RCgothic

Yeah, the fodag's just a cap layer, a few cracks in probably aren't cause for concern. The reinforced concrete foundation is now 2.2m thick, a few surface cracks aren't going to trouble it. It's really notable how well the paint on the OLM withstood the static fire this time, looks like a near 100-fold reduction in stripped paint. The OLM engine-camera also survived this static fire intact which it has never done before. It's not zero damage, but it's much, much better from what we can see.

The last variant of lunar Starship we got a render of showed landing engines high in the fuselage, so I presume Mars Starship will be similar. This isn't something SpaceX won't be aware of.

Some combinations are easier than others. Stick an existing spacecraft on top of an expendable Starship? They could knock out a new adaptor from stainless steel and GSE to support it in 6-12 months. Different stage on top of SLS? It'd be over 5 years to get through the design studies contracting and infrastructure mods. Building a new stage from parts? 5+1d6 years probably.

In the same way SLS would be faster and cheaper for using existing components? Orbital ATK and Thales didn't even bid on HLS. They don't have HLS designs ready to go, and even if they did ESA doesn't provide components to NASA for free it's at best a quid pro quo. NASA currently claims 46t to TLI for SLS block 2 cargo (I know some users who'll swear up and down it's higher, there's currently no public proof), but only 43t for the non-cargo version, of which Orion/ESM eats at least 26.5t, leaving just 16.5t from NRHO. The smallest lander NASA studied from NRHO to the lunar surface is 36t minimum for a 3-stage, so it's 19.5t short of a total 62.5t crew variant to TLI. 36t comanifest payload is also long way beyond what Orion/ESM can even brake into NRHO (roughly 13t if expecting to manoeuvre in NRHO and return without any moon rock samples). The mass budget of 43t *maybe* closes direct to LLO if the ESM is stretched 50% and the lander can be brought in under 11.5t. But that lander would be absolutely skeletal, doesn't exist, would have to wait for a new space suits, MLP, ESM and EUS even if it did, only gives a few surface days maybe once a year on average, could land no significant surface payloads, probably only 1 astronaut, has no upgrade path, almost certainly wouldn't meet NASA's safety standards, and is with 100% certainty getting cancelled faster than Apollo did and would deserve to be. 1 astronaut and no payload would be embarrassing. Nowhere even close to sustainable. I have some sympathy for the view that the landing should be delayed until we can do it properly: 4+ times per year and/or with crews of 4-20 in a permanently inhabited and steadily growing surface base. Zero sympathy for tearing up two fantastic lander systems that could support that in order to try and stick to a landing date that has always been impossible without an alternate history with an earlier start date. TLDR: The dates wouldn't close for a new lander even if the mass and cash budgets did, which they don't, and a skeletal lander absolutely couldn't acheive the programme goals of sustainable lunar missions. Edit: Once more for absolute clarity the medium-long term problem with Artemis is Orion ESM SLS, which are genuinely terrible, and to a lesser extent Gateway which is merely useless. The BO or SpaceX lander systems are genuinely the best parts of Artemis and are worth waiting for even if they cause a bit of a delay. The HLS landers can fly often, carry huge payloads, and if we can bypass SLS Orion and Gateway then a permanently inhabited lunar colony is possible. The depot architectures further enable missions beyond the earth-moon system. If we cancel HLS to depend only on SLS Orion and whatever skeletal lander a stretched ESM can limp into LLO we might as well give up and let China take the lead, because whilst China might not get back there first, you can guarantee that when they do they'll arrive with a plan for more than just flags and footprints. I genuinely cannot grok looking at Artemis and wanting to scrap the best bits whilst keeping the worst.

The closest alternative lander is the NT lander, which is even further away from ready and depends on a launch vehicle that has had zero test flights and an engine that has zero hours of flight time. Lunar Starship will be done when it's done, and if it's not NT will overtake it and SpaceX won't get paid. There is no magic alternative that can do it faster, or that could have done it faster if started at the same time. NASA should have started the lander program earlier, should have started the space suit program earlier, and if it needed cash maybe it should have focused on those things that were actually definitely needed for a landing instead of a lot of things that weren't like monolithic launchers, upgrades for that launcher, additional launch towers for that launcher, and space stations in the cheeks end of nowhere.

