SpaceX’s Starship preparing for a full stack, SpaceX testing Starship tanks off-site, NASA having revenge for the dinosaurs with DART,
and Firefly is joining the club!
Want to know more? Then let’s dive right in!
My name is Felix, and I’m your host for today's episode of What about it.
We survived our first hurricane!
We’re alive and unharmed with some minor damage to the house.
Ian hasn’t just blown our schedule out the window.
It did the same for the Spaceflight industry here at the Cape!
More on that later! Now, let’s talk SpaceX Starship!
Starship Updates
SpaceX is concentrating on Ship 24 again.
After the recent static fires,
a lot of work needs to be done to check the prototype Starship and to make it ready for a full stack with Booster 7.
As seen here in Chief's incredible footage from September 28th,
SpaceX hooked Starship 24 onto one of their heavy lifter cranes and set it down onto one of the mobile test stands next to Mechazilla.
Right after hooking it up, SpaceX workers began inspecting the heat shield.
Since the current heat shield design is somewhat of a troublemaker with tiles breaking or falling off regularly, reviewing critical spots is essential.
These pictures show the holes in Ship 24’s heat shield very well.
They can be found in all sorts of spots and don’t seem limited to specific tile shapes, either.
Whole hexagonal tiles are missing as well as unique tiles with different shapes.
In this footage, you can also see the six brighter tiles on the windward side of Ship 24.
Chief also took a picture of the other side for us for comparison.
Those six black heat tiles are likely antennas,
and the same pattern is on both sides of the Starship to ensure communication is always as good as possible.
Inspection work was also done on the engine section.
Everything needs to be perfect if the plan is to stack next and perform a full static fire.
It’s unclear when exactly SpaceX will try for a full stack again, but we’ll keep you informed as best as possible.
If you want to be even closer in the loop, follow me @felixschlang and our WAI cam operator Chief @cosmicalchief on Twitter!
Mauricio was up in the air again, giving us some spectacular new pictures from above.
If you are not yet, consider becoming a Parteon.
If you pay close attention to the images, you’ll see that SpaceX continues its expansion work around Mechazilla and the Suborbital pads.
Terrain grading and even a pond-like construction are in the works.
Starbase is expanding further.
All this work is likely related to protection efforts.
Grass fires during static fires and later on a launch water spillage.
Those need to be dealt with, and SpaceX is acting accordingly.
The cleared-out area is likely to prevent further fires,
and the pond likely is a retention pond for spilled water from sound suppression systems during a launch.
SpaceX has also taken another facility to operation.
The new Test tank testing grounds at the former location of the Macey’s Gun Range have entered operation.
Moving the test tank activity here gives SpaceX several advantages.
It is private property, and SpaceX does not need to do road closures for test tank activity anymore.
A small tank farm and an improvised blast berm.
That’s all that was required. Besides that test area, SpaceX is also already heavily using the remaining space for storage, and later on,
we could even see manufacturing being done here as well.
While Mauricio was taking these pictures, testing was already underway, as you can see here, with an iced-up edome test tank.
Comparing the Edome tank and B7.1, which is also on-site, reveals one big difference.
The forward dome on B7.1 is a regular Starship tank dome.
The one on the Edome tank is a much flatter design supposed to give SpaceX more usable space inside the rocket by flattening the ends of the tanks.
And If it weren’t for LabPadre and his cameras, we wouldn’t have any footage of the test, so a massive shout out to Louis and his crew!
Well done. As you can see, it was a test to destruction, and the results are yet to be known.
One thing is for sure, though.
These Edome tests will significantly influence future Starships.
Moving away from Starbase and to SpaceX’s activity at Kennedy Space Center,
there are three fascinating SpaceX news topics I want to show you today!
This is Space Launch complex 40, and you’re watching its launch structure's complete and utter destruction.
Yep. That happened. But don’t worry.
That was 14 years ago and what you saw collapsing to the ground in a colossal detonation was the old Titan launch structure at the pad before
SpaceX started building their infrastructure on site.
Rocket pads are ever-changing.
Rockets and their launch providers come and go, and NASA is focussed on reusing these pads as much as possible.
Now, SLC or space launch complex 40 at Kennedy Space Center is known for Falcon 9 and an incredible number of launches in the past few years.
And now, they’re adding SpaceX’s most precious payload to the list at SLC 40.
Crew Dragon. According to William Gerstenmeier,
former head of Human Spaceflight at NASA and now vice president of build and flight reliability at SpaceX,
they’re already working on infrastructure to allow Crew launches from SLC-40.
Soon, SpaceX will have two pads to launch Crew Dragons.
Now you might ask, what SpaceX needs a second Crew Dragon capable launch pad for.
Are they planning to increase crewed flight cadence?
Well, yes and no. The Crew 5 Astronauts arrived at KSC on October 1st.
Crew Dragon and the Astronauts got ready for the October 5th launch window on October 2nd with a full rehearsal of launch day activities,
and John and Stefanie were there for WAI Media to cover it for all of us!
"Together, as a crew we've been training for almost a year, but our preparation has begun long before that.
Koichi will be his fifth flight to space and he's been training for three decades and for Josh and Anna and I,
this will be our first flight."
SpaceX is making it very clear that they are the ones servicing the ISS right now.
And with missions like Polaris and Inspiration 4, SpaceX is even doing private crewed flights from Pad 39A and will continue to do so in the future.
But Gerstenmeier added that SpaceX won't bring Starship to LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center until, and I quote,
"we have a good and reliable vehicle."
