Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Photograph from last night shows the tank section has indeed moved inside the tall structure. The question of how it was moved seems to be answered too. If you blow the photo up and look closely, there are rails upon which the black base appear to move.

As of this morning, the site appears to have been evacuated and it looks like nobody is there. The nose fairing sections are still out in the open and exposed, as are all of the rings, only tied down with wires. Maybe they are considered more expendable. The cranes and man-lifts have all disappeared.

My own opinion is that none of this looks very hurricane resistant. A direct hit could destroy the Cocoa operation and set their clock back to zero.

Labpadre's livestream shows a huge shipment of.... something... arrived this morning at the Boca Chica Starship construction site. Rocket parts from the California factories? Or something more mundane?

The Cocoa Starship and its Rocket ship-yard appear to have come through Hurricane Dorian in good shape. Everything is wet and there are puddles, but nothing seems to have been thrown around by the wind. The fuel-tank cylinder in the tall structure, the nose fairing and all the accumulated rings look undamaged. Should be able to get back on track almost immediately.

Flyby drone video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...MHqr3GF6U8

And Hoppy made the cover of Aviation Week and Space Technology! This is kind of a big deal, since Aviation Week is more or less the trade-publication of record in the aerospace industry. I haven't read the article (it's behind a pay-wall) but those that have say that there isn't anything new in it.

(Sep 4, 2019 10:21 PM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ]And Hoppy made the cover of Aviation Week and Space Technology! This is kind of a big deal, since Aviation Week is more or less the trade-publication of record in the aerospace industry. I haven't read the article (it's behind a pay-wall) but those that have say that there isn't anything new in it.

A century from now a protected copy will doubtless be on historic display in the Martian colony's equivalent of the Hyman Archive or the Magazine Museum.

The fuel-tank cylinder has rolled back out of the tall structure and the Cocoa FL SpaceX crew was hard at work on it on Friday. Lots of metal banging sounds coming from the low building and a large crane was doing something, although it wasn't seen lifting anything exciting.

So hurricane Dorian is squarely in the rear-view mirror.

https://twitter.com/flying_briann/status...6592655366

Another thing that looks like an airfoil delivered by flatbed truck to Starship Boca Chica. There now seem to be at least three of them there.

https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/1170828150374375425

It makes sense if the Starship is to have three fins and the fins will have some kind of control flaps. Nobody's really sure how it wiil all fit together though.

Photo from Labpadre twitter post of the Salvage-1 junkyard... er, sorry, it's the Boca Chica Starship yard.



The Starships' configuration may still be a work in progress. For a while it looked like the plan was to have the Starships rest on their fins, science-fiction movie style. But recent hints suggest that they are moving away from the fins being load-bearing towards unfolding Falcon9 style landing legs.

Questions also abound about the canards expected up at the nose. There still don't seem to be any attachment points being engineered into the nose/fairing sections.

Render of the proposed modifications to the Boca Chica Starship launch site. (Which are already getting underway.) This is from an FAA document and may not be final. Elon was asked by somebody on twitter what the spiky things at the base of the Starship are and he said "Legs, but this render isn't accurate". This is apparently where the idea that they are going to Falcon9-style unfolding landing legs may be coming from. Leaving the fins simply as aerodynamic surfaces and not expected to bear the weight of the vehicle. I'm led to believe that the whole layout of the tail fins is still a work in progress, depending on lots of computational fluid dynamics modeling, and the finished tail fins may end up looking very different than shown here. Note also the canards up by the nose.

The FAA document is in the link below. It is a treasure-trove of information. The document is a reevaluation of the Boca Chica site, which was originally approved as a Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch site, but has evolved into a SpaceX 'Skunkworks' building the Starship. The FAA was required by federal regulations to do a new evaluation taking that into account. So they did and indicate that they plan in the future to issue experimental authorization for the Starship test flights.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/...Texas.html



The horizontal position of the Starship is noteworthy too. Unclear if they really plan to service and fuel the vehicle in horizontal position or whether that's just how it's drawn here. Lowering it to horizontal and raising it back to vertical would require a huge erector device. Notable that the Boca Chica berms have been replaced by blast walls that resemble those at McGregor.

