I saw it on Everyday Astronauts live feed taken from a video-camera onshore with a telephoto lens.
SpaceX (general discussion)
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I saw it on Everyday Astronauts live feed taken from a video-camera onshore with a telephoto lens.
Dilandu
I'm dissatisfied, which means, I exist.
YES!!!
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I watched the Spaceflight Now feed which included commentary from Zack of CSI STARBASE.... also heard that 2100 tiles were removed.
Starship didn't exactly explode like last time...it did seem to break up... maybe some annealing?
Then too, Starship seemed a good bit more responsive... didn't wallow--perhaps better handling also a result of reduced tile count?
The ISS crew (Don Petit?) was able to film the launch...looking forward to seeing that and other footage in the days to come.
Starship didn't exactly explode like last time...it did seem to break up... maybe some annealing?
Then too, Starship seemed a good bit more responsive... didn't wallow--perhaps better handling also a result of reduced tile count?
The ISS crew (Don Petit?) was able to film the launch...looking forward to seeing that and other footage in the days to come.
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The Space Bucket has a video out about some preliminary results from the IFT-6 test-flight:
/ spacex 1) Excessive starts from the moon end. We have a Starship designed to put 100+ tons of payload onto the Moon surface. This is like building a 1,000 seat airliner at 100kg per passenger and saying all passenger aircraft including general aviation and narrowbodies must swap to this giant aircraft. Imagine an Antonov AN-225 with only 20 passengers onboard doing a regional flight to a small town. This is Starship.
If we look at a fully reusable Starship system for the moon. Option 5B in this video:
For each Starship HLS landing on the moon we have to send two Starships to the moon. Each of those need 15 tankers from Earth. Even if we only need to send 4 crew to the moon we need 30ish launches of the biggest rocket in history.
2) The top design criteria should start with the payload requirement for the next 5 to 15 years. This is 4-10 crew per flight with max payload of 10 ton. The entire system is then optimised from that payload requirement. This is how space exploration has always been designed and optimised.
This payload requirement of 10 ton then means a reusable Moon Lander that fully fueled weighs about 200 ton. This same moon lander if only sending 4 astronauts to the surface or 1 ton of payload can do the trip with only 100 ton of propellant to go from lunar orbit to the surface and back to lunar orbit.
Then the next stage of the journey is to optimise based on the moon landers fuel requirement. A reusable orbital transfer vehicle can go from Earth orbit to Lunar orbit and back to Lunar Orbit. It needs to be sized to be able to offload 100 ton of fuel to the moon lander while still having enough propellant to return back to LEO. This orbital transfer vehicle could be a slightly shorter Starship version with around 1,000 ton gross weight.
This orbital transfer vehicle then required only 2-3 reusable orbital refuelings in Earth orbit from the planned 2,500 ton Starship V3 tankers. This system is then like the 737/A320 of space travel.
3) The goal is putting an American astronaut on the moon before China. Also building a small moon base that in the next 5-15 years will operate like the international space station. The 10 ton payload requirement easily supports that.
The reason why I selected 5-15 year period is because hydrogen fuel production will start on Lunar surface by then. A new lunar lander will switch to Hydrogen fuel. The orbital transfer vehicle no longer needs to bring 100 ton of propellant for the moon lander it can instead bring 100 ton of cargo. I don't know if hydrogen production will be easy or not.
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Does China have a time machine?
chimeric oncogene
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The small town isn't going to stay small forever; under optimistic scenarios the small town will be a large town in under ten or twenty years. You need to think in terms of medium term development and growth, not just for tomorrow. Starship's lunar surface payload is adequate for perhaps a 4-8-man lunar surface base assuming 1-2 flights a year; ISS needs sixty tonnes of upmass a year by comparison and it doesn't have logistics intensive rovers and flyers and ISRU test rigs and other vehicles, all thirsty for spare parts, fuel, and other consumables.
Lunar hydrogen/lunox will take ten or twenty years to roll out; the process of developing, scaling and deploying ISRU is likely to be quite fraught.
