SpaceX Starship test flights

Taking advantage of our new Space Flight section. :) SpaceX's Starship program is pretty interesting for science geeks — and very ambitious. Spectacular, too!

For anyone unfamiliar with this, it's all about Elon Musk's plan to get to Mars in a few years' time. (And he's likely to succeed.)

Sci-Fi fans realized they were in the real world when SN10 was rolled out a few days ago to stand alongside SN9. It did look like CGI in a movie.

https://projectavalon.net/SN9_and_SN10.png

Then and now!

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/as....0/2009543.jpg

So here's what happened yesterday in SN9's launch. No spoilers. :)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CTwBllaqcME

Another video — quite a good one — with commentary analysis (and some guesswork!), with higher resolution slo-mo images.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=zwZl6YV3xYA

And an interesting Tweet from Elon Musk. :) (Maybe 'MadOverlord' will be offered a job)

Engineering context: the Starship has 3 rocket engines, named 'Raptors'. To flip it back upright for a soft landing, two engines are needed. On SN9's test flight, one engine failed, and the one remaining engine wasn't enough to save it.

https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/...56507847561217

Quote:

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Posted by Bill Ryan

And an interesting Tweet from Elon Musk. :) (Maybe 'MadOverlord' will be offered a job)

Engineering context: the Starship has 3 rocket engines, named 'Raptors'. To flip it back upright for a soft landing, two engines are needed. On SN9's test flight, one engine failed, and the one remaining engine wasn't enough to save it.

https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/...56507847561217

---

That really was interesting. There was much speculation on Twitter about whether Elon Musk was being sarcastic. After all, it's an obvious suggestion: Starships have 3 engines, and only 2 are needed for a soft landing.

It turns out that he was entirely serious. They'll implement the changes with the otherwise-identical SN10 (still undamaged on the pad) later this month.

From a Human Condition viewpoint, it's a perfect example of how someone who's highly intelligent, able, successful and confident is totally comfortable admitting to a "dumb" mistake, as their strong sense of identity is quite unaffected by anything like that.

Meanwhile, here's the best view I've yet seen of SN9's fate, plummeting out of the sky at terminal velocity. (It does seem a handheld cellphone can sometimes beat all kinds of expensive, specialized cameras.)

https://twitter.com/i/status/1357448212827705345

Still be watching for Sn10 - Sn14 - not much between this batch.
Sn15 is going to be fun though !
A good few missions reaching Mars this month - two landers and an orbital. Best of luck to everyone involved with those, Mars tends to eat our space fairing dreams !

Countdown is on ...

Good luck SN10

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XOQkk3ojNfM

Any news on what caused the explosion after it successfully landed?

Quote:

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Posted by DeDukshyn

Any news on what caused the explosion after it successfully landed?

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No official word yet on the cause from SpaceX. SpaceX, Elon Musk and Principal Integration Engineer John Insprucker were all pretty buoyant about the flight and all the test data collected.

The authoritative website NasaSpaceflight.com wrote that it was "likely due to the failure of some of the landing legs". (Starship's landing legs are a known issue, and they'll very likely be re-engineered.)

It did seem, though, that there was a fire in not quite in the right place as it neared the landing, and that fire continued to burn after it had settled [almost] upright, looking a little like the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

For those who didn't see the flight, here's one of many good videos — though the dramatic music might not be to everyone's taste. (Watch to the very end! :) )

https://youtube.com/watch?v=liUevrjUkWo

Still no official word from SpaceX on exactly what didn't quite work right at the very end of SN10's otherwise highly successful flight.

This analysis by Scott Manley, supported by multiple-angle slow-motion video, is the best I've seen so far. There appeared to have been two problems:

1. Only 3 of the 6 landing legs were locked in place just before landing.
2. While all 3 Raptor engines fired after its long 'sky-dive' free fall, two of them shut down leaving only one to manage the landing. That was all planned, and it was successfully tipped back to vertical (unlike SN9!). But that one engine didn't develop enough thrust to fully decelerate to a gentle touchdown and instead made a harder-then-intended landing at about 15 mph, then bouncing very slightly on just half its deployed legs.

That 1-2 combo is not optimum for a very heavy machine like that with quite a lot of methane and liquid oxygen still on board. :)

(For North Americans who might wrestle with Manley's strong Scottish accent, just use the 'CC' closed captions. They're extremely accurate.)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=CF9mdMI1qxM

For any armchair rocket scientists in the house, this is pretty interesting.

It's tricky to explain simply (and a tricky problem to solve!), but the one-sentence summary is that the very fix that was implemented after SN8's crash landing was what caused SN10's hard landing and explosion. So SpaceX went out of the frying pan into [another] fire.

To his enormous credit, Elon Musk takes responsibility for everything that happens. That's leadership:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1369382210894237705

My personal prediction, if I dare make one! :) SN11, which will fly this month, will land on two engines, not just one.

Starship SN11 launched early yesterday morning — in crazy-thick fog. No-one could see a darn thing, even pretty close to the launchpad.

All seemed to go well, till 5 mins 50 secs when SpaceX's on-rocket video feed suddenly froze. Then everyone heard a really loud boom, with a huge orange flash lighting up the fog. Moments later, large pieces of debris came raining down all over the place. No-one outside SpaceX knows yet exactly what happened. (Meaning, what went wrong. It's known that the rocket exploded. :) )

This 10 minute video explains all there is to understand — so far. (And the title is very apt!)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=MoEv0dkWlvA

Spaceport Genocide
by Arthur Firstenberg <[email protected]>
4/6/21
https://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/w...t-Genocide.pdf

"In the western Pacific Ocean between Australia and the equator lies one of the most isolated, least visited places on earth. The second largest island in the world, it is still inhabited by traditional tribal peoples speaking hundreds of different languages. Although geographically and culturally it is a single land, this tropical paradise was divided in 1848 into a western and an eastern half by a line drawn down the middle in an agreement between the Netherlands and Great Britain. They regarded the black people who lived there only as a potential source of cheap labor for the extraction of resources from their land. Among the wealth on and beneath the island of New Guinea are timber, oil, gas, and minerals, including silver and nickel and the largest deposits of gold and copper in the world.

