General > General Technical Chat
Starship/SuperHeavy orbital Flight Test LIVE
asmi:
--- Quote from: wraper on April 21, 2023, 02:49:36 pm ---If legacy US space industry had similar budget limits to SpaceX they'd never be able to pump out anything. Frankly it's stupid to make things multiple times more expensive and spend unreasonable amounts of time to make something that works on a first try. Not to say in the end it still fails like CST-100. And this stupid stagnant approach was why Challenger disaster happened. They knew about the issue for years, yet failed to iterate the design. It's more like PR issue to ensure that nothing explodes to keep politicians happy.
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NASA is a political creature and as such it does what politicians say. That's why some people say that SLS stands for "Senate Launch System".
tom66:
--- Quote from: coppice on April 21, 2023, 10:51:02 am ---I'd say the rocket itself was pretty successful for a first try. The real mess up was the launch tower. They should have been able to predict pretty well how much punishment that would need to take, and civil engineering is pretty good at building to stress requirements. However, it seems a lot of concrete was smashed up on that launch pad. That feels like incompetence.
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In particular, it's odd that SpaceX chose not to use a water deluge system as has been used for Falcon 9 and many other heavy launch systems. It is almost as if they acknowledged this damage is better than waiting for a deluge system to be fitted.
coppice:
--- Quote from: tom66 on April 21, 2023, 03:20:27 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on April 21, 2023, 10:51:02 am ---I'd say the rocket itself was pretty successful for a first try. The real mess up was the launch tower. They should have been able to predict pretty well how much punishment that would need to take, and civil engineering is pretty good at building to stress requirements. However, it seems a lot of concrete was smashed up on that launch pad. That feels like incompetence.
--- End quote ---
In particular, it's odd that SpaceX chose not to use a water deluge system as has been used for Falcon 9 and many other heavy launch systems. It is almost as if they acknowledged this damage is better than waiting for a deluge system to be fitted.
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Musk said that losing the launch tower would be a real setback, as constructing a new one would slow them down. So I assume they were not casually putting it at risk.
switchabl:
--- Quote from: asmi on April 21, 2023, 03:00:23 pm ---Yep, and it still not 100% solved. I heard that almost every Soyuz launch a few of fire trench tiles are lost and have to be replaced. This new rocket has like a double of thrust of Saturn-5, so some pad damage after first few launches is all but expected.
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It doesn't look like their Texas launch site has a real flame trench at all (yet?). So this may not be so much about hitting the limits of conventional approaches and more about figuring out just how little you can get away with?
Sal Ammoniac:
--- Quote from: coppice on April 21, 2023, 01:58:49 am ---The first fully assembled Saturn V launched successfully. However, you are ignoring a rather long series of precursors which blew up trying to learn enough to bring that about. You are also ignoring Apollo 1, a subset of the full Saturn V, which incinerated its three occupants before even leaving the ground.
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What precursors? NASA boldly took an all-up approach to testing the Saturn V. The S-1C and S-II stages had never flown before the flight of Apollo 4.
Apollo 1 used the Saturn 1B, which apart from using the S-IVB as its second stage, was not a subset of the Saturn V, and the fire was entirely due to faults in the command module and had nothing to do with the Saturn booster. In fact, the Saturn that would have flown Apollo 1 was used successfully to launch Apollo 5 (the first in-space test of the LM).
The Saturn series had a perfect record of reaching orbit. Note that I'm only talking about Saturn here, not the Atlas, the Titan, or any of the other launch vehicles used by NASA for various programs.
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