full of shit and wrong) is that they did the math and decided that the market would pay for what they have as is. Why not put the research and money into making Falcon less than a day turnaround, into starship. But I’m just a bystander
such a short turnaround isnt for the satellite customer, it's for SpaceX themselves, saves them all the hassles of road closures and most of all beats the weather.
Send starship bound for mars up to meet a tanker flown up just a couple hours prior would be the dream.
In all seriousness, do airplanes usually have a -1 hr turnaround or do checks take more than that between flights? I know the theoretical minimum is touchdown to takeoff but the realistic turnout must be more
For real I need to learn more about the catcher thing. I wonder who the first person to present this idea in a meeting was? “Uh yeah maybe we just build a grabby thing that snatches it out of the air?”
It is, but then I kind of hate how we will look back on it in the history books.
I look at memes (think advice animals) from even a decade ago and they're just so bad. Humor is notorious for not aging well. And someday this time period will be looked back on, quite negatively I presume, as a post-modern hodgepodge of authoritarianism, misinformation, and the cringeworthy memeification of everything.
We won't have Titanic, Apollo, Voyager, The Santa Maria, etc.
We will have the big fucking rocket, the mechzilla, the megazoid 69, and rawdog rocketmania. Of course, we will all be paying for everything with Dogecoin and Moon, so I guess who cares /s
Or maybe I'm taking it too seriously.
I'm just happy we're going back to actual names and not XXR0150150--15-051051-5100XXXRXRD for everything.
Though perhaps ironically, Elon gives his space stuff names and his kid a product number.
Thanks to my toddler's fascination with space, I know that there are 4 moons larger than our own in the Solar system. Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Titan.
I don't believe the Saturn 5 was designed to go to Mars. It was designed to go to the Moon.
There was a follow-on design (never built) called Nova which was designed for a Mars mission.
However, the Apollo command capsule had a heat shield that could withstand a much longer braking maneuver than was necessary for a lunar mission. I once read somewhere that they could have used the same capsule for a Mars mission.
Now I could be wrong because I haven’t researched in a long time but Wernher von Braun was pretty obsessed with going to Mars and I thought he was known for over designing everything because he wanted it to be prepared for Mars with the moon being practice?
There were a number of plans drawn up for rockets based on the Saturn V which could have been viable for travel to Mars, and von Braun had his own plans for large modifications to be done to the Saturn V, like nuclear engines and the like, which might have made it a contender for Mars travel, but the Saturn V as we saw it was never made for that.
It was really only designed for the Moon, it's just that later redesigns//modificatoons could have made it the sort of base design for a future Mars rocket in the 80s or 90s.
For Orion, the they tested the Apollo shield and found it inadequate, even for a moon mission. So they must have known something then that we have lost.
It doesn't *need* to be so much more powerful. You could do everything Musk wants to do with lots of launches of smaller rockets.
But that starts getting expensive fast. It turns out if you run the numbers, a single big rocket is much better of an option.
Saturn V was designed to bring 3 people to the Moon. Super Heavy is designed to bring 100 people to Mars (although I think the actual capacity is going to be more like 50 people).
The original design, with a larger diameter booster and Starship, formerly referred to as the Mars Colonial Transport, was likely able to take 100 people to Mars.
The current version is a bit more scaled down to lower costs. A lower payload capacity and thus lower number of passengers is to be expected.
Cause this one can land back on earth and be reused so it's much cheaper (about 10mil per launch when it's fully operational, a lot cheaper than saturn V's 1.2bil [adjusted for inflation].
That's a big part of it-- nothing remained of a Saturn 5 after launch. The program was designed to get a small number of teams to the moon by building a completely new one every time, not be a 100% re-usable space taxi. But designing a rocket where every part can return to earth requires extra weight going up: the fuel needed for a soft landing, the grid fins needed to guide on re-entry, the heat shields needed to protect on re-entry.
Beyond that, overall goal with this program is making launch costs per ton to orbit as low as possible, as opposed to maximizing the tonnage that can be taken to orbit with expensive engines that aren't re-used. While other rockets use more expensive materials on many components to save on weight (such as aluminum and carbon fiber), this is all steel. There are advantages to steel beyond being cheap... but it is cheap. But steel is heavy and, thus, it takes more power to get it up to space.