The eastern half of the island, known as Papua New Guinea, has been independent since 1975 and is struggling to overcome its violent colonial history. The western half, known as West Papua, declared its independence when the Dutch colonial administration withdrew in 1961, but Indonesia, coveting its vast natural resources, invaded and formally absorbed West Papua into Indonesia in 1969. Since that time, Indonesia has engaged in continuous genocide against the indigenous population, who number about 2,000,000 people today. Over 500,000 have been killed, and thousands more have been raped, tortured and imprisoned by the Indonesian military.

As Paul Antonopoulos and Drew Cottle wrote in their heart-rending August 2019 article, Forgotten Genocide in Indonesia, “The primary reason for Jakarta not granting self-determination to the indigenous people of West Papua is because of the billions of dollars’ worth of natural resources. Although Papuans have been struggling for independence for over half a century, Indonesia through its military has been bolstering its global economic relevance by exploiting the territory’s vast reserves of natural resources that make their way to markets in the US, Canada, Europe, China and Australia, where the majority of mining companies are based.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is about to play a role in perpetuating this genocide.

The small island of Biak, off of West Papua’s northern coast, just one degree south of the equator, looks like this today:
https://ci6.googleusercontent.com/pr...Z8zLQiZKtqFIQk


If Elon Musk has his way, it will soon look like this:

https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/pr...yd_byIU6w36VjK

Indonesia would like to convert Biak into a lucrative “Space Island.” In December 2020, Indonesia offered the use of part of the island to SpaceX as a spaceport for launching satellites. SpaceX would like to launch and maintain as many as 42,000 satellites in order to provide high-speed wireless Internet everywhere on earth. This would require almost daily rocket launches forever into the future. Until now, SpaceX has been launching its satellites from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where the above photograph was taken. The spaceport at Cape Canaveral is surrounded by a wildlife refuge and has already done a lot of environmental damage.

“This spaceport,” said tribal chief Manfun Sroyer of plans for the island of Biak, “will cost us our traditional hunting grounds, damaging the nature our way of life depends on. But, if we protest, we’ll be arrested immediately.”

Biak’s location holds several attractions for SpaceX. Its location at the equator is ideal for launching satellites because less fuel is needed for them to reach orbit from there. And the vast reserves of copper and nickel on West Papua would supply some of the materials. Copper and nickel are two of the metals used in building rockets.

Indonesia has also offered Biak Island to the Russian space agency Roscosmos, which plans to develop its own spaceport on the island by 2024. Russia is planning its own fleet of 640 satellites, also to provide wireless Internet everywhere on earth.

The environmental effects of mining in West Papua are well-documented. “From the Grasberg mine,” wrote Antonopoulos and Cottle, ”one of the biggest copper and gold mines in the world, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of tailings contaminate the vital Ajkwa delta system every day, destroying the environment which the Kamoro tribe relies upon for food and trade. So devastating to the environment is the Grasberg mine that apart from the 80 million tonnes of waste debris which it dumps into the Ajkwa river system every year, the open cut mine can be seen clearly from space.” What was formerly the top of a glacier-covered mountain is now a mile-wide crater one-third of a mile deep.

The open cut operations were finally closed in 2020, but the underground mining operations at Grasberg are expanding, and the contamination of rivers, forests, fisheries, and coastal waters, as well as the destruction of tribal communities, continues unabated. A 2012 report from Earthworks and MiningWatch Canada stated that mine waste from Grasberg had “buried over 166 square kilometres of formerly productive forest and wetlands, and fish have largely disappeared.” The poisoned river is no longer a source of drinking water for the area’s villages.

West Papua’s mines will also be used to build Tesla’s electric vehicles (EVs), if Musk has his way. Nickel and copper are also needed for the long-range batteries used in EVs. Musk told Indonesian officials last July that Tesla would offer a “giant contract for a long period of time if you mine nickel efficiently and in an environmentally sensitive way.”

Musk and the government of Indonesia may come to an agreement as to what “environmentally sensitive” means, but West Papua’s native population may beg to disagree. It still means pulverizing and processing billions of pounds of rock, and depositing all the resulting tailings somewhere. In West Papua somewhere means virgin rainforest, pristine rivers and tribal lands.

Roads, Electricity and Cell Phones

In Papua New Guinea, the independent state to the east, most of the vast interior still has no roads or electricity -- or cell towers. And that was still the case only 5 years ago in West Papua too. But in the last few years, all of that infrastructure -- electricity to every village, a modern highway system bulldozed through the wilderness, and widely available cell phone service -- has been built by Indonesia and it has not been for the benefit of the native population, who do not want it and are gunned down or bombed if they protest.

Journalist David Robie calls the 4,325-kilometer Trans-Papua Highway “West Papua’s highway of blood.” According to John Martinkus, whose moving book, The Road: Uprising in West Papua, was published last May, the highway brings military occupation, more mining and timber cutting by foreign corporations, environmental destruction, and replacement of native villages by settlements of Indonesian immigrants.

