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 (33 comments total)

It’s just amazing.
posted by Emmy Noether at 5:40 PM on October 13 [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 [3 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 [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 [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

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 [17 favorites]

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

Congratulations to Gwynne Shotwell and her team.
posted by gwint at 6:31 PM on October 13 [32 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 [5 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 [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 [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

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

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 [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 [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 [9 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 [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 [9 favorites]

"We aim at the stars, but sometimes we hit London" ~ Wernher von Braun.
posted by Comstar at 12:27 AM on October 14 [8 favorites]

"Fickt nicht mit dem Raketenmensch" ~Thomas Pynchon
posted by chavenet at 1:14 AM on October 14 [3 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 [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 [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 [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 [8 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

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 [1 favorite]

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

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 [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 [9 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

outgrown_hobnail: see here.
posted by senor biggles at 3:49 PM on October 14