The lifecycle of a small lunar lander will be too short; it'll take five to ten years to develop, five to ten to mature and another five to ten to really hit its stride. A small, bespoke lunar lander will only be economical for a few years before (under optimistic scenarios) growth and development renders it obsolete. Developing vehicles has proven too expensive; better to use the same vehicle/derivative vehicle for as many roles as possible or increase/decrease the fuel loading of a vehicle rather than spend another few billion developing a new one. Hence the push for Starship to do everything in cislunar space - orbiter, tanker, space tug, lander, preliminary Mars flyby vehicle.
To extend your analogy, do you want to develop a new regional jet to service a small town for five years before replacing it with a 737 for five years before replacing it with an Antonov, or do you want to keep the Antonov and upgrade it here and there so you can keep using it for the next thirty? Developing a jet is expensive ya know; Mitsubishi spent like 8 billion on their SpaceJet Regional Jet thing and it still got cancelled.
Now of course there's a bigger debate over how much growth we can expect out of the cislunar economy, etc, but SpaceX is betting on significant growth; that's their whole schtick. If you don't think there's any room for growth in the space economy, sure, SpaceX might be building the Great Eastern, but that's not what SpaceX's calculus is.
The number of tanker sorties is IMO a bit of a red herring. Assuming Starship works (and that's still not entirely certain), the biggest problem is lack of payloads, lack of demand, lack of launch cadence - because it's not at all guaranteed that the demand will materialize, that if they build it they will come. The zillion tankers solve that problem neatly, until new payloads emerge to replace tanker sorties and efficiencies are found to reduce the demand of methane and lox upwell.
Also also, look at the history of the IPP and behold the hundreds of Shuttle sorties they envisaged to top up those Nuclear Shuttles with LH2. Also also also, look at the old 1950s Von Braun Moon and Mars missions, and behold the tankermania. Hundreds of tankers, tankers upon tankers. This has always been how expeditions have worked - you don't design a new type of truck, ship, or plane for every trip to Antarctica or every Red Ball Express extension across France or every Black Buck sortie to Argentina - you add more tankers.
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This is relevant for this next quote.
Both say 10 to 20 years. This means by the time the moon base turns into a large town there will be hydrogen fuel available. So the large capacity methane fueled lander will become redundant as soon as the large capacity is needed.
A small capacity methane fueled lander is then the best option in the short term.
Dynetics Alpaca lander is half developed it could be ready by 2026. It is methane fueled and is very close to the required size.
The Orbital Transfer Vehicle that I propose would be 90% similar to current Starship HLS. The landing engines and landing legs would be removed. SpaceX can easily shorten or lengthen the ship to optimise the requirement and minimise the number of tanker refuelings. The next launch of Starship will actually be slightly longer. It is easy for them to add extra sections.
In summary I support the Dynetics Alpaca lander as the short term option and then the Blue Origin lander as the long term option. Starship then handles the trip from orbit to orbit and the reusable orbital refueling.
In this example the 737 and Antonov can't run on hydrogen. Once the small town only has hydrogen fuel available at the airport then all options become redundant. The key is to then develop the cheapest system with the lowest running cost system in the short term. That would be the regional jet.
Well it clearly upset you enough to click on my profile and search my posts.
Or did you suddenly just gain an interest in SpaxeX and decided to join us?
US must beat China back to the moon, Congress tells NASA
US must beat China back to the moon, Congress tells NASA
'It's no secret that China has a goal to surpass the United States by 2045 as global leaders in space. We can't allow this to happen.'
Something to keep in mind is that there is no equivalent of NASA in the PRC and the PRC's space-programme is run by the PLA. I have no doubt that the PLA's long term plans for the Moon includes the establishment of permanent military-bases.
TheKutKu
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Confirmed by SpaceX to be due to an issue on the side of the tower.
Yet another wonderful launch by SpaceX! Personally my favourite part was the transition between reentry attitude to the belly-first dive at around 30-40 km altitude
Also new SpaceX HLS renders:
View: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1858991247312212112
chimeric oncogene
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This is very much a best case scenario.