“On December 1, 2018,” writes Robie, “a ceremony marking the declaration of independence from the Dutch in 1961 by raising the Morning Star flag of a free Papua -- as Papuans do every year -- ended in bloodshed.” Every previous year, at least in the remote Nduga region, this ceremony had taken place peacefully and been ignored by Indonesians. But this year, road workers and soldiers came into Nduga on the new highway and took photos and videos of the crowd on their cell phones. The resulting conflict left 19 road workers and a soldier dead. Since then, reprisal raids by the Indonesian military have forced some 50,000 people to flee their villages and become refugees. Two thousand soldiers, helicopters, and 650 commandos are involved in “protecting the highway.”

“It is the helicopters that are the worst,” writes Martinkus. “They are used as platforms to shoot or drop white phosphorous grenades or bomblets that inflict horrible injuries on the populace.”

https://ci6.googleusercontent.com/pr...B7yWAoge4oilaP
Thomas Klasibin stands in front of what used to be
the forest that supported him. Photo by James Morgan

And the spaceport, as Manfun Sroyer said, will perpetuate both the environmental damage and the continuing genocide. Aside from the noise, light, and vibrations accompanying rocket launches, all of the proliferating spaceports around the world are destroying their environment.

A Falcon 9 rocket -- the rocket SpaceX uses to launch its satellites -- consumes an incredible 3,200 pounds of fuel per second at full thrust. Unlike rockets that burn solid fuels, the Falcon 9 burns kerosene and doesn’t pollute the land and water surrounding the spaceport with heavy metals. But that is assuming the launch is successful. Every time a rocket crash-lands or explodes, the damage is tremendous. When two rockets crash-landed during test launches at a remote spaceport on Alaska’s Kodiak Island, 230 tons of soil were contaminated. And crashes happen regularly at every spaceport. A 2013 study of rocket launch crashes by Russian and Belgian space scientists found that rockets had been crashing, consistently since 1975, between 4% and 10% of the time at every spaceport in the world.

What is occurring on West Papua is possibly the worst genocide that is going on in the world today, and it is scarcely being reported. But it is not just genocide. It is a collision -- a collision between life and technology, a collision that stares us in the face everywhere we go, and it is not being reported because no one wants to look at it. “The people of West Papua are fighting with their lives every day to defend our forests, mountains and rivers,” says West Papuan independence leader Benny Wenda. “We are ground zero in the fight to protect our global natural environment.”

West Papua is the last place on earth where “primitive” human beings dare to say no to highways and electricity. The Trans-Amazon Highway was completed in 1975. The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan was fully electrified by 2010. The Old Order Amish are using cell phones today. In the year 2021, when humanity is preparing to colonize Mars, there is no place in most people’s conception of reality for the existence of human beings who are part of the natural world. To acknowledge their existence would require us to face the contradiction between life and technology. Between reality and fantasy.

But the Papuans are there. And they are important."

Arthur Firstenberg
Author, The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product...sible-rainbow/

• SpaceX wins a multi-billion dollar NASA moon lander contract!:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5m_Gu4ZGXRs

Quote:

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Posted by ExomatrixTV

• SpaceX wins a multi-billion dollar NASA moon lander contract!:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=5m_Gu4ZGXRs

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This is a pretty big deal. As many readers may be aware, humans are already on the Moon and Mars, and have been for quite a while. But the publicly visible space program, with far inferior but workable technology, has to somehow catch up with all that.

Here's a fairly good article (one of many, easily found), to supplement the video above:

• https://planetary.org/articles/why-n...ns-on-the-moon

~~~

Why NASA Picked SpaceX to Land Humans on the Moon

20 April, 2021

And How the Decision Will Help Humans Land on Mars

NASA last week announced it selected SpaceX’s Starship to land humans on the Moon as part of the agency’s Artemis program. To develop Starship for the Moon, NASA will pay no more than $2.9 billion to SpaceX over the next few years, money that will be matched and possibly exceeded by funds from SpaceX itself.

Under the terms of the award, SpaceX will fly Starship to the lunar surface without a crew at least once before transporting astronauts. NASA says there is still a chance that mission could happen in 2024, although the agency is currently conducting a review of the entire Aretmis program.

Investing in Starship will help NASA return to the Moon, but it will also do something more consequential. Starship is a Mars ship. By choosing Starship for the Moon, NASA is investing in the Starship program itself, providing SpaceX with a cash infusion for the same technology and systems it needs to get to the Red Planet—a true “Moon-to-Mars” strategy if there ever was one.

This decision is not without risk: NASA previously selected at least two companies to provide commercial cargo and crew services to the International Space Station in order to preserve competition, control cost, and ensure redundancy. By selecting only SpaceX, NASA is putting all its eggs in one basket.

But SpaceX has previously delivered on its NASA contracts. In the past 20 years they have grown from a small startup to the world’s premier aerospace company, launching cargo and astronauts at a pace commensurate with national space agencies. NASA now places the lives of its astronauts in the hands of SpaceX to reach the ISS, relies on the company to supply the space station, and places its precious scientific missions atop their rockets.

If Starship succeeds in returning humans to the lunar surface, it will be the ultimate vindication of the public-private partnership model. NASA will gain a lunar lander at a fraction of the cost of the Apollo-era Lunar Module, and SpaceX—a private entity—would gain independent access to the lunar surface, a locale previously the domain of a single nation.

And in the same fell swoop, both organizations would step toward Mars.

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/w...-moon.jpg.webp
Starship on the Moon — SpaceX's Starship vehicle sits on the Moon as NASA astronauts explore the surface.

The Background

Humans have not traveled beyond Earth orbit since the Apollo program ended in 1972. NASA has officially been trying to change that since 2004, when President George W. Bush announced what became the agency’s back-to-the-Moon Constellation program.

In 2010, the Obama administration canceled Constellation, but two key pieces of the program survived: the Orion crew capsule and a rocket that became what is now the Space Launch System, or SLS. Both vehicles are being developed using classic “cost-plus” contracting, where NASA pays for the full cost of development, even if costs rise far above initial estimates.

NASA’s Artemis program will use the SLS to blast astronauts to lunar orbit aboard Orion, where they will meet up with a previously-emplaced lunar lander to travel to the surface and back. Orion in the future will also dock with the Gateway, a small space station in lunar orbit. From there, astronauts can conduct science and transfer to lunar landers.

Rather than building a lunar lander in-house the way it does with SLS and Orion, NASA opted to pay space companies a fixed price to build their own lunar landers, which the companies will own. NASA in turn can purchase ongoing landing services from these providers. The total cost to NASA is therefore fixed—any cost overruns are shouldered by the companies.

Conversely, if companies can deliver their landers for less than the cost of the contract, the company retains the difference as a profit. NASA successfully deployed this model to ferry crews and cargo to the ISS.

Encouraged by a business-friendly White House that pushed for a 2024 Moon landing, NASA expanded its use of public-private partnerships beyond low-Earth orbit, creating new programs for commercial lunar payload deliveries of scientific instrumentation and technology demonstration missions. Last year, the agency funded SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics to develop human-ready Moon lander concepts for Artemis, and proposed to spend nearly $21 billion over the next five years to support multiple human landing vehicles.

But despite strong White House support, Congress last year provided only $850 million for lunar landers—far below the $3.4 billion NASA requested. Faced with a funding shortfall, NASA delayed its decision to select which companies would receive funding for continued development of their moon landers.

That is, until last week, when NASA announced they would go all-in on Starship.

NASA would have probably liked to pick more than one provider for redundancy. But with little funds to go on and the prospect of seeing the Moon landings drag out for many more years, they picked the cheapest—and most likely to succeed—option: SpaceX.

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/w...ftoff.jpg.webp
NASA astronauts ride a commercial rocket — A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft lifts off carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley on the first crewed commercial flight to the International Space Station on 30 May 2020.

How to Land Humans on the Moon

SpaceX’s Starship is designed to be much more than a lunar lander—it’s actually an end-to-end transport system designed to ferry people to Mars. The vehicle launches and lands upright, similar to the way the company’s Falcon 9 boosters return to Earth for reuse. SpaceX has been working on Starship for years, building prototypes and destroying them at a rapid pace as they perfect the vehicle’s ability to land upright.

But despite Starship’s ability to launch humans directly from Earth to the Moon or Mars, that’s not how NASA will initially use it.

For Artemis, Starship will blast off without a crew to lunar orbit. NASA astronauts will launch aboard Orion and SLS, and then either directly dock with Starship or transfer to it via the Gateway. A crew will take Starship to the surface, stay for about a week, and then launch back to lunar orbit, where they will transfer back to Orion for return to Earth.

NASA’s source selection documents showed that Starship was both cheaper and more capable than the landers proposed by Blue Origin and Dynetics. Dynetics brought to the table a history with NASA and the Department of Defense, while Blue Origin’s proposal featured its “National Team” consisting of stalwart contractors Lockheed Martin, Draper Labs, and Northrop Grumman.

This is not the end of either the National Team or Dynetics lunar lander concepts. The $2.9 billion contract awarded by NASA is for development activities, one uncrewed landing test, and one crewed landing demonstration of Starship. NASA plans to compete a subsequent contract for ongoing lunar surface ferry operations. Anyone can bid on that, so the other teams could continue to self-fund to mature their lunar landing designs in the interim.

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/w...nding.jpg.webp
Starship comes in hot — SpaceX's Starship rocket prepares to land following a high-altitude test flight on 3 March 2021. Starship landed in one piece for the first time ever but exploded minutes later. An unexpected flame appeared in the engine section just before touchdown.

Implications for the Space Launch System

