Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/30..._starship/

EXCERPT: . . . The design of Starship has been somewhat fluid over the years, and the latest has the reusable spacecraft coming in at 50 metres in length with a diameter of 9 metres.... The key figure for the in-production vehicle is the 150 tons Musk expects it will be able to carry to orbit while still being fully reusable. Of course, Starship is merely the second stage ... The first stage, the Super Heavy booster, is currently expected to be 68 metres long, take up to 37 Raptor engines ... and land using the grid fin technology used to guide a Falcon 9 through the atmosphere. [...] It's all exciting stuff, and few would bet against Musk's boffins after achieving the seemingly impossible feat of landing and reusing a Falcon 9 booster.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine poured a little cold water on proceedings, pointing out that while the Starship excitement was all well and good, maybe Musk and co could perhaps get on with sending crews to the ISS? It seemed a slightly cheap shot, since Boeing, one of the contractors for the agency's own monster - and very definitely not reusable - rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), is also on the receiving end of taxpayer dollars and has yet to ferry a crew into orbit. And, of course, the SLS has suffered horrendous delays despite the billions spent on it.

It would leave many at the US space agency blushing if Musk manages to get a Starship into orbit ahead of the SLS. Assuming, of course, the thing actually works. (MORE - details)

More detailed account of the friction between these two.

NASA Hands Elon Musk a Reality Check (interview with Jim Bridenstine)
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...ew/599218/

INTRO: This was supposed to be the year. After nearly a decade of planning, NASA astronauts would fly to space on launch systems built by a commercial company hired to do the job the space agency no longer could, not after the Space Shuttle program ended. For years, the United States had paid Russia to send its spacefarers to the International Space Station. Now the country would do it on its own again, from its own launchpads. This probably isn’t going to be that year.

The effort, known as Commercial Crew, is behind schedule, slowed by a mix of fundingshortfalls, technical challenges, safety concerns, and other factors. NASA might have to buy more seats on Russia’s Soyuz system to make up for the lag. SpaceX and Boeing, the companies in this effort, have certainly made significant progress. In March, SpaceX’s astronaut capsule, carrying a mannequin in a spacesuit, flew a seemingly flawless mission to the space station and back. The mood was buoyant, and Elon Musk and Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, were all smiles as they toured the launchpad in Florida in hard hats.

But barely two months later, the same capsule exploded during a test on the ground. And over the past few days, Musk and Bridenstine have been embroiled in a tense public exchange about the progress of their shared effort.

As Musk prepared this weekend to unveil the latest details about SpaceX’s Starship, a solo effort intended to send people to the moon and Mars, Bridenstine tweeted: “NASA expects to see the same level of enthusiasm focused on the investments of the American taxpayer.” Musk responded by saying that most of SpaceX’s resources go toward the Commercial Crew program and that the company is going “as fast as we can.” He even joked about NASA’s own effort to build a rocket to reach the moon, which is also years behind schedule.

It’s practically in the job description for NASA administrators to tell contractors to meet deadlines, but the public back-and-forth felt unprecedented; how many contractors also have a Mars spaceship project on the side? I spoke with Bridenstine today about the Commercial Crew program. The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. (MORE - interview)

Bridenstine's a good guy, he's a space geek, and he's done a lot to shake up NASA's lethargic institutional culture. He would probably like to be the Elon Musk of NASA if he could given the political contraints. He has to please a hugely disfunctional Congress in order to get funding. So he's feeling bureaucratic pressure from all sides.

SpaceX is building several Starship vehicles (two at the moment, two more to be started soon), they will fly unmanned during their test program, and if SpaceX loses one of them, they can just shrug it off as something they always expected to happen and learn their engineering lessons from the experience. In the "Tech" world, it's called "failing forwards". It isn't really any more costly than doing things the conventional way since conventional rockets are one-use-only by design and nobody expects to recover them. So for the legacy space industry, every test flight means loss of the vehicle. (Elon's just bringing a bit of "Silicon Valley" iterative rapid-prototyping culture to aerospace.)

We are already seeing it in small ways. Boca Chica started by making rings out of steel plates. It worked, but it was very suboptimal. In Cocoa they are trying something different, making rings on a jig, one-piece out of premeasured segments from rolls of steel from the mill, with just one welded junction. Better. Learn by doing. So SpaceX kind of makes it up as they go in some respects.

