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Ship 20 and Booster 4 are supposed to go to orbit, but will they?
Ship 22 and booster 7 are nearing completion and Mechazilla has… balls.
Let’s do this!
My name is Felix, and I am your host for today’s episode of What about it!?
And as always, there’s been a lot going on in the space industry lately, so let’s dive right in!
Starship Updates
SpaceX is flexing mighty muscles at Starbase right now.
This episode will be perfect meme material and a huge milestone has been hit.
It’s been some exciting few days again!
But let’s start with something I’ve not covered yet, as there’s just too much footage coming in from WAI cam operator Chief.
Booster 3 is no more. Let’s all take a moment of silence.
Gone too soon. We’ll miss you.
Alright, that’s enough. Of course, there’s a reason, why SpaceX cut it down and transported it off.
They need the space for other things.
Booster 3 was sitting on suborbital pad a and there are only two suborbital pads.
Since it was just a pathfinder and never meant to fly, it served its purpose and now it’s time for it to be scrapped.
Off to the local scrapyard.
One interesting thing to note here is that as a last step, SpaceX workers cut the booster free from Pad A. It was welded onto the stand.
Besides it showing that booster 3 was a pathfinder it also shows one flaw of the suborbital pad.
You don’t weld a rocket to a pad, right?
Normally you use hold down clamps to not damage a rocket.
So, this pad desperately needs an upgrade, and that upgrade is already on the way.
Meet Suborbital Pad A point 1. This upgrade segment was transported from the build site to the Launch site on January 7th and by now it’s very
clear what it’s for. It’s an upgrade for Suborbital Pad A and it brings hold down clamps and the new quick disconnect adapter which wasn’t yet
installed while it was transported to the launch site.
This footage also perfectly shows, how much a Starbase photographer has to endure while on the job.
Stay strong, Chief! We appreciate it very much!
Follow his work on WAI Plus by clicking on the info card!
It’s worth it!
Arrived at the launch site, SpaceX workers added the necessary quick disconnect adapter and now it’s sitting there,
waiting to be installed on suborbital Pad A. After this, both pads will have seen their upgrade,
and both will be ready to test the new generation of Starship and Super Heavy prototypes.
Either Ship 22 or Booster 7 will be tested here next!
Speaking of the next ships to be finished and tested, ship 22 is making progress!
Given the extra time from the FAA, which delayed the Starship orbital launches at least until March 1st,
SpaceX is working on the next pair of Ship and booster.
In RGV Aerial Photography’s latest flyby we can see the evidence.
Ship 22’s nose cone is already parked outside the highbay, waiting for the tank section to be ready for stacking.
This shiny nose cone once was thought for Ship 21, which, as it seems right now, was canceled.
It was just canceled half, as the 21 nose cone will now be used for the tank section of 22.
And that tank section is sitting in the mid bay right now, being finished on the inside.
Once that’s done it will be transported over to the high bay and get a nice and shiny nose cone.
So, what’s booster 7 doing? When will the next pair be ready for testing?
This is the booster 7 tank section held up by the gantry crane inside the high bay.
By now, almost all the parts needed for the stack have been spotted and I expect the final stack to be no more than two weeks out.
This would get us roughly to the end of this month until both booster 7 and ship 22 are ready for a roll out to the launch site.
So, with all that information, a new question opens up.
Will we actually see Ship 20 and Booster 4 fly?
SpaceX got handed extra time to work with from the FAA.
The earliest date for an orbital flight right now is March 1st as said.
Just yesterday the SpaceX work force reattached the Hydraulic Pressure Unit or HPU covers and right after that we finally saw them add the quad
skid covers for the large COPV’s, the avionics, the control circuits and the igniter fluids.
Next, we should see the still missing engine covers mounted and that would be the first time ever, that a Super Heavy booster is finished.
With Ship 22 and Booster 7 closing in and enough time for testing it’s still up in the air, though,
if SpaceX might use Booster 4 and Ship 20 as ground test articles instead.
Will SpaceX launch booster 4 and Ship 20,
or will they use them as ground test articles and continue with booster 7 and ship 22 because of the extra time they have?
What do you think? As always, tell me in the comments!
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Oh boy, here come the memes. SpaceX gave Mechazilla some balls.
No joke.
It all started with a bar between the two chopsticks.
Pretty soon it became obvious as to what that bar was for.
SpaceX workers attached giant red… sacks to it.
Supplied by MIS Marine & Industrials in large containers earlier, these sacks actually are water bags.
This is something I honestly have never seen before.
You never stop learning. These red bags are common when you need to test mobile cranes,
cranes inside buildings or onboard ships and even offshore rigs.
Owe from SpaceX 3D creation Eccentric was lightning fast again with his renders, tweeting it out even before SpaceX had started the tests.
MIS provides these water bags with a maximum capacity of up to 100 tons each.
They’re easy to use. Filled from the bottom with pumps and allow for very precise testing as you can gradually increase the weight.
Mounted very close to the actual lifting points where a booster or Starship would apply weight to the Chopsticks, they’re the perfect solution.
