An Extended Visit and Walk Around Starbase with Elon Musk

I don't know how many of you are aware of or have watched the three videos that YouTube channel Everyday Astronaut (Tim Dodd) posted to YouTube but I've spent the two and a half hours watching them over the last few days and they're really rather remarkable.  I think it's nothing short of remarkable for the billionaire CEO of the world's leading private space company agreeing to spend that much time walking around his rocket factory with a YouTube video channel host.  

Rather than embed them here, I'm going to link to them on YouTube.

• Hour one
• Hour two
• The final 21 minutes  

In addition, Tim has a website EverydayAstronaut.com and a summary page for the three portions.  It helps you to see and save off to your computer (if you'd like) some of the more important aspects of this conversation.  

While I think that anyone interested in SpaceX, the Starbase operations or Starship itself would find it easy to sit through the three interviews, I could imagine a lot of people would want more of the highlights.  That would probably fit the webpage better.  

The three videos start in the evening at Boca Chica and Elon takes Tim on a tour through several of the construction buildings there.  As the second video starts, sundown has passed and the sky is darkening outside.  It's fully dark for the remainder of the second and all of third video.  Elon, Tim and his cameraman following them walk through lots of interesting areas.  He fires questions at Elon who answers them rather frankly.  Several times he feels the need to say that the way SpaceX works means that things he talks about may be right today and wrong tomorrow.   

In the first video, Elon talks about his five step engineering process for developing Starship.  Much like Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, Musk's Five Laws of Engineering are to be followed in this order:

1. Make the requirements less dumb. The requirements are definitely dumb; it does not matter who gave them to you. He notes that it’s particularly dangerous if an intelligent person gives you the requirements, as you may not question the requirements enough. “Everyone’s wrong. No matter who you are, everyone is wrong some of the time.” He further notes that “all designs are wrong, it’s just a matter of how wrong.”
2. Try very hard to delete the part or process. If parts are not being added back into the design at least 10% of the time, not enough parts are being deleted. Musk noted that the bias tends to be very strongly toward “let’s add this part or process step in case we need it.” Additionally, each required part and process must come from a name, not a department, as a department cannot be asked why a requirement exists, but a person can.
3. Simplify and optimize the design. This is step three as the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that should not exist.
4. Accelerate cycle time. Musk states “you’re moving too slowly, go faster! But don’t go faster until you’ve worked on the other three things first.”
5. Automate. An important part of this is to remove in-process testing after the problems have been diagnosed; if a product is reaching the end of a production line with a high acceptance rate, there is no need for in-process testing.

After my years in design, I have to agree with these completely.  Number 2 isn't extremely relevant to lots of areas of engineering; saving the costs of taking out a small component doesn't mean much when you make a few hundred or a few thousand units, but gets more relevant when you make lots of them.  Think of saving two cents on something you sell 5000 of per year.  That's $100; not bad but you can't take the company out for lunch with that.  Now think of selling 5,000,000 a year, like a WiFi router or car stereo.

In Elon's case, he not only wants to manufacture quantities of Starships the space industry has never dreamed of, he has the added reality of rocket design.  For every pound he adds on the rocket - which will weigh in the vicinity of 200 tons - he reduces the payload by about two pounds.  He not only increased the weight of the rocket, he increased the weight of fuel needed to lift it. 

Musk strongly believes that all the engineers should know as much about the things they're working on as possible.  Don't just concentrate on your little piece.  As an example, Musk noted that an order of magnitude more time has been spent reducing engine mass than reducing residual propellant, despite both being equally important.

It has always been obvious to observers that Elon Musk is driven by his goal to see mankind become an interplanetary species and to move out to other worlds.  His emphasis has been Mars, and that's what has driven him.  In the third video, I recall him saying that in the '60s as we went to the moon, there was a line sloping upward tracing mankind's stretch into the solar system.  Then, in the late '70s, the line shrank back down to Low Earth Orbit where mankind has stayed ever since.  We flew first Skylab and then the Shuttles while Russia flew Soyuz and Mir.  When the Shuttle era ended, that line fell back to the ground, at least for the US.  He didn't mention getting the line back to LEO with his own company, just that the line is moving in the right direction and he wants to see it take off.  To the moon and beyond.  While also saying that he doesn't expect to live long enough to see a Mars colony become self-sustaining.

Musk noted that they are moving extremely fast as “if we operate with extreme urgency we have a chance of making life multi-planetary. It’s still just a chance, not for sure. If we don’t act with extreme urgency, that chance is probably 0.”

 Starship S20 getting work done on its Thermal Protection Tiles.  Those are made not far from me in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at a facility Elon referred to as "the Bakery."  Screen capture from Everyday Astronaut video.

Blue Origin Sues Over SpaceX Contract

Again.  First reported today by The Verge, less than three weeks after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) dismissed the Blue Origin/Dynetics action against NASA for awarding the Human Landing System (HLS) contract to SpaceX, the company filed its lawsuit against NASA with the US Court of Federal Claims today, Monday August 16th.  The suit is reported to refrain the same arguments that GAO refuted on July 30th.   

Blue Origin was one of three firms vying for a contract to land NASA’s first astronauts on the Moon since 1972. In April, NASA shelved the company’s $5.9 billion proposal of its Blue Moon landing system and went with SpaceX’s $2.9 billion Starship proposal instead, opting to pick just one company for the project after saying it might pick two. The contract involves two lunar landings — one test landing without humans, and another with humans — and SpaceX has already received $439 million from NASA to start its work, according to federal data.

For newcomers, we've been reporting on this since the start, but while NASA had expected and wanted to pick two suppliers, congress cut NASA's budget so far that they thought they couldn't afford dual sourcing.  SpaceX's $2.9 billion was almost exactly half of Blue Origin's $5.9 billion bid and unlike BO, SpaceX was closer to demonstrating ready to fly hardware.  NASA saw the bid as getting more for (our) money with SpaceX than the other teams.  Their HLS proposal is based on Starship orbiters, which have flown but not orbited.  BO has never achieved orbit on any of their vehicles.  

After losing the GAO decision, Blue Origin went on a more public smear campaign against SpaceX's plan, releasing this graphic on Twitter.  (The original, at that link, is about four times the size of this.)

Blue Origin targeted SpaceX’s Starship system directly, saying “there are an unprecedented number of technologies, developments, and operations that have never been done before for Starship to land on the Moon.” One critique cast SpaceX’s proposal as overly complex, noting it would take 16 separate Starship launches for each Moon landing.

