YazataMar 16, 2024 09:43 PM (This post was last modified: Mar 16, 2024 10:09 PM by Yazata.)
This is why I love the space-nut community.
Here's a 3-D animation of how S28 reentered, based on the SpaceX feed. Play it with audio on to hear what the SpaceX commentators were saying at the time.
It still looks to me like attitude control was their problem. We see the mach 25 airstream (but very thin at that altitude) impacting the heat shield, then hitting the ship broadside, then hitting it end on. The flight computer appears to have been struggling to control it, without a lot of success.
Previously spacecraft have gone into communications blackouts due to plasma making radio communications impossible. But Starship uses the much more capable Starlink constellation that allowed them to get video views that up until now have never been seen. It's one thing to calculate the hypersonic airstream with computational fluid dynamics models, it's something else to actually watch it. The views came along with massive amounts of telemetry data on temperatures and forces.
Perversely, the roll and the control problems might actually be helpful for SpaceX if it allowed them to get telemetry about what conditions were like with the vehicle in different attitudes. For example, what is heating like with the airstream directly contacting the steel skin?
Here’s a story my future grandchildren are going to hear from me more than once: I was on South Padre Island on April 20, 2023, when SpaceX launched its Starship for the very first time from Boca Chica Beach. It will be essential that they hear it from me, though, because this is how it was reported by the press at the time:
Was the SpaceX launch really a “success”?
Elon Musk’s Explosive Day: First SpaceX blew up a rocket. Then Musk blew up Twitter’s verification system.
Elon Musk’s Wealth Plunges $13 Billion as Drama Unfolds Across Empire: In the span of 24 hours, Tesla’s earnings disappointed, a SpaceX rocket exploded, and Twitter purged legacy blue checkmarks.
It’s No Surprise SpaceX Blows Up Rockets in Texas. That’s Why It Came Here.
SpaceX’s Starship blew up after launch—it also caused “catastrophic” damage on the ground
SpaceX celebrated Starship’s first launch. Some locals called it “truly terrifying”
The energy on the island was euphoric that day—the fire warming our faces, the tremendous roar of 33 rocket engines, the cheers on the beach—which made reading such headlines all the more jarring.
It was true, of course, that the rocket spun out of control and blew up...
But amid all the “literally true” statements, the press completely missed the point. While journalists were rushing to figure out their angle of attack—many opted to focus on their personal dislike for Musk—the SpaceX team was rushing to figure out what had worked, and what went wrong...
Failure is, as those who’ve tried something hard know, a stone on the road to success. For SpaceX in particular, it was the company’s keystone strategy for the past twenty years: learn from iterating quickly on failures until you can repeat success.
That strategy worked magnificently. Recall that in 2008, SpaceX was a fledgling company; its first three launch attempts, from 2006 to 2008, of its first rocket, Falcon 1, were all failures. No private company had ever successfully launched a rocket before. But the lessons from those three failures enabled the SpaceX team to successfully launch the Falcon 1 on the fourth try. Sixteen years later, SpaceX Falcons are the most launched American rockets in history, with hundreds of consecutive successes. The Falcon 9 Full Thrust has been launched 309 times—with no failures. Zero.
If you knew that story, would you think that the inaugural Starship launch was an unmitigated disaster because it didn’t function perfectly right away?
As we saw on Thursday, eleven months after that “failed” first launch, Starship made it to space at orbital speed. Stage separation has been successful twice now. SpaceX tested opening the Starship’s cargo doors and has laid the groundwork for in-orbit fuel transfers, which are important for deep space missions... The Starship connected to SpaceX’s own satellite internet network while it was hurtling violently around the Earth so that it could live stream its flight through a plasma field to millions of viewers. Please read the previous sentence again.
...the third launch of Starship—just one of seven planned launches for 2024—is the most exciting moment for American space in years. Consider: it is the largest rocket system ever built. It will land Americans back on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years as a part of NASA’s Artemis program. It has the power to take us to Mars and beyond. It can cement American dominance in the twenty-first-century space race. And it just made it to space for the first time.
So don’t let any sour punditry confuse you. What happened in Texas last week is a man-made miracle—emphasis on man-made, because it took the men and women of SpaceX 20 years to build a sustainable company that could pull off such a feat.
Read the rest (it's very good, about Starlink, the economics of spaceflight, how SpaceX funds itself and comparisons with NASA) here:
YazataMar 19, 2024 09:05 PM (This post was last modified: Mar 19, 2024 10:28 PM by Yazata.)
Gwynne was at the 'Satellite 2024 conference' today where she said SpaceX should be ready to fly Starship again in about six weeks. Teams are still reviewing the data from the last flight and that flight 4 would not have satellites on board.
She says that the goal for Starship this year is to reach orbit, deploy satellites and recover both stages. And of course to launch Falcon 9 148 times!
