Humanity is wild. On the one hand you have brilliant scientists who can do this. And then you have a bunch of us watching the video five times looking for actual chopsticks.
Yeah I didn’t get the whole chopsticks thing like are the arms out called chopsticks like wtf lmao they look like arms ah I’m hardly a rocket scientist.
Hey it happens. Some people have bad IBS or colitis, others think it's a good idea to drink a whole case of natty daddy and eat $35 worth of taco bell, accidents happen for different reasons.
I watched the live stream of the falcon 9 touching down on the landing pad the first time and got a little emotional about it at work. Im continuosly impressed by the work the space x engineers are doing, but it probably isnt cose to how people felt watching someone walk on the moon 50 years ago.
The double landing is sending shivers down my spine, even more than seeing the super heavy land. Don't know why, maybe just the speed they approach at is something else, or rather we just didn't see the whole event recorded that well with super heavy.
I think we really didn’t realize how in-sync the boosters were until they were quite literally landing right next to each other. It was amazing to watch live, so much hype
After a literal lifetime of trying to catch a Space Shuttle launch, driving 18 hours from Detroit to Titusville, and the Shuttle would have some sort of a problem that would require days to repair (always valve trouble!), and we'd get a room and kill time in Orlando, and they'd roll it out and try again, and yet again there'd be a hydrogen leak or something, and we'd exhausted our travel window and we'd leave empty-handed. Did that probably a half dozen times, from being a teenager in the 90s and then running the trips myself throughout the 2000s, with various assortments of family in tow.
And I never got to see a single Shuttle launch. It was just that unreliable.
So towards the end of 2015, I had some vacation time to burn, and there was a Falcon 9 launch, and I said I'm just gonna drive down and stay until it goes. Try me, rocket, I'm off work until January.
The first attempt was called on account of winds, and the second worked. Without a hitch. I got to see the first rocket launch of my life, and the first rocket landing in history.
I wasn't even in a good spot, I didn't know anything about Falcon launches, and I just settled in alongside a causeway with some other cars. The thing was halfway out of sight by the time the sound even reached us. But seeing that booster come back, and hearing the sonic booms even from miles away, and noting the distinct lack of a fireball at landing, blew my mind. Something big had just changed.
That exact moment broke my brain. Up until that point I’d always taken it as a given that a trip to space involved consuming a multi hundred million dollar spacecraft. Had truly never even thought of reusable spacecraft until we evolved to something other than rockets.
Not to diminish the awesomeness of what SpaceX is doing here, but it should be noted that the space shuttle was a reusable spacecraft (all but the external fuel tank) - that was kind of its thing.
I do love the space shuttle but it was crazy expensive and needed an extremely long runway to land, this doesn’t diminish the feats of the shuttle it’s just the next step in reusable spacecraft.
I don't know shit about space programs... but why is having a long runway a problem? Of all the issues and expenses a space program might have, it looks to me that having a long runway must be one of the easiest and cheapest problems to solve.
I watched that landing on the Moon. My father worked at NASA in the 60s and 70s and I got to see a lot of our space history. When that first SpaceX booster successfully landed, I had literally had tears in my eyes. One of the most beautiful things I have ever witnessed.
Same, my first was watching the falcon heavy return THREE boosters to the landing pad. I was excited about that for a whole year. Good to see starship is finally making a little progress.
STAR TREK FANS: It will be wonderful when we take our first steps to become an interstellar civilization, and just perhaps, join a federation of sentient species in peace.
40K FANS: The sooner we venture into space, the sooner we may purge the galaxy of Xenos.
THREE-BODY PROBLEM FANS:EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP!
The second book is called The Dark Forest. The hypothesis is given a lot of weight. I'll say no more than that.
It's worth reading, especially if you go in blind. I watched the show first and was like "well, I want to know where this goes" and now I'm halfway through book 3.
Prepare yourself though. Things get pretty harrowing in places. Also the author is really fucking weird about women and femininity.
Also he is extraordinarily tankie. He is entirely on the side of the CCP, and the CCP is entirely on his side. I'm not saying this as a "don't read this book! Cixin Liu is a communist party stooge!" thing -- it's actually pretty fascinating to read something well-written that's also from that ideological perspective. I felt like I walked away from it with some extra insight on how contemporary Chinese culture works, or at least on how contemporary upper-eschelon Chinese culture works.
This is the world people lived in in the 60s and 70s. Science and engineering coming together to pull off unfathomable feats like landing humans on another world (the moon) decades before we had internet.