NASA has evolved (devolved?) to the point where they throw billions of dollars and armies of engineers at a problem and refuse to fly their vehicle until it's been modeled and examined to death so as to get the possibility of failure as low as they can get it. Every question needs to be answered and every process planned before they begin. Contractors get "cost-plus" contracts that almost beg them to overspend. So everything arrives years behind schedule and billions over-budget. But they have a very good safety record to show for it. Except... there are lots of questions regarding design, materials, manufacturing and real-life flight performance that can best be answered by actually building and flying test prototypes and by learning from what does and doesn't work.

Now factor in the press. This Atlantic story is an example. Journalists are like King Midas in reverse. Instead of gold, everything they touch turns to shit. Journalists love nothing more than stirring up controversy, anger and hostility. They are so locked into their "muck-raker" self-image that they find/create muck even where it doesn't exist. So they rush in to portray Musk and Bridenstine as enemies who suddenly scorn each other.

I don't think that's true at all. I think that they are (perhaps cautious) friends. My take on all this is that Bridenstine was feeling heat and felt under pressure. (Look what Elon's doing! Why doesn't NASA ever do anything like that??) and he fired off his tweet out of frustration. (Instead of putting on big media shows to make you look good, fucking do something to make NASA look good!)

And given the hornet's nest it's stirred up in the media, I'd guess that he really wishes he hadn't done it and could take it back.

Bridenstine and Elon are at SpaceX's Hawthorne plant checking out progress on the Crew Dragon as we speak.

https://www.teslarati.com/nasa-admin-elo...tory-tour/

https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/statu...9418052608

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-...adquarters

Teslerati says, "As such, it's hard not to see this last-second media event and SpaceX HQ tour as an attempt to mend bridges, although different people would likely have different things to say as to who is doing the mending...

NASA says that the post-tour media Q&A with Bridenstine and Musk will be streamed on the NASA Administrator's twitter account and will kick off around 2pm PDT (19:00 UTC) on Thursday, October 10th."

Press conference just wrapped up at Hawthorne and Musk and Bridenstine sounded totally in tune. 

Apparently the biggest remaining items with Crew Dragon are 1) the in-flight abort test, and 2) a series of parachute tests.

The original parachutes worked well for the unmanned DM-1 mission, but seem to have suffered some failures in testing. Both Bridenstine and Musk emphasized this isn't a bad thing! They test to discover the limits of a system and if they aren't satisfied, they make engineering changes. As Elon put it, a test series that doesn't experience some failure was insufficiently rigorous. So SpaceX has designed some stronger parachutes that still need proving.

As to time estimates (not Elon time this time) if the abort test and the parachute tests (at least 10, they want them to all turn out roughly the same so that parachute behavior is predictable), the Crew Dragon slated for the first manned mission (DM-2) should be at the Cape by the end of December. The actual flight should come before the end of March. Elon emphasized that any delays after delivery aren't indications of NASA bureaucracy, they are necessary reviews to ensure the safety of the astronauts.

And Bridenstine had good things to say about Starship. He said that NASA shares Elon's desire to get human beings off Earth into the Solar System. And he said that NASA is already cooperating with Starship. By use of Cape Canaveral for launches, by use of the NASA Deep Space Network for communications with vehicles way off at Mars, by tasking the Mars Reconaissance Orbiter and Mars rovers to investigate possible landing areas and in-situ resources on Mars, and with a recent NASA contract with SpaceX to explore orbital refueling, something Starship needs and an extremely valuable capability for the nation as well.

Crew Dragons, once they are proven for flying astronauts, will enter series production next year. They will be churning them out at about one a month or so.  Bridenstine said NASA wants a fleet of them so that they can establish a launch cadence. He said that they expect to maintain their partnership with Russia's Roscosmos, but hope that Russian cosmonauts will sometimes be flying to orbit in Dragons and not just US astronauts in Soyuz's. Bridenstine wants a more reciprocal partnership.

He also mentioned that he'd just been in Japan talking to JAXA and Japan is looking at flying a Japanese astronaut on a Dragon. Bridenstine is trying to get a whole coalition of nations on board with NASA's plan to return to the Moon, establishing a permanent presence this time. So he's very focused on NASA projects coming in on-time and on-budget, so that he can show the foreign partners that planned missions are going to get off the ground at the time specified. (Not ten years behind schedule.)  

