A is A said:

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TexAgs91 said:

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I came to post this video before seeing all the CGI nonsense. I hope this thread doesn't get muddled up with all the conspiracy theories that distract from good discussion in the way that so many other great videos of space flight achievements do when they devolve into flat earth debates and faked moon landing nonsense.

These are epic achievements that will lead to game changing technologies. There's no room for conspiracy trolls here.

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where do y'all watch from?

I'm in houston and definitely want to watch one live. Y'alls crowd seems awesome.

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The party is at Isla Blanca Park!.. right on the jetties facing SpaceX.

That is where a majority of the SpaceX employees hang out for the launch as well. They bring their families and such. You will have to walk to your car. Last time I was there, probably about 300-400 people along the water.

If you go, get there early to park, set up, it is practically a tailgate atmosphere...and it can go on for days with the delays!

bthotugigem05 said:

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This was the image I was looking for this morning when I wrote that about the Dracos, I don't think this is a SpaceX image, just a render of how it could work.

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Well, it kinda proves my concern though, it shows it somehow landing upright....on a hill, with those tiny lander legs.

This is an interesting lunar landing concept...2:28

Yeah I'd guess that orientation would work best on a 'no atmosphere' planet.

Scott Manley has some good visualizations (and note the dinky legs failing/flailing);



Once again it seems like a raptor wasn't....really burning correctly at some point. They need that thing to get a lot more consistent.

Someone brought their dog

bthotugigem05 said:

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This was the image I was looking for this morning when I wrote that about the Dracos, I don't think this is a SpaceX image, just a render of how it could work.

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That's great guys. Now how do we get out?

double aught said:

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bthotugigem05 said:

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This was the image I was looking for this morning when I wrote that about the Dracos, I don't think this is a SpaceX image, just a render of how it could work.

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That's great guys. Now how do we get out?

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(A giant staircase unfolds and Marvin the Martian walks down it)

I think it's actually a crane.

Was on a Clubhouse chat with some people last night after the events and someone claimed they're already up to SN80 on raptor engines, things should get more consistent quickly.

scottimus said:

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This is an interesting lunar landing concept...2:28

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The dust hangs around in the air for a while

Elon out looking at the damage, to help give some perspective

Elon's crew probably have to draw pictures with arrows, using those fat crayons, so those bureaucratic numbnuts will understand what happened

Reading that makes me want to throw up.

This is the government trying to hamstring private space industry

Doesn't even make sense. These are all test flights. They're not anywhere near guaranteeing a landing.

Do they investigate out at White Sands every missile that blows up?

As was mentioned earlier it did not blow up in flight. This isn't the FAA's jurisdiction.

FAA investigated the SN 8 & SN 9 crash landings and closed them quickly.

And the ATF has no authority to change the definition of words in the NFA..... didn't stop them.

The FAA claims they have jurisdiction over anything that has the potential to clear the top of the grass blades now.

I think they're trying to.flex their control muscles before the regulatory system changes.... nothing they can actually do but delay it a few days. More than that and they're going to incur the public wrath.

Elon indicates what we probably all suspected; the engine wasn't doing what it was told/running correctly.

One engine of the three was burning a different color, and Scott Manley indicated in a video he thought it meant it was running fuel (methane) rich (I think this is the one they used all the way down, could be wrong). Maybe this impacted the engine's response to commands at the end.

bthotugigem05 said:

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Elon out looking at the damage, to help give some perspective

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Meh, that'll buff out.

There was a rumor on Reddit yesterday that said Bill Nelson, who is a big pal of Biden, is pushing hard to be the new NASA administrator. If that happens, Space X will have hurdle after hurdle thrown in front of them. This guy pushed hard for the SLS debacle and against privatization of space.

Hopefully the people controlling Biden's earpiece aren't stupid enough to pick him.

I read that but I don't think Nelson would be the worst possible pick. He's always basically been a do-nothing guy anyway, yet has been a fan of funding Nasa/space exploration obviously. Putting an old/irrelevant former senator into the seat is not going to be a big showstopper.

Asterisks' picks have all been so bad I was sure it was going to be a former Boeing/Lockheed exec or lobbyist, or maybe some sierra club board member. His handlers obviously aren't prioritizing the pick, whoever it is, which is just as well since it lets nasa keep doing what it is hopefully thru to selection of the lunar landing team/options (which should exclude Blue Origin/Boeing).

