WDR Today? Or just stack cryo?

According to NSF, no WDR.

They are discussing it now on dedicated stream. Partial load test probably.

Closeup of S31 damage at 3:30.

US LABOR BOARD SAYS IT WILL SUSPEND CASE AGAINST SPACEX PENDING COMPANY'S LAWSUIT OVER AGENCY'S STRUCTURE

— *Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) May 17, 2024

Statement of FAA provided to @NASASpaceflight about SpaceX led investigation:

"If the FAA agrees no public safety issues were involved in the mishap, the operator may return to flight while the mishap investigation remains open, provided all other license requirements are met." pic.twitter.com/bDsNSrg7lp

Adrian Beil  (@BCCarCounters) May 17, 2024

It's pretty wild that this thread is over 5 years old.

A lot has happened in those 5 years . It is awesome ,  not matter how you view Space X and Musk .

At first I thought it was a joke. A rather patchy looking grain silo with a rocket motor shoved in it

We have come a ways since then, haven't we? And I would say we still have a way left to go.

Dismantled towers, environmental studies, and more launch pads—what is up with SpaceX's plans for Starship in Florida?https://t.co/W6G9iNMLSt

Eric Berger  (@SciGuySpace) May 20, 2024

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/05/we-take-a-stab-at-decoding-spacexs-ever-changing-plans-for-starship-in-florida/

We’re aiming to build two towers at the Cape for Staeship, one at 39A and another tbd (we don’t have final approval yet)

Elon Musk  (@elonmusk) May 20, 2024

Starship Flight 4 in about 2 weeks.

Primary goal is getting through max reentry heating.

Worth noting that no one has ever succeeded in creating a fully reusable heat shield. Shuttle required >6 months of rework. https://t.co/4ffEHSLRbu

Elon Musk  (@elonmusk) May 20, 2024

Launch rehearsal for Flight 4 complete pic.twitter.com/Gh8s7n4JIQ

SpaceX  (@SpaceX) May 20, 2024

Starship flight 4 scheduled for Saturday June 1st according to new road closure just posted: https://t.co/VkvhpyD7qS

Starship Gazer  (@StarshipGazer) May 21, 2024

https://www.cameroncountytx.gov/order-closing-boca-chica-beach-and-state-hwy-4-saturday-june-1-2024-with-alternative-dates-of-sunday-june-2-or-monday-june-3-from-1200-a-m-to-200-p-m/

The proposed Roberts Road North Expansion has received a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) from NASA. It will allow SpaceX to expand its facilities by approximately 100 acres to support vehicle and payload processing, fabrication and more. pic.twitter.com/vPO6xykmmx

— Harry Stranger (@Harry__Stranger) May 22, 2024

Groovy.

think im going to drive down there tomorrow finally to see what I can see - heading down from just north of Houston. been itching for a road trip and cant make anymore excuses to not go down there.


any advice for a first time visitor?

I'd really, REALLY like to get up close and personal to the rocket garden if thats still possible? Remedios Ave is supposed to be a public road, which drives right by them.

im taking my Jeep so I certainly plan to drive down to the beach to check out the launch pad from all angles.

is there a gift shop type place? do they do tours? or is it just a fabrication / launch facility? I watch launches and follow somewhat closely, but am going in blind as far as an actual visit down there.


I have no plans on where I staying, I just assume I'll find a place once im down there and done exploring for the day.

Sadly, the rocket garden is no longer accessible.  No gift shop, tours, or visitor's center of any kind.  Most importantly, no restrooms or convenience store, so take what you need and hit the head before you drive out.

Watch this for other useful tips.  It helped us a lot before we visited last month:

The raptor testing stand at McGregor experienced an anomaly a few moments ago. The vapors from the anomaly caused a secondary explosion on the test stand.

Link: https://t.co/Eh5oaicmrw pic.twitter.com/3K7tz8d6OF

Chris Bergin - NSF  (@NASASpaceflight) May 23, 2024

The heat shield needing to be reusable is something that had not crossed my mind.  Hell Nasa got lucky if it survived enough to keep the shuttle from burning up and we all know that didn't even always work.  This will be interesting to watch in the future.  Replacing a few hundred thousand tiles will be time consuming to say the least.

Like Hadrian said, no restrooms. Very bumpy, almost non-existent road. So stop at the Stripes (at 3755 Boca Chica Blvd, Brownsville, TX 78521) and pee before you continue.



Even if you see this place and decide you don't need to pee. You fucking will after that road.

"Take out weight until it breaks and then add back what you need."

Looks like they need to add something back.

It didn't always work. They had burn-throughs before Columbia.
They just happened over non-critical areas.

Is June 1st confirmed for flight 4?  I am going to be in Corpus June 5-7th and I’ve been praying the test would take place during that window.  I would absolutely drive that 3 hours extra just to see the test flight.  It’s on my bucket list.

There are currently road closures labelled as "Flight Testing" for June 1 with backup dates of June 2 and 3.

