• 7 Posts
  • 135 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: February 28th, 2024
  • ptfrd@sh.itjust.workstoSpaceX@sh.itjust.works•[Meta] !spacex@sh.itjust.works turns two years old, call for moderatorsEnglish
    1·
    9 hours ago

    Until now I’ve been too lazy to look into what rules/guidelines exist for this community. Am I now right in thinking there aren’t any? (If so, I’m not complaining!) Or am I just not finding them (as an inexperienced Lemmy user)?

    The thing I was going to look into was any posting guidelines. How significant should something be to warrant its own post? For example, this tweet includes a video with an F9 barge landing perspective that I don’t remember seeing before.

    FWIW, my own feeling is that I’d like a quarterly “General Discussion Thread” (as with the equivalent Subreddit), to gather up all the minor stuff.

    Are posts automatically ‘published’ or do they go through moderation first? (If this is something I should be able to determine myself, if I knew more about Lemmy, LMK and I’ll go & do some reading!)

    P.S. My thanks to you and all the team for all your efforts.

  • ptfrd@sh.itjust.workstoSpaceflightMemes@sh.itjust.works•S35 payload deployment be likeEnglish
    3·
    23 days ago

    Dan Huot jinxed it by invoking Kubrick on the livestream. It was subsequently inevitable that SpaceX’s hardware abstraction layer (HAL) would claim not to be able to do it. I just hope it was telling the truth.

    HAL: I'm sorry, Dan. I'm afraid I can't do that.
Dan: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dan: What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: It's right there on your screen Dan, the actuators are stuck.
Dan: Oh yeah. Anyway, do you know any songs? You might want to start singing in about 27 minutes.
  • ptfrd@sh.itjust.workstoSpaceX@sh.itjust.works•Starship Flight 9 Launch ThreadEnglish
    3·
    23 days ago

    Make a good reef.

    Hope so!

    Though I believe that it was the Gulf of Mexico that received (large chunks of) B14.

    Whereas the Indian Ocean has probably some small bits of S35 debris. (Unless it fully vapourised on re-entry? You’ve also got me wondering whether any of the materials merely melt, and then re-solidify as solid lumps, either in the lower atmosphere or after hitting the ocean.)

    And while I’m being pedantic, @threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works, the table above says “Soft water landing” for the booster, which isn’t how I’d describe the plan they had for it.

  • ptfrd@sh.itjust.workstoSpaceX@sh.itjust.works•SpaceX blames Starship Flight 8 mishap on engine hardware failureEnglish
    3·
    27 days ago

    The missing piece here is that Lueders was sidelined by the administration, and only left NASA after that. I guess we can all agree that this was punishment for her awarding the contract to SpaceX, and the only question is whether she deserved that punishment.

    I don’t know. I don’t even know if the claims are true. But having an idea of your maximum price, and only telling any bidders what that is if they are a little bit over, doesn’t seem to me like the kind of thing that would be an uncommon occurrence in government procurement.

    My weak guess is that, prior to this year at least, SpaceX has been operating at a vastly lower level than Old Space in terms of dubious business practices, and the baby steps they took in that direction were expertly countered by the masters of the art, and that’s why we’re even talking about this level of detail in the only (?) contract that SpaceX contentiously won, and not the dozens they contentiously lost.

  • ptfrd@sh.itjust.workstoSpaceX@sh.itjust.works•SpaceX blames Starship Flight 8 mishap on engine hardware failureEnglish
    43·
    28 days ago

    but their goals seem easy in comparison, especially if you consider the tech we have now vs the 60’s

    I’d say their goals seem much harder in an absolute sense, but perhaps roughly the same in comparison to the technology level.

    They really do seem to be trying to create a Mars colonisation ship. Capable of transporting large amounts of mass for less money than it costs to transport small amounts of mass with existing rockets.

    My response to Destin is that Starship is clearly not optimal for another ‘flags and footprints’ mission to the Moon, but is such a paradigm shift that even if doing such a mission as a ‘side project’, it could still very easily be better than all the alternatives. And if, like me, you care more about a permanent presence on the Moon, the case for Starship becomes even stronger.

  • ptfrd@sh.itjust.workstoSpaceX@sh.itjust.works•SpaceX starts 2025 with Falcon records and Starship problemsEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    Good point. I wasn’t really thinking what i meant by “the critical path”. I was probably assuming the path to a vehicle & system working (at least qualitatively) as designed - including full reusability.

    But now that I think about it, probably the thing that matters most to SpaceX is launching at least one ship during the next Mars transfer window, in order to test their Martian EDL approach. (The critical path to making life multi-planetary?) And for that I guess booster reuse is much(?) more important than ship reuse. Or to put it another way, currently for Starship, Mars EDL is the main goal, and Earth EDL only matters to the extent it helps with that goal.

    I should’ve realized this without your question, because after Flight 4 I decided that it was now likely they would be ready by early 2027 - even if they did struggle with reusability. (I think even after Flight 3 we had grounds to reach this conclusion.)

    So I now say that this decision is probably not a mistake.

    N.B. When I say I think they’ll be ready by early 2027, I mean from an engineering PoV. I’m excluding politics and such. What if a NASA science team decides they don’t want Starship to contaminate Mars, and Trump doesn’t feel like helping Musk overturn that decision?