This episode is sponsored by Brilliant.
Mechazilla does more and more testing!
But what exactly is it capable of?
How does it move, and how precise will it have to be to catch a Super Heavy Booster?
Is all this even doable? Let’s find out!
My name is Felix, and I've been your host for the past 50 episodes.
And as always, there’s been a lot going on in the space industry lately, so let’s dive right in!
Starship Updates
At SpaceX's Starbase right now, everything is about Mechazilla testing.
The giant 145 m tall Integration tower, supposed to not only launch but also catch Super Heavy Boosters and Starships, later on,
is moving more and more.
While these are all just very early tests, they show that SpaceX’s Mechazilla is capable of all necessary movements for a catch by now.
The catch arms or Chopsticks can move sideways together and separately.
Chopstick movement up and down is realized through the carriage system attached to the tower itself.
Here’s one of Owe’s excellent animations showing half of the carriage system attached to the Integration tower.
It moves up and down along a rail system.
These linear bearings slide along the rail system all the way up to the top of the tower and down again.
In theory, relatively high speeds can be achieved with such a system.
Now, WAI cam operator Chief's footage is sped up significantly, as you can tell by the moving Moon in the picture.
Mechazilla is moving extremely slow right now.
The reason for that is caution.
The system is currently undergoing its first tests and hasn't even been stress tested yet.
Anything and everything could, in theory, go wrong.
Hope not.
If one or even both Chopsticks would come loose by accident.
If they’d fall, maybe even hit the orbital launch mount under them, the damage done would be significant.
Months of repairing and rebuilding would be the result.
So, this movement speed is not nearly as fast as Mechazilla can and will move later.
The Upper Quick disconnect arm was tested as well.
Articulated with hydraulic actuators, it won’t have to move that fast.
It’ll be used to fuel the Starship sitting on top of a super Heavy booster before a launch and to stabilize the whole stack like a traditional
strong back used, for example, on Falcon 9 rockets.
The arm is slowly being retracted and swiveled outwards a few minutes before launch.
No sudden movement is needed.
Tests continued on Sunday, and SpaceX's chopsticks made it all the way to the top of the tower.
Here's some footage taken from Louis's fantastic LabPadre live cams.
It's again sped up, showing the chopsticks arriving at the top of the tower.
Pictures and videos always have one problem, though.
It's hard to make out sizes. So, let’s get ourselves a size comparison.
How high did the sticks go?
All the way up to stacking position.
This is a full-stack Starship photoshopped into Sunday’s LabPadre view.
That should do the trick. By the way, the chopsticks will only need to go this high for a stack,
grabbing the Starship at the Mechazilla Hardpoints, lifting it up, and placing it on top of a booster.
Thank you, Alex, for the nice mockup!
Wonderful job!
Elon Musk himself posted a short clip of a Drone filming Mechazilla while the chopsticks were in the stacking position and posted it to Twitter!
Besides being a great perspective again, it also shows how tall Mechazilla actually is.
Right at the end of the video, we can see yet another quick disconnect test being performed on the Orbital launch mount.
Well done, Drone pilot. Perfectly timed!
So, what about the speed of the chopsticks?
How fast will they actually go once SpaceX is a bit more confident in the construction?
And, how fast will they need to move for a Super Heavy or Starship catch?
As can be seen in this beautiful and brand new animation by Owe from SpaceX 3D Creation eccentric,
the Mechazilla Chopsticks are moved around by this NOV ADS-30Q Oil Rig Drawworks, likely taken out of Phobos,
one of SpaceX’s future offshore Sea Launch platforms for Starships.
It features two electric motors with a total of 6000 Horsepower.
That’s quite the oomph and very much enough to lift a Starship or a Super Heavy booster.
It doesn’t say anything about the speed, though.
Gearboxes and pulley systems change the ratio at which the movement of the Drawworks is transmitted towards the chopsticks.
In the case of Mechazilla, we have twelve lines with a steel cable of between 38 and 48 millimeters, each roughly pulling around 82 tons of weight.
So, Drawworks turn rate does not equal chopstick movement.
Huge thanks go out to Owe again for all the help.
Working together with you is a blast!
Go check out his channel! Link is in the description!
Absolutely worth your time!
Right now, it's impossible to say how fast they'll actually be able to move, but a few Kilometers per hour should be possible.
It’s unlikely that they’ll be crazy fast, though.
The only videos we have of a Super Heavy Booster catch attempt are animations from various 3D artists from the Space Community.
Like Corey's here from C-Bass Productions, they're exceptionally well done.
Since it hasn't happened yet in reality, it's impossible to say how close to reality they are.
In theory, the chopsticks wouldn't have to move much up or down at all during the catch.
A Falcon 9 booster touches down on a drone barge very softly most of the time.
More important would likely be the sideways movement.
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Now, let's see how precise Mechazilla will likely have to be to achieve the first-ever orbital rocket catch in human history!
