There wasn't any static fire today, despite Mary receiving a warning notice yesterday for today.
Mary has received another static fire "overpressure" notice for tomorrow, Friday Jan 8.
The unlimited tfr's for Friday (Jan8) and Saturday (Jan9) have been canceled. But the one for Sunday (Jan10) remains and two new ones have been announced for Monday (Jan11) and Tuesday (Jan12).
So it's now looking like Sn9's flight will be on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, assuming that tomorrow's static fire performs as desired. I'm guessing that they are still tinkering with the new helium pressurization for the methane header tank.
Tim Dodd says that he's currently in South Padre Island in anticipation of the flight. Apparently he's plotting with Nomadd to get closeup video of the flight. Perhaps a remote control camera on Nomadd's Boca Chica roof. Tim has filmed from Nomadd's roof before, but everyone will be evacuated from the village for this one so it will have to be a robot camera.
But it will be hard to beat Lab Padre's new remote-control launch pad camera, set up in a shipping container right across the road from the launch site.
There's plenty of people with lots of expensive exotic camera gear out there. All space-nuts, even if they aren't exactly amateurs. (Some of them make a living doing this.) The legacy mainstream news media once again doesn't seem to care or even know what's happening. But tens of thousands of space-nuts all around the world know.
YazataJan 11, 2021 09:58 PM (This post was last modified: Jan 12, 2021 01:38 AM by Yazata.)
The expected static fire on Friday didn't happen. There seemed to be something wrong with the tank farm, so the vehicle was never fueled. That evening a crane lifted something out. It might have been pumps or valves. Presumably the offending bits have been replaced.
The problem today seems to be weather. There was a storm over the weekend with lots of rain on Saturday and lots of wind on Sunday.
Edit: The wind might have been even worse than I thought. Here's an overturned cement truck on the road west of the build site. Hope it wasn't full of cement.
Static fire is currently expected tomorrow with a flight penciled in for Wednesday or Thursday. That isn't written in stone and these things have a habit of slipping, so it's looking increasingly doubtful given the weather conditions. That's hard on all the photographers and space nuts who are in South Padre in anticipation, but good for the hotels that are housing them.
Here's one of Tim Dodd's remote controlled cameras. It's professional gear.
Others like nasaspaceflight.com are putting similarly sophisticated robot cameras in Boca too. So even when the village and the build area are evacuated, there will still be eyes in there. And there's LabPadre's Pad Cam right across the road from the launch site.
YazataJan 12, 2021 02:28 AM (This post was last modified: Jan 12, 2021 05:40 AM by Yazata.)
Mary has received the by-now-familiar warning notice for tomorrow Tuesday Jan 12. So the static fire is still on, even if the flight might not happen this week due to weather.
YazataJan 12, 2021 11:52 PM (This post was last modified: Jan 13, 2021 07:12 PM by Yazata.)
Still very windy today. Hoppy (who apparently commands the launch area) was heard earlier blaring out of its loudspeakers: "Attention Boca Chica! Winds are currently exceeding on-lift personnel safety limits. Please halt all lift activity at this time! Please halt all lift activity at this time!" (Hoppy cares about the safety of Elon's workers!) But Hoppy relented an hour later and authorized the boom-lifts to go back up.
But Hoppy's getting impatient. It just blared, "Attention on the pad! We will need to be pad clear in 10 minutes in order for us to make an attempt for today."
The Sheriffs have just appeared at the roadblock site about ten minutes ago and set up their soft road block (only SpaceX cars allowed in) but 30 minutes past Hoppy's ten-minute warning the pad still isn't clear. Cars are trickling out though. (LabPadre's chat suggests that the pad probably operates on Elon-time, where 'ten minutes' in Elon's time-distortion field can mean 'two hours' on Earth.)
While we are waiting for whatever might happen, enjoy Kimi Talvitie's Starship workout video
YazataJan 13, 2021 05:52 PM (This post was last modified: Jan 14, 2021 05:13 AM by Yazata.)
Another day of watching Elon's giant gain silo. Wind at ground level is quiet today.
10:50 AM CST - Sheriffs have closed the road again. Pad still isn't clear but vehicles are gradually leaving.
10:58 AM CST - Last cars have left and pad is clear.
12:00 noon CST - Tank farm is venting
12:20 PM CST - lots of engine venting from vehicle. Static fire should be soon (if they don't abort).
12:30 PM CST - Some kind of weird static fire just happened. There was no warning siren! Static fire was short and sound was odd at the end. Good news is that there weren't any fire balls or explosions. Speculation that the engines didn't start simultaneously. Currently going through the video frame by frame to verify staggered start. (The Sn8 landing burn had a staggered start, one engine then the other, so it's probably intentional.)
1:06 PM CST - Elon (who watches the streams) just posted this to clear up the consternation:
"Today at SpaceX is about practicing Starship engine starts. Ship is held down by massive pins while engines are fired. Two starts completed, about to try a third."