SpaceX’s rocket system, as proposed to NASA, would require several launches of a fuel tanker version of Starship that would, through some proprietary fueling depot floating in Earth orbit, supply fuel to a lunar lander version of Starship before trekking to the Moon’s surface, according to the GAO. Musk defended this approach in responses to Blue Origin’s critiques on Twitter, saying “16 flights is extremely unlikely” and that a “max of 8” launches would be required for one Starship lunar landing.

Musk went on to add something that only SpaceX could say:

“However, even if it were 16 flights with docking, this is not a problem. SpaceX did more than 16 orbital flights in first half of 2021 & has docked with Station (much harder than docking with our own ship) over 20 times.” 

SpaceX leads every other space company and even every other nation besides China in orbital flights per year.  Again, Blue Origin doesn't have an orbital class rocket and so has zero experience.  

I saw somewhere else that NASA thought SpaceX's plans to launch and rendezvous in low Earth orbit was a fundamentally sounder proposal than to do more in translunar flight or lunar orbit.  

Thanks to a Tweet from Eric Berger of Ars Technica, we find there's a group of Blue Origin employees who have taken to Reddit to tell everyone, "we are NOT like this" referring to these actions from Blue (as they refer to the company).  Eric went on to say:

This will further inflame internal tensions at Blue Origin, which are rising. Many employees are super disappointed in this tactic. It will also make other commercial space companies wary of partnering, and make it super difficult to win any federal contracts in the future.

We may be seeing Blue Origin cutting off its nose to spite its face.  It's easy to imagine no other company wanting to partner with them, and generating enough bad will inside NASA that they'll never drop another contract their way.

Weekend Shop Update on the 1 by 1 - part 5

Last weekend, I had essentially just finished the outsides of the two side plates. 

As the week began, I tapped the five holes that will get screws holding the sides together, #10-24 - a size screw I don't have a single one of - and then it was time to take my aluminum tooling plate off the mill and put the milling vise back on.  Now it was time to start working on some of the internal complexity of these parts.  As refresher, here's a rendering of the side plate 1 model I made from the pdf drawings. 

There are three large, cylinders of metal removed to make three different diameter and different depth areas in the metal.  I've numbered them arbitrarily: area 1 is 2.375 in diameter by 0.557" deep; area 2 extends the center of area 1 deeper and is 1.125 diameter; the bottom face, which has the four screw holes in it, is 0.375" below the floor of area 1; finally 3 is a separate cavity 0.903 in diameter and 0.875" deep.

So how do you remove that much metal?  There are a few main ways to do that.  

On a milling machine, you can mount the plate rigidly in some sort of fixture, remove as much metal as you can with a drill bit or end mills, and then switch to a boring head, which allows you to move a cutter outward from the center line and cut larger diameters.  A company named Criterion is the originator of the most copied designs, and there are now dozens of clones of their design, like this one made of Chinesium and sold by Grizzly.  I've done this before with a boring head like that.

Alternatively, you could put a rotary table on the milling machine, positioned so that a cutter with a flat end (any end mill) cuts while the rotary table rotates the work into the cutter.   

A completely different way that can work is to hold the work on a four jaw chuck on a lathe and use a boring bar on the tool holder to size the hole.  I did this for some of the parts on my CNC conversion of my big milling machine, like this.  All three of these methods are going to involve tons of making a cut, readjusting the machine and repeating. 

The basic thing this is doing is cutting a circle, and the ability to cut smooth nice circles is built into the programming language we use in CNC tools, G-code.  Plus, while the commercial CAM program I have can cut circles, it ends up being a fairly coarse approximation - I can see and feel the steps the CAM generates.  I've hand programmed circle cutting, too while making the parts for the big mill CNC conversion and while working on my Webster engine.  Since I consider having CNC a strong feature of my shop, I thought I'd try to do them that way.  

The first thing I did was use the biggest end mill I have, a 3/4" diameter cutter, in the centers of the cylinders and not cutting to final depth.  Just removing bulk metal and creating a starting point.  That works out to be two holes.  Next, and I'm not gonna lie, I had forgotten how to do the code for cutting circles and dug out the code for that motor mount in that video as a refresher.  

The basic approach is to use that 3/4" hole in the middle as an entry into the cut.  That hole is where I lower the cutter (so I'm not drilling with an end mill) and then move back out to the rim of the circle to cut around the perimeter. I have to keep straight in my head that the tool path marks the center of the cutter, not the diameter of the hole it's cutting.  When using the CAM program, it will work from the diameter it needs to cut keep track of the tool radius offset.

After testing a couple of things, I figured the way to cut the big cylinder (1) is by cutting two passes around the circle, one with cutter center at the edge of the 3/4" hole, which doubles its size to 1.5", followed by a second cut with the center of the cutter 0.375 in from the final size.  Since the radius is 1.188, the cutter goes at 0.813 from the center.  This is after the first operation on cavity 1 and a video is here. 

The changes in the way the bottom of the cylinder reflect the light can't be felt, and you can see marks from both passes around the circles.

Today, I wrote toolpaths to enlarge and deepen the center of cavity 2 and then enlarge and deepen cavity 3, bringing both to final size.  Except I misread the drawing and made cavity 3 too small.  It's always easier to correct making something too small as opposed to making it too big, and with the file that enlarges and deepens that cylinder taking about 15 seconds, it took me more time to fix the G-code than fix the part by running it (video of the process - 28 seconds long at actual speed).

Both cylinders 2 and 3 are to be sliding fits for some ball bearing sets, and both fit well.

If you compare this view to the rendering above, that shows a large semicircular cutout along the top edge.  I'll cut that like these holes but later, when I have both halves screwed together.  As of now, there need to be two screw holes on the top, left and bottom sides and a couple of other holes to manage.  I call this 80% done. 

EDIT Aug 15 10:00PM and 10:20 PM EDT - I didn't include a link to a video I meant to include - I hadn't uploaded them yet.  

Boeing Grounds Starliner for Foreseeable Future

Boeing's Starliner Updates site yesterday posted an update that Starliner is being returned to the factory for troubleshooting and the second test flight is off until further notice.  The notice in its entirety reads:

Today, Boeing informed NASA that the company will destack its CST-100 Starliner from the Atlas V rocket and return the spacecraft to the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility (C3PF) for deeper-level troubleshooting of four propulsion system valves that remain closed after last Tuesday’s scrubbed launch.

Starliner has sat atop the Atlas V rocket in ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility since August 4, where Boeing teams have worked to restore functionality to the affected valves.

The relocation of the spacecraft to the C3PF will require Boeing, NASA and United Launch Alliance to agree on a new launch date once the valve issue is resolved.

