SpaceX Starship / Super Heavy Discussion Thread

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
102

Twenty. Nine. Engines.
Imgur

In other good news, Blue Origin lost its protest of the NASA HLS decision it filed with the Government Accountability Office. Some guy made this comment a while back, which is very much on point:

They didn’t have that back in 1961 and 1962, they were moving fast. From the time of that Rice speech, I don’t know the exact time, they were letting contracts, actually finishing contracts within a year of that Rice speech. Unbelievable. I know that there were nine competitors for the lunar lander, and Grumman won. The RFP was released, and then it was awarded to Grumman six months later. Today, there would be three protests and the losers would sue the federal government because they didn’t win. So it’s very interesting, the thing that slows things down is procurement. It’s become the bigger bottleneck than the technology.

Oh right, Jeff Bezos said that. Chamber pot, meet shitkettle.

To be fair, I think a protest is actually reasonable for a big contract like this. The GAO is respectable and they look for violations that look like bias. They don’t question NASA’s technical decisions. So in a way I’m glad we’ve gotten this out of the way: NASA’s selection now looks squeaky clean.

103

Yeah, so far Nelson has been a pleasant surprise.

And 29 Raptors is an amazing sight, and I continue to be blown away by how fast that came together.

104

It’s astonishing how rapidly they’re moving now. Booster 3 is close to complete, with a full set of engines and grid fins.

Their strategy for the grid fins is interesting; apparently they no longer fold. I guess it makes sense; folding adds complication and the benefit is probably marginal given that they are reasonably aerodynamic in the standard position. Elon’s “best part is no part” philosophy appears to still hold.

The grid fins are also arranged differently; instead of being 90 degrees apart, they’re more like 60-120-60-120. I guess they want more control authority on one axis than another. I think that makes sense: the more lift they can achieve (by putting the body at a higher angle of attack), the less propellant they have to reserve for the return trip. But laterally they shouldn’t need as much.

The launch tower / catch mechanism is nearing completion as well. I still find it vaguely unbelievable that they plan on catching the thing, but all the pieces are coming together. They have a big winch thing that connects to a sled with arms, which will adjust to catch the booster just below the grid fins and slow it down gently. I can’t wait to see that in action.

I can’t blame them too much since their whole process is based around slower players, but it seems like the FAA is going to be the long pole here. They need to do some additional environmental reviews, there’s a public feedback period, and some other stuff. An August launch isn’t going to happen unless they get some kind of waiver.

More pics:
Grid fins and booster
Installation of flaps with heat tiles
Most of the biggest Starship pieces in one shot
Likely operation of the catch tower

105

I’ve only just started watching the video, but Everyday Astronaut has the first part of a long Starbase factory tour uploaded:

Seems like it’ll have plenty of good info in there.

106

Lots of good stuff in the video. Looks like this will be the replacement for the quasi-annual BFR/ITS/Starship presentation, which is fine by me.

One piece of info that I hadn’t seen even speculated about before: Starship won’t use thrusters or pushers for stage separation. Instead, they’ll do a pitch maneuver to gently separate the two stages via centrifugal force.

That seems nuts, but I realized it’s not nearly as nuts as it sounds. On just about every other rocket, the interstage stays with the booster stage. Because the second stage fits into the interstage, and it’s so large that there’s not much room for lateral movement, the separation maneuver had better be extremely linear. On the Falcon 9, they have a few small pneumatic pushers along the rim, and a giant pusher in the exact center. It’s been very reliable as the center pusher keeps the upper-stage engine perfectly aligned as it exits the interstage.

So how can SpaceX just fling the two stages apart without some kind of collision? It’s because the interstage comes with the upper stage, and totally surrounds the upper stage engines. It needs that because on re-entry, it comes in on its side and the engines need heat shielding there.

That means there is a clean plane of separation as compared to having to carefully extract the engine from the interstage. So they just undergo a pitch-up/down, pop the connectors holding the stages together, and let it go. A few seconds later the pieces are sufficiency separated and the upper stage ignites.

