Latest SpaceX starship launch

[Suff]

For those who are interested, because this is geeky space nerd stuff.

SpaceX is currently preparing for the next launch, IFT-5. They are, no surprise, currently in conflict with the FAA about their latest launch.

What is the conflict? That they are planning to catch the 200 tonne booster with rocket engine blasting and still with fuel in it, using the giant arms they call the chopsticks? Nope that's all good. The conflict is around that fact that they changed the flight profile very slightly and the hot staging ring will be ejected into a slightly larger potential path in the gulf of Mexico. To put it sarcastically an entirely different shark might get it in the head.

Even worse they said that it would be OK to drop a 200 Tonne booster AND the hot staging ring in the gulf of Mexico at the same location, but not to bring the booster back to land and not drop it in the ocean.

Some of us speculate that the reason the FAA have done this is because they can go to the fisheries and wildlife and the investigation has a window of 60 days and any single query and answer resets the clock to another 60 days. Potentially delaying it indefinitely.

Now SpaceX have just installed the flight termination explosives in the rocket and ship, the FAA has issued a NOTAM notice for the projected flight path starting Sunday for a window of 3-4 days. But if you contact the FAA and ask about a launch license they say nothing has changed and it is not going to fly until late November.

Which makes it very interesting. One point to note is that Starship is required for the NASA Artemis III human moon landing mission scheduled for September 2026 and every hold up now puts that at risk. NASA can issue launch licenses and the FAA has to issue a NOTAM for a NASA launch license.

Which is all rather interesting. I guess we will find out on Sunday.

On another note I had an interesting view, well for a geek anyway. I was posting my usual sarcastic asides like "It would suck if the booster shears an arm off, bounces off the launch mount and falls in the tank farm", the tank farm is quite close.

A day or so after that post SpaceX was seen manically welding strengthening plates on every weld on the arms with the entire welding team and every available cherry picker. We had a chat about it online because I was suggesting the arms would probably fall with the booster then they would align the catch to reduce force. We came to the conclusion that the cables would stretch around 6 inches when they took up the strain of the booster as the engine cut off. I hadn't done the math but ChatGPT is really good at engineering math. 6 inches of inertia from a fall for a 200 Tonne booster adds an additional 200 tonnes of inertial weight to be stopped. Or 400 Tonnes in all. I'm guessing the arms were not rated for 400 Tonnes and needed to be strengthened. It is certainly a design change because they applied the same plates to the second set of arms they have sitting there ready to be put on tower 2 they are currently building.

Lots of interesting stuff going on if you are a space nerd.

[Workingman]

I am also a space nerd, but my focus is on astronomy, cosmology, human history - its future.

The technology does interest me but I care little about the detail.

We are stuck here and the way we are going we will extinct ourselves long before the dream of populating other worlds becomes a reality.

We need to concentrate on Earth's current problems. Population, the raping of its finite resources, environmental destruction, climate, the desire for new "things" day after day.

This rocket stuff is fascinating but it solves our current problems not one jot.

[Suff]

I'm not so sure. Mars is a low gravity well and it is a half way house to the Asteroid belt.

The technology required to get to Mars and create a colony is exactly the same technology required to get to the asteroid belt and mine the asteroids.

Also Mars becomes a half way house for a fuel stop. The possibilities are very interesting. Especially if you factor in the moons of Jupiter with water and even lower gravity and the moons of Saturn with Methane and also lower gravity.

The other interesting part is how SpaceX intends to get to Mars. SpaceX is still a private company and that means it does not need to pay a dividend or present reports to the "shareholders" every quarter. They intend to expand Starlink Globally, get 2-3 billion subscribers and then use the profits to fund the colony on Mars.

This is fundamentally the opposite of just about every other private space company who are in it for the eventual profits. Also Starlink with 2-3 billion users generates funds which are larger than some pretty big sovereign states. Just imagine the entire GDP of the UK going to a Mars colony rather than the £500bn or so the government skims off it.

I have just about given up on "fixing" it on Earth. The governments can't sell it and most people are not willing to be convinced to pay for it. Then the companies won't change to mitigate it and we are where we are.

[Workingman]

The gravity on Mars is only ~40% that of Earth. Anybody going there will only be allowed a short stay before coming back; colonists will be there forever, that's if they can survive the cosmic and other high-energy radiations, temperature fluctuations and little atmosphere. They will probably have to live underground somehow, as living on the surface will not be possible with current shielding.

Mining of asteroids or other moons will have to done by robots as they will be beyond human endurance. The same goes for long-distance space travel, it's not Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica stuff.

There is a concept of using nuclear propulsion that could get us to Alpha Centauri (our nearest star with planets) in about 50 years, so a round-trip would be a multi-generational effort. Going further afield...?

All of the above are science facts. That's not to say that the science will not change, but with what we have today populating other planets is a dream / fiction.

[Suff]

Nobody said Mars would be easy. In fact Elon was particularly brutal in saying that the first people who went to Mars probably would not survive the return journey.

Have you looked at the Tesla Optimus? Not to criticise but to think about the possibilities in 3-5 years? Also and especially in remote operation mode from someone in a large and well shielded habitat.

Space solutions are about to take a serious jump. I think one of the first things they need to get are 1g spin gravity habitats in space.

[Workingman]

Optimus is a bot, it is not "us".

1G spin-gravity is useless unless we can protect the people and craft from cosmic radiation and other H.E. particles: we can't. There are concepts but they are either very heavy, rigid or use dangerous gases such as hydrogen. Do you fancy wandering about on Mars in a hydrogen suit?

