Wednesday, April 19, 2023

It's Almost Like The Last 24 Hours Didn't Exist

The two big stories from where I sit were that Starship is working feverishly to make Thursday's launch attempt, and nobody had any sort of definite clue on when that RHESSI satellite would reenter.  

Both of those stories are exactly the same tonight. 

A site I've been looking at today, Satview, has been updating the RHESSI predictions every few hours.  So what's the latest?  The last post says it was updated at 1515 UTC today, or 11:15 AM EST.  They post two predictions: one from themselves, Satview.org, and the other from USstratcom (United States Strategic Command).  

  • Satview says reentry begins 4/20 at 0714 UTC; here on the east coast 3:14 AM ET. 
  • USstratcom says 4/19 at 2349 UTC.  As I'm writing, that's about 10 minutes ago, 7:49 PM ET.  

Well, at 7-1/2 hours apart, at least the predictions are closer to each other than last night's 16 hours.

USstratcom prediction on the left, Satview.org prediction on the right.  The target indicator over the south Pacific west of South America (left) and over Australia (right) are the predicted locations when the reentry begins.  

As for SpaceX and Starship's Integrated Flight Test, there's scant information.  Space.com quotes Elon as saying,  

"The team is working around the clock on many issues. Maybe 4/20, maybe not," Musk said via Twitter on Tuesday night (April 18).

I've watched enough of the cameras to believe that statement isn't an exaggeration.  It's also true that they always seem to be working around the clock and overcoming obstacles.  It's just that we don't know anything else.  Tomorrow's launch window opens at 8:28 a.m. CT and closes at 9:30 a.m. CT; 62 minutes. 

This morning, we had a Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral, SLC-40, carrying 21 of the new V2 mini Starlink satellites.  During the coverage, one of the commentators said, 

"If we do make an attempt tomorrow, the chances of scrubs are high.  But whether a scrub or liftoff or a rapid unscheduled disassembly, or some combination of all of the above, excitement is pretty much guaranteed."

We'll be watching with our fingers crossed.  



10 comments:

  1. Poop! Looks like there will be no chance of a new paperweight.

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  2. Well Starship made it 4 minutes before BOOM.
    Excitement guaranteed!

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    1. Did you notice, couple times, looked like 2 engines came apart, blew pieces thru the engine skirt and something let loose under one strake near the bottom, it was shedding lots of bits near around point of max Q.
      Seems like a very rugged rocket, how it could stay together tumbling like it did, all that stress, must of been loosing oxygen thru a leak cause it ran out way faster then the methane, looks like they let booster run to use up the fuel, maybe to reduce the explosive forces. Also looked like they opened dump vents on starship just as it began to tumble. Both tanks. Maybe they knew what was going on watching and mitigating things before they hit the self destruct??
      Pretty darn awesome launch. Longest hold down it seemed, letting the stack settle down before release, from induced shock of the start up of all that horsepower combined with the pendulum effects of a fully fuel starship?

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  3. Well that was exciting. SS/SH got off the pad. It looked like there was a strange angle as it came out of the dust cloud. Also looked like an engine failed shortly after launch started. Then I saw another one about a minute into flight. There was a shot that showed three engines were out. I wonder if that was the cause of the problems. When I saw all of the pitching with the stack, I knew something was wrong. Sad that they had to use the FTS. I hope we hear soon the preliminary results of the investigation. And I hope that the enviroweenies don't try to use this to shut down SS/SH.

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  4. That was quite a show, and I've been working on myself to live by the idea that the SpaceX coverage (Kate Tice) was saying: anything after clearing the tower is a lesson learned. I'm sure they have a lot of data, with as much downlink as they can get send.

    But, yeah, I saw a shot up its skirt showing some engines out, and I think it was five engines out. And it was looking like the control system couldn't keep it pointed properly, which shouldn't be possible. I'm not sure it cleared Max Q, although I think they said it did. That was around the time the stack started tumbling.

    That was quite a show, though. We'll learn more about how the ground hardware survived and what the official stories are. I expect it to take weeks.

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    1. Over at the NASASpaceflight Forums starting on this page in this thread "Topic: FAILURE: SpaceX Starship 1st Flight : Starbase TX : 20 April 2023 UPDATES" there are some good photos and discussion on some of the problems in this mornings launch.

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    2. They lost the HPUs - no gimbaling, no steering vanes, no ship/booster clamp release.
      The loop-de-loop was INCREDIBLE!

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  5. https://youtu.be/bl7IqyEyqhY

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  6. In Kiev it said in the news, they had a meteor go over them last night. First everyone thought it Russian missiles. (to be expected i guess, LOL's!, reading previous piece in same science section, they say Russians are evil orcs, are making it rain so Ukraine can't have their greatest counteroffensive. I think clown world's losing it.)

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