BFR Developments

[Yazata]

In his latest video, Felix Schlang reports talking to an unnamed current/former worker at SpaceX Cocoa FL and being told that temporary and contract workers at Cocoa have been laid off. (Some of these have applied for work at Blue Origin.) The Cocoa site is to be closed and is currently operating with a skeleton crew. The Mk 2 prototype is to be scrapped. And operations will eventually move to Roberts Road, but this will take months to happen as facilities still need to be constructed.

Felix has some provocative stuff from this employee about how they were making rings at Cocoa with an automated machine that they had trouble getting to work the way they wanted. So many of the rings produced weren't to precise specification and these may have been the ones seen everywhere around the site. Then Elon supposedly told them to speed up, hence the welds are iffy in the extreme because they weren't inspected by x-ray as they had planned to do. (It was bad welds that appear to have doomed Mk1 in Boca Chica.)

So while they get Roberts Road up and running, the Starship focus is going to be on Boca Chica. Boca has put in their own ring-forming machine and automated plasma arc welder and are currently working on getting them up and running. (They made Mk 1 by hand... and it showed.) The speculation is that they will build from the top down, installing the top bulkhead first and then adding new rings at the bottom while the automated robot welding machine circles making uniform welds. Cocoa's ring machine will be moving to Roberts Road where they should have time to get it working as desired. Boca seems to have moved construction into shelters, both the white SpaceX steel framework tents and the tall 'ironhenge' building (their vertical assembly building which will apparently be exactly that) and won't be building Mk 3 out in the open in the dust and wind. There is already portable x-ray gear on the Boca site (where Mary photographed it) and observers expect it to be used a lot more than it has been to inspect welds. Parts are arriving in Boca already cut and formed to specification elsewhere, instead of all the cutting and grinding done on site as with Mk 1. That should improve fit.

It seems that Elon tried out an absolutely minimum construction method with Mk1 and found that it simply didn't work. (You can just imagine Boeing's Schadenfreude at that.) Tolerances and fit just weren't good enough. Quality of the welds was too variable. We could see it with our own eyes just from looking at the thing. So Mk 3 is going to be done with better precision and quality assurance. (Hopefully.)

Anyway, that's the talk this morning.

Watch the video here:

https://twitter.com/FelixSchlang/status/...8895850499

What appears to be the new Boca Chica ring forming machine. From the Lab Padre stream. Several semi loads of equipment arrived at the Boca Chica yard today and speculation is that it might be the robot welding machine that will circle around, welding each new bottom ring to the rings above it as the whole stack of rings grows upwards in a more automated process than we've seen. That will presumably take place in the tall vertical assembly building.

In other news, yesterday Mary photographed what appears to be a new nose cone taking shape in another of the structures. Unclear if the ring in the photo and Mary's possible nose cone are real flight components or just test products as they perfect their improved manufacturing methods. The hypothetical "nose cone" might turn out to be a manufacturing fixture or jig.

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Companies manufacturing far more mundane products than rocketships check the welds. Hopefully they purely thought they could get away with vo-tech school sloppiness like that on sub-orbital prototypes. Scary if they intended otherwise for even a test version of the real deal.

[Yazata]

Companies manufacturing far more mundane products than rocketships check the welds.

Some of the gaps between metal plates were so large that welders in conventional factories would have sent the pieces back to an earlier stage of manufacturing to produce better tolerances. It isn't considered good practice to try to bridge too large gaps with welds. I expect that the Boca Chica welders let their superiors know and it went back up the chain. It's not exactly secret, we could all see in the photos where the fit was bad. But somebody apparently told them to go ahead.

Hopefully they purely thought they could get away with vo-tech school sloppiness like that on sub-orbital prototypes. Scary if they intended otherwise for even a test version of the real deal.

