Update: Mary reports that she was just told that Sn10 will not fly tomorrow. Flight is being pushed back to Wednesday, presumably because of weather.
https://twitter.com/BocaChicaGal/status/...4001488901
Edit: Unlimited altitude flight tfrs have disappeared for Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday's remains. And new unlimited altitude flight tfrs have appeared for Thursday and Friday, presumably Wednesday's backup days.
Mary and nomadd have received their evacuation warnings for Wednesday (tomorrow).
https://twitter.com/BocaChicaGal/status/...1509056512
And the little unincorporated village of Boca Chica may soon be just a memory. Elon has announced that the build and launch areas plus the village along with lots of surrounding land is going to incorporate as the new Texas city of Starbase, Texas. (It will always be Boca Chica in my heart...) Very much a company town.
"Creating the city of Starbase, Texas
From thence to Mars, And hence to the Stars."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1366848696298561536
Well, I guess a name that means "small mouth" would have had its days numbered when it comes to the ambitions of a spaceport.
Maybe Boca Chica can hang around as the
city nickname. Augmenting it to the "The biggest small mouth in the world" would lose half the original, because that apparently translates to "la boca pequeña más grande del mundo". In addition to mistakenly hinting at excellent bronzeback bass fishing (smallmouth bass).
Vehicle is venting vapor and Sheriff just told Lab that 10 minute siren is immanent.
Pad Abort
Data showed Raptor outside expected parameters, so computer shut everything down.
Edit:
John Insprucker on the SpaceX feed says that they are going to recycle and try again in about two hours.
Elon says
"Launch abort on slightly conservative high thrust limit. Increasing thrust limit & recycling propellant for another flight attempt today."
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1367213114228318209
Tri-vent. About t-11 minutes
Exciting Events!
Takeoff and ascent were good, skydiver descent was good, and
landing was good more or less.
(First video in the post below is from the SpaceX feed, the second from the nsf feed. The first is visually beautiful and listen to the second with the sound on to get the excited reaction.)
https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/stat...3462777860
And for sure watch the extraordinarily dramatic SpaceX youtube video immediately above.
Watch all the videos in full screen.
After the largely successful landing fire was visible beneath the vehicle, but it seemed to be subsiding.
https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/stat...2894966787
Fire suppression monitors started spraying and it sat like that for several minutes. But perhaps the flames indicated a more serious propellant leak of some kind under the skirt.
Then it exploded! Pretty spectacularly too.
https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/stat...3075207172
https://twitter.com/Erdayastronaut/statu...9695404032
Meanwhile the internet was staggering under the load as upwards of half a million people were tuned into the various streams on Youtube.
Photographer Trevor Mahlmann's video
And here's Austin Bernard's video (I like Austin. He isn't a professional photographer, he's just a local south Texas guy for whom this is a labor of love.)
Missed it live, because I truly didn't expect them to make a second attempt today.
I'm still amazed that
Yusaku Maezawa is gung-ho about riding this around the Moon by 2023.
https://www.cnet.com/news/spacex-moon-mi...rom-earth/
"
Musk says he's 'highly confident' that the Starship will have reached orbit 'many, many times' before 2023 and that it will be 'safe enough for human transport' by the time the mission is scheduled to launch."
(Mar 4, 2021 05:20 AM)C C Wrote: [ -> ]Missed it live, because I truly didn't expect them to make a second attempt today.
Here, you can watch Mary's, Jack Beyer's and Das' robot army's compilation video from lots of different cameras and angles. Although half the attraction of watching live is not knowing what is going to happen.
Quote:I'm still amazed that Yusaku Maezawa is gung-ho about riding this around the Moon by 2023.
https://www.cnet.com/news/spacex-moon-mi...rom-earth/
"Musk says he's 'highly confident' that the Starship will have reached orbit 'many, many times' before 2023 and that it will be 'safe enough for human transport' by the time the mission is scheduled to launch."
I think that the 2023 date is Elon time.
I don't expect them to reach orbit with a full Starship-Superheavy stack until late this year or (more likely) first half of 2022. They need to perfect the Starship landing first (still a work in progress), then pressure and hop test the early booster prototypes (perhaps this summer or fall) before they think about the first uncrewed orbital test flight (conceivably this time next year). And I expect the first few orbital Starships to burn up in fireballs during reentry. It might be most of the way through 2022 before they manage to keep one intact through reentry and then land it in one piece.
Even those will be major feats. But advancing from getting a Starship up to orbit to something safe and reliable enough for human spaceflight will be another huge step. I don't really see them accomplishing it by 2023 (only two years). And it will be lots of additional work to create the widely anticipated Starship crew variant. I don't expect to see those until long after we see cargo and tanker variants. Maybe the middle of the decade. (Though I wouldn't be surprised to see Starships flying people by the time Artemis finally puts somebody on the Moon.)
Speaking of Elon, there's the dramatic saga of the Lab Padre Launch Pad Cam. (It has a happy ending.) This was/is a pretty high tech remote control (pan, tilt, zoom) video camera set up atop a shipping container across the road from the SpaceX launch site in Boca Chica. The setup included solar panels, batteries and a directional data link to South Padre Island where its images were beamed out around the world on the internet.
Well, last Tuesday persons unknown at the time drove up in white pickup trucks and
stole all of it! Even the shipping container was gone. At first everyone assumed it was criminals from Brownsville. But it turned out that it was SpaceX security that took it!
And at first they were very hard-nosed, insisting that the cameras had been on SpaceX property. Except that Lab knows the property owner and had permission to place his cams there. SpaceX wants to build an employee parking lot there, but the property owner was refusing to sell his land to them.
Meanwhile Lab was getting quite a bit of support, some of it from unexpected directions. Here's what was written on a Raptor engine delivered to Boca from McGregor. SpaceX employees at McGregor and other SpaceX sites are obviously going to be interested in what's happening with Starship at Boca and no doubt follow the streams closely.
![[Image: Ev1v40XXMAcXa6R?format=jpg&name=large]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ev1v40XXMAcXa6R?format=jpg&name=large)
And all of a sudden everything changed! A complete u-turn! SpaceX security who had been playing the hard guys suddenly told Lab that he could return his cams to the old spot. If SpaceX needed the property for anything, they promised to work with Lab to find Lab a good new viewing spot for his cameras. They apologized to Lab and offered to pay for any damage to his gear. (Lab said that wasn't necessary.) They assigned SpaceX workers and a heavy-duty SpaceX loader to place the container back on its old foundation. And now SpaceX security is looking out for Lab's cams so that actual criminals don't take them.
What caused the abrupt and total reversal? Everyone is saying that Elon Musk personally intervened on Lab's behalf. It's known that Elon sometimes watches Lab's streams and likes Lab. What's more, Elon is all about increasing public excitement about spaceflight and Lab brings tens of thousands of people from all around the world in virtually every country to daily personal involvement with and emotional investment in SpaceX. Lab is up there with Mary as a volunteer SpaceX publicity department. Unlike company PR flacks, the company doesn't control them. But that just lends them that much more authenticity. I think that Elon loves that alternative media aspect. (
Photo of Elon with Lab and his wife.) So Elon supposedly knocked a few heads together and told his people to reach a satisfactory accommodation with Lab.
And in a happy ending, Lab Padre's LaunchPadCam livestream triumphantly returned to the internet this afternoon!