Swiveling the chopsticks left, and right will be far more critical than large vertical movement to soften the touchdown.
Relative speed reduction mostly will be done by the center Raptor engines on Starship and Booster.
The alignment will need to be done by moving the chopsticks left and right.
Lunar Caveman was busy for Team Space, calculating the range of the chopsticks.
He could narrow it down to 113 degrees when the sticks are open based on pictures and self-made measurements.
Since we know the length of the catching beams, too,
a possible landing area for the booster can be calculated from a minimal to a maximal possible position.
On top of doing this, Lunar Caveman then made a very fitting size comparison.
What does SpaceX land rockets on right now?
Right. Drone ships. And those very much seem to be large enough to reliably hit and not fall into the ocean.
So, let’s use Falcon 9 as a comparison.
Here we go. Those yellow circles are what you can see on the deck of a SpaceX drone ship overlayed on the chopsticks for comparison.
It’s the circles every Falcon 9 booster lands inside of, and Super Heavy will land very similar to a Falcon 9 booster.
Here, for example, you can see the most beautiful live footage of a Falcon 9 booster landing to date.
It's GPS3 Vehicle 5, and as you can see, the booster is not dead center but manages to stay well within the rings.
So, in theory, the Super Heavy booster will roughly need the same precision as a Falcon 9 booster for the catch to work out.
The chopsticks have less range forward but the same or even more to the sides.
Doesn’t look that crazy anymore, does it?
The Chopsticks only need to quickly move to the precise edges of the booster, and the catch is successful.
The next question then would be, how quickly the Mechazilla chopsticks need to move to be able to get to the right position for the catch?
Let’s use Falcon 9 again for comparison as it even uses the same grid fin and avionic combination.
This is footage from the first-ever Falcon Heavy launch.
It's the perfect example as we can even study two Falcon 9 boosters land simultaneously.
The side cores both returned back to Kennedy Space Center.
There is still significant course correction and movement in the booster paths high above the pads.
The grid fins are working to keep them on course.
But watch as the picture switches to the ground camera and as the boosters get closer to the pad.
Almost no movement above ground.
Only downwards. On the last few meters, the grid fins are useless, the speed is low, and there really isn't any movement at all anymore.
They just softly touch down, and that's it.
Both made it. Well done, SpaceX.
I think, Corey nailed it very much.
There might be a bit much vertical movement to soften the catch in the animation as I don't believe that this much will be needed or that the
chopsticks will be able to move that fast.
But technically, this does come very, very close to what we might see at the first attempt.
I’m not saying it’s an easy task, but it’s not impossible either.
SpaceX already possesses the tech needed to steer a booster back to a landing site, though, and even after 100 successful landings,
they're still the only company in the world to return orbital class boosters back to Earth for reuse.
It's a challenging task, but SpaceX has already achieved similarly complicated tasks before.
What do you think? Will SpaceX have difficulty achieving the first successful catch, or will they get it right on the first try?
As always, tell me in the comments!
Chief produced so much footage of the Mechazilla testing.
It's far too much to show on a single episode.
That's why we have WAI Plus. If you want to see it all, head over to our subchannel, subscribe,
and see every little detail directly from the WAI cam!
JWST Updates
Last but certainly not least, for today's episode,
let's take a look at the most complex Space Telescope ever built and how it's been doing so far!
The James Webb space telescope is making stunning progress.
It’s on its way to the Lagrange 2 point roughly 1.5 million kilometers behind Earth as seen from the Sun.
And it has a full list of things to do until it arrives there.
Since its launch, it's gone through dozens of deployment steps and, so far, has completed all of them successfully.
On January 4th, for example, they've finished deploying Webb's sun shield.
All 5 layers got extended and tensioned successfully.
The shield provides protection on the level of more than SPF one million if it were sunscreen lotion and is needed for the very sensitive infrared
telescope to perform at peak efficiency.
The secondary mirror was deployed successfully as well, and it latched in place safely.
Then came the primary mirror wings.
Both expanded as planned and latched, which marks full deployment.
So, the first challenging phase of deployment is over, and you can breathe slower now.
Not much, though….
Now comes half a year of mirror alignment and instrument cooling until it will be ready to deliver the first images.
Actuators behind each mirror enable the aligning or phasing of the telescope’s 18 hexagonally shaped primary mirror segments to function as a
single 6.5-meter mirror. The mirror’s actuators are so precise that they can move in steps that are a fraction of a wavelength of light,
or about 1 10000’s the diameter of a human hair.
James Webb will use a single star as the focal point and adjust all mirrors so that in the end, only one single and very crisp star is visible.
Actually, it won't be that crisp.
Once that is finished, a process called wavefront sensing and control is utilized to align and very finely focus the mirrors.
A special laser acts like a star, and a device called a multi-wavelength interferometer then focuses the laser further and further.
All this is monitored and operated from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
And they seem to be doing an incredible job so far!
Thank you very much for working so hard on this important project!
Fingers crossed for the rest of the preparation phase!
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