I don't think that the Mk 1 was ever destined for space. The plan at one point seemed to be to fly it to about 60,000 feet high, then let it fall back to test the aerodynamics of its belly-first skydiver descent and its last seconds 90 degree pitch-up and propulsive landing. I suspect that they believed that it had at least a 50% chance of cratering trying that. The early pressure test failure may have surprised them, but not that much.

And I'm starting to suspect that it was as much a manufacturing experiment as anything else. Elon wanted to see how far they could get with the cheapest and fastest methods possible. They expected it to fail someplace, which it did. So... see where it fails and then address those deficiencies and try again. Elon apparently wants to work from the bottom up, finding the cheapest and quickest manufacturing methods that can be made to work, instead of spending billions a year of tax payer money to create absolutely ideal manufacturing conditions without actually succeeding in producing any flight hardware.

Compare NASA's non-reusable Space Launch System that began in 2011 and has already spent $14 billion with a first flight projected for 2021. That's precisely the model that Elon doesn't want to copy. So he spends a tiny fraction of that and actually produces some flight hardware in less than a year. Hardware that unfortunately blew up in a pressure test before it got a chance to fly, but still... nobody got hurt. So learn from experience, improve manufacturing methods a bit and try again. If new problems crop up, repeat the process. I think that a lot of Starship is still a work-in-progress, with things like fins, aerodynamics and reentry heat shielding still in design flux. They are making it up as they go, something that both fascinates and horrifies traditional aerospace. Even if he doesn't spend any of SpaceX's mainstream corporate funds (the company is valued at roughly $33 billion according to CNBC, Elon personally owns a majority of the company), he still has some $500 million that Yusaku Maezawa gave him for Starship just because Maezawa thought that it was so cool. If Elon spends an average of $20 million per iteration, that's 25 iterations just using that money, with nothing coming from the mainstream part of SpaceX. By then he should have results including something in space that would justify SpaceX devoting more mainstream (not crazy) assets to Starship without endangering the company. Keep in mind that SpaceX got where it is today by taking risks that others thought were crazy. (Landing a rocket booster? Yeah, right.)

[Yazata]

SpaceX seems to have been roused from its slumbers by Felix's video about what the Cocoa SpaceX worker told him (post # 301 above).

A CNBC reporter says that the company told him that, "SpaceX has not recently laid off employees, telling me that it gave those working on Starship in Florida the choice of either continuing work in Texas or supporting other SpaceX activities in Florida. A few temporary employees decided to leave instead."

https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/stat...6981298176

The reporter also says "SpaceX says it paused, but has not fully stopped, Starship's development in Florida while the company focuses on building Starship Mk3 in Texas."

In other news, Julia Bergeron reports that Go Discovery left Port Canaveral this evening with a couple of Starship 'M' stands and a fabricated fuel tank bulkhead from Cocoa and appears to have turned south once in the Atlantic. The assumption is that it's headed for Boca Chica.

https://twitter.com/julia_bergeron/statu...3437000705

Edit: MarineTraffic.com indicates that Go Discovery's destination is indeed the port of Brownsville TX.

https://twitter.com/SpaceXFleet/status/1...5988730880

Here's a hot-off-the-presses news story that neatly summarizes the current Starship situation:

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2019/12/...ip-builds/

[Yazata]

At the Boca Chica launch site they are disassembling the corpse of poor ill-fated Poppy:

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(Photo by Mary I believe.)

[Yazata]

But despite Poppy's demise, hope springs eternal! A ring was spotted being transported into Ironhenge (the tall vertical assembly building). They may or may not be preparing to stack and weld them. (Or it may just be to help them calibrate the new automated welding machine that they are believed to be installing in there.)

Photo by Labpadre.

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Here's a video showing what's believed to be the new Boca Chica manufacturing concept. Not this particular machine necessarily, but some manufacturing process like it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...e=emb_logo

[Yazata]

Go Discovery, carrying a shipment of stuff from Cocoa FL has arrived at the Port of Brownsville TX. The Boca Chica road goes right by the port. The SpaceX operations are about 10 miles away.

