https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1806412794444816599

Targeting Friday, June 28 for a Falcon 9 launch of the NROL-186 mission from California

Well this was a weird one.

Starbase activities (2024-06-27):

• Jun 26th addendum: More tower wall sections are delivered to pad B.
• Previous day’s cryo delivery tally
• Overnight, a horizontal tank arrives at Sanchez.
• LR11000 hooks up to GSE-3 (reference map). GSE-6 scrapping is completed.
• Morning chopstick testing: Slight movement, GSE tank scrapping crew arrives, chopstick closes on B14.1. Total of 3 slap tests in the morning. (NSF)
• Jun 27th closure is revoked, and a road delay is issued instead.
• CC8800-1 crane testing continues. Tower stacking is currently scheduled to be completed by August 15th.
• Afternoon chopstick testing: 2 slaps (ViX, NSF), a rail raise, and 2 catch tests (ViX, NSF), chopsticks return to resting position. Doherty photographs B14.1 afterwards, Golden shares his thoughts, SpaceX posts a highlights reel.

Other: Highlights from StarBase update with Kathy Lueders

• 3 months to completion of Starfactory
• Working with TXDOT on expanding HWY 4 to a 4 lane road eventually
• Starbase commercial retail Space on hold.
• Staff residency over 50% local to Brownsville with ~400 staff living on site.
• Permanent Orbital Fuel Depot for Moon + Mars missions
• SpaceX monitoring sound levels for Port Isabel + SPI + Brownsville during testing.
• Texas Parks & Wildlife Environmental mitigation teams in place before and after launches.
• Monthly emergency management meetings with Cameron County and local hospitals for catastrophe scenarios.

Norminal launch, booster landing, and Starlink deploy.

Welcome back B1062!

As is everyone born between 1965 and 2015, which is quite a few people.

Does Lemmy have a way to get inactive mods removed and replaced?

Messaging the admins of the community’s home instance is generally the recommended approach.

Well than was… an experience.

Any NSFW settings within the app which might be blocking them?

Lemmy has flairs now? How does one set them?

Can an airless tire ever be as cushioning as an airfull tire? Instead of compressing the entire volume of air, aren’t you essentially just compressing a small “spring” directly between the rim and the road?

I use the axiom of replacement to construct a set of ordinals which come after “infinity plus one”. Your move, sir.

Was it not here yet? What changed?

Edit: Ah. Better drilling techniques, ironically, pioneered by the fossil fuel industry!

Latimer and his colleagues improved on traditional geothermal techniques in several ways. But the biggest was this: They utilized horizontal drilling, boring about 10,000 feet down and then 5,000 feet to the side with each well. The technology has been around for decades, but it’s gotten a lot less expensive since the mid-2000s due to widespread adoption by oil and gas companies.

Nice that this drilling technology can be used in green energy applications too.

Isn’t Titan’s atmosphere mostly nitrogen, with a dash of hydrocarbons?

Great article. I love the (possible?) subtle dig at SpaceX’s development process, along with the acknowledgment that building a rocket factory is more difficult than building a rocket.

If you lay the first rocket that we ever built, Flight 1, against Flight 50, the rockets are largely the same. We didn’t put a minimum viable product on the pad and then have to go back and redesign it. That was important because we came out of the gate with Flight 2, Flight 3, and Flight 4 all in quick succession. We built something to be produced. It’s often said that production of rockets is just way harder than building the first one, and I think that’s accurate.

P.S. Anyone else read Peter Beck’s sections in his voice?

This young man volunteered to undergo the procedure even though he didn’t have to.

It’s not like he got a kidney transplant for funsies. He needed a kidney transplant. He just didn’t need to be awake for it.

Nicolas was first diagnosed with chronic kidney disease during high school in 2013. After moving to Chicago in 2022, his kidney function had deteriorated and doctors at Northwestern told him he needed to get a transplant.

The Northwestern team picked him as a candidate for the awake transplant because he was young, otherwise healthy and also willing to go ahead with it.

Nice shot of a beautiful jellyfish! So cool that you can distinctly see the stages and fairings!

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1806048223758557504

Targeting Thursday, June 27 for a Falcon 9 launch of 23 @Starlink satellites from Florida

Starbase activities (2024-06-26):

• Previous day’s cryo delivery tally
• Overnight, GSE-6 scrapping continues. Slight mishap in the early morning when attempting to remove the dome, but the situation was soon rectified.
• Main event: Chopsticks testing (NSF livestream): Road is closed, and chopsticks open and close on B14.1. Timelapse of two tests, first close, second close (slap!). Chopsticks, their arms wide.
• CC8800-1 crane undergoes some testing and inspections, then returns to vertical (alternate angle).
• S30 tile replacement and ablative shielding layer application continues. Additional recent photo from cnunez.
• Another horizontal tank is en route to Starbase.

