Catch me back at the pad, how about that!

October 13, 2024 5:24 PM

On October 13, Space X launched Starship 5 and several minutes later, caught the first stage ( called Super Heavy Booster) when it returned to the launchpad from whence it came! Scott Manley has great commentary about the feat, including the separate return of Starship itself into the ocean.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (52 comments total)

It’s just amazing.
posted by Emmy Noether at 5:40 PM on October 13, 2024 [1 favorite]

It's perhaps the first time in my life I have been completely awestruck by watching live footage of a technological achievement. What a historic moment!
posted by fortitude25 at 5:50 PM on October 13, 2024 [4 favorites]

What surprised me was how quickly it went through the first like 25% of the fuel just getting off the pad. And it looked like there was still some light burn through on the flaps still, I'm curious if that was in controlled locations to prove that the design won't immediately fail if it loses a hard tile, or if that was unexpected. And man, the backs of the flaps going through the heat treatment rainbow on reentry makes me wonder what the metallurgical implications are, but I'm sure they've considered them.

I'm still mildly curious how they intend to get anything other than flatpack Ikea satellites out of the Ship without eating up their mass fraction on structural enhancements, but I know the trick is to just get up and down successfully once before they start complicating the engineering even further.
posted by Kyol at 5:53 PM on October 13, 2024 [1 favorite]

> It's perhaps the first time in my life I have been completely awestruck by watching live footage of a technological achievement. What a historic moment!

I didn't see this landing live, but I watched the first successful barge landing of the Falcon 9 live and I felt similarly awestruck.
posted by WaylandSmith at 5:57 PM on October 13, 2024 [4 favorites]

the technological gap between watching this and wanting to get on one of these for a 40-minute flight to Narita is rather large!

Still, having grown up on tail-first rocket landings in SF, I'm rooting for SpaceX...
posted by torokunai at 6:00 PM on October 13, 2024

Mod note: One comment removed.

The ceo of Space X is definitely a controversial figure and tends to derail Space X related posts, so let's just leave them out of this post and focus on the neat and cool stuff.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:17 PM on October 13, 2024 [20 favorites]

That was slicker than snot on a doorknob.
posted by CynicalKnight at 6:23 PM on October 13, 2024 [1 favorite]

Congratulations to Gwynne Shotwell and her team.
posted by gwint at 6:31 PM on October 13, 2024 [36 favorites]

What surprised me was how quickly it went through the first like 25% of the fuel just getting off the pad.

People occasionally talk about building what amount to Truly Fuck-You Size gauss rifles up the western slopes of Cotopaxi, Chimborazo, or Kiliminjaro with the idea that if you can use utter shitloads of electricity instead of the rockets themselves to get them up to speeds as low as 1000-2000km/h, you can get vastly better booster to final-mass ratios.

It's still ridiculously optimistic what with some of those being active volcanoes but it has the benefit of being *less* ridiculously optimistic than orbital elevators or, God help you, Lofstrom loops.

See also the spinlaunch people, who ISTR were trying to build towards just directly hucking shit into orbit. But IIRC this would only work for payloads that could survive something like 100g while still inside the spinnerator?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:32 PM on October 13, 2024 [6 favorites]

On first watch, the maneuvering so close to the tower seemed doomed to fail, but somehow it all worked out. Before that, the amount of reentry heating in the engine bay was giving me heart palpitations.

Intellectually, I know that catching the booster is way more impressive given that the damn thing is at least half of the volume of the entire condo building I live in, but somehow yeeting a Tesla Roadster into heliocentric orbit and watching the near simultaneous landings of the Falcon Heavy boosters had more of an emotional impact.

The other thing that really impresses me is how Starlink has enabled continuous high bandwidth video streaming from orbit and all the way through re-entry. It's technological marvel piled on technological marvel.
posted by wierdo at 6:36 PM on October 13, 2024 [5 favorites]

A few other angles of the catch, via TikTok: 1, 2, 3, 4
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:36 PM on October 13, 2024 [2 favorites]

These spinlaunch people?

