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BFR Developments

#51
Yazata Offline
On Saturday the SpaceX engineers were looking at the engine. Considering the havoc it caused Wednesday and Friday nights (unleashing the fires of Hell) it looks innocent and pristine, at least superficially. ("Who, me? I didn't do anything!") Not blown apart or covered in sooty residue or seemingly any worse for wear. It's designed for reusability and for many restarts.

An (Australian?) visitor to the US took a detour from his itinerary to take a look at this thing and was amazed by how close he could get. He was standing with the security guard at the gate when the last two cars drove out and stopped to talk! They said that nothing was scheduled for Saturday night. Things resume at 0800 Sunday morning when they said a shipment is due to arrive. Didn't say of what. (The LOX and methane tankers? New supplies and parts, perhaps for upgrades prior to untethered flights?)

It's interesting comparing SpaceX with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin which is currently working on its huge New Glenn rocket. (Roughly the size of the Falcon Super Heavy, but without the Starship spaceship atop it.) Blue Origin seems to be super secretive about most of what they are doing, while SpaceX lets everyone see all their BFR activities from surprisingly up close. And believe me, people all around the world are watching.

Saturday photo by local resident Evelyn Arevalo (who isn't BCG).


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(Apr 6, 2019 05:29 AM)Yazata Wrote: But BCG was watching... and her detailed photos get lots of attention from the engineering geeks...

One of the engineering geeks remarked that some of BCG's photos were displayed in recent internal briefings he's attended at what he called "HEOMD". 'HEOMD' turns out to be NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Missions Directorate!

https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/heo/about.html

Another of the geeks is an ISS guy from Johnson Space Center. One said that he'd love to watch the Falcon Heavy launch in person on Tuesday or Wednesday, but has to "fly to Kourou".

So we discover (a) why some of them speak so authoritatively and really seem to know what they are talking about when it comes to rockets and space vehicles, and (b) that the established space powers are indeed paying very close attention to everything that's happening on a remote beach at Boca Chica Texas, and to BocaChicaGal's do-it-yourself self-motivated photographs and videos documenting it.

I think that we can assume that Boeing, ULA, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Roscosmos are probably watching as well. Alongside thousands of anonymous space geeks.
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#52
Yazata Offline
Now we know why the engineers were looking at the engine. It's been removed from the Hopper and trucked off to parts unknown. (McGregor? California?)

Do they want to dismantle it and look for signs of wear? Do they want to work more on solving the icing problem that threw them off for several days?

Do they want to hook it to a test-stand and get more experience with throttling it up and down? That's my own guess. (Guess is all it is.) Real untethered flights that involve hovering and propulsive descents will require precise control of the engine. If there's any truth to that, the engine is probably headed to the engine test stands at McGregor.
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#53
Yazata Offline
Test activity has been quiet at Boca Chica for the last couple of weeks. The Hopper is still sitting there, minus its engine.

But that doesn't mean that nothing is happening.

They are pouring lots of concrete. Part of it looks like building foundations for large hangers. Part of it is a giant circular concrete construction jig, apparently for spaceship sections. Assembly of the second Hopper is proceeding. (Elon Musk says that the second one is orbital, but I remain skeptical.)

Many trucks are delivering what looks like sand (to a beach!!). The new material seems to be adding to and extending the protective berms. (Maybe they were surprised by how much flame the first two tests put out.) Meanwhile bulldozers are scraping the local sand away. The explanation for that peculiar behavior seems to be that most native sands aren't good for their purposes since sand grains are rounded by weathering. They need very finely divided crushed rock (called "fines") with angular shapes so that it stays put.  

A large white truck (lorry to you Brits) arrived today and a crane is hovering over it. No telling what's in it. I was hoping one or more rocket engines returning to the site but apparently not. Whatever the crane is lifting (long white boxes) is said by eye-witnesses to appear lightweight, they way it's moving under the crane.