Apparently one of its heavier bits of cargo was six (edit: make that eight) rolls/'coils' of stainless steel. (It's how bulk stainless comes from the steel mill and it's what becomes the Starship rings.) John Winkopp thinks that these coils of sheet steel came from Roberts Road and not from Cocoa, more evidence that SX doesn't plan to be building anything in Florida in the near future.

https://twitter.com/SpaceXFleet/status/1...67/photo/1

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Drone shot of Go Discovery's deck by Lab Padre:

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Edit: Go Discovery is already unloaded and has left port. Unclear where it's going, back to Port Canaveral?

The stuff it was carrying has already been trucked to the Boca construction yard.

https://twitter.com/SpaceXFleet/status/1...3225796614

[Yazata]

This is all that's left of the bottom half of poor Poppy. Just a month ago at Elon's big presentation it was the darling of the whole space-geek world, how soon things can turn...

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Mary has a drive-by video that she shot yesterday that starts with her heading slowly towards the beach and looking north of the road at the large new construction area being prepared next to the shipyard. New fence, dozers and graders pushing dirt around. They apparently have decided to move away from the "build rockets out in a windy field" model and are actually going to build a rocket factory and be less like a 1950's Science Fiction movie and more like Boeing... or themselves at Hawthorne. (Maybe not quite a clean-room environment yet, though.) If they are going to build rockets inside, then they are going to need a to have a lot more inside than Boca Chica currently offers. So I guess that's the next item on the agenda. That portion of Mary's video ends with the current construction area, Poppy's abandoned top half and the big grey Ironhenge vertical assembly structure.

Then the scene abruptly shifts to more new fences and piles of dirt, this time a mile away at the launch area where Mary is heading back the other way, away from the beach, and looking south of the road. She passes a sheriff's car, a gate with a porta-potty, then a sign on the fence reading "SpaceX Starship Superheavy Orbital Launch Pad, Boca Chica Tx". (If they ever succeed in launching Starships into orbit atop Superheavys there (combined they will dwarf the Saturn 5) it will be something to see. There's just dirt there right now.) Then Mary passes the existing landing pad, the launch mount where Poppy's bottom half is being scrapped and then Hoppy and the fuel tank-farm.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVwuz7wt-Cs

In more news, Raptor testing continues at McGregor. Locals report hearing several relatively short burns with lots of deep throttling, and a much longer duration burn without any throttling. (Which fits, since they are making both throttleable and non-throttleable variants.) All with the distinctive Raptor sound. (Merlins sound different.)

[Yazata]

And just like that, Poppy's gone.

From LabPadre's stream:

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Here's Mary's morning video of just another day in Boca. Some of it is filmed at the shipyard, other bits at the launch area. It shows the Boca Chica sunrise, then them playing with giant steel rings, plus some stills of the top of the ring forming machine behind the rings. (The engineers have been trying to definitively identify it.) Then cutting up the bottom half of Poppy and seemingly preparing to do the same to the top half. Then shots of workers pushing dirt around and multiple cement trucks arriving and disgorging their concrete. Plus assorted deliveries and stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...e=emb_logo

And for those of you looking for a change of career, here's a job advertisement:

https://boards.greenhouse.io/spacex/jobs...4563206002

It's a little amazing, really. It's for a "Flight Operations Engineer (Starship)" Duties include:

Develop and execute launch, flight, on-orbit, and recovery operations streamlining future Starship launches

Drive development towards power on to launch in less than one hour with zero operators on console

Apparently they want to automate and robotize as many of the now-labor-intensive countdown procedures as possible. To less than an hour with no human intervention necessary?! (Holy shit!)

(NASA will have apoplexy! That just isn't the way that they do things...)

[Yazata]

Elon's Christmas tree

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1205676667705757696

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It's Raptor SN17 at Hawthorne, preparing to ship to McGregor for testing. Done up with Christmas lights on account of the season.