Amazing re-entry of Starship on today's test

I was watching the re-entry, one of the flaps started to melt. It was almost a fail but then it made safe splash down to the ocean and also the motors did
the breaking after what is left from the fins did the upwards flip. It was very exciting to watch.

Please be my guest =)

The stream

originally posted by: belkide
I was watching the re-entry, one of the flaps started to melt. It was almost a fail but then it made safe splash down to the ocean and also the motors did
the breaking after what is left from the fins did the upwards flip. It was very exciting to watch.

Please be my guest =)

The stream

Congrats to space x.

Hope they continue to improve and succeed.

This was so cool to watch. Growing up in the era of the Space Shuttle it is bringing back that excitement with the large ships.

Congrats Space X!!!!!!

a reply to: pianopraze

What's the alternative? oh right....

they'll go to the moon, and then never do anything similar for half a century meanwhile they magically loose the tech to repeat it and so we hsve to reinvent the wheel...

originally posted by: Terpene
a reply to: pianopraze

What's the alternative? oh right....

they'll go to the moon, and then never do anything similar for half a century meanwhile they magically loose the tech to repeat it and so we hsve to reinvent the wheel...

Agree it’s very sad.

We were supposed to be finding monoliths on Europa by now.

originally posted by: Terpene
a reply to: pianopraze

What's the alternative? oh right....

they'll go to the moon, and then never do anything similar for half a century meanwhile they magically loose the tech to repeat it and so we hsve to reinvent the wheel...

I have seen the clip of the guy I think from NASA saying that they lost the technology to go back but I have never seen anyone explain what he meant by that.

Did he mean we can't ask the engineers who came up with the idea and made it happen or what? Did they document nothing about this endeavor? Was there a fire that destroyed it? What does he MEAN???

a reply to: belkide

I'm too stupid to understand the dynamics of this but is a slow reentry impossible? Why?
A serious question here.

a reply to: Shoshanna

He meant all the machines are now retired and new ones has to go thru the same process which means starting over with calculations and materials and the work force.

a reply to: charlest2

I dont know. But must be possible as everything is possible in every realm lol =)

a reply to: belkide

Can they not slow the darn thing down to synchronicity with the earth and atmosphere before they go to reentry?

a reply to: charlest2

There are some motors malfunctioning and a perfect alignment is never possible, there is always a micro excess force to some axis when you are trying to align.

a reply to: Shoshanna

When was that interview made? Because we certainly lost Stanley Kubrick along the way... maybe that's what he meant.

‘Outer space’ is practically speaking, ‘fake’.
We aren’t going anywhere. Can’t get there from here.

a reply to: EmmanuelGoldstein

Voyager begs to differ.

originally posted by: charlest2
a reply to: belkide

I'm too stupid to understand the dynamics of this but is a slow reentry impossible? Why?
A serious question here.

A serious answer. No, not really, with rocket ships.

The basic objective is to start at the bottom of the atmosphere where you are moving at zero speed relative to the surface of the Earth and accelerate up to a stable circular orbit, spend some useful time there, and then return to the Earth's surface.

When you are in orbit, the speed with which you are moving around the Earth creates just enough centrifugal force upward to counteract the force of gravity pulling you down. The trick is that in order for that kind of orbit to last for any length of time, you have to be above most of the atmosphere.

The atmosphere is thickest at sea level and tapers off exponentially as you go higher. So what happens is that if you are at a low enough orbital altitude such that the atmospheric density is still perceptible, the rocket will run into air molecules, which will slow it down. That will put the rocket into a slightly lower orbit, where the atmosphere is slightly denser, so it will run into even more air molecules and slow down even more. That puts it in a lower orbit, and so on, and so on. That is called orbit decay, and the lower the orbit, the faster it decays. As a rough example, a rocket placed in an orbit 200 km above the Earth's surface will last about a day before it re-enters. A rocket at 300 km altitude will last about a month. A rocket at 400 km altitude will last about a year, and so on. Most spacecraft need a lifetime of at least a year, so most launch vehicles need to be able to get into a stable orbit of 400 km altitude or higher. At an orbital altitude of about 400 km, the orbital speed is about 7.7 km per second to create enough centrifugal force.

