Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

The Giant Crane is in the middle of moving the cylinder.

Sped up time-lapse video of the Cylinder's grand trip to the beach yesterday.

It wasn't anywhere near this fast, just walking speed. About 2/3'ds of the way through the video there's a short segment shot from a camera drone, which appears to be actual speed and shows the slow progress. At the end the Cylinder greets Hoppy and the Giant Crane places it atop its launch mounting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...pkX2QXLwFY

(Oct 31, 2019 05:02 PM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ]Sped up time-lapse video of the Cylinder's grand trip to the beach yesterday.

It wasn't anywhere near this fast, just walking speed. About 2/3'ds of the way through the video there's a short segment shot from a camera drone, which appears to be actual speed and shows the slow progress. At the end the Cylinder greets Hoppy and the Giant Crane places it atop its launch mounting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...pkX2QXLwFY

Now that's an uncanny, otherworldly parade or procession for Halloween.

If there's nothing on TV and you want to binge on watching 1950's Science-Fiction style Spaceship construction in real life (or as real as Elon's ideas can ever be said to be), here's a whole extensive (and constantly growing) collection of videos, most of them filmed by Mary/the BocaChicaGal.

Most of them are quite short, a few minutes at most. They start with Hoppy's tanking tests and rocket engine static fires. Then Hoppy's glorious bird-like flight. Then views of Starship assembly, the stacking prior to Elon's big Sept 28 presentation, then the disassembly and subsequent construction steps. Finally the Cylinder's crazy joyride down to the beach to meet up with Hoppy for its own pressurization checks.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...FWf7pD_6-L

Photo of Mary (right) and fellow Boca Chica resident Nomadd (left) out viewing the Cylinder's recent excursion. I still believe that Mary and some of the others (Lab Padre, SpacePadreIsle, Julia Bergeron, John Winkopp, Jared, Austin, Maria...) deserve this year's Pulitzer Prize for photojournalism. They won't win it though since they aren't professionals working for an established news organization. They are just regular people doing it on their own initiative because of their own interest in what's happening.

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/assets...591645.jpg

The amazing thing is that the earliest films of Hoppy's pressurization tests are only from March of this year. That's less than eight months! This project is rocketing along, quite literally, at a pace that's simply unheard-of in the aerospace industry. (Since World War II at least, when they were designing, prototyping, testing, manufacturing and deploying new warplanes in a matter of months.)

Compare it to NASA's white-elephant Space Launch System (SLS) which started in 2010, has already spent $14 billion, and probably won't fly until 2021. It's not even reusable and will cost so much to fly (one time for each vehicle) that it might never be operationally used. (Estimates are well upwards of $500 million/flight, an early 2012 cost estimate and probably much more now. NASA has stopped giving out per-flight cost estimates for SLS.) SLS will have a great deal more useful payload than Falcon Heavy (important for some anticipated missions, like to the Moon), but Falcon Heavy is already flying and costs less than $100 million/flight, including a nice profit for SpaceX. The SuperHeavy/Starship (formerly BFR) will (hopefully) come along in the first half of the 2020's and (hopefully) provide large heavy cargo access to space at even lower cost. Elon wants it to be as cheap as chartering a large airplane. And Jeff Bezos' Blue has its own heavy lift New Glenn rocket under (very secretive) development.

So SLS looks to many observers like NASA's giant money-hole into which they keep shoveling piles of cash, preventing NASA from doing anything visionary or exciting. (That's what you get when you have Congress essentially dictating program direction.) NASA can't even kill it, since it's mandated in their budget legislation. Too many members of Congress have contractors in their districts getting rich off of it.

Nov 1, 2019: Mary reports that a canard forward fin is being fitted to the nose.

From the looks of it, I'm still skeptical whether this is a final installation. It might just be some kind of fit-check. It looks to me like they still have to install more solid structural supports and actuators for the fins. They will have lots of force on them during reentry and landing.

https://twitter.com/BocaChicaGal/status/...7795477504

But they do seem to be getting ready to do something. Here's some photos and video of them preparing what look (maybe) like wing-root fairings and the fins themselves, on Wednesday. So there's a burst of activity and something is definitely happening with the front fins.

https://twitter.com/SpacePadreIsle/statu...6558632960

(Nov 2, 2019 12:42 AM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ]Nov 1, 2019:It looks to me like they still have to install more solid structural supports and actuators for the fins. They will have lots of force on them during reentry and landing.

https://twitter.com/BocaChicaGal/status/...7795477504

Things are becoming more clear. Here's a hole in the nose that people have been talking about...