And test SpaceX did and now you’ll see, where all those memes came from.
I mean… look at it. Bigger and bigger… balls.
Hanging down… under it. You get the idea.
Since the channel is somewhat youth friendly, I won’t dive deeper into the name finding, but I’m pretty sure you can come up with one too.
Put it in the comments if you dare.
Leaving the meme sphere and entering technical correctness again, once the bags were filled,
SpaceX tested horizontal and vertical movement successfully.
And since they pretty much filled all 6 bags from the bottom, this test can be called a success.
Nothing out of the ordinary happened.
Mechazilla survived.
Now, how much weight are we talking?
How much water did SpaceX fill into the bags?
So, we had 6 bags attached and they were filled up pretty good and in the end,
Mechazilla will at least have to carry the weight of a super heavy booster, which can be estimated at roughly 200 tons empty.
So, it would be the heaviest it’ll have to carry at any given time as a Starship weighs around 120 tons empty.
Add a bit of left over fuel to the booster and we’re at maybe 220 tons or so.
So, to sufficiently test the chopsticks and Mechazilla as a whole, SpaceX would at least need to add 220 tons plus a safety margin.
So, let’s say something like 240 tons, maybe, which would give us 40 tons on each bag.
Of course, SpaceX has not released numbers yet and maybe never won’t, but this will likely come very close to it.
So, we’re talking 40-ton balls… I mean bags.
That’s pretty impressive and as said, it looked very successful as well.
So, what’s next? How will the testing continue?
After removing booster 3 from Pad A and after the upgrade, everything is set for more testing on the suborbital pads.
And now that Mechazilla has possibly passed its stress test it’s ready for more.
What’s still missing here is the full speed chopstick movement test.
All we’ve seen so far was very slow speed.
So, we’ll likely see it go up to its maximum travel time, which, don’t get your hopes too high, won’t be crazy fast.
As a little correction from the last episode,
the connection between the chopsticks and the NOV ADS-30Q Oil Rig Drawworks has ten and not 12 lines.
This means that if the Drawworks would in theory run at 10 kilometers per hour line speed, the chopsticks would move at 1 kilometer per hour.
Now, you can add a gearbox in between and the ADS-30Q has one, but then you reduce the power you have at hand.
This is speculation, as hard numbers are difficult to find, but in the end,
the Chopsticks will likely not be able to move faster than 1 to 2 kilometers per hour.
So, slow. If you want to know, why this won’t really be a problem after all, go and take a look at Episode 200,
where I took the time to explain it.
And after all that is done, we’ll likely see a wet dress rehearsal for Booster 4 and Ship 20 on the orbital launch mount including, yes,
we’ve all been waiting for this, a new full stack.
So, there’s a lot of stuff to look forward to at SpaceX’s Starbase even without a launch!
SpaceX Launch Update
Last, but not least for today, here’s the launch recap of Transporter 3, SpaceX’s latest ride share mission!
I wasn’t able to stream it as I was in the middle of testing streaming capability from Starbase, so here’s the quick rundown of the mission!
This launch was special in every way.
Booster B1058 hit its tenth launch, in under two weeks this was SpaceX’s second launch of 2022,
the 145th mission in total and the 136th Falcon 9 launch.
And as always, Falcon 9 did a flawless job.
Transporter missions are something special on their own as well.
They’re SpaceX’s ride share missions and even though the payloads on their own might not be as impressive as a James Webb Space telescope,
the sheer mass of them makes it an orchestra of separations.
In a nutshell, for as little as 1 million dollars and up to 200 kilograms each,
customers can book a flight on these missions and SpaceX collects payloads until the next flight is financed.
This time we had 105 payloads in total including CubeSats, microsats, PocketQubes and orbital transfer vehicles.
Get, why I mean that these launches are interesting to watch?
Since the mission went to a sun synchronous orbit it even was a return to launch site, which always is the icing on a Falcon 9 launch cake.
Launch cake..
44 of the 105 payloads for this mission came from one single customer.
Planet. They sent flock 4x of their SuperDove satellites up with Transporter 3. It marked the first satellite launch under their new multi-year
and multi-launch rideshare agreement with SpaceX.
This ramps up Planets satellite fleet to 240 on orbit.
SuperDove satellites are so called land imaging sats.
They basically take pictures of everything going on down here.
350 million square kilometers of area are covered every single day with approximately 3 meters per pixel of resolution.
Small but plenty.
In short, the ballet of deployments was extremely impressive again and there was not a single anomaly to talk about.
Besides Launcher One, Electron, Astra and Atlas 5, SpaceX has another 3 launches booked for January alone,
giving us an action packed calendar to look forward to this month!
Team Space rocks!
Here we are again, continuing my Skillshare class guide on how to become a successful content creator.
Basically, what I do but you’re doing it instead!
We had Marques Brownlee, Andy Pizza and Hallease already,
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Youtube Success: Script, Shoot & Edit.
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Trust me, I’ve been doing this for a while now.
Marques Brownlee,
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