Unrolled tweet thread at threadreaderapp.com by Ryan Hansen Space @RyanHansenSpace. It's a look at the details of the steel plate parts and assembly under the Orbital Launch Mount.

The Ars Technica story was edited based on an FAA ... tweet.

(Note: at 6 pm ET on Wednesday, the FAA issued the following statement).

"The SpaceX Starship mishap investigation remains open," the agency stated. "The FAA will not authorize another Starship launch until SpaceX implements the corrective actions identified during the mishap investigation and demonstrates compliance with all the regulatory requirements of the license modification process."

SpaceX @SpaceX on Twitter

Ship 25 completes a six-engine static fire test at Starbase in Texas

11 seconds. In the audio, only a little bit of HONK at the end.

Someone pointed out that the flames start out as a triangle, but then switch rotated 60 degrees when the vacuum engines start - V to ^.

A comment in The Other Place mentioned that it looks like a little spalled concrete at 4 seconds in.

In a later tweet, Musk called it a "Key milestone completed for flight 2".

There's a lot more than what AutoTL;DR reported. The article is by Stephen Clark, who now swaps out with Eric Berger on the weekly roundup article for ArsTechnica.

So the big news of the day and night was what is believed to be the center plate of the water deluge system. It is thought that it will be placed directly under the Orbital Launch Mount.

@[email protected] already posted (at top level) "CSI Starbase video on new Deluge system", a deep dive part 1. The URL I see for the post is https://lemmy.world/post/879748 , because that's how I access this. The canonical one is https://lemm.ee/post/530280 .

CSI Starbase SPMT Tracker @SpmtTracker posted a tweet with a picture of what is very likely to be a vertical stand for the center plate. The image is on Imgur. The tweet is here. Ryan Hansen Space @RyanHansenSpace tweeted a rendering of how it might look under the OLM. This should be the image:

@[email protected] posted below (if sorted by new) a link to a 13-minute video by Starship Gazer, of people working in the tent on the center plate. https://lemm.ee/comment/534238 . Someone commented that, from 4 minutes on, it's comedy gold. People were grinning around them. I'm told that someone is standing on top of the cheater pipe at one point.

NASASpaceflight posted a video of the rollout of the center. It's about 1 hour 26 minutes long. The stand / jig was on the first truck; the center plate with some people on it was on the next truck. The clearest views are about 17 minutes on.

John Kraus @johnkrausphotos:

In a Twitter Space with @ashleevance, @elonmusk shares that Starship will hot-stage during the next flight, lighting engines on the ship with some engines still running on the booster, as to Never Stop Thrusting!™️

"Hot staging" is firing the upper stage engines while it's still nominally attached to the lower stage (like resting on or loosely attached). The advantages that I gather exist: It's fast. It takes care of stage separation without needing springs or little rockets or a flip or anything. Before firing a liquid-fueled stage that may have gases in a tank ("ullage"), you have to settle the contents so that the engine intakes suck only liquid (maybe using "ullage rockets"), but if you're still accelerating at separation, that's automatically taken care of.

But if you intend to reuse the first stage, well, I wonder whether six engines igniting will be too hard on it.

Apparently U.S. Titan rockets, a lot of Soviet / Russian ones (Soyuz, Progress, N-1), and (some?) Chinese Long March rockets were designed with hot staging.

Joe Barnard @joebarnard replies: "'okay so when I hot stage it’s “an anomaly” and I’ve “torched another flight computer” but when SpaceX does it it’s fine???'

Edit: There's now an article up at SpaceNews, "SpaceX changing Starship stage separation ahead of next launch", which includes

"We made sort of a late-breaking change that’s really quite significant to the way that stage separation works," Musk said, describing the switch to hot staging. "There’s a meaningful payload-to-orbit advantage with hot-staging that is conservatively about a 10% increase."...

Musk said that, for Starship, most of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster would be turned off, but a few still firing, when the engines on the Starship upper stage are ignited. Doing so, he said, avoids the loss of thrust during traditional stage separation, where the lower stage shuts down first.

Doing so requires some modifications to the Super Heavy booster. Musk said SpaceX is working on an extension to the top of the booster “that is almost all vents” to allow the exhaust from the upper stage to escape while still attached to the booster. SpaceX will also add shielding to the top of the booster to protect it from the exhaust.

“This is the most risky thing, I think, for the next flight,” he said of the new stage separation technique.

Besides the change in stage separation, Musk said SpaceX made a “tremendous number” of other changes to the vehicle, “well over a thousand.” He didn’t go into details about the changes, ...

SpaceX also made improvements to the Raptor engines, with Musk describing the vehicle launching in April as using a “hodgepodge” of engines built over time. The Raptors on the new vehicles include changes to the hot gas manifold in the engine to reduce fuel leakage.

Those changes, he said, gave him more confidence in the success of the next launch. “I think the probability this next flight working, getting to orbit, is much higher than the last one. Maybe it’s like 60%.” In an online conversation in late April, he estimated a “better than 50% chance” of success on the next launch.

In another note, Musk finally learned some caution!

Musk, asked about any plans for a Starlink IPO, declined to comment. “It would not be legal for me to speculate about a Starlink IPO,” he claimed. “I think it’s against regulations to talk with any kinds of specifics about a future public offering.”