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/spinlaunch-satellite-launch-system-kinetic/
posted by aleph at 6:46 PM on October 13, 2024

Several angles of the catch from Space X.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:08 PM on October 13, 2024 [3 favorites]

Friend of mine and his team were working on this, so that's cool, but I don't quite understand the utility of the complication of it all.

But again, I love shit that pushes us forward. I just wish the obvious accolades weren't attached to such an odious individual.
posted by drewbage1847 at 7:57 PM on October 13, 2024 [3 favorites]

I'd heard about SpinLaunch before, but didn't realize it was that far along now. It's definitely odd but it makes sense. Hopefully, they can pull it off.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 8:01 PM on October 13, 2024

I don't quite understand the utility of the complication of it all.


It’s a step towards full re-usability. Launch the rocket. Catch the rocket. Inspect, clean up and repair as needed, put a Starship on top the rocket that’s already on the launcher, fill with fuel, launch, repeat. There are claims that Starship and Super Heavy may get launch costs to orbit down below $100 a pound. I don’t necessarily buy that but it does have to potential to massively drop price per pound. When you’re not paying to build replacement rockets, things get a lot cheaper.
posted by azpenguin at 9:45 PM on October 13, 2024 [2 favorites]

" ... but I don't quite understand the utility of the complication of it all."

That's my thought too drewbage1847.

Sure, it's a neat trick and not just a gimmick, but if you wanted to get the booster back down for reuse, wouldn't it be easier to land it using parachutes and airbags in a football field-sized area than a pinpoint landing on a launch pad? That would leave more fuel to be used getting stuff to orbit as well.
posted by Relay at 10:45 PM on October 13, 2024 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Several deleted. This isn't a post about "do you like SpaceX / Elon Musk?" It's a post for discussion of a specific historic space tech event currently in the news. Feel free to make a post about what you'd rather discuss, and people can discuss that there. Evildoug, I'm giving you a day off for flooding the thread with nonsense comments.
posted by taz (staff) at 10:56 PM on October 13, 2024 [11 favorites]

wouldn't it be easier to land it using parachutes and airbags in a football field-sized area than a pinpoint landing on a launch pad?

Being able to precisely land it near the shop where it can be refurbished cuts down on turn around time, which cuts down on cost. That’s the theory, anyway.

Parachutes on a booster that size would decrease precision and add expense, even if possible.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:12 PM on October 13, 2024 [1 favorite]

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
posted by Soliloquy at 12:07 AM on October 14, 2024 [10 favorites]

"We aim at the stars, but sometimes we hit London" ~ Wernher von Braun.
posted by Comstar at 12:27 AM on October 14, 2024 [10 favorites]

"Fickt nicht mit dem Raketenmensch" ~Thomas Pynchon
posted by chavenet at 1:14 AM on October 14, 2024 [4 favorites]

I made a spreadsheet to play with the numbers to see what the price of pounds to orbit could be. With info I've been able to find for costs, looks like in a scenario with 1 booster and 3 starships, ignoring R&D cost, only 20 flights could get the cost to sub $100/pound. You can copy the sheet and plug in different numbers.
posted by Sophont at 2:06 AM on October 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

> It's perhaps the first time in my life I have been completely awestruck by watching live footage of a technological achievement. What a historic moment!

I didn't see this landing live, but I watched the first successful barge landing of the Falcon 9 live and I felt similarly awestruck.

In elementary school, they brought in a TV and my class watched John Glenn's first USA orbital flight. Three whole orbits! Just 90 minutes to circle the Earth! I was 9 years old. My memory says we watched all three orbits, but that was around 5 hours of coverage. Was it running in the background while we did our regular lesson plan?

There was a lot of drama on his re-entry, waiting while the radios didn't work from the intensely heated air.

