FAA Grants License For SpaceX's Third Starship Launch - Slashdot

FAA Grants License For SpaceX's Third Starship Launch

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• Re:

  If all else fails they still can just use a third stage for that.

  • Re:

    Very true.
    One wonders where they'd hide it.
    If they make it much taller, you'll be able to step into orbit from the top of the fucking thing.

    • Re:

      But if it isn't geosynchronous orbit tall, you will step out of orbit pretty fucking quickly too.

      • Re:

        Sadly, Starship will require a 6th stage to get to GSO.

• by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 14, 2024 @05:04AM (#64314355)

  SX has been going for 20 years. In that time, they developed one of the first private built rocket with 100% of their own money. A55holes like you said it could not be done.
  Then they built a Heavy size rocket with 9 engines, a cargo ship, with less than $300M from the government (which was less than 25% of what they spent). Yet, a55holes like you pointed to N1, along with other private and government built rockets that failed and said that SX could not do it.
  Then they got the F9 to land and was the first launcher/space craft that was TRULY reusable without requiring massive work. Yet, a55holes like you pointed to the Shuttle along with other failed private and government built rockets and said that it could not be done.
  Then they got a Super Heavy Rocket with 3 stages, again, on their own money, and again, you a55holes said that SX could not do 27 engines because the Soviets failed on N1.
  Then they got partially funded (far less than Boeing) to build a manned spacecraft with NASA's specs, and still got it done quickly. But a55holes like you screamed that SX could not do it and that only Boeing and old space could do it.
  SX announced building a massive constellation of communication sats, and again, a55holes like you said that he was going to lose money and that it was horrible for him to use his money to do so. Yet, Starlink is already profitable.
  Now, he is building the world's biggest rocket that has ever been built, and will go to the moon with 100+ tonnes of cargo being put on the moon (note that Saturn put less than 3 tonnes of actual cargo on the moon). Yet, a55holes like you continue to say that he can not succeed, that it will be a joke in space, and that it will be unprofitable.
  
  Don't you a55holes ever get tired of being wrong all the fucking time?
  • 2 hidden comments

• It is the largest rocket, and it's the most powerful in terms of raw thrust, but it isn't the most powerful in terms of thrust-to-weight ratio

  What the heck sort of metric is that supposed to be? T/W ratio determines how fast you accelerate. You want us to award "most powerful rocket" to ballistic missile interceptors [wikipedia.org] I guess?

  , and the thing is practically useless past LEO.

  Given that it was literally designed for Mars, it distinctly is not. Even without refueling, its payload capacity to GEO is 27t (vs. 100-150t for LEO), which isn't even remotely "useless". By contrast, Delta IV Heavy is 14t to GEO. Vulcan is designed for 8,5t to GEO. Ariane 5 maxes out at 10,5t. Etc.

  I assume you got this erroneous misconception based on the fact that its upper stage isn't hydrolox. But ignoring that it has higher ISP and than kerosene, and MUCH lower tankage mass than hydrolox, people who make this argument always boggle the mind to me. Because all this means is you change the optimal staging ratios. That is to say, a satellite designed for a launch vehicle with a hydrolox upper stage will generally have a smaller propellant tank and have the launch vehicle do more of the work, while a satellite designed for a vehicle with a non-hydrolox upper stage will generally have a larger propellant tank and do more of the work itself. Wherein what you effectively now have is a three stage rocket, which gives you far better performance for high-delta-V launches than a two-stage with a hydrolox upper.

  But even ignoring that, the difference between hydrolox and methalox upper stages isn't THAT huge to the point where you can say "It's awesome in LEO but worthless beyond LEO!" It just doesn't work that way. There's greater falloff in performance with methalox, but if you have 100-150t LEO performance, you're still going to have great GEO performance.

  • 2 hidden comments

  • Re:

    (Also, when seeing these numbers, keep in mind that Starship also has a lot of dead mass dedicated to being reusable)

    • 3 hidden comments

    • • (Also, when seeing these numbers, keep in mind that Starship also has a lot of dead mass dedicated to being reusable)

        Bingo. And therein lies the problem. Starship is not a good rocket.

        I guess it depends on your definition of "good". There are examples (Delta-IV, for example) of rockets that are more efficient, in terms of payload fraction, or ISP, or what-have-you. But those rockets are all expendable, built one at a time (practically bespoke), fly infrequently, and are several times more expensive ($/kg to orbit) than even the Falcon 9. So if Starship is "not a good rocket" because it's built robustly and made for (inexpensive) re-use, does that make more elegant rockets "good", even if they're 5x-10x the cost with a years-long waitlist? That doesn't seem logically sound.
        
