The Incredible SpaceX Starship and a New Golden Age in Space

Turns out it was the ground computer, not the vehicle. :gaah:
 
Successful Starship Flight test 4 this morning. Truly amazing video from different angles. Best in full screen.

To skip the intro bs, start play at about 32 minutes. Video shows launch, thru booster separation, booster soft splash down, and Starship engine cutoff to orbit. Total about 44 minutes. Several ads; just go to bottom right and click skip.

 
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jvett77 said:
Successful Starship Flight test 4 this morning. Truly amazing video from different angles. Best in full screen.

To skip the intro bs, start play at about 32 minutes. Video shows launch, thru booster separation, booster soft splash down, and Starship engine cutoff to orbit. Total about 44 minutes. Several ads; just go to bottom right and click skip.

Click to expand...

Thanks for posting this
 
Following the successful soft water landing on Flight 4, Elon has confirmed that it is now planned for Flight 5 to feature a Booster catch attempt using the launch tower "chopsticks" which are used to first stack the Starship for launch. Two animations below show the capabilities.

Tower catching the Super Heavy booster.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/s...Twitter.mp4/revision/latest?cb=20240407181926

Tower catching the Starship.
 
jvett77 said:
Following the successful soft water landing on Flight 4, Elon has confirmed that it is now planned for Flight 5 to feature a Booster catch attempt using the launch tower "chopsticks" which are used to first stack the Starship for launch. Two animations below show the capabilities.

Tower catching the Super Heavy booster.
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/s...Twitter.mp4/revision/latest?cb=20240407181926

Tower catching the Starship.
Click to expand...


Donald Trump GIF by GIPHY News


Trump2024
 
SpaceX Starship Flight Test 5 is expected in late August/early September according to recent Musk comments.
 

On Monday, Isaacman and three crewmates — including his close friend and former Air Force pilot, Scott “Kidd” Poteet, as well as two SpaceX engineers, Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis — will arrive at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to prepare for the launch of a far grander, more dangerous, and experimental trip to space.

The mission, called Polaris Dawn, is slated to take off no earlier than 3:30 a.m. ET on August 26.

Almost immediately after reaching space, the Polaris Dawn crew will begin a “pre-breathe” process to prepare for the spacewalk. It’s akin to what scuba divers do to avoid decompression sickness, otherwise known as “the bends.” The crewmates must purge nitrogen from their blood so that when the Dragon capsule is depressurized and exposed to the vacuum of space, the gas doesn’t form bubbles in their bloodstream — a potentially lethal condition.

“We don’t have an airlock on this mission,” Gillis told CNN, referring to the areas on board the International Space Station (ISS) that serve as special decompression chambers for astronauts heading out for a spacewalk. Polaris Dawn will instead take “a really novel and different approach” to the pre-breathing process that involves “slowly decreasing cabin pressure and raising oxygen concentration.”

Unlike any pre-breathe attempted on the International Space Station, the process will take roughly 45 hours — nearly two days, said Gillis, who works as a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX and trained the Inspiration4 crew for their mission.

Finally, to kick off their third day in space, the Polaris Dawn crew will open the Crew Dragon’s hatch as they’re about 435 miles (700 kilometers) above Earth. All four of the crew members and the entirety of the spacecraft’s interior will be exposed to the expansive void. Only Isaacman and Gillis will actually exit the spacecraft, however, tethered by a couple of umbilicals.

Then there’s the matter of the Crew Dragon vehicle itself. To make sure the spacecraft’s avionics — or electronics used for navigation and communication — could survive the heavy radiation environment encountered during the Polaris Dawn mission, engineers “literally strapped a lot of the avionics to a gurney and brought it to an oncology lab,” Isaacman said.

The SpaceX team hammered the avionics components with radiation until they broke, Isaacman said, to precisely determine when and how the technology might fail.

Once the Crew Dragon spacecraft is exposed to the vacuum of space, components inside the spacecraft could then vent off toxins — a natural trait of certain materials used to make various components — as the cabin is repressurized after the spacewalk, according to Menon.

To avoid that, the Crew Dragon and “a lot of the pieces of hardware that are flying in the vehicle went through basically a bake-out before we will ever go into space. What that does is it off-gasses a lot of those toxins,” said Menon, a lead space operations engineer at SpaceX who will also serve as the crew’s medical officer.

The “bake-out” involved putting the vehicle into a vacuum chamber at high temperatures, allowing the hardware to release the toxins before flight.

SpaceX also implemented automatic rebooting software, according to Menon, which can — without human intervention — troubleshoot computers that might malfunction due to radiation.
 
@jvett77 is slacking...There are some awesome reentry views.


 
SpaceX successfully launched Starship Flight Test 5 this morning from it's Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

For the first time, this demonstration mission included an ambitious attempt to maneuver the 232-foot-tall (71-meter) rocket booster to a gargantuan landing structure after it burned through most of its fuel and broke away from the upper Starship spacecraft. The Super Heavy was successfully caught midair with a pair of massive metal pincers, which SpaceX calls “chopsticks.”

