SpaceX prepares itself for a tenth Starship flight test SpaceX is gearing up for another Starship launch, blaming a previous failure on structural issues and fuel pressurization problems. The launch is currently scheduled for Sunday, August 24, with the launch window opening at 1830 CT (2330 UTC). The mission will be similar to previous ones, including a payload deployment of …
These are all really old phrases / acronyms. They were made up by aviation engineers. Imagine another of multi million dollar prototype just blew up / crashed. A phrase with a little humour helps move on from the disappointment to getting the next prototype ready to explode.
"Last, best hope for peace"
I thought that was Babylon 5.
And, it's not like the history of the Babylon project was any better. Similar to Swamp Castle.
Babylon 1 destroyed during construction (sabotage)
Babylon 2 destroyed during construction (sabotage)
Babylon 3 destroyed during construction (sabotage)
Babylon 4 disappeared within 24 hrs of coming online (taken back in time to be used as command base during previous shadow war)
Babylon 5 stayed up, and was eventually decommissioned and turned into a museum, a decade or two after the war.
SpaceX’s Starship programme is starting to look less like Apollo and more like the V-2: oversized, overhyped, and mostly good at blowing itself up. You’d think with Elon’s well-documented soft spot for “German efficiency,” they’d have leaned harder into the Wunderwaffe cosplay - maybe a few more Roman salutes on the launch pad would help keep the fuel lines from exploding. Then again, von Braun’s rockets at least landed in one piece… albeit on London.
Not all of von Braun's rockets landed on London, just some of those developed from the A4 experimental series. Hos later designs missed London by a wide margin, which in the case of the Saturn-V was probably a very good thing!
(dammit - no rocket icon)
I played in the crater that was in the field behind the house
Our local woods in Barnet (about a mile away from the house I grew up in) had a number of deep bomb craters from where a WW1 Zeppelin had dumped its bomb load in an attempt to prevent itself crashng (or to crash more softly and without lots of boom boom on board..)
Agent ZigZag, a German 'spy', actually a double agent, an expert safe cracker and professional thief, was used by the British to misdirect both V1 and V2 targeting. See:
https://www.frankfallaarchive.org/people/edward-eddie-arnold-chapman/
"...
Chapman returned to Britain in June 1944 to report on the accuracy of the V1 and V2 rockets. He transmitted false wireless messages to the Germans, telling them that the bombs were hitting their targets when in fact they were undershooting. He also gave the Germans fake targets to aim at, which were apparently only empty fields.
..."
There was a biography and a film, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2113649/
In fact he and the other German spies in Britain were all double agents working for the British. We know this because a Brit in Europe, involved in the German war effort, repeatedly warned the British of three agents who were transmitting detailed intelligence for months. Eventually he realised that the only reason for their continued activity was that they were all double agents.
> Mostly because the British boffins[1] took pains to report their landing sites as _past_ London, causing the German to decrease the range-to-target.
Was that not the V1's that used a propeller on the front to calculate how far it had gone? After a number of rotations it shut the fuel off.
It worked using the German spy network (which was under our control) and a strange fact that the Germans had not any recent photos of the bomb damaged north London area to compare it with.
"Not all of von Braun's rockets landed on London"
A smaller number, but still quite a few, were aimed at Belgium, especially Antwerp, and parts of France in an effort to halt the Allied advances and/or deny the Allies various facilities such as ports or bridges.
While the company and it's prophet (or "profit") bang on about all of the data and how quickly they can iterate new designs, why do they keep adding complexity to the tests? The contract with NASA to provide a lunar orbit to surface shuttle has no need for satellite launching capability. There's no contract for sending anything on Starship to Mars. Photos exist from the inside of Starship showing glowing perforations from burn throughs where heat tiles have gone missing. SpaceX is claiming they already have later versions of the rocket lined up for tests which begs the question what they will learn from launching old hardware that will be valid going forward.
In the mean time, for any moon or Mars mission, there will need to be a fleet of tankers launched that can top up an orbital depot that will top up the main craft going to those destinations. Transferring cryogenic propellants in orbit has never been done. The connectors for such a thing have never been qualified. Why isn't SpaceX using the Falcon 9 as a test bed to develop that capability? It would be much less expensive to do that and then make modifications for use on Starship. If they wait until they have Starship working, they are going to be a decade behind on their contracts and NASA will have to drop them as a supplier due to non-performance. So far SX seems to continue to get government contracts, but there should be a point where somebody wakes up and demands the older contracts are satisfied before there can be any more.
Maybe SX sees the rough road ahead and that's why Elon is shifting money to X.AI that he also holds the majority of control over.
"Is there an insurance aspect?"
Sunk cost fallacy or losing face by admitting there are too many flaws and they need to toss them in the bin.