It’s a good example of not continuing to do something just because you’ve always done it that way. Sometimes circumstances change and invalidate the reasons why you did a thing in the first place. Like the old joke about the roast:
A boy is watching his mom cook a roast, and sees her cut off the ends before putting it in the oven. He asks why, and the mom replies that she’s always done it that way because that’s the way her mom taught her. The boy continues to ask why, so they call the grandmother to find out. The grandmother says: “You idiot! I cut the ends off because it didn’t fit in the oven otherwise.”

107

Yikes. Blue Origin is looking really desperate:
https://www.blueorigin.com/assets/blue-origin-hls-national-team-lunar-starship-infographic-2x.jpg

Left out of the infographic is that SpaceX has developed four orbital launchers, launched hundreds of times, operates two different orbital spacecraft (one of them man-rated and is currently carrying astronauts to the ISS), and operates their craft out of two different spaceports.

Meanwhile, Blue Origin has done zero orbital anything. Methinks this is coming from Bob Smith (CEO of Blue Origin), getting a hint from Bezos that he may not have a job for very long unless something changes fast.

It is worth repeating Eric Berger’s comments, though:

108

Part 2 of the Starbase tour is up:

Lots of goodies in there, including some bits on Falcon 9. I wasn’t aware that even F9 Block 5 wasn’t really a frozen design, and they’re saving the early boosters for expendable missions since they’re too annoying to refurbish.

This is the first real view we’ve had inside the tents. A bunch of Raptors laying around, nosecone fabrication (including a newer and much less-janky style using fewer pieces). Lots of robots causally sitting in the background (not doing anything here but used, among other things, to install the tabs for the heat tiles.

There’s a point where Musk gets distracted, seemingly due to some problem with the heat tile installation, and texts the lead for that group. I have to guess he pretty regularly makes rounds like this to spot problems.

A couple of recent articles on Blue Origin put some things in perspective:

The second article quotes Tory Bruno (lead of ULA, which is currently waiting for engines from Blue Origin) putting a positive spin on things. But essentially they’re saying the same thing, and in particular Bruno acknowledges this:

And why is that happening? It’s happening because the testing is more complicated than they anticipated. And because they allowed themselves, we allowed ourselves as a program, to have fewer test assets to work with than we originally planned

Blue Origin promised from the beginning that their development program was “hardware rich”:

Clearly, that hasn’t been the case. Internal sources at BO and now Tory Bruno admit that it’s actually the opposite. It’s hard to believe it’s because Bezos can’t afford it. But maybe Bob Smith (BO CEO) can’t get out of the conservative “old space” mentality.

At any rate, it’s an astonishing contrast with what we see at SpaceX, where they have dozens of engines and nosecones and ring sections and other bits just laying around. At one point Musk says they need to take more risks because if the pieces aren’t being destroyed in testing, they have to keep them around somewhere, and they’re running out of space.

One final bit of amusement. That poster above from Blue Origin? They exaggerated the scale of the BO lander by 25%, so it’s actually even dinkier than it looks in the graphic. I know there’s somehow a tie-in here with the overly phallic New Shephard rocket…

109

Prat 3 of the Starbase tour is up:

This one is… a bit different. Almost like filming a war zone. We get to meet some really sharp and energetic people, like Sam Patel. And we get a picture of several of the little problems they’ve run into, like the launch ring being out of level by 1/2", and so on. It’s almost unbelievable how fast they’re moving.

110

The speed blows me away. Two weeks ago the booster was still being worked on, SN20 hadn’t even been fully stacked, and they were still building the launch tower. If NASA was at that state of completion, I would have estimated that you wouldn’t see a fully stacked starship on the launch pad for at least a year or more.

SpaceX did it something like eight says later. I’ve worked on lots of engineering projects, and never seen any project move with this kind of speed. In those videos, the place is just a hive of activity, and it’s like that all the time.

Musk has a giant list of tasks that have to be accomplushed before his Mars dreams can be realized, and he knows that if they aren’t done by the time he retires or dies the dream will likely die with him. So he’s on a mission to move fast. And he has the money and enough knowledge to pull it off.

