BFR Developments

**C C** · Oct 5, 2019 06:09 PM

(Oct 3, 2019 08:49 PM)Yazata Wrote: Today the Giant Crane picked up the bottom half of Starship and placed it atop a circular mounting completed in the last few days from heavy steel I-beams.

https://twitter.com/BocaChicaGal/status/...0880999425

That rainbow pic is pretty wild. I guess that's supposed to be a positive omen... we'll see if it hopefully pans out.

**Yazata** · (This post was last modified: Oct 7, 2019 12:17 AM by Yazata.)

Boca Chica resident Nomadd on NSF has this reminder to anyone who gets too dismissive of Elon Time (time dilation due to the warp-speed velocity of Elon's ideas):

OK, some of Elon's time estimates aren't entirely plausible in Earth's relativistic frame. But...

Here's Nomadd's photo of Hoppy just 10 months ago. (The Starship was still just an idea.) At the time, many people thought that Hoppy was just a water tank.

Here's Nomadd's photo of the launch area 10 months ago.

I'll add this SpaceX photo of Hoppy on August 27, after a 9 month gestation:

And this photo of September 28, just a month later:

[Image: EFlxV7YXoAAaxcD?format=jpg&name=small]

Keep in mind that there are two of these prototypes in late stages of construction, at two different construction and launch sites, (one launch site will be Cape Canaveral with all of its existing infrastructure, the other will be entirely under SpaceX control) with two more incrementally upgraded Starships due to start construction soon.

Finally, here's Austin Bernard's photo of the Boca launch area today with construction of the new Starship pad facilities underway (while Hoppy supervises)

The media can sneer all they want, NASA and legacy aerospace can dismiss it as little more than a folly, but it isn't bad for just ten months.

"Warp Ten, Mr. Sulu!! More Power, Scotty!!"

**Yazata** · (This post was last modified: Oct 7, 2019 05:56 PM by Yazata.)

The three Starship engines have been removed, loaded into the Raptorvan, and shipped off to God knows where. (McGregor?)

[Image: EGQM9svXkAA0N-v?format=jpg&name=900x900]

But they aren't just removing things that were "installed" last week. BCG's detailed photos show them installing new and cryptic (to me) plumbing pipes and fittings along with lots and lots of electrical cables. So while the assembled version on Sept 28 looked cool, it was kind of a shell, the basic structure and tanks, but still in need of much of its spaceship guts.

One of Mary's many extraordinary photographs (that historians of science and engineering will be writing about for generations) showing some unidentified intestines being hoisted:

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Another photo by Mary: Just the place for a pina colada:

And remember that we are only 10 months from the beginnings of Hoppy to where we are now.

**Yazata** · (This post was last modified: Oct 8, 2019 10:16 PM by Yazata.)

Photo from LabPadre's stream showing the Boca fabricators making rings

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Notice the proximity of the Boca Chica Village house in the background. Elon has offered to buy the whole town (maybe 30 houses?) for 3x market value (currently $75K - $150K per house), but some don't want to sell. Seeing as how this is one of the lowest cost places in America next to a warm beach, I think that the residents (many of them retirees, I gather) should be offered the cost of a comparable dwelling elsewhere on the Gulf coast, even if roughly duplicating (within reason) what they have here is more expensive. Plus $100k or something like that for the hassle of moving, plus a nice new Tesla as a gift. Elon needs to treat these people right. He has already said that the current residents that sell can continue to use their old houses (except on days when there are launch dangers) until the properties are needed for facility expansion. (Not clear when that would be.) So for a while at least, Mary and company would still get their up-close-and-personal view of building spaceships.

**Yazata** · (This post was last modified: Oct 10, 2019 05:53 AM by Yazata.)

The Starship is "progressing" in reverse!

https://twitter.com/BocaChicaGal/status/...9256675330

Today the fins came off. Not entirely surprising, since they never seemed to be a final installation and were just kind of tacked on. (Especially the nose fins which are hardly connected.) Even the bottom fins didn't look attached securely enough to handle the stresses that they would experience in flight. (Little 9 second time-lapse video by Mary showing one of the fins coming off):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...pWAmo6pxis

Well, now that the Sept 28 showmanship is exposed, it's kind of fun to watch them actually construct a flight-capable vehicle. This kind of construction has never been seen before in this kind of detail. (And no rocket like this has ever been seen before, outside old 1950's-style science fiction movies.)

NASA still doesn't believe in it and thinks that it's just Elon's crazy folly. Yet everyone in Houston is nevertheless watching very closely, just like everyone else is in legacy aerospace, Europe, Russia and elsewhere. It's fascinating. And a bit scary to some of those who are heavily invested in far less ambitious things. (What if it works?? We'll be screwed!!)

Quote:One of Mary's many extraordinary photographs (that historians of science and engineering will be writing about for generations) showing some unidentified intestines being hoisted

Mary's photographs (See here) show three very similar pieces of this mysterious intestine, each with the same curves but of different length, installed in a raceway. The lower ends emerge by the engines (probably one per engine) and the upper ends disappear into the tank structure at staggered heights. The engineers seem to think that it's part of the raptor engines' autogeneous pressurization system. This feeds pressure generated by the rocket engine pumps back up into the fuel and oxidizer tanks to keep them pressurized for fuel flow, tank structural rigidity etc.

https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1968-626

In other news, road closures have been announced for Boca Chica on Wed Oct 23 through Fri Oct 25. It's hard to imagine the Mk 1 Starship will be ready to do anything by then, so I'm guessing that they will be performing a wet dry-run on the new ground-support launch facilities, tanks, pumps and pipes at the beachfront launch site. Pumping liquid methane around with untested equipment might involve an explosion risk, hence the closures. That's my guess.

