—-
Starliner Christian Davenport
"We'll land when we're ready" is the new "We'll fly when we're ready."
6/21/24,
https://x.com/wapodavenport/status/1804318927205359619Loren Grush
Waiting for a Starliner landing date is the new waiting for a Starliner launch date
6/21/24,
https://x.com/lorengrush/status/1804309554181628298 —-
Polaris Dawn < We are getting very close to the Polaris Dawn launch, NET July 12th. Are you still targeting July 12th?
Jared Isaacman
It won't be too long after the NET date. We will provide updates soon but we are getting really close. All major joint sims are complete. We have final suit ATP tests this week in the chamber, then refresher sims right before entering quarantine. It is bittersweet, we spent 2+ years training together and that is about to end.
6/22/24,
https://x.com/rookisaacman/status/1804542451065008313 —-
Video: Tim Dodd tours Starbase with Elon Musk, the day before Flight 4 Everyday Astronaut
Join @elonmusk for a tour inside @SpaceX's Starbase and the brand new Starfactory. This video was shot the day before Flight 4, on June 5th, 2024. Part 2 comes out next week!
pic.twitter.com/0YsIYelGq5 6/22/24,
https://x.com/erdayastronaut/status/1804530882528661588First Look Inside SpaceX's Starfactory w/ Elon Musk - YouTube 64 min. Lots of nerdy details. (Lil X and other kids are running around and trying to interrupt, for the first few minutes. Don’t despair.)
Some notes:
Long term goal: 1,000 ships a year. Maybe not all here. This factory is capable of 100 a year. A ship every three days.Currently making 200 Falcon upper stages a year. Probably more than that next year. That was unbelievable not long ago.
We’re at maybe V1.6, 1.7 of Starship today. Still testing, working out the details. But
no one has ever built a fully reusable orbital rocket before, so we are in uncharted territory. To be a true spacefaring civilization, we need full and rapidly reusable rockets.
I call it rapidly reusable reliable rockets. There is no point in an expendable rocket.
If you can do 200 tons reusable, you can do double that expendable. 400 tons.
Toughest remaining problem is a rapidly reusable orbital heat shield. No one’s ever built one before. Shuttle was close, but it took months, and thousands of people, to refurbish. Goal for the rest of this year is to get through the high heating so the heat shield survives.
Heat shield. Have booster come back and be caught by the tower. And ship come back and be caught by the tower. Those are the three big things we need to happen. That’s what’s needed for full reusability. THE PAYLOAD FOR THIS YEAR IS DATA. Not satellites.
Nosecone, black with with spots or tags. EM: we’re checking each tile, making sure it’s well-seated and not cracked. We’re continuing to iterate on the mounting point. 99% of the time it works well. Need to determine if the 1% is due to a cracked tile, or another problem. It’s a snap-on. You pretty much have to break the tile to pull it off. That’s meant to go on and stay on.
Hundreds of changes after each flight. At the detail level, thousands for each flight. That’s hardware, across booster/ship/engines. There’s also software changes, of course. But a very small change can be a big deal. Tim: and then fly two months later!
Understand: we’re still in testing. Early tests were learning how to work with stainless steel and liquid methane. And using the first Full Flow Staged Combustion Engine as the engine.
All a lot of people saw was a flight: did it land or not land — but we were trying to figure out: how do we work with steel? How do we work with methane as a fuel? And a total new engine architecture. New flaps. Need very powerful actuators for the flaps. It’s like an airplane moving its wings. We use Tesla motors to actuate the grid fins. And the flaps on the ship.We try not to use hydraulics. It’s all electric actuation. The engines are also gimbaled electrically. I think there’s actually no hydraulics in the vehicle, except some very tiny little part. There’s pneumatics. (Tim: yeah, valves and stuff)
And all the engine-to-vehicle interactions are very complicated. You don’t see all that when you fire an engine on the test stand. Whole different interactions in flight than when you are testing on the ground.
Tim: different orientation, different G-forces. Zero-G.
EM: there’s no test stand that can test a rocket at 17,000 miles an hour doing 6 G’s, in every different orientation. So you do as much as you can on the ground, then you gotta fly it. You use simulations, but a lot of things are missing from reality in simulations.
There’s a bunch of engines down there. (Screencap ⬇️ ). Each one is the most advanced rocket engine ever made. FFSC engine.
This version of the engines look “much cleaner than they used to” — hardly anything visible above the bell — and these are not V3.
We eliminated a bunch of welded and bolted joints. Especially want to get rid of the bolts. Bolts, flanges and seals are hell. Especially if they are hot.The next gen raptor is a bit difficult to service, because there are parts that don’t have a flange any more, it’s just welded shut. If you need to change a part, you have to literally cut it open. Tim: swap the engine? EM: no, we can cut it open. (Laughs.).
I mean, you can see a lot of flanges here. Flange, Flange, Flange, Flange. Beast level flanges.
Turning a corner — Tim: “Holy crap, it just keeps going”. Now with air conditioning. EM: “There’s more behind that wall.”
Orbital Refilling will be docking to ourselves. That’s much easier than docking to the space station, and we do that a lot.
Tim: Orbital fuel depot? EM: to go to the moon, may not need one. Send a ship up, send tankers immediately. And your boil-off rate will not be too bad. Can’t use atmosphere to brake on the Moon. Don’t need flaps or heat shield. Need very little thrust. But you do need pretty big landing legs. So in case one leg lands on a boulder and one lands on a crater, you don’t want to tip over. ⬇️ Second image: Header tank (for landing), surrounded by COPVs. “Gotta pressurize the header tank with something, and the engine’s not on.”