That said, Musk posted this overnight:

Flight 4 in about 10 days https://t.co/1Fb0ProHjG

Elon Musk  (@elonmusk) May 24, 2024

So who knows...  

Now targeting June 5:  https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-4

Also of note, they're planning to jettison the hot stage ring after separation this time.

Flight 3 Report

Starship is designed to fundamentally alter humanity’s access to space, ultimately enabling us to make life multiplanetary. The third flight test of Starship and Super Heavy was an important step on the road to rapidly reliable reusable rockets.https://t.co/ITeUTSqXEG pic.twitter.com/23J39Sd7Qz

SpaceX  (@SpaceX) May 24, 2024

https://www.spacex.com/updates/#flight-3-report

May 24, 2024
ON THE PATH TO RAPID REUSABILITY

Starship is designed to fundamentally alter humanity’s access to space, ultimately enabling us to make life multiplanetary. The third flight test of Starship and Super Heavy made tremendous strides towards this future and was an important step on the road to rapidly reliable reusable rockets.

On March 14, 2024, Starship successfully lifted off at 8:25 a.m. CT from Starbase, Texas. All 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy Booster started up successfully and completed a full-duration burn during ascent, followed by a successful hot-stage separation. This was the second successful ascent of the Super Heavy booster, the world’s most powerful launch vehicle. At stage separation, Starship's six second stage Raptor engines all started successfully and powered the vehicle to its expected trajectory, becoming the first Starship to complete its full-duration ascent burn.

Following stage separation, Super Heavy initiated its boostback burn, which sends commands to 13 of the vehicle’s 33 Raptor engines to propel the rocket toward its intended landing location. All 13 engines ran successfully until six engines began shutting down, triggering a benign early boostback shutdown.

The booster then continued to descend until attempting its landing burn, which commands the same 13 engines used during boostback to perform the planned final slowing for the rocket before a soft touchdown in the water, but the six engines that shut down early in the boostback burn were disabled from attempting the landing burn startup, leaving seven engines commanded to start up with two successfully reaching mainstage ignition. The booster had lower than expected landing burn thrust when contact was lost at approximately 462 meters in altitude over the Gulf of Mexico and just under seven minutes into the mission.

The most likely root cause for the early boostback burn shutdown was determined to be continued filter blockage where liquid oxygen is supplied to the engines, leading to a loss of inlet pressure in engine oxygen turbopumps. SpaceX implemented hardware changes ahead of Flight 3 to mitigate this issue, which resulted in the booster progressing to its first ever landing burn attempt. Super Heavy boosters for Flight 4 and beyond will get additional hardware inside oxygen tanks to further improve propellant filtration capabilities. And utilizing data gathered from Super Heavy’s first ever landing burn attempt, additional hardware and software changes are being implemented to increase startup reliability of the Raptor engines in landing conditions.

During Starship’s coast phase, the vehicle accomplished several of the flight test’s additional objectives, including the first ever test of its payload door in space. The vehicle also successfully completed a propellant transfer demonstration, moving liquid oxygen from a header tank into the main tank. This test provided valuable data for eventual ship-to-ship propellant transfers that will enable missions like returning astronauts to the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program.

Several minutes after Starship began its coast phase, the vehicle began losing the ability to control its attitude. Starship continued flying its nominal trajectory but given the loss of attitude control, the vehicle automatically triggered a pre-planned command to skip its planned on-orbit relight of a single Raptor engine.

Starship went on to experience its first ever reentry from space, providing valuable data on heating and vehicle control during hypersonic reentry. The lack of attitude control resulted in an off-nominal entry, with the ship seeing much larger than anticipated heating on both protected and unprotected areas. High-definition live views of entry and a considerable amount of telemetry were successfully transmitted in real time by Starlink terminals operating on Starship. The flight test’s conclusion came when telemetry was lost at approximately 65 kilometers in altitude, roughly 49 minutes into the mission.

The most likely root cause of the unplanned roll was determined to be clogging of the valves responsible for roll control. SpaceX has since added additional roll control thrusters on upcoming Starships to improve attitude control redundancy and upgraded hardware for improved resilience to blockage.

Following the flight test, SpaceX led the investigation efforts with oversight from the FAA and participation from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB). During Flight 3, neither vehicle’s automated flight safety system was triggered, and no vehicle debris impacted outside of pre-defined hazard areas. Pending FAA finding of no public safety impact, a license modification for the next flight can be issued without formal closure of the mishap investigation.

Upgrades derived from the flight test will debut on the next launch from Starbase on Flight 4, as we turn our focus from achieving orbit to demonstrating the ability to return and reuse Starship and Super Heavy. The team incorporated numerous hardware and software improvements in addition to operational changes including the jettison of the Super Heavy’s hot-stage adapter following boostback to reduce booster mass for the final phase of flight.

