24 thoughts on “Starship”

  1. I know why Elon has paused on the off-shore platform. He needs to wring everything he can out on land before he commits to bending a bunch of expensive to re-work metal on the platforms. He don’t need them yet anyway.

    It’s the Falcon Heavy situation all over. You really couldn’t finalize its design till the Falcon 9 had been worked-out first.

  2. A rocket launch is traffic or rocket launch is fireworks and eventually they have become an unwanted distractions.
    Or they are like giant windmills.
    Musk plans to launch from the ocean- so it’s a bit different.
    But I think such planning should include ocean settlements and people living there should be planning and hoping for a lot of constant fireworks- or they live in ocean settlement which further away from the show.
    30 miles away from it, is a lot less of distraction- but if down range from it, make it +100 miles.

    This why I think Mars settlement will cause ocean settlements on Earth. And three launches from Earth per day with Starship is only in reality where we have Mars settlements.
    It seems as little as 100 starship per year from KSC could be too much for residents in the area but if it’s temporary, it different then going on and on for years.

    1. Not ocean settlement in the sense of sea bed dwelling, but perhaps an apartment complex, small town on an above water sea platform within 30 miles of the sea-based launch & landing platform for SpaceX employees and their families? Semi-tropical environment of the Gulf of Mexico not too hard to take with A/C. Occasional evac due to hurricane possibly. Hmm, possible pre-cursor to a Space Colony?

  4. A falcon 9 launch recovers the booster in about 10 minutes. A TFR that lasts an hour three times a day will be no more of a headache than the “TFR” over Washington, DC we have had to deal with for the last 20 years. That’s some kind of temporary there.
    Three a day for a year will give space entrepreneurs over 100,000 tons of lifting capability to LEO per year. At $10.00/kg., I could build a pretty nice house up there.

      1. Darn it
        Well Starship can’t launch before March 1
        but FAA could delay it more, though FCC license might be the “last thing” you get before FAA license is granted and/or it’s guessed that around that time FAA grants license.

  6. For the past 30 years, I’ve been trying to convince the space community to get rid of “legacy lingo”, starting with “range.” In commercial aviation, one goes to an airport, climbs aboard an airliner which then takes off on a flight to a destination airport. One would never say “Bye, honey, I’m off to the range to board a mission to [fill in city name].” The terms “range” and “mission” (as opposed to “flight”) connote military operations, often experimental ones. They are incompatible with commercial parlance, and insinuate concepts that don’t contribute to the advancement of commercial space transportation.

    The word “range” evokes the word “safety”, which is entirely appropriate for a “range”. But it demands that commercial space transportation be shackled to the notion of “range safety”, where the sole regulatory concern of the government is to protect the uninvolved public and property from the consequences of a flight (not “launch”) failure. Every single licensed commercial launch must “demonstrate” an expectation of casualties among the uninvolved public of 100E-6. This is done by means of Monte Carlo analyses of failure modes and consequences, implemented in software that has never undergone IV&V, and is considered reliable only because there have never been any third party casualties from a US space launch.

    There might be another reason for there having been no such casualties: the precautions we take make such risks vanishingly small.

    That isn’t the real argument, though. The real argument is over the treatment of space launch as different from aviation. If airlines had to demonstrate an expectation of casualties of 100E-6 for each and every takeoff…well, there would never have been any takeoffs. Ground casualties are given very light treatment in FAA regulations, mostly in the experimental aircraft regs. But they are the be-all-end-all in licensing of commercial launches and reentries.

    Commercial aviation wouldn’t exist if it had been regulated under FAA/AST rules. I say this having been Chief Engineer of FAA/AST for ten years.

      1. Early rockets were considered ordnance, so you’re probably not too far from the root cause of the issue.

    2. So, we should rename Midway to the Chicago Mid-Town Range? I always think about parts falling off the aircraft when flying in and out of there… It’s always humorous to me, house, house, house, school, house, house, warehouse, railroad, highway, concrete wall, Runway!

    3. I guess this sort of legacy is how we get peculiar nomenclature. Reminds me of a YouTube video that was introducing sailing lingo. They had three different names for ropes (sheets, lines, halyards) based on where they were located and how they were used. Here, I would prefer some normalization of terms that doesn’t reek of historical reenactment.

