BFR Developments

[Yazata]

Before the launch Jared Isaacman's jets overflew the pad several times. And this time it was Jared piloting one of them. He was in Starbase and was interviewed on the SpaceX broadcast.

https://x.com/_lpierce/status/2057928244087660980

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Stage separation. Clearly something is wrong with the boostback burn ignition.

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The extraordinary video from a satellite being ejected from the cargo bay

https://x.com/CSI_Starbase/status/2057962333474066816

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[C C]

Didn't expect the cheering for Starship exploding on landing.

Don't know why they bothered to paint the booster, since it wasn't fated for the grabber and refurbishing for another flight, either. Unless the paint itself needed to be tested.

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Very sad. Overall I thought it looked like it would be good enough for launching inanimate objects into low earth orbit but not for sending humans into deep space within the near future. With moon landings planned for the near future .. I don't know where that leaves SpaceX.

Will have to make many a non-occupied flight to the moon, automatically unload equipment/materials, and return successfully to Earth before any astronauts risk their lives. Don't see how there is time to accomplish that degree of vetting before 2030, or before China has a manned moon landing.

[Syne]

Will have to make many a non-occupied flight to the moon, automatically unload equipment/materials, and return successfully to Earth before any astronauts risk their lives. Don't see how there is time to accomplish that degree of vetting before 2030, or before China has a manned moon landing.

You don't need a ship that size for a manned moon landing. Only for materials transport and Mars trips.

[C C]

Will have to make many a non-occupied flight to the moon, automatically unload equipment/materials, and return successfully to Earth before any astronauts risk their lives. Don't see how there is time to accomplish that degree of vetting before 2030, or before China has a manned moon landing.

You don't need a ship that size for a manned moon landing. Only for materials transport and Mars trips.

BO's Blue Moon lander is still just in the cargo testing phase, and the other contenders are surely even slower than Blue Origin. Space X could probably start its own smaller lander program today and still catch up to them, but the whole lot will still take years of development and tests. But maybe BO will miraculously turn out to be faster at developing its lander than with its rockets.

[Yazata]

Actually, yesterday's first flight of the new Version.3 Starship seemed to go reasonably well. One raptor.3 engine on the booster (out of 33) quit during ascent, without significant effect on mission success.

Regarding what happened to the booster after stage separation, a participant on X provided this analysis, which may or may not be accurate but sounds plausible enough to post.

During stage-separation the more powerful V.3 ship engines and the new design hot-stage adapter appear to have set the booster flipping at an estimated 44 degrees/second, which on a vehicle that large would have produced a force estimated at 2.2G. That hypothetically caused massive sloshing of propellant which might have resulted in multiple engines ingesting gas instead of liquid propellant. Rocket engines hate to ingest gas into their turbopumps, so some of them might have started to react violently by exploding, creating a cascade of engine failure during the failed boost back. Leaving the booster to descend about 200 miles offshore in the Gulf rather than right offshore as planned, hitting the water above mach 1.

A simple way to address this might be to increase the time between stage separation and boost-back engine ignition, so as to settle the propellant at the propellant inlets with attitude control thrusters. This should be an easy software fix and shouldn't delay the next flight.

Meanwhile one of the three vacuum raptors on the ship shut down for unknown (to those of us outside SpaceX) reasons, leaving the ship with 3 functioning sea level raptors and 2 remaining R-vacs. This turned into a useful engine-out test for the ship, which managed to reach the planned velocity despite the missing engine, apparently by running the five remaining engines for longer than planned.

The deployment of dummy satellites was quite successful, particularly one with cameras aboard that imaged the ship in space on the night side of the Earth.

Reentry went better than previous ships, showing continuing improvement in the heat shield. Elon says that the heat shield didn't burn through anywhere and didn't subject the metal skin of the ship to extreme heating. All of the tiles seem to have remained in place throughout which is big, since tile attachment was one of the issues they have been working furiously on.