I'll comment that reaching orbit is already achieved, though they still need to circularize the orbit to that it doesn't clip the top of the atmosphere at perigee. And they don't want to put Starship into a more stable orbit until they demonstrate an in-orbit deorbit burn, so that they can control where Starship eventually comes down. And that demands that they demonstrate better attitude control for the ship so as to limit the pitch and roll rates.
Deploying satellites should be a natural progression once they have the ship in a stable orbit, depending on how well the "pez dispenser" mechanism works first time out. If it chokes, it should be ready on the second try.
So the really big challenge for the rest of this year is recovery of both stages. Frankly, I don't expect tower catches this year. It's more likely that they will accomplish soft touchdowns in the ocean. I think that's very likely to happen with the booster, since they already land F-9 boosters and have lots of experience with that. But it's an iffier proposition with the ship, depending on how well the thermal tiles work on reentry from orbital velocity (mach 25). They do have a lot of the old Space Shuttle tile guys working for them now, so they have some institutional memory about tiles. Successful reentry in turn will also require them to get better attitude control of the ship so as to keep the thermal tiles facing into the airstream. So attitude control really looks like the first item on their to-do list for OFT-4.
Kelvin Coleman, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation, also made some remarks. He said he did not anticipate that investigation to turn up any major issues that could significantly delay the next launch.
Spacenews account of Coleman's remarks (with some highlighting by me):
“It ended in what we call a mishap, but at the end of the day we deem it a successful launch attempt,” he said, because it resulted in no injuries or property damage. “SpaceX was able to collect a great deal of data from that launch.”
He said he expected SpaceX to quickly provide a mishap investigation report, noting that after the second Starship flight the company completed that report in several weeks. “We expect the same to be the case here. We didn’t see anything major. We don’t think there’s any critical systems for safety that were implicated.”
The FAA has updated SpaceX’s Starship launch license after every flight to date to reflect changes in the mission, such as the different suborbital trajectory used on the most recent flight. However, Coleman said the agency wants to move to a process where the license is valid for “portfolio of launches” rather than individual ones. That is particularly important, he added, because SpaceX is planning six to nine more Starship launches this year.
That is part of a broader effort to streamline the launch licensing process to address criticism from industry and Congress that the FAA is moving too slowly on approving launch licenses under a new set of regulations known as Part 450...
I've been arguing for some time that the FAA should approve multiple launches at once, to be executed at whatever pace SpaceX can manage, with the FAA retaining the option of revoking the license if anything happens that risks public safety. So I'm very pleased to see that the FAA is moving towards that kind of model.
Video produced by Mauricio and his RGV crew showing several different renders of S28's reentry, highlighting different things like plasma plume, orientation relative to the earth, and pitch and roll excursions.
And one of the LabPadre space-nuts said that he was at a post-flight beach party at Boca Chica where he spoke to a SpaceX booster propulsion guy who told him that SpaceX knows why the booster's landing burn failed and that the fix is already in work.
"No kidding, Arianespace. The steamroller has been apparent for more than a decade. You were kind of warned to stop building expendable solid rockets and yet ..."
YazataMar 24, 2024 01:28 AM (This post was last modified: Mar 24, 2024 01:32 AM by Yazata.)
Starfactory never stops growing.
It isn't complete yet, the missing chunk in the top center facing the vertical assembly bays is being filled in as we speak. Foundations are being completed, concrete floor slabs poured and structural steel is going up.
YazataMar 27, 2024 12:26 AM (This post was last modified: Mar 27, 2024 01:17 AM by Yazata.)
Mauricio and Irma's (RGV Aerial Photography) very detailed photo of the Starfactory.
You can blow this photo up without it losing its sharpness, to see framework expanding, piles of additional structural steel on the ground, foundation footings and the ever present Texas pickups for scale. (This building will be BIG.)
And just to the right of the Starfactory, you can make out the edge of the foundations of another large building. Belief is that it will be an office building, but the foundations seem awfully massive for an office building. Maybe it will be a largely open design supported by only a few columns. We will see...
At the far left you can see the end of the last remaining giant tent. This is the inventory tent, filled with big steel racks jammed with rocket parts, like a Home Depot for spaceships! This is where an endless parade of delivery trucks deliver an infinite variety of... stuff, which is logged into SpaceX's computerized inventory system. Need a high-pressure LOX cryo-valve? We got'em in stock!
And just to the right of that, more heavy duty foundation work is visible. This will be a six-level parking structure (badly needed and long overdue at Starbase.
Finally the vertical assembly bays. The larger 'megabays' are receiving huge rollup doors to keep the sun, wind and dust out. Installing some environmental control in the bays will make welding easier and reduce steel expansion and contraction due to temperature variations. The vehicle assembly people have said that quality control and uniformity has been a nightmare and they are working to improve it.
So Starbase is moving away from its Space Cowboy roots and becoming more like a conventional aerospace plant.
Mar 16, 2024 09:43 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 16, 2024 10:09 PM by Yazata.)
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