And here's what's there now -- an actuator for the nose canard fin. Windward side:



The Starship will perform most of its descent falling sideways, in what people are calling a belly-flop or skydiver position, only flipping tail-down right before landing when the landing burn begins. Elon says that it's counterintuitive since it's the exact opposite of what an airplane is trying to do: Starship wants to maximize drag, not minimize it. (It does need some lift though, since it needs to kind of fly along the very thin top of the atmosphere, bleeding off orbital velocity but not so quickly or penetrating so deeply that it overheats. Then it falls sideways like a supersonic skydiver, with its fins out like a sky diver's arms and legs.) He promises that it should be something to see.

Of course this particular prototype almost certainly won't see orbit. That honor will go to a subsequent higher-fidelity and more-perfected version. This one might not even make it suborbitally to the Karman line (the commonly accepted boundary of outer space). It's mostly about going to about 60,000 feet (20 km) then falling sideways and perfecting the last second flip landing.

View from the other leeward side.



Photos by Mary the BocaChicaGal. You can see why the world's assembled aerospace engineers almost have orgasms while looking at Mary's extraordinarily detailed photos. (You can even read the workers' scribbles.)

SpaceX artist's conception of Starship entering Mars' atmosphere in its sideways position.



This isn't a whole lot different than how the Space Shuttle did it. Except that the Space Shuttle was a space-plane that turned into a glider and completed its landing on a long runway. Starship will continue down through the atmosphere in its sideways skydiver position until it's moving subsonically and less than 1000 feet up. Then it pitches up 90 degrees and completes its landing tail-first, propulsively.

Edit: Monday November 4 midday CST. The second nose canard fin is being attached.

https://twitter.com/BocaChicaGal/status/...7933971456

On Tuesday there was what appeared to me to be a new access port into the crew/cargo compartment (which will remain empty in this particular vehicle) near the bottom of the top-half section. Notable were two sets of what appear to be maneuvering thrusters to either side of the hatch. Two sets of three. Unlike the Falcon 9 surplus thrusters on Hoppy, these appear to have been specially designed for Starship. From how they are positioned, they seem intended to produce roll motion.

Photos by Mary/BocaChicaGal.

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/assets...592965.jpg

The nose has a similar port, right up at the tippy-top. Don't see any thrusters up there.

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/assets...592967.jpg

The tip of the nose is open and will eventually be covered by a cap. Yesterday Mary photographed them lowering what appeared to be a translucent plastic tank containing some kind of fluid into that nose opening with a crane. Speculation seemed to be coalescing around the idea that it was hydraulic fluid for the nose fin actuators.

(Nov 4, 2019 03:06 AM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ]Starship will continue down through the atmosphere in its sideways skydiver position until it's moving subsonically and less than 1000 feet up. Then it pitches up 90 degrees and completes its landing tail-first, propulsively.

As Elon says, it will be something to see. (But the crew better keep their barf-bags handy.)

Here's an animation by somebody called Sven that shows the final moments of this hugely unorthodox landing method:

https://giant.gfycat.com/RecklessBountif...ifish.webm

NASA never did anything like this. And unlike Elon's other ideas, we never saw it in a 1950's science fiction movie either. It's sui generis.

New road closures at Boca Chica for Nov 13 with alternate day on the 14th. Purpose seems to be tanking/pressurization tests of the Cylinder. It was originally planned for Nov 12, but apparently there's a weather front that's expected to be delivering weather that day.

In the meantime, lots of construction work is underway at the launch area where the Cylinder currently is. Concrete is being poured for new Starship launch/landing pads and associated stuff. There's an even larger area next to the launch area that's been surrounded by new fencing and there are stakes in the ground and a couple of those little Bobcat mini-dozers are doing something out there.

https://twitter.com/JohnRand0061/status/...6213823489

Meanwhile in Florida, not much seems to be happening. There are cars in the parking lot every day, but not much change visible to the eye.