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Thursday, April 27, 2023

US Fish and Wildlife Says No Big Impacts from Starship

I'm honestly surprised to see a statement from the US Fish and Wildlife service this soon after the test flight of Starship, which was a week ago today.  As reported by SpaceNews, their statement was dated yesterday.

In an April 26 statement to SpaceNews, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it documented impacts from the April 20 Starship integrated test flight that lifted off from Boca Chica, Texas, to the neighboring Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. That documentation started after the highway leading to both the launch site and refuge, closed due to what the agency called “launch pad safety concerns,” opened two days after the flight.

That means this is based on four days worth of work.   

No debris was found on lands belonging to the refuge itself, but the agency said debris was spread out over 385 acres belonging to SpaceX and Boca Chica State Park. A fire covering 3.5 acres also started south of the pad on state park land, but the Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t state what caused the fire or how long it burned.

There was no evidence, though, that the launch and debris it created harmed wildlife. “At this time, no dead birds or wildlife have been found on refuge-owned or managed lands,” the agency said.

It's probably early, then, to see that the Boca Chica equivalent of the Snail Darter (whatever that might be - if it even exists) wasn't inconvenienced by the sand being relocated, or the very high sound pressure levels.  While they found no evidence of harmed wildlife, by now most people have seen some of the snapshots of the chunks of concrete that flew surprisingly long distances.  Like this one that looks like it has got to weigh a couple of hundred pounds.

Photo from one of the professionals stationed there, Patrick T. Fallon of Agence France-Presse via his Twitter account. Patrick is still trying to find his Nikon D5 that got blown away.  Chunks of concrete are scattered over miles from the Orbital Launch Mount. 

It's not clear that the only task SpaceX has is the repair of the OLM.  They still have to complete an investigation of what went wrong and what's required to fix it.  Whatever they conclude will have to be approved by the FAA before they would issue a new launch license or remove the hold on the current one.  We have no word on whether or not there are portions of the Starship or Superheavy that need to be redesigned and probably won't hear such news for a while.  We know that Ship 24 and Booster 7 were both considered obsolete and were launched primarily to learn as much as possible, so it's possible they already noted something that needed redesign and the next ships or boosters already have been modified.



7 comments:

  1. That is quick. But probably realistic. You'll see sand scouring during tornadoes and other high-wind events. And the boom was probably less sonically damaging than the tip vortices from wind farms (which are now being linked to whale deaths, no, really, seriously, the low-level sonics from wind farms are killing whales...)

    Still waiting to see what SpaceX does for site mitigation. Flame diverters? Flame trenches? Big arsed barriers around the tank farm? Still waiting...

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    1. CSI Starbase and one other blogger put their heads together and came up with the flame trench solution being built at/under Stage 0. It's almost ready to go, too. Musk may well be right when he said 6-8 weeks to be able to relaunch. The guy that they contracted to help him with the problem is a genius at this sort of thing.
      Also, Musk stated today that they are going to get the next booster to go right away, rather than slowly ramp up the engine(s) output. They were actually building up thrust very slowly since this was the first launch. Well, now they know they can go to 90-100% thrust as soon as the engines stabilize. He said the ship should clear the tower in 2.5 seconds, as opposed to the 5 seconds it took the first time.
      No, the launch stack was NOT supposed to go sideways, and they deliberately shut down the two outer ring boosters and the one in the middle. If the HPU's hadn't gotten blown to hell, he (and I have to agree) said that it would've separated and the ship would have made orbit. But, that's why they test things.

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  2. As this was the largest rocket yet, should we suppose that the pad was not beefy enough for this launch? Further, was it the thrust from the engines which hurled the concrete chunks that far?

    I haven't looked into it so I'm trying not to 2nd guess the design, material selection, and installation of the pad.. Yet I'm wondering how they apparently missed that which a third year student in a materials lab should know.
    At the least I want to see data from strain gauges.

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  3. This illustrates my concern for the idea of landing and launching on unimproved surfaces. It appears this problem has not been thought through, or much at all. The latest Mars lander used the elevator idea to good effect, but how do you do that with a Starship?

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    1. The booster will only ever launch and land on Earth. Starship is far less powerful, but is all that is needed under Martian gravity (or the Moon).

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    2. Way back when I had to visit SLC 6 at Vandenberg for some testing so spent some time at the complex. The difference in scale between the starship infrastructure (Launch mount etc.) and the scale of the infrastructure of SLC 6 at Vandenberg always struck me as very odd. I was happy to see that SpaceX has signed a contract that will enable them to use SLC 6. EdC

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    3. The Lunar Landing version of Starship has, according to illustrations from SpaceX, landing rockets up above the tankage section but below the section. Come down on main engines, transfer to landing rockets and there's no or little debris tossed around.

      Don't know if this will work with Starship on Mars, but Starship on earth didn't thrash the pad it was launched from.

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