The ship exploding after it soft landed in the ocean was expected and isn't considered an issue.

So... they didn't recover this booster... but they never planned to. Certainly it didn't get as close to recovery (soft landing in a chosen spot) as they might have liked, but the problem is most likely easily resolved with software changes. That said, the booster performed well on its primary mission, getting the ship up into space.

The ship lost an engine for unknown (by me) reasons, but that reduced fuel consumption allowing the five remaining engines to burn longer making up most of the difference. So the lost engine turned into a valuable test of the ship's ability to perform with an engine-out.

This was a test-flight after all, the first flight of the heavily redesigned Version 3 engines, ships and boosters. I think that SpaceX is pleased with how it turned out.

[Syne]

Launching about 40 metric tonnes of simulated payload, out of a capacity 100, should have left plenty of margin for error.
I read the fiery ending of Starship was planned.

[Yazata]

Don't know why they bothered to paint the booster, since it wasn't fated for the grabber and refurbishing for another flight, either. Unless the paint itself needed to be tested.

The new Raptor.3 engines are naturally black. And I think that the black coating on the bottom above the engines is a thermal coating. The booster doesn't reenter the atmosphere at anything like the ship's blazing speed (maybe mach 4 as opposed to mach 25) so it doesn't need tiles, but it still gets hot.

Besides, painting it looks cooler. Elon cares about that.

Will have to make many a non-occupied flight to the moon, automatically unload equipment/materials, and return successfully to Earth before any astronauts risk their lives. Don't see how there is time to accomplish that degree of vetting before 2030, or before China has a manned moon landing.

As I understand it, NASA only requires that SpaceX successfully perform one uncrewed Starship HLS landing on the Moon before humans fly. That assumes that the first uncrewed landing is faultless.

But I agree that chances are increasingly remote that SpaceX's HLS will be ready for humans in 2028, just two years from now. I don't expect the Chinese to be ready by 2028 either. Blue Origin's Mk.1 lander may or may not be ready, but it's not designed for crew.

It's entirely possible that China might land humans on the Moon before the US makes it back after 60 years. But if the US goes a short time after China, it will be with larger capacity landers able to sustain at least a minimal permanent presence.

The United States already beat China to the Moon, way back in 1969. The competition now is to create a permanent lunar outpost. And I think that Starship, Blue's landers and a bunch of other uncrewed landers from companies like Firefly hold the lead in that.

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Video in the X post below by Matt Anderson who was just sworn in as NASA Deputy Administrator on Thursday, spending Friday in the back seat of one of Jared Isaacman's jet fighters above Starbase! He says, "Not a bad way to spend day two on the job!'

(The jets are privately owned by Jared, but he's put them in the service of NASA while he's Administrator, with Jared covering all the costs.)

https://x.com/i/status/2057946499841945724

(Photo by Richard Gallagher of WAI)

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Here's Jared in the Starbase factory/office building after the flight with some of the brain-trust behind Starship. The bearded guy sitting down is Mark Juncosa, SpaceX VP of Vehicle Engineering. The grey-haired guy with glasses is Bill Riley, SpaceX VP of Starship Engineering. (I have no idea how their responsibilities are differentiated.) Both are very big deals in aerospace, and Elon is...well...Elon.

(Photo by Steve Jurvetson, a big Silicon Valley venture capital guy who sits on the SpaceX Board of Directors.)

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Ship 39 surrounded by hot plasma during reentry

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[Yazata]

Aaron Burnett (another venture capital guy) writes: "SpaceX (fully aware of an impending IPO) set up drones specifically to capture this fireball and chose to livestream it. Let that sink in."

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Elon replied: "We strive to entertain"

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2058633781569798287

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[Yazata]

Truly extraordinary photo by extreme astrophotographer Andrew McCarthy with a remote camera about 600 feet from the pad. The poor camera gave up its life to get the shot, which is historically good.

Outline of a human inserted for scale

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