- Starship's third full stack flight test is just
around the corner and with the first two tests,
achieving some merits of success and progress.
The third flight with Booster 10
and Ship 28 has made some pretty substantial upgrades
and changes to not only the hardware,
but also the flight profile and the mission itself.
I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut,
and today I just wanted to do a really quick overview
of these changes and upgrades as we prepare
for what's always guaranteed to be an exciting launch
of the world's biggest
and most powerful rocket ever flown. Let's get started.
- Let's start off with the launchpad
and the stage zero infrastructure
because there have been some huge
upgrades since the last flight.
SpaceX can now load LOX on the booster in less than 40
minutes, and methane in 41 minutes, both took about an hour
and 37 minutes before,
and now they can load LOX on the ship in 53 minutes
instead of an hour and 13 minutes
and methane in 51 minutes instead of one hour
and 17 minutes.
These are ridiculous fill rates,
considering it's about 10 times more propellant
and fills it into similar time to a Falcon 9.
Thanks to additional coolers
and pumps, there are some new tanks
that will be used on future flights to help
with additional storage needs.
The pad also received a few upgrades
and additional heat reinforcement on the launch mount
and tower, and a few small tweaks here
and there to hopefully reduce refurbishment
time between flights.
Okay, onto the rocket itself,
the FAA has signed off on SpaceX's mishap report on
Starhip's second flight, which ended in both the ship
and the booster being terminated.
SpaceX listed 17 upgrades to the ship
and booster that would address the issues
that cropped up during IFT-2.
There's ten upgrades and changes for the ship
and seven for the super heavy booster.
So here's a quick overview of some
of those changes on the booster.
There's a few noticeable changes on the outside.
First off, you may notice the grid fins on Booster 10 look
different than Booster 9,
but SpaceX actually walked back a small design change
and returned to the grid Fin design from prior vehicles
removing a small strip along the outer edge,
there have been upgrades to the Starling terminals
that will hopefully help improve data
connections to the vehicle.
There's a slightly different common dome design
that's debuting on Booster 10 that's more rounded
and less rampy.
There's a small tweak to the stability mount that they use
during lifting, and there's likely some changes
to filtration and potentially slosh baffles in the booster
as some kind of blockage in the oxygen line of a raptor.
was the demise of Booster 9
but the booster will mostly see changes in software
and engine control algorithms that should help.
It better cope with the flip maneuver after hot staging.
While the booster doesn't seem to have a ton
of notable hardware changes,
S 28 is quite a bit upgraded over its predecessor S 25.
In fact, IFT-2 which flew Booster 9
and Ship 25 was a bit of a mismatch
as S 25 was already a fairly outdated vehicle
design when it flew.
In fact, Ship 28 started life completely differently when it
was stacked in reverse order from top down,
which allowed the vehicle to always be attached
to the crane, reducing rigging time during construction.
It also finally caught up to its booster friend by upgrading
to Raptors that have electric actuators
for its thrust vector control system.
Instead of the older hydraulic ones.
This greatly tidied up the engine compartment
and helps reduce the risk of fire,
which fire reduction risks is generally another upgrade.
S 28 has many tweaks
and changes to help prevent fire on the vehicle, which is
what took down S 25.
There's also just the simple change
to not dump oxygen in the same manner, which is
what helped feed the fire onboard S 25.
The oxygen vents inside the aft skirt have changed
and it speculated their angle could help
with attitude control as well.
More obvious changes on the outside include some changes
to the heat shield placement
and pattern similar to the booster.
It also gets a mighty upgrade
with Starlink dishes now featuring four dishes instead
of one, which again will help provide better data
and hopefully get us some beautiful
views while it's in space.
The flaps added some small static wicks
to help discharge static electricity.
Side note, the front flaps are actually older than S 25.
They were taken off of S 22, which never flew.
S 28's aft flaps have beefier mounting points compared
to S 25 and the body has been strengthened
with 24 new reinforcement stringers inside the oxygen tank.
Another fairly obvious change between S 25
and S 28 is the vents on the propellant tanks.