Since there was only one static fire already today, opinion is that Elon means the last SF was a two engine start (Sn8 landing used two engine staggered start that fed off the header that had pressurization problems) and they apparently still want to fire the third engine too.
2:12 PM CST - Vehicle venting and siren just sounded!
3:38 PM CST - Two, count'em two more static fires! Prior to today, they only managed one static fire per day. Today they fired off three in 3 hours!! Like Elon said, they were practicing engine starts today and are getting it down to a routine. It's being pointed out that if they had noted anything wrong with the data in the first fires, they wouldn't have done the subsequent ones.
Edit: Closures for tomorrow cancelled. That's a good sign that says that they are done with static fires. The next road closures are for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week. That's when Sn9's flight is expected. Temporary flight restrictions are still for tomorrow, Friday and Saturday. They will have to be adjusted.
In what must be an 'only in Boca Chica' moment, here's a giant Mars rocket in the background, with a pirate ship passing in the foreground! (I think that it's a tourist excursion boat in South Padre Island.)
Aaargh! Makes me thirsty for some rum, just thinkin' about it.
It tracks the observed time yesterday between various venting events prior to engine ignition and engine ignition.
'Con' = condenser in the tank farm that puts out lots of vapor.
'SV' is skirt vent, vapor visible coming out the bottom
'MV' is what he calls "methane vent" since it comes from up by the methane tank. My guess is that it's from the methane header embedded in the common dome or perhaps from the helium pressurization system that they are using to pressurize it in Sn9.
'TV' is Tri-vent. This one is obvious and very visible with three copious and at times forceful streams of LOX vapor from equidistant points around the top of the thrust skirt. (Presumably one associated with each engine.)
The condenser starts its activity first and Adrian noted that of the three engine ignitions yesterday, the condenser preceded the ignitions by 34:37 to 39:05. That's a range of 4 minutes, 28 seconds. So the condenser precedes engine ignition by 35 to 40 minutes approx.
The skirt vent preceded engine ignition from 17:05 to 17:40. That's a variation of 35 seconds. That might be associated with GSE and propellant loading.
The methane vent comes about a minute later, from 16:05 to 16:25. Variation of 20 seconds. That might be associated with propellant flowing into the methane header.
But the obvious and highly visible tri-vent is the one to closely watch. It came from 11:53 to 11:54 prior to engine ignition for a variation of one second out of three ignitions!! That's close enough to set a countdown timer for 11 minutes and 53 seconds when the tri-vent is observed. I'm guessing that it's associated with propellant flowing down to the engines.
Here it is. It's generating quite a bit of interest from the engineers.
These are just his results for yesterday. He has spreadsheets for all of the Boca Chica Raptor ignitions.
I'm not really convinced of the reliability of the engines at this point. Starting them seems to be a battle when they need to start reliably in flight to complete the propulsive landing. And there's some question about how well they can run without breaking.
So while there have been rumors about Blue Origin having problems with their new BE-4 engines, I kind of suspect that SpaceX is having trouble with their Raptors too.
Unknown whether new engines will necessitate another static fire. Tim Dodd, who has been living in a hotel room in South Padre for a couple of weeks in anticipation of Sn9's flight, asked Elon that question. Elon artfully dodged answering it. Speculation that a flight might still be several weeks off. Some of the many photographers and space nuts who had gathered in South Padre are starting to leave.
(Jan 15, 2021 06:24 PM)Yazata Wrote: Apparently their triple static fire that was supposedly so successful ended up breaking two of the three Raptor engines!
"Two of the engines need slight repairs, so will be switched out"
I'm not really convinced of the reliability of the engines at this point. Starting them seems to be a battle when they need to start reliably in flight to complete the propulsive landing. And there's some question about how well they can run without breaking.
So while there have been rumors about Blue Origin having problems with their new BE-4 engines, I kind of suspect that SpaceX is having trouble with their Raptors too.
Indications that the broken engines are being removed as I write this.
Unknown whether new engines will necessitate another static fire. Tim Dodd, who has been living in a hotel room in South Padre for a couple of weeks in anticipation of Sn9's flight, asked Elon that question. Elon artfully dodged answering it. Speculation that a flight might still be several weeks off. Some of the many photographers and space nuts who had gathered in South Padre are starting to leave.
Also, the whole idea that reusable vessels can land on and and take-off from the soil of unruly, extraterrestrial landscapes without worry of the engines having been damaged by kicked-up debris and varying conditions while resting there has perhaps been a naïve hope (minus a radical re-conception of rocket engines).
Even the Apollo lunar module relied on the engine of that protected, virgin second stage to get off the Moon, not the one exposed to the surface that landed. Likewise the Chang'e 5 that recently returned lunar samples.
Jan 8, 2021 09:32 AM
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