RCgothic

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.

Nice!

O_o

No, actually. Making up numbers here to illustrate: If Superheavy RTLS is a 20% payload penalty (because of its superior performance ) and it can put 250t mass into LEO inc starship dry mass and reserved deorbit and landing fuel, then expending Superheavy gets ~312t to the same orbit. If we apply a Falcon 40% payload penalty to Superheavy, that would imply 417t to LEO expended. That exaggerates Superheavy's performance by 105t. The bigger Falcon payload penalty is not bounding for the purpose of estimating Superheavy's expendable performance.

I made an argument like this on Twitter one time and it was suggested back to me that because Raptor has a higher ISP and Superheavy has higher temperature tolerances, it doesn't need to save as much fuel for boostback and landing, so applying a Falcon payload penalty to Superheavy probably isn't fair.

20M lbfs for superheavy is ~275 metric tonnes per raptor by the way. More powerful than currently available BE-4 figures. (~250t)

200t+ to a useful orbit. That's likely 250t+ to LEO Ref. Even more expended. These performance figures may be aspirational rather than near future. The flight cadence certainly is.

Wow

Yes, that's exactly what this is. It rolls under the OLM, the wings fold out, and then it's hoisted up to engine level.

I guess that's in order to maintain control authority on the booster. In other news, metal plates already getting installed. It's coming together quickly!

Or maybe the extended flip staging manoeuvre they had planned previously was just that much of a performance penalty.