On later flights, the parachutes were visible, right near the ships. How did they get that accuracy on the re-entry!
posted by jjj606 at 3:43 AM on October 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

We aim at the stars, but sometimes we hit London

I had thought that was a Mort Sahl line, but according to Wikipedia, it had been voiced by the character of a cynical press officer in the Wernher von Braun biopic I Aim at the Stars.

Furthermore from the wikipedia article:

I Aim at the Stars wrestles with the ethical complexities of scientific progress and the personal life of von Braun. It highlights the disquieting paradox of a man who aimed for the stars but whose inventions caused immense destruction on Earth. The film takes its title from von Braun's own philosophy: "We aim at the stars, but sometimes we hit London," underscoring the dichotomy of his life's work.

posted by rochrobbb at 3:43 AM on October 14, 2024 [3 favorites]

It's a post for discussion of a specific historic space tech event currently in the news.

But there are a bunch of other historic things currently in the news which greatly intersect with this, and isn't it a bit privileged to pretend that these achievements are somehow happening in an apolitical vacuum?

1930s Metatafilter: The people who own Peenemünde are definitely controversial figures and tend to derail rocketry related posts, so let's just leave them out of this post and focus on the neat and cool stuff.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:29 AM on October 14, 2024 [12 favorites]

Relay: wouldn't it be easier to land it using parachutes and airbags in a football field-sized area than a pinpoint landing on a launch pad?

Brandon Blatcher: Being able to precisely land it near the shop where it can be refurbished cuts down on turn around time, which cuts down on cost. That’s the theory, anyway.

And weight, you don't put the mass of landing legs or parachutes into the thing so you've got more space for fuel and/or payload.

I spent a few minutes watching a fake stream that interrupted the countdown near zero, like 00:06, with a deep-fake Musk offering to double my cryptocurrency investments, but when I found the right steam, this was impressive -- while it could've been hilarious had it gone wrong.
posted by k3ninho at 6:52 AM on October 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

One thing with SpaceX is that they have the money to fail and that they’re not afraid to do so. I don’t know how confident they were on this first test but my guess is that they would not have been surprised if the first catch had failed in spectacular fashion. If it had, study everything, pore over the data, find what went wrong and then try it again after fixes are made. They lost several Falcon 9 boosters in the process of learning how to land them upright. That’s the reason the booster landings are reliable now, because of all of the explosions and tipovers that they were able to study. For a lot of companies, a bunch of failed tests is out of the question, because after one or two failures the company may be unrecoverable.
posted by azpenguin at 7:15 AM on October 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

They still haven’t fixed the flaps melting off, which I assume means they don’t see it as a big enough priority yet; one has to imagine this is fixable without drastic design changes, so they’ll get there.

The big issue is definitely timelines. Since IFT3 they stopped testing more than one thing at a time, and given the number of things they have to prove out for HLS (refueling and actually carrying cargo being pretty big ones), this is moving a lot slower.

They need to pick up the pace. Maybe part of this is NASA being slow on launch approvals, but I don’t know how much of that is genuine and how much is SpaceX looking for excuses.

Or NASA needs to acknowledge how dumb the moon mission architecture is and just admit they’re paying SpaceX to do free R&D on a Starlink deployer.
posted by Room 101 at 7:31 AM on October 14, 2024

Parachutes are a great option for steering to a pinpoint landing. This idea has been explored since Gemini. And Space X has played around with this method for faring recovery for the Falcon 9 (which they abandoned).

There are two main issues with steerable parachutes on Starship: 1) the inherent weight penalty of a redundant steerable parachute and 2) the R&D cost of developing a parachute big enough for Super Heavy.

The main problem of steerable parachutes is redundancy. Usually, three or more round parachutes with no ability to steer are used. Multiples allow a safe landing even in the event of one failing. This recently happened to Blue Origin. Crucially, all the round parachutes can be deployed at the same time. If a steerable parachute was used, only one parachute could be deployed at a time. So the redundancy would be sequential: the failed chute would have to be cut away and another deployed. Besides the long drop while waiting to deploy the backup chute, sequential redundancy means each parachute needs to be large enough to carry the whole weight of the payload, so now your parachutes weigh substantially more. instead of carrying 150% of your required parachute area, now you’re carrying 200%.

