BFR Developments

And the nose is finally on its way to the launch area!

Photo by Elon of the nose in its assembly bay last night

Screenshot from the LabPadre stream

(Oct 21, 2020 11:21 PM)Yazata Wrote: And the nose is finally on its way to the launch area! [...]

Party noise. Watching from their grassy knolls, now every nosey person knows it's no more noes for the nose not being a no-show.

Last night's road closures were never canceled and the sheriffs were indeed out there with their roadblock. Why was a mystery. The nose hasn't been mated with Sn8 yet so a static fire using the header tanks was impossible.

Well, it seems that they ran a cryo pressure test of the header tank in the nose, with assorted venting from new and unexected places on the nose. Seems to have been successful. Makes sense that they would do it before joining the nose to Sn8, since if the header tank burst, they wouldn't want to damage the rest of Sn8.

In other news, Austin Bernard has tweeted a photo of the manufacturing pathfinder nose after its white paint job, complete with an American flag and a nasa worm logo. Which pretty much confirms that it's intended to be a mockup of the Starship lunar lander proposed for nasa. This is intended to carry heavy payloads between the Moon's surface and the Gateway space station in lunar orbit. It won't have any flaps because it will never reenter the Earth's atmosphere. 

https://twitter.com/austinbarnard45/stat...5872556035

SpaceX or nasa image of the idea that was one of the three nasa selected for early development money (nasa admits that it's riskier than Blue's updated redo of the Apollo lander, but it has by far the most upside if it works). But SpaceX needs to show visible progress on it.:

The Cinderella moment! Caterpillars becoming butterflies. A Texas Tank turning into a Spaceship!

https://twitter.com/BocaChicaGal/status/...5777857536

https://twitter.com/austinbarnard45/stat...8600115200

https://twitter.com/nextspaceflight/stat...1281236992

Look at the tiny people in the lifts for scale...

https://twitter.com/BocaChicaGal/status/...8397661184

Remember that this is less than half of the whole stack when it's atop the Superheavy.

Absolutely amazing photo by Mary from twitter

https://twitter.com/BocaChicaGal/status/...9579368450

Austin Bernard made this little video of the nose passing right by him on the road and of its finally joining its less pointy but more flamey counterpart at the launch site.

https://twitter.com/austinbarnard45/stat...3580197888

Here's Austin kicked back by the road watching the nose roll by. (Everything is bigger in Texas!)

https://twitter.com/austinbarnard45/stat...2845233152

100 successful flights

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1320131227383365632

Photo by Austin Bernard (check out the tiny figure on the lift next to the open access port for scale)

Something is on for tomorrow from 5 AM local to 11 AM Central (6 AM to noon Eastern and an ungodly 3 AM - 9 AM Pacific.

The 'notices of impending doom' (nomadd's phrase) have gone out to residents. Be outside your house when the siren sounds.

Speculation is that this will be another 3 Raptor static fire, from the header tanks this time. Or at least a fuel tanking test with live propellants.

There are also road closures on tap for Sunday through Tuesday. So the actual static fire may come then.

There are new FAA TFRs but only from MSL to 1800 feet, so it clearly won't be the 15 km flight. (That will require a MSL to Unlimited TFR.) Probably not a Hoppy-style hop either, because I don't believe that one is planned. The FAA is probably concerned that if this humungous thing blows up, it could hurl metal fragments up to 1800 feet.

Elon's been tweeting again!

Stable, controlled descent with body flaps would be great. Transferring propellant feed from main to header tanks & relight would be a major win.

But, a RUD right off launch pad is also possible. Fortunately, Sn9 is almost ready.

(RUD means "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly", aka 'explosion')

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1322659784210960390

Understanding exactly how the body flaps control pitch, yaw & roll during descent, such that the ship is positioned well to relight, flip & land, would be a big win.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1322660616939720705

Thomas Burghardt asks, "In the event that relight doesn't occur, will Sn8 splashdown offshore, or some other plan to terminate the flight?"

Yeah. Although, if it fails right at the end, some landing pad repair will be needed to fill in the crater.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1322662045234454535

And just because Elon is, well... Elon

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1321275062998257665

How many other big-time corporate CEOs (Tesla, SpaceX and more...) and Captains of Industry would say something like that?

(I bet that Jack in the Box doesn't know whether to sue him or thank him for making them cool. They've been trying to do that themselves, with Jack's late-nite "Munchie Meals" obviously inspired by California's legal cannabis market.)

For those of us who grew up on a constant diet of old 1950's science fiction, Elon has finally delivered (see Austin Bernard's photo above) what finally looks like a proper Space Ship. (There are aesthetic standards that nasa's been ignoring that must be met.)

Some images of how it was all supposed to be

Here's a 1950's vision of a Starship separating from its Superheavy booster

Mary and nomadd in Boca Chica! (Except if it was Mary she'd have a camera out photographing the launch.)

Preparing for tonight's Starship testing at the launch area in Boca

On Mars

Steely-eyed CC of the Space Guard saving the day

Austin Bernard asks Elon:

"Hey @elonmusk will SpaceX livestream the 15km hop. The excitement for this flight is unlike anything Ive ever seen."

Elon says,

Sure, although it might be quite a short livestream! Lot can go wrong, but we'll provide video, warts & all. You will see every frame that we do. 

There's a road closure scheduled for tonight, but as yet no sign of a roadblock. 

Another closure is on tap for tomorrow 9 AM to 11 PM local, and residents have received the warning notices for that one. It's expected that tomorrow will be a three engine static fire fed from the header tanks. If that goes well and they don't see any need to redo it, I expect the 15 km flight to happen in a couple of weeks. The FAA still has to issue the necessary air space closures.

It looks like next week might be busy in Boca. Road closures start this Sunday and run all next week until Friday. It's beiieved that there will be a succession of static fires, with the engines feeding from the main tanks and the headers. They might do separate static fires for the three engines as well as one or two for all three. But I personally don't expect that and expect them to only fire them three at once.

Then maybe, just maybe, the 15km flight on Thursday or Friday. But probably the week after. Still, interesting events on tap.

https://www.cameroncounty.us/spacex/

Elon doesn't really sound very confident that the first 15km flight test will succeed. Too many unknowns, like shutting off and restarting the engines in flight, which has never been done with Raptors, though the Merlins on the Falcons do it all the time. Also, they aren't sure how the flaps will perform in flight and aren't sure the thing will remain controllable. (I'm sure that they have done lots of wind tunnel and computer model simulations.)

But Elon says that succeed or fail, it will be exciting either way.