I posted this in another thread, but figured I’d post it here as well.

TL;DW highlights:

• 01:15 Current Starfactory designed to produce 100 ships per year.
• 02:30 Aiming for 200 tonnes to orbit with full reusability
• 11:20 Starlink missions on Starship are not a priority for 2024
• 15:00 Currently design not able to cope with the loss of a single tile on the pressurized tank portion. Future designs incorporating a backup ablative layer underneath tiles.
• 17:30 Mass savings of passive vs active heat shield might not be as much as they originally thought, since the mass of the ceramic heat shield has grown. Elon still confident that passive shield is best for reentry from interplanetary transfer.
• 21:30 Linear-adjacent flow (assembly line) for vehicle production.
• 27:20 IFT-3 loss of ship control. Valves got clogged by ice. Elon confirms that they are tapping off the preburner for ullage gas to repressurize the oxygen tank. They’ve added better “ice strainers” and will add redundant valves in the future.
• 33:45 Reducing number of grid fins is not a high priority.
• 36:00 Still several thousand changes between each vehicle. Primary payload on these test flights is data.
• 42:00 Future raptor versions will have cooling circuits integrated into various parts, reducing the total number of parts, bolted joints, welded joints, and the need for engine heat shields
• 47:30 Long-term goal for raptor thrust is 330 tonne-force.
• 50:00 Separate propellant depot likely not needed for Artemis, just dock tankers directly to Starship HLS.
• 54:30 Tile attachement points
• 56:45 Ship header tank
• 57:45 Pez door test on IFT-3 “had some issues”.
• 1:00:45 Tesla drive units are still used for actuating the booster grid fins and ship flaps. Striving to eliminate all hydraulics on the vehicle.

Side note at 01:40 on Falcon 9 upper stage production: Close to 200 this year, likely over 200 next year.

TL;DW highlights:

Pre-IFT-4:

• 03:20 Current ships do not have catch points, future ships will.
• 04:00 Catch point design is a trade off between an inefficient but precise landing with small catch points, or an efficient hoverslam but imprecise landing with beefy catch points.
• 04:50 Forward flaps move the center of pressure too far forward, and the ship has the tendency to enter engines-first. Current forward flaps are too big. Rear flaps do the main bulk of controlling the pitch. Forward flaps just trim the roll and yaw.
• 10:30 “If you could have done iterative design on Falcon 9, would you?” “We couldn’t have done Starship without the lessons from Falcon 9.”
• 12:00 Tower B upgrades: Taller for next gen Starship. Arms will be shorter. Current arms have too much inertia.
• 13:00 OLM redesign: “More of a flame trench?” “Yeah.” Also, hold-down/launch arms redesigned to reduce risk of binding during liftoff.

Post-IFT-4:

• 20:30 Reentry heating was observable from the internal cameras (visible, not IR cameras), but the stainless steel held up.
• 21:20 Hinge needs to be beefed up on S30. Thicker tiles, thinner the gaps between tiles, better gap filler, tightening tolerances.
• 22:55 Moving the forward flaps leeward is now a priority for Starship V2. Redesign front support structure.
• 24:20 “Did all flaps have similar burn-through?” “No. Right foreflap took the most damage.” This was concluded based on how much control authority each flap had. Elon speculates that the tile gaps on the right foreflap happened to be slightly worse than the other flaps. Ship maintained stability, but was not able to steer to pinpoint landing location (off by 6 km).
• 28:00 Booster landing was accurate enough to attempt tower catch on IFT-5. “You don’t feel like you need to have tower 2 ready before you do that?” “No, not necessarily. We do have replacement parts for the arms. They are a better set of arms.”
• 29:00 Tower catch attempt contingent on talking it over with the teams. Rarely does Elon drop an imperial decree :)
• 29:20 IFT-5 profile? Repeat of IFT-4? In-space Raptor relight? Undecided at this point.
• 29:50 Update on the two rear tiles which were intentionally removed: One had two layers of ablative shielding, the other had one layer. One layer burned through, but two layers didn’t burn through.
• 30:30 IFT-5 between 30 and 60 days (Elon time :), depending on changes needed to 30.