Additionally, the most challenging aspect of parachute development is reefing during opening. If the parachute opens too quickly, the shock loading will tear it to shreds. All existing ram air parafoils use a special slider system that uses wind resistance to carefully mediate the forces of opening. I suspect a parachute for Super Heavy would be so big that existing strategies might not work. Super Heavy is gigantic. It weighs 275,000 kg when empty, 10x heavier than the payload rating of the largest ram-air parafoil parachute currently available: the US military’s JPADS-60K.

TL;DR SpaceX knows parachutes and chose a powered recovery for good reasons.
posted by Headfullofair at 7:46 AM on October 14, 2024 [4 favorites]

I watched the launch with a mix of wonder and dread. I had tears in my eyes to see a launch vehicle that might just make it possible for me to see a permanent moon presence in my lifetime. Tears to see that massive vehicle caught through the engineering marvel that the brilliant people at SpaceX had accomplished.

And I felt dread, knowing as a rocket scientist how much energy is required to take that much mass into orbit. Knowing as an engineer on a flight project monitoring the atmosphere how much impact that much energy use can have.

I remember reading and re-reading the section on rockets in the World Book Encyclopedia as a little girl, looking at the drawings going from the humble Scout to the mighty Saturn V. I remember the rocket park in Huntsville when I attended Space Camp (twice).

But I'm older now, and I've learned a lot. And my dreams have turned to nightmares, watching our world burn.

There's a good reason to use a Falcon Heavy to launch a payload like my beloved GOES-U into orbit. It will provide the data we need to know what is happening to our world - the data we need to save lives from weather events that are far too common today. But I have to admit to myself that I see no reason for us to pursue Artemis to its conclusion - to regular, massive launches to put people on the Moon. No reason to spend so many resources, expend so much carbon, while the seas rise and people perish in North Carolina.

This is a dream we need to let die. Let us instead build our mechanical wonders, build our Pioneers and Mariners, our Curiosities and Junos. Send them out as our ambassadors, to worlds we can someday earn the right to visit. When we have learned to care for our own.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 8:21 AM on October 14, 2024 [14 favorites]

Is it out of bounds to ask what deliberately misunderstood Culture reference this is named after? Asking for a friend.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 2:59 PM on October 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

outgrown_hobnail: see here.
posted by senor biggles at 3:49 PM on October 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

" ... but I don't quite understand the utility of the complication of it all."

That's my thought too drewbage1847.

Oh, oh, let me try summarize this.

1. The regular "landing" that Falcon 9 has been doing takes about 20 days to turnaround (current record is 21 days for B1062) and re-launch, while a "catch" landing like the Super Heavy did could have a 2 day turnaround to re-launch since they only need to refuel.

1a. This is because you can't land at the launch site - the launch site contains extensive machinery and infrastructure on the ground, like flame trenches, flame diverters, water curtains, all to mitigate the rocket fire. (Remember when Space-X tried to launch a Super Heavy as an experiment without those mitigations...). The landing pad is just flat concrete without those mitigations, and so it gets badly torn up when landing. This is exponentially so for a giant rocket like the Super Heavy compared to the Falcon 9. So if you want to land a Super Heavy, you basically land a 25 story building at the landing pad, then get the machinery in to turn it horizontal for transport overland to the launch pad, then turn it vertical again and refuel it.

2. There is significant aero and weight inefficiencies in adding landing legs to the rocket, as well as additional points of failure. You're trading off the lightest possible landing leg versus the probability it will fail. In a "catch" landing you can make the catching arms as strong as you like. This is again exponentially so for a giant rocket like the Super Heavy compared to the Falcon 9, it would need extremely strong landing legs.

