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Old 05-14-2022, 10:06 AM
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Default Elon Musk Explains Updates To Starship And Tours Starbase

Elon Musk Explains Updates To Starship And Tours Starbase
May 14, 2022


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ux6B3bvO0w
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Old 05-16-2022, 07:31 AM
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Originally Posted by Winston2021
Elon Musk Explains Updates To Starship And Tours Starbase
May 14, 2022


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ux6B3bvO0w

I like Elon, but I've made it to about 7 minutes and have decided he really needs to take a college speech class.
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Old 05-16-2022, 12:15 PM
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Better title would have been "Tours a couple of high bays, with parts of rocket bodies".

I was disappointed that in touring a starbase, the tour did not include the launch pad area.

The four significant things I take from that:

1 - The new bigger high bay can accomodate about 10 or more "build stations". Since they seem to build the boosters in two halves before joining (?), that would mean two booster halves and one starship in 3 stations. Not including Starship noses that are fabricated elsewhere.

2 - They won't use tanks of Nitrogen for gaseous thrusters anymore. They wil use "ullage" gas from inside the oxygen tank. The Lox is always getting warmed up and some has to be vented anyway, and they figure enough pressure available in orbit to be able to use it for that purpose.

3 - The first "hatch" for payloads is a slot to be used like a "Pez Dispenser". The new bigger Starlink satellites (rectangular) will be stacked on top of each other and moved into place one by one to the "slot" that they will be ejected out of like a piece of toast from a toaster. That won't work for other larger payloads or the the Lunar Landing version. But that's the first version. And also they have thousands of the new larger Starlink satellites to the launched on Starship.

4 - OK, related to the hatch thing, that they need for the nose section to be pressurized for re-entry. I take that to mean that the nose section is not structurally stiff stiff enough otherwise, sort ofl ike Atlas but not as weak. Musk referred to a pressure deal for that hatch. Normally, payload fairings are totally vented during launch. So I take it that for launch it will be pressurized, bleeding off excess pressure as it gets into thinner air, to maintain a desird pressure (not unlike an airliner). At some point (maybe before burnout but in a vacuum), they'll vent all the air out as they won't need the strength.

Well, MAYBE pump that air into a tank. Because if they vent the air out, then to repressurize later, all they'll have onboard would be gaseous oxygen or methane, which could could be disastrous for re-entry or landing. Or carry a tank of nitrogen for that, which might be more practical than the mass of a pump and electrical demand, plus needing a tank anyway.

On further thought, gaseous oxygen might not be so bad if the pressure needed was not very much, to keep the nose section stiff enough. Say 2 or 3 PSI. Whoops, but for landing they'd need to ramp up the pressure to be above ambient pressure for landing, and we know from Apollo-1 how bad pure oxygen can be at 14.7 PSI or above.

Ok, FIVE things:

5 - Mention of possibly going to only two grid fins on the booster at some point, but more likely two big ones and a smaller 3rd one. The two big ones for pitch (and roll), the small one for yaw, as it does not need as much control for yaw, as it does for pitch (The F9 booster landing approaches, before the landing burn, are sort of kind of very badly almost "gliding", thanks to the grid fin control authority in pitch). A single small grid fin for yaw only, would cause a rolling moment, but the big grid fins could cancel that out easily. It occurs to me that they could test that method out on an F9 booster, remove two opposing grid fins, add one smaller grid fin, tweak the software, and test it out. Perhaps with a booster with 10 or more flights, just in case.
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Last edited by georgegassaway : 05-16-2022 at 01:38 PM.
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Old 05-16-2022, 04:29 PM
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One more thing, George, that I got out of it was that Musk sees no reason to waste the effort on a full orbit and de-orbit burn instead of the 75% orbit and splash down near Hawaii, partly because he thinks there is a pretty good chance of failure at some point during the mission. It was also mentioned that the difference is only about 30 m/s difference between Hawaii and full orbit, so they will get all the data they need.
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Old 05-16-2022, 11:09 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tbzep
One more thing, George, that I got out of it was that Musk sees no reason to waste the effort on a full orbit and de-orbit burn instead of the 75% orbit and splash down near Hawaii, partly because he thinks there is a pretty good chance of failure at some point during the mission. It was also mentioned that the difference is only about 30 m/s difference between Hawaii and full orbit, so they will get all the data they need.