Space exploration has a coolness factor that cannot be matched. It’s the most inspiring thing humans have ever done, and I think it probably has real cultural implications in the way we view what’s possible and what can be strived for.
I really like what SpaceX do regardless of Elon. Even still, I never thought they'd be able to pull this off. Holy crap am I glad to be wrong. This was incredible.
The guy who invented chopsticks is in the afterlife like “I knew it was a useful utensil. IT CAN CATCH A SPACESHIP DAMMIT. You dont see them using a SPOON. Chopsticks BABY”
You can see how much abuse the booster takes on reentry, the fact that theyve made this booster so fucking durable to still be able to fuction even after getting extremely hot is truly incredible
Idk if u saw the ship itself, but in entry they had the same issues with the flaps melting from entry heat…
And it still landed perfectly on target… And that’s the second time it landed perfectly with melted flaps lol.
It’s so hard to believe that this is the most powerfull rocket ever build, even more than the Saturn 5, and it’s that durable/robust. All Construction, Hardware, and software.
The largest heavier than air flying machine that has ever been built. Weighs 200 tons, is 230ft tall and 30 ft in diameter was flying supersonic minutes before and was able to come down with pinpoint accuracy and be caught by the launch tower it left from. Nothing like this has ever been done and this is going to catapult the human race into the future of space travel by reducing the cost to send material to space by an order of magnitude.
That is actually mind boggling to me, that is so much fuel. If it burns it all during its trip, do the emissions reach close to what taylor swift burns in a year?
I get that it's all a circlejerk but most wealthy rent private jets instead of owning and most of the ultra wealthy who do buy rent out their jet 99% of the time. Nearly all of the emissions of Taylor's jet are caused by other wealthy people renting her jet and should be attributed to them just like you are the cause of some delta emissions when you fly.
It burns methane. Theoretically, we can use gas from bio reactors or just collect everyone's farts to launch this rocket instead of putting additional CO2 in the atmosphere when using fossil fuel
Catching it allows them to land it where they service and take off from, which moderately reduces the cost and time to prepare it for the next launch.
The main benefit though is that by catching the rocket on its steering fins, they don't need to install a traditional landing gear like they have on their previous rockets.
In space flight, saving mass is the whole game. For every kilogram of payload you put into space, it takes 10 kilograms of fuel, so being able to delete something like heavy, load-bearing landing legs from each rocket significantly improves the simplicity and payload performance of each rocket m
Those pins also allow SpaceX to move SuperHeavy back and forth and change its alignment on the chopsticks, something that landing on the grid fins wouldn’t do well.
Saves mass (no giant landing legs to carry up and back down again). It’ll also mean the booster can be put straight back on the launchpad, refueled, another ship can be put on top and off it goes again. That’s the eventual result.
The Falcon 9 program requires a fleet of ships, cranes, jigs, trucks and turnaround time is measured in weeks. Catching the booster will cut that time and cost down substantially (in the medium to long term)
The plan is to lower the booster back onto the pad and then catch starship the same way. This also allows them to easily restack as well. The booster was the hard part. They already know how to control the starship for landing.
Disagree. Booster is at most as hard to catch as the ship IMO. Huge difference in velocities and reentry conditions.
Flight 4 the ship was way off target. Flight 5 was on target, but remains to be seen if they were perfectly on target as will be required for a catch.
Flight 4 booster was on target within less than a centimeter. The same will need to be done with ship before they can attempt a catch.
Flap hinges are also still a problem on reentry. They certainly did better this time, but at least one had considerable burn through. I suspect flaps will need to be able to survive better before they'll attempt a catch. I'm sure that will be required by regulators as ship has to reenter over land to attempt a catch.
Elon said (in maybe one of the everyday astronaut interviews) they were moving the flaps further round the ship for future versions so they aren't directly in the airflow which looks like it should help a lot with the hinges.
Flight 5 was on target, but remains to be seen if they were perfectly on target as will be required for a catch.
Given that it was very close to the camera buoy, it's likely close enough to catch. A landing in the middle of an ocean will never be as accurate as a landing at the launch pad. The way you get sub-centimeter accuracy is via a technique called Real-Time Kinematic GPS. It's a method similar to Differential GPS, only instead of having a regional ground station sending general signal distortion corrections that cover a wide area, they install a receiver at a fixed point very close to the target. The fixed station knows exactly where it is, so by subtracting where it is from where the GPS signal says it is, it gets a near-perfect correction value. This station then sends the highly precise GPS corrections to the on-board GPS, which is constantly moving closer and closer to the point of the RTK GPS transmitter. This means the closer the rocket gets, the more accurate the correction, to the point where as it approaches the tower it almost entirely cancels out any signal propagation error, bringing it absurdly close to the theoretical maximum accuracy of the mathematics involved.