Falcon 9 already dominates the world's space launch capacity (something like 80% of all tonnage sent to space is on Falcon 9s, B1062 has been reused 23 times). Super Heavy with its catch landing will enable Space-X to deliver something like 100x more tonnage to space by virtue of a 10x faster turnaround time and 10x higher payload.

Basically increasing your payload size by 10x is just as beneficial as enabling a 10x faster launch cadence, and it's unbelievable Space-X has managed to do BOTH in a single generation.
posted by xdvesper at 8:21 PM on October 14, 2024 [3 favorites]

As impressive as it was to see the booster return to the pad and be safely recovered, the fuel required to do so will impact how much cargo it can take to orbit. In fact, that's still the big question--- how much cargo CAN the Starship realistically put into LEO? So far they've only done suborbital flights with completely empty rockets and seem to use the majority of the fuel to do so. Someone said it will take 10X more to orbit but do we actually know that at this point? SpaceX is likely going to need to beef up the tiles for re-entry (given that the flaps still haven't come through without damage) which adds weight which reduces cargo even further (I believe it's something to the effect of a 2:1 ratio--- for every pound you add to the weight of the launch vehicle, you lose 2 pounds of cargo capacity. One benefit of the Falcon 9 is that the second stage is expendable, so they don't have to fret about how to protect it during the re-entry interface thereby making it much lighter.

As for going to the Moon, a big obstacle--- one that might not be something overcome-- is orbital refueling. Can it even be done? Will the liquid oxygen boil off too quickly? And how many launches will be required to refuel? 8? 10? 20? A lot is going to depend on the reliability of the engines being able to relight in space. There is a reason we've used hypergolics for critical stuff in the past (retro rockets, the engine of the Apollo service module, the engines on the lunar module, etc.)--- they're dead reliable and simple, don't require an ignition source and the fuels don't boil off as quickly in space, etc.

Someone mentioned bringing down the cost to put cargo into orbit. And my question is why that's so important. In a typical mission the cargo itself is far and away the most expensive part of the entire launch. And the market for commercial launches really isn't that big to begin with. The majority of SpaceX's launches these days are putting their own Starlink satellites into orbit.
posted by drstrangelove at 4:58 AM on October 15, 2024 [1 favorite]

how much cargo CAN the Starship realistically put into LEO? So far they've only done suborbital flights with completely empty rockets and seem to use the majority of the fuel to do so.

Apparently the last couple of flights have given the ship orbital velocity; they just chose an "orbit" that reintersected with the atmosphere.

But yeah, not trusting the PR very much I've wondered what the actual payloads will end up being. It's hard to see how this is going to work out when so far they've been testing versions where they haven't bothered to give them the capabilities of the real launchers. But they *say* 100-150 tons to LEO.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:57 AM on October 15, 2024

Someone mentioned bringing down the cost to put cargo into orbit. And my question is why that's so important.

My thoughts, and I'm just an interested layperson: Current speculation from Space X is that it'll take multiple launches of Starship to send people and equipment to the Moon. As you mentioned, anywhere from 8-20 launches per mission which frankly seems like a lot. Surely that could be made more efficient right?

It sounds like Space X's way of getting efficient is to make it very cheap, so that launching 8-20 Starships is no big deal. Which makes a certain sense, but it definitely remains to be seen if that's doable and economical.

But the only model we have that worked is the Apollo one, which was designed for short stays of up to 3-6 days for two people. So we'll see.

My non engineering brain keeps getting caught with how Starship Human Landing System will handle actually landing on the dusty and uneven Moon service. It's going to topple, isn't it? Again, we'll see.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:01 AM on October 15, 2024

Mod note: Couple more comments removed. If you want to talk about Elon Musk, you're welcome to start a thread about that, otherwise skip this one, as it's about the launch and catch, thank you.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 8:14 AM on October 15, 2024