Yeah. But that 3/4 orbit is somewhat old news. IIRC that was the plan for when it was supposed to launch last July. Which was 8 Starship prototypes that will never fly (#16-23), and 7 boosters (#1-7) that will never fly, ago.

Current plan IIRC is to launch Starship #24, with Booster #8 (was gonna be booster #7 but they had a cryogenic fueling testing accident that caused internal damage. They fixed it, but only useful now for more pad fueling tests, not to trust to fly).
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Old 05-17-2022, 07:13 AM
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Originally Posted by georgegassaway
Yeah. But that 3/4 orbit is somewhat old news. IIRC that was the plan for when it was supposed to launch last July. Which was 8 Starship prototypes that will never fly (#16-23), and 7 boosters (#1-7) that will never fly, ago.

Current plan IIRC is to launch Starship #24, with Booster #8 (was gonna be booster #7 but they had a cryogenic fueling testing accident that caused internal damage. They fixed it, but only useful now for more pad fueling tests, not to trust to fly).


Nothing he said was really cutting edge new news.


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Old 05-26-2022, 11:10 AM
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Part 2: Go up SpaceX's Starship-catching robotic launch tower with Elon Musk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5k3ZzPf_0
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Old 05-26-2022, 04:42 PM
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"At SpaceX, we specialize in turning the impossible, to late."

Edit: I didn't expect Elon to be an iPhone guy.
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Old 12-20-2022, 08:11 AM
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I think with Starship Musk may have bitten off more that he can chew. A booster with 33 VERY closely packed engines brings to mind the Soviet N1 fiasco. Ever getting that man-rated is going to really be something as will catching it on the launch pad next to all of that other expensive infrastructure without blowing everything up.

If Starship doesn't wash and doesn't manage to bankrupt SpaceX maybe a Super Falcon 9 using 9 Raptor 2s and a Super Falcon 9 Heavy fleet as fallbacks using hardware developed for Starship?

Starship, Twitter, and Musk
December 19, 2022

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4501/1

By most accounts, 2022 has been an incredibly successful year for SpaceX. It has performed 59 launches so far in the year, nearly double the number it conducted last year, with one or two more launches planned before the end of the year. Those launches have ranged from commercial communications satellites to NASA science missions, from a private astronaut mission to the International Space station to a commercial Japanese lunar lander. More than a quarter of all Falcon 9 launches, dating back to the vehicle’s introduction in 2010, took place this year.

That high launch cadence, coupled with the removal of Russian vehicles from the market and delays in the introduction of new vehicles, has made the Falcon 9 the default, and sometimes only, option for companies and organizations, including those that might not otherwise work with SpaceX.

If there’s one area where SpaceX has fallen short, though, it’s with Starship. A little more than a year ago, over the Thanksgiving holiday, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk called for all hands on deck to deal with what he called a “production crisis” with the Raptor engines that will power Starship. Getting Starship flying, he said, was essential to deploying that Gen2 constellation that offers much better economics.

“What it comes down to is that we face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year,” he wrote in that email.

The Raptor production problem appears to be solved: the company hit its goal of producing seven Raptor engines a week earlier this year, said Mark Kirasich, at the time deputy associate administrator for Artemis Campaign Development at NASA, during an advisory committee meeting at the end of October. (Kirasich retired from the agency last month.)

