(Nov 25, 2020 04:37 PM)Yazata Wrote: [...] There are rumors in Boca Chica village that residents might be required to leave entirely for up to three days for the test flight. I guess that there isn't only the now familiar explosion risk, but also some risk that all or parts of this huge thing might crash down on their heads if the landing attempt goes seriously awry. My understanding is that they plan to keep most of the flight plan out over the Gulf to minimize that risk. But it will still have to steer onshore to land, which is likely to go wrong and result in a big fireball and lots of shrapnel.
For litigation and bad publicity reasons, I'd say it was high time to force the final, obstinate residents of Boca Chica to accept a buy-out. If it wasn't for SpaceX's own plans to replace the hamlet with a private resort or Texas Spaceport, and potentially place those visitors in jeopardy.
".... with the ultimate aim of turning Boca Chica into a '21st century Spaceport.'"
(Nov 25, 2020 04:37 PM)Yazata Wrote: [...] There are rumors in Boca Chica village that residents might be required to leave entirely for up to three days for the test flight. I guess that there isn't only the now familiar explosion risk, but also some risk that all or parts of this huge thing might crash down on their heads if the landing attempt goes seriously awry. My understanding is that they plan to keep most of the flight plan out over the Gulf to minimize that risk. But it will still have to steer onshore to land, which is likely to go wrong and result in a big fireball and lots of shrapnel.
For litigation and bad publicity reasons, I'd say it was high time to force the final, obstinate residents of Boca Chica to accept a buy-out. If it wasn't for SpaceX's own plans to replace the hamlet with a private resort or Texas Spaceport, and potentially place those visitors in jeopardy.
".... with the ultimate aim of turning Boca Chica into a '21st century Spaceport.'"
Those poor Boca Chicans facing a dilemma, stay home and have a bomb drop on your head or stay home and avoid Covid.
YazataNov 25, 2020 07:49 PM (This post was last modified: Nov 25, 2020 10:01 PM by Yazata.)
It isn't just the handful of Boca Chicans who haven't sold out to SpaceX. I believe that SpaceX is using the houses that they've purchased as company housing, to house engineers temporarily in from California or wherever. There's been quite a bit of housing renovation. SpaceX has even constructed a landscaped trailer park full of silver Airstreams to house less favored 'trailer trash' workers. That area has been given a catchy name that I don't remember - 'Mars Gateway' or something like that. They've also turned the former tiny village convenience store into a restaurant with an outdoor dining area topped by the silver aft flaps from the former Mk.1. (I call it the Rocket Diner because that's what it looks like.) So there may be more people in Boca Chica now than before SpaceX arrived like a hurricane. Most of the old residents were seasonal 'snow-birds' anyway, in for the winter from places like Michigan. The new residents fill it up year round, but are mostly SpaceX employees and hence easier to herd around for the tests.
Today the news is that they have installed the nose on Sn9. This time the deed was done in the new high bay instead of at the launch pad like with Sn8. Presumably integration of the electrical and plumbing systems is better done at the build area than at the bare-bones pad. So Sn9, Sn8's backup, is complete apart from some final integration stuff.
In order to move the whole thing to the pad (it's big) they have been doing mods on the SPMTs (self-propelled modular transporters), the actual name for what everyone has been calling the Roll Lift crawlers. The previous rocket sections have ridden atop two of these. The recent mods have consisted of building a framework of I-beams atop them to allow them to take a wider stance. There's question whether the narrow two-lane road can take it, so they've been testing their new transporter on soft dirt surfaces. And reportedly the state of Texas did some road improvements on the road a while back, improving the shoulders of the road, so that the edges of the road are now said to be stronger than the middle which is softer. So SpaceX thinks it will work. (At some point in the future SpaceX will have to pay for some extensive road work between the build and launch sites.)
The blockhead in the foreground of Mary's photograph is flight veteran Sn5, which is believed destined to become the bottom part of the full-scale mockup of the Starship lunar lander that SpaceX is proposing for nasa. There's a white painted nose with the nasa worm logo and an American flag sitting nearby. 5 will probably be getting a white paint job too.
I don't have any but what happens to Tesla Stock ($570 US approx) if a catastrophe occurs like a town destroyed or huge loss of life? Does the company go belly up?
C CNov 25, 2020 09:37 PM (This post was last modified: Nov 25, 2020 09:38 PM by C C.)
(Nov 25, 2020 08:36 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: I don't have any but what happens to Tesla Stock ($570 US approx) if a catastrophe occurs like a town destroyed or huge loss of life? Does the company go belly up?
On paper, Tesla and SpaceX are supposed to be distinct public and private business entities, despite hyperbole about mergers in the past. However, the publicity of one can affect the other through non-company channels and the underlying, shared Musk relationship.
EXCERPT: When rocket launches go wrong, space insurers can step in and prevent companies from dealing with the costs [...] With the development of more reliable, cheaper rockets, the space insurance business can continue to grow while the probability of launch failure decreases year after year. The U.S. government’s backing and support of the commercial space industry has allowed it to flourish into what it is today.
[...] With about fifty companies in the space insurance business, this niche market happens to provide consistent returns, as CNN reports that these firms collected $715 million in premiums and paid out $635 million in claims last year. The space insurance business and the commercial space industry as a whole would not have existed without Congress’s intervention. Congress amended the Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984 in 1988 to allow for the government to insure against genuinely large-scale disasters...
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EXCERPT: As companies revolutionize space flight, outer space is shaping up to become a major market for the insurance industry. [...] “There will be an increasing need for third party liability coverage, simply because when you have a proliferation of commercial non-state interests and commercial activities in order, it is just pure statistics that you’re more likely to see either physical or electromagnetic interference between different operators in orbit and also from orbit with the ground,” he explains.