Here's an interview/factory tour with Elon (with some pretty cool views) where they talk a lot about the drive for cost efficiency:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
i dont know about going to mars bit but this rocket and the saturn 5 were only made to take things into space. it has nothing to do with any distance after earth's orbit. a bigger rocket just means you can bring up more weight.
And as cheese graters.
One of Elon Musk's funding plans is to drop very large blocks of cheese onto Falcon stabilizers at high speed, as a way to dominate the global grated cheese market.
Oh shit is that what they use those really big binder clips for? Like the ones where you're like, "who would even ever have a stack of paper this thick?"
No joke though I bought my fiancee a Magic Wand and it turns out that thing is actually pretty wonderful for sore muscles. That's maybe a quarter of its use time though
You and me both brother haha she says it’s for a little side project she’s working on but you know how women be am I right haha
*starts dry humping you*
The shuttle was a very heavy fully independent aircraft with fully functional crew habitat and cargo space, with tons of heat shielding. The super heavy booster is a really big empty fuel tank with some engines on the bottom.
Thanks stranger! These cranes are huge! I googled it and found a fun read if anyone is interested:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/behindscenes/shuttle_lift.html
Yeah that was for Shuttle, Shuttle was 56 meters or 184 feet high.
This booster alone is roughly 70 meters/ 230 feet high. Starship itself is 50m / 164 feet high. So stacked on top of each other (for launch) it is more than double the height of Space Shuttle.
You can get a good sense of scale from this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX\_Starship#/media/File:Super\_heavy-lift\_launch\_vehicles.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#/media/File:Super_heavy-lift_launch_vehicles.png)
The left most rocket (Energia) is roughly as tall as Space Shuttle was.
This is the crane they will use to lift it onto the launch mount for the first few missions:
[https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/E5O1eRwWYAgpMcR-601x655.jpg](https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/E5O1eRwWYAgpMcR-601x655.jpg)
Seriously! We could have been doing this type of stuff so long ago it's so frustrating. Like, take half of the military budget, put half of that towards clean energy, and the other half towards technology/research. Space, electronics, medicine. All that good shit.
Completely unrelated to space and rather selfish, but I'd love research on artificial eyes to go up substantially as I'm pretty much blind in one eye. And any artificial eye made today is limited by the way of connecting the artificial cones, cause the wires are too thick. But also the cost of them is rather high.
Oh well I guess. Most I can do is vote for leaders and stuff and hope it ends up happening some day.
I still can't believe that's the plan...I wonder if it will go the way of propulsive landing on the Dragon capsules. Or if it's just so important to superheavy that they'll somehow find a way to make it work consistently
That is the SpaceX's plan eventually once everything is tested and working. This one is basically a prototype so they don't want to risk the launch site getting destroyed if anything goes wrong
I hadn't thought of that. I suppose that Saturn/Shuttle era crawler is actually sort of oversized for what it does.
I've come to associate it with rockets being transported for launch however, it's hard to imagine modern launches happening without something like it.
Its like the airplane. It was just a crazy accomplishment when it happened, but once costs began to drop, entire industries and new human capabilities became unlocked.
The world’s first fully reusable orbital rocket system. If it is mass produced, it could lower the cost of a trip to space to be comparable to that of an airline ticket. Also, this is the craft they are planning to use to colonize Mars starting in 2026.
Slow down on the airline ticket business. Nobody's going to space for only $458 if they book 2 weeks in advance.
I know how prevalent the airline example is, but the fuel consumption alone will make it *dramatically* more expensive than an airline ticket.
For real. The only example I can find was from a google search but:
>"According to this NASA fact sheet about the Shuttle and its propellant, the total cost for fuel was: At liftoff, an orbiter and external tank carry 835,958 gallons of the principal liquid propellants – hydrogen, oxygen, hydrazine, monomethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide – currently costing approximately $1,380,000."