Edit: Peter Hague PhD @peterrhague: Thus far Musk estimates $2-3bn invested by SpaceX so far in Starship. The price of a single SLS launch

there doesn’t seem to be an alternative to the Starship development thread

Well, Starship Development Thread #46B seems to be the closest we have at the moment, and is intended to echo it. Two of us are posting the important updates there.

More pour info, this time from tweets from Zack Golden @CSI_Starbase. The truck counts basically match those from @[email protected]'s post earlier.

SpaceX has received their final load of concrete for today's Orbital Launch Mount foundation work. Here are the totals after the 15.3 hour marathon:

June 25th - 132 Truck loads

July 3rd - 171 Truck loads

Total Volume = 2,302 m^3 = 3030 yd^3

Total Weight = 5,411 Tons

For reference, a Fully loaded Starship ~ 5,000 Tons

Note: There were 4 additional trucks that showed up but were turned back around without offloading.

Shoutout to agents @VickiCocks15 and @SpmtTracker for keeping track of all these.

4:11 PM · Jul 3, 2023

and

Obviously this number is significantly greater than we predicted. For those who asked, that previous number was not considering the area in yellow, which were also completed today. This area is technically outside of the true foundation of the OLM

with a picture by RGV Aerial Photography.

(For those who don't know, Cameron County is around Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. I happen to know that off the top of my head because there's a rocket research center there.)

Fish and Wildlife's comments were published yesterday. I gather that the document was deleted from the original location, but as I recall, it was pretty much copied and pasted into the body of the final FAA determination WRITTEN RE-EVALUATION OF THE 2022 FINAL PROGRAMMATIC ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT FOR THE SPACEX STARSHIP/SUPER HEAVY LAUNCH VEHICLE PROGRAM AT THE BOCA CHICA LAUNCH SITE IN CAMERON COUNTY, TEXAS. I remember the bit about "Per the table above, an average summertime thunderstorm at Boca Chica would deposit more water over the landscape than any single or all combined activations of the deluge system".

There's a new (lord I hate the new name) thread from The Ringwatchers @Ringwatchers about the Hot Stage Load Head et al. Someone did an unroll and it's here. I haven't time at the moment to go over it in detail. It looks like two ring sections will be above and below, and they will be reinforced because they are irrelevant to the hot stage sieve. The Hot Stage Load Head has been reinforced in several ways; there are pictures. The assembly will go into the can crusher.

Starship Gazer @StarshipGazer 5:21 PM - Jul 20, 2023

New Booster Hot Staging section spotted earlier today. - 7/20/23 - https://starshipgazer.com

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

SpaceX made a prototype like this, with lots of vertical slits, and then scrapped it. It was suggested at the time that it might have been for hot staging. Well, that's looking more likely. The current article has the outlines of the vertical slits but they haven't been snipped out.

"SpaceX Files its Starship Mishap Report to the FAA" by Jack Kuhr at Payload.

SpaceX has filed a final mishap investigation report to the FAA for its April 20 Starship integrated flight test, the FAA told Payload on Tuesday. ...

SpaceX delayed submitting the final report for months while it implemented significant changes to both the launch vehicle and pad....

The changes mostly being the booster bidet, but there's also the Flight Termination System (FTS).

The FAA did not provide a specific timeline for its review process, leaving the timeframe for potential approval up in the air. SpaceX will need the go-ahead from the FAA before it launches again.

What about it!? @FelixSchlang tweet from 3:03 PM - Jun 29, 2023:

It happened!!!

SpaceX opened the wall to the inventory tent and revealed one of the water deluge plates to us up close and countless other things in there!

High res pictures for supporters on all platforms coming soon!

The image alone.

In a reply, they said it looks to be upside down.

In The Other Place, u/warp99 wrote,

Looks like the segments are around 400mm thick and constructed from 40mm (38mm=1.5"?) steel plate The overall shape is a hexagon about 10m across the flats with each corner notched out.

They also speculated on how to weld the edges together: maybe put them on a stand above the final location, weld them from above and below, attach cranes and remove the stand, lower into place.

Starship Gazer (as seen on Nitter) had more pictures.

Much lifting and lowering and all sorts of craney stuff, but it's believed that all the manifolds are in place by now. A nice Imgur picture of a manifold being craned.

According to a SpaceX label, it's for Human Landing System, presumably a mockup or test article.

Chris Bergin - NSF @NASASpaceflight 4:20 PM · Aug 12, 2023, "Mary ( @BocaChicaGal) took some cool shots of the Ship 22 nosecone that went on a wander today. Human-sized door on its side!"

Image 1 -- Image 2 -- Image 3

Jack Beyer @thejackbeyer 5:05 PM · Aug 12, 2023, "The former S22 nosecone with a door that was rolled out today has an electrical box that says "HLS" on it... neat. @NASASpaceflight"

Image 1 -- Image 2 -- Image 3

TheSpaceEngineer @mcrs987 5:48 PM · Aug 12, 2023, "This is what we currently believe the interior of the Ship 22 crew cabin article looks like. -lol in the time it took to make this infographic it has now been confirmed to be HLS related"

Image

SpaceTwitter 5:02 PM - Jul 27, 2023:

After initial activation, a full-pressure test of the new Starship flame deflector is planned for Friday

With it is a great picture, taken from a height, of the recent test.

Same to you, bud! I figure I'll keep blowing on the embers. Either the flame will catch (& I get to boast "I was into Lemmy before it really took off"), or my lungs will get too tired.

The, or one of the, most successful rockets ever? And people are taking pictures and videos of the launches anyway.

And this couldn't have been predicted because ...?