And that’s likely a good decision.
If a Starship were to crash land at Pad 39-A, the fallout for both NASA and SpaceX would be immense.
Losing crew access to the ISS due to the one pad capable of launching crews being destroyed in such an event would be a catastrophe.
So,
NASA and SpaceX working together to create a second Crew Dragon Capable pad before sending a Starship to space from Kennedy Space Center likely
isn’t just based on more Crew Dragon flights, but might also be a preemptive approach by NASA and SpaceX to ensure uninterrupted ISS servicing.
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On we go with the next crazy SpaceX announcement.
SpaceX might perform a Servicing mission on the Hubble Space Telescope together with Nasa.
When I heard this news, I jumped out of my chair.
Why? Because this means that Hubble might stay in business for a long, long time into the future.
Since its launch to orbit in April 1990, Hubble has been serviced 5 times before by NASA from 1993 to 2009.
Each time utilizing the Space Shuttle Orbiter to reach the Telescope in low Earth orbit with a crew of Astronauts and to perform maintenance work on it.
In fact, the Shuttle orbiter was the spacecraft making these missions possible in the first place.
Now, NASA has announced that they don’t want to give up on Hubble just yet.
With the Shuttle long gone, they’ve found another pitstop service provider.
SpaceX.
On September 29th,
NASA announced that they’re conducting a feasibility study with SpaceX to find out if it would be possible to service the Hubble Space Telescope
with a SpaceX crew Dragon. First, to boost its slowly decaying orbit, and second, to maybe even assist the telescope in other ways.
Hubble would require new gyro stabilizers and other upgrades that would be easy to do if NASA had the means to reach it with a servicing crew.
Right now, Hubble is predicted to stay operational until the 2030s.
The main cause of failure? Orbit decay.
The space telescope is currently orbiting Earth at around 335 miles of altitude.
There’s not much atmospheric drag up there, but enough to make it slowly sink down.
If SpaceX could help lift its orbit again, it would likely extend Hubble’s life by at least a few more years.
SpaceX proposed this study to NASA in partnership with its Polaris Program.
Remember how I said on the last episode that SpaceX might transform into a full-service provider, including its own Astronauts and missions,
adding to the current launch provider status?
The study is expected to take up to six months.
After that, we should know more, and we’ll keep you updated!
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All of our Patreon and Youtube member funds go directly into better equipment.
Check out our Patreon site through the link in the description or just conveniently click the join button under the video to become a YouTube member!
NASA’s double asteroid redirection test or DART has hit the target.
The roughly refrigerator-sized probe hit its mark, Asteroid Dimorphos, on September 26th and created quite the impact.
The mission is trying to discover how much an Asteroid's trajectory can be changed with an impactor so that something like what happened to the
Dinosaurs around 65 million years ago doesn’t happen to us.
Confirmation of the impact came from a signal loss on September 26th.
Dart hit Dimorphos, 160 meters across or about the size of a pyramid, at a blistering 22 thousand kilometers per hour.
Damn fast!
The Hubble and the Webb space telescope both were able to capture the impact in a series of images turned into a video here.
And it was quite the impact. You can see the debris shockwave sent out into space after the hit.
Analysis in the coming days will show how much Dart was able to shift the Asteroid's trajectory.
Staying at NASA and switching to SLS, there is a new launch window for Artemis 1.
SLS has rolled back into the VAB.
First motion was on September 26th, and now it’s back safe and sound inside Highbay 3. The reason?
This friendly guy here. Hurricane Ian has devastated large parts of Central Florida.
Besides some minor damage to our house, we were lucky, but the wind was strong enough to push over trees and rip off branches.
So, NASA decided to roll SLS back into the VAB to protect the rocket.
According to NASA, there was no damage to Artemis 1 Hardware, and a new launch window, lasting from November 12th to the 27th,
has been given out. According to NASA,
the new launch window is from mid to end November to give time for post-storm recovery and to identify checkouts for the upcoming launch.
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Now, let’s talk new Space again!
Firefly joins the orbital rocket club!
Tim Dodd hosted it, and the world of Spaceflight enthusiasts, including us here at WAI,
watched as Firefly launched their Alpha rocket to Space on October 1st!
Mission accomplished. 35 kilograms of Cube and Pico Sats.
Most of them copies of the satellites that were lost on the failed first attempt.
There was one small hiccup.
When Meco and stage separation occurred at T + 2 minutes and 40 seconds, Debris can be seen flying away from the separating stages.
That’s likely Firefly’s interstage being blown apart by the upper stage engine igniting too soon.
That’s a straightforward fix, and something similar happened to SpaceX on their Falcon 1 launch 3.
In their case, stage separation occurred too early with the first stage engine still burning,
causing the booster to bump into the second stage, creating a mission failure.
In Fireflies case, the second stage engine ignited too early, when stage separation was not complete.
These things happen. Especially so early on.
It doesn’t reduce the success in the slightest, though.
Firefly made it and joined the club of orbital launch providers.
Well done! You rock!
Last but not least, a small shout out to Joe Scott from Answers with Joe, whom I was able to talk to recently!
You can watch the over one-hour conversation on his channel now.
A link is in the description! Make sure to give it a watch, a like, and if you haven’t done so yet,
make sure to subscribe to Joe’s channels, Answers with Joe, and Conversations with Joe!
Thank you for having me, Joe! You rock!
That’s it for today! Thank you very much for watching, and I’ll see you again on Friday!