The reason they use powered landing is because it looks cool, the elderly morons in control of federal budgets love the CEO, and any tax dollar that goes to NASA is a dollar taken away from direct corporate profit. You need fuel to land, the weight of wich could more easily be used for more payload.
posted by kzin602 at 10:22 AM on October 15, 2024

weight of wich could more easily be used for more payload

While I want to agree with you about morons in control of budgets, from what I recall, there are studies out there showing that reusable launch vehicles can pay off (emphasis on the 'can' - the Shuttle clearly wasn't good at that). There are tradeoffs in mass fraction, dry mass cost, and various manufacturing factors that I have no understanding of. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin realized the advantages of reusable vehicles early on and designed accordingly.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 12:12 PM on October 15, 2024

And in fact, when it's necessary, SpaceX does fly Falcons completely disposably like good ol' rockets - they did for Europa Clipper just the other day. But if the launch profile doesn't need all that delta-v, should we just keep chucking millions of dollars of highly specialized machinery into the Atlantic for funsies budgetary reasons, somehow? I mean, if it was just "looks cool" and "elderly morons" (which, to be fair, this doesn't necessarily disprove), ESA and CNSA wouldn't be busy making Falcon 9 clones to compete. Whether either of those will ever actually see flight or not, ecch, who knows. But it's not hard to see the appeal in saving a cool $100+ million flight charge to send up a communications or weather satellite?

And while I think NASA is doing a decent enough job with their robotic science budget, I really gotta question how the HSF side of things is going with Artemis and Starliner. I mean, the current cost overrun on the SLS tower (how many billion? with a B? oooof) alone feels like it might exceed SpaceX's development costs to date for Starship, and it feels like it will be a dang miracle if Starliner ever actually ends up filling any paid flights before the ISS EOL.

Now whether there's actually a non-Artemis rationale for Starship's capabilities, I dunno... They say eventually it'll be cheaper to put up a hundred replacement Starlink satellites on one Starship than to fly 4 Falcon missions, but I don't know how the economics of Starlink actually works out in the long run aside from VC burn. And if they can't work out some way of getting a 5m satellite out the ... side? nose? of Ship, I'm not sure it matters that it only costs $100/lb to get the satellite to orbit. And I'm sure they're working very hard at that, but at the moment it seems like a tall order.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the first flight where we get an orbital return bellyflop in daylight. I wonder if anyone has simulated it from the figures - that last 10km of the descent almost felt like it had a better glide profile than the notoriously brick-shaped Space Shuttle.
posted by Kyol at 1:02 PM on October 15, 2024

We aim at the stars, but sometimes we hit London

I think this joke is, if anything, too kind to Werner Von Braun, who was a literal, actual, card carrying Nazi and SS officer (party membership number 5738692 on the card), who personally briefed Hitler to ask Hitler for more money to bomb as many civilians as possible with the worst terror weapons he could engineer. He was not slow-walking or self-sabotaging any part of the war effort, he was an active participant, touring the concentration camp factories.

9,000 people were killed by Von Braun's rockets, and 12,000 concentration camp prisoners died making them.

He was just following orders, of course. The SS promotion to Major was just a formality, like routine annual thing you know?

Truly an incredible feat to wash and recycle him into an American patriotic hero and pillar of NASA. A proud tradition of the American space program.
posted by other barry at 3:52 PM on October 15, 2024 [1 favorite]

Onboard camera and tower views of the booster being caught!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:40 AM on October 16, 2024 [2 favorites]

That first scene where it just gently comes to rest on the arms looks so elegant.
posted by Captaintripps at 11:13 AM on October 16, 2024

In terms of economics, Starship only makes sense if satellite constellations like Starlink become at least an order of magnitude larger. Starlink has stated they want to expand from their current ~5000 to at least 40,000. Once you have that many in LEO, with a 5 year planned lifetime, you have to put 8,000 in orbit every year to maintain them.

Right now Starship is rated at 100 tonnes to LEO, compared to 22.8 for falcon 9.

The question ends up being a) just how much more efficient can they really make it, b) can Starlink truly justify having that many satellites in orbit, and c) are there any other practical applications for a launch vehicle with this capacity (presently the answer is no, there aren’t)

Apart from that it’s just a math equation.