A bunch of them have moved in location
and the cowbell style thruster ish vents have completely
been removed from the middle of the ship
and now the nose vents do feature
that cowbell style thruster-ish vent.
But maybe the coolest change we see on S 28 is something
that I've been waiting to see
for a long time on one of these tests.
S 28 finally has its payload door operable instead
of being welded shut, which brings us
to the changes in the mission
that we will hopefully see occur on IFT 3.
And there's actually some fairly large changes
that are completely different from IFT 2 with
that payload bay not welded shut.
It means we're hopefully going to see it open a little more
than three minutes after ship engine shutdown at 11 minutes
and 56 seconds, there is a Starlink dispenser installed,
but since this is a suborbital mission,
there will be no payload actually deployed
Then we'll hopefully see another first first with Starship.
They plan to try and relight a raptor engine in space.
Now at the moment we don't know if they will do this
prograde or retrograde
so either slightly extending its reentry location
or slightly shortening it
but I'd speculate they'd want to practice a retrograde
deorbit burn, but we'll have to wait and see.
This time, instead of making about three quarters through
an orbit and then landing in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii,
Starship is now targeting a good bit shorter trajectory
and it will land in the Indian Ocean near Australia.
The reenter corridor is fairly large
and I'm guessing it's that big,
so they can accommodate whether
or not Starship completes that Raptor relight test as
to why exactly they're aiming shorter than before.
We don't really know the difference
between the two points is marginal in terms
of total velocity, so perhaps just reentering in a bit more
of a remote location is preferred
and it just adds a touch more margin to the profile.
The ship will still just do a belly flop landing
as there appears to be no attempt at a propulsive flip
maneuver likely
because they're just not even sure if it's going
to survive reentry.
So they might as well wait to try
and program all those maneuvers
until they know the ship can make it back in one piece.
Lastly, one more exciting change is
that SpaceX will be attempting to transfer propellant
between a header tank and a main tank wall in space.
This is part of the "Tipping Point" contract for NASA
to demonstrate this technology for a milestone
for the Artemis Program's Starship Human Landing System.
While propellant transfer isn't new,
it's usually done in a relatively small amount
between two vehicles like the ISS
and a resupply vessel like ROSCOSMOS' Progress vehicle,
which is a hypergolic propellant
and not cryogenic propellant like on Starship,
successfully completing this test is worth $53 million.
So we really hope they nail this one,
but that's pretty much everything.
Okay, so now for my thoughts
and expectations at this point,
you can tell SpaceX has higher expectations than before
and they should because it's really to the point now
where this vehicle needs
to start honing in on achieving some of its lofty goals.
But of course, do keep in mind
that this is still just a test vehicle and a test flight.
So it's not detrimental if this would fail spectacularly
again, because of course there's no shortage
of rockets in production waiting for their chance to fly.
However the clock is ticking,
and of course, NASA needs this rocket in order
to land humans on the moon for the Artemis program.
So yeah, it's it's time to start, you know, seeing progress
and getting closer and closer to some
of those big milestones.
So personally, I hope we see the booster safely come back
and do a landing burn for a soft water landing.
I think that'd be great.
I also hope the ship gets through its main burn
and completes its three demonstrations
of relight door operations and propellant transfer.
If it does survive reentry, that'd be awesome,
but for that one, I'm a little more 50 / 50.
But what do you think?
Do you think it's going to do better than last time?
About the same? What are your expectations?
Let me know your thoughts or your
questions in the comments below.
And don't forget to join us live
whenever this thing launches.
We already have our 4K live stream up,
which I think we're the only true end-to-end 4K Stream
available since SpaceX no longer streams on YouTube.
Our last stream was amazing, honestly,
and we've made even more upgrades
and spent hundreds of hours literally working
to make this next stream incredible.
So I hope we see you there.
And now it'd be a great time to consider becoming a Patreon
supporter, a YouTube member,
or an X subscriber, so you can get access
to our 4K multi-view clean feed,
and you can have your very own mission control in your own
house on launch day.
That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd,
the Everyday Astronaut bringing space down to earth
for everyday people.