I think a lot of the toothpaste is out of the tube re: privatization anyway, aside from Artemis it's not like NASA have any launch vehicles anyway. Maybe the lunar lander program would be affected but it's all private companies up for those bids anyway.

Granted, Boeing and Lockheed are basically lobbying organizations that build air/spacecraft at this point, I think that would be the real risk for SpaceX.

bthotugigem05 said:

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I think a lot of the toothpaste is out of the tube re: privatization anyway, aside from Artemis it's not like NASA have any launch vehicles anyway. Maybe the lunar lander program would be affected but it's all private companies up for those bids anyway.

Granted, Boeing and Lockheed are basically lobbying organizations that build air/spacecraft at this point, I think that would be the real risk for SpaceX.

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I think they (and a cooperative FAA) could easily squash starship for human occupants. I don't think Nelson himself would have the power to do so, but Biden selecting him would be a sign that the administration itself was sympathetic to that view. And they could easily do so. One reason companies like Lockheed have sites all over the nation is to maintain congressional support. SpaceX doing most of their work in Texas sorta screws them since liberal politicians don't give a crap about Texas.

(Edit: didn't mean to diamond my own post)

SpaceX is primarily a California based company, not Texas. Their most exciting stuff is happening in Texas, but the majority of their operations are in California, with other operations in Florida and Washington state. Once Starship is reaching maturity it won't be an exclusive to Texas either. I'm sure they'll have many manufacturing locations and launch/landing pads around the world.

hph6203 said:

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SpaceX is primarily a California based company, not Texas. Their most exciting stuff is happening in Texas, but the majority of their operations are in California, with other operations in Florida and Washington state. Once Starship is reaching maturity it won't be an exclusive to Texas either. I'm sure they'll have many manufacturing locations and launch/landing pads around the world.

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Texas and California at nowhere near being swing states and only account for 4 of 100 senators and 89 of 435 representatives. That is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Lockheed Martin, by comparison, has over 375 facilities and 16,000 suppliers in every US state.

SpaceX also has the Cocoa facility in Florida where they're working on the heat shield tiles.

No matter what, Boeing and Lockheed have more locations and a lot more pull though.

New Eric Berger book on SpaceX coming out;



Entertaining;

Quote:

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Reprinted by permission.

In the spring of 2016, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos invited a handful of reporters into his rocket factory in Kent, Washington. No media had been allowed inside before, but Bezos's secretive, fifteen-year-old space company named Blue Origin was finally beginning to reveal the full scope of its plans. Like Musk, Bezos had identified low-cost access to space as the key hurdle standing between humans and moving out into the Solar System. He, too, had begun building reusable rockets.

Over the course of three hours, Bezos led a tour through his glossy factory, at turns showing off Blue Origin's tourist spacecraft, large rocket engines, and large 3D printers. He also shared his basic philosophy of Gradatim ferociter, Latin for "Step-by-step, ferociously." Rocket development begins with the engine, explained Bezos, who was then working on his fourth-generation engine, known as the BE-4. "It's the long lead item," he said, casually strolling through the factory, wearing a blue-and-white-checkered shirt and designer jeans. "When you look at building a vehicle, the engine development is the pacing item. It takes six or seven years. If you're an optimist you think you can do it in four years, but it still takes you at least six."

In the fall of 2019, as we talked on board his private Gulfstream jet, I related this story to Musk. It was a Saturday afternoon, and we were flying from Los Angeles to Brownsville, Texas. This interview had originally been scheduled for early evening the day before, at SpaceX's factory in Hawthorne, California.

An hour past the scheduled time on Friday, his apologetic assistant texted that a crisis had come up. Musk felt terrible, she said, but we would have to do the interview at a later date. I returned to my hotel, preparing to fly back to Houston, when the assistant called back that evening. Musk had decided to visit the company's Starship build site in South Texas that weekend and wanted to know if I cared to tag along. We could do the interview during the flight.

Three of Musk's sons joined their dad for the trip, along with their dog Marvin (as in Marvin the Martian). A well groomed and mannered Havanese, he adored his master. With Marvin at Musk's feet, we had gathered around a table at the back of the plane, for the interview. Clad in a black "Nuke Mars" T-shirt and black jeans, Musk wanted the boys to hear Dad's stories about the old days.