Elon Musk is the guy who has accepted the mission to make science fiction real. For CC and her retro-sensibility:


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#54
C C Offline
(Apr 25, 2019 09:56 PM)Yazata Wrote: Elon Musk is the guy who has accepted the mission to make science fiction real. For CC and her retro-sensibility:


Kind of highlights the Boca Chica facility lacking railroad tracks (or they're not readily visible like in the vintage portrayal). Didn't consider trains obsolete yet for that kind of operation. The nearest industrial park has rail transport branching off to it, lots of chemical tank cars traveling in and out. Locomotive power still popular in Kazakhstan's middle of nowhere.

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#55
Yazata Offline
Here's a pretty cool video shot in the last few days by LabPadre (the guy in South Padre Island who has the best live stream to watch when testing is taking place) from a small airplane showing the hopper and its launch site almost on the beach. The scene quickly shifts to the spot a mile or so west where the new "orbital" hopper is being built next to a distinctive large white hangerlike structure. There seem to be three centers of SpaceX activity, with the new "orbital" hopper under construction a bit to the west of Boca Chica Village and the existing hopper and its fuel tanks and iconic flare stack a mile or so away to the East near the beach. Finally the video flies over the South Padre Island resort with its hotels.

You can see how close the middle SpaceX facility is to Boca Chica Village, the one street un-incorporated 'town' where BCG lives. Literally across the street. When the testing is underway, 'soft' roadblocks on the Boca Chica beach road are off to the west, but allow local residents and SpaceX employees with passes through. Then there's a 'hard' roadblock at Boca Chica village that halts all road traffic to the beach where the Hopper is.

This air photo from Teslarati will help you place the scenes in the video. It shows the Boca Chica operation at a much earlier stage of development. The red thing marks where the Hopper, fuel and oxidizer tanks and flare stack are. There seems to currently be expansion underway there, with what might be a new landing/launching area and new berms. South Padre up at the very top is where LabPadre's live-stream cam is situated atop a hotel. And the blue marker marks where the control center and the parabolic dishes are. BCG's little one-street town is visible there too. It's where the hard roadblock is located on test days. The new Hopper is now under construction off to the left of the blue marker where a large white structure has sprung up since this photo and new hanger foundations are being poured as we speak. There will be new buildings there. Lots of shipping containers are collecting, probably containing rocket parts. (Elon says that many components are being made in LA and shipped to Boca Chica.) If the new Hopper is really going to be orbital (I think that sub-orbital is more likely) it will need to be a lot more elaborate than the existing Hopper, which may never reach an altitude higher than 100 meters or so. Many more parts, and the new one won't be made out of tinfoil.

A question: If they are going to be building really big rockets off to the left of the blue thing, but launching them from near the red thing, how are they going to move them?


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To CC: Nope, no railroad tracks that I can see. Everything comes in on that one road.

It doesn't really look like a rocket launch pad out there where the red thing is, too much dirt and too many Texas pickups, but it's apparently where they have segregated all the explosive bits, the Hopper and the methane tanks.

Watch the video here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...1JKRJgQ_Ws
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#56
Yazata Offline
(Apr 25, 2019 11:11 PM)C C Wrote: Kind of highlights the Boca Chica facility lacking railroad tracks... Locomotive power still popular in Kazakhstan's middle of nowhere.

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The Russians have always had kind of a retro sensibility. The communists tried to impose kind of an industrial-futurist aesthetic on them in the 1920's, but it never really took. So there's always been kind of an Edwardian feeling to Russian design, as if everything kind of froze in 1918.

If it wasn't for the rocket, that train could be 19th century. (I guess that it's diesel, but it's belching enough smoke to be a coal-burner.)

I've always loved the antennas on the Russian Kurs docking system that they use on their Soyuz capsules. (Visible to the left of the nose in this photo.)


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Its curviness reminds me of an antique gramophone horn.


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#57
Yazata Offline
Lots of new information about what's next up for the Hopper from Teslarati, illustrated by BCG's photographs of cement trucks swarming over the beachside launchsite. (They were at the more westerly construction site as well where building foundations are being poured.) They note that while Hopper testing isn't happening at Boca Chica, lots of construction is.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starhop...tor-tests/

Included:

"A handful of concise tweets published by Musk in the last few days of April implicitly confirmed that the next steps for Starhopper involved untethered flights off its South Texas pad, once again powered by a single Raptor engine."