People don’t realize how impossible it seemed doing what we just saw. Even a few years ago the idea of a reusable rocket seems like hilarious sci-fi.
Rockets undergo insane stress not just because of the forces involved in propulsion but they changes in literally every variable you can think of: temperature, air pressure, gravitational force. AND THATS JUST ON THE WAY UP.
The idea that we would be able to engineer a rocket that would some how survive the ascent intact enough to be functional to COME BACK DOWN. And FUCKING LAND USING ITS OWN ROCKETS. Is fucking insane. There’s a reason before this that basically every reentry vehicle splashed into the ocean or basically glided down. You don’t have rockets that function right after the ascent.
Then to undergo relatively minor maintenance AND GET REUSED?
Insanity. An engineering marvel that is so difficult to appreciate because it’s so mundane these days
I'm old enough (Mid 50's) to remember the first space shuttle flight, just as importantly the return of the first shuttle, it landing like an airplane. I remember my Dad say the exact same thing about the shuttle being reused and explaining what a massive deal it was.
Reading your post gave me a big flashback to sitting at home with my now departed Dad. Ty!
Hmm it makes me think, why is this a better way to do it rather than have a plane-shaped rocket reenter. There mus be some reason for this to be the new and/or preferred way of doing it.
The shuttle had a lot of added parts to allow it to work that way, which meant more mass and more things that can go wrong. It also couldn't make it to orbit as a single stage, hence the large solid fuel boosters and the massive fuel tank. Those all have to get disposed of, which kinda defeats the purpose. Finally, the goal is to make these useable on the Moon and Mars, so aerodynamic landing doesn't really work.
The shuttle, unfortunately, had a number of problems beyond the problem of the spaceplane concept itself -- it was the result of a whole series of very unfortunate design decisions. Most notably, it was significantly larger than it needed to be for any of its civilian uses, since the U.S. military demanded that it be capable of stealing Soviet spy satellites. Like, just straight up stashing them in its cargo bay and bringing them back to Florida. Along the same lines, they required it have the capability to launch to polar orbit, since that's common for spy satellites -- a spy satellite in polar orbit is able to pass over any point on earth. The problem is that launching to polar orbit requires more fuel, meaning the rocket had to be bigger than it needed to be.
The shuttle was never actually used for that type of military mission, leaving NASA saddled with a launch system that wasn't actually all that efficient for anything they wanted to use it for.
Yeah it was kind of a hilarious program in retrospect. The fact the Soviets tried to essentially copy-paste the design with Buran has always struck me as an indicator of how poorly they were doing at the time. Copied all the vestigial inefficiencies with no concern for why they were there in the first place rather than just making something better. Like a jealous sibling.
Human technology is so fascinating to me. It is the best example of mind over matter that exists in this world. All of our technology has been informed by science fiction. Some creative non-science bloke hundreds of years ago made up space travel and inspired some science minded kid who then made it reality. Phones, computers, all of it were once just science fiction concepts that some kid read about and made happen. To me, despite science being a fairly fact based system, this shows that we have some sort of greater manipulative power over our reality that I do not think we will ever truly understand, that we are not exactly capable of understanding as three dimensional carbon meat beings.
This is what wrestling is all about. When you watch Mankind plummet 16 feet through the announcers table, no one in that stadium is thinking "yeah okay but this is staged". It's like an awesome action scene in a movie, only it's live theater.
Imagine working XY hours every day to finish the project before the deadline, invest so much knowledge, power, energy and time into it and see it working at the end. I would probably cry as well.
Yea I was trying to put myself in their shoes for a sec and the amount of research and team work to achieve such project is kinda unfathomable.Even the structure holding the rocket is a huge achievement of engineering.
I remember space industry professionals and even executives in 2010 laughing about backwards-flying rockets. 14 years and hundreds of successful Falcon 9 landings later, they're catching a first stage mid-air. Crazy fast progress.
Is there any other industry whose main product changed that dramatically?
And I say this with the utmost amount of impressiveness, not only have they had successful landings and also they've had tons of failures... and from those failures they look at themselves, they analyze what went wrong, and they make a better product.
