The headline says, "SpaceX rolls giant Super Heavy booster to pad ahead of Starship's 1st orbital flight" and if this was the first time it ever happened that would be news. It's just that this isn't even the first time this booster was rolled to the pad. Yeah, I get that it's cool to watch and it is super cool to see the end result of the engineering it took to get "the biggest rocket in world history" rolling down a two lane road.
The part about this story that makes me go, "what?" is that I watch for news on this mission nonstop and haven't seen anything about a problem with the vehicles for Flight 14. I've seen more talk about the possible Flight 15 than I have about 14. I saw nothing about the booster for FT-14 being rolled back to Starbase or any problems with it. The counter to that is the announcements about launch date and time have always included something like, "pending FAA approval" so that when they slipped the date for FT-14 six days last Friday, the idea that the FAA didn't approve of something is a natural conclusion to jump to, along with modifications of that - like approval hasn't been granted because the FAA is overworked or doesn't have enough people to read everything.
The SuperHeavy booster for Flight Test 14 on its way to its launch pad at Starbase. (Image credit: SpaceX)
I'm trying to get more information on just what the story here is; I mean, it would make more sense to me that this is the booster for FT-15 and it's the one that was moved around. I'll report it if I find anything.
Is it because this will be the first Starship mission that will launch satelites into proper orbits from orbit?
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing it's more likely because Starship itself is going orbital for the first time. After this, they can deploy a number of the big Starlink satellites anytime they want to. Possibly every test flight.
DeleteNice. 60 V3 Starlink satellites per flight. I bet they could fit 80 if they redesigned the pez dispenser.
DeleteI have no idea. I know the V3 Starlinks are bigger than the ones they've flown before, and I know the previous versions flown on the Falcon 9 didn't use a Pez dispenser because there wasn't one on the F9.
DeleteElon's talking about 100,000 of the V3 sats, and after all these years, there's around 10k in the constellation. It's more than that but not the over 12,000 launched, due to various failures.