And Elon said that as Crew Dragons enter series production, emphasis will shift from design engineers to the production and fabrication people. The design engineers will need something new to do. So SpaceX is going to be moving some of the engineering staff to the Starship program. But not until NASA is satisfied with the Crew Dragons. NASA sounded ok with that.

Elon Musk and Jim Bridenstine sounded like brothers. I don't think that it was an act either. They are both guys who are hugely enthusiastic about human spaceflight, who got into their line of work because they are space-nuts, and they excite each other.

Clip of Bridenstine talking about Starship and NASA's attitude towards it

https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/stat...4958469120

NASA photo of Jim Bridenstine at a Crew Dragon simulator with one of the astronauts assigned to the first manned DM-2 mission beside him while Elon looks on. The guy in a blue flightsuit in the left foreground is the other DM-2 astronaut.



Another



NASA photo of Bridenstine inside a Crew Dragon capsule with one of the astronauts (in astronaut Doc Martens!) beside him. The black bar above him is the control panel. It's a touch-screen computer display (that I assume works with space suit gloves). It can be pushed up out of the way when you need to get in and out of the couches, or pulled down closer.



This is why Bridenstine and Musk got on well. Elon let Jim play with his toys.

One of them needs to finally demonstrate that an American-made rocket/craft can still get astronauts into space (and do it without killing them). If it wasn't for sending supplies to the space station, putting satellites in orbit, and sending probes to other planets, the rest of the world would really be scratching its head.

(Oct 11, 2019 05:24 AM)C C Wrote: [ -> ]One of them needs to finally demonstrate that an American-made rocket/craft can still get astronauts into space (and do it without killing them).

Both Bridenstine and Musk pointed out yesterday that if human astronauts had been aboard the DM-1 mission instead of Ripley and Little Earth, they would have gotten to the Space Station and then back to Earth in fine shape. (That's often forgotten.)

But then the "anomaly" occurred (it seems to have been identified and corrected) and the parachutes didn't perform as well as desired in extreme test conditions (they worked fine for DM-1), so the DM-2 mission was pushed back. (Elon said that they have adopted stronger lines and new stitching for the improved parachutes, so I'm guessing that they tore apart when the capsules opened them while going faster than planned.)

Quote:If it wasn't for sending supplies to the space station, putting satellites in orbit, and sending probes to other planets, the rest of the world would really be scratching its head.

Both Musk and Bridenstine said very emphatically that the US being out of manned spaceflight for the better part of a decade is unacceptable. Bridenstine didn't exactly say it, but one senses that as NASA Administrator he's feeling pressure to get Commercial Crew up and flying sooner rather than later. Perhaps explaining his frustration with Elon seeming to have his mind somewhere else. (Concentrate! Get your eye on the ball, Elon!) So Elon invited Bridenstine to Hawthorne to see everything they are doing to make Crew Dragon ready.

So everything is good and they are still pals. Even if they frustrate each other occasionally.

One of the NSF engineers couldn't resist this bit of snark though: "A curious meeting between the leader of the nation's space program and the NASA guy."

NASA photo of Bridenstine looking at a Merlin engine in Hawthorne. (Merlin powers the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. Starship uses the bigger, more advanced, complicated and challenging Raptors.) If you look closely at the orange and white sticker on the engine in the photograph, it reads "Flown Hardware". So this particular engine has already been to space and back.



Another photo of Bridenstine at the Crew Dragon simulator. It's a Crew Dragon touch-screen control panel that I expect can present various challenging scenarios. And notice that Elon and his SpaceX guys aren't dressed in the company uniform of black t-shirts. They are wearing SpaceX's version of formal wear for Bridenstine's visit.

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I like Jim Bridenstine!

Here he is at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, giving a 15 minute one-on-one interview to Tim Dodd!!!

Tim isn't mainstream media, he's a space geek! He's unshaven, wears a baseball cap and t-shirt, sandals and pants with a big hole in the knee. He doesn't have a big newspaper or a national cable news channel. He just has his website and his internet followers. (One of whom it seems is Bridenstine himself. Another is Elon.) And here's Bridenstine giving Tim the same kind of access (or better) that he would give CNN or the big newspapers.

Gotta love it!

The interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...U_vOt3wSDg

Tim's website:

https://everydayastronaut.com/

Regarding the parachute problems referred to above, testing of the new upgraded parachutes seems to be going well.

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1191067348914098176