SpaceX reveals plans to catch their Super Heavy Starship booster on the first attempt.
Parts for a third Starship launch tower spotted at Kennedy Space center, and James Webb is 5% away from viewing the Universe's beginning!
Let’s dive right in!
My name is Felix, and I am your host for today's episode of What about it.
Sorry for the absence! The whole family was down with Covid.
Lucky for us, the space industry didn’t stand still at all, so there’s a trove of topics to talk about today!
Starship Updates
WAI is back, and as much as our studio has improved while we were on sick leave, SpaceX has not been standing still at all either!
The biggest sensation while we were on hiatus might have been the Booster 7 explosion.
While creating a lot of fancy headlines again in worldwide news outlets,
the SpaceX community carefully analyzed the incident and tried to predict as well as possible how much this would delay the orbital launch.
10 days after the incident, many question marks can be answered already.
First of all, even though it looked very destructive, the damage was not terrible.
Mechazilla, even though standing next to the explosion, took no meaningful damage.
The launch mount itself is charred.
The main structure itself wasn’t damaged much.
The electrics and hydraulic systems took some damage.
Nothing an overhaul couldn’t fix, though.
After all, the orbital launch mount will have to take the beating of 33 Raptor engines on every launch in the future.
Not with such a strong shockwave, but with more heat.
The next big question obviously surrounds the state of Booster 7. Did it survive?
Yes. Was there a lot of damage?
No. Will it fly to orbit? Tentative yes.
Musk gave Booster 7 a personal inspection on July 13th.
Was just up in the booster propulsion section.
Damage appears to be minor, but we need to inspect all the engines.
Best to do this in the High Bay.
Musk commented on the reason behind the explosion as well.
Cryogenic fuel is an added challenge, as it evaporates to create fuel-air explosion risk in a partially oxygen atmosphere like Earth.
That said, we have a lot of sensors to detect this.
More later.
Fuel evaporated from inside the engines right before a static fire attempt.
Since there are so many engines under the booster, it was enough to create the powerful explosion.
When working on rockets, explosions occur.
Especially when working on rocket prototypes.
Since Super Heavy is the largest rocket booster prototype ever to be manufactured, even a little leakage can create a large explosion.
This is footage of the STS 114 shuttle mission.
What you’re looking at is a camera pointed at the RS-25 main engines right before ignition.
Do you see the sparks flying under them?
They are being thrown out under the Hydrogen powered engines to ignite any dangerous leaked gasses before they can accumulate and eventually create
a similar explosion as to what happened under booster 7. This is one way to deal with this kind of problem.
Ignite the leaked fuel before it gets dangerous.
And for SpaceX and its Starship, this could be the solution as well.
Musk mentioned sensors under the booster.
So, SpaceX has the means of detecting dangerous mixtures,
even though that seems to not have worked for Booster 7. But what good is it if you can’t eliminate the gasses even if you detected them?
I would not be surprised if a similar system would now find its way into SpaceX’s launch mount design.
On July 14th, SpaceX lifted Booster 7 off the OLM and rolled it back to the production site.
Since then, a lot of work has been done.
On July 18th SpaceX took out many, maybe even all Raptor engines from under the booster.
Checks must be performed on every single one of them as they were the closest to the blast and are similar to delicate clockworks.
Judging by the incredible pictures Chief took for WAI, they appear to be in great shape visually.
No bent bells. No parts missing.
Of course, this is just our visual inspection, and the SpaceX engineers can do much more than this.
X-ray inspections will likely be performed.
Parts will be inspected as close up as possible to make sure that everything on every single engine is as it should be.
Perfect.
And Chief also took pictures of the reason for SpaceX wanting to be very thorough with the inspections.
The same day, SpaceX unmounted the Booster 7 Raptor 2 engines, they also loaded Starlink v2 satellites into the Satellite loader.
Of course, it’s not 100% sure yet,
but it does definitely look more and more like SpaceX indeed does want to send Starlink v2 satellites up into Space right on the first ever Starship
orbital launch. Why not show the world, that the system can deliver right on that first launch?
It does sound good to me! And the first launch gets even crazier.
There’s evidence that SpaceX might try to catch the Starship booster right on the first flight.
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The Starship-Super Heavy test flight will originate from Starbase, Texas.
The booster stage will separate and will perform a partial return and land in the Gulf of Mexico or return to Starbase and be caught by the launch tower.
This is a quote from a recently published SpaceX FCC filing for Starship’s first orbital launch attempt.
Crazy.
A picture provided in the filing shows the booster launch profile.
After separating from the Starship,
it will then relight its engines as indicated by the red color in the flight path and boost back to the landing site, and as you can see,
the loop starts and ends at the same spot with a small dogleg maneuver.
To me, this seems like SpaceX will check the booster in flight with their Starlink data connection, which this FCC filing is for.
If everything does check out and all the data SpaceX receives from the returning booster looks good, they will go for it.
So, we won’t only see a payload delivered by Ship 24.
We might also see the first booster catch attempt if everything plays out as SpaceX wants it to.
Can you even imagine the level of excitement?
