Mass production.
My name is Felix, and I’m your host for today's episode of What about it.
Starbase is expanding again! Starship 24 is ready for the orbital flight!
Mass production at Starbase is coming!
Stoke Space is hopping! Stay tuned, and let’s dive right in!
Starship Updates
Starbase is in crunch mode. As talked about in the last episode, there are quite a few things left before a Starship launch ignition can occur.
SpaceX is completely focused on preparing everything for the first Starship orbital flight test.
At least at the launch site…
New shielding is being added to the Starship orbital launch mount legs again.
Last time I showed you pictures of new staircases going up the legs to ease access to the launch table above.
Cherry pickers won’t do forever.
Now, after the stairs have been added, they must be protected.
If we take a look at the OLM through Chief’s WAI Cam, the extent of construction efforts becomes visible.
This timelapse shows very well how much activity there still is.
Scaffolding below and on top of the launch table.
The last segment of the ring shield has just been put in place and is now being welded in.
There’s work going on everywhere on one of the most important structures at Starbase.
Hard to imagine that this is supposed to launch a Starship in four weeks from now.
But even though this does look like a mess, there’s a system behind all of it, and SpaceX is known for being extremely fast.
Grasping the entire scene is difficult if you don’t have the right picture.
Luckily we have one of the best Starbase photographers out there on our team.
Try wrapping your head around this.
The OLM launch table in 57 megapixels.
Available in full res in my Twitter feed!
11 workers in one picture. And if you’re wondering why in some places, it looks like a spider's web,
those mostly are either power lines for tools, gas hoses for welders, and of course, ropes and chains to secure things in place.
The last bits of work are also being performed on the orbital tank farm.
This is the top of the so-called kettle reboilers.
They’re used to turn a gas into liquid again and thus have one of the most important tasks at the tank farm.
New connections have been installed, and insulation is now applied to the fresh piping.
Fresh
Work is ongoing on Booster 7 as well.
While the hydraulic pressure units are still without a cover, work has also started on the quick disconnect plate on Booster 7’s engine section.
It is connected to the tank farm for pressurization reasons.
Just a little bit of pressure in the tanks raises the overall structural stability drastically.
Aerocovers have been installed above the qd plate, and I expect SpaceX to add a cover that will close the QD plate after lift-off.
Those are all parts we’ve never seen on a Starship booster before, as they’re only needed for a trip to space.
Good signs all over the place.
March 21st was a foggy day. These views might be beautiful to look at, but for the ground equipment itself and the crews working on it,
this is a nightmare. Fog means moisture, and moisture means rust.
In combination with the sea salt from the Gulf of Mexico, this is the main reason for everything at Starbase rusting immediately.
On the other hand, everything becomes slippery in these conditions.
Walking on wet steel at a height of up to 145 meters likely isn’t a pleasant experience, raising the risk of work-related injuries.
Stay safe, Starbase!
Nonetheless, Chief was able to take these pictures.
The lower QD hood, needed to protect the quick disconnect on the launch table from the blast of 33 Raptor engines come lift-off, was retracted.
This gave a good view of the connector itself.
In this picture is extended out.
Once the rocket launches, the connector retracts into the hood, and the door located on top in this picture slams forward,
protecting the delicate connector from being damaged by the engine exhausts.
Heading over to the construction site, everything is focussed on new infrastructure expansions.
The drill used for piling work has shifted over to the Sanchez site after finishing work on the foundations of what’s presumed to be another High
Bay. Now, it is drilling at the site where SpaceX has been working on on-site commodity production for some time.
Oxygen and maybe even Methane is supposed to be produced here in the future,
and SpaceX is getting ready to put some larger infrastructure here soon.
Piling work, so drilling deep down into the ground, lowering rebar into the hole, and filling it with concrete is only needed for very large structures.
Those that need the extra support.
Right next to all that, booster 8 is in the process of being scrapped.
The last part of the engine section was lifted off a stand on March 21st.
You can see the lower header tank assembly sticking out of the hull.
If it had flown, this would have been its landing fuel tank.
Moving just a few meters over to the rocket garden, we saw Ship 26 being lifted onto a new stand.
Welcome to the Starship parking lot!
It’s still unknown what exactly SpaceX wants to do with this naked Starship that’s missing all of the re-entry hardware like flaps and a heat
shield. Theories like an orbital tanker ship or a Lunar Starship test article have been going around in the past few months.
Moving to the High Bay, Ship 28 has been stacked onto its fairing section.
Progress continues, and SpaceX will have plenty of ships to launch after Ship 24.
If everything works out, we should see several Starship launches this year.
And finally, we have the new large building next to the High Bay.
No one rally knows what it will be in the end.
Things like Payload integration, Heat shield shop, or just a Booster production line have been mentioned.
A clean room would be another option, but I do not think that this will be the case.
Clean rooms would go against SpaceX’s approach.
But then, what will it be?
This is where it will be located.
Right next to the other high bays and the Starfactory.
At least the part of it that's done.
Top-down, it looks like this through RGV Aerial Photographies camera lens taken on March 10th.
We can at least mark all that’s there already and see what it might look like in the end.
These are all the positions, where SpaceX had done all the pile drilling, and from these,
we can extrapolate the base shape and placement of potential doors.
The left and the right will likely receive large doors.
So, this already doesn’t look like yet another assembly high bay.
It looks more like a building where on one side, something enters and leaves on the other side.
So, what could be possible is a building where on one side you have a Starship hull come in, and when it exits on the other side,
it has a heat shield, flaps, and internals finished.