“Mission success in human spaceflight depends on thousands of factors coming together at the right time,” said John Vollmer, vice president and program manager, Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program. “We’ll continue to work the issue from the Starliner factory and have decided to stand down for this launch window to make way for other national priority missions.”

Starliner while still on the Atlas V launch vehicle in the Vertical Integration Facility.  Boeing photo.

The delay seems to be entirely the right thing to do.  The message they Tweeted was much shorter (I assume due to Twitter limits) but said they're "standing down to make way for other national priority missions."  

Those familiar with the schedules for the rest of the year are saying that the most likely time frame to try to schedule for is February of 2022, and even that is daunting.  That depends on Boeing finding the root cause of the valve issue, identifying a fix, implementing it, and successfully testing it.

Eric Berger, space correspondent for Ars Technica offered this input:

Over on Ars Technica, Eric reports a possible root cause:

According to Vollmer, some of the NTO leaked through seals on the valves. Such leaks are well understood from a physics standpoint, Vollmer said. But then this oxidizer combined with some unanticipated ambient moisture in the cavity around the valve, and this resulted in corrosion that prevented the valves from opening properly.

It is not clear how this moisture got into the spacecraft. While there were thunderstorms when the vehicle was on the Florida launch pad in early August, the ambient moisture did not come from those storms. It could have been due to the humid Florida atmosphere, however. This is one of the issues that Boeing must now investigate alongside engineers from NASA and Aerojet Rocketdyne, which manufactured the spacecraft thrusters.

If this is from needing better protection from humidity or more waterproofing, that means it's a hardware problem and not software which is probably better for everyone.  The running joke in the hi-rel avionics world when I left it was that the attitude used to be "fix it in the software" until that resulted in so many fusterclucks that it became cheaper and easier to "fix it in the hardware".   There are whole industries dedicating to torturing hardware to verify it will survive the worst possible "real world" conditions. 

The New IPCC Report Is Out

What I wanted to do on Wednesday (when I came down with an odd little sickness) was write the definitive debunking of the IPCC AR6 report that was released on Monday and has been making news this week.  I failed at that because I'm not as far along at a starting point as many other people.  There's too much to read and digest in a couple of days.  Lots of people with big head starts on me have already done much of that heavy lifting.  In a bit of reading around, you can get a good idea of the things wrong with it, if you read the right sources. 

Some good sources are

• Roger Pielke Jr. 
• Steven McIntyre 
• The No Tricks Zone (from Germany in English)  
• And, of course, Watts Up With That 

The report was greeted with media adopting, "Red Flag Warning" and similar strident language.  I don't think it's justified.

Since we're nearing the peak of hurricane season, a tropical storm will pass to our west by Sunday and another is behind it by three or four days following a similar track, the way the paper addresses hurricanes was something I'm sensitive to.  There's a subtle mistake (very likely) here that Roger Pielke spotted since he's the author of one of the papers:

I don't mean to be trite but one of the most downloaded papers in history says most published papers are wrong.  In that paper, John Ioannidis presents a list of factors that are associated with results being wrong.  This one seems to be custom written for IPCC papers.

Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.

This is one of them.  

 

The Best Laid Plans

I had a post planned for today and then started feeling really whupped.  The cats had me up at 3AM and then through the night.  Whupped enough so that I didn't dig far enough into the stuff I had planned to talk about.  Long time readers know that it happens now and then.

So... attempts at humor. 

 

"They see me meme-ing, they hating,  I know that they're thinking I'm so white n' nerdy" 

Miscellaneous Space News Update

A few small items, none of which is long enough to warrant a full column

Item 1:  Boeing still has not reached a conclusion about what caused the error with "unexpected valve positions" that led to the scrubbing of the Starliner test flight last week. There was an update to Boeing's Starliner Updates site yesterday some time after I last checked it, explaining their progress.  Some quotes from the article:

This weekend, Boeing restored functionality on more of the 13 CST-100 Starliner propulsion system valves that did not open as designed during prelaunch system checks last week.

Boeing has completed physical inspections and chemical sampling on the exterior of a number of the affected valves, which indicated no signs of damage or external corrosion. Test teams are now applying mechanical, electrical and thermal techniques to prompt the valves open. Seven of the 13 valves are now operating as designed, with inspection and remediation of the remaining affected valves to be performed in the days ahead.  [Bold added: SiG]

Frankly, I find that a little alarming.   Seven of 13 are now operating as designed, and all they can report is no signs of damage or external corrosion?  If the valves operate as they're supposed to when connected to hardware that can apply the necessary control signals and voltages, then the problem is in their software.  Which came damned close to dooming their first Starliner.  

Then they go on to state they still haven't determined the root cause of the problem.  Maybe I'm just a fussy old engineer, but I'd prefer to have all of those valves working and it won't fly until the root cause analysis is completed and the cause can be demonstrated.  (Full disclosure: I often thought those meetings filling out the "five whys" forms were an unnecessary pain in the ass, but they're good organizational tools.  Sometimes we fix a problem that's a result of the root cause and not the deeper underlying problem.  Fixing the wrong problem happens regularly.)

Needless to say, they haven't declared victory or scheduled a launch, yet.  I'm just getting the feeling this particular problem should have been found before.  

---

Item 2:  The Blue Origin and Dynetics' protest against NASA for selecting SpaceX to provide the Human Landing System (HLS) rather than them has been ruled against by the General Accounting Office (GAO).   The GAO ruled that although NASA had demonstrated a desire to proceed with more than one HLS provider, that they could pick only the best one of the three competitors, however they decided which was best.  

The drawback is that the GAO deliberated on this for 95 of the 100 days it was allowed to decide, and during that time no NASA funds could be delivered to SpaceX and the company was not allowed to work on the HLS.  Since the HLS is derived from Starship, it might be a bit tricky at times to decide if they're working on their Starship or the HLS.  I'm sure that some or even most of the hardware on the Mars and moon versions is identical but that dedicated moon hardware couldn't be worked on.

---

Item 3:  NASA has had a program going to develop new Extravehicular Activity (EVA) suits for use on the moon in the Artemis program.  Brace yourself for this shocking news: the program is late and over budget. 

NASA's Inspector General says delays in spacesuit development are another factor making a 2024 astronaut Moon landing impossible.

With $420M spent and another $625M expected, suits won't be "ready for flight until April 2025 at the earliest."

Report Link (pdf)

(Source quote)  

The program has been running since 2007 and the suits are now expected in 2025?  Eighteen years and over a billion dollars to develop a suit?  

