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Big Flying Rockets: Space Launches V


SpaceChampion
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5 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Scrubed.  Frozen valve.  Dang it.

Yep. It's a full Wet Dress Rehearsal now.

 

 

Good animation of the flight path to expect when they finally launch:

View of the interstage area between the Starship and the Super Heavy booster.

 

Edited by SpaceChampion
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Next Starship launch attempt: April 20, 8:28 a.m. CDT (9:28 a.m. EDT; 1328 UTC):   (stream begins 45 minute before).

SpaceX's stream:

 

NASASpaceFlight forum's stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/mhJRzQsLZGg?feature=share (already live now overnight)

Everyday Astronaut's stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/eAl3gVvMNNM?feature=share (going live an hour before)

 

If you're want to see any of the past developmental launchs here are the links:

 

Edited by SpaceChampion
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OHH well that was exciting.  RUD!

Reminds me of the first Falcon 1 flight -- fails to achieve stage separation.

For this, anything getting past the launch pad is a success.  They made it past MaxQ.

 

I was trying to watch/listen to all three streams.  Tim Dodd is 5 miles away and him, his laptop, cameras and coffee was covered with sand.  That was unexpected -- but it tells us how powerful those engines are!

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13 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

RUD.  But it cleared the tower.  Looked (to me) like the Superheavy had lost 6 engines before RUD.  Were those what was supposed to light for landing?

Yep, about 6.  It's possible they intended to simulate engine-out situation, since the booster had plenty of power to meet it's flight path goals regardless, but I don't know they intended all 6!  I'm sure more info will come out soon. 

I think it's possible with 6 engines not lit they deliberately didn't do the stage separation in that situation.

 

 

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How many successful full missions before they can greenlight crew? I assume that because the published expectation was 50/50 for complete success the project is still on schedule to deliver its first crewed flight as planned. I guess the real test for staying on schedule is the next launch.

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19 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

 

If you count the number of circles of light in the photo I count 27, and if you count the total number of circles in the diagram that's 33. 33-27=6. Pretty easy to figure out how many engines aren't working in that photo. But maybe one engine fired then cut out, so the data from the rocket probably indicated 38 engines firing at launch.

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14 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

How many successful full missions before they can greenlight crew? I assume that because the published expectation was 50/50 for complete success the project is still on schedule to deliver its first crewed flight as planned. I guess the real test for staying on schedule is the next launch.

Depends on what you mean.  How many times is enough isn't going to be known in advance.  It's all about what the sensors tell them how it's performing.  If nothing looks out of the ordinary, once might be enough, but they'll do hundreds anyway to find all the failure modes.

SpaceX's criteria is more demanding about what they'll require out of Starship than NASA's requirements on performance, but NASA criteria for material certainty about every molecule used is more demanding than any private company could afford.  The way around that for commercial space companies is "heritage", which is more than reliability of the ship, but confidence in the company.  They fly on their own dime and get flight heritage proving it works.  Nobody in the space industry but SpaceX and many of the newer rocket companies does this trial and error approach, which is odd since that's how engineering works in other industries.

Artemis one had zero successful launches of SLS before it was used to fly by the Moon, and test out the Orion spacecraft.  The next Orion/SLS will have crew.  So NASA will fly on its own stuff without much flight experience.  I guess you can do that when you have billions more to spend on handcrafting and testing everything.

The Artemis program isn't depending on Starship to launch crew from Earth.  They'll have the contractor-built SLS take the crew to the Lunar Gateway, rendezvous with a Starship there and descend to the south pole with it.  NASA doesn't actually require Starship to do the harder stuff -- launch with crew, return to Earth with crew, survive re-entry with crew.  SpaceX could theoretically fail to launch a bunch of uncrewed Starships as long as the last one makes it to the Lunar Gateway, then the crewed mission to the lunar surface would surely go ahead.  The Artemis 2 mission would demo landing without a crew, so there should be high confidence if that is successful that Artemis 3 can go ahead with crew to the surface and back.  Landing on the Moon isn't going to be thermally stressful on Starship, so there is less to worry about.

But to get there Starship has to do all these other things first.

 

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On 4/21/2023 at 5:52 AM, The Anti-Targ said:

If you count the number of circles of light in the photo I count 27, and if you count the total number of circles in the diagram that's 33. 33-27=6. Pretty easy to figure out how many engines aren't working in that photo. But maybe one engine fired then cut out, so the data from the rocket probably indicated 38 engines firing at launch.

When I rewatched the flight as you say there were 6 out, but in the diagram only 5. A sixth winks out in the diagram at one point to indicate the correct number but lights back on moments later.  An issue with a sensor probably but in the wrong direction -- should default to not working, rather than working.

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