In theory, if SpaceX’s Starship can land on the Moon, it can ferry humans there as well. There’s no need for the Space Launch System and Orion at all.

In theory. But NASA’s not ready to say goodbye to those vehicles yet, and with good reason.

First, the technical side: While SpaceX has shown that it can reliably land the booster stage of its Falcon 9 rocket upright (although one occasionally misses the mark), the spent booster stage doesn’t currently land with a heavy, pressurized crew capsule on top of it.

Starship, meanwhile, is an order of magnitude larger than the Falcon 9, and is still trying to perfect its landing on Earth. Its booster, the Super Heavy, has yet to fly. NASA is not yet ready to launch its astronauts on such a new system, though that could change over time.

Additionally, vehicles returning to Earth from the Moon hit the atmosphere at much higher speeds than they do when returning from Earth orbit. NASA’s Orion crew capsule, which uses legacy heat shield technology that dates back to the Apollo program, successfully tested a high-speed reentry during its 2014 test flight. The gargantuan Starship vehicle will belly-flop through the atmosphere, taking a page out of the Space Shuttle’s playbook. Starship has yet to successfully land from Earth orbit, let alone lunar orbit.

That brings us to the second reason: politics.

SLS and Orion were written into U.S. law by the Senate in the 2010 NASA Authorization bill and employ tens of thousands of people in every state. Congressional support for the projects has remained strong over the years, even as the projects have delayed their schedules and blown their original budget projections. By merely flirting with non-SLS options for sending humans to the Moon, as former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine did two years ago, the agency incited the wrath of powerful Senators.

The current plan for Artemis is thus an artful mix of political and technological compromises. Every major NASA contractor participates in the program, as will the agency’s major international partners through the Gateway program. Artemis comprises both classic cost-plus and contracts and new fixed-price contracts for its major components, with jobs distributed around the country. It is the inevitable outcome for a large project that depends on discretionary spending overseen by a representational political system.

https://planetary.s3.amazonaws.com/w...entry.jpg.webp
Starship enters Mars' atmosphere — This artist's concept shows SpaceX's Starship vehicle heating up as it enters Mars's atmosphere.

Moon to Mars

Despite the current focus on the Moon, NASA’s public relations materials constantly remind us that Mars has not been forgotten. Artemis is a “Moon to Mars” program, though up until this announcement the Mars part of that claim was more ambition than reality.

The Moon and Mars represent markedly different environments and challenges. The Moon is far closer to Earth, allowing astronauts to stay in what is basically real-time communication with the ground. They can return home in a matter of days if something goes wrong. There are launch opportunities roughly every month.

Mars offers no such conveniences. Communications are delayed by tens of minutes, requiring significant increases in spacecraft autonomy. Launch windows are limited to once every two years when Earth and Mars are optimally aligned. Landing on Mars, with its thin atmosphere and significant gravitational well, is a far harder problem than landing on the Moon’s airless expanse.

Nevertheless, the Moon (and more broadly, cislunar space) can be useful for developing and testing the hardware and techniques needed to send humans to Mars. That is, if missions to the Moon are deliberately pursued with Mars in mind—it is all-too-tempting (and cheaper) for engineers to optimize for Moon-only solutions in a tight budgetary environment.

The addition of Starship to Artemis can spurn this temptation. SpaceX is a new breed of aerospace company: one with ambitions beyond that of serving government needs. As a privately-held company, it is under near-total control by its founder, Elon Musk, who can pursue his agenda as long as it makes money. His agenda happens to be human settlements on Mars.

Whether this is a feasible (or even desirable) goal is besides the point. SpaceX has a highly-capable workforce. It is well-capitalized. And it is building a Mars ship with Starship, whether or not NASA chips in.

So by choosing Starship, NASA is gaining a partner with shared long-term goals that is going to Mars regardless of current domestic politics. Both sides benefit. SpaceX will enjoy a significant cash infusion in Starship and will gain access to the lunar surface. NASA saves billions of dollars on a lunar lander while supporting an Mars initiative.

With Starship, NASA is buying the Moon, but it is investing in Mars.

Starship SN15 (the next one after SN11, with a zillion improvements) nailed the soft landing last night. The entire space-watching viewership — a large one! — lost their minds. :)

Everyday Astronaut Tim Dodd's new co-host, MaryLiz Bender (a very good presenter, btw, and a great addition to that team) was in tears. The Angry Astronaut (another good presenter) couldn't stop shouting on his own modest handheld livestream.

There are many videos to choose from, but this one shows the emotion: the crowd of SpaceX employees watching with bated breath as the landing clouds settle to reveal the Starship standing proud just after 6:20. The ship coming in through the clouds to land starts at 5:40.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=swexWob7UHE
And a good, clear shot of the soft landing from a different camera. :thumbsup:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Je_MWdR4AWI

• How Elon's SpaceX Starship SHOCKED Scientists, will blow your mind...

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=c-vPglqmC0U

Astronomers breathed a collective sigh of relief as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) sprung to life. Getting the $10-billion telescope up and running following its launch on Christmas Day 2021 had been a nerve-racking affair. JWST would not fit into any modern rocket without being folded, and it had to rely on hundreds of moving parts to unfurl to full size once in space. Ultimately those efforts were successful, and the telescope has started returning some of its first calibration images to thrilled audiences back on Earth. Yet the experience left many astronomers wondering if there was a simpler way to build and launch telescopes of this size. “We were worried about the unfolding,” says John Blevins of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. But with a larger rocket, “you don’t have to unfold in space. You can do it on the ground.” As chance would have it, two such rockets are currently sitting on launchpads. Each should ultimately exceed the power of the mighty Saturn V, which sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. The first, NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), is ready and waiting at Kennedy Space Center in Florida for its inaugural uncrewed voyage around the moon as part of the Artemis I mission—the opening shot in NASA’s plan to return humans to the lunar surface in the 2020s. The rocket, tentatively scheduled for a launch in late this month, is meant to be as reliable as possible and is therefore based, in large part, on legacy hardware from NASA’s Space Shuttle program. But reliance on tried-and-true technology could be its Achilles’ heel: some estimates currently peg the SLS’s cost at an eye-watering $4.1 billion per launch. Presuming it is not scuttled by congressional appropriators feeling buyer’s remorse, its massive size could eventually be a boon for scientists seeking to send larger, more ambitious spacecraft and telescopes throughout the solar system—and even beyond. However, it can't! How Elon's SpaceX Starship SHOCKED Scientists, will blow your mind...

