totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

32 minutes ago, MKI said:

can imagine the excitement and joy in seeing something fly to space in real life

I've actually seen two launches while at Disney - Shuttle, with my wife before we had kids, and the Falcon.  With the Falcon I knew to look for it... But back in the day, seeing Shuttle was a complete surprise and a treat!

Wife was excited, too and she's not at all into this stuff 

9 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

joke

Which actually got a laugh! 

9 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

if you ask for your own position to be shelled

Grin.  I have experience in both the literal and figurative meaning of this phrase.  If you know what you are doing - you are generally safe. 

Edited August 18, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[mikegarrison]

10 hours ago, RyanRising said:

Wait til these guys find out about the Meritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. They're gonna have a fit.

That's pure whataboutism. It's really got nothing to do with the fact that SpaceX put an industrial facility right next to an existing wildlife refuge and specifically promised in their environmental statements that they would limit impact -- promises that (according to reports) are not being met.

There does seem to be a certain pattern here that SpaceX isn't the greatest neighbor. They take over the roads, close the beaches, impact the wildlife, make people leave their homes, etc. Probably this is all reasonable for a space launch facility, but the problem is they promised not to have this kind of impact and then seem to have disregarded those promises.

I work in noise and emissions, and I'm very familiar with issues of airports coming into conflict with the people who live near them. Much of this is not really specific to SpaceX. But the attitude they project is not a friendly one. I've seen when industries try very hard to work with local concerns, and I've seen when they try to steamroll over local concerns, and most of what I've seen from SpaceX (and indeed also Tesla) indicates that they are generally in "steamroll" mode.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

12 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

they are generally in "steamroll" mode.

Which will hurt them in the long run. 

I wonder if that is partly the fault of Aspergers guy - a bonus in 'let's just do it, we can do it' when dealing with hesitant engineers and 'not how things are done' traditionalists... But a significant challenge  in understanding why people care about something that doesn't matter (to Aspergers guy). 

Edited August 18, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[mikegarrison]

1 minute ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Which will hurt them in the long run.

Maybe. Depends on how long the long run is. Steamrolling over a retirement community and a few birds is actually not going to cost them a whole lot, I suspect. It's not super friendly, but maybe they don't see making friends with the neighbors as high on their priority list. We know they attempted just to buy everybody out.

The same tactics would hurt them a lot more in some other places than they will on a remote Texas beach.

[tater]

Seems like if we want launch facilities that are not raining debris down like China, we need low latitude, east facing coasts to be used, which will result in a few square km of impact for each facility. The choices are southwest Texas, eastern FL, Puerto Rico (?), or Hawaii. That's it for possible locations.

Grossly overestimating the size of the Boca Chica facility for the sake of argument, it's about 400 acres (~1.6 km²). A decent chunk of that google earth polygon is empty space, I made it continuous from the entire village side land area to the end of the launch facility. KSC seems to be 570 km² as a reality check, so Boca Chica is 0.3% the area of KSC. Hawaii has less land to work with, and it's harder to get to, and more expensive. Not sure what else we can do if we want to innovate with space launch capability.

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

@mikegarrisonand @tater... You guys both bring up good points.  Were this a NASA facility, I would largely discount the concerns neighbors and others might bring to slow things down.

Yet, I have a sense that SX is a company that is enjoying a PR boom at the moment.  One they've almost screwed up a time or two (remember the removal of the cameras?).  That popularity is working for them.  But they can, if not careful, lose that popularity. 

BO can easily drop a bunch of cash off at the Sierra Club (generally reasonable) or some of the really weird anti-development groups in hopes of influencing the environmental review... Because SX needs to be full steam ahead - while delays help would be competitors 

[mikegarrison]

1 minute ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

@mikegarrisonand @tater... You guys both bring up good points.  Were this a NASA facility, I would largely discount the concerns neighbors and others might bring to slow things down.

Yet, I have a sense that SX is a company that is enjoying a PR boom at the moment.  One they've almost screwed up a time or two (remember the removal of the cameras?).  That popularity is working for them.  But they can, if not careful, lose that popularity. 

BO can easily drop a bunch of cash off at the Sierra Club (generally reasonable) or some of the really weird anti-development groups in hopes of influencing the environmental review... Because SX needs to be full steam ahead - while delays help would be competitors 

That's not usually how it works, actually. Blue Origin, for instance, has no more interest in restrictions on Texas rocket launches than SpaceX does, because guess where they launch their rockets from?

[tater]

Related to the launch facility, the ultimate goal is to move launches to platforms at sea. So the math (to my mind) would be the impact area per unit time. So we have KSC which is 300X the area with a few decades of operation at probably zero concern level for the environment, then some continued decades at a better level of concern. Then we have SpaceX with some years of impact (already being scrutinized at a higher level than KSC was for the first XX years) on that smaller area, which promises to go forward some more years, then move away offshore (which has impacts on the environment, but different ones).

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

3 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

That's not usually how it works, actually. Blue Origin, for instance, has no more interest in restrictions on Texas rocket launches than SpaceX does, because guess where they launch their rockets from?

Yeah - but Bezos has lots of land and no little twuttles that might want to nest there. 

I get it - just spitballing potential concerns based on the environmental review. 

[sevenperforce]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

rational minds understand what you are saying... But Climate Change has grabbed some people by the emotional short hairs. 

Think about how many people you have heard saying that hurricanes are more frequent because of CC... Without any data to back that up - yet it's a fervently held article of faith. 

It's a common misconception that climate scientists have predicted more frequent hurricanes as the result of climate change.

Climate scientists have never predicted more frequent hurricanes, and hurricanes are not more frequent than they used to be.

