| Grizlas | Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 15-04-2023 14:53 |
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About two years ago Spacex conducted a flurry of Starship tests at their Boca Chica facility called Starbase. These tests must have taught them all they needed to know to go for launch, because nothing has left the ground at Boca Chica since then. That is about to change.
In the past two years, Spacex has been hard at work building what they call "stage 0" - meaning the Orbital Launch Mount, Arm and Tower : https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/starship/
If this rocket makes it to orbit, it will be the biggest rocket to ever fly. The numbers speak for themselves (simplified numbers, take with grain of salt):
Saturn V
Thrust: 35.1 MN
Low earth orbit capability: 140t
Cost: 1.200M
Space Launch System (SLS)
Thrust: 39.1 MN
Low earth orbit capability: 95t
Cost: 875M
Starship
Thrust: 72 MN
Low earth orbit capability: 156t
Cost: 100M
As you can see, Starship is more capable and a lot cheaper. While great, this is not the important part. The rocket is built to be able to fly 5 times a day!
To illustrate what that means, consider if NASA had built a stockpile of SLS rockets and could launch 5 a day. After a week (35 launches) they would have put 3.325t to orbit at a price of 30,625 billion.
After a week of Starship launches it would have put 5.460t to orbit at a price of 3,5 billion if expendable. But starship is fully reusable. If we set fuel and handling costs to 5 million, the price drops to 100 + 5*35 = 275 million a week. So during this week the ton-to-orbit price for SLS is 9,2 million while Starship manages it for 50K. That is a 184x improvement.
The first attempt to launch will be at 12:15 on Monday. Don't miss it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5QXreqOrTA
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You want to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing? |
Edited by Grizlas on 15-04-2023 14:55 |
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| Norlander | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Copenhagen | | Joined: 09.06.06 | | Posted on 15-04-2023 15:46 |
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Having read some of the discussions on r/space and /spacex, seems the best we can hope for is no delays and cancellations, quite trickly launch this. If it just works, then it will be bloody revolutionary.
One guy was wondering why they would splash it down into the pacific, the size of it is so big, that the cargo area is bigger than all of the ISS 
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The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
- John Kenneth Galbraith |
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 15-04-2023 19:12 |
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When Falcon 9 was first launched, there were a series of cancellations (scrubs) and delays. They will stop the countdown at any point in which they detect any "out of family" values from their myriad of sensors. So most likely the rocket won't go up Monday, but there is a chance!
Someone speculated that the reason for the starship splashdown - they are stopping the vehicle shortly before reaching orbit - is to avoid the scenario where the engines fail to restart, leaving the vehicle in orbit, perhaps damaged, creating space debris. Not a great first look for starship if that were to happen. By stopping short of orbit they remove that risk.
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 20-04-2023 17:59 |
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After one scrub, starship took to the skies on the second attempt!
The rocket successfully cleared the pad, but failed at stage separation and was manually terminated.
I have been waiting patiently to see this for 2 years, and I was not disappointed. People have come up to me to offer their condolences on the "failed" launch, which I find amusing. The rocket pad and tower (stage-0) are incredibly intricate with complexity matching or exceeding Starship and booster. Had this rocket blown up on startup, there would be no more launches for 1-2 years. Now they can repair and launch their next test rocket in only a couple of months. Being made mostly of fuel, rockets are extremely explosion-prone. One spark in the wrong place is sometimes all it takes. So there is always a real chance that the rocket will explode immediately upon startup. Add to that the fact that this launch mount has no flame diverter, which they now know they need, and no water deluge system, which they also now know they need, to help lessen the impact of the insanely powerful plume producing ungodly amounts of thrust, it is fair to say that I was worried for the pad. Elon gave it a 50/50 chance of clearing the pad, which I think I agreed with. So for the rocket to even clear the pad is a huge success!.
But there is more. At 0:16 3 engines were already out/exploded. Could be due to concrete debris blown of the pad, or could be something else. In other rockets when an engine explodes, it is usually bye bye, since one explosion quickly ignites something else, leading to a RUD. To combat this, Spacex has installed some shielding between the engines to avoid a cascading effect. This seems to actually have worked, which is a big deal. The rocket lost a total of 5, or 6 engines all in all with at least 3 visible explosions, yet the rocket kept flying. Usually the words "rocket" and the plural of "explosion" don't go in the same sentence.
