Ariane 6 maiden launch live broadcast.

[wraper]

About APU and it's failure at 11 minutes.

[Stray Electron]

If SpaceX do succeed with Starship, it's hard to see what market this rocket will have in a few years.  But maybe I'm missing something.

This allows Europe to launch anything they want into space.
Cost is secondary consideration.

Congratulations on the successful launch.

  Nails it. European Nationalism will ensure that it will get plenty of usage by the EU countries even if it's cost 3x as much.  This is about the EU trying to form an economic union (and a space program) that can compete with US industry in general and in this case, specifically with the US space program.

  Russia, China and Japan are also attempting to get into the space business.  (Iran and North Korea just want to get into the weapons business.)


   You do realize don't you, that a LOT of the computers, electronics and TE and TE techniques that are discussed on this forum were developed in the US for the 1960s Space Race don't you?  I'm sure that Europe would like to Kickstart their own high tech industries in the same way that the US did in the 1950s and 1960s with the Space Race. 

   They say that competition is a good thing so we'll see how this plays out over the next 30+ years. 

[coppercone2]

I think there is also a quality concern here, I am pretty sure alot of Europeans are... concerned about space-x as a company

i.e. https://www.businessinsider.com/former-spacex-employees-lawsuit-elon-musk-execs-spanking-video-2024-6

its kind of like do we trust animal house for space defense & security

what it makes me think is "is a reasonable complaint or request going to be taken seriously by that kind of company during a dire situation?"

then there is a concern about self destructs and disabling access to infrastructure based on the opinions of a single individual or possibly a board of his friends, that are in another country, across the ocean.. .with only the slow feed back process from congress to correct it. i.e. redeployment of satellites after ASAT attack


I don't think it will push computer technology forward too much anymore, but there is something to be said about having cheaper reliable power electronics and stuff like that based on knowledge from research for rockets. Right now treez is an example of european expertise in economic power supplies, I think they can maybe do better.


The whole idea of basically trusting your ENTIRE access to a area needed for defense with a single foreign private company is nuts. At best you could try to get the pentagon as a intermediary to make it into some kind of enforceable contract, but wow that does NOT go down well at all in a politically turbulent country. Its a bit like relying on mercenaries, they said a big reason why the roman empire fell was reliance on mercenary forces for defense reasons. In this case its like relying on mercenary transport ships. The only example that comes to mind is CHOAM from the dune books lol, no big power yet has contracted out their entire navy (which I think is similar to satellites since they have persistent objects away from your country that seem to go in big circles endlessly). Even Japan demanded its own boats. They don't have too big a army but they still got plenty of boats. On a singular level , its like having your own car vs having to take the bus or taxi, its ridiculous. In this case its like having to charter a bus from germany to drive to france to pick up the weather man to get to work.


In the early days of sail, countries were also feverish about having their own boats if they had any access to water at all.

[brucehoult]

Damn ... Falcon 9 upper stage just had the single engine explode when trying to re-ignite an hour after launch to circularise the orbit. The booster worked normally and landed safely on the drone ship.

Unusual ice buildup was visible during the initial engine burn. Something may have been leaking.

The Starlink satellites were deployed into an elliptical orbit with the apogee at the desired altitude but very low (but not in the atmosphere) perigee. They might or might not be able to circularise their own orbit, but even even if they can they will have a shorter than normal lifetime because of using up a lot of their propellent doing that.

[wraper]

^Reflective foil looks unusually puffed up. Considering excessive ice build up should be oxygen leaking somewhere inside. Some oxygen ice is normal but not anywhere this much.

[brucehoult]

Something starts to happen by mission time 3:50 but it gets dramatic at 4:06.

https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1gqGvNkwZPgGB

[iMo]

[Sal Ammoniac]

Perhaps it's time to start a new thread to discuss the Falcon 9 engine failure...

[brucehoult]

If there was a space&rockets or even aerospace sub-board (like "Cooking" and "Tea") then I might agree with you.

But there's not, the only other recentish similar post are a 737 Max one that's been going since January and Tianlong-3 accidental launch a couple of weeks ago..

And this post veered into comparison of Ariane and SpaceX capacity and price and reliability within 2 or 3 hours, four days before the Falcon 9 upper stage failure. So it was basically already on topic in this thread before it even happened.

[coppercone2]

there is something to be said about the one use rocket particularly for human use. I feel like the materials are not advanced enough yet to really give me confidence its going to work more then once, and the engineering controls are not fool proof.

It seems that with every manned accident, its the boosters that act up, not the shuttle. Space-x reuses the part that gets the hell beat out of it by really intense fire, vibrations and strain. I think its OK for low value sats (which is what they seem to be on) though so long it maintains a positive score.

