The operations considered in this tiered EA include up to 25 annual Starship/Super Heavy orbital launches, up to 25 annual landings of Starship, up to 25 annual landings of Super Heavy, and vehicle upgrades.
Woo! The current limits are 5 per year. And don’t cover v2/v3 vehicles.
It’s just a draft so it has to go through a public review process. But given how clean recent launches have been, it doesn’t seem like there are many legitimate objections (though I’ve no doubt there will be many illegitimate ones).
One of the surprising things you notice from watching a launch in person, aside from the noise, is just how bright the engines are. Just way out of proportion from anything except the sun. You can sorts see that here, where as the engines whip past the camera, there’s some significant lens flare.
Got kinda roasted on the way down–but they didn’t even expect the Ship to survive, having intentionally removed thousands of tiles to stress the margins.
The stainless steel (vs. aluminum) and lack of fragile carbon-carbon aero surfaces seem to make it way more resilient than the Shuttle.
Not quite. They will have one more soft ocean splashdown like this, and then (if things go well) attempt a tower catch similar to the catch of the Flight Test 6 booster.
The next test will also be with the v2 version of Starship, which has the new flaps, stretched tanks, and a few other tweaks. So probably they want to ensure it works as well as they expect, and if so they’ll try the tower catch.
Only the Moon/Mars variants will have landing legs, so there’s no way to land on a barge or the like. Gotta be the chopstick arms.
Musk has mentioned recently that a metallic heat shield with something like transpiration shielding may be back into consideration. Possibly used selectively in critical areas. I think the tiles are clearly adequate to protect the ship, but they haven’t proven themselves to be rapidly reusable yet. I think they’ll want a tower catch before making any hard decisions, though. They’ll want to actually see how much damage there is.
It’s possible there will be some kind of ocean platform in the distant future, but I don’t think they have any plans for it yet. It’ll only matter when they reach >>100 flights/year.
NASA/SpaceX released some new pictures of the HLS system:
The new windows look great. Man, what a fantastic view that will be.
Looks like they’re sticking with the high-mounted descent thrusters (the ring about 2/3 up from the bottom). They were hoping to get rid of that and depend only on the normal engines, but they’re just too powerful, and will excavate a hole just like with Flight Test 1. They’ll use the thrusters to handle the last part of the descent. They’re spread out enough to not create a giant crater.
The last image is just funny. The astronauts will ride to the moon in the tiny lifeboat that is the Orion capsule, and transfer into a giant luxury liner for the descent to the surface. I think they’d have preferred to ride HLS the whole time…
I think what we are seeing here is the equivalent to the “pro life” conservatives for which this one subject is so important that they are ready to look the other way with Trump, here they are ready to look the other way fascinated by spacemanship.
Makes me think of the Futurists, who were to become one of the founding groups of italian fascism.
They
emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city.
The Futurist Manifesto had declared: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”
Elon Musk (and Peter Thiel!) would feel great in Mussolini’s presence, and his admirers seem willing to turn a blind eye to this fact because, I don’t know, Mars? I find this sad.
It reminded me of the Apollo command-service module and the lunar lander, made also by 2 different companies BTW; while that was also funny looking, one should wonder if safety considerations are also in play, if there was/is no redundancy by adding another independent propulsion/support system, then the Apollo 13 astronauts would never had a chance after the oxygen tank explosion in their service module.
I suspect that someone at NASA who didn’t dare say so out loud thought “after the rest of Artemis/Gateway/SLS/Orion utterly fails, we’ll be able to just do direct lunar missions with Starship”.
That’s right. In fact I didn’t realize this before, but the vehicle on the top must be a propellant depot, not the HLS itself. It’s missing a bunch of features on the HLS, like the ring thrusters and landing legs. The vehicle on the bottom is a fairly normal-looking Starship (with the flaps and heat shield). Going back to the NASA page where I got these, I see they confirm that:
But that depot does look close enough to the HLS that I think they must be closely related. Both need to drastically reduce propellant boiloff. So they both have white paint and probably a cryocooler of some kind. The depot doesn’t show any solar panels, but I suspect they’re undeployed behind the slot-looking things near the front, which are also there on HLS.
I’m sure they’ll claim that, but introducing Orion at all adds a bunch of complexity. The whole “Near-rectilinear halo orbit” thing they’re using is only used because Orion doesn’t even have enough performance to get into low Lunar orbit. But it complicates contingency modes as there’s no easy way to just put yourself on a free-return trajectory or blast yourself back out of Lunar orbit in case you need to get back.
They could have done the rendezvous in Earth orbit. There’s still enough time there to do a basic checkout of all systems. And the HLS itself has so much mass that they can add a tremendous amount of redundancy in the life support systems. They could even have an internal “lifepod” can can be pressurized independently, not to mention extra suits and food/water/O2 supplies. Apollo had to shave everything to the bone, but HLS has ~100 tons of available cargo mass and can afford to be generous.
Finally a bit of sanity in the whole deluge system debacle:
SaveRGV–an activist group that seems to have the sole purpose of shutting down SpaceX activities in Texas–was denied an injunction against stopping uses of the Starship deluge system.
SpaceX had said in the past that they had a permit, but there was some uncertainty about it, and it was unclear what they had, if anything. Well, the docket now makes it clear:
So it was TCEQ’s mistake all along. SpaceX actually didn’t have the right permit, but one could hardly blame them when the regulator themselves tells them otherwise.
Thankfully, the judge sees reason, and notes:
And also:
That last bit is interesting–that the FWS thought the deluge system could reduce harm to the environment.
The judge also considers the harm from the injunction itself:
I’m quite sure SpaceX won’t have to worry about of that kind of stuff anymore. Anyone attempting to cross them will likely encounter severe consequences.
Very soon? Don’t you mean already? I think the classic example is nuclear power plants where it takes 15 years or so to complete one–although these court delays across federal and state courts and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for multiple statutes and regulations are not responsible for all the problem–frankly the nuclear power plant building industry comes across as incompetent.
You misunderstood me completely; I meant the exact opposite. Sorry to be unclear. Stated more explicitly …
In the near future the various green groups will be declared terrorists or bankrupted by countersuits from politically connected corporations.
In an authoritarian takeover any form of civil society will be considered subversive and quashed.
So as annoying and/or misguided as e.g. SaveRGV is, they’re ultimately on the better side of the bigger battle not against space launches, but against authoritarian cronysm.