Then there is the speed "thing" to get us to other places. We simply cannot get to the escape acceleration and constant velocities to do it. Nuclear pulse, ion drives and solar sails do not cut it. To move the mass of a crewed spacecraft, any spacecraft, to even 20% of lightspeed would take almost impossible power that we do not yet know about. Also, hit a dust particle at a collision speed close to that of light and you are done for. Your ship would need shields (that don't exist), and the energy released would be that of nuclear bomb. Warp drives - give it a rest.

Then there is communication. Currently it takes between 4 to 22 minutes to contact Mars, depending on our relative orbits. It takes almost a day to "speak" one-way to the Voyagers and they are only just out of the solar system. The further out the longer it gets. Probes would need a sort of AI we do not have. Radio waves are part of the electromagnetic spectrum and travel at the speed of light. If we got a probe or astronauts to Alpha Centauri it would be nine years before we heard back. Kirk on Enterprise in the Delta quadrant speaking directly to Earth is fiction.

If we can ever send communities out into space they will be on their own and will need to take everything with them they need to survive. They will no longer be "us" just space nomads.

[Suff]

I'm only thinking of Mars and the asteroid belt for now.

They haven't even touched the materials we may use in space yet, they've been struggling with 25 tonnes to oribt once every 3 months. When this goes up to 200 Tonnes to orbit 10 times a day things will change out of all recognition.

[Workingman]

200 Tonnes to orbit 10 times a day, eh?. When will that happen, and what will it solve? What is in those 2,000 tonnes day after day and where will it go? It's just more space crap blocking out our ability to see the Universe. Astronomers are already saying the Starlink system is doing this: more will make it worse.

[Suff]

I now you are a space nerd but you are Elon averse. This means you have a Huge gap in your knowledge on the plans for thisk.

As you know there is a Mars transfer window around every two years. In those two years SpaceX intend to push up to 1,000 tonnes a day to LEO to be marshalled in marshalling yards ready for boost to Mars in the transfer window.

Also SpaceX needs to build an orbital fuel depot for NASA Artemis III and the Starship HLS which is to land on the Moon for Artemis.

SpaceX also intend to build a base on the Moon too. Moonbase Alpha they call it.

Now you are going to say "how will they pay for it". Well here again you have to listen to Elon, yes I know it's irksome but if you don't you miss the boat. Think Starlink, 32,000 sats in LEO at any one time, 3bn customers around the globe. $40 a month. $1.4Trillion a year in revenue at around 80% profit.

You talk about crap in orbit but the only reason there isn't more crap in orbit is that it was too expensive. Falcon9 killed that one and Starship is going to bury it 100ft under ground. Now that LEO satellite clusters have been proven not only to be effective but to be on a par with land based systems in general, everyone wants one and I do mean EVERYONE. The Chinese are going nuts trying to build and launch as many as they can. Of course the Chinese sats don't have special reflecting panels to try and help the astonomers, they are visible with the naked eye.

Then there is Kuyper. Amazon intends to have thousands also.

Then there is AST Spacemobile which you might have heard about due to SpaceX having a legal spat with the regulator and naming AST as pretty much a vanity project. These sats provide direct to unmodified cell 5G. AST has 5 sats up right now, their antenna array is 64 square meters. Each. The largest in space. But the CEO says these sats will only provide viability testing signal for less than one hour. To get the full coverage for the US only they will need an antenna array 3x that size and 40 to 60 of them. Care to guess what it is going to do with earth based observations of the heavens?

The next move has to be space based shared telescopes. Both visible and radio. Rockets the size of Starship can deploy these telescopes for a very low price. Today Access to space has come down to around £1,500 per kg with Falcon 9, also driving Roscosmos down with it. However SpaceX are aiming for $10 per kg with Starship. Even if they miss by an order of magnitude it's still only $100.

These are the the fundamental changes happening in space today. It is not going to stop and it is not going to slow down. All the new startups and the Chinese are not trying to compete with ULA or Blue Origin and god help anyone who tries to copy ESA; they are competing with SpaceX which only drives the whole market faster.

It is on the basis of these changes to space that they are talking 10 launches 200tonnes. Where is the other 1,000 Tonnes going? I didn't miss it. Fuel to get the ships out of the lowest orbit and into a higher orbit or even to the Moon. Fully half the launches will be fuel for the other launches to go further.

This is one to watch. If they are able to launch on Sunday and catch this 200 Tonne booster which is 230 feet tall, then things are only going to go way FASTER. That is going to drive a colony on Mars in a way that was unthinkable only 10 years ago.

[Workingman]

Yes, all of this is technologically possible, but what for? To keep us keeping on destroying the Earth, and accelerating our demise, with our "wants" in the process?

I couldn't give a stuff about conglomerates and their $ £ € riches. I do care about the planet and those who live on it, for how many generations we have left. Not many I suspect.

That should be what we all aim for, but the capitalists, politicians and economists have convinced the unthinking public that we need their newest gadgets, and we fall for it.

iPhone 12 at 8G with a billion pixel cameras? How about a 90 inch plasma tv to watch crap cooking and reality shows? Call a driverless cybercab to get you to and from the pub!

I give up.

Space. It's out there and always will be. We wont, not even with St Elon in charge.

Did you know that wildlife species numbers have fallen by 73% in the last 50 years? We did that, and will soon be on that list. Welcome to Hell on Earth.