The giant SpaceX rocket is supposed to launch in ten minutes. I tuned in just in time to hear them say they’re canceling the launch for today — they’re continuing the countdown to practice procedures but are going to reschedule for a different day.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Not yet.
Give it another 48 hours and another attempt and eventually. SpaceX has shown they can do what people thought they couldn’t do.
Very.Impressive. Record.
Very. Impressive. Group.
Musk aside.
And it’s Elon’s latest Flash-Gordon-inspired rocketship goes down in a flaming heap, he’ll no doubt blame it all on the “Woke Mind Virus” infecting his engineers with CRT and Transgenders!
Another victim of Cancel Culture!
@ ^ feralboy12 : Another wise choice of abortion that will result in later success and be the better for it…
Nothing wrong with Flash Gordon .. well, okay, actually in retrospect quite a bit wrong with it but I did absolutely love the animated cartoon of it back when I was a kid as seen here as the second SF show I ever saw after Battle of the Planets and before Starblazers and, yeah, loved that rocket too.
Oh & Flash fought nazis and they were explictly the bad guys in that cartoon which began in WW II whereas Musk and too many others now (yes, now in 20-flucking- 23!) supportand enable them FFS!
SpaceX has shown they can do what people thought they couldn’t do.
Really? When has anyone ever said SpaceX couldn’t launch a rocket?
The Apollo program was funded by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, two even bigger assholes than the muskrat.
And it was led by German rocket engineers with a questionable relationship with their former employers.
The engineers in Boca Chica have never worked at Mittelbau Dora.
So in this particular case, it is OK to celebrate a potential success.
And Max von Sydow was fun in the silly film.
Playing devil’s advocate here, but it makes sense to delay a launch rather than have the rocket explode. NASA canceled a few launches for that reason.
Raging Bee: the idea of collecting up almost all private funding to build the biggest rocket ever built is what was doubted (though less loudly than doubts that F9 could land, or that F1 could fly at all).
The public sector has sunk something like 100 million into this project. By contrast, previous heavy-lift rockets cost tens of billions of dollars of public funds (in today’s currency) — even the contemporaneous project, which had access to all the same level of technology.
numerobis, indeed. A hell of a lot of public funding went into rocket research, design and development, all of which current designers benefit from. Pogo oscillation comes to mind, a phenomena that haunted most, if not all of the Apollo program, as well as predecessors. It was finally largely resolved in the space shuttle program, but still occasionally pokes its ugly head up to haunt engineers in new rocket designs and that’s just one challenge out of many in designing rockets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_oscillation
Hell, know why they dump so much water into the launch pad base? Cooling is a small part, but the critical reason is simple enough – noise. Heavy lift rockets generate enough sound pressure to dismantle themselves. The Soviets didn’t bother resolving that issue with water until 1978, but managed without it until then, uncertain as to how they resolved that issue, save that Russians do build some sturdy spacetanks. ;)
And tank is used as a conscious choice. What else can you call spacecraft that can enter the atmosphere inverted until the service module tears off and cosmonauts survive or Venera slamming into Venus at 17 m/s and despite rolling over, the damned thing still worked? I’ve still no clue how to build circuitry that would operate for 23 minutes – 2 hours under such hellish conditions! Even if remnants of one probe did land in Kentucky, can’t blame them, equally strange place and all. :P
Hey, if it was easy, it’d not be called rocket science.
And I’ve delayed launches of my own model rockets if things were amiss. Most of the time, had I not, I’d have had small pieces to pick up, rather than a modest repair and successful launch later. Although, I have had a couple lawn dart over the years, which irritated me, as a recovery system failure is a danger to those on the ground.
numerobis: The public sector has sunk something like 100 million into this project. By contrast, previous heavy-lift rockets cost tens of billions of dollars of public funds (in today’s currency) — even the contemporaneous project, which had access to all the same level of technology.
Where did you get that figure? The Washington Post says NASA funded the Starship project with $2.9 billion in 2021 alone, but it seems a little bit like cherry-picking to count only the public sector’s funding. Why not count all the money needed to achieve the goal?
Consider a comparison a little closer to apples-to-apples: How long did it take the organization to get people into orbit, and how much did it cost in total?
NASA: Three and a half years (July 1958 to February 1962), $10.8 million (in 2020 dollars) — and that’s all of NASA, including the aeronautical stuff and the unmanned stuff, and with no precedent.
SpaceX: Eighteen and a half years (May 2002 to November 2020). SpaceX’s budget in 2021 alone was $1.6 billion (more than a hundred times as much as NASA’s 3.5-year effort), and NASA has made everything about its efforts a matter of public record (which means that it was available to SpaceX).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/14/starship-launch-faa-license/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
https://dashboards.trefis.com/data/companies/SPACEX/no-login-required/yaQTBXoY/What-Is-Driving-SpaceX-s-Revenues-Valuation-
Well, this particular story could end well.
Putting aside the cringey fact of El Musky’s presence, this dingus could loft in orbit really large payloads (NASA is already salivating about the telescopes they could stuff aboard), and it has nice moonship potential.