This is really just an early alert (and the orbital flight could still be several weeks away), but it looks like they're getting close to launch at last.
:happy dog:

• https://zerohedge.com/technology/spa...ppen-next-week

SpaceX's Massive Starship Rocket Orbital Test Could Happen Next Week

SpaceX's 394-foot-tall Starship Super Heavy rocket could make a key orbital test as soon as next week, according to a Federal Aviation Administration notice.

According to the FAA notice, Starship is scheduled for launch on April 10th from Boca Chica, Texas, with April 11th and 12th as backup dates in case of any unforeseen issues before launch or during the final countdown.

In a statement to Bloomberg, the FAA said that the notice "should not be interpreted as an indicator that a determination to issue a license has been made or is forthcoming. The agency will only make a determination after SpaceX meets all safety and other regulatory requirements."

A Reuters source said the FAA could grant SpaceX's launch license as early as Monday. The source added the licensing process is nearing completion and could take longer due to an environmental compliance review.

The test mission will mark the first launch of the Starship atop a Super Heavy first-stage booster with 33 rocket engines. The Super Heavy booster will attempt a landing in Texas near the launch site, while Starship will attempt a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean near the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

Tim Dodd's Everyday Astronaut site is good to keep abreast of the latest events, road closures, timings etc.

https://everydayastronaut.com/starsh...ine-checklist/

To the Stars !

For anyone interested but not all up to speed, this video is a very good intro summary of what's been happening, and what will now soon happen. (We hope! :) ) The first 5-6 minutes or so says it all.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZmtHyIMn69Q

The Starship suborbital launch attempt is go for Monday morning (17 April) US time.
:happy dog:

https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/stat...94586768756736

This is what's planned to happen:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fto_zaaa...pg&name=medium

There are three major aspects of the test:

1. Booster lift-off and successfully clearing the launch mount. It's the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, so just getting the thing off the ground is itself a major test all on its own.
2. A few minutes later, the separation and ignition of the second stage. That's a regular Starship, the kind that flew its own test flights reported earlier on this thread a couple years ago.
3. Over an hour later, now halfway round the world and over the Pacific, the Starship will flip into horizontal 'belly-flop' mode to re-enter the atmosphere, when the heat shield will be tested, as well as the integrity of the ship to see if it all holds together. (There won't be any attempt (this time) to simulate a soft landing of the second stage Starship. It'll crash into the ocean horizontally and will presumably break up and sink with no attempt at retrieval.)

To me this seems little more than a multi-billion dollar demonstration of scaled up, pimped out 1950s technology, given 'they' have had anti-grav and field propulsion cracked for decades now.

I cannot help but marvel at what a spectacular waste of time and money this is.

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Posted by Mark (Star Mariner)

To me this seems little more than a multi-billion dollar demonstration of scaled up, pimped out 1950s technology, given 'they' have had anti-grav and field propulsion cracked for decades now.

I cannot help but marvel at what a spectacular waste of time and money this is.

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Yes! :ROFL:

But it's still a bunch of fun to see. (Rather like this, vs. a smooth, silent 300 mph Chinese supertrain :) )

https://youtube.com/watch?v=GW_CqaBg39c

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Posted by Mark (Star Mariner)

To me this seems little more than a multi-billion dollar demonstration of scaled up, pimped out 1950s technology, given 'they' have had anti-grav and field propulsion cracked for decades now.

I cannot help but marvel at what a spectacular waste of time and money this is.

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Did you mean this?


https://scontent-atl3-2.xx.fbcdn.net...LA&oe=643EC382

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Posted by Bill Ryan

Quote:

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Posted by Mark (Star Mariner)

To me this seems little more than a multi-billion dollar demonstration of scaled up, pimped out 1950s technology, given 'they' have had anti-grav and field propulsion cracked for decades now.

I cannot help but marvel at what a spectacular waste of time and money this is.

---

Yes! :ROFL:

But it's still a bunch of fun to see. (Rather like this, vs. a smooth, silent 300 mph Chinese supertrain :) )

---

Yes fun, and I do look forward to watching the spectacle. But this is also a massive troll, and that's what I find insulting.

What they are doing is hoarding the technology that could transform and rebuild our broken, dysfunctional world. Not just in propulsion/transportation, but energy-tech. Instead of an energy crisis we'd have a bonanza, one that would trigger a new epoch and change everything.

Instead, they feast on the goodies in secret, while we plebs live off the scraps.

One of the reasons this is worth sitting on the edge of one's seat for is that success is not at all certain (though, it must be said, it's highly likely). Elon Musk himself tweeted "Excitement guaranteed". Nothing else is!

Some readers may not know this piece of history. The rocket scheduled for its launch attempt on Monday is the most powerful rocket ever built — taking the place of the previous record-holder, the Soviet N1 back in 1969. But this is what happened to the N1.

The giant explosion is to this day the largest accidental man-made explosion, and the largest non-nuclear explosion, there has ever been. With this disaster went the Soviet Union's plans of beating the US to the Moon.

The video, compiled from Soviet archive footage that only much later became public, is less than 2 minutes. :flower:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=u2eAHvFprE8

One thing sticks in my mind here. It's been over 50 years since the razzmatazz of Apollo, and we haven't been back to the moon in all that time (at least openly!).

Space is a realm under strict control. There are 'things' up there they don't want us to see. Even Nasa got pretty much cancelled when they mothballed the space shuttle. I don't think they want us in space. Space tours, space hotels, colonization of Mars - I don't see any of that happening.

These billionaires looking to privatize space...I think that's a big problem for them. A problem they will probably look to fix.

I'm not making any predictions, but I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX fails. Maybe it's even set up to fail, the goal: to put the brakes on private space enterprise.

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Posted by Mark (Star Mariner)

One thing sticks in my mind here. It's been over 50 years since the razzmatazz of Apollo, and we haven't been back to the moon in all that time (at least openly!).