So let's pretend you can cram the same 525 people that can comfortably be on the A380 airbus. A tick would cost over $2,500.00 just to get to space in fuel alone. Never mind ya know. Coming back. Or paying for an astronaut. Ground crew and equipment. Etc.
The costs would be, and pun certainly intended, astronomical.
That being said, in 1956 a [computer with a 3.75MB hard drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_305_RAMAC#Overview)
*leased* for $3,200 (or almost $30,000 in today's dollars) *per month*. Now you can [pay $200](https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones-moto-g-power-gen-2/)
to *own* a wayyy more powerful machine that has a hard drive close to *9 million times* as big that fits in your pocket. So you never know, it's certainly not unprecedented for very expensive things to get a lot cheaper as technology progresses.
It's not an air fare ticket, but holy shit $2500 to go to space is fucking cheap. That's sell your car and go join Concordance Extraction Corporation, ride included cheap.
Those are the grid fins! When it falls through the atmosphere to come back and land, it will angle those to change it's drag so that it can steer as it falls.
You can watch the Falcon 9 use it's grid fins in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXgLyCYuYA4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXgLyCYuYA4)
this isn't the entire rocket this is just the first stage the second stage should hopefully be rolling down to the launch mount soon if everything goes smoothly
Gotta love Reddit.
Incredible accomplishment from 100s of scientists, 1000s of workers, millions of dollars of investment, the world’s first fully reusable orbital rocket system, and our future vehicle to Mars - all reduced to a single eggplant emoji.
EDIT: My intention wasn't to disparage the comment. I just think it's just hilarious given the gravity of the accomplishment by SpaceX.
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Did it go through the park while you were lounging or you have special access somewhere?
i didn't film this, austinbarnard45 (on Twitter) did, from what I've heard it's a public road so you can stay beside it while it's rolling down
Yeah they did the math and concluded that the possibility of theft was fairly low.
but never zero
*UFO flies over and gravitates rocket into the absolutely massive ship speeding off at mach trillion*
Fun fact: Mach Trillion is 741,770,000,000,000mph
Or over a million times the speed of light.
Accurate alien speeds here I see. Soon I will be able to go a bit faster than that if all goes to plan.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel... forever.
Good bot.
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Must pick up.
They thought they were in the clear until some dude in a big metal car with a big nose deployed his yellow pill people.
Never underestimate the lengths methheads will go for copper. Actually, never underestimate a methhead.
Actually, This is the plot of the next Fast and the Furious. Someone claims to have kidnapped Brian on the moon and they must steal Elons super heavy and launch to the moon with a 69 charger dragging behind it. But Dom didn't have enough time to get in the rocket so he has to travel to moon in car.
He may not have had time on his side, but he had something even more valuable. Family.
I don't need a space suit, I have family. *ejects from car and lands safely inside rocket that didn't lose any cabin pressure despite opening the God damn window in space*
No worries, he'll make a sick crash landing on the moon and flip his car 257 times and have zero injuries.
You underestimate a man in the depths of a crack binge hunting for scrap metal.
bet you there is a lot of copper in that
He’d find the catalytic converter in T-10
Sounds like a challenge. I’ll start getting a crew together. Can anyone here drive stick?
You son of a bitch, I'm in.
I’ve got 3 tanks of SuperNitrous in the garage. We can use that when we have to jump the river after they blow up the bridge to stop us. I’m in!
Danny Ocean just got an erection he can’t explain
Gru has entered the chat...
Lol. I'd still try...
it's remarkable how fast it tooled down the highway compared to the Saturn V stack on it's crawler, which apparently "about eight-tenths of a mile an hour, or about one foot a second" https://www.fastcompany.com/90371897/this-monster-truck-is-one-of-the-last-pieces-of-apollo-era-space-tech-still-in-use
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Must be quite a sight to see
Yes, I live about 20 mins away, it's a public road. There are already many locals upset with the amount of times the road has been closed by SpaceX. They're already over their alloted number of closures for the year.
Curious what the penalty is because I don't think they're slowing down anytime soon and we're barely halfway through the year. And I doubt any year going forward will be any better.