With all the booster talk, we should, of course, not forget about Ship 24, which is undergoing tests at this moment.
As you can see here on LabPadre’s cameras, Spin-Up tests have been performed successfully.
All six engines spun up. Next, we should see static fire attempts.
Hopefully, with fewer explosions.
Which leaves us with the verdict.
With SpaceX already performing checks on Booster 7 and the visual inspection of the damage to the OLM and Mechazilla being on the low end,
we should expect Booster 7 to roll back to the launch site in the next few days.
SpaceX doesn’t seem to have lost much time, and another valuable lesson was learned.
I expect an orbital launch to happen somewhere between late August and mid-October.
Take it with a grain of salt, though.
This is prototyping, and predictions are hard.
On we go with SpaceX’s efforts at Roberts Road and Pad 39A.
Starbase 2 or SpaceX Florida. However you want to call it, things are ramping up in Florida.
These are fresh pictures from Greg Scott’s latest flyover at Cape Canaveral.
Activity at Roberts Road is speeding up further and further.
Besides more Mechazilla segments, almost fully assembled catch arms or Chopsticks, and first buildings undergoing construction,
Zack from CSI Starbase was able to spot something exciting.
This is a picture of our Florida WAI cams showing Segment number 4 of the Florida Mechazilla Starship Launch tower being rolled out to Pad39A
for stacking. Its the first segment after some time but it shows the progress,
SpaceX is making on this second Starship launch tower at Kennedy Space Center after the one in Texas.
And Zack found this in a recent picture taken of Mechazilla 2 at Pad39A.
Look how the first segment is mounted on the concrete socket with these brackets/ That’s Zack's first clue to something rather astonishing.
Now look very closely right next to one of the built segments.
Let’s zoom in on it. Do you see these brackets?
Those look like mounting brackets for the first segment on the concrete base.
And you need these exactly once per Mechazilla.
Now, it’s hard to tell if these really are those brackets.
But if they are and Zack from CSI Starbase is right, this could be the first sign for a third Mechazilla.
The second one in Florida. Possible locations for a build site could either be Pad39A, SLC40 or the proposed LC49,
which SpaceX wants to build north of the SLS Pad 39B.
NASA and SpaceX are already working on project details and after that come reviews.
So, it’s not far along. What do you think?
Is Zack right? And if so, where would that third Mechazilla be built?
As always, tell me in the comments!
In general, SpaceX’s dominance in the launch industry is growing more by the day.
On July 14th, they launched CRS 25.
25 Cargo dragons to the ISS since the contracts with NASA started.
This launch would have been my first opportunity to report directly from the press site at Kennedy Space Center and with NASA’s permission.
Unfortunately, I was sick with Covid and could not attend.
Nonetheless, the launch and landing were flawless, and CRS25 reached the ISS safely.
To put it into perspective, up until now, SpaceX has completed 31 missions so far this year,
delivering roughly 351 metric tons of useful payload to low Earth orbit.
By the number of launches, SpaceX has now broken its record from last year, and we’re just in July right now.
SpaceX could possibly launch more than 52 rockets this year.
Last but certainly not least, 351 tons to low Earth orbit is more than twice of what the rest of the world combined has launched so far this year.
As soon as Starships are operational,
SpaceX could be in the position to launch more payload mass to Space in a single week than all of Earth's launches in a Year combined.
Sometimes, though, mass is not as important as the kind of payload.
James Webb and the beginning of the Universe
The moment we’ve waited for. The universe as never seen before.
Bold words. And not an understatement.
Nasa has finally released the first images from the now fully operational James Webb Space Telescope,
and the world is in awe of the results, even though these are just the first images.
Every image is a new discovery, and the Telescope will give the world a view of the Universe as we’ve never seen before.
These are the words of acting Nasa administrator Bill Nelson.
Again, he’s not overstating it.
A first deep field image revealing the most distant galaxies we’ve ever layed eyes on.
The current record holder in the image?
13.1 billion years. Not only does this show us these Galaxies,
but it also shows us what our Universe looked like only 700 million years after it was created.
That’s about as long as higher evolved life exists on our own planet.
In the greater timeline of our universe, that’s only around 5% of the total age of the Universe.
5%. That’s all that’s left to the Big Bang itself.
One of my favorite images, the Southern Ring Nebula, was previously inspected by Hubble in the mid-’90s.
Now and with James Webb’s capabilities, the southern ring nebula reveals much more detail.
With its infrared cameras,
it is not only able to take higher resolution pictures but also to reveal details hidden from Hubble's view Since James Webb is operating at the
Lagrange L2 point, shielded from the suns rays, it is able to view into the infrared spectrum much more than Hubble ever could,
revealing details from inside the nebula.
This is just the first batch of images.
Thanks to a perfect orbit insertion back in December of 2021, James Webb is left with an excess amount of fuel,
likely expanding the science lifetime way beyond the 10-year mark.
It is hard to imagine what kinds of images we might see from JWST in the future,
but it’s safe to say that scientists and amateur space fans alike will get countless moments of joy and excitement from its discoveries to come over the next decade.
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