Below is a chart of the Starship experimental test program proposed for Boca Chica, from the same FAA document. It give a good indication of what they intend to do with their Boca Chica Starship and how many times they plan to do it. It looks like they will start out by basically duplicating what they did with Hoppy. 5 to 10 "Wet dry runs", where they fuel and pressurize the vehicle without igniting the engines. Then firing the engines in 5 static test fires, followed by 3 which will raise it a few cm in a very low hover. Then three 150 meter hops (like Hoppy just performed). Then three hops up to 3 km (~10,000 ft). And finally three actual spaceflights up to 100 km (the Karman line) to explore flying the vehicle outside the atmosphere and reentry aerodynamics. Elon thinks that it should be able to reach orbit, but if it did it wouldn't have enough fuel to return, so they apparently aren't going to try doing that, at least until they have their Super Heavy booster flying. And I'd guess that's likely to be the Florida prototype launching from Cape Canaveral. (Or maybe an improved prototype that hasn't been started yet, that incorporates the lessons learned from these two existing ones.)

Though interestingly, a render in the FAA document of proposed changes at the Starship manufacturing yard shows, along with a large new building and a couple of large wind-screens (wind interferes with welding they tell me), a Superheavy under construction at Boca Chica. So they may eventually be flying the whole stack to orbit, Moon and Mars from Boca Chica as well as Cape Canaveral. But that would require more launch pad modifications and probably a new assessment and approval.

Also noteworthy that they anticipate this Boca Chica test program taking 2 to 3 years. (Of course that assumes that all milestones are met successfully and the Boca Chica Starship isn't lost in an accident.)

...So, this is what's on the Boca Chica watchers' upcoming menu.

(Sep 9, 2019 06:38 PM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ]. . . Elon was asked by somebody on twitter what the spiky things at the base of the Starship are and he said "Legs, but this render isn't accurate". This is apparently where the idea that they are going to Falcon9-style unfolding landing legs may be coming from. Leaving the fins simply as aerodynamic surfaces and not expected to bear the weight of the vehicle...

Would be nice if the fins could still be weight-bearing as a back-up, in case the landing legs went haywire. If MacGyver was flying around in a retro-future spaceship, he'd certainly get away with that kind of thing as a makeshift remedy to a crisis, in category with all the other duct-tape and household items solutions to emergencies.

I missed this little twitterburst that has people talking:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1166856662336102401

Elon's teasing a Super Starship with an 18 m/60ft diameter as a successor to the Starship (which is a successor to the Crew Dragon, which still hasn't flown people yet). Presumably that would require a Super-Dooper Heavy booster. Though people point out that if it could reach orbit on its own and be refueled there (by conventional Starship tankers?) it could serve as an interplanetary transport to and from Earth orbit to destinations elsewhere in the Solar System.

Elon says that they are shipping Raptor SN10 (to McGregor presumably). He also says that he expects the Boca Chica Starship's 20 km flight to happen in October and "orbit attempt shortly after".

I remain skeptical that they will launch the Boca Chica Starship into orbit if they won't be able to land it again. Are they willing to lose it? Does Elon really mean 'up to orbital altitude' instead of literally in orbit at 'orbital velocity' (18,000 mph)?

Things should become clearer on September 28 (the 10 year anniversary of the first successful flight of Falcon 1, SpaceX's first orbital rocket) when Elon is planning his big technical presentation in Boca Chica. (Better tacos than in Florida.) They are already building what may or may not be a big covered stage and an older-model Merlin 1C engine (the kind of engine that powered Falcon 1) has just arrived, perhaps to serve as a prop for his presentation. (Maybe he'll position one of the new Raptors next to it for contrast.)

Here's a diagrammatic render of planned changes to the shipyard section of the Boca Chica site from the FAA document. Note the Superheavy booster atop what they say is an existing 10 foot ringwall. Eagle-eyed observers say that they appear to readying to pour more concrete for new ringwalls, perhaps for additional Starship prototypes. Note also what appears to be Hoppy sitting there. If Hoppy is to be a Raptor engine vertical test stand, wouldn't it remain at the launch area out by the beach? It would need proximity to the fuel and oxidizer tanks, to say nothing of the danger of explosions (RUDs the engineers call them. They seem to have a superstition against saying 'explode'.)