RCgothic

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.

Yes I recall that speculation now. Good call!

Notably the ability to hot stage potentially allows a zero zero abort.

Starship/Superheavy changing to hot staging. 10% payload increase. That'd be up to 165t to LEO Ref. Booster is getting longer for the adaptor and shielding required. Ready for flight in about 6 weeks (Elon time).

ULA not doing great this year.

I'll add my strong disapproval of wobbly rockets to the chorus. A *slight* amount of wobble may be unobnoctious, but if it bends a rocket like a banana or prevents construction of large vessels then it'd be preferable to remove entirely. Aero and structural failures are fine, but find a better way. I can fly a wobbly rocket to orbit, but it's not what I'd call fun. The bug that stopped me playing this patch was after a frustrating time nursing such a rocket to orbit through several flights it just despawned on acheiving an above atmo perigee. As an unrelated suggestion - it'd be nice if struts and tubes had toggleable internal attachment points.

Apparently it's a tape commonly used in spaceflight, including on the ISS. The issue wasn't known until now and this could have repercussions beyond Starliner.