However, Starship has not achieved a flight rate of at least once every two weeks. It has not achieved a flight rate at all, with its first orbital launch attempt still yet to take place. At that late October meeting, Kirasich said the company appeared to be on track to conduct that launch in early December, but that date, like so many other estimates in the past, has come and gone without a launch
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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan
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Old 01-25-2023, 01:58 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Winston2021
I think with Starship Musk may have bitten off more that he can chew. A booster with 33 VERY closely packed engines brings to mind the Soviet N1 fiasco. Ever getting that man-rated is going to really be something as will catching it on the launch pad next to all of that other expensive infrastructure without blowing everything up.

If Starship doesn't wash and doesn't manage to bankrupt SpaceX maybe a Super Falcon 9 using 9 Raptor 2s and a Super Falcon 9 Heavy fleet as fallbacks using hardware developed for Starship?

Starship, Twitter, and Musk
December 19, 2022

https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4501/1

By most accounts, 2022 has been an incredibly successful year for SpaceX. It has performed 59 launches so far in the year, nearly double the number it conducted last year, with one or two more launches planned before the end of the year. Those launches have ranged from commercial communications satellites to NASA science missions, from a private astronaut mission to the International Space station to a commercial Japanese lunar lander. More than a quarter of all Falcon 9 launches, dating back to the vehicle’s introduction in 2010, took place this year.

That high launch cadence, coupled with the removal of Russian vehicles from the market and delays in the introduction of new vehicles, has made the Falcon 9 the default, and sometimes only, option for companies and organizations, including those that might not otherwise work with SpaceX.

If there’s one area where SpaceX has fallen short, though, it’s with Starship. A little more than a year ago, over the Thanksgiving holiday, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk called for all hands on deck to deal with what he called a “production crisis” with the Raptor engines that will power Starship. Getting Starship flying, he said, was essential to deploying that Gen2 constellation that offers much better economics.

“What it comes down to is that we face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year,” he wrote in that email.

The Raptor production problem appears to be solved: the company hit its goal of producing seven Raptor engines a week earlier this year, said Mark Kirasich, at the time deputy associate administrator for Artemis Campaign Development at NASA, during an advisory committee meeting at the end of October. (Kirasich retired from the agency last month.)

However, Starship has not achieved a flight rate of at least once every two weeks. It has not achieved a flight rate at all, with its first orbital launch attempt still yet to take place. At that late October meeting, Kirasich said the company appeared to be on track to conduct that launch in early December, but that date, like so many other estimates in the past, has come and gone without a launch


Well, the N-1 comparison isn't particularly strong, IMHO. Yeah N-1 used 30 engines in close proximity. That's about the only thing they have in common.