The third flight of Starship provided a glimpse through brilliant plasma of a rapidly reusable future on the horizon. We’re continuing to rapidly develop Starship, putting flight hardware in a flight environment to learn as quickly as possible as we build a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond.

This is probably a very dumb question.

#1 why are there filters, why not filter on the ground. Extra Mas and components degrade performance and add complexity.

#2 are the filters actually filtering anything, or just acting as more of a honeycomb structure to convert turbulent flow to laminar?

made my trip down today and wow - that was an overwhelming experience to say the absolute least.

maybe its because its the week before launch? but holy shit were there soooooo many construction workers. every single spaceX parking spot was full and the entire paved and graveled area on the spaceX side was full of workers cars. trucks, construction trucks, delivery drivers, raw steel deliveries flying up and down the road and equipment / machinery driving around as well.


with that being said - really freakin cool stuff to try to take in while also trying not to get into a wreck or in anybodies way.

not many tourist at all surprisingly, there were probably 10 cars parked down at the end by the launch pad, and the only people on the beach were a few fisherman.  

I was able to park in a few spots to get out and walk around.  you can tell they have really beefed up their "privacy" with the fencing and big concealment panels.  I'd imagine it to keep traffic flowing which I completely understand.  no one seemed to care that I was there so long as I stayed out of the way - which I did.

the Rocket Garden is sadly unaccesable. Unsure if its b/c they are doing construction on the road that goes by it or if its closed for good but you can walk up to the security checkpoint and get somewhat close - if you can find parking.

drove down from north of Houston then back up to Corpus - I am beat.  time for some room service beers and a nice spread of food.



here's a few of the pictures I managed to take - like I said, very chaotic, hard to keep out of everyones way.

edit to add - I was upset to see they had un-stacked it. was really hoping it would be fully stacked, but still - huge.



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Glad you made the trip down. Surreal, isn't it?

At 5:06 of this video, you can see the construction that is cutting off access to the rocket garden.  In terms of traffic, parking, and the general level of activity around Starbase, I spent a week visiting at the end of April and it was like that every day.  They are working at a furious pace.

no where else in the world can you get that kid of access to literal space hardware - its incredible.

I work in steel fabrication (procurement for a large fab shop) - we build oil rigs, large LNG projects, even provided tons and tons and tons of steel for the Tesla building in Austin - so I was fascinated by the massive, massive scale of all the fabrication and construction there.

Elon / SpaceX's crane is impressive

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That seems like a departure from 100% reusable.

I imagine it's a kludge to deal with the fact that the boosters weren't originally designed for hot-staging. If they keep hot-staging, future boosters designed with it in mind will be built and not require jettisoning the ring. It's heavy and probably causes center-of-gravity issues; at least, that's my completely uneducated guess.

At the moment the rocket is 100% expended. Even if they make it through re entry on the next flight it's probably going to be awhile until they start reflying hardware.

Even if they do drop the hot staging ring I would imagine it's a much cheaper thing to replace than the second stage of a Falcon 9. Those engines aren't cheap. Theres a reason why the vacum Merlins sometimes have those stubby little nozzles.

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Hafnium doesn't exactly grow on trees.

Meh. It's not a very sophisticated part and it does carry a bit of weight.

Something to optimize much later. Better to focus on more important things right now

They're still in the prototyping stage.  No doubt the final design will be fully reusable.

Exactly, its a still testing.

"Well crap, that LS swap didn't get us into the 8s. Let's try a Godzilla."

I get the logic, just surprised musk didn't outright veto the idea on principle.

A temporary allowance of a non-reusable component to allow testing of the rest of the launch system to continue, instead of putting the test program on hold while an alternative to that component is designed?  Makes perfect sense for the rapid development process.

He probably wasn't happy about it, but he'd be even less happy about putting the test program on an extended hold.

The principle is speed of overall development.

SpaceX isn't obstinate.

The initial plan was carbon fiber. Thrown out for 300 series stainless. Cold staging, now hot staging.  Fancy concrete, now retrofitted stainless deluge system.

Dagger is always misinterpreting Elon statements as dishonesty when they are really just the result of extremely rapid acceptance of new realities and developments without any sort of misguided shame or cover up. That's a sign of compete honesty, not deception.

"“If the landing on the virtual tower works, then we will actually try on Flight 5 to come back and land on the tower” at Starbase, he said, part of the company’s plan to rapidly reuse Starship vehicles."

Source

With only one launch structure, that is way too risky and stupid.

If they make a hash of it the FAA investigation will allow plenty of time to rebuild.

Even if they had two launch towers I would wait until I had more than one successful imaginary landings (in the ocean) before I risked the real structure.

newly engaged with this thread so apologies if its covered - where is this?

Second Launch tower at Boca Chica TX has started construction

Whatever it takes.

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honestly other then the arm hardware and hydraulics which they probably have spares of, there not much to hurt on the tower. its heavy massive steel. on landing theres not much fuel on board and the ship is aluminum foil compared to the tower.

Tank farms more the risk.