This report (linked above) was issued by Office of the Inspector General (OIG) today, just a couple of days after the GAO issued their ruling in previous story.  Elon Musk heard about that and said, "SpaceX could do it if need be."  Granted the suits have quite different requirements, but SpaceX developed the suits for the Crew Dragon manned capsules, after all.  It's not that far out of their expertise.  

As it turns out, SpaceX is already one of around two dozen “interested parties” [PDF] active in NASA’s new xEVAS (Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services) program – an effort to commandeer the spectacular success of commercial cargo and crew programs to replace half-century-old spacesuits. xEVAS has currently released a draft Request for Proposal (RFP) and is awaiting responses to that draft until mid-August before releasing the true RFP in mid-September.

Interested parties will then have until mid-October to submit proposals to design and build modern EVA (extravehicular activity) spacesuits capable of supporting astronauts on the lunar surface and on spacewalks in Earth orbit. NASA says it will then take a full five (or seven) months to review those proposals, downselect, and reward at least one or two contracts – hopefully resulting in two redundant EVA systems much like the 2+ redundant providers NASA chose to support its Commercial Crew (CCP) and Cargo Resupply Services (CRS) programs.

Yes, it sounds like a repeat of how the HLS contract was awarded, so we'll have to see what happens.  I think that SpaceX, being driven by the vision of settlements on Mars, is already working on suits for Mars or at least giving it some thought.  Sure the moon is a different environment; Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere, but it has some, and the sun isn't as intense on Mars.  This isn't a field I've read much of anything on, but it seems like one designed for the moon would work on Mars, but maybe not the other way around.  Maybe they've already started?  Based on this drawing.

SpaceX illustration.  There are some pretty stark differences between this depiction of the HLS lander and the first one from May of '20.  Although it seems like a crop from the one they released in May of this year.

What Was Up With the Starship Stacking Anyway?

As we talked about on Friday, SpaceX transported Starship 20 (S20) to the launch complex and stacked it on top of Booster 4 (B4) for about an hour.  OK, cool.  If it was a fit check or just a gigantic photo opportunity I'm cool with that, but there was nothing even semi-official to judge what was going on.  

Today, we get a couple of interpretations from the two Erics who follow SpaceX (and space exploration) full time: Eric Ralph at Teslarati and Eric Berger at Ars Technica.  Both point out what we really know: for one, brief, shining moment, the tallest rocket in history was standing on the launch pad in Texas.  When it's fired up to launch, it will be the most powerful rocket in history.  

Eric Ralph added a little information I haven't read yet to the picture.

For those that followed the process closely in the days and weeks prior, the fact that Starship’s first full assembly was just a fit check (and, really, more like 50:50 between fit check and photo op) came as no surprise. In the lead-up, it became clear through several reports that CEO Elon Musk had challenged SpaceX to stack Ship 20 and Booster 4 by August 5th and flown in several hundred employees normally stationed elsewhere to accomplish the feat.

SpaceX could have stacked a non-flyable Starship on Booster 3; it's right there on the test stand, close to B4 on the Orbital Launch Pad (OLP).  Instead, they chose the booster and Starship which are the full-up operational prototypes that are expected to fly soon.  

There's still a backlog of things to be done on this pair, what some are calling B4-S20, and they're in line with our speculation in last Friday's post.  Quoting Elon Musk:

4 significant items:

– Final heat shield tiles for ship
– Thermal protection of booster engines
– Ground propellant storage tanks
– QD arm for ship

2 weeks.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2021

There's more testing that needs to be done.  S20 is in the high bay waiting for more heat shield tiles, but at some point will be tested as we talked about Friday.  They've never built this configuration of Starship before, with three Raptor Boost and three Raptor Vacuum engines.  That means there's new plumbing and new controls. It's prudent risk reduction to bring S20 back out to the test stand and test it.  Test stand B has been modified specifically for some of these tests:

(Photo Credit: Philip Bottin on Twitter)

The same sort of testing campaign is needed for Booster 4.  The only tests done to a Super Heavy have been the few done on B3; some cryogenic tests and the one brief static firing.  B4 may well be taken down off the OLP and brought to test stand A, but A currently has B3 on it.  Some of the tests can be done on B3, but a static firing of any significant duration isn't happening without a water deluge system and that seems to need the size of the OLP.  Especially if they fire all 29 Raptors!  

The wild card they need to be concerned about isn't in that list: they need the FAA's approval.  Eric Berger over at Ars Technica believes that something that went largely unnoticed by most of us is a poke at the FAA from Musk.  Musk released this photo. 

Berger's theory is that releasing a black and white photo of SpaceX workers building Starship/Super Heavy will cause a nearly reflexive recall of photos like this one:

On Friday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk sent a clear message to the FAA and other federal regulators. One evocative photo, in particular, drove home his message to anyone watching. It showed workers standing beneath Starship, as it was lowered onto the first-stage rocket. In releasing a black-and-white version, Musk knew exactly what he was doing in harkening back to the age of skyscrapers.

The 21st-century skyscrapers are being built right now, the photo screamed, by modern engineers and welders. Such rockets are not to be found in PowerPoints or wooden mockups any longer. They are living, breathing machines nearly ready to breathe fire.

To the FAA, Musk seemed to be saying, federal regulators must do their part to ensure the future arrives on schedule. Just as the 20th-century skyscrapers marked the beginning of a new era and eventually launched America into a prosperous future of finance, communication, marketing, and more, the 21st century now beckons.

By invoking the imagery of building skyscrapers, Musk seems to be saying we're transitioning from the days of building skyscrapers to building Starships. Delaying Starship is the equivalent of delaying the age of skyscrapers and the prosperity that brought.

Clearly, these aren't the earliest days of space programs. For the last 60 years we've been exploring our neighborhood in the solar system, taking our first, tentative steps in the bigger picture. Starship is intended to start extending our presence into the wider solar system and taking the first steps toward building colonies on sterile, uninhabited worlds. Musk is betting that the FAA will want to align with that.  Good luck with that, Elon.

 

 

Weekend Shop Update on the 1 by 1 - part 4

"When we last left the story"  I had shown the derivation of some extra tool paths that the CAM program wouldn't create and showed the cut out of Side 2. 

The other side plate shouldn't be hard, especially with the lessons learned already, right?  Yeah, I had to cut the last few passes around the outline due to the cutter slipping upward in its holder, but that was one time versus the three times on the other piece.  Here's the way it turned out, and I'll show you this before I explain things.

