totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[darthgently]

52 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Bezos is better at keeping low profile, but I agree that it's no reason to let him off the hook. People should scrutinize BO and its gov't contracts more. Both the past under current admin, and what they'll get under the incoming.

Relevant read: Whataboutism

I'm pointing out specific patterns in company statements and decisions in the context of technology used and stated and expected timelines for the development as well as past behavior of companies under the leadership of the same individuals - the political stance of said individuals was at no point brought up, and you trying to make it sound like it's about politics rather than company policy is exactly what you're accusing the rest of us of doing right now.

Company policy is relevant to the discussion of technology and its safety, and so setting that aside because you want to make it sound like decisions made by company leadership are automatically politics, because it hurts your own narrative, is not helpful to anyone involved in the discussion.

Not buying it.  You specifically brought up politics and political connections several times.  Again, your concerns, if sincere, would better be directed to the decision makers involved rather than merely focusing torturing the forum.

If you would stick to knowns and not blatantly biased hypotheticals it would be easier to accommodate the walls of text.   The whatabout was to point out the bias and it did that.

Let’s just stop this.  Stick to the facts and the forum bounds.  Get on X if you want free speech.  I’m easy to find.

[darthgently]

22 hours ago, GuessingEveryDay said:

I think I found a map for what the NOTAMs looked like for the IFT-7's launch plan.

Turk and Caicos is very helpfully labelled on the map.

As already noted, but ignored, those are the initial restricted zones in those maps not the dynamic ones preplanned and issued in case of a break up.  The larger zone that rerouted planes was north of the islands.

Any debris that was blown over the Turks and Cacos would be small lightweight material probably carried by winds because it is small and lightweight.  The only thing I’ve seen reported is a scrap of the underlying ablative about the size of a piece of office paper, not a tile or a chunk of metal, or a raptor.   Not ideal, but the sky is not, in fact falling.  No reported damage or injuries

 

Edited Saturday at 08:09 PM by darthgently

[K^2]

23 minutes ago, darthgently said:

Get on X if you want free speech.

Bait used to be believable.

 

Anyways, FAA asking for a mishap investigation indicates that a mishap resulting in increased risk to public has occurred, in their opinion, and they want to know why.

https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/statements/general-statements

Notably, from the FAA statement:

Quote

A Debris Response Area is activated only if the space vehicle experiences an anomaly with debris falling outside of the identified closed aircraft hazard areas. It allows the FAA to direct aircraft to exit the area and prevent others from entering.

Emphasis for anyone with trouble parsing the statement whole. So the claim that, "The hazard zone was indicated in advance, and that's where the debris fell," does not hold water. The debris fell outside of the hazard area, creating danger to airline traffic.

[PakledHostage]

For the record: This is not some clickbait crap. VASAviation is a very informative aviation channel. 

Edited Saturday at 06:04 AM by PakledHostage

[darthgently]

15 hours ago, K^2 said:

So the claim that, "The hazard zone was indicated in advance, and that's where the debris fell," does not hold water. The debris fell outside of the hazard area, creating danger to airline traffic.

I never claimed that.  I specifically wrote that the dynamic zone after the break up was north of the islands and that lighter and smaller material was blown onto the islands.  So outside the zone.  SpaceX didn’t define those zones, btw.

Edited Saturday at 08:08 PM by darthgently

[tater]

Funny, the same people here brought up the same problems BEFORE Musk had any connection at all to the President elect, and indeed while he was an enemy of the current President (who intentionally shunned/targeted his companies (EV tax credit was designed to not apply to tesla, they only got it by dropping prices since unlike their competitors, they don;t lose money on every car they sell and had the margin to do so)). An enemy for thinking people should not be unpersoned on twitter (I had my twitter locked for an unremarkable reply stating a self-evident truth back in the day that was considered wrongspeak). So these claims are BS.

Not sure what any of that has to do with the FAA, the problem SpaceX—and other launch providers—currently has with the FAA is one of efficiency, not safety requirements. When it takes longer to get a 10 page ruling than it takes to build a complete Starship stack, there's clearly something wrong at the agency writing the document. What is wrong could simply be lack of staff commensurate with the current volume of launches, but regardless it needs to be addressed. That outfit whose name escapes me working on in space mfg cited the same problems with their reentry capsule. Clearly it needs regulation as they drop a capsule into the western desert in the US, but they are required to do an analysis of how the capsule might interact with buildings along the entry track should it fall short. That's a fine average calculation to do to ballpark safety margins, but the CEO said they have to redo it every flight looking at the typical houses under that particular track. So if it heads to Utah via San Diego, they need to do calcs for tile roofs, via Oregon maybe cedar shingles. Obviously they could just have been asked to do it once with calcs for a bunch of generic roof types and put the results in a table. If BO gets their act together, they need to jump from NG-1 to a current F9 flight rate if they want to get Kuiper up. FAA Space people were built up to deal with a total number of launches in a year that is exceeded in a month now.

