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Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9526: Dec 2nd 2021 at 9:15:55 AM

SpaceX confirms that tonight's Starlink mission is a go, at 23:12 UTC (6:12 PM EST). The payload will be 48 Starlink V1.5 internet satellites and 2 BlackSky imaging satellites.

The booster will be B1060, making its ninth launch (and hopefully landing). This one did the GPS III-3, Türksat 5A, and Transporter 2 missions along with five Starlink missions. I'll post the livestream link when we get closer.


Astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron have returned to the Quest airlock after a successful EVA to replace a faulty S-band antenna.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 2nd 2021 at 12:51:58 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#9527: Dec 2nd 2021 at 1:30:05 PM

Huh. Russian Wikipedia is quite skimpy on Energia (both 1 and 2) even in comparison to English Wikipedia. Not even information on what payload #2 was supposed to carry.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9528: Dec 2nd 2021 at 2:25:46 PM

I know that Energia launched twice. One was the demo flight of Buran, and the other carried a secondary rocket that failed because it pointed itself the wrong way.


CNBC: Rocket Lab gives first look at plans for bigger, reusable Neutron rocket as it takes on SpaceX

Eric Berger interviewed Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck off-camera and got a number of extra tidbits.

  • Neutron will always try to RTLS. Sea landings are not out of the picture but are not the primary design intention.
  • Neutron is very "fat", giving it a high ballistic coefficient for rapid deceleration in the upper atmosphere and consequent reduced thermal loads. This should reduce or eliminate the need for a reentry burn.
  • The quad fairing is called "Hungry Hungry Hippo" internally. Since it remains attached to the first stage there is no need for separate recovery.
  • The second stage is hung inside the fairing. It needs minimal structural support and can thus be very light-weight.
  • The rocket factory will be near the launch site (currently Wallops Island, VA). Neutron will remain vertical for its entire life, so there won't be a need for a strongback.
  • Neutron will be designed for 24-hour turnaround. It comes back in one piece, its engines don't coke (like SpaceX's Merlins), and it will return to its launch site. The material cost of reuse isn't the main issue but the amount of labor.
  • Neutron is designed with the possibility of flying crew, although it won't seek to be crew-rated initially.


Also via Eric Berger on Twitter, NASA has selected its Commercial LEO Destinations partners: Blue Origin ($130 million), Nanoracks ($160 million), Northrop Grumman Systems Corporation ($125.6 million). These are the companies that will develop commercial space station concepts and NASA will eventually downselect to the final contractor(s).

Axiom did not compete since it already has a contract to build out its own space station. SpaceX did compete but its entry, based on a converted Starship, was not expected to win.

Edited to add the CNBC article.


SpaceX's Starlink mission livestream is here. As of this post (22:25 UTC), the poll for propellant loading will occur in about two minutes. We may get a beautiful twilight nebula from the second stage under the current lighting conditions.


Arianespace's Galileo mission livestream is here. This launch is scheduled for barely an hour after Starlink, so the streams will be very nearly back to back.

Edit: The launch was scrubbed.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 5th 2021 at 4:13:09 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9529: Dec 2nd 2021 at 3:24:19 PM

SpaceX's Falcon 9 launched on time and has reached orbit. The first stage booster landed successfully on the drone ship. The second stage is now in a coast phase, with a circularization burn occurring in about 45 minutes ahead of payload deployment.

The second engine burn was completed and the two BlackSky satellites have been deployed.

I just saw a notification that the Arianespace launch was postponed for another 24 hours because of some ground station issues. It's still next on the schedule but will launch December 4 at 00:23 UTC (7:23 PM EST). One day later is ULA with the STP-3 mission atop an Atlas V 551, December 5 at 09:04 UTC (4:04 AM EST).

Next week is also packed and I'll provide full details this weekend.

Edit: Starlink deployment confirmed. That wraps this mission for SpaceX.


One more news item that I'll edit into this post. Via Chris Bergin on Twitter, NASA has awarded the Booster Production and Operations Contract (BPOC) to Northrop Grumman. It will be paid $3.19 billion to build solid rocket boosters for nine SLS flights. I guess that's beyond the ones that are already paid for.

Yes, that includes fixed costs as well as per-booster costs, but it's still $354 million per flight, or $177 million per SRB. An entire Falcon Heavy in expendable mode costs less than that. Are they literally stuffing the money into the propellant mix?

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 2nd 2021 at 9:16:05 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9530: Dec 3rd 2021 at 10:05:50 AM

Friday news dump!

