The Astronomy Thread
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Sanrith Descartes
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Furry
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Lightning go up, and strong winds can be very bad for launching things too.
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Captain Suave
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
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This! People have no idea what they are attempting to do at SpaceX. Or my MIL goes on about 'they don't need to spend all that money on space, there are problems in America that need fixing first (and irony of ironies, she's a Brit). I keep explaining to her that Elon (or NASA, etc.) doesn't take a big bag o' cash, pull a lever and a rocket pops out. There are hundreds if not thousands of good paying jobs that go into these rockets.
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Tuco
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Did they cite any specific reason why Starship isn't doable? Seems like the hardest parts they've tried, the engine design and landing, have been done and what has gone wrong have been re-entry challenges that, while difficult, aren't really specific to the unique designs of Starship vs the details of how and where to bolster the ship for re-entry.
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Kiroy
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Just read they did a massive steep angle on re-entry which is why the wings/flaps got damaged. They purposely tried to punch through the atmosphere really quick to stress test starship. Must have meant they were pretty confident this time because I assume the data from the hovering/landing was more important. On the other hand I think they dude said they have like 7 more built and ready to rock (they retrofit improvements on the fly) so fuck it.
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Captain Suave
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Just bad expectations and wanting to see Elon attached to failure. Regadless of what you think about the man, SpaceX is objectively the most skilled and successful rocket enterprise in history.
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Furry
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Yea, they're basically just being dumbasses. Starship is plenty doable, just with "issues" that need to be hammered out. We're lucky to have early 1900s insanely rich guy who is willing to blow obscene amount of money to make it reality no matter what side of politics you are on. This is just good for humanity, period.
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Kiroy
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and this is it
I got lucky enough to meet a blue origin engineer in a place where we could have a candid conversation and we talked a lot about spacex vs the other space companies. He said they basically have weekly meetings trying to figure out how spacex is doing what it's doing, and that they're about 10 years ahead of anyone else. A very interesting tidbit is that blueorigin and pretty much every other rocket company are budget and perfection oriented, saying that there's a pretty big bureaucratic layer with ordering parts and moving projects forward. Said he heard spacex has warehouses just completely full of redundant parts, tools and raw materials so if a team needs something they put in a work order and have it within hours, vs their process taking weeks or longer. Also the other companies are hyper paranoid about shit going boom, so their dev cycles take years until they are 99% sure it won't blow up, we all know how spacex does it.
I guess this pictures was up for much debate and all the engineers didn't believe it. They have some ideas how raptor 3 exists but only theoretical and couldn't come close to coming up with the real engineering in it.
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Captain Suave
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SpaceX should be an all-time case study for risk tolerance. If it's just money on the line, the long-term advantage of allowance for failure seems quite clear. If you're not failing, you're not trying enough new ideas. Not having any is exactly what stagnated NASA.