That uncut area on the top around the two bolts is supposed to be 0.124" above the rest of the top surface. That's 4 passes at .031" per pass; the rest of that surface is the right depth.  In the red highlight box where you see the ledge and across the right side, it's .093 - three passes. I ran the file again, just to watch through the first four layers and the cutter just never went there. I was concerned it might have been from my editing the file, but that was just to keep the cutter out of the uncut area. It went into that area on the right to cut it down to -.093, it just didn't go back to cut the last pass. I've been using Deskproto for about 10 years and I can't think of another time it did something like this.

It wasn't hard to use my Logitech Rumblepad controller to cut the rest of that away, but it was odd and therefore unsettling.  After all, the reason we use CAM programs instead of coding everything by hand is they're supposed to make complex shapes easier without making mistakes like this. 

Now it was time to take both pieces off the mill, de-burr them, then bolt them together, smooth them and remount to get ready to drill the holes for the two tooling pins that go into both sides to hold them in the right positions.  That makes it easier to take them apart and put them back together precisely, which I'm going to have to do.  Other than breaking the one fine sanding belt I own before I was fully done with sanding, there were no issues.

This is where I made a silly screw-up and spent a day trying to find it.  The issue centers on the dimensions in red in this drawing. 

The problem showed up when I went to position the centering drill over the hole for one of the tooling pins circled in red.  It looked too close to the top edge, and instead of measuring what's in the red oval, I got more like .150 to .160 instead of .220.  That led to studying it for hours, looking at other measurements and just being confused.  The overall length and width of the plates were right.  The dimensions going left to right looked fine.  The dimensions from the edges of the raised area to the part's edges were also offset.  IIRC, the top one, 0.696 was too small and the 0.625 on the bottom was too big. 

What this would mean was that the CAM program had shifted the centerline X-axis upward in this view.  I couldn't figure out how it could do that and not mess up the whole part. 

Late one night last week, after puzzling over this for hours, I took yet another look at the work and realized my mistake.  I had put the two pieces on mill backwards.  Notice the ~45 degree angle in the drawing is at lower left.  Here you can see it's on upper left.  The top of this stack is side 2.  You can tell it from side 1 by the machining marks

Since the next operation was just positioning the mill and drilling a total of 11 holes of different sizes, it didn't take as much time to finish this phase of the machining as it did to figure out what I did wrong setting up to do it. 

There are five large holes with a counterbore; those had to be done in three steps; the two tooling pin holes had to be prepared in three steps also and tooling pins cut to length.  So it wasn't simply drilling 11 holes, but it wasn't hard just a lot of motions.

These are complex pieces.  The vertical side facing you, the right and the far vertical sides all get drilled and tapped holes.  Two per side on both side plates.  The far side gets a 1.1" diameter hole bored into it, centered on the plane where the two side plates touch.  And lots more.  I'll be working on these for a while, but I think the way most of that should get done is with the machining vise on the mill's table.  

Reading A Graph Between the Lines

This is a recent update to something that we've talked about here over the years: Compounded inflation from Jan. '00 to June '21 in several different categories of goods and services.  I think it's very illustrative. 

That's US Consumer Price inflation for 15 different things; and some categories are broader than others, but the overall changes in price go from up over 200% to down (guessing) 95%.  

It also shows from top to bottom the things that are highly government regulated (another way of saying there's no free market working) down to consumer goods that are regulated much more lightly (saying the free market if functioning fully).  

College tuition and fees are virtually untouched by the market economy.  The number of real classroom seats to put equally real student butts into is far smaller than the number of those butts.  In a free market, that supply/demand imbalance tends to raise prices but only a small number of students say "that's too much" and looks for other career options.  For those who don't look elsewhere, the fed.gov has guaranteed that grants, scholarships, and loans are available to pay for those seats regardless of the costs.  Or as we've just seen with graduate students, the Fed.gov just guarantees they'll pay back the loan regardless of what the student does, essentially making graduate schools free to anyone who reads their contracts. 

BTW, the leveling off of college textbook prices is surprising and unprecedented.  Nobody knows quite what to make of that other than to point out how remarkable it is.

Hospitalization and medical care services are likewise backed up by government edict as well as government direct payment, both Federal (e.g. Medicare) and state (Medicaid).  The effect of private insurance is harder to pin down because it's susceptible to market forces but only weakly compared to the patient picking the service and provider directly.  The insurance carriers compete to sell to the employers buying coverage, so there is some market there.  (In most instances, health insurance isn't bought directly by the person using it, rather it most often comes as a benefit with employment.)  The problem is that a third party (the contracted insurance company) doesn't have as much at stake as an individual buying their own healthcare. 

The lowest of the rising prices have been tied between Housing and Food and Beverages for the entire time; these are strongly competed for, but government programs for housing low income people affect the market, as does food relief (Food stamps/EBT cards).  

The most free market is for home electronics, and they pick TVs in particular.  I think most people might guess this and the world is full of stories of how much the prices for LED TVs dropped over the years.  In comparison to computers, for example, computers tend to have a harder to evaluate price for some level of performance.  Prices aren't in free fall or dropping in half every couple of years, but the buyer gets more for their money; maybe more processor cores, or more memory, faster solid state drive or other upgrades.   

Since "cellphone services" (I read the word "contracts") are full of government mandatory fees, I'm moderately surprised they say the prices have come down as much as they're saying.  Similarly, the prices of new cars are all affected by government mandates, but there haven't been any major changes going into effect over the period - say like increasing mandatory fuel efficiencies or other high cost demands.

In essence you can read this plot as reflective of the total effect of market intervention.  The higher the inflation, the more the government distorts the free markets, while the lower, the freer the market.  It's not a completely perfect correlation but it's a good one.

SpaceX Stacks and Unstacks Starship

Yesterday, August 5, orbital Starship prototype S20 moved out of high bay and down the mile and a half road to the launch complex at Boca Chica.  

In the latest stage of SpaceX’s continually impressive “Starbase Surge,” the company rolled the first orbital-class Starship prototype’s aft tank section from its birthplace in the factory “midbay” to a much larger “high bay” around noon on August 3rd. Mere hours later, Elon Musk revealed that SpaceX had fitted the Starship with a full six Raptors – a first for any Starship prototype, though Super Heavy Booster 4 technically beat it to the punch with the installation of a staggering 29 Raptor engines hours prior.

The rocket’s conical nose section joined it in the high bay later that evening and SpaceX wasted no time stacking and welding the two Starship halves together early on August 4th, effectively completing the basic structure of Ship 20 (S20). After a day of final integration work, Starship S20 left the high bay around dawn on August 5th and took to the highway for a brief trip from SpaceX’s Boca Chica factory to launch and testing facilities just a mile and a half to the east.