Michael Sheetz via Twitter: ULA CEO Tory Bruno, in an interview on CNBC, says that the Blue Origin BE-4 engines that will be used on the first operational Vulcan Centaur launch are in production and expected to arrive "early next year". He hoped they could be ready by Christmas, but Blue Origin has been affected by COVID-19 like everyone else. Qualification testing is going well.


ULA is rolling out the Atlas V 551 rocket for this weekend's STP-3 launch this morning.


I'll include this in my weekend summary, but Elon Musk tweeted that construction of a Starship launch pad has begun at Kennedy Space Center LC-39A. It has been known SpaceX plans to launch Starship from Florida as well as from Texas, and construction had begun some time ago but was put on hold as all of the design work was still ongoing. No sense building something that they'd have to scrap and do over. Now it seems as if it's ready to start again.

Edited to add: It is unlikely that SpaceX would need to go through the same environmental review process as it has in Texas since its lease on that launch site incorporates all necessary licenses and approvals.


Ars Technica: NASA sets sail into a promising but perilous future of private space stations

This article covers the announcement that I posted yesterday of NASA publishing its initial awards for the Commercial LEO Destinations program. The awards allow three companies to pursue development of space stations that NASA would pay to visit, but would otherwise be able to serve commercial interests. Axiom Space was awarded a separate development contract last year.

The CLD awards are not yet funded by Congress, which forces NASA to walk a perilous tightrope. The ISS is running out of time and it will take years to launch and commission the new stations. The least-desirable case is for the ISS to go out of service without a usable alternative in orbit.


The Ars Technica Rocket Report is here. I'll give a rundown on Sunday, as usual.

However, I want to highlight this Aviation Week article, which elaborates on reports (that I mentioned earlier) that NASA engineers are troubleshooting an issue with one of the controllers for the RS-25 main engines on the SLS rocket for Artemis I. If they are unable to bring it back online, some or all of the hardware will need to be replaced, further delaying the planned wet dress rehearsal and thus the test flight.

The controllers are not part of the original RS-25 engines, and there has been some concern that the additional complications they add would cause issues. Well, here we are.


Rocket photographer Jenny Hautman, whom I posted about a short while ago after she was involved in a horrific crash that nearly killed her, sends her thank-yous after being released from the hospital. She credits her Tesla with saving her life, along with the first-responders and doctors of course. I was one of many people who donated to the GoFundMe campaign to help support her and her family. She got to watch and photograph the Falcon 9 launch yesterday.


Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël tweets that the issue with the downrange tracking station has been resolved and that they will resume the countdown for the two Galileo satellites tonight. I'll relink the livestream as we get closer and provide live updates.


Scott Manley just posted a short video of the launch of Space Shuttle STS-114, which provides a glorious view of the flexing of the stack that occurred when the main engines ignited. The whole vehicle would bend a few degrees under the immense force of the SSMEs and the SRBs would only be ignited once it flexed back to vertical.

The video also shows what is believed to be the only footage of the Shuttle striking a bird on ascent. Regardless of whether it survived the impact, the bird would have its internal organs liquefied by the force of the sound emanating from the boosters and/or be cooked by their heat, so it was most certainly an ex-bird after that.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 4th 2021 at 11:24:07 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9531: Dec 3rd 2021 at 3:46:40 PM

Arianespace's livestream for the VS26 launch of two Galileo navigation satellites atop a Soyuz ST-B/Fregat-MT rocket has started, with commentary to begin about 27 minutes prior to liftoff at 00:23 UTC (7:23 PM EST).

Galileo is the ESA's version of the US Global Positioning System. This is a contracted launch: Arianespace purchases and operates Soyuz rockets from Russia and flies them from Guiana Space Center in French Guiana.

Edit: The launch was scrubbed due to weather conditions. They will try again tomorrow.


NASA to Secure Additional Commercial Crew Transportation

With Boeing's Starliner facing extended delays, NASA has taken steps to purchase more crew transportation missions to the ISS from SpaceX. The Commercial Crew Program pays for six operational flights from each contractor. SpaceX has already performed three of those (plus two demonstration missions) and the remaining three are now likely to fly before Starliner is operational, leaving a gap in NASA's capabilities.

It was always intended that additional launch services would be procured after the end of Commercial Crew, but if Starliner had been participating, that would have happened up to two and a half years later. I feel like I've expressed everything that I can say about this situation. It speaks for itself, and what it says is not very flattering to Boeing.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 3rd 2021 at 7:21:47 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#9532: Dec 4th 2021 at 1:57:28 AM

Someone has got to do the research on why these things are always delayed. Is it the same situation as with nuclear power plants, where the sheer complexity of the task means lots of opportunities for things to go wrong?