Also: if it works as intended, maybe EM will forget about bloody Twitter and shut up for a while and work on something worthwhile for a change. Double win!
nikolai @10, I really love the accurate numbers shown on various sites on the actual ROI from our space programs. The gains have been absurdly huge!
Ironically humorous, as both Soviet and US space programs were proxy dick measuring contests over ICBM capabilities initially. Equally hilarious was one of Carl Sagan’s early government projects, the Air Force wanted to detonate a nuke on the moon as a show. Sagan calculated it and showed them that it’d likely be invisible to the naked eye on earth. I’m sure LeMay was pissed…
outis @11, I doubt Musk could be so easily distracted. Never underestimate the drive present in a misanthrope driven by ego.
It is clear that Musk just wanted to launch on 4/20!
@ ^ Kevin Karplus : LOL! Nah, it really looked like Starship was going to launch the other day and, of course, there’s no guarantee that the second attempt will fly with weather and possible technical issues again. Still that is indeed the sceheduled date forthe next attempt see :
https://www.space.com/spacex-targeting-april-20-starship-space-launch
nikolai: What NASA is funding to the tune of a few billion a year is SLS, by a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed. It isn’t significantly funding Starship, by SpaceX. SLS was supposed to be the quick and easy repurposing of Shuttle technology to get a cheap heavy-lift rocket. It’s cost well over $20 billion so far, and “cheap” appears to mean $2-4 billion per launch.
The Mercury program was a bit over $200 million at the time, over $2 billion in current dollars. You seem to have inflation-adjusted the costs backwards somehow.
The SpaceX funding for Starship is not publicly revealed but generally assumed to be in the $3-5 billion range based on some investment rounds that SpaceX did for it.
Recycling leftover shuttle components ballooned as expected by many. Reinspection, maintenance of aged components, recertification for flight costs more than was rather oddly underestimated by those involved.
And overbudget and space tend to go hand in hand anyway. It is rocket science, after all.
Space dot com has this article here :
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-rocket-super-heavy-launch-what-time
on tonight’s Starship launch attempt. Here’s hoping they get to light this ginornormous candle this time! I’ll be watching probly on youtube.
Whether or not they do, their record shows it almost certainly will soon fly successfully even it it does take them a while.
Yeah, Musk is an absolute douchebag* but the work and feats and rockets and spacecraft built by SpaceX have been magnificent and deserve – have earned – our respect and admiration surely?
Continued :
.* After all NASA used nazi – literal nazi rocket scientists including Werner VonBraun to get the American astronauts to our Moon first and so far only. A truly staggering and extraordinary success even tho’ clearly achieved in part by people who were at least once the very epitome of evil.
.***
Some good links on this Starship rocket and its planned first flight here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2023/04/11/infinite-thread-xxvii/comment-page-1/#comment-2175025
Plus see one list of Space X successes and records and firsts here :
https://interestingengineering.com/science/destination-mars-15-incredible-spacex-milestones-past-and-future
Whilst NASA Spaceflight’s live youtube coverage hyperlink is here for those wanting to follow launch attempt two tonight.
numerobis: What NASA is funding to the tune of a few billion a year is SLS, by a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed. It isn’t significantly funding Starship, by SpaceX.
And your source for showing that the Washington Post is wrong and that you are right is…?
I fully agree that SLS is a boondoggle, but that doesn’t mean that NASA isn’t funding Starship at significant levels.
numerobis: The Mercury program was a bit over $200 million at the time, over $2 billion in current dollars.
According to the citations I provided, NASA’s entire 1962 budget was $1.3 million in 1962 dollars (and increasing), which is $10.8 million in 2020 dollars. (I erroneously misattributed this to the entire cost over three and a half years.) And let’s not consider the cost of the entire program, especially since Starship hasn’t even gotten off the ground yet (and won’t have more than a test flight even if this morning’s preparations go to plan); it seems more fruitful to talk about goals attained for a given cost, since cost was the origin of claims that SpaceX was doing well. On the metric of cost-to-goal, SpaceX is doing rather poorly.
Where are you getting your numbers for the cost of the entire program?
numerobis: The SpaceX funding for Starship is not publicly revealed but generally assumed to be in the $3-5 billion range based on some investment rounds that SpaceX did for it.
Whose assumptions?
Denialism is setting in. I’ve heard, “separation was planned at 60 km and they tried to trigger it early due to engine failure”, no, separation failed at the proper time – per the filed flight plans and “they weren’t planning to recover the first stage, but allow it to fall into the ocean”, no, the flight plan plainly shows that they planned for the booster to land intact on their recovery barge pad.
Now, if the denialists weren’t wrong or flat out lying, then SpaceX should be forbidden to launch anything in the future, due to intentional falsification of flight plans.
Just more worship of their god-Musk (keep singing it to the tune of the 1960’s Batman), what a bunch of ultramaroons! For yea and verily, the muskrat can do no wrong, for he is the muskrat thy god or something.