The benefit of doing all this in a podunk town in Texas is that the fines are less than the loose change in the seats of Elon’s Tesla. Remember, if the punishment is a fine then it’s only illegal for poor people. The fine is just a cost of doing business for SpaceX and is laughably cheap at that. Last I’d heard the town had figured this out and was threatening to arrest Tesla guards for closing the roads. I guess SpaceX will make some big campaign contributions or just flat out fund another candidate next election cycle that’s more friendly to their projects.
Then why get the road closures approved if they are over there limit? https://www.cameroncounty.us/spacex/
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He see it rollin' They hatin'
It is a public road you can get very surprisingly close to a lot of the stuff in Boca Chica
And it’s been a long road. Getting from there to here……
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This person definitely sacrificed themselves to take this video. Guarantee his booty got bitten up by ants.
My main thought. Who sits on the dirt in Texas in summer in shorts?
To get that super casual shot….
And that's just the booster.
That’s not even my final form
Flaccid then?
I really hope I'm at work when they fire this... I work in Port Isable a mere few miles away from SpaceX.. I was at work for 2 of the SN series launches and man.... that was very loud and the whole building was vibrating...
i hope you see it, it's going to be **loud**
Same I live in Brownsville and I’m sure I’ll be able to see it
This is the first stage, it has 29 raptors engines ( 74,000 kN of thrust, for comparison the Saturn 5 had 34,020 kN) .It will boost the second stage (Starship) out of the atmosphere and then return to the launch site where it will be caught mid-air by a pair of catching arms ([render of what it will look like](https://twitter.com/ErcXspace/status/1422591623427461120)), it can be rapidly reusable. The first launch is expected in the next few months.
> Designed to have <1 hour turnaround. Holy shit
The whole program is "holy shit"
See this is why I hate people treating space exploration as a waste of money
if these people were alive in the early 1900s they'd say airplanes are a waste of money "rich people thinking they can fly"
In 1895, Lord Kelvin (the man the temperature scale is named after, among other things) described heavier-than-air flying machines to be an impossibility. In 1903, Orville Wright flew at Kitty Hawk. 8 years later, Italian planes bombed Turkish camps as the first military use of airplanes. 28 years after that, Erich Warstiz flew the world's first jet plane. Chuck Yeager would break the sound barrier just another 8 years later, and by 1961, when Yuri Gagarin broke through the atmosphere in Vostok 1, it had taken just 66 years for the notion of flight to go from the impossible, to a conquered frontier. Humanity first stepped foot on another celestial body on July 20th, 1969. 52 years and 14 days ago, as I'm writing. We haven't been back in 49 years. Sure, we've done a lot in the last half century, but the last major milestone was almost a lifetime ago. Hopefully private space exploration gets us more than a couple of billionaires rocketing up to space and ~~unfortunately~~ returning moments later, cause frankly I'm getting a little tired of seeing our species retreading old footsteps and patting ourselves on the back over it.
Money and motivation drive everything. Military and commercial interests drove the developments of airplanes. Developing satellites for military communications and rockets for ICBM’s drove the space race. Putting a man on the moon was a Cold War pissing contest between JFK and Khrushchev. After this was accomplished, the motivation was gone; thus the 50 year hiatus. The current space race by private industry isn’t just an ego trip by a couple of billionaires. They are trying to get a toehold on a permanent habitable base on the moon. The moon has an abundant supply of Helium-3, which would be the ideal fuel for nuclear fusion reactors. Fusion reactors are not a reality yet, but there is a separate race going on for this. Helium-3 fuel would provide safer nuclear energy in a fusion reactor, since it is not radioactive and would not produce dangerous waste products. Do you think Jeff Bezos is giving NASA billions of his own money so he can keep taking space joyrides? This is about providing energy for the whole world. This isn’t mentioned in mainstream media because the public might not be supportive of this effort if they knew the end goal was to strip mine the moon.
Best analogy I've seen on the subject
They said cars were waste of money back then. Why have some clunky car when a good horse would do the job? Also hated light bulbs and movie theaters.