**Yazata** · (This post was last modified: Oct 13, 2019 09:01 PM by Yazata.)

First photos of what may or may not be a third Starship construction site. Still not clear about what's happening and it remains kind of mysterious.

This one is in Florida, not far from the Cocoa Mk2 site, but on Kennedy Space Center grounds nearer the ultimate launch site. Still pretty bare, one of these tentlike hanger structures, some porta-potties, worklights and a crane.

The site is already assigned to future SpaceX operations according to KSC plans and will eventually be home to a 300 foot control tower and a big vertical assembly building at some future point for when they are flying Starships over and over. Perhaps they plan to assemble some of their vehicles there too. Conceivable that rings, bulkheads and various other parts will still be fabricated at Cocoa and transported in trucks (as oversized loads in some cases) to KSC for final assembly. That might be easier than moving giant spaceships.

(Blue is building their big New Glenn rockets at KSC as well. But Jeff Bezos treats that like Area 51 and nobody can see what's happening.)

I'm just speculating, but this might be where they will build the Superheavy booster, which will be bigger and harder to move from place to place. They are already faced with the challenge of moving their Starships from Cocoa to KSC, and Superheavy will be that much worse.

Plus, there's a potential problem of a railway overpass that might be built (by Richard Branson!) that will block the route out from Cocoa to KSC. (Too low for Starship to pass, even lying on its side.) But latest word is that Branson's overpass might have been redesigned as a conventional railroad crossing. Unclear what's happening with that. Branson wasn't trying to mess with Elon, his Virgin Trains company had already contracted to build a rail line along the east coast of Florida. Branson likes space, witness Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit, so they seem to be trying to work things out. The city probably has traffic concerns too.

https://twitter.com/therealjonvh/status/...3914336258

**Yazata** · Oct 17, 2019 11:40 PM

Unconformed reports that the Cocoa site might have started construction of the Mk.4 prototype. (The second Cocoa Starship.)

If it's happening at all (still not entirely clear) it's early ring-stacking to produce a cylinder.

Photo by John Winkopp, who is a professional aerial photographer who flies his camera drone around the Cocoa site every day. (Security makes it hard to get a clear camera shot on the ground.)

https://twitter.com/John_Winkopp/status/...2250470400

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The tall steel cylinder in front of "the cathedral" (the tall structure) is the Mk.2 tank section. It's clear that the top tank bulkhead hasn't yet been installed (and in fact is sitting just above the shadow from the building on the left, apparently wrapped in plastic-wrap). Speculation that finishing the interior work was harder on the Mk.1 (Boca) prototype with the bulkhead in place, so Cocoa is leaving it to last. The smaller cylinder is the bottom part of the nose fairing. (This will contain the cargo and crew quarters in the operational version.) And the pointy tippy-top nose is visible just to the left of the tank section. This part of the nose is being packed with header tanks, batteries and other heavy things to create better mass distribution for reentry aerodynamics, along with the structural supports and actuators for the nose canard fins.

But there's that thing in the lower right sitting on a stand... I suspect that's what John's interpreting as the first signs of Mk.4.

Plus, there's all the double rings (two rings joined and welded around their circumference) seen scattered around. These don't seem destined for Mk.2.

**Yazata** · Oct 19, 2019 07:52 PM

(Oct 10, 2019 04:10 AM)Yazata Wrote: In other news, road closures have been announced for Boca Chica on Wed Oct 23 through Fri Oct 25. It's hard to imagine the Mk 1 Starship will be ready to do anything by then, so I'm guessing that they will be performing a wet dry-run on the new ground-support launch facilities, tanks, pumps and pipes at the beachfront launch site. Pumping liquid methane around with untested equipment might involve an explosion risk, hence the closures. That's my guess.

The road closures have been canceled.

https://twitter.com/bluemoondance74/stat...6384705536

**Yazata** · (This post was last modified: Oct 20, 2019 05:10 AM by Yazata.)

Visible changes in Boca Chica are progressing a lot slower now than the frenzied pace before Elon's big unveil on Sept 28. But important things are happening every day, electrical cables being strung, pipes up the raceways from the engines to the header tanks installed, and perhaps most importantly, real structural fittings and hydraulic actuators for the fins. (The fins were just tacked on for looks in September.)

Yesterday there was lots of banging and shrieking metal-cutting noise from the cylinder. Here's a photo from LabPadre's live-stream cam of the hard-hats torturing the cylinder:

and the result were what appeared to be two rectangular holes at the top of the engine bay, 180 degrees apart. One is visible in this photo from the LabPadre stream:

Today we saw what the holes were for, as structural fittings for the fins started to be installed. Mary/Bocachicagal recorded a time-lapse video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...efNJufqCP8

They still need to be welded in place, still need their hydraulic actuators, and aren't ready for prime time yet. But this is one of the places where a bottom fin will attach for real.

**Yazata** · (This post was last modified: Oct 21, 2019 04:32 AM by Yazata.)

If I Only Had a Brain!

Something with lots of bundled electrical cabling coming out of it was seen being lowered onto the top of the upper fuel tank bulkhead today where a group of hard-hats greeted it. Speculation has tagged it as possibly being the flight control computer, perhaps packaged with some of the other electronics like radios.

Mary also spotted crews installing COPV pressure vessels in the engine bay under the vehicle's bottom skirt. On Hoppy, they powered the actuators for engine thrust vector control. These might be involved with moving the fin actuators too. (Given the work on the fin mountings done yesterday and continuing today.)