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March 29, 2024, 09:58:51 AM

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SpaceX Starship

Started by Alberon, March 03, 2021, 09:45:36 PM

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Alberon

Thought it was time for a new thread for SpaceX's new launch system. Elon Musk wants to land this Starship on Mars by the end of the decade which sounds utterly mad, but the company has made impressive strides in reusability and lowering launch costs.

The latest test version of the Starship is the SN10. It is currently set to do the next launch test at around 10.30pm tonight. The SN8 and the SN9 both performed well but, critically, both failed to land. The SN9 failed because when it fired up two engines to land one of them failed. If the SN10 launches it will fire all three Raptor engines on landing and select the best two to complete the test.

Blumf


Alberon

Not 100%, but it landed in one piece, seems the legs didn't deploy.

It's leaning a little and there was a small fire, but this is a significant advance on the fireballs SN8 and 9 made.

Dex Sawash


hamfist

and then it BLEW UP - holy shit ! a methane leak by the sound of it

MojoJojo


Alberon

Still a good step forward though.

Roll on SN11!

Pinball

We're gonna need another Timmy.

Blumf

Great comedy timing. Wait quarter of an hour before going boom.

Mr_Simnock

These things are like the cheap chinese made fireworks you could pick up in the 1980's. Even if you watched a banger go off successfully you didn't dare approach it for about 5 minutes in case it was dodgy and blew up again. God knows how many crushed Uyghur bones were used in theses things, every catherine wheel I lit and enjoyed sparkling was probably the nearest thing a dead worker got to a proper cremation.


touchingcloth

Arduinos and Raspberry Pis make this sort of stuff easy. Anyone could make a Mars rocket if they spent an hour or so doing coding, so there's nothing unique about Ælon.

Jittlebags

I like the way they look like the kind of craft that Emperor Ming might have had.

Alberon

Today could be SN11's time to fly (and crash and burn?).

It underwent a successful static fire earlier today and is now working toward a possible launch in a few hours.

Jittlebags

Could they not put South African 'gang-banger' Elon Musk into the cockpit to oversea events?

Alberon

Launch scrubbed. They'll try again Monday.

Blumf

Launched today, but it was so foggy all we got to see was the on-board feed direct from SpaceX. Then, on engine restart for landing it blew up, showering the area with debris.

Was watching the Everyday Astronaut's feed, who was dead chuffed that he was allowed to place some cameras quiet close to the launch site, within the exclusion zone, only to (seemingly, not confirmed yet) lose one to the falling bits of rocket. $20k worth of kit gone, and no video to show for it because of the fog. Well gutted, mate.

Now the wait whilst SpaceX figures out what went wrong.

Blue Jam

Quote from: Jittlebags on March 26, 2021, 09:53:05 PM
Could they not put South African 'gang-banger' Elon Musk into the cockpit to oversea events?

TAKE THIS ROCKET AND FEED IT INTO YOUR ANUS

Alberon

The Nasaspaceflight team's camera came close to be taken out by the debris as well. It seemed to be knocked as the fragments rained down and they think they lost the solar panel powering it.

It looked like they were making progress with SN8-SN10, but this seems a massive backwards step. The next version for the testpad is SN15 which is apparently a revised new version of Starship compared to the last few.


bgmnts

Listen, this is important. Fuck the planet Musk wants to be space bro.

Jittlebags

Quote from: Blue Jam on March 30, 2021, 04:15:51 PM
TAKE THIS ROCKET AND FEED IT INTO YOUR ANUS

FIN SIDE FIRST

Operty1

Wouldn't want to be on the first 'manned' trial of one of these.

Have they even got to space yet? How much money do they have? How long can they keep blowing rockets up for until the money runs out?

katzenjammer

The tweet has gone. Was it the one by this fella that he was 'encouraged' to remove?

https://twitter.com/rosscwinton/status/1377699328567951361?s=20

Alberon

Quote from: Operty1 on April 02, 2021, 03:22:27 AM
Wouldn't want to be on the first 'manned' trial of one of these.

Have they even got to space yet? How much money do they have? How long can they keep blowing rockets up for until the money runs out?

These ones aren't trying to reach orbit, indeed they can't without the booster section. This is just about trialling launch and landing systems. The launch and glide back to the pad seems to be working well every time, the tricky bit is reigniting the engines and landing. Parts of future prototypes up to SN20 are already at the launch site awaiting assembly. As I said above the SN15, which is next in line, has apparently a lot of changes to the SN8, 9, 10 and 11 (hence why SN12-14 were scrapped).

As to how many prototypes they can explode, I think these are relatively cheap, but they need to start showing some progress. The current schedule has Starship flying passengers around the moon by 2023 and hopefully going into orbit perhaps this year. I don't think either is achievable at the moment.

The first prototype of the booster rocket which will sit under Starship, BN1, is being scrapped after construction, but BN2 could make it to the launchpad. Starship should be able to launch on its own from the Moon and Mars, but the higher gravity here on Earth means it needs the booster rocket to reach orbit. The design of the booster intends it to be reusable like the Starship, but the current plan to retrieve it seems insane even by SpaceX standards. It would apparently come back to the launch tower and, rather than land, hook itself on to the tower and hang there.

EDIT TO ADD: Apparently the current plan is for BN3 and SN20 to put Starship in orbit by July this year. We'll see.

Alberon

#25
SN15 headed out to the launch pad a few days ago and it is having its raptor engines fitted ahead of its test flight and explosion next week.

Meanwhile NASA has picked which of the three competing companies out of SpaceX, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Dynetics to build the lunar lander. According to the Washington Post in the end they chose to give the $2.9 billion contract to SpaceX.

SpaceX's proposal was to use the Starship to land on the moon, so this only increases the pressure to get the thing to work in its test flights at Boca Chica.

Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse

I hope Elon Musk wastes all his money on this and it never works and his bloated, heroin-filled corpse is flung into a pauper's grave

chveik

Quote from: Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse on April 16, 2021, 11:19:06 PM
I hope Elon Musk wastes all his money on this and it never works and his bloated, heroin-filled corpse is flung into a pauper's grave

looks like he's mostly wasting public money

Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse

Quote from: chveik on April 17, 2021, 12:04:34 AM
looks like he's mostly wasting public money
fucking parasite

Blumf

Quote from: chveik on April 17, 2021, 12:04:34 AM
looks like he's mostly wasting public money

Cheaper than the Space Launch System, which is costing the tax payer billions every year just to reuse old Space Shuttle bits, and after a decade still hasn't had a launch (which are estimated to cost well over a billion a pop)

In comparison SpaceX's Falcon 9 took about 5 years and less than half a billion total to develop the new engines and overall rocket design to launch, and turned out to be very cheap to run (62 mil). We'll see what the totals are for their Starship project, again with new engines and fancy design, but I'm betting they'll be under the SLS project, even combined with the Falcon development.

Both projects represent some good old fashioned Keynesian money cycling though, with bonus tech development. And at least they're not pointless weapons systems for subduing brown people in the vicinity of oil.

But seriously, Musk is a twat. No denying that.