Why is it not moving?
- why is it not moving??
My name is Felix, and I’m your host for today's episode of What about it.
Happy new year, everyone! Today we’ll dive into the reasons why SpaceX has yet to launch its Starship into space,
and we’ll take a close look at a very important milestone to be done at SpaceX’s Starbase soon.
We’ll also dive deep into InSight, NASA’s robotic look inside the red planet which recently ended its life,
sending its final pictures and findings back to Earth.
Stay tuned, and let’s dive right in!
Starship Updates
And we’re back at Starbase. Another year has begun,
and there’s a lot of work ahead for the SpaceX team working on the largest and most unusual rocket ever built.
To explain what’s going on right now, we have to go a few days back.
These pictures are from 2022. December 21st.
SpaceX rolled booster 9, the next Super Heavy booster in the production pipeline, down to the launch site for cryo-proof testing.
These jams in the test pipeline are likely not intended.
But they’re not bad, either. Since Ship 24 and Booster 7,
the prototypes still slated for the first orbital launch of a Starship in human history, have still not flown,
Booster 9 is kind of in the middle of everything.
The first cryo-proof test went well, and explosions and major problems are becoming increasingly rare.
SpaceX workers pressurized the lower oxygen main tank and then proceeded to fill the upper Methane main tank with liquid nitrogen.
We’ve seen these tests many times.
What’s changed over time is that anticipation of it holding the pressure.
It does. Every time. We’ve not seen an overpressure event from a cryo test in a long time.
SpaceX has perfected the stainless steel hull construction so much by now that it seems to work reliably.
As of recording the episode, Booster 9 is still sitting at the launch site on the mobile test stand,
likely waiting for a rollback to the construction site any day now.
This is the usual routine at Starbase.
Test, check, fix and test again.
Hardware-rich development is the term for it, and it means that we’re seeing a lot of different prototypes being built, tested,
and checked for flaws.
Thank you for the awesome pictures again, Mauricio.
You rock! WAI is proud to be one of your biggest supporters!
This video recorded by WAI Cam operator Chief at the construction site is a perfect example of hardware-rich development.
It is the flip of the common dome section of Starship 28.
24 hasn’t flown yet, and 28 is already being prepared for stacking.
It also gives a wonderful view of the internal tank slosh barriers and the holes for the ch4 and lox downcomers.
The production quality of these prototypes has come from outright ugly to this in around three years.
A fully reusable stainless steel rocket.
SpaceX’s pipeline is stuffed. Here’s a view from LabPadre’s 24/7 live cams looking into the highbay.
Ship 25 in the foreground and ship 26 in the back, just being removed from the welding turntable, used to weld the large ring sections together.
It’s done. Next are raceway installations, flaps, and a lot of detailing.
After that, it’s tested, and then it’s ready for flight.
Generally speaking, SpaceX has a growing problem.
The prototype production pipeline is churning out more and more perfect-looking test candidates, and the launch site is not launching them.
Down the road, there are tests but no launches at this point.
And the reason for these delays becomes visible if we take another look at Mauricios aerial view.
SpaceX is still very much busy building the launch infrastructure.
The blast berm separating the orbital launch tower and the fuel farm has recently been upgraded and is now almost done.
I’m saying almost because there’s still work going on there.
The plumbing is being rerouted.
And that last step on the bottom of the berm is being filled with dirt and will likely receive a cover when that is done.
Then there's the orbital launch and integration tower or Mechazilla.
Its concrete foundation is being reinforced.
Likely because SpaceX found damage after some recent static fire activity.
It’s tough to do hardware-rich development on a 469-foot or 143 meters tall launch tower.
You can’t just put a new one there if you find mistakes.
You have to make do with what you’ve got.
"Show me what you got! I want to see, what you got!"
But you can do some testing even with Mechazilla and the OLM.
And that’s what SpaceX is doing right now.
"I like what you got!"
Have you ever wondered what a Starship and Super Heavy full stack weigh, including fuel?
Empty, so when lifting it onto the OLM like here in Ryan Hansen’s wonderful animation, it’s not that much.
Circa 200 tons for the booster and another 150 for the Starship.
Still a heavy weight but not nearly as much as a fully fueled stack.
This hasn’t happened yet.
Even though we’ve seen full stacks before, SpaceX has never fueled them all the way.
And there’s a simple reason for it.
They don’t know if the Orbital launch mount can take it.
Fully fueled, the Starship stack weighs in at roughly 5000 tons.
That’s right. The weight of around 123 fully loaded semi-trucks.
By far the heaviest flying object we’ve ever built once it does fly.
Just as an example. Do you know what this is?
It’s the Airbus A380. By far the largest airliner in the world, dwarfing anything else by a solid chunk.
To compare it to a Starship, we need the maximum takeoff weight.
And… drum roll… on an Airbus A380, the behemoth of the air, the maximum takeoff weight is 575 tons.
So, fully fueled and loaded to the brim with passengers and freight containers.
A Starship sitting on the OLM and waiting for ignition is 8.69 times the weight of an Airbus A380.
Let that sink in.
And all of this weight is resting on these.
The 20 hold-down clamps inside the orbital launch mount ring.
The name is misleading. While one purpose of the hold-down clamps is to hold the rocket down on the olm while the engines are igniting,
it’s also the rocket’s parking spot.
All the weight is resting on these 20 arms.
5000, which is the weight of a fully fueled Starship stack divided by 20, which is the number of hold-down clamps,
makes a crazy 250 tons per arm.
So, two of those arms almost hold the weight of one fully loaded Airbus A380.
Now, that needs to be and can be tested beforehand.
And that’s what SpaceX is preparing for as I am recording this episode.
There is no official name given by SpaceX yet.
Hold down clamp load tester? OLM weight simulator?