We get it, the X man has a different political POV than you, and that makes him very bad, and a unique risk.

Regarding the hazard zone, I think they have an area defined where there is likely debris from a failure at the altitude aircraft operate within where they have a "keep out" for some length of time. Everywhere outside that along the flight path is ALSO a risk for ALL space launches, and always has been—and you use ATC to get aircraft out of the track should an anomaly occur. They don't make all aircraft avoid the ground track of uncontrolled Chinese boosters indefinitely—they might divert some aircraft once they know there is a decent chance of debris at <50,000ft.

Edited Saturday at 03:22 PM by tater

[tater]

I'd prefer to simply talk about SpaceX stuff. It's important to notice derails exclusively come from one POV that feels the need to interject politics. Following the rules apparently means that the polite people just ignore political bombs dropped, never dropping any themselves (because we read and understood the rules). Then there will be a cleansing—the judge telling the jury to ignore what they already heard. Guess that's the playbook.

ObSpaceX:

 

[AVaughan]

Regarding the risks of crewed Starship launches.  In the short term I would be more concerned about them rushing to catch Starship after re-entry, since with the existing catch tower locations, I think they pretty much need to do a re-entry over land, potentially putting people on the ground at risk if/when something goes wrong.

Regarding debris landing on the Turks and Caicos Islands.  In Scott Manley's video I thought the flightpath went pretty much directly over the Islands, so the possibility of debris landing on them would have been known beforehand.  (With that said, I'm not sure there is a launch corridor from Boca Chica that doesn't pretty much overfly at least some land in the Carribean/Central America region.  That route may well be the best/safest route available).

[darthgently]

14 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

For the record: This is not some clickbait crap. VASAviation is a very informative aviation channel. 

That is a good vid to watch.  I watch a few AV channels and that is how the ATC machine works and it works very well.  
Below is an image of the initial post break up declared debris zones.  They were north of the islands as I previously posted.  I maintain that any debris outside these areas was wind blown lightweight fluttering stuff like small pieces of the ablative under layer as seen in one posted pic.  

Edited Saturday at 08:06 PM by darthgently

[tater]

Cool image:

 

49 minutes ago, AVaughan said:

Regarding the risks of crewed Starship launches.  In the short term I would be more concerned about them rushing to catch Starship after re-entry, since with the existing catch tower locations, I think they pretty much need to do a re-entry over land, potentially putting people on the ground at risk if/when something goes wrong.

Crew launches are a long way off,IMO.

As for a SS catch, a reentry with the terminal phase over land is required for the Gulf.

This image looks like a tilt-shift image because the heat has blurred so much of the field of view. Awesome:

 

Edited Saturday at 04:45 PM by tater

[darthgently]

I need to make a big correction to my statements about the debris zones being north of Turks and Cacos.  Small phone, tired eyes syndrome on my part. I should have double checked instead of doubling down. My brain wasn’t taking in the zoom level and tagged the wrong land masses as those islands.  That said, given the cell phone vids recorded show the debris arcing over and past the islands for the most part I do think any debris making landfall was blown back by the wind.  Those fireworks were very high up

Edited Saturday at 04:48 PM by darthgently

[AVaughan]

6 minutes ago, tater said:

Crew launches are a long way off,IMO.

As for a SS catch, a reentry with the terminal phase over land is required for the Gulf.

Yeah.  But from memory, Elon was talking about wanting to try a Ship catch for flight 8 or 9.  Personally I think they aren't ready to do a re-entry/approach to the catch location over land, unless they happen to have a corridor over an un-inhabited area.  (I guess that is possible, but I think finding an un-inhabited corridor is unlikely, with their current catch tower locations.  Build a new catch tower somewhere else, or switch to a drone ship or a landing pad somewhere else, and that could change).  

[darthgently]

21 minutes ago, AVaughan said:

Yeah.  But from memory, Elon was talking about wanting to try a Ship catch for flight 8 or 9.  Personally I think they aren't ready to do a re-entry/approach to the catch location over land, unless they happen to have a corridor over an un-inhabited area.  (I guess that is possible, but I think finding an un-inhabited corridor is unlikely, with their current catch tower locations.  Build a new catch tower somewhere else, or switch to a drone ship or a landing pad somewhere else, and that could change).  