Space is a realm under strict control. There are 'things' up there they don't want us to see. Even Nasa got pretty much cancelled when they mothballed the space shuttle. I don't think they want us in space. Space tours, space hotels, colonization of Mars - I don't see any of that happening.

These billionaires looking to privatize space...I think that's a big problem for them. A problem they will probably look to fix.

I'm not making any predictions, but I wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX fails. Maybe it's even set up to fail, the goal: to put the brakes on private space enterprise.

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Well i counter that, Elon Musk will be one of the first 10 humans to ever walk „officialy“ on Mars.

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Posted by seehas

Well i counter that, Elon Musk will be one of the first 10 humans to ever walk „officialy“ on Mars.

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I strongly suspect more than ten humans have walked on Mars already, as I think you do, hence "officially" in double quotes.

Whoever is already up there won't easily allow some upstart entrepreneur to drop in and start p!ssing in their sandbox. There's a reason why most unmanned missions to Mars end in failure, and not all of them are "technical faults".

The chance manned missions could end up the same way is to my mind quite high.

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HkCl...S_SCENE3.0.jpg

This is the running livestream that I'm watching. SpaceX themselves (https://spacex.com/launches/mission/...ip-flight-test) will start their own coverage something like 45 mins before the launch attempt, now targeted for 8:20 am US Central time (88 minutes from now).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Vb9hFqF6i0

Update: today's (Monday's) launch was scrubbed at about T-10 minutes due to a frozen stuck valve. (Aaargh! :) ) Best guess at the moment for the next attempt is Thursday morning.

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Posted by Bill Ryan

Update: today's (Monday's) launch was scrubbed at about T-10 minutes due to a frozen stuck valve. (Aaargh! :)) Best guess at the moment for the next attempt is Thursday morning.

---

Yes, they're trying again. The launch window (US Central Time) is from 8:28—9:30 am. Here's the best livestream, coming on air at 6:30 (just under 3 hours from now)
:happy dog:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=eAl3gVvMNNM

A brief update: (!) There will be a zillion videos online later. :)

1. It launched successfully and cleared the pad — but half a dozen of the 33 engines shut down. Soon after that, several other engines seemed to flame out.
2. Then, after a minute or so but now well away from the launch site, the rocket started to spin and tumble.
3. After a couple of minutes either the SpaceX team activated the flight termination system (i.e. they purposefully blew it up in mid-air) — or it exploded all on its own. :)
4. The launch mount, the support tower and the fuel tank farm are all (pretty much!) intact and undamaged. That alone is a major success. There was always the risk, almost impossible to evaluate, that the entire launch area might have been badly damaged from the immense power of the 33 engines.

Here's the truly impressive lift-off: (of the largest and most powerful rocket ever built)

https://twitter.com/heydave7/status/1649057151065919491

This zoomed image shows the 8 failed engines which caused the entire flight to become unstable. This double ring of engines is supposed to be symmetrical. :)

https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/as....0/2177252.jpg

But overall, it was a genuine success. (Yes, really!) The only bad outcome here would have been if the rocket had fallen back on the launch pad and destroyed everything.

• It actually lifted off.
• The launch pad is intact.
• SpaceX will have a ton of good telemetry data to analyze over the coming weeks, prior to the next attempt in a few months time.

Watched it live and it was really, really exciting. Great to be headed back to space and to do it with a private company is amazing. Watching the crowd at SpaceX headquarter, the vast majority of the people shown were young. I was not sure this next generation had it in them to get back to space.

Great job Space X and great vision to you Elon Musk!

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Posted by Bill Ryan

The launch mount, the support tower and the fuel tank farm are all (pretty much!) intact and undamaged. That alone is a major success. There was always the risk, almost impossible to evaluate, that the entire launch area might have been badly damaged from the immense power of the 33 engines.

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There's been a huge amount of discussion and speculation among the SpaceX-watching community (which consists of a lot of very bright people and highly experienced engineers), prior to any kind of formal post mortem statement from Elon Musk and his team.

It seems that:

• While the launch mount, tower and tank farm are all intact, there's actually a huge crater under the launch mount where the 33 raptor engines blasted into the concrete. That's like a large bomb going off, and videos show huge chunks of concrete flying into the sea as far as half a mile away. Many observers believe that some of the debris probably impacted the engines or other systems during the several seconds before it was released from the launch mount.

• One of the systems that seems to have been damaged or failed was the HPU (Hydraulic Power Unit), which was critical. That controls the gimbaling (directional steering) of the engines, as well as (it's being assumed) the release of the second stage (the Starship itself) from the Booster. (The two never actually separated, even when it was doing its cartwheels in the upper atmosphere.)

An amazing photo showing (a) the size of the rocket, and (b) the scale of the explosive blast at takeoff:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FuKYf5ta...jpg&name=large

The liftoff and flight starts at the 45 minute mark




Starship gave us quite a show during today’s first flight test of a fully integrated Starship and Super Heavy rocket from Starbase in Texas.

At 8:33 a.m. CT, Starship successfully lifted off from the orbital launch pad for the first time. The vehicle cleared the pad and beach as Starship climbed to an apogee of ~39 km over the Gulf of Mexico – the highest of any Starship to-date. The vehicle experienced multiple engines out during the flight test, lost altitude, and began to tumble. The flight termination system was commanded on both the booster and ship. As is standard procedure, the pad and surrounding area was cleared well in advance of the test, and we expect the road and beach near the pad to remain closed until tomorrow.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-1wcilQ58hI

going to need to rethink the pad structure. Saw another video of flying concrete cratering a car...

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Louis Balderas, the founder of LabPadre, which films SpaceX’s launches, said that while it was common to see some debris, smoke and dust, the impact of Thursday’s liftoff was unlike anything he had ever seen. “There were bowling ball-sized pieces of concrete that came flying out of the launchpad area,” Mr. Balderas said.

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https://twitter.com/_emergent_/statu...263003136?s=20

later

https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/stat...765330945?s=20

