Posted on 05/28/2025 5:54:11 AM PDT by Red Badger
Ping!.....................
I’m starting to think ‘SABOTAGE’.................
I watched the launch for a while on youtube. After 10 or 15 minutes the indicated velocity started dropping which seemed unusual at the time, but I quit watching.
Geez! They act as if this was rocket science.
That thought has crossed my mind as well. He has so many workers, it could be anyone from a hands-on technician to a software engineer, or anyone in between. Someone with the knowledge to eff things up.
Ouch!
That's quite a stylistic way to say it blew-up.
Gotta love engineer-speak. Another way to put it:
it is amazing to me even 50 years+ after space travel was started how hard it still is to do right.
I imagine Russia would probably crash more nukes on its own land than us if there ever was a war.
I don’t ever want to find out.....................
The actual story is that the booster was intended NOT to land the way it normally did but to come down at a higher angle of attack to see if the empirical results matched what they were seeing in silico and in the wind tunnel.
Amazing technology. Thanks for posting.
When they get the kinks worked out, this is going to be a heck of an asset.
I don’t think so, I used to build parts for jet and rocket engines. There’s a lot that can go wrong. I’ve been following the Starship closely. I think one of the problems is that they do so many things well, they don’t do the triple redundant thing NASA did in the 60’s and 70’s. Fuel leaks happen. How do you handle it before the LOX or Liquid Methane freezes and cracks everything it touches when you have a leak. First leak detectors, second Pressurized inert gas to flush the leak out a vent, valves to isolate the leak and shunt the gas to a secondary supply system. All this is weight, which means money. Remember though, perfection is the enemy of production, so give up some weight for redundancy instead of expecting a perfect build every time. All that being said, As someone who grew up near Cape Canaveral, where my dad worked. Spacex is an incredible company doing incredible things. Catching a couple of hundred tons at the launch tower is not a trivial physics problem. ( BTW that means Spacex can drop that 200 tons going 18000 kph , figure those joules of force Iran, with a roughly 1 meter CEP from outside the atmosphere) And ever since “Rocky Jones Space Ranger” I had been waiting for ships to be reusable and land like they took off.
I’m not a rocket scientist, but I still don’t understand why they do that so-called “hot staging.” Seems to me the booster is still either attached or way too close to the upper stage that there probably is some sort of damage done to the upper stage when it ignites. Seems like there’s too much of a possibility of ignition shock wave damage to the upper stage.
Thank you. Came here to say this.
My step-dad worked on the Mercury Project............
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