Manley has a great point that the failure decision tree could be a lot more sophisticated than it is now.

So that rather than a knee jerk FTS activation Starship could intelligently decide, depending on available working systems and resources and available impact areas within its current capabilities to reach, it could cross range or glide further or drop short to be over an empty area etc.

Maybe reusable variants could sacrifice some payload to have redundancy and/or hardening of the flap control and RCS systems with the above in mind

[Minmus Taster]

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, tater said:

image

I missed that they ran water for the catch.  Nice to see it, as it seems like a smart and simple idea.

[Minmus Taster]

Any news on if Starship is grounded? I'm hearing news groups talking of it but they don't back it up with any reports.

[AVaughan]

16 minutes ago, darthgently said:

Manley has a great point that the failure decision tree could be a lot more sophisticated than it is now.

From memory of Scott's video, I think he said the explosion was roughly 2-3 minutes after the loss of telemetry.  So it isn't clear to me that the FTS didn't wait a while after whatever caused the loss of telemetry. 

So I'm wondering what caused that delay, did SpaceX manually trigger the FTS after loss of signal, or whether the flight computers considered Starship still within it's allotted corridor for a couple of minutes after loss of thrust or what?

(I'm also wondering if a slow roll would be enough to keep Starship thrusting (mostly) prograde on one or two off-centre Vac Raptors, and enable it to limp to orbit/de-orbit if it lost all its the sea level raptors in future).

10 minutes ago, Minmus Taster said:

Any news on if Starship is grounded? I'm hearing news groups talking of it but they don't back it up with any reports.

Given the fuss and the impact to general aviation, I think we can be confident that the FAA will at least want a proper assessment of whether any debris landed outside the designated hazard areas, and whether those hazard areas were appropriate, before letting Starship fly again.  (I also expect they will want SpaceX to finish their investigation into the cause of the mishap as well).

[Deddly]

I haven't been able to personally keep up with all the posts lately, but I did notice a few people complaining about politics. If you see anything rule breaking, please do use the report button. It's anonymous and brings things to the moderators' attention that might otherwise get missed.

Thanks guys.

[darthgently]

37 minutes ago, AVaughan said:

From memory of Scott's video, I think he said the explosion was roughly 2-3 minutes after the loss of telemetry.  So it isn't clear to me that the FTS didn't wait a while after whatever caused the loss of telemetry. 

Yes, he commented that it appears to have, perhaps intentionally and intelligently, waited until a bit into thicker atmosphere perhaps to narrow the debris path as in vacuum the FTS would have spread the debris out quite a bit more.

But he further commented that if the FTS had not fired at all 33 would have dropped in empty ocean well past the islands with zero airborne debris field, to paraphrase

Edited Saturday at 06:34 PM by darthgently

[Minmus Taster]

Spoiler

Me digging though Elon Musk's twitter to find this tweet:

 

[darthgently]

55 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I missed that they ran water for the catch.  Nice to see it, as it seems like a smart and simple idea.

They did it on the prior catch also.  Good idea in case of a RUD in addition to reducing thermal wear on all the various parts

[Minmus Taster]

Just keeps on getting better, this is going to be interesting..

[darthgently]

39 minutes ago, Minmus Taster said:

Just keeps on getting better, this is going to be interesting..

Tennis instructor gets chance of lifetime claim to fame.  Only requires changing his story ever so slightly.  Color me skeptical.  I’d need to see phone location records of him being on the court at the right time or his students verifying the story.  Odds are it was found laying on the court when he was doing a FOD check before lessons.  The internet age! 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, Minmus Taster said:

getting better

I swear - that flight profile matched every in-flight save I had during KSP2's first few months.  Just wait for the patch!

21 minutes ago, darthgently said:

laying on the court

Terminal velocity is what, again?

If it is light enough - perhaps it landed on a tree or fence and then got blown off... onto his head?

Edited Saturday at 07:47 PM by JoeSchmuckatelli

[GuessingEveryDay]

3 hours ago, AVaughan said:

Personally I think they aren't ready to do a re-entry/approach to the catch location over land, unless they happen to have a corridor over an un-inhabited area.  (I guess that is possible, but I think finding an un-inhabited corridor is unlikely, with their current catch tower locations.  Build a new catch tower somewhere else, or switch to a drone ship or a landing pad somewhere else, and that could change).  

They could request a retrograde orbit. Worst case scenario, suborbital Starship gets ripped up by low orbiting debris and lands somewhere in the Pacific. It's a good thing because that'll clear up that orbital path of any debris whatsoever, because Starship is already falling down anyways.