This, by the way, is why we need billionaires. There is just no way any conventionally organized company with a long management chain of professionals could pull this off. You need someone at the top with money and the power and vision to say, 'screw the hierarchy - we’re going ahead and I don’t care if we blow up ten of them before we learn. And if a junior engineer has a better idea than me or anyine else, we’ll do that. Even if we have to throw away millions of dollars in previous work."

Musk said a while ago that the most important thing he would tell engineers is “don’t accept the constraints you were given if you see a better way.” The problem is that traditional project management us all about constraints, and anyone who has worked on a large engineering project from anywhere but the executive suite knows how hard or impossible it is to push back on constraints you were given.

Even if your manager agrees with you, someone will kill the idea somewhere along the chain. And eventually engineers learn to just do the bit they were told to do and ignore the silliness of other decisions made at a higher level.

Sometimes you need someone at the top who is beholden to no one but his own pocketbook, who has skin in the fame, and who can cut through bulkshit and force needed change a bureaucracy simply can’t or won’t do.

Contrast Blue Origin. Bezos was busy with Amazon, so he hired an old dpace executive to run the show, and he built a decent old space company with a traditional hierarchicsl engineering division with tight financial controls, lots of ‘oversight’ to make sure people didn’t step out of their lanes, etc. That would look okay against any other old epace company, but looks pathetic next to SpaceX.

111

If only more billionaires had this extreme drive. And, apparently, a great talent for finding highly motivated and capable employees. It’s great to see more of them in these latest videos.

All of this really would be literally unbelievable if it weren’t being done out in the open and being monitored by an army of watchers at all times. Over 100 engines produced already (largely tracked from leaving Hawthorne, being test fired in McGregor, and finally arriving in Boca Chica). Several upper stages, each more refined than the last. A couple of boosters, seemingly almost complete. A launch tower, ground equipment, etc. And much of it coming together in a matter of days. Still an immense amount of stuff to do, but getting to orbit this year no longer seems implausible. Or even particularly optimistic.

I liked what Musk said about design in the first video. His 6-step checklist:

  • Eliminate dumb requirements
  • Delete useless parts
  • Simplify and optimize
  • Speed up iteration time
  • Automate
  • Do it in this order

(“Do it in this order” is last, so that it comes first if you mess up and do it in reverse). And Musk gave an example where he screwed up with the insulation mat on top of the battery for the Model 3. He spent a great deal of time working on automation to place the mat, simplifying the placement, and so on. It turned out that the mat was unnecessary: the acoustic guys thought it was for fire suppression, and the fire safety guys thought it was for sound suppression. So they deleted it. And if they were more on the ball about eliminating dumb requirements, they wouldn’t have even needed to do that.

I really can’t understand Bezos. Both he and Musk had the same level of space engineering knowledge circa 2000: approximately zero. But Musk learned a lot, fast, while Bezos apparently spent every second on Amazon. It’s obviously a very successful company, but at this point it almost feels like luck, with them succeeding only because the competitors were totally incompetent back then. Maybe Bezos just isn’t that capable. He doesn’t really strike me as being all that sharp when he talks about space stuff.

I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but the GAO report has lots of good details in it about HLS:

I laughed and laughed at this:

Yeah, they actually cited a “K-12” education page on the NASA site to remind Dynetics that vehicles have to produce more thrust than the vehicle weighs in order to lift off. At least Blue Origin’s vehicle wasn’t that bad…

112

Musk is building a rocket factory. Rather like he built a car factory at Tesla.

He makes the point that dealing with all the manufacturing challenges is far harder than coming up with a design.

There was once a business methodology called Taylorism that was rather popular in production line manufacturing. I believe it was based on the idea that all wisdom came from the top and their chosen design. It was not the job of the lower orders to suggest changes. The Japanese took a different approach which motivated workers to constantly look for improvements to quality. American and European manufacturers tried to do the same, but it was painful to watch.

Musk is also using iterative development techniques common in the more enlightened parts of the software development business.