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9533: Dec 4th 2021 at 5:47:02 AM

Interestingly, NASA's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) performs exactly such studies, at least as far as NASA's own procurement programs go. I posted about one a few weeks ago, specifically on Artemis. One of the points in the study is that basically every major NASA procurement for a new technology or new technology application has gone beyond its original deadline. It doesn't specifically address why.

We can of course look at specific programs to discover the causes of their delays. Commercial Crew was originally supposed to have its first flights in 2016, but Congress systematically underfunded the program. That one wasn't on the companies, so it's not fair to charge it against them, but it was still a delay.

Given all of that, SpaceX was supposed to fly its first crewed demonstration flight in 2019, but a capsule exploded during testing due to a faulty valve design so it got delayed until March 2020. There were also issues with parachutes that required extensive revalidation.

Boeing was supposed to deliver its Starliner on a similar timeline but its first uncrewed demo flight revealed serious flaws in software validation and now its latest launch attempt revealed issues with corrosion in the maneuvering thrusters. Two years later, it has yet to conduct a fully successful mission.

If I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the delays in contract performance stem from three primary causes: excessive optimism, underfunding, and "unknown unknowns".

Edit: As an example of "optimism", NASA was originally targeting a Moon landing in 2028, but the Trump administration accelerated the timeline to score political propaganda points. 2028 would have given ample time for SLS and HLS to be ready. 2024 is forcing things to be rushed.


SpaceX reports that it has completed a static fire test of the Falcon 9 booster for NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) spacecraft, set to launch December 9.


ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet tweeted some of the images that he took of the ISS during the circumnavigation made during the departure of the Crew-2 mission. These are used by NASA engineers to inspect the integrity of the exterior, since there isn't any other convenient way to do so. Space Shuttle used to perform this task.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 4th 2021 at 2:05:01 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Troper1138 Since: Dec, 2010
#9534: Dec 4th 2021 at 12:27:45 PM

The video also shows what is believed to be the only footage of the Shuttle striking a bird on ascent. Regardless of whether it survived the impact, the bird would have its internal organs liquefied by the force of the sound emanating from the boosters and/or be cooked by their heat, so it was most certainly an ex-bird after that.

"Details are still sketchy, but we think the name of the bird hit by the Space Shuttle was Harold Meeker."

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9535: Dec 4th 2021 at 3:28:24 PM

[up] I haven't read The Far Side in ages, but I remember that one.

Arianespace has decided to fuel the Soyuz rocket for another attempt to launch two ESA Galileo navigation satellites tonight at 00:19 UTC (7:19 PM EST). The livestream is here.

I will be out of the house if/when this thing flies, so someone else feel free to provide commentary. I'll post an update when I get back.


I'm back. It lifted off on time and delivered its payloads to the MEO transfer orbit. It'll take four hours to get to its destination so I'm definitely not staying live for it.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 4th 2021 at 8:14:35 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9536: Dec 4th 2021 at 5:10:17 PM

I just saw a tweet that ULA's STP-3 mission aboard an Atlas V 551 rocket has been scrubbed for tomorrow morning due to a leak in the RP-1 ground storage system. Definitely can't fuel the rocket if there's kerosene spilling everywhere.

The next launch attempt will be December 6 at 09:04 UTC (4:04 AM EST).

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
fredhot16 Don't want to leave but cannot pretend from Baton Rogue, Louisiana. Since: Jan, 2015 Relationship Status: Too sexy for my shirt
Don't want to leave but cannot pretend
#9537: Dec 4th 2021 at 5:10:55 PM

How safe are rocket launches nowadays?

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Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9538: Dec 4th 2021 at 5:24:35 PM

Interesting question. Rockets are far more mature as a technology than they used to be, and folks on the ground are a lot more willing to scrub launches if there are any signs of problems. Launch fever is highly discouraged in the industry. That said, all new rockets go through reliability curves, so the maturity of the launch system has a lot to do with the success rate.

The last time a Soyuz failed was in 2018. The last time an Atlas V failed was never, at least not under ULA. SpaceX has not had a launch fail since 2016, if you count blowing up on the pad as failing, although it has lost some boosters in landing attempts. The last and only in-flight failure of a Falcon 9 was in 2015. The Block 5 variant has a perfect record of reaching orbit and a 93.5% landing success rate.

