Not necessarily. The catch mechanism is what will also stack the stages. The load points on the the ship will be directly underneath the forward flaps. It looks as though the tower could still be tall enough to stack a larger starship.

I believe they still had an overhead swing arm ctan for vertical integration if I remember right.

Kceovaisnt- said:

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Not necessarily. The catch mechanism is what will also stack the stages. The load points on the the ship will be directly underneath the forward flaps. It looks as though the tower could still be tall enough to stack a larger starship.

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Yeah, and the forward flaps would be about 7M higher. Maybe the tower is tall enough already. If not, just need to plug in another section.

I think that was originally a concept, but no longer. The only winching mechanism moves the catch arm carriage up and down the tower. With a great deal of speed as I understand. The design was simplified to combine the functionality of a crane and the catch system since the catch arms will need to lift and reorient the rockets with a great deal of precision to quickly place it back on the table for reuse. Why not just use the same system for integration of the second stage?

TexAgs91 said:

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Kceovaisnt- said:

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Not necessarily. The catch mechanism is what will also stack the stages. The load points on the the ship will be directly underneath the forward flaps. It looks as though the tower could still be tall enough to stack a larger starship.

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Yeah, and the forward flaps would be about 7M higher. Maybe the tower is tall enough already. If not, just need to plug in another section.

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That crane doesn't look tall enough.

aTmAg said:

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TexAgs91 said:

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Kceovaisnt- said:

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Not necessarily. The catch mechanism is what will also stack the stages. The load points on the the ship will be directly underneath the forward flaps. It looks as though the tower could still be tall enough to stack a larger starship.

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Yeah, and the forward flaps would be about 7M higher. Maybe the tower is tall enough already. If not, just need to plug in another section.

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That crane doesn't look tall enough.

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It's not. They'll need to extend it

TexAgs91 said:

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aTmAg said:

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TexAgs91 said:

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Kceovaisnt- said:

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Not necessarily. The catch mechanism is what will also stack the stages. The load points on the the ship will be directly underneath the forward flaps. It looks as though the tower could still be tall enough to stack a larger starship.

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Yeah, and the forward flaps would be about 7M higher. Maybe the tower is tall enough already. If not, just need to plug in another section.

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That crane doesn't look tall enough.

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It's not. They'll need to extend it

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I'm not a craneologist.. is that easy to do?

Kceovaisnt- said:

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I think that was originally a concept, but no longer. The only winching mechanism moves the catch arm carriage up and down the tower. With a great deal of speed as I understand. The design was simplified to combine the functionality of a crane and the catch system since the catch arms will need to lift and reorient the rockets with a great deal of precision to quickly place it back on the table for reuse. Why not just use the same system for integration of the second stage?

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I was talking about stage integration, I was more implying large payload integration

aTmAg said:

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TexAgs91 said:

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aTmAg said:

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TexAgs91 said:

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Kceovaisnt- said:

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Not necessarily. The catch mechanism is what will also stack the stages. The load points on the the ship will be directly underneath the forward flaps. It looks as though the tower could still be tall enough to stack a larger starship.

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Yeah, and the forward flaps would be about 7M higher. Maybe the tower is tall enough already. If not, just need to plug in another section.

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That crane doesn't look tall enough.

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It's not. They'll need to extend it

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I'm not a craneologist.. is that easy to do?

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Me either, but I think their franken crane is modular and made to be customized. They've extended it in the past at Starbase.

The franken crane is just an interim/ad hoc solution before the arms for the tower (and quick disconnect) are fully validated/implemented. The chopsticks with some sort of track mechanism should handle the 7 meters (or so) of growth for each stage.





Now, Musk has indicated that the next launch towers will be 'much' improved. Also, SpaceX have hinted that a permanent production complex and attendant facilities will be built in the future replace temporary infrastructure. No timeline for that though I expect that won't happen until the R&D test flight campaign wraps up. They also just bought/made their own crane so the leased frank crane days are probably limited.