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4qkib-rlDWQ

In the online armchair engineer community watching all this, there's a great deal of hand-wringing, 20-20 hindsight criticism, and know-it-all "I told you so"s. About 2/3 are harping about the whole thing, while 1/3 are enthusiastically celebrating a historic test flight.

Here, in an excellent 5 minute interview on CTV News, former NASA astronaut and test pilot Chris Hadfield states exactly how it is — pointing out that the very first test flight of ANY newly designed aircraft or space vehicle nearly always only just gets off the ground (if that :) ). It's worth listening to. I agree with everything he says.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iiDGb1CXw4I
And here's the archived real-time livestream from SpaceX themselves, which was also posted above. :thumbsup:

Start in at 40 minutes, and feel first the suspense and then the ecstatic delight among the SpaceX employees who can barely contain their excitement as this ginormous rocket fires up and slowly starts to leave the ground.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-1wcilQ58hI
Much of the internet hand-wringing has been about the flying-concrete damage around the launch site, but it's all intact. The tank farm has some tents, and the launch mount has a sizeable crater under it, but all that can be fixed within a couple of months. The bigger obstacle might be FAA approval for the next attempt, if the authorities get worried about worst-case scenarios, which is [partly] their job.

Finally, an interesting snippet of insight, while everyone awaits a formal statement from SpaceX of what did and didn't go as planned. One imagines they're still sifting through a whole mountain of flight telemetry data, while engineers start to examine the launch pad area to see how superficial (or not) the damage is.

Two members of the NSF forum (which I've been scanning with interest as a guest), themselves experienced retired engineers, have spoken to SpaceX engineers off the record who say that the entire thing went absolutely as well as could be hoped for until the stage separation, which failed. That failure auto-activated the remote flight termination system. (No human would have pressed the "destruct" button: it was all computer controlled.)

The thing was intended to rotate in the upper atmosphere at a certain height (alarmingly to the human eye!), rather like a field athlete spinning a couple of times before letting go of the discus. (In other words, a kind of sling-shot effect.) The flight self-terminated — apparently — merely because of the failed separation. It's possible that one reason for that was because several failing engines prevented it from reaching the correct high altitude, but that will all come out in the wash when SpaceX are ready to explain everything that we saw.
:happy dog:

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Posted by Bill Ryan

In the online armchair engineer community watching all this, there's a great deal of hand-wringing, 20-20 hindsight criticism, and know-it-all "I told you so"s. About 2/3 are harping about the whole thing, while 1/3 are enthusiastically celebrating a historic test flight.

Here, in an excellent 5 minute interview on CTV News, former NASA astronaut and test pilot Chris Hadfield states exactly how it is — pointing out that the very first test flight of ANY newly designed aircraft or space vehicle nearly always only just gets off the ground (if that :) ). It's worth listening to. I agree with everything he says.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iiDGb1CXw4I

Much of the internet hand-wringing has been about the flying-concrete damage around the launch site, but it's all intact. The tank farm has some tents, and the launch mount has a sizeable crater under it, but all that can be fixed within a couple of months. The bigger obstacle might be FAA approval for the next attempt, if the authorities get worried about worst-case scenarios, which is [partly] their job.
.
.
Finally, an interesting snippet of insight, while everyone awaits a formal statement from SpaceX of what did and didn't go as planned. One imagines they're still sifting through a whole mountain of flight telemetry data, while engineers start to examine the launch pad area to see how superficial (or not) the damage is.
.
.
The thing was intended to rotate in the upper atmosphere at a certain height (alarmingly to the human eye!), rather like a field athlete spinning a couple of times before letting go of the discus. (In other words, a kind of sling-shot effect.) The flight self-terminated — apparently — merely because of the failed separation. It's possible that one reason for that was because several failing engines prevented it from reaching the correct high altitude, but that will all come out in the wash when SpaceX are ready to explain everything that we saw.
:happy dog:

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Is a critical opinion not legitimate, if it can be charactized as “hand-wringing”? The definition says this means the excessive display of concern or distress.

My hands are relaxed, and so are my mind and emotions. Mr. Hadfield gave a good pep talk, as have many others, but the reason for the rocket failure seems likely to be damage to on-board systems, due to flying chunks of concrete.

It’s not about how badly the launch area was damaged, it’s a question of how this mode of failure (of the rocket) was not foreseen. Is concrete not a well understood thing? This brings into question the competence of SpaceX’ engineering management, IMO. I don’t want to, and so don’t, entertain the idea that they intended this failure mode.

The high groundwater level at the site is why they used that setup. I predict that, if they really want to keep launching from there, they will raise the launch platform (and, then necessarily, the service tower), and incorporate suitable geometries and maybe add water ablatement. Might take a bit longer than just repairs.

From my limited POV, I am onside. Onward and upward! ~8D

This would be very interesting for armchair rocket geeks (and no-one else! :P ), a detailed live audio-only Q&A held with Elon Musk 12 hours ago about what the heck really happened with the last Starship launch.

I've posted it here not for the engineering discussion, but because I was astonished how truly terrible Elon was when trying to explain things to others, even when his audience was fairly well-informed. Maybe he was stressed, completely unprepared, or hadn't had enough sleep, but he was just so totally inarticulate it really surprised me.

As an aside (but the discussion doesn't really belong on this thread!), he seemed to me to show every symptom of being on the autistic spectrum — which I'd now guess he probably is, as a high-performing Aspergers. Listen in for a couple minutes at almost any point, and you may be able to see this clearly.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mmIqSPux3FY

Funny you should say that Bill . . .

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57045770
The SpaceX CEO spoke about his use of social media, saying: "I sometimes say or post strange things"

Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has revealed he has Asperger's syndrome while appearing on the US comedy sketch series Saturday Night Live (SNL).

The 49-year-old told viewers he was "the first person with Asperger's" to host the long-running programme - to loud cheers from the audience.

People with Asperger's interpret the environment around them differently to other people.

It is thought to be the first time Mr Musk has spoken about his condition.