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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4940 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.

...

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.

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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