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Photo by Carlos Nunez showing Ship 30 (the Flight 5 ship) in Megabay 2 receiving improved tiles.



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This is taking shape at Masseys. It's supposedly a structural test cage designed to squeeze, push, pull and twist ship and booster tanks and cargo bay sections as they lengthen vehicles with bigger propellant tanks, change the number of engines and cut different cargo bay doors into the ships.



But anyone who watched the old Stargate TV series knows what it really is.

Part 1 of Tim Dodd's tour of Starbase guided by Elon himself! In this installment, we go inside the Assembly Bays and then inside the new Starfactory! All while Elon answers Tim's questions and makes his own remarks.

This was recorded the day before Flight 4 and it's cool to hear Elon talk about what he thinks its chances would be (~50%). It seems like it performed better than even Elon expected. The reason why the video has taken a while to come out is that it had to be edited for ITAR. Part 2, in which Elon and Tim move on from the Starfactory to the Launch Site (with Flight 4 still on the pad!) will be coming out soon.

And the inside of the Starfactory is all clean, like a normal aerospace factory! No more mud and dust! (And birds) You could eat off the polished floors! (Elon jokes about how the original setup was like a Jawa junkyard on Tatooine and how old Mark I was conceptual, a concept piece.) Elon says they had to learn how to build Starships and what kind of manufacturing processes they would need, before starting a factory full of work stations and tooling for assembly-line mass-production of giant spaceships.

Check it out!

https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1804530882528661588

Part two of Tim's interview with Elon.

This one contains lots of fascinating information nuggets regarding changes in the second tower and launch mount, an extended discussion of how Starship's flaps work, and a post-Flight 4 discussion of what worked right and what didn't, along with improvements to future ships.

Customs and Border Protection has an 'aerostat' (tethered uncrewed blimp) that operates out of South Padre Island and normally watches the border. But on launch days it's been known to watch other things.

Here's video that it took of Flight 2, obtained by Andrew C. of Rocket Future:

https://x.com/TheRocketFuture/status/180...9599335931

Tile replacement on Ship 30 (the Flight 5 ship) continues. This photograph shows the new heat resistant layer (the black sheet) on the right front flap. The tiles will go on top of this, fixed to the little steel pegs welded to the steel skin by robots. On flight 4 they had two instrumented spots where tiles were omitted on purpose. One spot had two layers of heat resistant material, the other one. The missing tile spot with two layers didn't burn through the layers during reentry. The missing tile with one layer did burn through to the steel underneath, but the steel didn't burn through.

So that seems to be what they are going with for Ship 30, to harden it against reentry heating.

(photo by Carlos Nunez)

Wonderful little Flight-4 video from SpaceX

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1808900954730942940

Inside the control room when the rocket nerds realized that Starship had survived reentry and had begun its landing burn







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Another 'Humans for scale' photo

Elon's Secret Weapon:

Lars Blackmore - Originally English, Cambridge graduate, moved to the US, MIT PhD, was a top software designer at NASA's JPL...

Then he moved to SpaceX.

He's the guy who wrote the landing software for Falcon 9 boosters that's so reliable that since they perfected it, there's been hundreds of landings without a failure...

And now he's in charge of Starship's landing algorithms, not just for Earth but for the Moon and Mars as well...

Here he is back in the day, when F-9's were first landing...



And here he is in the control room at Starbase on June 6 (with Elon right behind him), when Flight 4's booster soft-landed in the Gulf and the Ship survived to perform its landing burn west of Australia.







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(Jun 10, 2024 09:45 PM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ]They are making surprisingly fast progress on the second tower.

The Tower-2 base is almost complete (made out of heavy gauge armor steel, filled with concrete), the Giant Crane is assembled, and the first tower segment is at the launch site ready to be lifted atop the base. The short little t-rex arms and the carriage that they will ride up and down Tower-2 have arrived from Florida and are waiting in Sanchez.

Photo by Carlos Nunez