How, we don't know, but a lot of the components (like the repurposed drawworks winch motor) for BC were of course salvaged also from the el cheapo purchased used oil platforms (themselves not a permanent long term design clearly). Possibly, a much different/bespoke configuration will be used for future iterations (1 more @ BC and at least 2 more @ KSC, then the two floating oil rigs will of course be different again). As expensive/incredible as all the stuff is we are looking at/they've built in one year, it is absolutely only a parallel to Falcon 1 (or Starlink 0.9 at best). Launch tower, cranes, engines, heat shielding, chopsticks/winch, tank farm, tower, telemetry/camera systems, all of it is going to change quite a bit in 'final' products.

Payloads would be loaded in starship prior to being stacked/fueled. We know virtually nothing about how the payload fairings/future crew walkway etc. will actually work/look. The biggest real issue in the stretch to my eye is how that will impact re-entry dynamics/thermal stuff. The stubby ship actually experiences a lot less time at peak heat vs. a Space Shuttle for instance due to it's...I guess terrible aerodynamics/taking longer to slow down. Will a stretched/aerodynamically finer one be harder to slowly manage the high heat phase in the atmosphere? I dunno.

Chinese announce they want to have a sustained landing capacity by 2027. Dropping new rockets in favor of uprating what they have and using rendezvous to get to lunar space

The US, otoh, is using a federal regulatory agency to punish the company developing our lander and heavy lift vehicle, because a racist senator got butthurt.

Gotta love the anti-space, anti-science party being in control.

Shackleton Crater is a strategic location on the moon. Pretty sure China wants to seize it first.

I thought we own the moon since we landed there first and put a flag in the ground

Talking about a 1 megawatt reactor at some point in the near future. Our hand ringers are still refusing to let us even talk about one.

Carter gave it back.

Didn't realize Angara had failed. Wonder if that's some of why the announcement about the Chinese parallel staged heavy launcher is being announced, Russia is throwing in with them by all appearances

Ag_of_08 said:

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Didn't realize Angara had failed. Wonder if that's some of why the announcement about the Chinese parallel staged heavy launcher is being announced, Russia is throwing in with them by all appearances

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It was really just the upper stage Persei tug that didn't fire. The Angara might work to replace the Proton, but I am not sure it will be competitive anyway. I don't really keep up with them but I thought the real future as they see it was to be the Feniks though perhaps that is not the case, as in 2020 they did show a F9 copy (using methelox).

It's not real clear what their plans are, if there is a central plan at all, but I don't think the Chinese are really going to rely on new Russian launchers/Roscosmos despite some rhetoric from the Russians about a big alliance. The CCP and Russians alike obviously despise SpaceX.

I was actually implying the Russians will rely on the Chinese launch vehicles.

I haven't found a ton on it besides what angry astronaut was talking about, but the Chinese have announced plans to accelerate their moon program by building a falcon heavy class vehicle by ganging 3 longmarch 5 first stages in a parallel configuration that would give them about 27tons trans lunar. I would not at all be suprised if they went with EOR/LOR model using that size LV, which we could do within a couple of years if we actually wanted to, and transfered out that way in conjuction with the Russians. The Russians have a lot more experience than the Chinese do with stations and long duration flight, hell the new Chinese station is basically Mir2 anyway.

It would also mean they could tell the US to get ****ed, which they would love to at thisnpoint I'm sure.

Oh ok. I think the Angara saga is illustrative of why the Chinese won't really partner with the Russians though; they already have the old Soviet tech that does work (Mir, Soyuz/Shenzhou, engines, etc). The Angara was started as a successor in…1992. It works ok I guess but this 'new' (modified) upper stage just didn't fire right the 2nd and 3rd times, perhaps a bit Boeing-ish.

