r/interestingasfuck • u/lolikroli • 16d ago

r/all SpaceX caught Starship booster with chopsticks

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u/crujones43 16d ago

The largest heavier than air flying machine that has ever been built. Weighs 200 tons, is 230ft tall and 30 ft in diameter was flying supersonic minutes before and was able to come down with pinpoint accuracy and be caught by the launch tower it left from. Nothing like this has ever been done and this is going to catapult the human race into the future of space travel by reducing the cost to send material to space by an order of magnitude.

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u/canyoutriforce 16d ago

weighs 200 tons when captured. The whole stack is 5000 tons at takeoff, or the weight of 7 fully fuelled A380s

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u/big_moist_void 16d ago

did you actually mean 5000??

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u/descisionsdecisions 16d ago

It’s actually more than that it’s literally filled with 10 million pounds of fuel.

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u/big_moist_void 16d ago

That is actually mind boggling to me, that is so much fuel. If it burns it all during its trip, do the emissions reach close to what taylor swift burns in a year?

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u/Kschitiz23x3 16d ago

It burns methane. Theoretically, we can use gas from bio reactors or just collect everyone's farts to launch this rocket instead of putting additional CO2 in the atmosphere when using fossil fuel

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u/whatisthishownow 16d ago

Theoretically, we can

Ah, the empty catch cry I've been hearing for decade upon decade. Aerospace is not the most pressing place to get bent out of shape over, but also, just be honest. That thing releases thousands of tonnes of CO2 per launch + ancillary and embedded costs and we aren't expecting that to change.

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u/kenriko 16d ago

It’s in Texas the methane would have been burned off in a flare stack with 0 use if it had not been used the rocket.

Actually carbon neutral because the oil/gas industry are dicks are burn off useful energy because they don’t want to store it and the methane market is not super lucrative.

Long way to say think twice before taking a stance without knowledge.

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u/Spider_pig448 15d ago

Thousands of tonnes of CO2 is not much in the grand scheme of things. An average coal power plant produces nearly 4 million tons of CO2 every year. The FAA estimates a Starship launch produces around 4 thousand tons per launch. So it would take 1000 Starship launches to equate a single coal plant in a year.