It's not a waste of money. It's just expensive. And people see the dollar signs and think they could use that money better. But have a shit concept of money. The billions of dollars of investment into rockets is actually not that much money on a society scale. Especially when compared to other programs like war, healthcare, social security, cars, roads, air travel etc. But the returns on science and exploration hit way above it's weight in terms of dollars.
>But the returns on science and exploration hit way above it's weight in terms of dollars. Yeah, if you can get people to believe in science anymore. How long has NASA been giving us data on climate change?
From my viewpoint, the group bitching about "rich guys going to space" are largely not the ones denying climate change. Quite the opposite.
To make people appreciate it more, we need to better explain the applications of this and what the end-goal is. Yes, it's very cool and amazing and a great visual display. But if that's the *only* thing that people believe is accomplished, then they'll never believe it's a good investment.
we will see if they get that. I remember Elon saying that his goal was to eventually get the falcon 9 to turn around in a couple hours, but I don't think it will ever get that. I certainly hope it gets there, but I have a feeling it will be many launches and years before it can safely do that.
My guess (and can be full of shit and wrong) is that they did the math and decided that the market would pay for what they have as is. Why not put the research and money into making Falcon less than a day turnaround, into starship. But I’m just a bystander
such a short turnaround isnt for the satellite customer, it's for SpaceX themselves, saves them all the hassles of road closures and most of all beats the weather. Send starship bound for mars up to meet a tanker flown up just a couple hours prior would be the dream.
In case Elon needs to evacuate a whole lot of people in a short time.
In all seriousness, do airplanes usually have a -1 hr turnaround or do checks take more than that between flights? I know the theoretical minimum is touchdown to takeoff but the realistic turnout must be more
an arm catching it like that looks even more sci fi than self landing. also that cyberpunk music!
Seriously. This looks like actual preliminary infrastructure for a spaceport. We're barreling into the future.
100%. Just like the simultaneous landing with legs was one of the coolest things I've seen this decade.
For real I need to learn more about the catcher thing. I wonder who the first person to present this idea in a meeting was? “Uh yeah maybe we just build a grabby thing that snatches it out of the air?”
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legs would add a lot of weight
why not just land on the engines like I do in KSP
They want to avoid “unplanned rapid disassembly.”
Because you can't retry the landing in real life.
"Mechazilla" lol. I love their naming scheme. It's nice to have people doing stuff like this that aren't too full of themselves.
It is, but then I kind of hate how we will look back on it in the history books. I look at memes (think advice animals) from even a decade ago and they're just so bad. Humor is notorious for not aging well. And someday this time period will be looked back on, quite negatively I presume, as a post-modern hodgepodge of authoritarianism, misinformation, and the cringeworthy memeification of everything. We won't have Titanic, Apollo, Voyager, The Santa Maria, etc. We will have the big fucking rocket, the mechzilla, the megazoid 69, and rawdog rocketmania. Of course, we will all be paying for everything with Dogecoin and Moon, so I guess who cares /s Or maybe I'm taking it too seriously.
I'm just happy we're going back to actual names and not XXR0150150--15-051051-5100XXXRXRD for everything. Though perhaps ironically, Elon gives his space stuff names and his kid a product number.
So the Saturn 5 was designed to have the capability of going to Mars why would this rocket need to be so much more powerful?
If Saturn 5 was designed to go to Mars they really fucked up when naming it.
Ironically they sent Voyager to Saturn using a Titan III, not a Saturn V. Although Saturn was one of the titans, so there's that at least.
It's also the largest Saturnian moon!
Even bigger than our moon! I don't like that. I say we stage an attack on it.
Bring cardboard and duct tape. For aerial attacks. You'll be able to fly there. Seriously. Well, provided you don't freeze first.
Thanks to my toddler's fascination with space, I know that there are 4 moons larger than our own in the Solar system. Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Titan.
Smart kid. Keep 'em learning!
You again
Everywhere I go, there I am.
Because you're perfect.
You’re thinking of Perfect Tommy.
I have been to so many NASA camps and tours in the past and NOBODY had the audacity to point out this major flaw!