Thunderf00t just released a video on the heat tiles he's managed to obtain that's highly interesting. I wish he would have weighed a chunk of tile as received and after soaking the sample in a glass of water overnight. I was not aware of the hygroscopic nature of the material. Since the tiles are likely flotsam, freeze drying them would be a good idea. I expect the mass difference would be enormous so if a Starship were rained on, it might not be able to lift off fully loaded. To find that out empirically might melt the launch structure since the rocket would move very slowly or just sit there like a mega(giga) blowtorch until something gave way. There's finite cooling water available and once it's gone.....
Thunderf00t is too fond of hearing himself talk imho.
The tiles used on Starship are basically the same stuff used on the shuttle. And getting rained on wasn't a problem for the shuttle either. (The outer surface of the tile is "glazed" and non-porous so water intrusion shouldn't be much of a problem for a rocket on the pad.)
"StarShip"("): 3 failures
N-1 (USSR):4
So for this flight will "StarShip" match or beat the N-1....!
(*) "StarShip": there's hubris: it will never ever get to the stars, to Mars at best. Moon maybe. LEO looking dodgy at the moment ... Let's all spaff lots of methane whilst European gas prices are sky-high! Oh and we buy are gas from... The US. In competition with His Muskiness.
As fursty Ferret said, mostly because it won't work very well after fishing it out from the ocean. Lots of corrosive salt water getting into places it really oughtn't to go. And it would have to be towed through the ocean to get to shore. It big. You won't believe how big it is. You think the Statue of Liberty is big? Startship is nearly 100 feet bigger! Now add in at least a couple of cranes on shore to lift it out and try to stand it back up again. Then there's probably weeks, at least, in refurbishing it, especially the most expensive bits, the 30-odd engines.
Even in the short to medium term of re-using it after a catch, it's probably cheaper to lose some launch capability and spend a bit extra on fuel for a landing, especially since if it succeeds like Falcom 9, the turnaround time will be cheap and minimal for multiple re-uses.
All of the above assuming that it system works as expected and there's no silly overlooked fundamental flaw. If his long term plan of many flights to Mars ever comes to fruition, mostly it's the boosters that will be launching and being re-used. Not so sure about the Ship parts. I'd expect at least a portion of them, possibly as many as half, will stay on Mars once landed as "accommodation" ;-)
"Lots of corrosive salt water getting into places it really oughtn't to go. "
The v3 Raptor is 3D printed with lots of the piping embedded and most things are welded in place so there's no taking anything apart and having a squizz inside. That's a lot more disposable than reusable. I have to wonder how much disection they will be doing to be able to look for issues within the engine after flight until they have something reliable enough to count on for multiple flights before replacement. Elon says they are running them at the edge of what the materials can take. Again, that's not a confidence building statement about something that is supposed to be used over and over. They do that sort of thing with dragsters and have to rebuild the engines after each short run down the track. My car has over 250k miles on it with the same not-high-performance original engine. I am worried about it.
"Can someone explain - and I am prepared to be shot down in flames here - why it is deemed preferable to catch it, with the enormous expenditure of energy, compared with fishing out of the ocean.”
Good question, and nobody will shoot you down in flames for asking a good question.
As the answers below, salt water is really quite corrosive and although you will need to use more fuel to return to a landing pad, and hence reduce the usable payload you can launch, that is almost certainly less than the cost of the checking and refurbishing of the booster than would be required with a water landing.
Actually does anyone know, does an empty super-heavy booster even float?
"why it is deemed preferable to catch it, with the enormous expenditure of energy, compared with fishing out of the ocean.”
If it isn't landed somehow, it won't be reusable. By catching it, they delete landing legs and all of the mass those would add along with some aerodynamic penalties. Once you have accurate enough landing capability, landing on legs or "armpits" doesn't mean much. There's also no need to fetch the rocket from out in the ocean which needs a good sea state, a life vest so it doesn't sink and powerful tugs. Chop sticks on a platform floating on the surface would be really impressive if there's any sort of sea on. In shallow enough water to plant legs and jack up a platform, they'd be close enough to shore anyway.
There has to be the need for a huge cadence to make the reuse penalties pay off. I wonder if that's why the architecture is such that each moon mission will require a large number of tanker flights rather than work done on expendable craft that could make it in one or two launches. A Mars mission would take more capability and could need an orbiting gas station for fills ups before a big rocket sets sail. Throw in a mandate for fully cryogenic propellants and cadence is required to deliver to the station before the previous delivery(ies) have boiled off. SpaceX also has a need for a ship that can carry more volume to LEO to support the constant launch needs of Starlink. I question whether it will work for refills unless they are replacing whole strings at a time and not just filling holes. BTW, in 2025, SpaceX is deorbiting a Starlink sat every 2.6 days with an expectation that the number will increase as the satellites age. One can expect deorbits to hit 15 a day just based on SpaceX disclosed numbers about the number launched, the build-out goal and expected lifetime.
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