Ultimately the Russians take forever to get anything new actually done (right); the Soyuz (rocket) still fires up with large wooden matchsticks shoved up the engines to ignite, LOL. It works and all, but they are a lousy business partner for the CCP if the latter wish to quickly innovate/advance and do new things, plus they don't want to give more credit to the Russians than they have to (and money/funding isn't their problem). The Soviet engineers from the 50's-60's-70's are long retired/dead, and the Russians no longer send all of their brightest to aerospace engineering schools.

The sunshield tensioning that was to take place today was delayed. No idea why. Hopefully not a bad sign.

Think I read somewhere that they have the option of delaying certain steps if they're not completely satisfied with the temperature readings. I'm thinking that's probably the cause.

While I agree they're resting on their laurels, I don't think they're quite that bereft of talent, more so money and political drive until recently.

They also bring a set of heritage engines that are some of the finest in the world. The Chinese and Russians have been very very vocal about wanting to team up, if nothing else the resupply and manned support will be useful to the Chinese. I wonder if Russia will develop a soyuz with the Chinese version of the IDA.

I truthfully think their biggest value tonthe Chinese will end up being espionage, but.... who knows anymore. If their parallel staged long March 5 heavy becomes a reality, they may very well meet their goals, but I'm afraid it will cost lives in the end.

Yes they took the 1st off and then yesterday decided to focus on 'learning more about how it behaves in space.'

Not sure exactly what that means but I assume they are studying the telemetry/data they have been getting before moving anything else about (I suspect some people also just took a couple days off vs. 1, having been 'at the office' since some time before Xmas essentially; we're talking about the government, here, after all). Once commanded the tensioning I think is largely automatic over the course of a day or so.

“So far, the major deployments we’ve executed have gone about as smoothly as we could have hoped for. But we want to take our time and understand everything we can about the observatory before moving forward.” - #NASAWebb lead systems engineer Mike Menzel #UnfoldTheUniverse

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) January 2, 2022

Not too worried about them having an unstated problem at this point.

What's the projected speed of JWST when it enters it's orbit around L2? I know it's climbing out of a pretty steep gravity well right now.

L2 is a saddle sitting on a ridge, so I'm guessing it's got to be moving pretty slowly to avoid, as Scott Manley called it, yeeting out into heliocentric orbit to never return.

Can you feel the tension? Webb is feeling it...in a good way! We tensioned 3 of 5 sunshield layers yesterday. Today we start with Layer 4: https://t.co/qFHcqjUniL

Follow along LIVE for the final layer starting ~9:30 am ET (14:30 UTC): https://t.co/E0iKHwugcn #UnfoldTheUniverse pic.twitter.com/2HiZBqMcrI

— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) January 4, 2022

Live stream of sun-shield deployment

Another neat youtube feed with information about Webb.

ETA: All 5 layers of the sunshield were successfully deployed.

For the first time in history, a spacecraft has touched the Sun. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has now flown through the Sun’s upper atmosphere – the corona – and sampled particles and magnetic fields there. 🛰☀️

Credit: @NASA /Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory pic.twitter.com/QqgXLg6FXX

— Science Channel (@ScienceChannel) January 4, 2022

It's a hot topic.

nortex97 said:

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It's a hot topic.

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nortex97 said:

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It's a hot topic.

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Outstanding

I... I know people that would probably do crap like that....

Nice folks, but damn I have some weird friends..... and that's weird even by my standards..

https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/04/americas/meteor-pennsylvania-pittsburgh-scn/index.html

Quote:

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A meteor that caused a loud boom heard in western Pennsylvania on New Year's Day exploded in the atmosphere with a blast equivalent to 30 tons of TNT, NASA said on Monday.

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munch96 said:

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https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/04/americas/meteor-pennsylvania-pittsburgh-scn/index.html

Quote:

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A meteor that caused a loud boom heard in western Pennsylvania on New Year's Day exploded in the atmosphere with a blast equivalent to 30 tons of TNT, NASA said on Monday.

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What's an infrasound station? Do we have stations set up to just listen to the sky?