He is applying these ideas in the auto and space businesses where management is pretty old school in its approach. So he runs rings around them.

It must be pretty exciting to work at Tesla or SpaceX. I am sure he attracts the best talent from across these industries.

Successful, innovative, businesses need a visionary leader that makes use of the best talent they can find to overtake the competition. The conditions have to be right for this to happen.

The space business is constrained by reduced budgets and a move away from expensive cost plus deals. The auto business is being forced to develop an electric power train and re-engineer its production lines.

It reminds me of Apple under Steve Jobs that used design and software to create smartphones that people wanted to use and an App Store business. Rather than what staid phone manufacturers and Telcos decided the customers were going to get.

Musk does play the visionary part very well. I don’t really buy the Mars stuff. But Starlink and bringing communications to the unconnected billions - that has a lot of potential.

113

I don’t know about SpaceX, but Tesla goes through a lot of management changes. Much like many high tech companies, rather than auto companies.

114

It only takes a few to do great good. Billionaires are an example of ‘Lévy flight’ in complex systems - extreme outliers that engage in high risk/high reward activities that the system is not capable of otherwise.

For example, in ant colonies the vast majority of ants follow predictable behaviours close to brownian motion, but a few ants do not. They wander off away from the colony, usually never to be heard from again. But once in a while one finds a huge food source that revitalizes the entire colony. We see the same behaviour in all social animals, including humans.

In human systems, great explorers of the past are an example. The Kon Tiki expedition. Fabulously wealthy monarchs paying for highly speculative attempts to cross oceans to find new lands. Today, it’s billionaires funding new mechanisms for charity, building giant telescope arrays to look for alien life, investing in research for more efficient hulls for their racing yachts which trickles down to shipping, building rockets, or building a 4 billion dollar center to solve ageing.

Most of their efforts, like most efforts in cutting edge science and engineering won’t achieve much. But occassionally they make a breakthrough that no one else could have made given the constraints of normal organizations, and change the world.

If Starship proves out to work as Musk intends, it could change the world. Hell, it could change the course of mankind. And it took a billionaire to do it. SpaceX is already saving the government billions of dollars. If Artemis succeeds, SpaceX will deserve a lot of the credit.

115

The FAA is slowly inching their way toward (likely) approval for Starship launches out of Boca Chica. This is the last obstacle to orbital launches that SpaceX faces. Current thought (unconfirmed) is that SpaceX will receive a “mitigated FONSI”, or “mitigated Finding Of No Significant Impact”, which means they’ll have to take some steps to mitigate any environmental damage, but that it is essentially an approval for the request.

The FAA says they’ll release the findings on June 13. They’ve been delaying month-by-month for a few months now, but the last delay was just two weeks, and they’ve also said they’ve completed “Section 4(f)”, which is apparently the last milestone.

In the meantime, they’ve also released the entire collection of 19,000 public comments:

Musk has received some criticism to the effect that the delays are just deserts for siccing his army of mindless Twitter followers onto the FAA. From browsing the comments, that characterization is the exact opposite of the truth.

The “pro” comments are all unique, clearly written with distinct voices, and–while the quality varies–present a diverse set of opinions. They vary from appeals about SpaceX rekindling the spirit of space exploration last felt during the moon landings; to economic arguments about any delays to Starlink 2.0; to environmental arguments about the benefits of a reusable vehicle; and so on. They are largely all thoughtful.

The “anti” comments are all exactly the same duplicated form letter, starting with “I am deeply concerned about” and ending with “Thank you for your attention on this matter.” There are reams upon reams of these. The people (if they are indeed people and not bots) probably did not read the letter themselves; if they had any real thoughts on the matter, they would have written something in their own words, as the pro comments did. Instead, it was clearly some astroturfed effort, with the original letter being distributed to some mailing list. In fact it appears that many of them could not be bothered to send the email themselves, as the “From:” line for many show the same “on behalf of So-and-So” verbiage, indicating that they originated from a third party.

It’s likely that the FAA had to nevertheless read through these individually, wasting their time on copy-and-paste FUD. It’s these people who are clearly abusing the system.

