(Oct 12, 2021 04:12 AM)Yazata Wrote: There hasn't been much rocket action at Starbase as they wait on FAA approval for an orbital Starship launch. That could take months.
But things are happening. A new Starship (Ship 21) and a new Booster (B5) are under construction. The new wider High Bay has its foundations mostly in and prefabbed framing is being delivered.
At the Launch area the Orbital Tankfarm is being finished and we have seen some liquid nitrogen testing of its labyrinthine plumbings, pumps and valves. Work continues on the Orbital Launch Mount which is covered in scaffolding.
And most exciting, they are constructing Elon's crazy Grabber Arms that he promises can grab a landing spaceship out of the air making landing legs unnecessary. (And everyone thought that he was kidding. Think again!)
Photo of the arms from the nasaspaceflight.com stream. They aren't exactly small. Everyone calls them the Chopsticks, because Elon said something about plucking flies out of the air with chopsticks. It isn't clear what will move them together like tweezers, whether hydraulic or electric. The whole arm assembly will move up and down the tower, powered by cables connected to huge pulleys and the powerful Draw Works that SpaceX pulled off one of their offshore oil drilling platforms.
The whole thing moves up and down the tower on roller assemblies (photo below). And this afternoon a crane appears to have dropped one! By all accounts nobody was injured, but it's an industrial accident and work is currently halted.
(Oct 12, 2021 05:26 AM)C C Wrote: Looks like a lounge of mechagodizillas.
Elon calls the finished tower with its multiple arms 'Mechazilla'. It's less a Cape Canaveral style launch tower than it is a Giant Robot! More machine than tower.
YazataOct 20, 2021 06:49 AM (This post was last modified: Oct 20, 2021 06:54 AM by Yazata.)
Today's big event today at Starbase, the spaceport that doesn't exist, was preparations to lift the massive Mechazilla robot arms. Kong, the Liebherr 11350 crane (second biggest in the world) lifted the assembled arms and the attached carriage that they will ride up and down the tower a short distance (~5-7 meters) in the air as everything was adjusted so that the arms were balanced and the tensions were right on all the lifting cables. (Took a lot of adjustment, craneology is a surprisingly complex science.) Then the whole thing was set down again. It's anticipated that the grand lift will occur early tomorrow morning. Attaching it to the tower will be a big job.
And last night they conducted some kind of static fire of one of the new vacuum Raptors attached to the bottom of Ship 20. Thinking is that it was a preburner test since the big belch of flaming gas seemed to produce little thrust. Mary has received another overpressure notice for Wednesday evening so it's expected that a full ignition static fire of the Rvac will occur then. It's unknown how they will do a static fire which requires complete pad-clear while the arms still aren't completely attached to the tower. We will see.
And in other news, a big white horizontal methane tank and a huge cryoshell arrived to complete the tank structure of the new orbital tank farm. (The cryo-shell is a big covering that will go over a steel tank intended for cryogenic liquids with the gap between the inner tank and the outer shell filled with insulating material.) Despite all the large tanks having now arrived, there remains a lot of plumbing and plumbing testing before the new tank farm is ready for business.
Photo by Mary of the tank and the cryo-shell arriving this morning
And this from the no-longer Daily Hopper. (The guy who draws it got a senior position at a European satellite manufacturer and can't devote as much time to his beloved comic strip.)
YazataOct 20, 2021 04:10 PM (This post was last modified: Oct 20, 2021 05:41 PM by Yazata.)
Chopsticks have gone up and are currently being attached to the tower! That's going to be a big job and tonight's static fire has been postponed, as I suspected it would be. They don't want to leave this thing (literally) hanging.
Edit last I checked it's up to a whopping 843,000 views. Will top a million soon.
Edit-2 as of Sunday morning about 15 1/2 hours after it was posted, it's up to 2.1 million views! That isn't half bad for a spaceport that doesn't even exist.
YazataOct 29, 2021 06:29 PM (This post was last modified: Oct 29, 2021 07:05 PM by Yazata.)
Pieces of SpaceX's new Liebherr 11000 crane, last seen on an autobahn in eastern Germany, have started arriving at Starbase.
These cranes are so huge that they are transported in pieces and assembled (by smaller cranes) at each job site (nobody ever said that craneology is easy). From the looks of it, SpaceX isn't leasing this one and has purchased it new from the manufacturer.
YazataOct 30, 2021 05:52 PM (This post was last modified: Oct 31, 2021 02:06 AM by Yazata.)
In just one day, the new crane is coming together faster than I expected. It's designed for "easy" assembly, I guess (for those who find moving and precisely positioning huge multi-ton pieces of machinery easy). It already has its body and its crawler treads and is recognizably a crane. Doesn't have its boom yet. (When the box says "some assembly required" they aren't kidding.) I wonder whether SpaceX had to assemble it or whether Liebherr sends an assembly crew. (Liebherr is a German company but its US subsidiary has a Houston office.)
The Mechazilla Grabber Arms have moved, no doubt propelled by the hydraulic cylinders above as work continues.
Two more Raptor vacuum engines have been installed in 20.
Work continues to prepare B4 for whatever they plan to do with it. I think that they still anticipate flying it for the first orbital test. The schedule-delay factors are 1. completing the launch site, and 2. FAA bureaucratic approvals. But B5 is coming along in the High Bay, with lots of incremental improvements. So if this takes too long, they might just fly 5.
Perlite expansion ovens have been set up to prepare perlite for use as thermal insulation between the cryoliquid storage tanks and their shells. Perlite is a glassy igneous rock, with water inclusions in it. When ground-up perlite is heated in ovens the glass softens and the water boils, puffing the perlite up to some 20x its original size, like rock popcorn. Produces very good low-density thermal insulation that's widely used in the liquified natural gas industry.
(Amazing the things you learn watching spaceships being built. Giant cranes, perlite...) Lots of heavy construction and industrial processes visible.
Structural framing for the new wider High Bay has started to rise.
And a new booster test tank has appeared and is being installed atop the new booster thrust simulater, with some 30 hydraulic rams to simulate the pressure of rocket thrust on the bottom of the tank.
That's just one day. Even when there's no rocket launches, Starbase doesn't sleep. There's always something happening. A three ring circus (more like 20). Pretty good, considering that it doesn't even exist.
Oct 12, 2021 05:26 AM
(This post was last modified: Oct 12, 2021 05:29 AM by C C.)
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