It was a little surprising to see this.  As we were discussing in the comments on the 4th, there were no road closures for the day and a closure is required to move the transporter carrying the Starship - the multi-axled vehicle takes up the entire road.  Early in the morning Thursday, they announced a closure and S20 soon took the road, followed by a piece of ground support equipment also bound for the launch complex.  

By mid-morning, S20 was in the launch complex and eventually moved over near the Orbital Launch Integration Tower, but within a few hours, SpaceX announced over a PA in the area that further stacking operations were cancelled for Thursday due to winds in the area.  

Up early this morning, I was watching the Nerdle Cam by 7:30 EDT - 6:30 CDT and before sunrise in Boca Chica.  S20 was lifted and looked to be almost in place by 9:00 local.  This picture is from nearly an hour later.

Imagine my surprise when I went back to check on progress an hour later and found this: 

Unstacked?  S20 Taken down and put back on the transporter?  What?  Why?

S20 was unceremoniously loaded on the transporter and taken back to high bay.  

So what was this all about?  It seems to have simply been a test to see how things fit.  After all, these stages are 9 meters in diameter, about 30 feet.  No matter what sort of measuring instrument you use, it's not trivial to make two mating parts 30 feet in diameter and have them fit exactly.  Since the ultimate plan is to build many boosters and many Starships, all interchangeable, checking that things go together as expected is a good idea.  

Another thing to point out is the thermal tiles on S20.  This is the first time we've seen a Starship fully black like this, but if you look closely around the "flings" (the control surfaces at the front of the rocket) where they meet the body, you'll see unfinished areas.  SpaceX is running into a shortage of these thermal tiles; they've overloaded their suppliers.  It's true that tiles can be installed while on the launch pad, but that's easier with the facilities in the High Bay. 

Stacking Starship onto the booster seemed like a bold move.  They've never flown a Starship without static firing it, and they've changed out more than a couple of Raptor engines over the course of the testing all of the Starship prototypes.  Doing a test fire of S20 seems prudent since this configuration has never been tested.  The three Raptor Vacuum engines have never been tested on a vehicle before, although that doesn't seem particularly risky.  

The same concepts apply to the booster.  They've never tested the hardware to run cryogenics to 29 Raptor engines, and some sort of static test seems like a good idea.  Much as we can say against the SLS, they did their "green run" test firing of the full first stage to qualify it for flight.  A few different static firings, turning on a few engines at a time might be a valid way to test them if they're concerned about lighting up all 29 at the same time with all that other stuff so close to the launch pad.

Blue Origin Expecting to Deliver BE-4 Engines by End of Year

Insiders close to the development of the Blue Origin BE-4 engine are saying that the first two space qualified BE-4 engines are on schedule for delivery before the end of the year, according to an article today on Ars Technica.  The article isn't a press release or some other formal announcement from BO, it's an investigation of why the engines are at least four years late in delivery.  

The company aspires to deliver these two flight engines to United Launch Alliance before the end of this year, although that increasingly appears to be a "stretch" goal. Delivery may slip into early 2022. And in order to make this deadline, Blue Origin plans to take the somewhat risky step of shipping the engines to its customer before completing full qualification testing.

ULA took the risky step of contracting Blue Origin to develop the new engines for their new Vulcan rocket back in 2014.  ULA is an old-space company and they were betting on a new company with very little to show for itself, but promising to deliver an engine comparable in performance to the Space Shuttle Main Engines at a lower cost and deliver them by 2017.  There's much interest in why the program has been delayed so much, but Blue Origin has been silent.  The interest is not just the space program watchers, and not just ULA (we would assume they get regular updates from BO), but also includes the DOD.  ULA is a main supplier of launch services for DOD payloads and it's in their interest, too.  

Despite this widespread interest, however, Blue Origin has said almost nothing publicly about the engine development. Therefore, this story attempts to provide some context for why the BE-4 engines are late. It is based on anonymous sources at the company's headquarters as well as industry officials, some of whom would likely be fired if they were named.

According to his sources, the first two engines (1 and 2) are not assembled but most of their components are built.  BO is embarking on an aggressive and risky approach to completing the certification of the engines.  They've never tested an engine identical to the first two they'll deliver, but they say they have tested an engine close to the configuration of the flight engines, and it has performed well during hot firings that approximate the duty cycle of a Vulcan first stage launch.  I've italicized the words with highest pucker factor in my reading.  

They intend to test two more of these close engines this fall at their facility near Van Horn, Texas and then it gets more dicey. 

After these tests, a fully assembled flight engine no. 1 will be shipped to Texas to undergo a fairly brief round of tests, known as acceptance testing. If this engine passes, as expected, it will be shipped to ULA. Then a virtually identical BE-4 engine will be sent from Kent [Washington] to Texas. This "qual" engine will undergo a much more rigorous series of tests, known as qualification testing. The idea is to push the engine through its paces to find any flaws. Then a similar process will follow with flight engine no. 2, followed by a second "qual" engine.

There's a risk that engine no. 1 or 2 will be installed and undergoing checkouts by ULA, the qual engines will fail some tests, starting design fixes and ULA will have to remove the engines for modification or replacement.  Any testing they have done will have to be repeated as well. 

BE-4 test fire on the stand in Texas.  Blue Origin photo.

Why are the engines late, anyway?  The summary I get out of it is one word: mismanagement.  Aside from the distracted leadership of Jeff Bezos, a consistently reported persistent problem is that the BE-4 engine testing and development program has been relatively "hardware poor" in recent years.  The way I read that, it means if some component wasn't working properly, or just suspected of that, there was no way to swap it out and try another.  Granted that having plenty of hardware is expensive, but saving money that way can be "penny wise but pound foolish" and more expensive.  

It apparently wasn't always that way.  Back in '17, when the engines were supposed to be delivered, they claimed to be "hardware rich."  Being hardware poor seems to be a result of when Bezos hired Bob Smith formerly of Honeywell to run Blue Origin.  According to the sources, Smith focused more on reorganization of Blue Origin's leadership rather than hardware development. Other programs were prioritized, too, so the BE-4 team didn't get all the resources and freedom it needed to proceed at full speed.  (Everyone who has worked for a big company and been re-organized dozens of times is now identifying.) 

It's not all grim.  About two years ago, BO hired an experienced propulsion engineer, John Vilja as Senior Vice President of Engines.  Over the last 12 to 18 months he has instituted a lot of changes, not the least of which was creating a more hardware rich environment.  