Well–at least it probably benefits SpaceX in the end, because duplicated arguments only have to be addressed once. I don’t know if the variety of pro arguments will act as any kind of deciding factor, but it surely does not hurt.

My own comment was placed in the “Purple Category”. I am unsure what that means.

116

Woo! The FAA issued a mitigated FONSI, which means that SpaceX can launch from Boca Chica:

There are about 75 mitigations that SpaceX will have to take care of. While that may sound like a lot, many of these are things SpaceX is already doing, or would do in the future, or are trivially easy.

The initial license is only for 5 launches/year. They have the option for increasing that, but I’m fairly sure this will never be a major spaceport by itself. They’re already doing construction in Florida and have bought some offshore platforms. Boca Chica might just always be a test range.

117

I found this line in the doc especially interesting:

The natural gas pretreatment system and liquefier are no longer needed due to advances in the design and capabilities of SpaceX’s Raptor engines. Previously, additional refinement of methane to purer levels than commercially available was anticipated to be needed. However, as a result of engine advances, SpaceX can rely on commercially available methane without refinement. Accordingly, SpaceX is no longer proposing a natural gas pretreatment system and liquefier.

That should lower launch costs as well. At least once they get to a point where propellant is a significant factor (may take a while to get there).

118

Some of the required mitigations are kinda funny.

SpaceX will have to “volunteer” an employee to write a history paper:

Preparing a historical context report (i.e., historical narrative) of the historic events and activities of the Mexican War (1846–1848) and the Civil War (1861–1865) that took place in the geographic area associated with and including the Area of Potential Effects (APE).

I’m sure their CNC machine shop can handle some bronzework (BTW, the markings were gone long before SpaceX showed up):

Replicating and installing the missing stars and wreaths on the Palmetto Pilings Historical Marker

This one is actually pretty cool, and genuinely uses SpaceX’s strengths:

Provide enhanced satellite monitoring via solar powered Starlink for remote wildlife viewing opportunities. Enhanced satellite monitoring will be provided at location(s) to be determined by USFWS, in coordination with SpaceX

Kitty! I’m sure the ocelots will be titillated.

SpaceX will make an annual contribution of $5,000 to the Friends of Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge Adopt‐an‐Ocelot Program within 3 months of the issuance of the BO and by March 1 of each year thereafter for the duration of the BO.

The birds get some bux, too:

SpaceX will make an annual contribution of $5,000 to the Peregrine Fund within 3 months of the issuance of the BO and by March 1 of each year thereafter for the duration of the BO.

Sea Turtle, Inc. doesn’t get money, just space:

SpaceX will provide a dedicated space for Sea Turtle, Inc. volunteers on SpaceX property to monitor Boca Chica Beach use and to conduct pre‐and post‐ launch surveys at Boca Chica Beach

Anyway, all this is fine by me. Especially the Adopt-an-Ocelot donation. News sites seem to be making a big deal out of the 75 mitigations (not sure where they got that number: I count 111, not counting sub-mitigations), but all of them look to be either obvious stuff or minimal good citizen type stuff. Really, the various contributions should be a lot more.

119

I don’t have a dog in the mitigations “fight”, but looking at that list I wonder if maybe we shouldn’t have similar mitigations required for every new factory, big box store, shopping plaza, school, and housing tract in the land.

And if we don’t have them for all those other land uses, why for this one?

I certainly support the public safety & pollution management efforts around their explody equipment and the many noxious chemicals used in launch vehicles, but the other stuff seems … unrelated.

120

Elon Musk on Twitter an hour ago saying Starship will be ready to fly in August and then once a month after that. Looking at my Elon calendar conversion chart that might mean sometime in the autumn:

121

Next month is July, not August :slight_smile: . And it sounds like they’ll produce a new Starship stack once a month after that. I agree, there is going to be some Elon time conversion in there… but I don’t think they’re too far off from orbital flight. Landing is going to be more challenging! I think they’ll be lucky to have an intact landed booster+orbiter this year.