Musk laughed when told about Jeff Bezos's timeline for engine development. "Bezos is not great at engineering, to be frank," he said. "So the thing is, my ability to tell if someone is a good engineer or not is very good. And then I am very good at optimizing the engineering efficiency of a team. I'm generally super-good at engineering, personally. Most of the design decisions are mine, good or bad." Boastful? Maybe.

But SpaceX built and tested its first rocket engine in less than three years with Musk leading the way. Musk and Bezos, at least, would agree on this much: the process of building a rocket begins with the engine. After all, engine is the root word of engineer. In principle, a rocket's propulsion system is simple: An oxidizer and a fuel flow from their respective tanks into an injector, which mixes them as they enter the combustion chamber. Inside this chamber, the fuels ignite and burn, producing a superhot exhaust gas.

The engine's nozzle channels the flow of this exhaust in the opposite direction a rocket is meant to go. Newton's Third Law of Motion for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction does the rest.

Alas, the reality of building a machine to manage the flow of these fuels, control their combustion, and channel an explosion to lift something toward the heavens is staggeringly complex. And that's not to mention fuel efficiency. A rocket engine's thrust depends on the amount of fuel burning, its exit velocity, and pressure. The greater each of these variables are, the more thrust an engine produces, and the heavier payload it can power into orbit. Conversely, if it takes too much fuel to produce a large enough thrust, or the engine is too heavy, a rocket will never leave the ground.

Musk recognized early on that when it came to propulsion, founding member of SpaceX and American aerospace engineer Tom Mueller was not a good engineerhe was a great one. For the Falcon 1 rocket Musk wanted a lightweight, efficient engine that produced about seventy thousand pounds of thrust. This, he reasoned, should be enough to get a small satellite into orbit. Mueller had helped design and build several engines at TRW, some more powerful than this, and some less so. The Merlin engine would draw upon some of these concepts and ideas, but Mueller said he and Musk began with a "clean sheet" design.

Few of Mueller's friends in the industry believed building a brand-new, liquid-fueled rocket engine without government backing was possible. "All these guys told me a private company can't build a booster engine, that takes the government," Mueller said. SpaceX did not invent the Merlin engine out of whole cloth. As with almost all rocket engines, the Merlin drew on previous work. For example, although Mueller had developed a lot of different engines, he lacked experience with turbopumps. Rockets use a staggering amount of fuel, and a turbopump is the machine that feeds propellant into a rocket engine as fast as possible. Inside the Falcon 1 rocket, liquid oxygen and kerosene fuels would flow from their tanks into a rapidly spinning pump, which would spit out this propellant at high pressure, delivering fuel into the combustion chamber primed to produce the maximum amount of thrust. One of the first issues Mueller had to address was how to build a turbopump.

In the late 1990s, NASA had developed a rocket engine nearly as powerful as the proposed Merlin engine called Fastrac. There were other similarities. Fastrac used the same mix of fuels, liquid oxygen and kerosene, a similar injector, and had the potential for reuse. Despite a series of successful test firings, NASA canceled the program in 2001. Given these commonalities, Mueller thought SpaceX might be able to use the turbopumps NASA built for the Fastrac engine. He and Musk visited NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama shortly after Fastrac's demise in 2002, and asked if they could have them. Yes, they were told, but SpaceX would have to go through NASA's procurement program, which could take a year or two. This was too slow for SpaceX, so Musk and Mueller moved on to Barber-Nichols, the contractor that had built the turbopumps.

Barber-Nichols, it turned out, had had a devil of a time building the Fastrac turbopump. To work with the larger Merlin engine, Barber-Nichols would need to do a lot of redesign work. They went back and forth with the SpaceX engineers. During one visit to the Colorado-based company, a designer there happened to suggest a name for the engine to Mueller. Musk had chosen the Falcon name for the rocket, but said Mueller could name the engine, stipulating only that it shouldn't be something like FR-15. It should have a real name. One Barber-Nichols employee, who was also a falconer, said Mueller should name the engine after a falcon. Then, she began listing various species of the bird. Mueller chose the merlin, a medium-sized Falcon, for the first-stage engine. He named the second-stage engine after the smallest of falcons, the kestrel.

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