US Launch Vehicles and Spacecraft: Discussion & News

Hyperloop, Starship... Muskian scams are designed for idiots who think Sci-Fi is real and who lack any basic knowledge of Engineering.

Big_Gazza wrote:Hyperloop, Starship...     Muskian scams are designed for idiots who think Sci-Fi is real and who lack any basic knowledge of Engineering.

Don't forget that embarrassing Cyber Truck fiasco of a Kabuki Theater lol!

Big_Gazza wrote:Hyperloop, Starship...     Muskian scams are designed for idiots who think Sci-Fi is real and who lack any basic knowledge of Engineering.

Musk-Rat got some bots to defend him.

GarryB wrote:Would prefer the Musk posts go on threads for US launch vehicles and spacecraft...

Move them there, it doesn't belong here

Crew Dragon spacecraft successfully lands in Gulf of Mexico

Crew members said they were feeling well

NEW YORK, August 3. /TASS/. The Crew Dragon manned spacecraft of the US company SpaceX splashed down in the Mexican Gulf off the coast of Florida on Sunday, according to a live broadcast on NASA’s website.

The capsule’s drogue parachutes deployed at the altitude of about 5.5 km. Shortly after, when the spacecraft descended to the altitude of 2 km, the four main chutes unfurled.

The splashdown took place at 14:48 EST (21:48 Moscow time). It was the first water landing by NASA since 1975, when the US space agency’s Apollo module returned to the Earth after the historic docking with Soviet Union’s Soyuz-19.

The spacecraft’s crew, US astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, said they were feeling well.

Another glorious achievement and fail for Space-X.

The ancient NASA derived tech is now delivering astronauts to orbit, but the new tech for rockets to Mars
is failing. Not a squeak about the failure, but endless trumpeting of "historic achievement" which is nothing
but restoration of decades old levels. Space-X has had 20 years to get NASA's tech to work. That is
a bloody long time. I would not ride Musk's rockets even if you paid me millions.

Crew Dragon spacecraft with four astronauts aboard docks with ISS

https://tass.com/science/1224431

SpaceX launches Dragon resupply spacecraft to ISS

https://tass.com/science/1231921

Go to the very end for all the action. Musk got his barn cistern to fly. Quite an accomplishment. But it "flubbed the landing".

The reason that this stunt was a joke is that this cistern did not fly above 20 km and those flapping wings must be some sort of joke.
Their flapping and deformation to reduce drag is likely what doomed this stunt.

I wouldn't ride a bicycle that SpaceX put together.

SpaceX is a promotional company designed to harvest tax credits and sell stock placements.

The predictable result...  



I LAUGHED so fucking hard..... Poor little Muskian groupies. Reality won't be denied.

I pity the dumb fuck who ever willingly steps foot into one of these Death Silos.

kvs wrote:

Go to the very end for all the action.   Musk got his barn cistern to fly.   Quite an accomplishment.   But it "flubbed the landing".

The reason that this stunt was a joke is that this cistern did not fly above 20 km and those flapping wings must be some sort of joke.
Their flapping and deformation to reduce drag is likely what doomed this stunt.

Just read the fucking retards who comment on this clip.... The mind simply boggles. So many people with no ability to judge a failure when they see one.

If you note the design of all the other real rocket systems in all countries you never see the diameter of the rocket greatly
exceed the diameter of the rocket engine cluster.    This Muskian POS is like having a tricycle "engine" for a car.   If the
volume of fuel was really that large in proportion to the nozzles then this thing wouldn't even be able to fly.  

Yeah, I know that some will say that this is just a tall rocket scaled for more diameter and less length.   That is not a
valid argument.  There are multiple stages in regular "tall" rockets and only the upper stages have smaller rockets since
they are already flying fast thanks to the full first stage (including any boosters which supports my point about the
engine footprint in the first stage).  

If this barn cistern was for real, it would have had many more rocket nozzles filling up the base and some group
of those nozzles would be turned off during vertical landing since the more than 50% of the fuel would be expended
on the way up.   If this was a glorified engine test, they could have used a smaller diameter rocket.    Testing the
cistern would require the full engine and not some three-nozzle downsized variant.