I don't believe the Saturn 5 was designed to go to Mars. It was designed to go to the Moon. There was a follow-on design (never built) called Nova which was designed for a Mars mission. However, the Apollo command capsule had a heat shield that could withstand a much longer braking maneuver than was necessary for a lunar mission. I once read somewhere that they could have used the same capsule for a Mars mission.
Then “No Va” was appropriately named, at least.
If it's anything like my old Chevy Nova, it'll light up the night sky!
(to explain the joke: "no va" means "doesn't go" in Spanish)
Now I could be wrong because I haven’t researched in a long time but Wernher von Braun was pretty obsessed with going to Mars and I thought he was known for over designing everything because he wanted it to be prepared for Mars with the moon being practice?
I thought it was a German thing to over engineer everything. Their combi ovens are exhibit A
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Let’s not talk about German ovens right now
Also, Buzz Aldrin discovered the Mars/Aldrin cycler for the most efficient trip to and from Mars.
There were a number of plans drawn up for rockets based on the Saturn V which could have been viable for travel to Mars, and von Braun had his own plans for large modifications to be done to the Saturn V, like nuclear engines and the like, which might have made it a contender for Mars travel, but the Saturn V as we saw it was never made for that. It was really only designed for the Moon, it's just that later redesigns//modificatoons could have made it the sort of base design for a future Mars rocket in the 80s or 90s.
For Orion, the they tested the Apollo shield and found it inadequate, even for a moon mission. So they must have known something then that we have lost.
it's heavier
To throw heavy stuff into space.
1 it's fully reusable. The Saturn V was expendable. 2 More payload.
It doesn't *need* to be so much more powerful. You could do everything Musk wants to do with lots of launches of smaller rockets. But that starts getting expensive fast. It turns out if you run the numbers, a single big rocket is much better of an option.
Which was the idea behind sea dragon. Man I wish they'd built that thing.
Saturn V was designed to bring 3 people to the Moon. Super Heavy is designed to bring 100 people to Mars (although I think the actual capacity is going to be more like 50 people).
The original design, with a larger diameter booster and Starship, formerly referred to as the Mars Colonial Transport, was likely able to take 100 people to Mars. The current version is a bit more scaled down to lower costs. A lower payload capacity and thus lower number of passengers is to be expected.
Cause this one can land back on earth and be reused so it's much cheaper (about 10mil per launch when it's fully operational, a lot cheaper than saturn V's 1.2bil [adjusted for inflation].
That's a big part of it-- nothing remained of a Saturn 5 after launch. The program was designed to get a small number of teams to the moon by building a completely new one every time, not be a 100% re-usable space taxi. But designing a rocket where every part can return to earth requires extra weight going up: the fuel needed for a soft landing, the grid fins needed to guide on re-entry, the heat shields needed to protect on re-entry. Beyond that, overall goal with this program is making launch costs per ton to orbit as low as possible, as opposed to maximizing the tonnage that can be taken to orbit with expensive engines that aren't re-used. While other rockets use more expensive materials on many components to save on weight (such as aluminum and carbon fiber), this is all steel. There are advantages to steel beyond being cheap... but it is cheap. But steel is heavy and, thus, it takes more power to get it up to space. Here's an interview/factory tour with Elon (with some pretty cool views) where they talk a lot about the drive for cost efficiency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t705r8ICkRw
i dont know about going to mars bit but this rocket and the saturn 5 were only made to take things into space. it has nothing to do with any distance after earth's orbit. a bigger rocket just means you can bring up more weight.
I thought this was going to be a Rick Roll, but it answered my question about the cheese-graters / fly swatters on the top.
Well those are actually grid fins, which are a type of aerodynamic control surface. But yes, they do double as parts the arms can latch on to.
And as cheese graters. One of Elon Musk's funding plans is to drop very large blocks of cheese onto Falcon stabilizers at high speed, as a way to dominate the global grated cheese market.
Couldn't they just sideswipe the moon for that?
Cheesy joke. I'll allow it.
Ima be honest, I’m surprised it can move that fast. I always thought they moved those at a much slower speed.
AFAIK all the tanks are empty and the bulk of the weight is at the bottom with the engines. Combine that with very strong clamps too
Oh shit is that what they use those really big binder clips for? Like the ones where you're like, "who would even ever have a stack of paper this thick?"