On it went, through maximum aerodynamic pressure, or max-q without breaking up. This means that the design structure itself is viable - also a big deal. And finally, it went spinning. When rockets normally go spinning, they spin for a couple of seconds, then break under the strain. The rocket was travelling close to 3 km/s and spun for almost a minute(?) before they manually detonated it. This means the structure is extremely sturdy, which is also great.
So, all in all I'm very happy with the result. Now I believe Spacex will get to work installing at least a water deluge system, and perhaps a flame diverter. That will take a few months. The next starship and booster will have many improvements compared to what flew today, and so will the raptor 2 engines.
Spacex learned a ton from this, and will use the data to improve their launch vehicles. I'm confident that they eventually will get everything just right. Exciting times.
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You want to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing? |
Edited by Grizlas on 20-04-2023 18:02 |
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 20-04-2023 19:47 |
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I knew the launch mount would take a beating and so did Spacex. They reinforced the pad with special FONDAG concrete, a pre-blended, high strength, heat resistant concrete designed for heavy industrial applications.
Well, here is the launch pad now: https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/1649062784167030785
and this happened 5 miles away:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thA8jlgcJ-8
A water deluge system won't cut it. They have to figure our how to build a flame diverter. Won't be easy given the geology.
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| Norlander | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Copenhagen | | Joined: 09.06.06 | | Posted on 20-04-2023 20:32 |
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Probably easier to build one that to send a rocket to Mars 
Or they could go to the Cape, as that has both water deluge system and a flame diverter.
It was impressive to see the lauch, and the Kerbal tumbling without breaking up was quite something (FAA confirms it was an automatic self destruct once it was off course), my biggest concern was seeing how many engines failed to light (same time impressive that it got off the pad and to 39 km altitude without 5 engines), that has shades of N1.
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The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
- John Kenneth Galbraith |
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 20-04-2023 22:02 |
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Or they could go to the Cape, as that has both water deluge system and a flame diverter.
I suppose you're referring to pad 39A, but that is in use for the all-important falcon 9 launches that keep NASA running smoothly, so they will probably leave that as it is. They are already building their own OLM and tower(s) at the Cape. There are pipes for a water deluge system, but no visible indication of them building a flame trench yet. That will come now, i'm pretty sure.
my biggest concern was seeing how many engines failed to light (same time impressive that it got off the pad and to 39 km altitude without 5 engines), that has shades of N1.
While that is somewhat concerning, keep in mind that these are the first Raptor 2.0 engines - which are arguable the most complex engines ever, and will steadily improve. Also consider, that the engines are being completely managed by the OLM; chill, pressure, turbo pump spin-up is all done by the OLM - which is also a novelty. Still, only 3 of 33 failed to start properly - which might very well be because they got a big chunk of concrete in their face.
I think it is just a question of building enough engines, they will get it right eventually.
And yeah...N1.
Musk said that the Russians, employing maximum carrot (hero of the nation) and maximum stick (gulag) still failed to get that many engines to work in unison - and they were the A-team back then.
Space is hard.
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Edited by Grizlas on 20-04-2023 22:04 |
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 23-04-2023 10:36 |
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Just a quick OLM status follow-up.
So the special super-strong Fondag concrete under the OLM got demolished/excavated by the exhaust plume of the rocket. this is what it looked like after launch:
So, what will Spacex do next? Elon Musk offered these tweets:
And here is a picure of said metal plates, waiting to be installed:
But I must say, I'm a bit shocked at the post-apocalyptic state of the launch site.
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 30-04-2023 01:12 |
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Musk just held some sort of Starship post launch discussion on Twitter Spaces.
it is a treasuretrove of information:
https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1652451971410935808?s=46
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmIqSPux3FY
to sum up:
Launch went ok. Will take 2 months to repair OLM. Will try with metal plates instead of flame diverter. Biggest failure of the launch: the self-destruct mechanism, which should have been instantaneous, took 40 seconds to work.
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You want to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing? |
Edited by Grizlas on 30-04-2023 01:13 |
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 04-05-2023 09:22 |
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Great article summarizing the launch:
https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/05/musk-orbital-goal-starship-debut/
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 27-05-2023 11:26 |
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Here's a nice spacex video from the launch
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1662251874936934400
Next launch will be in about 2 months Elon Time.