So when the rocket decides it's time to come home, it fires some retro-thrusters to reduce its speed a little. That causes it to go into a lower orbit, where it encounters more atmospheric drag, which causes it to go lower, where it encounters more drag, and so on. You basically force the orbit to decay quickly by use of the retro-thrusters. You only have to reduce the orbital speed by about 0.3 km per second to get the orbit to decay within an hour or so.

The aerodynamic heating that a rocket experiences is determined by both the atmospheric density it is experiencing and the speed at which it is moving through that air. When the rocket is going TO orbit, it is starting at zero km per second at the densest part of the atmosphere and accelerating up to 7.7 km per second in vacuum. So, as the speed increases, the atmospheric density simultaneously decreases and that combination keeps the heating relatively low. When you are returning FROM orbit, the rocket starts at about 7.4 km per second and is diving into an atmosphere whose density is steadily increasing that makes the atmospheric heating problem the exact opposite of the ascent situation. On ascent, you are flying AWAY from atmospheric density, but on descent you are flying INTO atmospheric density.

Since you have to start at an entry speed of around 7.4 km per second at around 400 km you have to scrub off that much velocity and altitude by the time you get down to zero speed and zero altitude. At some point in that trajectory, you are going to experience a combination of high speed and high density and therefore high heating.

The way you can minimize the heating rate is to use some aerodynamic lift to glide when you are at high altitude, so you spend more time decelerating at high altitude where the atmospheric density is lower. That's what the Space Shuttle did, and is why it was a lifting body instead of a simple capsule shape. The Starship is also a lifting body and will use a lifting trajectory for the same reason.

Even so, both the Shuttle and Starship experience high heating rates somewhere along the trajectory and both have to have heat shield tiles.

a reply to: belkide

Congratulations SpaceX

originally posted by: belkide
a reply to: Shoshanna

He meant all the machines are now retired and new ones has to go thru the same process which means starting over with calculations and materials and the work force.

Ok so just like the specifications and everything like that will be different because the crafts are different i get that. Thanks for explaining i hadn't heard any explanation of that I think I saw the clip of the guy saying it on one of the flat earth movies hehe.

a reply to: Shoshanna

The computers for the Apollo missions had less computing power than your digital wristwatch. Guys with sliderules.

Modern computers and stuff are totally different and need different testing.

I remember mission control in the old days.

The computers used great big tape reels!

a reply to: belkide

Man, you people will believe anything. Show the video to a CG expert and buckle up. It's all fake.

a reply to: hoobah

Explanation: Uhmmm? Belief is the ability to believe anything you want to, and there is no rules about belief ok!

Personal Disclosure: I don't believe in any facts because I either KNOW a fact or I don't know a fact, belief is not required for them to work eh.

Belief however is a REQUIRED apriori if one wants to do magick or imagine anything beyond what is real.

On one hand of course it is fake, solipsism tells me so ...

Solipsism [wiki]

Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/ ⓘ SOLL-ip-siz-əm; from Latin solus 'alone', and ipse 'self')[1] is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.

On the other hand when discussing FACTS, one should not invoke faith based points of view, as facts destroy faith and the two things are highly explosive together.

It's got to be very hard to fake launching a spaceship the size of the starship and hiding what happened to it after launch as we have common off the shelf optical technology that can view the starship in low earth orbit pretty good ok.

Note: That fact has nothing to do with the video supplied by SpaceX.

Besides that little fact there is the bigger fact, that what's the point of faking such a momentous event eh?

I suggest strongly that you explain exactly why it is fake and not resort to the cop out that some CG [computer graphics] expert can discern the difference between real footage and deep faked AI generated footage, let alone explain that sufficiently to the ATS crowd of members, without being too technical and yet also not dumbing it down too much so that the resulting explanation is practically worthless in determining the voracity of the claims that it is real footage or not.

Man, you people will derail anything. Show me your PROOF and buckle up. You're all fake!