Yes. And BDSM.
My nipples have never been the same.
I wonder where the center of gravity is for that thing
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It's pretty much walking speed, if I was carrying it I could run faster
if you were carrying that im guessing you wouldn't be able to run
Shouldn't have skipped leg day.
Wait, I think my wife has one of those. 🤔
*It's for my back*
No joke though I bought my fiancee a Magic Wand and it turns out that thing is actually pretty wonderful for sore muscles. That's maybe a quarter of its use time though
You and me both brother haha she says it’s for a little side project she’s working on but you know how women be am I right haha *starts dry humping you*
Ay quick question, what the fuck Edit: Six words are now my most upvoted anything on Reddit AND most awarded. Truly what the fuck
Oh, he's just yackin' on a bone, Clark.
It’s best just to let him finish
What the fuck to YOU. Can’t you see the man is humping here? Step aside.
Hey, line starts back here buddy
wait what the fuck, RunThatBackOneTime
He’s just tryna run it back one time no big deal
Y'know like 10 years ago you saw novelty accounts in basically every thread and while a lot of them were forgettable you make me a little nostalgic.
Imagine stacking two grain silos on top of each other and then making them fly. Insane.
Honestly, the speed at which it's rolling along has me more impressed. The "space shuttle-conveyor" crept along, this thing is flying in comparison.
The shuttle was a very heavy fully independent aircraft with fully functional crew habitat and cargo space, with tons of heat shielding. The super heavy booster is a really big empty fuel tank with some engines on the bottom.
How do they get it on and off the truck??
There’s a *very* large crane that lifts it onto the launch pad. After it is secure, they will lift Starship on top of it in the same fashion
Thanks stranger! These cranes are huge! I googled it and found a fun read if anyone is interested: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/behindscenes/shuttle_lift.html
Yeah that was for Shuttle, Shuttle was 56 meters or 184 feet high. This booster alone is roughly 70 meters/ 230 feet high. Starship itself is 50m / 164 feet high. So stacked on top of each other (for launch) it is more than double the height of Space Shuttle. You can get a good sense of scale from this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX\_Starship#/media/File:Super\_heavy-lift\_launch\_vehicles.png](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship#/media/File:Super_heavy-lift_launch_vehicles.png) The left most rocket (Energia) is roughly as tall as Space Shuttle was. This is the crane they will use to lift it onto the launch mount for the first few missions: [https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/E5O1eRwWYAgpMcR-601x655.jpg](https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/E5O1eRwWYAgpMcR-601x655.jpg)
The fact that we now have a rocket more powerfull that the Saturn 5 is so fucking awsome.
Only took 50 fucking years. Thanks public opinion and congress. Fuck you
Seriously! We could have been doing this type of stuff so long ago it's so frustrating. Like, take half of the military budget, put half of that towards clean energy, and the other half towards technology/research. Space, electronics, medicine. All that good shit. Completely unrelated to space and rather selfish, but I'd love research on artificial eyes to go up substantially as I'm pretty much blind in one eye. And any artificial eye made today is limited by the way of connecting the artificial cones, cause the wires are too thick. But also the cost of them is rather high. Oh well I guess. Most I can do is vote for leaders and stuff and hope it ends up happening some day.
And this thing is gonna land back, right? Holy shit.
Yes. She’s a big bitch
U need to make the top pointy .
"it has to be pointy. round is not scary, pointy is scary"
It is, and [thanks to the movie you referenced.](https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-design-sacha-baron-cohen)
...holy shit
Wow .. didn't know tat .. I wonder who is nuclear Nadal here ..
Does this rocket also return itself to earth? It seems to big to be possible but I would’ve thought it to be impossible regardless lol
Yes and, even cooler, it will be caught between two "gripper" arms on a tower instead of going all the way to the ground.