This is not to imply there weren't other problems with the basic BE-4 design and other problems as well.

Blue Origin spent much of 2019 redesigning turbomachinery within the BE-4 engine and then testing those fixes late that year and into 2020. This issue now appears to be largely behind the company. COVID-19 also impacted development and testing, with engineers largely working remotely in 2020. That made it more difficult to be hands-on with the engines alongside the technicians in the factory.

Blue Origin has also had to deal with stringent requirements from United Launch Alliance for aspects such as combustion instability. This potential problem has plagued US rocket engines since the massive F1 engine built for the Saturn V rocket in the 1960s. Combustion instability involves rapid, unexpected pressure changes inside the thrust chamber during ignition of fuel and oxidizer. If this instability propagates, it can destroy an engine.

The challenge for Blue Origin is that in working for ULA, it is essentially dealing with the US military, which has exacting standards for the performance of rocket engines launching its most valuable payloads. And since the BE-4 will be called upon to launch high value satellites for the Department of Defense nearly from the beginning, it must meet those standards up front rather than after a number of test flights. The paperwork and testing required for such certification is lengthy.

For obvious reasons, we don't know that BO is going to deliver these engines, pass qual. test or any other goals talked about here, but I think one of the reasons so many are skeptical of BO is because they're not transparent about what has been going on.  Everyone who follows the space programs knows that engine development is high risk, difficult stuff.  We expect setbacks and problems.  We understand that some development programs are harder than others.  Being as opaque as BO just invites more doubt.  I'm just surprised there haven't been more comic memes about BO besides this one. 

 

Metal-Free, Completely Organic, Fully Biodegradable Batteries

Batteries that don't have metal electrodes, that are completely organic and fully biodegradable exist.  They're still somewhat of a laboratory curiosity in that I can't tell you a name that's on the market.  They're even worse at energy density than batteries that don't check all those squares in your game of Buzzword Bingo.  

I should point out that when they use the term organic, it's in sense that chemistry formally recognizes: it means that they're based on carbon compounds, not that they're grown on hippie farms.  As always, the common word biodegradable translates into normal-speak as "they will rot."

The article I'll refer to first appeared in the June Electronic Design magazine and focuses on work carried out by a team at Texas A&M University headed by Jodie Lutkenhaus, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering.  In place of inorganic elements or compounds, like Lead and Sulfuric acid or Nickel and Cadmium terminals with a conducting paste, they created a battery using positively and negatively chargeable polypeptides.  Polypeptides are combinations of amino acids by what are referred to as peptide bonds.  The biggest and best known polypeptides are the proteins every living tissue is made from.  The battery polypeptides are only similar to those bigger proteins in the organic chemistry sense.

The process begins with an amino acid called L-Glutamic Acid (L meaning it rotates polarized light to the left; "levorotary").  L-Glutamic Acid is common in foods but not one of the "essential amino acids" that we can't synthesize and thus need to eat.  

Here I'll mercilessly grab part of the original article.  

In basic chemical terms, they started with l-glutamic acid polypeptide chains, then attached 2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-4-piperidine-1-oxyl (biTEMPO) to make the cathode and 4,4′-bipyridine derivatives (viologen) to make the anode (Fig. 2). A radical-based chemical mechanism “shuttled” electrons between the two structures.

Of course, as anyone doing research on batteries will tell you: a battery is more than just making this glop and pouring it somewhere, it has to be packaged properly, too. The packaging is shown in the Electronic Design article, but looks much like (well...) a battery.  Anode and cathode separated (by some filter paper in this case) and connected positive to anode and negative to cathode.  

The big question I had when I first saw this was how the energy density compared to other batteries, assuming it would be lower than existing batteries at this point in development.  

The storage density of this battery, with a terminal voltage between 1.1 and 1.6 V, is about 38 mA-hr/gm and 60 mW-hr/gm, which about one-third that of lithium-based sources. Furthermore, according to their detailed, fully referenced comparison table, it’s in the mid-range of “organic” cells that are non-degradable.

Unless I've gotten too out of practice at converting units, milliWatt*hour/gram are numerically the same as Watt*Hour/kilogram.  60 W*H/kg seems lower than the stated 1/3 of lithium batteries, but not terribly low.  I've read of electric car batteries doing over 400 W*H/kg and some claims of twice that being seen in some lab somewhere.  Gasoline offers 12,000 W*H/kg.

Given that, it's reasonable to ask "so what?  Why should I care about a low capacity battery that doesn't seem to offer any improvements?"  

The standard arguments against Lithium Ion batteries center on their not being recycled as much as people want (it costs too much), and that they use cobalt in their chemistries, a toxic metal that has become the target of human rights protesters - undoubtedly you've seen the pictures of children forced to work in the cobalt mines in horrible conditions.  Both of these objections are being raised in several places and everyone in the battery business is trying to come up with better solutions.    

 

 

And... They Did It

Booster 4 is in the launch complex at Boca Chica.  

Screen capture earlier this evening.  Booster 3 is on the left side of the screen (behind the blue field carrying text) but up on the test stand while B4 is right of center, still on the transporter, and next to the crane likely to lift her onto the Orbital Launch Pad. 

Hoppy flew two years ago this month.  August 27,  2019.  Hoppy is off to the left of this view.  It's mind boggling that we've gone from the "Flying Grain Silo" (formally named Starhopper) to the cusp of an orbital flight of the full Starship Superheavy in two years.  It would be great to see that flight by the 27th of the month.

Over here on the Space Coast, Boeing's Starliner capsule test flight was scrubbed today.  The mission is tentatively scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday the 4th, at 12:57 PM EDT, but that's far from sure.  From Boeing's Starliner website: 

During pre-launch preparations for the uncrewed test flight of the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, Boeing engineers monitoring the health and status of the vehicle detected unexpected valve position indications in the propulsion system. The issue was initially detected during check outs following yesterday’s electrical storms in the region of Kennedy Space Center.

We are in wet pattern on the East Coast of Florida this week, with 60 to 80% chances of thunderstorms every afternoon, at least here south of the Space Center.  It's to be expected.  Since the launch moves a little earlier in the day every day that passes (due to the Space Station Orbit shifting vs. time), and the rain chances go down as the week goes by, it might be more realistic to set the date later in the week.  Of course, there have been lots of launches into gaps between the clouds over the years.

More importantly is that associating the "unexpected valve positions" with the previous day's thunderstorms carries an implication that those two events go together.  That the storms may have somehow caused that issue.  Maybe it's a reach, but that needs to be investigated if they haven't ruled it out. 