Rocket Lab's Electron has had three failures out of 22 launches and one of those was on its first test flight; it reached orbit on the second attempt. The Space Shuttle only failed on ascent once out of 135 missions, although one was also lost on reentry.

Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, tackles rocket safety in this video that discusses whether Starship should have a launch abort system. In it, he cites a value I've seen in other places that modern rockets have about a 99 percent success rate. That is: one in every hundred launches fails.

From that video: of 320 launches with humans on board (as of December 2019), there have been ten incidents of actual or potential loss of life. Of those, abort systems saved lives in two cases, caused deaths in one case, would have saved lives in one case had they been used, and were not a factor in the others. From 1990 to 2019, only two crewed launches out of 180 have aborted or failed.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 4th 2021 at 8:34:38 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
SeptimusHeap from Switzerland (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Mu
#9539: Dec 5th 2021 at 1:57:41 AM

That is: one in every hundred launches fails.

So if Starship launches a few hundred times we can expect one Challenger-like disaster? I am pretty sure that one of the things the Columbia and Challenger investigation committees highlighted the tendency of NASA to treat a low risk as if it were a no risk.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Silasw A procrastination in of itself from A handcart to hell (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3
A procrastination in of itself
#9540: Dec 5th 2021 at 1:59:41 AM

That is across all modern rockets, you can’t get the risk percentage to 0 without excluding the historical modern rockets which have had disasters.

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
Redmess Redmess from Netherlands Since: Feb, 2014
Redmess
#9541: Dec 5th 2021 at 2:25:29 AM

It's also not the same kind of risk as, say, cars, or even planes. A car crash, you can survive. A plane going down, less likely, but you can still survive.

Your rocket goes down? Almost certain death.

Hope shines brightest in the darkest times
petersohn from Earth, Solar System (Long Runner) Relationship Status: Hiding
#9542: Dec 5th 2021 at 2:53:39 AM

[up]That depends on the kind of escape system used. Challenger didn't have any way to save the crew once the rocket exploded. If the rocket has a launch escape system, then the crew has a decent chance of surviving a similar failure of the booster. Once you are up in orbit, things go more fishy. In case of the failure of the heat shield, such as in case of Columbia, or the failure of the parachute, such as in case of Soyuz 1, the crew is certainly doomed.

Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9543: Dec 5th 2021 at 7:34:03 AM

Note that the Space Shuttle's use of solid rocket boosters combined with its side-mounted location meant that an abort before SRB burnout was essentially suicidal. There was no feasible way to prevent the escape capsule from going through the SRB exhaust even if one could have been designed to begin with. Everyone knew this and just accepted it.

SLS avoids this problem by putting the capsule on the top of the rocket rather than the side so that its "puller" escape system can get clear. Crew Dragon and Starliner both use full-profile abort systems, as does Soyuz.

Starship has no feasible way to abort during second-stage flight. It's kind of the opposite of Shuttle. If the Super Heavy booster fails, Starship could ignite its engines and pull away, but if it lacks the ability to land without a catch tower, it would have to perform either an RTLS maneuver or an abort to orbit.

The lack of a full-profile escape option is troubling, but SpaceX wants to make Starship the most reliable vehicle in history by an order of magnitude and will fly it as many times as necessary to get that right. It's designed for an unprecedented launch cadence. NASA requires a minimum of seven uncrewed flights to certify a rocket for humans; Starship could do that in a week (although it probably won't).

A Starship will fail with people on board. This is a statistical certainty. The question is how we deal with that. We didn't cancel Shuttle after Challenger. We didn't throw away all our airplanes the first time one crashed.

Anyway, petersohn is correct that the reentry phase has no abort option no matter what vehicle you're in. It's a binary outcome: live or die.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 5th 2021 at 10:48:19 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9544: Dec 5th 2021 at 8:36:32 AM

Fighteer's Weekly Launch Activity Update

It felt like last week was going to be nuts but then we only had two orbital launches: a Starlink rideshare from SpaceX and some Galileo navigation satellites from Arianespace (which deployed successfully after I stopped watching). We also had a spacewalk on the ISS that successfully replaced a broken antenna and we found out more about Rocket Lab's Neutron.

If this coming week remains on schedule, however, we're going to have a ton of things to watch: ULA, Rocket Lab, ExPace, Roscosmos, SpaceX, and Blue Origin. Of particular note are the IXPE mission for NASA, Russia's launch of a Space Adventures orbital tourism flight to the ISS, and Blue Origin's third crewed flight.

As always, visit Next Spaceflight or Everyday Astronaut for details, and you can see the Google Doc I created here.

