News Changes to the SpaceX BFR rocket.

[Urwumpe]

At least, this hypothesis has something good in it, the relation between the accidents and the flight time.

But if its just about the harmonics, fixing it could be as easy as installing an additional support somewhere along the length of the lines to change the harmonics or installing additional bellows at the bottom to make the propellant lines less stiff. I doubt that this is really a plausible one. Its also no problem that aerospace engineers didn't already have to fix after the first flight since ground testing can't reproduce the harmonics properly. You simply must expect them to be worse and hope you are not too optimistic there.

 

[K_Jameson]

Old multistage 2 in Orbiter when the autopilot went crazy

 

[GLS]

Your links are coming across corrupted in some way:

 

[Thunder Chicken]

This is the internet equivalent of Sasquatch footage.

 

[Urwumpe]

This is the internet equivalent of Sasquatch footage.

Yes, especially since there is no higher quality version of the screen capture around. Its 2025, not 1990.

 

[steph]

 

[Frilock]

View attachment 42729

 

[K_Jameson]

View attachment 42729

Quite accurate.

 

[N_Molson]

Excellent video on the Starship and SpaceX topic (you can set subtitles auto-translation to english, it is worth it).

 

[Urwumpe]

Interesting, I can still understand more French than expected, only the words I never heard before are a problem.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

I've always wondered how they were going to get enough fuel out to Mars to land on it. It would really suck to be closing in on Mars only to find that you don't have enough dV to actually slow down and land. It's not like they will have a free-return option if this happens.

Even using pretty charitable numbers for stainless steel reflectivity, the heat load is going to be such that many tons of methane and oxidizer are going to boil off on the 9 month traverse to Mars. If more typical numbers are used you are then talking many hundreds of tons of boil-off.

They would have to send the Starship with payload with a small fleet of tankers to keep the payload Starship topped up, assuming they can figure out how to reliably transfer hundreds of tons of fuel while in space.

Perhaps it is a kindness that it persists on exploding in suborbital test flights.

 

[N_Molson]

I've always wondered how they were going to get enough fuel out to Mars to land on it.

Sadly the most simple answer is also the most plausible one (Occam's razor). So they don't.

Musk has become an expert in selling pipe dreams in order to raise funds, get subsides and get rich in the process. It worked very well so far (though cracks are starting to appear), but I fear his vision doesn't go much beyond that. It is clear the (very) ambitious objectives set before 2035 won't be met. Space enthusiasts are going to be disappointed, and the sad thing is that a lot of skilled NASA people are getting or will be fired and their expertise will be lost, so the recovery will take a long time. And we're not even there yet.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

Sadly the most simple answer is also the most plausible one (Occam's razor). So they don't.

Musk has become an expert in selling pipe dreams in order to raise funds, get subsides and get rich in the process. It worked very well so far (though cracks are starting to appear), but I fear his vision doesn't go much beyond that. It is clear the (very) ambitious objectives set before 2035 won't be met. Space enthusiasts are going to be disappointed, and the sad thing is that a lot of skilled NASA people are getting or will be fired and their expertise will be lost, so the recovery will take a long time. And we're not even there yet.

I was a space enthusiast when space exploration was a national accomplishment. Apollo, the Viking and other probes and satellites for science, the shuttle. Now it's just becoming billionaires playing with big toys for their egos. Starship and Superheavy and Blue Origin are technically interesting, but I don't feel any pride about them, especially at the cost to the nation.

 

[Urwumpe]

I was a space enthusiast when space exploration was a national accomplishment. Apollo, the Viking and other probes and satellites for science, the shuttle. Now it's just becoming billionaires playing with big toys for their egos. Starship and Superheavy and Blue Origin are technically interesting, but I don't feel any pride about them, especially at the cost to the nation.

I actually love the recommendation of the Augustine commission (Doesn't alone the name sound like an important meeting in the history of the church?) to let the industry handle the hauling and the leave exploration and more important "Finding out how to live in outer space" to NASA.

There will always be a wild frontier somewhere, but we don't want it to stay as close as it is.

 

[GLS]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1907876664274473132

 

[jedidia]

Wait, they're doing another one already? If this goes on, it's gonna be worth adding "sunny with a chance of spaceX debries" to the bloody weather report!

 

[Frilock]

Wait, they're doing another one already? If this goes on, it's gonna be worth adding "sunny with a chance of spaceX debries" to the bloody weather report!

They don't have a date set yet, and the FAA still needs to finish up its work with flight 9. They are reusing the first stage here of a previous launch so I'm guessing they wanted to see what shape the engines would be in after the firing more so much than actually preparing for an imminent launch. That being said I've seen rumors of them wanting to launch on the 20th of April, and given Musk, it wouldn't surprise me if he was pushing for that date.

 

[GLS]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1911902306876178477

 

[GLS]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1919417514515210630

 

[steph]

Didn't they just have a RUD during a test fire?