The way I’ve seen it explained, anything that goes on a rocket counts as a munition. Which, logically, includes Buzz Aldrin.
ITAR made for some real headaches for some of my grad school classmates. There’s no real military application for an imaging solar spectrograph, and nobody should really care if North Korea gets one, but it goes on a rocket, so ITAR applies, and so none of the foreign grad students were allowed in that lab, and they had to block off all of the windows so they couldn’t even look in.
I think that sometimes ITAR gets a bit overplayed. The trouble is that you go to prison if you violate it and someone wants to make an example of you. So if there is even the tiniest chance that something might be a violation, it gets treated with extreme care. Also, even if it’s just one small component of the project that is affected, it “infects” the rest of the project, since it’s going to be impossible to track things to such a level of detail that the foreign students are never exposed to that component. You need two separate rooms, check-in/check-out procedures, etc. It’s easier to just say that no foreign students can work on it at all.
In Everyday Astronaut’s case, he sent his edited piece to the SpaceX corporate lawyers, who okayed it (probably after some changes). They know exactly what falls in the boundary. So we get to see a fair amount of interesting stuff, including close-ups of the engines.
There was a moment when Musk is describing the inner ablator layer, but says going into real detail would be an ITAR violation. Not too surprising that heat shield material would be controlled.
The burny flap we saw was the worst of them. Basically just a matter of luck (random variation with gap clearance, etc.)
Next flight will have massively beefed-up hinges. Throwing mass at the problem in various ways. But further down the line there will be a redesign that moves the flaps leeward.
The forward flaps aren’t needed for pitch control anyhow. The center of mass is far aft, and it’s the rear flaps that keep it from going tail-first. The forward flaps should only dip into the airstream for roll/yaw control. Probably also means they can be smaller.
The missing heat tiles had their ablator material behind them. Two different tests with one vs. two layers of ablator. Two layers of ablator survived reentry. One layer burned through, though the stainless may still have survived (this was just a day after, so I’m sure they aren’t done looking at the data).
Second tower will have some flame diverter improvements. Maybe more like a traditional trench.
They aren’t too worried about damaging the first tower if the catch attempt goes awry. The current “chopsticks” are already obsolete (too long and therefore slow to move).
They’re still making design trades about landing fuel (increased precision requires more fuel) vs. structural mass on the catch points (beef these up and they can handle a higher range of velocity, but that’s more vehicle mass).
Overall, they’re still in the “first find something that works, then improve it” phase for many design choices.
I can’t say I am a big fan of Musk but it seems he is closely involved with the development of these rockets and has a pretty good layman’s grasp of what they are doing and the challenges they face and can talk well about that in simple(ish) terms. He seems a good promoter of this.
The back, actually. Since the Ship is doing a “bellyflop”, it has heat tiles on one half (the “windward” side, i.e. facing the plasma), and bare metal on the other side (“leeward”). Leeward just means the side sheltered from the “wind”.
The flaps are currently set 180 degrees apart, so the hinges are subjected to direct plasma flow. If they increase this somewhat, say to 210 degrees, then the hinges will be behind the main body and have some level of protection.
Happy to draw a diagram if this is still confusing…
Nope, that actually made perfect sense. “Leeward” implies it’s in the “lee” of something. Plasma flow (meltiness) makes sense as something to be in the “lee” of.
Assuming Starship comes to fruition (and it’s currently looking like a good bet), I think that in coming decades or centuries this is going to be part of a carefully examined study of technological development. It isn’t like people haven’t wanted to develop spaceflight for almost literally a lifetime now. Governments were willing to throw huge sums of money at space development; yet somehow it always fell through. Then a maverick tried a completely different approach which succeeded beyond the expectations of the conventional pundits. I think the contrast between the “Old Space” military/aerospace contractor paradigm and SpaceX is going to be held up as a classic example of how things need to be done to get it right.
What these companies don’t seem to appreciate is that this destroys their ability to compete in the long run.
Sometimes I see people say that Boeing got greedy with Starliner. I don’t think that’s true. If they were greedy, they’d charge Boeing prices, with SpaceX costs, and also ship on time so as to win as many future contracts as possible. They’d have made billions instead of losing billions. But when you lack competitive pressure for decades, and make no effort to keep the organization lean and efficient, eventually you lose the ability to compete, even when it does become existential.
Say what you will about Musk’s Mars plans, but they’ve kept SpaceX focused on progress even as they’ve become a virtual monopoly. They haven’t let up the gas at all. That drive will wear off eventually, but not before they advance the state of the art substantially.
And then everyone’s going to learn exactly the wrong lessons, and dogmatically follow exactly what SpaceX did (or whatever they think is analogous to exactly what SpaceX did, in whatever other domain they’re looking at), and are going to be just as surprised when the next disruptor comes along and outdoes that.
Someone leaked this photo of the booster exploding after landing:
Could be fake, but most people are thinking it’s real. Anyway, no surprise at a decent size mushroom cloud here. The How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster video shows that boosters tend to explode after falling over. And the Super Heavy booster is rather larger than the Falcon 9, and has much more residual propellant. An explosion is probably better than letting the Chinese capture it, anyhow.