This would go along with the idea of mass producing them and, according to Gwynne Shotwell, COO and current lead at Starbase,
assembling up to three Starships per week.
In short, Starbase is busy on all ends.
At the launch site, the main goal clearly is the orbital test flight.
The big one we’re all waiting for, and honestly, it looks like, at the very least, another 4 weeks.
And at the construction site, we have countless new prototypes and, at the same time, ongoing prep work for mass production.
The outlook at Starbase couldn’t be more pleasing!
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On we go with Stoke Space!
If you don’t know who I am talking about here, come on out from under your comfy rock!
Stoke is a Washington State-based young aerospace startup led by Andy Lapsa and with around 80 hard-working people.
They’ve set out to accomplish the holy grail of rocketry.
Full and rapid reusability. Same as SpaceX but with a wildly different concept.
Where at SpaceX, the goal is to colonize Mars with the largest rockets ever built,
the Stoke engineers are building an Aerospike-like actively cooled upper stage which will launch into Space and return back to Earth propulsively
utilizing 30 tiny engines. And they’ve extensively tested their theory on the ground!
A few days ago, I had the chance to meet with a few very talented people from the Stoke Space team.
Incredibly inviting, open, and motivated!
They’ve recently tweeted this picture, announcing that they got Launch Complex 14 from the United States Space Force.
Launch Complex 14 is a very historic site at Cape Canaveral.
Maintained by the US Space Force, it’s the pad from which all Mercury-Atlas flights were launched.
It doesn’t get more historic than that.
I’ve been there before.
Andy told me that the heritage site would be preserved if at all possible.
Today, most of the launch complexes from the Early NASA days are in bad shape.
Cracked concrete and vegetation growing over them.
The old glory is long gone. With the recent boom for Space startups, these sites have been more and more repurposed, and now this site is next.
On top of the new pad, Stoke Space has given out some more information about their upcoming hop test.
Anyone who is getting Starhopper vibes here is on the right track.
It’s a technology demonstrator in the same way, Starhopper was back when SpaceX started its Starship development.
At around 4 to 5 meters tall, this contraption has one purpose only.
To answer the question if the concept of 30 small engines fed by a central turbopump assembly works.
A hop test will likely happen within the next two months, and we have all available fingers crossed here at team WAI!
We’re stoked! Next, we have yet another aerospace startup making headlines.
Relativity space had its next launch attempt with Terran 1. An 80% 3D printed rocket.
Third time’s the charm! On March 22nd, Relativity Space, a young California Based aerospace startup, took its first steps toward space.
Statistically, the success rate for a first launch of an orbital-class rocket stands at around 30%.
It is rare. There is an incredible amount of know-how needed to sling a payload around our planet successfully.
Largely due to the high gravity of our home world.
One G is painful. Rockets must work at the limit of what’s possible today to make it into orbit successfully.
And the same goes for Terran 1, Relativity Space’s 3D-printed rocket.
This has never been done before in so many ways.
Fueled by methane and oxygen, 3D printed and the first orbital vehicle for Relativity Space.
The list is long, and some records were edged into stone after the ignition.
The first thing to notice here is that the flame changed color throughout the flight in a very different way compared to Hydrogen or RP1,
the most common fuels in the industry.
Things are changing, and these methane plumes will be the future.
Not only Starship but New Glenn, Vulcan, and many other large projects have long adapted this new and coming fuel for the future of spaceflight.
We watched the rocket from the ground and this strange almost white engine light looked like a rising star.
A rising star for Relativity Space.
The first stage worked flawlessly.
Terran 1 is a technology demonstrator for the actual Relativity Space Rocket to come after this first vehicle.
65 meters tall, fully reusable upper stage, 3D printed, and with around 20 tons of payload to orbit,
it will be the Starship for medium to heavy lift rockets once fully operational.
That’s a long way, and the final design will likely look very different.
The views we got from Relativity Space were nothing but spectacular.
On March 22nd of 2023 they proved that a 3D-printed rocket is structurally strong enough to launch and reach space.
Everything went fine through MaxQ, which is the point of maximum aerodynamic stress.
There’s no tougher point for the structural frame than this.
Then came Meco. This was it for the first stage.
Perfect job! Incredible for the first launch!
Stage separation worked fine as well, and all eyes went on the AeonVac, the vacuum-optimized upper-stage engine.
These are the pictures transmitted by the rocket, and we can see that the second-stage engine at least tried to ignite.
A few frames of clean burn can be seen as well.
Then the flames turn red and look very erratic.
Followed by engine gimbal movement.
The telemetry indicates a decreasing speed while the altitude likely still increases due to the ballistic curve the second stage was on.
The engine is still running. But likely with minimal thrust.
At around T+3 minutes and 44 seconds, the upper-stage engine goes into full damage mitigation mode,
trying to stabilize the derailing flight path through strong gimbal movement.
Finally, at roughly T+5 minutes, the team acknowledged and announced the T+ anomaly with stage 2. That’s it.
Now, here comes the verdict. This was a huge success for Relativity Space.
Do not believe any headlines saying that Aeon one failed.
Reaching MaxQ and stage separation are major milestones for the team,
proving that a 3D-printed rocket can be strong and efficient enough to reach orbit.
All this is the very foundation for their undergoing work with Aeon R. Congratulations to Relativity Space for this historic achievement!
I wouldn’t be surprised if this motivates others to try the same.
I can’t wait to see Aeon One do its first orbit, hopefully on the next launch attempt!
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