There is immense uncertainty in the whole venture of lunar oxygen production or lunar ice extraction. Oxygen deposits are relatively well understood (all the dirt is some oxide or another), but old-school LUNOX (a la the SEI of the 1990s) will work with either methane or LH2, that's not important for this discussion. The exact characteristics of the lunar polar hydrogen deposits as I understand it are still a tad unclear (is this ice? ice mixed with dirt? frost? hydrated silicates, clays? etc etc). Even more speculative are lunar carbon deposits, cometary material is believed to be tarry ice, so there might be ammonia or even methane clathrate or other tarry stuff in there too - might it be better to turn that into methane if your infra is already CH4?
We will know more when we have ground truth, and once we actually get machines up and running that are actually turning ice/dirt/etc into rocket fuel.
Getting to that point is IMO probably not a venture that can be done with a skeleton crew of four and two Alpacas a year. One might desire a base with fairly robust exploratory capability, say, twelve, sixteen people, two to four big rovers (???) (unless you get really lucky and it turns out to be giant sheets of pure ice), and one might want to iterate on the ISRU technology a bit once you start digging around, finding out you left the nice wrench at Cape Canaveral, run out of spare filters, allocating spare parts etc. So getting to that point might require a Starship-HLS sized facility. Many tens of tonnes, probably well over a hundred tonnes per year, not individual tonnes. You can break it up and rely on a higher Alpaca flight rate, sure, but it's like significantly more than ten flights a year at that point.
Also I think Starship HLS is not going to hit that 100 tonne brochure payload; there's a lot of parasitic mass on that thing.
Old studies on Phobos etc suggest that you can use a 90 tonne facility to crank out 600 tonnes of propellant a year. Typical mass ratios of payloads up and down (say ten ish, 3 up, 3 down) means that your 90 tonne facility is supporting about 60 tonnes of downmass a year (maybe a bit more if you're lucky, but either way, it's the same OOM ish). This is economical after a bit, but not a quick fix or magic wand, and depending on how cheap your tankers are, it might be cheaper to ship propellant upwell for a fair time even when you have an ISRU pilot plant (which is likely to start off very finnicky). The ratio of facility to propellant is expected to increase as you scale up the facility thanks to economies of scale, and I expect there to be crossover at some point.
Finally, SpaceX was going to develop Starship for interplanetary/cislunar missions no matter what, so any future ISRU effort is going to plug into SpaceX-sized operations, assuming SpaceX succeeds. Assuming Starship flies, the demand for propellant may well be paced by Starships, and if your lunar ISRU has to be competitive with Starship Tanker, well, it has to be a bit bigger than a 9 tonne facility cranking out 60 tonnes a year (which would be Alpaca-sized) of LH2/LOX.
Atomic Rockets isn't the best reference for this sort of thing, but sci fi afficionados have been thinking about this on and off for decades, and that's where I started.
1980s phobos study; very optimistic I would suspect: https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/mining.php#phobosplant0
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Dilandu
I'm dissatisfied, which means, I exist.
I'd say that lunar aluminium/oxygen is more readily available as fuel pair.
chimeric oncogene
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Yes, but the engine development is so far behind it's not funny. There are significant challenges to getting aluminium to run smoothly in a rocket engine - the engines get gunked by the solid particles and suchlike; surmountable probably, but not trivial; and you might just be better off with just sticking to the LOX.
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I'm on the Al-Lox rocket side. Albeit I agree there are issues @chimeric oncogene . There has been some bad news about the Lunar cold traps recently, long story short they formed too late (1 billion years ago) to trap lunar water (3 billion years ago). At least we know there are boatloads of aluminum in the crust, as much as oxygen.
My approach to lunar resources
-1 There is no "silver bullet" resource high there for Earth.
-2 Only and mainly aluminum, oxygen and silicon.
-3 So find something interesting to do with theses three resources : solar array, SBSP, rocket propulsion, telescope mirrors...
My approach to lunar resources
-1 There is no "silver bullet" resource high there for Earth.
-2 Only and mainly aluminum, oxygen and silicon.
-3 So find something interesting to do with theses three resources : solar array, SBSP, rocket propulsion, telescope mirrors...
