SpaceX announced on Friday that the company is targeting “mid-November” for the second flight test of the Super Heavy rocket and its Starship upper stage.
The company said the launch date is pending regulatory approval, which means that the Federal Aviation Administration and US Fish and Wildlife Service have yet to complete the environmental review process for the rocket and its launch site, which is surrounded by wetlands in South Texas.
It’s also smart. Setting expectations low is important when you are essentially carrying out integration tests in a potentially explodey way and the eyes of the world (and regulators) are watching. If the thing blows up you want to be able to say, “Yeah, we knew that was a possible outcome, and planned for it.”
Not quite! “Most” is correct here. Because they’re hot staging, the center three engines on the booster do not cut off. The Starship starts up and pulls away, despite the remaining thrust from the booster, and as soon as it’s clear, the booster does a quick flip (using thrust vectoring) and starts boosting back. The booster landing ends up being a bit more efficient, which means they can do the staging later, which means more delta-V available for the upper stage.
Still–you’re right that I’m not expecting all 33 engines to be still functioning at that point. Hopefully they lose fewer of them than last time, though…
The second flight test of a fully integrated Starship could launch as soon as early as Friday, November 17, pending final regulatory approval.
A live webcast of the flight test will begin about 30 minutes before liftoff, which you can watch here and on X @SpaceX. As is the case with all developmental testing, the schedule is dynamic and likely to change, so be sure to stay tuned to our X account for updates.
Starship’s first flight test provided numerous lessons learned that directly contributed to several upgrades to both the vehicle and ground infrastructure to improve the probability of success on future flights. The second flight test will debut a hot-stage separation system and a new electronic Thrust Vector Control (TVC) system for Super Heavy Raptor engines, in addition to reinforcements to the pad foundation and a water-cooled steel flame deflector, among many other enhancements.
Hard to be sure, but given the expressed level of confidence from SpaceX and other parties, I think there must be some behind-the-scenes knowledge that the Fish & Wildlife approval is basically a done deal and will arrive next week sometime.
The Lex Fridman interview with Musk had a few funny moments with regard to the calculations they had to make. Specifically, they had to compute the probability of the craft hitting a shark and/or whale as it came in.
Musk himself at times appeared cavalier about safety on visits to SpaceX sites: Four employees said he sometimes played with a novelty flamethrower and discouraged workers from wearing safety yellow because he dislikes bright colors.
Yep, a man-child with enough money to do whatever he wants. The prosecution rests.
Classic use of a reporter using Simpson’s paradox in order to mislead the public. It’s entirely possible that SpaceX is safer than their competition, but because the breakdown of what they work on is different, the overall statistics can seem reversed.
The article states that Brownsville had an injury rate of 4.8 per 100 worker-years. Cape Canaveral is 0.9 and Redmond is 0.8. “Industry average” is 0.8.
Let’s see, what are they doing in Brownsville that isn’t being done elsewhere? Something that might not correspond to an industry average?
Oh, right! A huge amount of heavy manufacturing, fabrication, construction, and so on! That isn’t typical at all of aerospace. In fact, mostly they just outsource things like launch tower manufacturing to Bechtel or someone. But SpaceX is doing it themselves. Someone on Reddit dug up the stats for industries that seem more comparable to what SpaceX is doing in Brownsville:
Average of all private industries: 2.7
Fabricated metal product manufacturing: 3.7
Machinery manufacturing: 2.8
Motor vehicle manufacturing: 5.9
Motor vehicle body and trailer manufacturing: 5.8
Motor vehicle parts manufacturing: 3.1
Aircraft manufacturing: 2.5
Ship and boat building: 5.6
A 4.8 doesn’t seem like a huge outlier among industries on the heavier end of the manufacturing spectrum.
When Boeing’s injuries for the SLS program don’t accrue to them because they had Bechtel manufacture the launch towers, it doesn’t mean the injuries didn’t happen.