1728831146179.webp

https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/loops/...ex-booster-chopsticks-catch-01.mp4?c=original

Landing rocket boosters after flight is a feat that SpaceX mastered with its smaller workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9. Boosters from that rocket have made soft touchdowns on seafaring platforms or ground pads after more than 330 launches — allowing those vehicles to be refurbished and flown again. SpaceX says that has driven down its costs, allowing the company to undercut the rest of the rocket market.
 
jvett77 said:
SpaceX successfully launched Starship Flight Test 5 this morning from it's Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

For the first time, this demonstration mission included an ambitious attempt to maneuver the 232-foot-tall (71-meter) rocket booster to a gargantuan landing structure after it burned through most of its fuel and broke away from the upper Starship spacecraft. The Super Heavy was successfully caught midair with a pair of massive metal pincers, which SpaceX calls “chopsticks.”

View attachment 126475

https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/loops/...ex-booster-chopsticks-catch-01.mp4?c=original

Landing rocket boosters after flight is a feat that SpaceX mastered with its smaller workhorse rocket, the Falcon 9. Boosters from that rocket have made soft touchdowns on seafaring platforms or ground pads after more than 330 launches — allowing those vehicles to be refurbished and flown again. SpaceX says that has driven down its costs, allowing the company to undercut the rest of the rocket market.
Click to expand...
These are capabilities far in excess of what Boeing and Nasa possess, thanks to bad government.
Musk is one smart MOFO.
 
While SpaceX has pulled off over 300 Falcon 9 booster recoveries since 2015, the process for recovering the Super Heavy booster (not to be confused with Falcon 9 Heavy booster), is similar except the 200-ft, 300-ton Super Heavy may have optional landing legs; as was demonstrated last week in test flight 5, the booster is automatically guided to the launch tower where it hovers and then, if it’s in exactly the right position, is grabbed and held in place by the tower mechanical arms (chopsticks) mechanism.

The SpaceX team developed an automated landing system consisting of:
  • On-board computer supported by an inertial navigation system with sensors that process real time data with information on position, orientation, and velocity of the rocket, along with external conditions data.
  • Re-ignitable engines with vector thrust control; they can be restarted and re-throttled as required. Only 3 of the 33 engines are used to maneuver the rocket back to the launch pad where in the future, it could be refueled and launched again with a new payload.
  • Nitrogen gas thrusters on sides of booster at the top for adjusting orientation of the rocket and for keeping it upright while landing
  • Hypersonic grid fins on the sides of the rocket in the middle to control and position the rocket by cutting through the air stream
  • Deployable landing legs on booster (Falcon Heavy only; Super Heavy, optional)
This system will allow SpaceX to reuse rockets faster than ever. In Musk's grandiose scheme to build a city on Mars decades from now, he envisions multiple Starship launches/day.
 
Red_Alert said:
Click to expand...


That is just amazing. The way the exhaust adjust angle so quickly. I would think that much heat would destroy the thing catching it. The programing to do the flying of it must be special.

I felt that splashing down in the ocean was weird when we are already in a vehicle that flies. I always assumed the shuttle craft was the only way to go. I would have never thought of that type of reentry.

Just amazing.
 
SpaceX's Starship Flight 6 test flight is scheduled to launch no earlier than Monday, Nov. 18, at 5 p.m. EST from the company's Starbase site in South Texas, near Boca Chica Beach. This will be SpaceX's sixth test flight of a Starship spacecraft and its Super Heavy booster, as well as the second attempt to catch the giant Super Heavy after stunning launch and rocket catch last month on Oct. 13. Amazingly, the turn-around time for this mission is about 6 weeks.

1731712435563.jpeg
The two stages of SpaceX's sixth Starship vehicle are seen at the launch pad ahead of a planned Nov. 18, 2024 launch.
 
The sixth flight test of Starship is now targeted to launch Tuesday, November 19. The 30-minute launch window will open at 5:00 p.m. EST. Mission objectives include the booster once again returning to the launch site for catch, reigniting a ship Raptor engine while in space, and testing a suite of heatshield experiments and maneuvering changes for ship reentry and descent over the Indian Ocean.
 
Starship flight test 7 is scheduled for January 11, 2025. A successful static test of the Super Heavy booster occurred yesterday. 33 engines generating 17 million pounds of thrust.

Mission objectives include the booster once again returning to the launch site for catch. This failed in flight test 6 because on liftoff, the antenna was damaged preventing comm between the booster and launch pad computer, so they opted for a Gulf splashdown. SpaceX quickly discovered this and relocated/secured the antenna hardware.

 
After a four-day delay, SpaceX will launch Starship Test Flight 7 tomorrow, Wednesday, Jan. 15 at 5 p.m. EST. The launch window runs to Jan 17. The new, upgraded version of the Starship spacecraft includes new flap design, new generation of heat tiles, and upgraded avionics.

Meanwhile, in a few hours, about 1 AM, SpaceX is set to launch a Falcon 9 from the Cape Canaveral, carrying two robotic vehicles, the Blue Ghost lander built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas, and the Resilience lander from Ispace of Japan.

Firefly is sending its Blue Ghost 1 lander to Mare Crisium. It will deliver 10 NASA science payloads to the lunar surface that will aid positioning and navigation for executing precision landings in a desired location. The Resilience lander from Ispace of Japan previously crashed on the lunar surface in 2023 after nav problems resulted in it running out of fuel and crash landing.

Firefly Blue Ghost 1 Lander___________________ Ispace Resilience
1736915389871.webp 1736915178399.webp
 
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