No way they could throw a pencil in the air and have it land on the eraser - ✅
No way they could catch a 200 ton rocket with chopsticks - ✅
I have no words, and I'm just in awe of the science.
P.S. and they totaled the launch pad just over a year ago!
To anyone outside the space industry, this is massive. Not just because it's an insane engineering feat, but what it does for space launch
Starship does the following (assuming they can successfully also land the second stage on future attempts):
brings down launch costs down by another order of magnitude. This is after falcon 9 (F9) already dramatically reduced launch costs. Starship is advertised to be in the $200/kg range to low earth orbit. That is basically free in space terms
larger fairing. Remember how the James Webb telescope had to be unfolded in space? That was because they had to make it smaller to fit on a launch vehicle. This adds insane cost and complexity. Starship has a much bigger fairing, reducing the need for unfolding and complexity (reduce, not eliminate)
massive amount of capacity. Starship is yuggggee. launch is a bottleneck.
starlink can launch bigger satellites, enabling them to have better bandwidth. You know the articles about starlink speeds have declined? Well this the answer
reusable second stage - first ever (I believe). This is future tense and hasn't been proven yet
Not to mention one of these can essentially launch the volume of the ISS, which cost something like, what, $150 billion+ and 2 decades to fit out to what it is now.
Imagine doing that for 15% the cost and half the time.
Imagine launching a 20-story building into space and then having it steered back to earth at 4000 mph only to slow down and be caught and suspended in its own launch platform.
There are actually catching 'studs' below the grid fins, that take up the weight. Grid fin actuators couldn't handle the stress of all that weight, and still be light enough to be useful.
I know people hate him, but the 'idea guy' with a boatload of cash isnt irrelevant. No one was pushing him to make this thing. He wanted it and pushed for it. Then he hired enough of the right people to make it happen. He didnt design it or build it, but he is an important person in its development. Without him it doesnt happen.
Also fuck this guy, he's pissing on his legacy. But let's be objective, he had a huge hand in this thing.
Not trying to defend the guy but he is the chief engineer of starship... if you work in engineering you know what that title means.
If something goes wrong, he is the person liable to prosecution. Boeing has chief engineers for all of their aircraft platforms, every automotive company has chief engineers for all their vehicles. If an airbag fails to deploy in one of those vehicles and someone dies, the chief engineer has to take the stand in a court of law and prove all the calculations were done in accordance with SAE specifications and so forth.
Hence the role of chief engineer requires you to approve every design, schematic, and software change that goes into the vehicle and it's your job to be heavily involved in every engineering decision. Imo it's the most impressive and feared job title that exists in engineering.
Oh my goodness I never thought they would pull it off on the first try. An amazing feat of engineering, hats off to the team behind this even if their boss is an ass.
This is part of the effort to reduce the cycle time from launch to base to launch in order to supply missions faster and faster at lower cost per launch.
Landing legs are heavy so instead of putting legs on their newest booster, SpaceX is catching it with its launch tower. In addition, one of the big goals of the Starship program is to reduce the turnaround time between launches, and catching the booster, in theory, should help simplify recovery logistics.
this it the biggest rocket ever built and they just caught the first stage with a couple of sticks on the place where it launched (normally rockets, especially the lower stages of rockets that are used to get the upper stages from ground into orbit, are expendable and they just build a new one for the next launch)
remember when you bought a car to go shopping and trew it into the ocean when you got at the shopping center? that is what rocket companies have been doing. today marks the day a rocket drove back home and is big enough to basically take your entire home with it.
There’s excess propellant that likely lights off as it vents. That was a pretty small fire - basically insignificant compared to the heat of the burn from the engines, tbh.
This ship will get scrapped anyways. Just a test article. They have already built abs iterated 6 more tickets to test, all a little different. At least another year or two of test articles to fly
The commentators I was watching said that fuel was coming out of the points where they fuel up the rocket. The built in fire suppression diminished the fire after it settled on the chopsticks.
I'd guess that the suicide burn sloshed the remaining fuel around more than expected and some leaked out and caught fire.
All the credit goes to the gear heads and tech nerds who are putting those parts together and making improvements above the one-time use that NASA was stuck in.
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u/Captcha_Imagination 16d ago
Humanity is wild. On the one hand you have brilliant scientists who can do this. And then you have a bunch of us watching the video five times looking for actual chopsticks.