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 28-11-2023 06:02 |
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You want to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing? |
Edited by Grizlas on 28-11-2023 06:04 |
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 28-11-2023 06:24 |
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Finally Spacex had repaired their launch pad, FWS had finished their report and FAA had issued a second launch license for Starship.
Here's an easily digestible video about it:
To make a long story short, the launch was another success for Spacex (despite what you might have read in mainstream media)
1. The launch pad seems to have survived unscathed.
2. No engine outs on booster.
3. Hot staging worked.
After these milestones things started going sideways, unfortunately. The booster exploded shortly after stage separation, most likely due to the negative acceleration imparted upon it by the second stage engines. This causes propellant to slosh forward in the tanks (starving engines, causing cavities) and the slosh back with great force (fluid hammer effect) and break stuff. Here is a nice animation:
The second stage continued on its journey after stage separation and was looking to be able to complete its trajectory, when all of a sudden there seems to have been some sort of rupture in the LOX tank. Shortly hereafter the flight termination system activated itself automatically, destroying the vehicle - probably when it detected that it was not able to reach its planned reentry destination.
So what's next?
Elon has recently announced that Spacex will "hopefully" be ready to fly late December. This probably won't happen because of, you know, Elon Time. But also because the FAA needs to complete another mishap report (needs to be done after every launch that doesn't go 100% to plan), which most likely will take a few months.
Maybe we will have another launch in February. Until then!
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You want to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing? |
Edited by Grizlas on 28-11-2023 06:27 |
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| Vuzman | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Copenhagen, DK | | Joined: 10.06.06 | | Posted on 05-12-2023 13:44 |
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When I kill her, I'll have her
Die white girls, die white girls |
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 05-12-2023 21:17 |
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wow...
After the first I think 5 factual mistakes in that video I stopped watching. I hope you're not one of the million subscribers being misled by this guy. He seems to be making a living off of "busting" people, but he clearly does not know what he's talking about when it comes to rockets. Worse, he does not seem to want to admit ignorance in the face of overwhelming evidence that he is wrong?
I suggest watching some other videos for information (like the one I posted) and forget about this guy. Like Hitchens said, what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence, so I'm not going to go through that video trying to disprove everything. Suffice to say he is wrong a lot about Spacex.
Apparently, some other people have deigned this worthy of some rebuttal. Here are some videos :
here, here and
here
EDIT: Ok. I thought I should at least watch the entire video before commenting, so I went back and watched it - even worse than I thought, but also funny. One thing just confuses the hell out of me. Most of the video is a re-run of old Elon Musk predictions and how wrong he turned out to be. He is absolutely 100% correct on this point. Musk is a businessman that always tries to sell his products. He does this by stating grand visionary goals and unrealistic timeframes. This is well known by everybody, and certainly by Musk himself, who will happily admit to being wrong and being too optimistic.
So what about this Thunderf00t guy, how have his predictions fared? His predictions about Spacex and about Tesla have certainly failed spectacularly, yet here he is, making new videos that uphold his disproven claims without any admittance of being completely wrong (see links). Pretty disingenuous and hypocritical if you ask me. He might have started out as an objective science critic, but whatever this is, its not that. Maybe the Dunning-Kruger effect got the better of him.
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You want to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing? |
Edited by Grizlas on 05-12-2023 22:17 |
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| Norlander | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Copenhagen | | Joined: 09.06.06 | | Posted on 06-12-2023 13:49 |
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It's always a laugh to watch people predicting that companies known for testing new ideas will go broke from testing new ideas.
Spacex is at the moment the most successful launch organization of all time, this year they have launched more payload mass to orbit than all other companies and countries combined, they're actually at 80% of total mass launched, yet go back 10 years and "industry experts" couldn't shut up about how dumb Falcon 9 and re-usable boosters were as an idea. Now it has basically made everything else redundant (apart from Chinese state launches).
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The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
- John Kenneth Galbraith |
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 08-12-2023 18:31 |
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It's always a laugh to watch people predicting that companies known for testing new ideas will go broke from testing new ideas.