What ever you want to call it, its purpose is clear.
The contraption has two bottle opener-shaped end pieces on the top.
Those will be resting on two hold-down clamps at a time.
The middle piece can be varied in width with that middle actuator so that it can be hung inside the olm and onto the hold-down clamps.
Once it is resting on the clamps,
it will then pull a large amount of crane counterweights up with its two strong actuators hanging down on the sides.
SpaceX can slowly increase and decrease the load resting on the clamps at any point in time.
All the way up to the maximum weight of the counterweights, which should be roughly 500 tons, so 250 tons per clamp.
Once one pair of clamps is tested, the load tester then detaches from the tested pair of clamps, rotates to the next pair,
and the process starts over again.
This way, SpaceX will be able to test the maximum carrying capacity of each of the 20 clamps.
This way, it’s not being left to chance if the construction actually holds the weight of a fully fueled Starship stack.
I’ve heard the question several times over the past few days on my Twitter account, why SpaceX is testing this now and why they didn’t do it earlier?
The answer likely is split into two reasons.
Number one is that an empty Starship stack weighs far less, as said.
Around 350 tons. That’s only 17.5 tons per clamp.
Secondly, the OLM was not finished yet.
SpaceX does this test now as they’ve reached all the milestones to be able to test this under the right conditions.
Them performing the test now is a sure sign that SpaceX is very close to launch readiness now, at least for the ground hardware.
Thank you for watching up to here.
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On we go with NASA InSight’s final breath!
From its stunning launch on the 5th of May in 2018 until now, Insight has kept the science world busy.
A perfect example of the importance of robotic exploration in our solar system.
It reached its end of life just before Christmas on December 19th, 2022.
Four and a half years of struggle on an alien world and insights into Mars we couldn’t dream of before.
Reason enough for us here at WAI to give you a summary of the mission and its milestones.
Built by Lockheed Martin Space since May 2014 and delayed from its original 2016 launch window, the mission at this point was 2 years behind schedule.
Problems with the craft's instruments kept the team busier than originally planned.
A life's work that couldn’t be more daring.
Insight's task was to study the inside of another world by listening to its vibrations and its heartbeat as it slowly changes and moves deep within
the planet. For this, Insight was equipped with instruments you normally don’t find on another planet.
Seismic sensors to be buried under the surface of Mars.
So much can go wrong, and has in the past.
Viking 1 and Viking 2 in 76 both carried seismic instruments.
However, Viking 1’s seismic instrument malfunctioned and couldn’t deploy, and while Viking 2 was able to deploy its seismic instruments,
there was no way of telling if it detected vibrations or just the wind moving the instrument ever so slightly.
And Mars would give InSight an exceptionally hard time in the future.
Insight is a one-meter high and six-meter wide lander dominated by its two large circular solar panels.
It’s a similar design to the Phoenix lander,
which touched down on Mars in 2008 with the goal of studying the history of water in the martian arctic.
Reusing lander platforms is a common thing in the space exploration business.
Proven designs are very precious.
It comes equipped with multiple instruments for scientific research,
such as a seismometer with a windshield and a robotic arm to place the instruments on the surface of Mars.
The theory was to listen to the waves of earthquakes and meteorite impacts as they propagate through the planet's interior.
By listening to the change of the wave while moving through the planet, the internals of Mars would become visible.
After traveling through deep space for more than 6 months,
Insight separated from its service module and entered the Martian atmosphere heat shield first.
Parachute deployment, heat shield separation.
The final approach was propulsive, bringing Insight down to its designated landing zone.
Landing on Mars is dangerous, and throughout the history of robotic Mars exploration, many Landers have been lost on approach,
never even starting their scientific investigations.
For insight, though, the trouble was still to come.
Mars is an unforgiving place for a robot and the problems started shortly after landing.
Insight is equipped with three main science instruments.
One of them, the heat flow and physical properties probe or HP3, struggled from the beginning on.
NASA’s calculations for the composition of the surface regolith at the landing site were off.
It was supposed to use a self-hammering mechanism, driving a temperature sensor all the way down to 5 meters depth below the surface.
It couldn’t even penetrate the surface, though.
They tried everything. From Pinning it down to the surface using the robotic arm…
To outright just squeezing it down while it was hammering.
It couldn’t get traction and thus never was able to get meaningful measurements.
It was abandoned in January 2021.
Another big problem from the beginning was dust on the solar panels.
Every Mars mission has to deal with it,
and insight even tried dropping dirt on the panels and then hoping that this dirt would clean off the dust.
What worked flawlessly, though, was InSight’s seismometer.
It was the instrument to bring priceless insights into the martian interior.
It detected over 1300 seismic events on Mars during its mission.
35 of which at magnitudes between 3 and 4.
Here, for example, is a meteorite entering the atmosphere, exploding and several fragments hitting the ground.
Or this. A marsquake.
All this was done to see what makes Earth so special compared to other rocky planets like Mars.
The goal was to find out what was going on inside of Mars and insight delivered.
In July of 2021, NASA published three essential papers on their findings.
And the biggest sensation? Mars has a molten core.
Contrary to Earth, where the crust is solid, the mantle is molten, and the core is solid again, on Mars, Crust and mantle are solid,
and the core is molten.
By reconstructing the seismic waves detected by the seismometer, Scientists were able to look inside Marrs like never before.
We now know that Mars has a not-very-dense liquid core with a diameter of around 1830 kilometers.
On December 19th, NASA officially concluded the Insight mission due to loss of power.
Insight will be remembered as one of the fundamental science missions about our red neighbor,
and science has and will greatly profit from its findings.
Farewell insight. You will be remembered!
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And if you want to get even smarter about Space and rockets, watch this video next to continue the journey!
Thank you very much for watching, and I’ll see you again in the next episode!