SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.

  • FauxPseudo @lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Which is an incremental improvement over the prior attempt. People mock these failures as though they have never built anything and have no concept that any step forward is a win when you are trying to do something that has never been done before. They got the smaller rockets working. It will just take time to get this giant one working.

    • leds@feddit.dk
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      1 year ago

      Yeah but to get from here to a 99.99% reliability is a very very long way

      • Player2@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        Look at the Falcon rocket history. They started out at a very similar point, though at a smaller scale. And yet now they are comfortably human rated. They have landed the last 171 times in a row without fail, with another one coming this evening to add to that incredible number.

        The guy at the helm is a terrible person, but this does not discredit the absolutely insane progress they have made.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      1 year ago

      What aspect of this “has never been done before”? Its a multi-stage rocket (NASA and the Soviets have been doing that for about seventy-ish years and the Nazi scientists we all recruited were doing it for even longer). The main innovations are material choice (which is debatable) and landing a rocket on a pad, which is mostly a function of having good computers.

      Space flight is hard. That said, there is a very strong argument for being much less iterative. Especially when the quest for a reusable rocket involves constant spraying of wreckage across oceans and land.

      • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        and landing a rocket on a pad, which is mostly a function of having good computers.

        Launching a rocket is even easier, it’s mostly a function of having a big tank of propellant and powerful engines. A big rocket ? Just need a bigger tank and bigger engines.