EDIT 04 Aug 21 1100 AM EDT:  As of the latest updates, the Starliner test flight is scrubbed with no official word of reschedule.  Official words at Starliner Updates but it still revolves around not understanding why the "unexpected valve position indications in the propulsion system" were seen.

While We Were Having A Weekend, SpaceX Was...

While we were having a weekend SpaceX was doing their version of going "where no man has gone before."  In this case, doing a few things no one has ever done before.  These are absolutely necessary steps for the first attempt at an orbital flight of Starship and the Super Heavy booster.  I don't know which part is most important but they're all important. 

First, they lifted the Orbital Launch Table onto the OLP or Orbital Launch Pad, the six-legged structure that's been in process for almost a year.  The two big cranes, Buucky and Kong, lifted the table into place where the final assembly was worked on.  

I highlighted the structure with a red circle.  I don't think the work on the table is complete, but it's standing on its own, with nothing attached to either crane.  Kong's cables and attachment point are visible above the OLT/OLP and Buucky, the large yellow crane, is pointed in a different direction.  

The other large story is that Booster 4 made a huge leap towards being ready to fly.  In one of what most be the most surprising tasks they've taken on, starting yesterday, all 29 Raptor engines were installed on B4 between Sunday night and this morning, the final two being put in place by the day shift this morning.  

After accepting delivery of five new Raptor engines earlier the same day, Super Heavy Booster 4’s (B4) first Raptor rolled out of one of SpaceX’s Starship factory tents around 6pm CDT to form what would become a line of engines awaiting installation. One by one, Raptors were rolled out of that tent and by 5am CDT, an incredible 25 engines had been spotted and installed on Super Heavy. Come shift handoff around 6am, 27 Raptors had reportedly been installed in 12 hours. The two remaining engines likely joined them an hour or two later, marking 29 high-performance rocket engines installed in just 12-14 hours.

Elon Musk Tweeted this picture

That's a busy looking area!  We don't know what the plans are for how much thrust they're going to try to set for this mission, but it's potentially the most powerful launch in history. 

It's possible that B4 can be transported to the Orbital Launch Pad as early as tomorrow, August 3rd, but that's just based on what appears to be ready and one Tweet by Musk in response to a NASA Spaceflight.com picture of the Table and Orbital Launch Pad being worked on.

Needs to be level & match booster fittings. We will find out on ~Tuesday.

It's also worth noting that the Grid Fins for B4 were installed over the weekend as well.   These are not cast titanium like the Falcon 9's grid fins, but welded steel.  They aren't retracted down parallel to the booster's body during the mission, but are rotatable for control purposes.  There's a worker visible in the upper right, behind the black crane or lift.  If that guy is in the range of about 6' tall, the grid fins look to be the length and maybe width of a small car.  Those fins are going to support the weight of the booster when it's recovered out of the air during descent after the flight. 

Photo credit to BocaChicaGal at NASASpaceflight.com - as usual.

Back in May, SpaceX had reported they had a goal of completing the first orbital mission of Starship in the "third quarter."  This isn't a government job and they didn't mean the third quarter of the Fed.gov's fiscal year, April through June, but the calendar third quarter: July through September.  July is over and we can sense the urgency to meet their self-imposed schedule of this quarter.  August or September?  Good question.  I'll be watching.

How We Know It's August in Florida

The first indicator isn't the calendar.  The first indicator is when the UV Index says 11 on a scale of 10 and uses the description, "Potentially Fatal."  We know that's aimed at visitors to the area who aren't used to it and don't pay much attention.  

There are many places where folks look forward to summer; it's time to go outside - maybe for the first time in months, enjoy warm, glorious days; garden, bike, picnic; maybe enjoy a book while lounging on the beach.  Songs like Nat King Cole's classic "Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer" come to mind.

That's not here.  Here, summer is something to be a bit more reserved about.  If you live here, you can keep up with your regular life.  If you were from a moderate place, not used to our heat and humidity, running or other outdoors activity could conceivably kill you.  August marks the Dog Days of Summer; everything outdoors slows.  Fishing slows - sure the fish have to eat, but they become more active after dark.  Animals are more sluggish.  Ordinarily, it can be nasty here from about mid-July to almost the middle of September.  The worst of it is August. 

When we first got an HDTV years ago, Mrs. Graybeard and I naturally spent much of our TV time searching out HD programming.  One of the first movies we watched was "The Chronicles of Riddick".  You have to understand this is not even particularly good scifi.  It's a fun movie to watch, it's a visual treat, it's a fantastic display of special effects perfect for HD, but don't pay too much attention to the story.  To quote a review (long gone from the net), "Furyans, Necromongers, Elementals, The Underverse, the Threshold...it so clearly wants to be epic that it forgets to tie all of these disparate worlds, universes and civilizations into a coherent story. (Director) Twohy clearly makes the mistake of not realizing that there is a huge difference between being grand and being simply confusing and the more ideas that are introduced, the more lumbering it becomes…"   

We still watch it on occasion when we run into it.

A large portion of the movie, and one of the longest action sequences, takes place on the planet Crematoria (many of the names in the movie are that cheesy).  Crematoria is a planet that has a tremendous temperature variation (probably an impossible amount) with daytime temperatures of 700F and night time temperatures 300 below zero.  When the sunrise terminator sweeps through, the force of the heat gales that come with it is literally enough to blow you apart, disintegrating flesh and blowing pieces off until you die.  There's a scene where a character (Purifier), a Furyan like Riddick, sacrifices himself by walking into the sunrise terminator and self-immolating.  That's him trying to stand up to the gales while being set afire and having pieces of burning flesh blown off him.

The first time I saw that scene, it reminded me of the time we decided to do a long bike ride on July 4th (I think it was a hundred mile ride, but for sure it was a virtually all day ride).  I mentioned it to Mrs. Graybeard who said, "sure, we've been out on days like that."  

The National Weather Service publishes charts for heat index that show the amount of danger from the combination of heat and humidity.  This is one of their charts.  I've drawn a box around the typical morning conditions here.  "Extreme caution" conditions are common.  In the afternoon, it pushes farther into the orange, maybe red.  This afternoon, for example, it was 93 with humidity around 75%.

And that's what life here is like for August plus or minus a week or two.  Stay out of the sun.  Do your outdoor activities near sunrise or sunset.  Don't expose bare skin to the sun any longer than necessary - and even then, use sunscreen if you need to be out when the sun is intense, say from 10 AM to 4 PM.  SPF 3 million is adequate.  Without air conditioning and mosquito control, a technological civilization could not exist here.