Back to the launch site to have a hot staging ring installed.

It was asserted in an NSF recap stream I think. That said, their article on the test states a near-full set of 33 raptors with an intent to fire all 33. https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/08/starship-booster-9-critical-testing-phase/#more-95083

Apparently it was a 9-engine static fire, so 4 early shutdowns is near 50% followed by an early test finish. They'll 100% do another static fire IMO.

Test was targeted for 5s, so half test duration with 4 engines shut down earlier. I'd expect them to repeat the test, that doesn't sound like they acheived what they wanted.

FireEx. Deluge. Static fire! Short, a couple seconds. Looked good! Confirmation: 2.7s second firing, 4 early shutdowns.

Possibly 7 minutes to static fire, there's an official countdown. Maybe a few slight holds first. Both tanks now completed loading.

I agree, that's the bit that doesn't sit right to me.

1) Antimatter isn't a fuel. There's no natural antimatter resources in nature. It needs to be created from another energy source. It's effectively a storage medium. 2) Antimatter would not be easier than Fusion. Fusion admittedly needs a very hot plasma to overcome nuclear repulsion, but it only needs to pulse that hot briefly and if containment is not perfect the spill just quenches mostly harmlessly. Antimatter needs perfect containment. It still needs to be a plasma because it needs to be charged to be contained electromagnetically. It needs to be contained 100% if the time with 100% efficiency. And if containment isn't perfect it'll violently disassemble its containment assembly and everything in the immediate area.

The third is definitely growing on me.

According to the stats it's a height increase of 3m from 40m to 43m with a 2m fairing diameter decrease from 7m to 5m.

I'm not sure. Length of coast isn't necessarily related to DV performance, though certainly higher energy manoeuvres such as GEO insertion or LO insertion requires longer coasts so there is some correlation. But if you burn immediately for a high energy earth departure then you'll need a regular nozzle but won't need endurance mods. It could make sense that Standard is the new half-cut MVac, Medium is Falcon Upper Stage Classic, and Long Coast is upper stage with endurance mods. Alternatively Standard could be the regular upper stage, Medium is with the usual long-coast mods, and Long-Coast is a new ultra-long coast spec for lunar missions and such, with short MVacs an option on all of them. I'm speculating. Definitely interested to find out more.

3 cores, three times the number of sensor limits that could be violated. I also think talk of reusability limits being violated is premature. Also, the centre core is never before flown and the side boosters have flown twice. This falcon heavy is a rookie by falcon standards. It could be they've recently encountered a new fleet issue that they're currently keeping an enhanced eye on, or it may be a higher number of scrubs right now is just dumb luck.

Unless the uranium has been in a reactor this is not a big deal. Unirradiated fuel is barely radioactive, mostly only emits alpha particles at a very low rate, and is likely dense enough to survive re-entry mostly in one piece without getting scattered by vapourisation in the upper atmosphere. It can be safely handled with thin unshielded gloves.

As a nuclear engineer I concur. The supply chain for nuclear fuel fabrication has many steps, is energy intensive, and requires minute tolerances. That's not even counting cladding materials and poisons. They would definitely be shipping nuclear fuel from earth for the foreseeable future.

Twitter wasn't good for my health and this is just a suitable watershed. I don't mind viewing curated tweets, but I'm not going to go doomscrolling to find space news anymore.

I won't be posting any more content from Twitter (or X as it's about to become) - I'm now permanently logged out. Relying on you guys now to get my SpaceX news!

Possible reason Ship27 was scrapped: https://twitter.com/RGVaerialphotos/status/1683177399268126722?s=20

Smooth test so far! Looking good.

Rumour is that SpaceX are targeting mid-August for flight test 2. Slip to the right to be expected though.