That's right, the next three boosters - alongside good portions of another. Anybody want to say they'll stop producing them after these three?
In a post on X this past Friday (Feb. 2), SpaceX took a stride toward showing that when they talk about wanting to launch Starships often they're not just blowing hot air. They posted photos of three stacked Super Heavy boosters with a fourth partially stacked alongside, all inside their Megabay building in Boca Chica, Texas, now adorned with the sign calling it Starbase.
You'll notice the grid fins at the top of the three fully-stacked boosters in the center. On the left you can see a fourth booster that isn't full-sized without grid fins, and I don't know if the round section on the right gets stacked onto it or if that's for another one.
Their post said, "Super Heavy boosters for the next three flights, with a fourth ready to stack, in the Starbase Megabay"
Starship consists of two elements, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable: Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper-stage spacecraft called Starship.
When fully stacked, Starship stands about 400 feet (122 meters) tall. It's the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, capable of launching up to 150 tons of payload to low Earth orbit, according to SpaceX's spec sheet.
Super Heavy's 33 Raptor engines were rated to produce 16.7 Million pounds of thrust, or just over 506,000 pounds of thrust each. Since then we've seen later versions of the Raptor claimed to producing more than that, but it's a good number for comparisons.
The next flight test has been talked about as being this month, we just don't know when. The usual waits and delays are playing out now: getting the FAA license and any other approvals they need.
I love this! Which one of these *won't* have a rapid unscheduled disassembly? It would take NASA fifty years to do what Elon's done in five.
ReplyDeleteI'm amazed at the speed of innovation, production and just frikken Getting it Done. I was in elementary school and the teachers would drag a tv into their rooms and we all got to watch the lift off of the different missions. It sure wasn't one every few months or weeks. And landing the damn boosters!!??? Are you kidding me?? How baddass izzatt?
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, of course, after this round of boosters and starships, the next gen has the potential to be taller, like significantly taller.
ReplyDeleteWhich means building the 2nd tower higher than the existing towers, and then once the second tower is up and working, rebuilding the first tower at Boca and the tower at the Cape.
Also noteworthy is the NASA administrator in charge of the Human Landing System and all things Moonish visited Boca Chica and she and her staff are now very excited with SpaceX. Apparently the HLS mockup has been equipped with a functional life support system and other nifty things.
Wish SpaceX would do a video tour of the mockup.
Just think what progress SpaceX could make without having to deal with corruptacrats.
ReplyDeleteDo not forget the watermelons!
DeleteAs amazing the thrust numbers are i think about the investment getting to this stage, particularly the driving force pushing everything. It is almost incomprehensible, whatever it is. Somebody or something wants to get something into orbit awfully bad. For some reason the whole multi-planetary thing, just seems to me, speaking for myself specifically that is, a tale and a hidden agenda exists and this is the driving factor. Only relying on my gut sense here, like my grand pop told me one time after telling him i suspected something but had no solid proof, he told me to pay attention to your instinct, its usually your sub-conscience trying to tell your awake brain something important.
ReplyDeleteIts easy to get caught up in the majesty along with the just phenomenal level of work-technology going on with Super Heavy, nothing like it exists in all history, yet its almost akin to the efforts back in the day around Babel and the tower, and thats the thing right there. In a truly eff'ed up world where an elitist cabal has its meat hooks sunk into everything at all levels of human activity, how they are just the most incompetent group of humans period, inbred and monopolizing everything with their financial nepotism, inhibiting every aspect of any natural human order if things, master meddlers, here is this whole X thing, with hardly any constraints everything else seems to suffer, in other-words just let humans do what they can do best, no limits, it truly sticks out like a sore thumb, yet there is this X attached to it all, because X stands for the destroyer, aka Lucifer if you will the dark under-lord of the underworld. Nothing good comes out of that aspect of history. Making X a household name is akin to making all the woke things normal. Particularly of one is aware of the biblical cautionary tellings from Christianity and its origins. Regardless, and i am as non plussed as every one with SpaceX's remarkable achievements, especially both the manufacturing processes and how close to physically impossible power factors they are producing reliably in those Raptor engines, they got one heck of a core group on innovative outside the box critical thinkers working for SpaceX. But think about it. The worlds going to hell in a hand basket and here is SpaceX, the contradictions in terms gives one pause to think critically about it all. Has any truly private organization ever dared to pour so much investment at such risk factors pouring vast sums of money into something that pretty much has not been done before? I mean everything else is a fart in a mitten in a hurricane in comparison. Attempting to make Super Heavy as reliable as Falcon is with similar reusability with these power factors, nothing like it has been accomplished successfully never mind attempted. May be its as simple as the genius of a kind of scalability in practical terms. Keep scaling upwards pushing non quantum tech to its total limits and sit on it making such a thing dependable/reliable and financially successful. But what is it truly that is operating along the fringes of the shadows behind it all? Its not the incredible efforts and achievements here I wonder about. Thy un-lying eyes deceive not. Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!
But thy amygdalae senses something else is afoot. If i had to make a stab at it, somebody/something wants to put a lot of something into orbit around our world for total human control purposes.
Yup, got the ol' tin foil hat on here too.