All of the Space-X fans are swooning what a great success this was and the final crash is just some bugs to be ironed out.
They are kind of right, I am sure that with enough trial and error the landing can be polished. But this whole test was bizarre.
They can't possibly have such a configuration usable for flights to Mars. So what was the point of the test? It did not
test the fully assembled system with a full sized engine.

Given the dramatic failures of the this barn cistern in the near past, I would expect a full size engine to shake it apart.

Daniel_Admassu wrote:'Successful Explosive Crashes' aside, I never really understood the Starship concept. Is such relatively small single stage chemical rocket supposed to go on a trip to Mars, come back and land? Or is it a small scale demonstrator for now?

Very good question.   That thing is way too small for even reaching the Moon.  

If it is a demonstrator with a reduced scale, then it will be too large if scaled to the proper size.   Think of something more powerful
than the Saturn V with a cluster of F-1 type engines numbering up to 10.



It will need several more engines to compensate not having upper stages and it will also need to have lots of fuel left over
for landing due to its enormous size. So it looks like the Starship is nothing more than an LEO shuttle and Musk would
have to establish an orbital rocket assembly to get to Mars.

kvs wrote:

Daniel_Admassu wrote:'Successful Explosive Crashes' aside, I never really understood the Starship concept. Is such relatively small single stage chemical rocket supposed to go on a trip to Mars, come back and land? Or is it a small scale demonstrator for now?

Very good question.   That thing is way too small for even reaching the Moon.  

If it is a demonstrator with a reduced scale, then it will be too large if scaled to the proper size.   Think of something more powerful
than the Saturn V with a cluster of F-1 type engines numbering up to 10.



It will need several more engines to compensate not having upper stages and it will also need to have lots of fuel left over
for landing due to its enormous size. So it looks like the Starship is nothing more than an LEO shuttle and Musk would
have to establish an orbital rocket assembly to get to Mars.

OK, the LEO Shuttle regime makes more sense. Still it is my estimate that even for that it needs to be larger with a more powerful engine. But SSTO essentially means exponential weight and fuel cost penalty and so 1. It has to absolutely land without scratch and 2. That engine better be multiple-use capable for the whole concept to work.
However staged or not re-use and landing have a great prospect and we have to admit that Musk is absolutely pioneering the technology. I know that Russia has experimented with several similar concepts in the past but I feel it has to play catch up now in that regard. If reliability of the landing improves and engines can fly at least for several missions then SSTO makes absolute sense because the cost of fuel (Kerosene and LOX) ultimately is not that significant out of the total vehicle hardware and assembly expense.

The US space shuttle LOX-LH engines were multiple use. I have heard nothing about the Starship being simply an LEO
delivery vehicle, that was just my supposition based on its size or any realistic up-sizing.

I find the effort to make regular egg-shell rockets into reusable ones to be rather strange. If the idea is to have a fully
reusable delivery system, then just adapting current rocket designs is not enough and starting from scratch makes more
sense. The glider booster concept is a better one than a vertically landing cistern. From the other failed tests of the
Starship, it is an egg-shell metal husk that is more appropriate for a disposable rocket.

A cluster of first stage modules like with the Angara V, evolved into gliders that land after burning out around 50 to 60 km
is a superior approach since it does not require extra fuel which is a very big savings and payload boost. Expending the
second stage is good enough and PR optics do not matter. We are nowhere near Star Wars single stage to orbit travel
and it is moronic to pretend that we are "high tech" like in sci-fi.

Didnt the energia main rocket have a much larger diameter than its engine? How did it manage to work. I noticed the starship cistern has a lot of spacebetween its wall and engine and the engines seem to be embedded in the cylinder, which seems dumb.

That does not look anything like the Starship. All countries that have ever produced rockets including the Saturn V fill up the
first stage cross section with rocket nozzles. Even the N1 followed this approach in spite of using many small rocket engines
compared to the enormous F1 engines on the Saturn V.

Regardless of this point, the size of the Starship is nowhere near large enough for any flight to Mars.

I always got the impression that this thing was just the upper stage of a really sketchy superheavy rocket and judging by the number of explosive failures it has had already just imagine how bad it will be when the morons get to adding the first stage.

As for engine reusability, didn't they have an engine failure a while back?