Well, it’s next weekend, and we’re back from Vegas. Here‘s a good article on the state of play for the beast. I suspect that the hed wasn’t written by the author.
[Update early afternoon]
This seems related, somehow. Sarah Hoyt’s thoughts on The Man Who Sold The Moon.
[Sunday-morning update]
Early in the program Elon said they were using a specially modified stainless steel, and I dredged up an old NASA report from the 60’s that discussed a modified 301L stainless steel that was optimized for notch toughness at cryogenic temperatures (NASA TN D-3445). The chromium and nickel content was about the same, but they got rid of almost all the silicon, and manganese, and greatly reduced the allowable sulfur and phosphorus. Later in the flight test program Elon said they’d switched to regular 304L stainless, which would’ve brought the silicon and manganese levels back up, which in theory should’ve reduced its notch toughness at cryo temperatures.
I wonder if that contributed to some of the weird propellant leaks they’ve had.
George I’ve always been partial to the idea that they re-engineered the propellant feed lines in Starship V2 that introduced novel failure modes. Like harmonic vibrations that show up only after enough propellant has been consumed to induce them. If your static tests are done with full tanks and only last a few seconds, well, you might miss that. They are gathering a good dataset here. That always helps.
Didn’t think much of the article or Jeff Wise, having started watching one of his Youtube vids on MH370.
It’s strange to me to speculate that Starship is just doomed. Yes, they’ve had a string of failures with V2. But they had a string of successes with V1. To me the obvious implication is that there’s something wrong with V2, not that there’s something irrevocably wrong with the Starship program.
Ditto.
And it’s at least as odd for some to be drawing invidious comparisons between Starship’s development miscues and those of Falcon 9. The first Falcon 9 failure, CRS-7, took six months to recover from with a successful return to flight. Starship’s recent failure-retry cycle has been more like two months long. And that for a vehicle that is much larger and more complex than the F9 2nd stage and which is supposed to re-enter and land in reasonable shape besides.
Oh you noticed that eh? 😉
Let’s see, the Booster seems to work fine including catch and re-use and is being refined, the ship has had a couple of successful reentries with flip and landing burn, on target. V2 has had issues but not the same one each time. Lots of learning going on, progress being made and the big thing people miss is that this is a hardware rich experimental program which we haven’t seen before to anything like this extent.
“You don’t hear as much cheering anymore.”
Enh, most of the people who cheer on SpaceX are still positive and the ones who aren’t dropped out because of TDS and Twitter, not because of SpaceX’s performance.
Other than irrational negativity, the article was ok. Comparing the space shuttle to starship is kind of silly. I have a feeling that things will move slow and then they wont and all the logistical preparation will move things faster than people expect, except the media wont talk about it much because it will be boring, routine, but most of all, expected.
I often compare Starship to Shuttle if only because Stage 2, the Starship itself, is roughly the same size as the external tank on the Shuttle.
That really gives people a perspective on how massive the entire stack is (though I’ve yet to see it in person), and helps give some context to how big of a deal it is for Booster to return to launch site and propulsively land, let alone between the chopsticks.
I’ve never seen either in person, its like imagining a thousand elephants standing on each other. I heard that Kennedy Space Center has a great shuttle display, excellent showmanship.
Here‘s a good article on the state of play for the beast. I suspect that the [headline] wasn’t written by the author.
The author needed to do his homework a little more carefully.
Falcon 1 required four (not three) flights before it was successful. It’s unclear which of flights 2 and 3 he skipped over. F1-F2 suffered harmonic oscillation which shutdown the 2nd stage Kestrel engine before it achieved orbit. The notorious F1-F3 was the one where the two stages collided shortly after separation and ended that one prematurely. F1-F4 was the first time SpaceX achieved orbit and the brass-ring.
Should I be concerned about the Gell-Mann effect here?
Yeah, how far-fetched would it have seemed in say, the early 1930s, to write a story that suggested America would reach the moon via a gigantic government program launched in part to fulfill a promise made by a martyred president and also largely to distract from a raging war, or in spite of it, all while using captured and repatriated German engineers. You’d have been laughed out of the editor’s office!
And then after succeeding a handful of times, give up on doing it and lose the ability to go back for over 50 years. Absurd.