”As a commercial operation in space expands, then you will have an expansion of risk; therefore, I suspect there’s an increasing need for third party liability. There will be some novel elements to that [such as] physical damage caused by something falling out of the sky; it’s been contemplated in lots of areas including aviation liability, of course, but aviation has the benefit of legal regimes that give insurers a degree of certainty. You don’t have quite the same thing for space risks.”
Within the next decade, Slomski also predicts that there will be a greater need for a more comprehensive international liability regime. “It’s a great area for lawyers to think hard about — you want certainty and uniformity of legal rules, and I don’t think we have that right now,” he adds.
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EXCERPT: The SpaceX Starship has yet to soar, but the same can’t be said for the mission’s insurance requirements [...] As part of the license, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. ... is required to maintain insurance policies covering $300 million for starship pre-launch activities and policies covering $198 million for potential claims that result from the starship prototype suborbital flight testing from Boca Chica, Texas. The insurance policy requirements for suborbital flight testing ... were initially set at $100 million...
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EXCERPT: To get a license from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), companies need to have third-party liability coverage to cover any damages to outside people or businesses caused by the launch. Companies looking to launch uncrewed vehicles into space will also likely purchase insurance policies for their rockets or satellites.
“There’s no particular liability that’s different from what they’ve been doing in the past,” Kunstadter said. “They still have to have a license to launch and, in order to get the license, they have to show financial responsibility, as does any company launching from U.S. soil.”
For uncrewed launches, challenges come as more companies start launching vehicles into space, creating the opportunity for crashes and other types of accidents that simply haven’t occurred before. “If you’ve got a proliferation of commercial operators in orbit, then eventually someone is going to cause damage to someone else, whether it’s in orbit or on the ground,” Slomski said. “So the risk landscape is going to become more complex.”
When it comes to crewed launches, the types of coverage needed and who purchases them depends on whether the crew is made up of NASA astronauts, company employees or third-party participants [space tourists]. “The rocket doesn’t know who it’s carrying, whether it’s carrying NASA astronauts, or employees of the launching company, or third parties,” Kunstadter said. “There are various liabilities for that.”
If a rocket is crewed by NASA astronauts, as was the case in the SpaceX launch, then NASA provides the insurance coverage for their personnel. If a company provides its own crew members for the launch, then they would likely be covered under some kind of workers’ compensation policy.
(Nov 25, 2020 08:36 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: I don't have any but what happens to Tesla Stock ($570 US approx) if a catastrophe occurs like a town destroyed or huge loss of life? Does the company go belly up?
SpaceX and Tesla are legally separate companies. So legal liability accrued by one won't extend to the other.
Of course if Elon is sued individually and gets a big judgment against him, he might have to sell TSLA stock to pay it off, which could drive down the Tesla price. For a while at least. TSLA is so hot that many investors would see such a dip as a buying opportunity and push the TSLA price right back up.
YazataNov 26, 2020 10:36 PM (This post was last modified: Nov 26, 2020 11:34 PM by Yazata.)
Toby Li reports that SpaceX has reserved the "Cameron County ampitheater" which is a small county park at the southern tip of South Padre Island where that latter town has built a viewing area for SpaceX launches in hopes of attracting tourists, on Monday 11-30 and on Tuesday 12-1. Toby says that it will be for the use of SpaceX employees to watch. It's about six miles from the launch site.
Which suggests that employees won't be able to watch from the build site where they customarily watch. Which in turn suggests that Mary won't be able to watch (and livestream) from there either.
Nomadd says that he would choose to watch from the high-rise beachfront hotels in South Padre, which are fractionally futher away but higher up so their view isn't obstructed by the coastal dunes and stuff like that.
Lab Padre will be better off than Mary and Nomadd, since while Lab's camera tower is closer, half way between the build site and the launch site, it's remotely operated and unmanned. Lab lives in South Padre and operates his cameras from there. Probably the only better view of what happens will be from SpaceX's own cameras, at the launch area and on the vehicle itself. Elon promises a stream.
Below is an old satellite photo from before SpaceX built the area up. It shows the little one-street Boca Chica village. The build area is by Stargate and the Giant Tents are by the U in UTRGV. If you look upwards from the first G towards the village, you will see an intersection where the main road meets a road going up to the east end of the village. That junction is where the new restaurant with the Mk.1 fins is by the parabolic dishes. It's where the Sheriffs usually have their last hard roadblock, its where SpaceX employees customarily watch and it's where Mary often films.
YazataNov 27, 2020 12:24 AM (This post was last modified: Nov 27, 2020 12:29 AM by Yazata.)
One of the eagle-eyed viewers of the Lab Padre stream caught Sn8 waving its forward flaps at the camera -- some are calling them elonerons (from Elon and ailerons) -- and posted this gif on nsf.
Still no FAA temporary flight restrictions for Monday's much-anticipated Sn-8 flight. Rumor out of Space-X has it that the flight is being pushed back until at least later in the week. I don't know why, though the weather forecast doesn't look all that good for Monday. Or maybe it's just bureaucratic slowness at the FAA. (They are pretty good about getting TFR's out quickly though.)
Seems kind of strange that Musk builds electric cars to reduce automobile ghg emissions while his rockets rip thru the atmosphere. I’ve read rocketfuel shares only a small portion of the total human contribution but what about thousands of flights. Just how many flights is Musk envisioning for Space X per year? Then there’s the competition.
Nov 25, 2020 05:14 PM
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