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BlueAbyssal
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Why is size more important than cost and flight rate? This also neglects that SpaceX isn’t building Starship just for whatever NASA wants, they have their own internal goals that are much bigger, and building a small interim lander costs them time, money, and additional NRE versus just adapting the vehicle they’re already building. If this was a clean-sheet program and intended solely for the Moon I think you’d have a strong argument.
Gwynne Shotwell, who is generally less given to optimism than Musk is, has said 400 Starship flights by the end of 2028 is possible. Quibble about the timeframe or number of launches we may, but whether they hit that target then or later, thirty launches is a small fraction of their ambitions. I think you’re too focused on size, and not enough on cost and execution.
This only follows if you assume a) as before, that Starship is meant for NASA, and b) that NASA’s ambitions are the apex of what anyone hopes to achieve. I can think of at least three companies who, over the next 5-15 years, would like to land thousands of tons of hardware on the Moon. SpaceX is indeed optimizing their entire system from their payload requirements, which are initially twofold: launch thousands of Starship-optimized Starlinks, and enabling the settlement of Mars. Everything else, like the lunar Starship design, is a bonus.
Too much NRE and diversion of time and money from existing programs which obviate any need for such a vehicle. You’re overoptimizing right from the start, which is what NASA has traditionally tried to do, and the results have been mediocre.
That isn’t SpaceX’s payload requirement, therefore it doesn’t apply.
It’s far more likely early lunar ISRU will be liquid oxygen alone; as water has many other uses besides splitting into hydrogen and oxygen, and it is fairly rare on the Moon, it could just as easily be that methane-fueled spacecraft remain dominant, as fuel is a fraction of overall propellant loads.
You do have a point, though, and this is something I’ve written about elsewhere; even lunar-derived oxygen alone, if it can be supplied at a lower cost than Earth launch, can significantly reduce the number of tankers from Earth per cargo or manned mission.
Thanks for laying this out well. IMO too many people write as though SpaceX is constrained by what NASA wants to do, and doesn’t have plans of their own that require a vehicle of at least Starship’s ambitions. Optimized vehicles can come after we know the real requirements; trying to do so beforehand is an exercise in hubris.
Edit: it appears RJMAZ is banned. Well, we can at least discuss the premises of his arguments.
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Something made them decide to pass on a catch attempt, so they soft-landed in the water. When it tipped over after stopping it went BOOM.
FighterJock
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Possibly an internal issue that has yet to be determined that got flagged at the last minute and they decided to soft-land in the water instead of trying to save the booster. It was sad to watch after the successful catch last time, I suppose you can't have success all the time.
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According some sources on X.
Seems one of sensors on Booster 13 was not working correctly
What let to deviation of Booster flight path to Launch tower.
It is far better to gather data and preserve the ground infrastructure than take unnecessary risks with a flying bomb. I was presorted they attempted a catch last time or that the FAA approved it.
Related question: what exactly is the abort mechanism in a failed catch? They were apparently a second away from scrubbing the catch last time, but where exactly is the booster supposed to divert to in that scenario?
Related question: what exactly is the abort mechanism in a failed catch? They were apparently a second away from scrubbing the catch last time, but where exactly is the booster supposed to divert to in that scenario?
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Flight 6 show the Abort option: crash in ocean near launch site.
others could be use Flight Termination System but falling debris drive environmentalist nuts...
another option is crash the booster on beach near launch side, but, you know the environmentalist...
VIP at Launch site
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Starship looked VERY cooked coming down in the daylight. Discoloration even on the leeward side of the barrel, and visible buckling. NASA's going to want to see that resolved before they let humans ride that through re-entry. Well unless Elon's new best friend privatizes the agency and gives it to him.
This was the last V.1 Starship - first generation. The next one will have many goodies, for example they moved the canard to a slightly better place on the nose. Plus plenty other incremental improvements.
No such thing can happen and also not the president's call.
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None of the vehicles, or concepts, have had tiles on the leeward side of starship. If radiative heating, or perhaps attached flow around the barrel, is significant enough to distort SpaceX's alloy they may need to expand the TPS coverage rather significantly.
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Was temporary wrinkling due to thermal expansion. It went away as it cooled off as I recall.
The Space bucket has a video out about a closer look at why SpaceX aborted the Booster landing:
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