Over at Starbase Boca Chica, the crew is in the midst of preparing Booster 7 for transport back to the high bay to more thoroughly inspect and repair B7 as needed. Ars Technica reports:
Musk flew into Brownsville on Monday evening after the anomaly to assess the damage firsthand and determine a plan to move forward. Tweeting shortly after midnight, he said, "Base of the vehicle seems ok by flashlight. I was just out there about an hour ago. We shut down the pad for the night for safety. Will know more in the morning."
Yesterday morning, he added that to get the room and visibility they need they'll go back to high bay. This is a job for the chopsticks on the Orbital Launch Integration Tower, and it lifted B7 onto one of the self-propelled transporters - multi-axled, high weight capacity vehicles - around 4:30 PM. I grabbed a screen capture of the booster as it got high enough to be visible. In the Lab Padre chat area this morning, someone said that one Raptor had been replaced out at the pad either earlier in the morning or last night.
Clearly some of metal is missing at the top of those four engines in the red box, and during the rest of the booster's movement it looked like other engines had the same sort of damage. Whether or not that's important damage or minor things to be expected, I have no clue. At 7:11 PM, with three hours to go in the today's road closure, the booster hasn't moved in a couple of hours and movement doesn't seem imminent. Chances are we won't get more information until tomorrow, if then.
Meanwhile, we get an evening launch, the delayed CRS25 Cargo Dragon mission to the Space Station is set to launch 8:44 local time, so minutes from now.
What an amazing sight . . .
ReplyDelete1) Those are fairly thin-skinned cowlings for the engine(s). They could have been removed during the inspection process or blown off by the FAE - but since the edges are clean I say they've been removed.
ReplyDelete2) the booster got picked up and moved to a transport stand, about 9:30 PM CDT they started for the High Bay for inspection/fixing. Made it successfully.
3) CRS 25 launch was flawless - SpaceX makes it look easy!!
Right after I finished posting this, I saw that the road closure had been extended to 2AM (their time) so I figured B7 would be in the high bay by the morning. Just got a "members only" video from Lab Padre showing the move.
DeleteThe process of putting the post together, checking and editing was interrupted by going outside to watch the launch. A beautiful one with a bonus of one those "Space Jellyfish" effects. We could see the booster's first burn start but then it went behind a neighbor's tree. Came in just in time to see the landing on YouTube.
Good point on the cowlings! I should have noticed that. Just not used to it, I guess.
During the afternoon, we watched them move the booster from last week's flight, 1058-13, onto the transporter to carry off to the refurbishment building.
From what I have seen in the past, Space-X has a good process in place for handling "quality escapes". They seem to be much more honest and thorough in their root cause analysis than most companies, and also in their follow through.
ReplyDelete