Apparently three serial-production Raptor engines have been produced so far. It sounds like SN-01 was seriously damaged during testing at McGregor. SN-02 was the engine fired on the Hopper a month ago, with the Hopper basically serving as its test-stand. And SN-03 is currently at McGregor undergoing a full testing workup. Elon Musk has just verified that SN-O3 was the engine that was just observed undergoing an impressive 40 second fire on the stand at McGregor.  

The tanking tests observed earlier are reported to have initially been liquid nitrogen, relatively inert. The purpose of these tests was to look for leaks and to prove the ground support equipment's ability to handle cryogenic liquids. Then there were several tanking tests with liquid methane and liquid oxygen. The article doesn't mention the icing problem that apparently delayed them. Then the two SN-02 test fires that totalled less than ten seconds total run-time. After which, the engine was removed and trucked off to who-knows-where. Presumably the engineers want to examine SN-02, given what happened to SN-01.

Elon Musk specifically denies that there were any issues with SN-02 that caused it to be pulled after only two test fires at Boca Chica. He says, "No, just preparing for untethered hover tests".

Elon also reveals that initial hover tests will use one engine rather than the three engines that are coming later for more ambitious higher altitude flights. I'm guessing that maybe the higher altitude three-engine flights won't use the fairly crude original Hopper but the new one instead. Elon has called the second Hopper "orbital", but I'm skeptical. (That would make it the first single-stage-to-orbit vehicle in history.) My guess is that it will ascend to space sub-orbitally and then descend propulsively like the Falcon 9 first stages.
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#58
Yazata Offline
Here's some video shot last week by Labpadre (the guy with the best live-stream when tests are occurring) with lots of closeups of the original Hopper. People are calling it the "watertower", for obvious reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...zqDMF-RivI

The last few days, since this video was shot, it's been a hive of activity. Lots of work being done by guys in hard-hats at the bottom where the missing engine goes. My guess (I'm not an engineer, what do I know?) is that when a new engine arrives and is installed, it won't just be fixed immovably pointing downwards. It will have a much more elaborate mounting capable of gimbaling in multiple axes, to allow vectored thrust. If they are installing that now, untethered flights might be in the offing and a new engine might be arriving soon.

Vectoring the thrust to control a free-flying vehicle will require an elaborate control system, which perhaps is being installed as we speak.

It's not just the bottom of the thing. There's also lots of activity atop the Hopper with unidentifiable (to me, anyway) pieces of gear being attached.

Edit: the new gear has been identified as parts of the attitude control system from a Falcon 9. (They're using off the shelf components.) These apparently include cold gas reaction control thrusters. Probably not for maneuvering in the vacuum of space, which this particular vehicle is unlikely to ever reach, but to provide roll control authority while only using one engine. If they have two or more rocket engines offset from the vehicle's center axis, they can gimbal opposite ways to create torque around the center axis. But you can't do that with just one engine. So there needs to be some other way to control roll. There was writing on the side of the Hopper too. BCG got some closeups and somebody blew them up and one of the things written seems to be "ACS centerline". (Attitude control system?) The Falcon 9 thruster pod went in a spot labeled "ACS pod here".

A big blue cross-shaped outline has been painted on the thing's domed top. Unless everyone has suddenly got religion, something interesting is probably due to be installed in that spot. It hadn't been installed as of this afternoon.

After pouring lots of concrete and installing a big new liquified gas tank last week, the crews remain busy as bees this week. Now they are buzzing around the vehicle itself, attaching lots of new parts. It might be in the process of actually becoming a rocket-powered aircraft rather than a watertower.
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#60
C C Offline
(May 8, 2019 03:40 AM)Yazata Wrote: Here's an actual video of the last time that Elon didn't have roll under control...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...ewyvQEqsS4

LOL. I'm guessing there was extensive use of AI deepfake technology there. Or else somebody extremely gifted with old-fashioned video/audio editing (even tediously, manually hiding/correcting sloppiness frame-by-frame if that's what it took).
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