Right? - When Spacex first started, a lot of skepticism was warranted. Here comes a Silicon Walley millionaire and tries to apply his brand of agile software development to aerospace. Everyone in the industry was laughing at him, understandably so. Fast forward 20 years and the entire industry has changed. Falcon 9 has proved beyond any doubt that this "move fast and break things" way of rocket development is far superior to the old way of making sure failure was impossible before moving forward. Almost everybody in "old space" has acknowledged this by now, NASA in particular. Nobody in the aerospace industry is laughing at Spacex anymore.
Except some so-called skeptics on youtube who have found a way to make money off of the general dislike of one Elon Musk.
He is doing a bunch of stuff that's easy to criticize. Electric vehicles, brain implants, tunnel-making, hyperloop, AI, social media platform and so on. All these topics have one thing in common; nobody on the internet knows that much about them. Electric vehicles? this is an emerging industry, not many people have a solid understanding of how they work yet. Brain implants? tunnel boring machines? who knows anything about that? AI, social media? anything goes! and so on. All either new or obscure topics anyone can have an opinion on without being challenged.
Space is different as it has fascinated people since the stone age and still does. Ever since sputnik there have been people enthusiastic about rockets and space travel. Many making this interest into a lifetime career and even more having it as a hobby. There are a lot of people, both hobbyists and professionals who have been engaged in public discussions about space and rocketry for 70 years, building up a considerable knowledge base.
So when these skeptics, who might appear to be knowledgeable on all the other Musk topics venture into the Aerospace area and begin criticizing Spacex, suddenly it is blatantly obvious to anyone with even a mediocre understanding of rockets and the Spacex approach to rocket development, that these guys don't know what they are talking about - embarassingly so.
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| Norlander | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Copenhagen | | Joined: 09.06.06 | | Posted on 11-12-2023 11:15 |
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He goes into both Artemis and Starship, really good talk.
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The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
- John Kenneth Galbraith |
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| Grizlas | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Denmark | | Joined: 08.06.06 | | Posted on 11-12-2023 13:54 |
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I watched this - great talk. Many of his points are reasonable. I have my doubts about the Artemis program too, but it's mainly related to the timeframe which I find quite unrealistic.
SmarterEveryDay gives nicest of criticisms (in stark contrast to the dude above). He is very humble about it, but feels that this whole program seems messy compared to the Apollo program.
Again, I dont want to judge this guy, but it seems to me like he is not fully onboard with the new way Spacex is developing rockets. The development of Falcon 9 did also look messy. Many of the design features were radically changed on a monthly/weekly basis and despite this the Falcon 9 turned into the most reliable rocket of all time. But for sure - compared to the Apollo program and every old space company out there, the Falcon 9 and Starship development process looks reckless and dangerous.
He also claims that there seems to be a lack of discussion about Artemis, which this woman contests:
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You want to tempt the wrath of the whatever from high atop the thing? |
Edited by Grizlas on 11-12-2023 14:19 |
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| Norlander | RE: Starship orbital launch attempt |
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| | Location: Copenhagen | | Joined: 09.06.06 | | Posted on 11-12-2023 19:02 |
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He is amazing, and judging by the comments to that talk he got a lot of people at NASA thinking the same way.
Just the whole Artemis diagram is insane, using SSL to launch humans, use 15 starships to launch fuel, then another starship as the lunar landing module, its over complicated compared to Apollo, and that will increase failure rates by a whole lot - and honestly runs counter to the design philosophy at both SpaceX and Tesla (best part is no part). The comedy part is that the 1 SSL that ULA won the contract for costs almost as much as the whole chain of Starships, but the worrying part is the complexity of it all.
Honestly should just have been done as a mission, fund going to the moon with XX amount of billions, whoever can get to first milestone gets YY amounts of dollars, then if you later get to milestone 2 you get zz amounts of dollars, etc. (often 5 to 8 milestones in total). More than one company/consortium can complete this, but only those who complete milestone 1 get to go for milestone 2, etc. The big benefit of doing this is that you are funding those who show results.
caveat: I'm more familiar with the ARPA-E grants from the US DoE, and have only a cursory familiarity with any NASA grant. Within the context of ARPA-E this is a rough overview of how it works. There has also been talk about doing some HEU projects this way going forward, but for now it is not gotten to the political level in Europe.
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The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
- John Kenneth Galbraith |
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