Nice bit of doppler shift in that audio as the rocket ascended. Then you could hear aerodynamic descent for a few seconds before the rockets reignited. A little sample of London blitz there.
SN9 could launch as early as Friday, with Saturday and Sunday as reserve days.
Seems like the little tipover incident wasn’t a big deal. IIRC, they replaced the damaged flaps but that’s about it.
Musk said they’re pressurizing the header tanks with helium on SN9. That should definitely fix the pressurization problem that SN8 encountered, but they’ve been really trying to avoid helium since it’s expensive, finite, and not available on Mars. But they might have to bite the bullet on that one.
I’ve not read about what they learned about the problem. So I’m wondering what Helium does that their prior system did not.
In an awful lot of situations, saying “I know; let’s use Helium!” increases, not decreases, your problems. It’s the hardware equivalent of regexes.
Helium is the “standard” way of pressurizing propellant tanks. It’s not easy to deal with, but SpaceX has lots of experience with it from the Falcon 9 (including some hard lessons from earth-shattering kabooms). So it should be relatively straightforward to drop in a helium pressurant system.
Their goal with Starship was to use autogenous pressurization; that is, use vaporized propellant to pressurize the tanks. Oxygen for LOX and methane for LCH4. In principle, this reduces complexity since you just need a heat exchanger to vaporize the propellant instead of a whole array of helium tanks. But it’s not something that SpaceX has a great deal of experience with. I guess it worked well enough for the main tanks, but something about the headers was different.
Most likely, they’ll work through the issues, but for now they want to keep flying and it sounds like helium is the fastest way through the current bottleneck.
Launch window for SN9 is tomorrow between 1400 and 2359 UTC
https://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_1_1077.html
…although weather might force it to Monday or Tuesday
Bah, it’s Tuesday now. With Wednesday and Thursday as back up.
SN9 is expected to have the same flight profile as SN8 - but hopefully a bit more vertical at the very end.
A slightly odd news item: SpaceX buys two oil rigs:
Musk does seem to have a talent for buying stuff on the cheap. The old NUMMI plant in Fremont for Tesla, an old Space Shuttle transporter, a giant LOX tank… and now two oil platforms, originally ~$500M each, bought for $3.5M each. And now named, appropriately enough, Deimos and Phobos.
Clearly these are to be turned into Starship launch/landing platforms, though they have their work cut out for them with the required modifications.
Presumably this allows them to launch from closer to the sea-borne landing site which will save on the fuel the booster needs to land.
Possibly, but I think the intent is to still land back at the launch site so as to reduce transportation costs.
Part of the reason is to just get the launch away from populated areas, since a Superheavy launch will be immensely loud and have the energy of a small nuclear weapon if it explodes.
They might want two just to increase the launch cadence, and have a backup in case one is damaged. Or maybe Superheavy lands at one and Starship at the other. That might be wasteful though since Starship is pretty light and could land at on a normal barge. I dunno but there are a number of possibilities here.
SN9 flight could be today.
Stream will be live in an hour (from time of posting):
…though the actual launch window is between 12pm and 6pm CT.
Watched the countdown go to 2:06 - T ) now 4:40 PM CST (2240 UTC)
Brian
I think I just saw that it was scuttled for the day due to wind.
Brian
Okay so many false alarms but SN9 test should be today unless the rocket has issues!
BTW: here’s a great site that lets you select from and watch four camera views simultaneously:
Rescheduled for tomorrow dagnammit.
I’m seeing not scrubbed that the TFR is still in place but the FAA is holding up the launch somehow/for some reason.
I have no clue what the FAA space rules are, but I’m actually surprised Musk thinks the aircraft regulations are “fine”. Also, they get approval for SN8, what about SN9 is different?
Brian
well this is one louder, innit?
Okay; this one is scrubbed for today finally.