However, climate scientists DID predict more SERIOUS hurricanes as the result of climate change, and there ARE more serious hurricanes than there used to be. Even controlling for larger populations and more coastal property in the danger zone, the damage wrought by hurricanes now is substantially higher than it used to be, even though the number of hurricanes has remained the same.

It's kind of like saying that if you take all airbags out of cars, you won't have MORE accidents, but you will have more DEADLY accidents.

[tater]

60 years of KSC. Say impact was km²*1 for the '60s, then km²*0.25 for 20 years, then km²*0.1 for 30 years. (yeah, BS numbers, but for giggles).

That's 10,260 impact points.

SpaceX so far is 3 years at, heck, we will call them max impact, their km² unmitigated. SpaceX has 4.8 impact points. Total impact for SpaceX to date would be ~0.05% of KSC lifetime impact.

Obviously getting their per km² impact down to KSC levels would be the goal, just again trying for context. Still, a large impact on a tiny area is potentially a tiny impact vs a much smaller impact on a larger area.

There's a thread for hurricane talk

Edited August 18, 2021 by tater

[tater]

[coyotesfrontier]

3 hours ago, tater said:

Orange and green, what does it mean?

[Lewie]

Just now, coyotesfrontier said:

Orange and green, what does it mean?

IIRC green means loose, red means broken.

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

19 minutes ago, tater said:

 

I'm well known to be 'not a math guy' but I'm pretty sure that counts as 'a significant percentage'. 

That doesn't bode well for rapid reuse

Edited August 18, 2021 by JoeSchmuckatelli

[tater]

6 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I'm well known to be 'not a math guy' but I'm pretty sure that counts as 'a significant percentage'. 

That doesn't bode well for rapid reuse

It's the first one to be completely tiled. They'll work it out.

[Beccab]

12 minutes ago, tater said:

It's the first one to be completely tiled. They'll work it out.

Also, it all only concerns the nosecone (lots of custom tiles, was always known to be hard to tile) and the upper section of the upper tank (tiled in a single day down at the launch tower waiting for the test stack). The rest of it, which was done in the tents and high bay, is full of "ok" written on it

[MKI]

The old startup motto of "move fast and break things" seems to be applying very well to the heat shield tiles :O

 

(that motto also isn't recommended anymore haha)

 

[Beccab]

https://boards.greenhouse.io/spacex/jobs/5477244002?gh_jid=5477244002

SpaceX is looking to hire an Offshore Operations Supervisor in Brownsville to help "convert our vessels Phobos and Deimos into Starship launch, landing, and propellant generation sites"

Chances are initially the propellant production will be limited to LOX (it's almost 80% of the fuel after all) and that perhaps Phobos is set to move to Brownsville after it is emptied? We'll see

 

Also:

They are chaining them down, so likely leaving in direction MacGregor

[tater]

 

And Erc X version:

 

[Minmus Taster]

16 minutes ago, tater said:

 

 

What's with the forward flaps?

Edited August 18, 2021 by Minmus Taster

[tater]

3 minutes ago, Minmus Taster said:

What's with the forward flaps?

Right up the page:

 

 

Edited August 18, 2021 by tater

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

5 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

 

Something weird going on in forum - I keep getting random stuff 

Like that was not supposed to happen. 

... 

Okay - what I wanted to ask... 

With these changes... Do you scrap 20 and fly a different iteration - or toss the wrong designed but built one at the sky to entertain those who think 420 is hilarious? 

[RyanRising]

7 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

That's pure whataboutism. It's really got nothing to do with the fact that SpaceX put an industrial facility right next to an existing wildlife refuge and specifically promised in their environmental statements that they would limit impact -- promises that (according to reports) are not being met.

There does seem to be a certain pattern here that SpaceX isn't the greatest neighbor. They take over the roads, close the beaches, impact the wildlife, make people leave their homes, etc. Probably this is all reasonable for a space launch facility, but the problem is they promised not to have this kind of impact and then seem to have disregarded those promises.

I work in noise and emissions, and I'm very familiar with issues of airports coming into conflict with the people who live near them. Much of this is not really specific to SpaceX. But the attitude they project is not a friendly one. I've seen when industries try very hard to work with local concerns, and I've seen when they try to steamroll over local concerns, and most of what I've seen from SpaceX (and indeed also Tesla) indicates that they are generally in "steamroll" mode.

Oh shoot, I was under the impression the conditions were much more similar than that - SpaceX coming in with a bunch of rockets to this wildlife preserve and the local authorities were welcoming that for the same reason wildlife tends to do well near KSC - what human in their right mind would go over there? If that's not the case, it's a totally valid criticism and i retract my joke. I have also seen the points about their takeover of Boca Chica and the closures before, and I do agree that they make for a pretty awful place to live near by. (At Boca Chica, anyway. I do live close to their HQ, but they haven't tried flying a rocket from there yet.)

 

7 hours ago, tater said:

This deal is getting worse all the time. I mean, I get the reasoning for it, and engineers would hang a dead possum off a plane if it made it fly faster, but ew.
Still better than the trifin design though.

[Beccab]

4 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

With these changes... Do you scrap 20 and fly a different iteration - or toss the wrong designed but built one at the sky to entertain those who think 420 is hilarious? 

It's not exactly an error in S20 to be like that, SN15 and previous proved that it can work; it is just an improvement that we will see in future iterations, perhaps not even in S21. Once it is implemented it should probably reduce the amount of heat shield tiles required and make the flaps more effective, but there's nothing keeping S20 from flying given how much stuff needs to be verified even before the flaps start making any difference

Edited August 19, 2021 by Beccab