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SpaceX photo of the landing. The thing clearly has to translate sideways a bit so as to come down on its lovely landing pad (the concrete square) which it successfully did.



Daily Hopper

Dr. Z liked Sn15

https://twitter.com/Dr_ThomasZ/status/13...0035420162

He says that watching Sn15 launch and land was the highlight of his week. He can't wait to see these things on the Moon and Mars. And he says that it's time to start thinking up some amazing payloads to go in them.

Photo of the partially assembled Liebherr 11350 on its way to the pad. It still doesn't have its main boom. (Photo from LabPadre's Sentinel Cam).

Another strangely poignant cartoon from The Daily Hopper

Here's a German called Owe wth a very interesting little video render showing how the Orbital Launch Integration Tower's base goes together. The video shows the structure of one steel truss segment. The first has already been installed on the concrete base as shown. So everything he shows is already in. And two more segments just like it have been constructed just west of the build area at the old gas-well site. It's expected that they will be transported down the road by SPMT and then lifted into place atop the existing structure by the giant Liebherr. I don't know how many segments it will ultimately have, but the tower as a whole is expected to approach 500 feet tall (the tallest structure in Texas south of San Antonio).

https://twitter.com/Bl3D_Eccentric/statu...0863472641

Sn15 has moved (atop its SPMT transporter) from the landing pad to Launch Pad B, where Bluto the crane has attached to it in preparation to lifting it onto the launch mount. Talk is that inspections are to come and if everything looks good (preliminary inspections do look good) they will try to refly it again.

But... bad weather (a weather front with thunderstorms) is approaching and should be in the area through Wednesday evening, so the lift isn't expected until maybe Thursday.

https://twitter.com/SpacePadreIsle/statu...7403821063

Here's some clues about the flight plan for the first orbital Starship flight, which might happen as early as the second half of this year, from a Federal Communications Commission filing. Credit to Michael Baylor of Nextspaceflight.com for discovering this.

"The Starship Orbital test flight will originate from Starbase, TX. The booster stage will separate approximately 170 seconds into flight. The Booster will then perform a partial return and land in the Gulf of Mexico approximately 20 miles from the shore. The Orbital Starship will continue on flying between the Florida Straits. It will achieve orbit until performing a powered, targeted landing approximately 100 km (~62 miles) off the northwest coast of Kauai in a soft ocean landing."

and...

"SpaceX intends to collect as much data as possible during flight to quantify entry dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally. This data will anchor any changes in vehicle design or Conops after the first flight and build better models for us to use in our internal simulations."

https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481&x=

And this... something that SpaceX was going to do anyway with their Starship orbital refueling tankers, but here's NASA paying them $50 million to demonstrate it and show NASA how it's done. Interesting to see that SpaceX is to have it completed by the end of next year.

Contract 80MSFC21C0007 (from solicitation 80HQTR20NOA01-20STMD80)
On-Orbit Large Scale Cryogenic Propellant Management and Transfer Demonstration

Contracting Office Name: NASA MARSHALL SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
Vendor Name: SPACE EXPLORATION TECHNOLOGIES CORP.

Date Signed (mm/dd/yyyy) : 05/04/2021
Period of Performance Start Date (mm/dd/yyyy) : 05/04/2021
Est. Ultimate Completion Date (mm/dd/yyyy) : 12/31/2022

Action Obligation: $15,135,000.00
Base And Exercised Options Value: $50,450,000.00
Base and All Options Value (Total Contract Value): $50,450,000.00

Elon tweets

3/4 of the way around the Earth

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1393064162335485952

We need to make sure ship won't break up on reentry, hence deorbit over Pacific

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1393083299526889473

There's a wall of shipping containers between the road and what is expected to be the propellant refinery just west of the build site.

Today Mary spotted them unloading big white letters from a truck. First one 'S'. Second one 'T'



She says that the final result indicates that it isn't a new Starbucks.

Here's Mary's latest update video, filmed well within Elon's Reality Distortion Field, featuring Giant Crane Action.

It isn't just the surreal Liebherr 11350 that features in this, they are also assembling a Liebherr 11000 that's almost as big. There's a bumper to bumper succession of big flatbed trucks delivering mysterious crane parts, which are lifted into place by... other cranes. Cranes making more cranes, a very Elon nightmare.

Moving one of these things, let alone two of them, isn't for the timid. It takes heavy equipment and a whole crew assembling this giant piece of machinery from countless parts, all of which have to arrive in the right order, out there in a field somewhere. (Something that Elon knows, just ask Hoppy.)

The video shows lots of other stuff as well.

But it's starting to look like after Sn15's successful flight, the emphasis has changed from cranking out more Starships towards completing the Orbital infrastructure and powering towards the first orbital attempt (in which a Starship flies to Hawaii the long way around) perhaps as early as late summer. (I think late 2021 or early 2022 is more likely.)

And to top it off, the lighting of the new 'Starbase' sign for the first time!