SpaceX rockets and launches
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2hats
Dust.
Engineering-speak for 'within acceptable tolerances'.
These ones..?
or this one..?
beesonthewhatnow
going deaf for a living
Google “money shot”. Just make sure safe search is turned off, the explosion was quite violent so you don’t want the results filtered.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
It seems to be quite specific to space things. I haven't come across it in other engineering contexts.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I've not been paying all that much attention to this but I was a bit annoyed that the landing gear was being blamed for what happened next. Because to my eyes it was blatantly on fire near its base some seconds before touchdown.
beesonthewhatnow
going deaf for a living
That’s ace, but I wish we could hear their reactions when it went bang
That angle also really shows how close to the ground it gets before the flip manoeuvre, so cool.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
Pretty sure that it's also used in military aviation. I suspect that in both cases it's used instead of "normal" is already used for something else, kind of like how they say "say again" instead of "repeat".
weltweit
Well-Known Member
SpaceX is at the moment proving they can land in Earth's atmosphere and gravity. The Moon and Mars are different environments, the fins and rockets will have different effects, I don't imagine it will be just a case of adjusting some equations by a factor to be able to land on them. Does anyone have any ideas on this?
It's obvious that the performance of such an object is not normal, yet when it's performing as intended, then it's within the nominal (defined) specifications.
Crispy
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The moon will be much easier. No atmosphere to muck about with, so it's all simple thrusting.
Mars has just enough atmosphere to be annoying, but not enough to be useful. The current plan is to come in mostly belly up so that the lift vector points towards the planet. This forces the trajectory to stay within the atmosphere instead of skipping straight out again. Once they're captured and heading for the ground, it'll be much the same as the Earth landing, just with a higher terminal velocity due to the lack of resistance. Same flip and burn to land.
The upper regions of Earth atmosphere have a similar density to Mars, so they will be able to get data on behaviour up there, but really it's going to be lots of computer modelling and then throw one at Mars as soon as the orbits line up. Possibly in 2024 for a 2025 encounter.
I'm not an engineer or any kind or scientific kind of person so my input here is probly not needed but ive been following spacex stuff and kind of really wanting them to make it happen so the latest this month was disappointing for me. probly more for them I know, but I'm really fascinated by space stuff and just want someone to be able to do something spectacular that means it can happen regularly. I don't know if I'm right or not but I think before all this it was just governments throwing money at space exploration which I dunno if I agree with cos I think we have enough problems right here right now, but there really is something inside me that wants spacex and other companies that don't use governmental money to just work. Ann I delusional? Do spacex and so on use government money? I really don't know much about this at all, just what I read online so please don't slate me for not knowing I really am interested
Crispy
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Spacex were going to put themselves out of business after failing to launch their first little rocket, falcon 1, three times in a row. With the last cash on hand (and this was long before musk became the richest man on earth) they got one more rocket built using up all the spare parts. It worked but they barely had any paying customers to move the company forward. But it was enough to convince NASA that they were serious and so they got a contract to develop cargo supply services to the space station, on the then as yet unbuilt falcon 9.
NASA literally saved spacex from bankruptcy and have been one of their best customers and partners.
Now, with Starlink coming on line, providing high speed internet to the middle of nowhere anywhere, spacex could end up having an income larger than NASA's entire budget. They'll still happily work together, but spacex don't need their money any more.
And don't forget, the company was founded with the explicit purpose of colonising mars. That ludicrous dream is the ultimate motivator for their engineers
NASA literally saved spacex from bankruptcy and have been one of their best customers and partners.
Now, with Starlink coming on line, providing high speed internet to the middle of nowhere anywhere, spacex could end up having an income larger than NASA's entire budget. They'll still happily work together, but spacex don't need their money any more.
And don't forget, the company was founded with the explicit purpose of colonising mars. That ludicrous dream is the ultimate motivator for their engineers
weltweit
Well-Known Member
Anyone seen any Starlink broadband ads?
I am wondering how much it will cost and what sort of device one will need to connect to it?
Crispy
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£440 for the dish, which is about 60cm diameter. Service is £85/month. This will fall as they scale, but currently their competition (geostationary satellites) has similar prices but far far far worse service. ie if you can get get wired broadband, it's not for you.
Pic of dish and router box, power cable and powered data cable. This is literally all you need.
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Crispy
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It will. Right now they're having to offset the cost of launching all the satellites and the development of the dish hardware (it's a very sophisticated phased array of the kind usually found in military aircraft radar) so they're charging what the market will bear. Once they've poached all the existing customers of eg Hughes and Viasat, they'll a) have a decent income and b) be forced to drop the price to expand the customer base.
Starship actually helps in this regard. If it's as cheap as planned, it will make the satellites even cheaper to launch.
beesonthewhatnow
going deaf for a living
Are there still concerns from astronomers about the impact all these starlink satellites are having on the sky, or have they solved that problem?
Crispy
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Better than it was; they're darker now. Still not great though.
In theory it's completely fixable in software on the telescope.
A second argument is that Starship will be so cheap, earth-based observatories will become obsolete.
I don't entirely agree. Starship is big, but it's not big enough to launch something like the Extremely Large Telescope in one go.
Crispy
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Off Topic:
It's got a terrible name but the ELT is a stependous machine.
The new official website is very good and goes into technical detail
eg this page on the main mirror M1 Mirror | ELT | ESO
It's absolutely massive
It's got a terrible name but the ELT is a stependous machine.
The new official website is very good and goes into technical detail
eg this page on the main mirror M1 Mirror | ELT | ESO
It's absolutely massive
Crispy
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Launches in October (for real this time)