Starlink is profitable (maybe—after all it’s a private company and we have to take their word for it). That’s on a subscriber base of about 5 million. If they get 50 million subscribers (to justify throwing 10x the satellites in orbit) then this all scales up. If that DOESN’T pan out, then they don’t really lose that much since Uncle Sam is paying a huge portion of the development costs for this platform.
posted by Room 101 at 12:25 PM on October 16, 2024

And if it isn't profitable, at least a few other businesses / countries have done the same math and liked the numbers they came up with. I mean on the one hand it was easy to be kind of dismissive even a year or two ago when they only seemed to manage a kind of shockingly low number of users per cell, so it felt like their primary userbase would have to be ultra-rural, and there just aren't really that many people way out in the sticks at the density they could support, but it looks like I could get a Starlink antenna now in my mid-sized American city without too much fuss.

And honestly, 50 million customers isn't really that many customers globally - it's not even 1% of the world's population. I'm not sure any particular business is really set up for the political challenges Starlink faces as a communications provider, doubly so with the current CEO out there making friends and influencing people, but I'm sure there's a good chunk of people who don't care.

I'm still sort of amazed that that market might be big enough to justify / support a Starship launch every 5 days just the same, but I suppose if they manage to get the whole thing to be fully reusable, they wouldn't be pissing away the $12 million in fairings and ... whatever the Falcon 2nd stage's disposable cost works out to be ($20m on the low end?), so there's that savings too I guess.
posted by Kyol at 3:23 PM on October 16, 2024

... with a 5 year planned lifetime, you have to put 8,000 in orbit every year to maintain them.
So 8,000 pieces of space junk come hurtling back to Earth each year as well? Never mind the financial cost of launching them, all those rocket launches have to be catastrophic for the environment. I guess all the Teslas cancel some of that out?

Regardless of who is involved, the technological feat of successfully doing this, on the first try no less, is astounding. Colour me super impressed.
posted by dg at 11:05 PM on October 17, 2024

I have some sad news to share with you about meteors and space dust.
posted by wierdo at 3:26 PM on October 18, 2024

Meteors don't contain a lot of aluminum (though they do contain some), which can destroy ozone when oxidized. Satellites are chock full of aluminum, and some studies indicate satellites will soon outpace natural production of atmospheric AlO.

Does that actually mean we're going to have another ozone hole eventually? No clue. But it's at least something people are looking at. There's the light pollution as well to consider.

Heavy-lift, high-frequency space travel is unlocking some interesting applications, but we do have some international issues we're going to have to sort through, particularly since eventually other countries (mainly China) are going to want their own LEO telecommunications megaconstellations.
posted by Room 101 at 5:23 PM on October 19, 2024

So, it turns out that the catch didn't go as well as we thought - in fact, it was on the verge of becoming a major conflagration, as well as almost being aborted due to system failures.

That's the "so that's what they didn't want to tell us" part (though some of this was already known from observation.) Now, here's the hilarious part - you know how we know this (given SpaceX has been tightlipped?)

It's because the CEO of SpaceX decided to take a key business call on speaker...while livestreaming Diablo IV.

Like, there's War Thunder players leaking classified secrets for online cred...and then there's this.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:30 AM on November 1, 2024

So, it turns out that the catch didn't go as well as we thought - in fact, it was on the verge of becoming a major conflagration, as well as almost being aborted due to system failures.

That's not too surprising. It's an extremely dangerous and risky idea and there is almost certainly going to be some sort of accident at some point.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:33 AM on November 1, 2024

We knew some of this - you can't exactly hide an engine undergoing rapid explosive disassembly, after all.

But there's a vast difference between "well, from what we saw the recovery wasn't nearly as smooth as SpaceX is playing things" and "we know that they were on the verge of either a large fireball or aborting the catch because the guy who owns the company doesn't understand how OPSEC works and literally broadcasted everything online."
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:13 AM on November 1, 2024