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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4499 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I really enjoyed the latest Starship test flight.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lFkqZF-Ss7o&t=6250s

It's fairly widely accepted that the most difficult and most experimental parts of what SpaceX is hoping to accomplish are the re-entry and landing of the orbital vehicle, so actually demonstrating the ability to complete those tasks (albeit imperfectly) is a big step forward. Also high up on the difficulty scale is a precision landing of the booster, and while we don't know if it landed with the necessary precision, demonstrating the capability to do the soft landing on the booster is also a big step forward.

ETA: Given this is the second flight to put Starship into a suborbital trajectory with orbital velocity, I would recommend @ArjinFerman get his checkbook ready.

I did notice they're making progress between launches a while ago, so the checkbook has long been ready. I doubt I'm wrong about my broader point about SpaceX collapsing, and the revolutionary impact of reusability being a house of cards.

and the revolutionary impact of reusability being a house of cards.

..uhh, what?

Their record for flying the 1st stage booster is doing so 21 times. How's that not impressive?

how much maintenance was required between those flights, and how much did that maintenance cost?

Musk claims that for them, refurbishment cost is ~10% of mfg cost of a booster. If you have a gigabrain theory how it's actually not cheap and SpaceX is borrowing money to sell launches at an artificially low price, I'd surely love to hear about it.

Note that their mfg cost is also a lot lower than for other companies.

Also it seems launching 1 kg to LEO, which used to cost $25k in the Apollo era is now down to $1200 if done by SpaceX.

If BFR which costs $100 million to build each( I refuse to use 'starship', they can go fuck themselves with that name) ends up equally reusable, cost of launching 150 tons to LEO is going to go down to cca 15 million $. (I assume $5 million covers the fuel cost handily especially in Texas). Musk is more optimistic about BFR reusability due to improvements such as no soot anymore but there's the heat shield on upper stage and all that too so who knows.

Meanwhile, in comparable dollars in 1960s, cost of launching a similar amount of mass was cca 1.2 billion $.

If it works out, one could launch an entire aircraft carrier sized ship, in chunks, for less than it costs to build one today. ($12 billion, launch cost 9 billion$).

Pretty funny - we could actually start building space battleships soon. The nuclear salt-water rocket propulsion that would give them range to Pluto and back one tank fairly fast are doable, and if your exhaust has a speed of 66 km/s there's no risk of it spiraling down into Earth atmo anyway.

Musk claims that for them, refurbishment cost is ~10% of mfg cost of a booster. If you have a gigabrain theory how it's actually not cheap and SpaceX is borrowing money to sell launches at an artificially low price, I'd surely love to hear about it.

Naw, just looking for numbers to sanity-check the claim of reusability. 10% refurbishment sounds like extremely good savings.

I think we're going to need to build some things off-planet before battleships are worth having to defend those things, but I'm definately rooting for Musk on this one.

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