That ring manufacturing process he has is IMO scary. I think you would need a giant pilger machine to make a really durable one. But even then, I feel like metal is god damn weird. Really it should be 100% forged after forming too, because the skin should be less susceptible to cracks.

No one likes a non-forged axe. But the stresses on these rockets are enormous.


And if you did have said pilger and it worked good, it would pretty much make sense just to smelt the thing and reform it because its well automated

That might be a good use for mars too, build a nuclear reactor there and form rocket tubes in a giant ass plant.


As for the reusable heat shields, I too am really dubious after restoring this old kiln. These old bricks are totally fucking unpredictable. It could spall when its compacted, or it can crack in half. Who the fuck knows why! The "foam" process of the fire resistant material is shady, I think it needs to be all engineered micro lattice structure, you can't trust random bubbles for too long. Of course thats my opinion, its going to turn out that material might totally suck balls and you need the randomness of the forming process to make it half decent lol. Well I will give it one thing, I still think high heat ceramics are less unnerving then glassy structures, now those are just unpredictable

[brucehoult]

there is something to be said about the one use rocket particularly for human use.

I dunno. Would you want to a passenger on a new 737 Max that had never been test-flown? I wouldn't.

I'd rather be on the 2nd or 3rd or 5th flight of something where there were already a dozen of the same design that had each made 15 to 20 flights, with zero failures. That's the current situation with Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters.

Note that it was the use-once part of Falcon 9 that failed. Even then it was a completely survivable failure. It deployed the satellites and they might yet be usable. It seems it's not a matter of available fuel and dV but whether the thrust over a complete orbit will be greater than atmospheric drag at the perigee and they can get a net raising of the perigee at all. Ideally, of course, you want to add all the dV instantaneously (or at least over 5 or 10 minutes) at one or more apogees, not thrusting all the way around..

If the upper stage had more than one (smaller?) engine then there might well have been full mission success.

Maybe it's a bit different for things coming back from orbital speed, or higher.  Falcon 9 boosters only hit ~6500 km/h, Superheavy 5750 and 5500 km/h on tests 3 and 4 respectively. That's only 4% to 5% of the energy of orbital speed, so no big problem to deal with. The slower Superheavy isn't even bothering with an entry burn before hitting the atmosphere.

There have been 6 Crew Dragon 2 built. The first prototype had a successful Demo-1 flight, but was accidentally destroyed in a ground test of the abort thrusters a few weeks later.  The second one was retired after a successful Flight Abort Test. It might well be that it's always sensible to retire them after a launch abort (hopefully after they save the crew!). That should be very unusual.

The remaining 4 built are all still in service, with a total of 13 crewed flights between them, including the one currently docked to ISS on its 5th flight.

There are also 3 cargo Dragon 2s, which have done 10 flights between them (4, 4, and 2)

I feel like the materials are not advanced enough yet to really give me confidence its going to work more then once, and the engineering controls are not fool proof.

Dragon seems to be adequately proven. Starship is certainly still an open question.

I'm sure they can protect it adequately, it's just a question of how much weight they have to add, and how much maintenance between flights.

SpaceX just seems to like to approach the optimum from the "let's prove we didn't do enough" side, not from the "build it like a brick outhouse and then see how much we can safely trim off later" side.

[coppercone2]

I have seen many more used things break then new things break unless their not tested properly when it comes to structural stuff. I never thought to myself this weld is getting better with age, just due to what they are.

For precision systems sure, you get to the 'correct' point. But structural stuff? No way.


You trust a old aluminum ladder over a new one? Or things like heavy hooks, beat up bolts, used up steel cable and older wiring.. I rarely have more confidence in them. It feels like a space rocket is chock full of those things. Especially brittle stuff

I think there is a error that develops because people used to build things so much better that you end up thinking age made it better but I think the manufacturing quality of those things degraded to such a point that they are just orders of magnitude inferior.


Granted, they only expect 10 uses out of it.. but the stress conditions those objects undergo are like the worst there are.

I think the data set that is relevant to space travel proportional to the amount of total data there is about general materials science knowledge used terrestrially is still very small and it might not be wise to use methodologies even vaguely similar to terrestrial conditions in order to assert objects durability.

Total number of rocket launches humans made is like 50000. For something like cars or planes, you have orders of magnitude more data gathered within the same time period. A car manufacturer has 1.7 billion cars to date to learn from and make judgements based on. 50K is jack shit compared to this, but I think they are using the same methodology as cars. And with cars you can study all of them, the majority of rockets are burned by the atmosphere save for some debris. And relevant to heavy rockets, I bet that number is under 5000.


and despite all of this, it still seems like its super easy to make a shitty unreliable car, even though you can test all the components and their under massively better conditions (but built with similar cost engineering practices as space x)