  7. There’s no reason a working fully reusable launch vehicle can’t fly from an inland base. Edwards, White Sands, or even Jackass Flats, to begin with. Airliners have neither LES nor autodestruct ordnance. Either normalize the idea, or forget about it. There’s no viable middle ground.

    1. Well there is the reason we don’t fly SSTs to inland airports and it’ll be the same issue with Super Heavy. Noise. Now maybe you can have “feeder” Starbases that launch only the Starship for a sub-orbital hop to an offshore staging platform whereby it can be mated to a SuperHeavy for a longer transit or orbital flight? Hub and Spoke all over again….

      1. What SSTs are those? The same ones we don’t have because of NIMBY? That would make my point: normalize it or give it up. I did operate geophones under the Dulles landing pattern and had to shut off my hardware during Concorde landings and takeoffs. Those 1960s gas turbines were loud, though not as loud as was claimed. Bur exaggeration won the day, as it will now if we allow liars to lie.

        Supposedly, 33 Raptors are not louder than 27 Merlins. You’ll notice Falcon Heavy isn’t breaking windows nearby? I stood 3 miles from STS-1 launch, and it wasn’t all that loud. People there with me say Saturn 5 was a bit luder. This is all one with people who claim if starship RUDs on the pad, a million people will be killed in Brownville and Matamoros due to the 5 kiloton explosion. And one with people who claim the sonic booms from landing SH will deafened everyone for miles around, that the booms from landing Starship will break all the windows in Florida. You see a pattern here?

        The whole point of splashing the first SH/SS is to see exactly what the accoustic environment will be like. The other point is, if you can fly SH/SS out of a coastal site (“a range”) then you can fly it out of a somewhat remote inland site. Jackass Flats is not far from Frenchman Flat and Yucca Flat. I think the largest above ground bomb set off there was 74kt. You won’t even hear a Starship launch in Las Vegas, although you might go, “Look! Up in the sky!!”

        As for overflights of populated regions, how many people on the ground died from Columbia?

        1. Well, the range safety idea is probably going to get discarded if Elon achieves anything near his planned flight rate, as the “range” will be closed for a launch and recovery more often than it is open. It would be like having to stop all nearby highway traffic every time an airliner takes off or lands.

          “Are people on the ground getting killed? No? Then keep on flying.”

          That said, I should mention the hundreds of Americans who the Pentagon apparently thinks are killed by falling weather balloons every year.

          Judging by so many of the “experts” the media and government have trotted out, I’m willing to say that the general understanding of balloon engineering we have now is less than it was in the late 1800’s, and that in their “balloon world” we could have scheduled commercial balloon flights between New York and LA.

          1. One of the weirdest sights in recent memory came from the on board camera of a descending Falcon 9 first stage narrowly missing hitting a weather balloon. Now I wonder whose it was.

            Early airports like DC’s National were sited with Ford Trimotor and DC-3 in mind. Dulles was sited with jumbo jets and SSTs in mind. But no one anticipated the DC burbs would sprawl out there in just a few years. That’s what I was doing with the geophones: finding bedrock to plan excavation and blasting for water and sewer lines, as developers knew the burbs were coming.

            You might not want to launch a Starship from Central Park, but maybe Patchogue, halfway between NYC and the Hamptons. And let’s not forget the municipality built a park and bleachers on the south end of South Padre, facing Boca Chica. The biggest problem is going to be car alarms going off in the parking lot.

          2. Imagine if they’d had the dirigible mooring mast atop the Empire State Building active, and Hindenberg had gone down there. Oh, the humanity! That would’be beat King Kong by a mile!

  8. @William Barton I’d love to hear more about the weather balloon you saw on a Falcon landing. If it was returning to land, the easiest answer would be that the balloon was launched from the range. They release them frequently before a launch to detect upper level winds. If it was landing at sea, then things get a little more complicated.

    1. I’m pretty sure it was an RTLS, and the ballooon looked like a typical 2 meterish radiosonde thingy. All the Falcon launch videos are on youtube, so it could probably be found, but that would be a tedious chore!

    1. 31/33rds of a successful static fire! Getting there. I notice the booster lox tank was full, but the methane tank was just enough. No 5 kiloton RUD today, so we can’t find out if everyone in Matamoros would have died…

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