Space.com reports on a couple of tweets from Elon Musk over the weekend which strongly imply that the goal for the first orbital flight of Starship is in March. That's not a surprise, but it's as close to a promise as we're able to get.
"If remaining tests go well, we will attempt a Starship launch next month," Musk said via Twitter on Saturday (opens in new tab) (Feb. 4). "Success is far from certain, but excitement is guaranteed," he added in another tweet (opens in new tab), this one on Sunday (Feb. 5).
The design economics for Starship are so revolutionary that it simply changes everything. It makes interplanetary travel much more feasible, for both cargo and people. It literally could mark the beginning of mankind as an interplanetary species.
None of this is news to people who have been following the tests and
refinements going on at Boca Chica as long as we've been able to. I'm
pretty confident all regular readers here know the record of Starship
suborbital hops -
the most recent was May of '21, almost two years ago - and you'll know that both Booster 7 and Ship 24 have
had a number of static firings. The largest number of engines fired on
Booster 7 was
14 engines fired back on November 14th, briefly making it the most powerful rocket on Earth. Ship 24, meanwhile had
static fired all six of its engines two months before.
We all know that before the first attempt at orbit, a major milestone is to
static fire all 33 boosters on B7, we just don't know when we'll get to see
that. Road closures are scheduled for the rest of this week, from 8AM to
8PM everyday, but that was true for today as well.
B7 & S24 on Monday, Jan. 23rd "full flight-like WDR." SpaceX photo.
There are rumors that the launch site deluge hardware we talked about
in the last couple of weeks
is being worked into place before the full static fire, but I know of no hard
data to back that.
From the Just for Fun department. Today is the fifth anniversary of the first Falcon Heavy launch The launch that lifted Elon's personal Tesla into a Trans-Mars trajectory, where it now resides.
Had the occasion to watch a video on Stoke Space https://www.stokespace.com/ on the tube. Seems like an interesting concept. Anyone with more knowledge than me looked at them yet ?
ReplyDeleteMicro-processor computer control has allowed that style engine to exist. Previous, like old-school rocketry, engines had to concentrate their power into the minimum number of nozzles.
DeleteThough, interestingly, the design of ring-mounted engines on the edge of a rocket core is not new. Quite a few other proposed designs incorporated a ring of engines, including Boeing's Big Onion, Japan's Space Tourism SSTO, Convair's Nexus and the non-nuclear launching of the Project Orion are some of them.
What limited some of the above designs was the control of thrust necessary to deal with non-center thrust-line thrusting. Lack of money or support doomed others, but without cheap microprocessing computers, none of them would have really worked.
Or that's what one rocket scientist told me years ago. He predicted the rise of non-traditional launch companies and designs.
Neat thing about the ring-thruster concept is it leaves the huge base open for all sorts of things. Like a large central cargo door. Or heat shield. Or both. Or weapons positions... Or a nuclear thruster... which could be used as a weapon...
I've got the feeling that SpaceX is going to launch just to see if the dynamic forces of launching meet their computer models. Survival is probably secondary at this point. Nice, but flight data is far more important, even catastrophic-failure flight data, than ship survival.
ReplyDeleteStill, looking forward to the static test and potential launch (if Booster 7 and the launch complex survives said static test.)
I think that's a big consideration. Models are nice and all, but without verification, especially for something as complex as fluid dynamics of super hot fluids, they're as bad mental masturbation as climate models.
DeleteMusk's desire to launch without needing any sort of concrete or pad or water deluge is perfectly logical for the much smaller Starship than the Superheavy boosters. There isn't going to be an improved launch pad on the moon or Mars if a Starship is coming back to Earth. There's just a hell of a lot of difference between Starship and the whole stack.
As fast as SpaceX gets things done, and if the launch will not occur until after February, there's a good chance they'll get the deluge system in place and tested before The Big Launch. Static firing of all 33 booster engines might set 'em back if no deluge is used when that occurs. It's a crapshoot unless a copy of the PERT chart or a timeline is available - and as we all well know, what happens at Starbase stays at Starbase! ;P
ReplyDelete