        I'd argue that if your goal is to get X tonnes to a destination in space, finding a substantially less expensive way to get it there is going to count for a lot more than whether the delivery system is more mass-efficient.
        
        Granted: Starship hasn't actually demonstrated that yet. But based in part on Falcon 9's success, I expect Starship will get there.

        • Re:

          I don't think you grasp the level of inefficiency we're talking here.
          It takes another fully loaded Starship + 150T of transfer fuel to move a single gram of mass past GTO.
          The inexpensiveness of the venture is a quirk in economics. In terms of resources used, no launch that ever happened will come close to matching a single trip to the moon.
          It takes 7 full Starships to put an Apollo 11 payload into LTO, or somewhere around 14 Saturn Vs.

          Depends. For Americans, it was cheaper than everyone else to buy SUVs.

      • Re:

        Sorry, but that is just a dumb comment. Look, consider this example: A 40-ton truck contains a lot of dead weight dedicated to making it re-usable. I'm sure you could make a disposable truck that weighs a lot less, so it could carry more. The engine, the tires, the transmission - only good for one use. The frame and body could be lightened. Etc. At the end of every trip, throw away the truck.

        Until recently, we didn't have the technology to make anything *but* disposable rockets. That has now changed, and

        • Re:

          Sure isn't.

          A 40-ton truck is not subject to the rocket equation. Now this is a dumb fucking comment.

          Correct. And that's awesome. But that has nothing to do with the fact that Starship is a shitty rocket.
          Look at it this way.
          Saturn V has about as much delta v left over going all the fucking ways to Mars orbit as Starship does, stripped down to nothing but bolts and fuel- at Earth geosynchronous transfer orbit.
          It's a shitty fucking rocket.
          
          It only becomes a cool rocket if you refuel it.
          And that's an aweso

          • Re:

            Apologies for the shitty formatting of my delta v calcs.
            Starship:
            Stage 1: IFull: 3600, IDry: 200, TFull: 4900, TDry: 1500, Isp: 327: 3796.08m/s
            Stage 2a: IFull: 1300, IDry: 100, TFull: 1300, TDry: 100, Isp: 355: 8929.51m/s
            Stage 2b: IFull: 1300, IDry: 100, TFull: 1300, TDry: 100, Isp: 380: 9558.35m/s (refueled)
            Total: 12725.59m/s
            LEO: 3469.56m/s left. Can go: GTO
            GTO: 1029.59m/s left. Can go: Fucking nowhere.
            
            Saturn V:
            Stage 1: IFull: 2214, IDry: 137, TFull: 2833.2, TDry: 756.2, Isp: 168: 2176.13m/s
            Stag

    • • Re:

        Starship *is* an expendable (or reusable) second stage.
        It will never send anything to Venus without serious gravitational boosts.
        Which we can do right now already with better rockets.

  • • Re:

      The Starship system is designed for cost efficiency as its primary metric. If and when it becomes operational, we will see how effective they were in meeting their objectives, but older, more traditional rockets were designed around optimizing other metrics, but not sure how optimizing for cost and tonnage to orbit could make it a "bad" rocket...

      • Re:

        It gets that by default. All SpaceX rockets are cheap, because its competitors rockets are built using Cold War labor and contract structures.
        A reusable Starship could be 10x more expensive to build, and if it hits the marks Musk thinks it'll hit, it would still be a fraction of the cost of one of its competitor's rockets.

        Indeed. And that was literally how this thread started- me saying I'm skeptical they will.

        Yes, like efficiency.

        You aren't?
        If your optimization means unconscionable waste of materials and

• Re:

  Actually, this rocket can fail in just about any way they like, and we'll still call it a success.

  I mostly agree. But if it fails due to something they've already seen before, that could be considered a failure, because it'd mean they haven't fully learned or corrected something that was already shown to be wrong.

  • Re:

    I'm not sure even that would be considered a "failure" to them.
    Musk would simply say that it was a success because they learned a bit more about the problem.
    
    Again, I have no problem whatsoever with their approach to its development. I think it's fantastic, and a breath of fresh air.
    But the metering of a launch as a "success" or a "failure" is a joke that is hard not to look at cynically.
    
    I'm quite confident there is no possible outcome of the test that he would call a failure, rendering any such classi

    • Re:

      I'd say that's pretty heavily implied by "test launch".

      • Re:

        Then why is every aborted launch by NASA, without the subsequent SpaceXian excellent explosion and complete loss of hull a failure?