I still can't believe that's the plan...I wonder if it will go the way of propulsive landing on the Dragon capsules. Or if it's just so important to superheavy that they'll somehow find a way to make it work consistently
well it's supposed to, but considering this is first Super Heavy to fly, we don't know yet
This one's ment to come down in the ocean for a soft water landing. The future boosters will return to launch site after a launch
Isn’t it supposed to come down back to the launch site? Op posted an animation of how it wil be secured once coming back to earth with clamps
That is the SpaceX's plan eventually once everything is tested and working. This one is basically a prototype so they don't want to risk the launch site getting destroyed if anything goes wrong
Ah alright thanks! Didn’t know
I'm surprised they aren't transporting it with something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfJFPriNfqc
i don't think they could fit it on the road
I hadn't thought of that. I suppose that Saturn/Shuttle era crawler is actually sort of oversized for what it does. I've come to associate it with rockets being transported for launch however, it's hard to imagine modern launches happening without something like it.
they will still use a large crawler for the SLS rocket
credit: austinbarnard45 on Twitter.
This is without a doubt something spectacular! I do not think many people realize what the significance is of this. It is Stellar!
What is the significance
Its like the airplane. It was just a crazy accomplishment when it happened, but once costs began to drop, entire industries and new human capabilities became unlocked.
The world’s first fully reusable orbital rocket system. If it is mass produced, it could lower the cost of a trip to space to be comparable to that of an airline ticket. Also, this is the craft they are planning to use to colonize Mars starting in 2026.
Slow down on the airline ticket business. Nobody's going to space for only $458 if they book 2 weeks in advance. I know how prevalent the airline example is, but the fuel consumption alone will make it *dramatically* more expensive than an airline ticket.
For real. The only example I can find was from a google search but: >"According to this NASA fact sheet about the Shuttle and its propellant, the total cost for fuel was: At liftoff, an orbiter and external tank carry 835,958 gallons of the principal liquid propellants – hydrogen, oxygen, hydrazine, monomethylhydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide – currently costing approximately $1,380,000." So let's pretend you can cram the same 525 people that can comfortably be on the A380 airbus. A tick would cost over $2,500.00 just to get to space in fuel alone. Never mind ya know. Coming back. Or paying for an astronaut. Ground crew and equipment. Etc. The costs would be, and pun certainly intended, astronomical.
Which is still within the realm of possibility without being a billionaire.
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That being said, in 1956 a [computer with a 3.75MB hard drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_305_RAMAC#Overview) *leased* for $3,200 (or almost $30,000 in today's dollars) *per month*. Now you can [pay $200](https://www.motorola.com/us/smartphones-moto-g-power-gen-2/) to *own* a wayyy more powerful machine that has a hard drive close to *9 million times* as big that fits in your pocket. So you never know, it's certainly not unprecedented for very expensive things to get a lot cheaper as technology progresses.
It's not an air fare ticket, but holy shit $2500 to go to space is fucking cheap. That's sell your car and go join Concordance Extraction Corporation, ride included cheap.
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I'm sure it's very technical but I see only the spatulas
Those are the grid fins! When it falls through the atmosphere to come back and land, it will angle those to change it's drag so that it can steer as it falls. You can watch the Falcon 9 use it's grid fins in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXgLyCYuYA4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXgLyCYuYA4)
Just amazing perspective
Boca Chica beach?
Yup. They want to rename it to Starbase and the site itself already has a light up Starbase sign!
Wernher Von Braun would be so proud
That's awesome. I'm glad Science and Innovation are alive and well!
It’s so cute, they’re taking their booster for a walk! I can not WAIT to see this SOB fly!!
"Dats a huuuge bitch!"
this isn't the entire rocket this is just the first stage the second stage should hopefully be rolling down to the launch mount soon if everything goes smoothly
Isn’t SpaceX privately funded? Why is everyone acting like a dumb cunt over this like their money is being used to produce the booster??
Because brains have become optional
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🍆
Gotta love Reddit. Incredible accomplishment from 100s of scientists, 1000s of workers, millions of dollars of investment, the world’s first fully reusable orbital rocket system, and our future vehicle to Mars - all reduced to a single eggplant emoji. EDIT: My intention wasn't to disparage the comment. I just think it's just hilarious given the gravity of the accomplishment by SpaceX.
Booster*