Because big news is hard to find
Very Little News on Test Flight 7
Very little new News seems to have come out today beyond what Beans commented about last night at 11:33PM from an X posting by Elon Musk.
Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity.
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
There are stories that the FAA might or might not require some more involved investigation than usual, and links to videos like this one posted by people who looked up and saw the RUD.
The outcome is a disappointment to SpaceX and observers. It's the first time a Starship has failed to complete its mission since the second test flight in November 2023. This was going to be the year that SpaceX worked on getting their mission cadence up to pretty much a flight every other week - 25 launches is the goal for the year - and that depends on not getting tied up in more delays.
The Super Heavy booster coming in, seconds before the catch Thursday at Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX
Keep Your Eyes on Stoke Space
Stoke Space is a well-funded startup space company from Kent, Washington working on the design of a fully reusable orbital rocket. How well-funded?
The Washington-based launch company announced Wednesday that it had raised $260 million in Series C funding, a significant capital raise at a time when it has become more difficult for some space companies to attract funding, Ars reports.
More details on Stoke Space are in a blog posting here from September of 2023. Stoke Space is aimed at getting a completely reusable medium lift rocket called Nova and test flying it this year. Nova's first stage will land vertically, similar to a Falcon 9 rocket, and the second stage, which has a novel metallic heat shield and engine design will also land back on Earth. The engine design is shown and explained in that September '23 blog post.
This is their upper stage engine:
Every other vehicle out there has engines that are gimballed to steer the vehicle - thrust vector control is achieved by changing the direction the engines are pointed. The engines are bigger and their large engine bells cover the entire area of the base, or close to it. Stoke, on the other hand changes the thrust of the engines to change the direction of the thrust vector. With the engines being farther from the center of the stage, the engines have more leverage and that makes room for their regeneratively cooled heat shield. The engines themselves are said to be conventional liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen engines with their nozzles implemented in that one large circular structure. The control must be in feeding the fuel and oxidizer to the engines.
Stoke says they aim to fly the first Nova this year. At this point, I'd like to believe but I'm going to lean in the direction that Eric Berger has in the Rocket Report. Historically, it is unlikely for a company to move from engine testing to a first orbital launch attempt in the same year, so a Nova debut in 2026 seems more likely.
Definitely a celestial event to remember. There is one chunk o space debris giving off serious flames. Was trying to think what part that was, header tanks rupturing, cause they are more protected by the nose structure?
ReplyDeleteReal pretty mach diamonds on those Stoke engines, not much exhaust bell length, hard to judge the proportions but it looks compact.
ReplyDeleteMr. SG, can you talk about millimeter and sub millimeter radio wave lengths, figure your the right guy to ask for this. Why its used for these very distant ibjects?
ReplyDeleteThis here Universe Today article talks about the furthest, so far, detected galaxy, they stipulate its formed only 375 millions years after the big bang.
https://www.universetoday.com/170423/webb-and-alma-team-up-to-study-primeval-galaxy/#more-170423
I can try, but that sort of radio astronomy is really not my field. What that article talks about is measuring specific frequencies that are emitted by different elements. Different elements radiate at different frequencies and the spectrum is like a fingerprint of what the galaxy is made of.
DeleteOne problem with this sort of measurement is that the signal gets weaker with distance, so they're looking for the presence of extremely weak signals. That's why they use the forty 12-m diameter antennas of the ALMA - the signals can be combined in phase - added - so that they're stronger than what smaller antennas can detect. Along with the size of the array, another trick is to cool the receivers with liquid helium to get the noise as low as physically possible.
Another problem is that the frequency is shifted lower depending on the rate the distant galaxy is receding at - called red shift. That affects what they set their receivers to monitor, so more just changing the instruments on the ground than anything.
My guess is that they're using millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths because lower frequencies (longer wavelengths) get absorbed by the interstellar "stuff" more than the mm and sub-mm waves. The interstellar space medium is very thin but over the incredible distances they're talking about its absorption of radio is significant. That 13.4 billion light years they're talking about is a number that I can't name in miles. It's 78.8 *10^21 miles. The NIST website tells me that's 78.8 zetta or sextillion miles.
Hope that helps.
Man, you got your brain dialed in today! Thats some answer, answered my question to a T, and then some new stuff to learn top it off, thanks, appreciate you very much.
DeleteThe distance and intervening stellar medium question is what interested me, I mean just how teeny those wavelengths must be, incredible they are able to get meaningful data out of what they pick up with the antennas is in many ways as remarkable as nature of space time itself. Truly great stuff in every respect, your help is too, its practical knowledge, that matters.
ps, its not like mounting a home built copper pipe Jpole on the roof to pick up signals in the mountains, more like how a skywave antenna functions in amazing ways in comparison.
DeleteThe Stokes engines are tackling an old problem in a new way. They will eliminate a lot of fiddly bits but of course needing others. But thinking of new ways to solve old problems is what leads to progress.
ReplyDeleteIts really irking me, have to say it, while watching test flight 7, and the first engine stopped per the telemetry visual, and the way the people narrating reacted and time lag before any mission control info was provided, I just had that strangely certain sense they where not surprised or may have had expectations the ship did a RUDD. Its the same gut feeling which caused me to first turn away from legacy media, that somebody was shoveling the you know what. Can't shake that sense of things, more I give it a good think the more certain I am about it. Here is what might have happened, its nothing sinister, being it was the last Block 1 Ship, being they are getting time to use Raptor 3's, being its the last sub-orbital, being they tried a new engine fuel/oxydizer feed system, they went for broke with the engines, went WOT, to discover how much they can push their engine technology, an engineered risk, because, first, they chopped a whole 12 seconds off the booster boost-back burn, (and did that with one engine out), looks like they shortened the 1st stage of the landing burn, appeared shorter, and booster came in faster, on its second stage landing burn, along with they sure reached close to orbital velocity and altitude much quicker than previous test flights, somebody said lets see what this baby has, damn the torpedoes! It went Ca-Blooey.
ReplyDeleteGonna see if I can get from the previous test fligh v-clips the flight times and velocities, compare them up see whats what. Another thing, this test flight totally blew BO's flight statistics away. Watching Blue Origin first trst flight was like watching paint dry compared to SuperHeavy.