If you read the history (particularly Boris Chertok's books "Rockets and People" which is a four volume set of sizable books typically around 400 pages, and yep I read em all) the N-1 was done on the cheap with some very questionable practices. First and most important, they thought they could do a super-heavy booster using the same "fly to destruction, figure out what happened, and fly again" techniques they'd used to develop the R-7 and many other Soviet missiles. They talk about the US inventing "all-up" testing for the Saturn V, but truth is the Soviets had been doing it that way for over a decade by that point. They simply didn't have the testing facilities or money and resources to build them like we did, so particularly in the case of N-1, they simply built the rocket "all up" and launched it, expecting to have a few failures before they worked the kinks out. With a super-heavy booster though, that is a terribly expensive way to do it, particularly if it falls back on the pad and goes off with nearly the power of a small atom bomb. N-1's guidance system was unique, a little TOO unique, in that used "thrust differential steering" instead of simple gimbaling or, as the Soviets particularly preferred, vernier engines for steering. It's KORD control system throttled the outer ring of engines in pairs opposite each other, and if the guidance system wanted to steer the rocket a certain way, it would throttle up an engine on one side and throttle down its partner directly opposite it. When an engine failed, the KORD system would then order the shutdown of the opposite engine in the pair to keep the thrust balanced, and N-1 was designed to allow for a couple pairs or so of engines to shut down in flight, depending on how far into flight it was. OF course if you lost too many engines too soon, well, you get what happened on the second flight where the N-1 simply lost too much thrust from engines being shut down, and keeled over and belly-flopped onto the pad with a full load of fuel and went up like a small atom bomb. The KORD system was complex and they didn't realize that their heat shields around the engine, nor their conduit work to protect the wiring for the KORD system, was inadequate, which is what caused the first N-1 fire and explosion in flight-- one of the complex manifolded fuel pipes to one of the engines developed a leak and caught fire, and this RAPIDLY burned through the conduit and heat shielding protecting the KORD wiring and the system simply shorted and lost control of the rocket causing it to break up and explode. They beefed up the heat shielding and protection of the wiring which solved the problem, but then another 'gotcha' caught up with them. Kuznetsov's NK-33's were great engines, BUT they could only be fired ONCE and then were ruined and could not be refired. SO to overcome this, they built them in batches of six-- five operational and one test engine, with all five constructed identically at the same time using the same materials/procedures. It was ASSUMED that if the ONE engine operated well and survived its test firing, that the other five built alongside it would as well, similar to how model rocket motors are built and test-fired. Of course nobody realized there was foreign object debris in one of the propellant ducts of one of the other engines, which caused the chain of failures and shut-downs that caused the second N-1 to belly flop back onto the pad and obliterate it. Kuznetsov finally developed "reusable" rocket engines but they wouldn't have been available until the fourth N-1 test flight, which was cancelled along with the program despite it being basically ready to go. The Soviets didn't have the technology to even make domed-cylindrical tanks like the US did for Saturn V; they could only make spherical tanks of the size required for N-1, so that's why it had the weird shape/appearance that it does-- two different size spherical tanks made up each of the first two stages-- a larger liquid oxygen tank on bottom topped by a smaller kerosene tank above it, separated by a LARGE conical interstage structure and with external propellant ducts (and covers). The third and fourth stages were hypergolic (which with its lower ISP hurt performance significantly compared to Saturn V's hydrogen propellants, but the Soviets were just in their infancy with hydrogen propellant because it had no application to the missile programs all Soviet boosters grew out of). The third N-1 made it *almost* to staging, but the stage developed a roll that the KORD system was not designed and unable to control, and it eventually was spinning SO fast that it exceeded the stage structure's strength and the rocket broke up shortly before staging. Measures to prevent this happening again were taken, to be tested on the fourth flight, but sadly it was cancelled along with the entire N-1 project when Valentin Glushko took over the dead Sergei Korolev's OKB-1 design bureau from his deputy and successor Vasily Mishin in the early 1970's, and he got approval to replace N-1 with his own version of the "Energia" rocket, which became the Energia we know that launched twice successfully-- launching the Polyus space battle station and then the Soviet shuttle Buran on its only unmanned automated flight and successful landing back at Baikonur. Due to Soviet funding difficulties Energia was cancelled itself after that.

Remember too that Falcon Heavy lifts off under the power of 27 rocket engines, only 3 less than N-1, and it's quite successful (so far), even landing its boosters back near the pad.

As for Starship, yeah the "chopsticks" recovery deal sounds like it's going to be a VERY expensive experiment that is going to take a few (or more than a few) tries to get to work right. They finally got the upper stage to land successfully, but it remains to be seen how well the 'belly flop' heat shielding reentry technique will work. It'll be interesting to see. I think that they're deliberately slowing down because yeah all eyes are on this thing, and while they expect failures early on, too much public perception of too many failures could cause a lot of blow-back for SpaceX, as it did with N-1. Better to go a little slower and work kinks out step by step and have a much better prospect of success than to go off half-cocked and end up having STUPID and expensive mistakes happen. It's not like there's any real competition and even if there was, so what?? It's a complex business and even Blue Origin has learned the hard way with BE-4 it's not as simple as they thought it was... let alone Boeing's Starliner which they SHOULD have known better considering how long Boeing has been in the space business for NASA...
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