    Launch counts for 2021 

  Launches Landings      Launches    Launches
Provider Orbital Suborbital Stg 1 Stg 2 Cap Payloads Crew  Nation Orbital Suborbital  Vehicle Orbital Suborbital
Arianespace 6/6     20/20  China 44/46   Antares 2/2 
Astra 1/2     1/1  European Union 13/13   Ceres   
Blue Origin   5/5 5/5  5/5 5/5 8 India 1/2  Delta 1/1 
CASC 42/42     79/79 6 Iran 0/1 1/1 Electron 4/5 
ExPace 2/2     2/2   Japan 2/2  Epsilon 1/1 
Galactic Energy         Russia 13/13  Falcon 27/27 
GK LS 1/1     38/38  South Korea 0/1  GSLV 0/1 
i-Space 0/2     0/7  Taiwan    Hapith   
ISA 0/1 1/1    0/1  United States 42/45 8/11 H-Series 1/1 
ISRO 1/2     19/20      Hyperbola 0/2 
JAXA 1/1     9/9      KSLV 0/1 
KARI 0/1           Kuaizhou 2/2 
MHI 1/1     1/1      LauncherOne 2/2 
Northrop 4/4     6/6      Long March 42/42 
Rocket Lab 4/5  2/2   11/13       Minotaur 1/1 
Roscosmos 8/8    2/2 8/8 9     New Shepard   5/5
SpaceX 27/27 1/4 26/27 1/4 5/5 1168/1168 12      Pegasus 1/1 
Starsem 7/7     248/248       Proton 1/1 
TiSPACE             PSLV 1/1 
ULA 4/4     8/8       Rocket 3 1/2 
Virgin Galactic   2/2   2/2 1/1 8      Simorgh 0/1 
Virgin Orbit 2/2     17/17      Soyuz 20/20 
VKS RF 4/4     4/4       SpaceShip   2/2
Totals 115/123 9/12 33/34 1/4 14/14 1645/1682 43     Starship   1/4
             Vega 3/3 
             Zoljanah   1/1

Notes:

  • Landings: Stg 1 = Stage 1; Stg 2 = Stage 2; Cap = Capsule/space vehicle.
  • Payloads: Spacecraft (Progress, Dragon) count as one payload for this list regardless of how many things they're carrying.
  • Vehicle: For simplicity, these are grouped by family regardless of specific capabilities.

Recent and upcoming launches

Nation Provider Rocket Payload/Mission Reuse Liftoff Status
United States SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 Starlink Group 4-3 B1060.9 (ASOG) Dec 02, 2021 23:12 UTC Successful
European Union Arianespace Soyuz ST-B/Fregat-MT Galileo FOC FM23-FM24  Dec 05, 2021 00:19 UTC Successful
United States ULA Atlas V 551 STP-3  Dec 06, 2021 09:04 UTC  
China ExPace Kuaizhou 1A Xingyun  Dec 06, 2021 23:10 UTC  
United States Rocket Lab Electron/Curie "A Data with Destiny"  Dec 07, 2021 00:40 UTC  
Russia Roscosmos Soyuz 2.1a Soyuz MS-20/Space Adventures  Dec 08, 2021 07:38 UTC  
United States SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 IXPE B1061.5 (JRTI) Dec 09, 2021 06:00 UTC  
United States Blue Origin New Shepard NS-19 NS4 Dec 09, 2021 15:00 UTC  
Russia Roscosmos Proton-M/Briz-M Ekspress-AMU3 & AMU7  Dec 12, 2021 12:09 UTC  

Events

  • Soyuz MS-20 is scheduled to dock with the ISS on Dec 8 at 13:41 UTC and depart Dec 19 at 23:56 UTC.

Fighteer's Weekly SpaceX Report

  • SpaceX has long had plans to build a Starship launch facility at Kennedy Space Center LC-39A. This week it finished removing the old structures at the pad and will begin building new ones.
  • Booster 5 took a brief trip outside of the high bay on its transport stand before being put back inside. Ship 21 and 22 continue assembly, as does the new wide bay.
  • Ship 20 attempted another static fire test that appeared to have been aborted. During the same window a cryo test was performed on the Booster 2.1 test tank, apparently using the orbital tank farm's liquid nitrogen stores.

Ars Technica Rocket Report

This week's Rocket Report covers the following topics, some of which we've already discussed.


As a scheduling note, I will not be watching the STP-3 launch tonight (or tomorrow morning) but I will post the livestream link before I go to bed.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 5th 2021 at 11:39:46 AM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
SilverCrown (Private) Relationship Status: Singularity
#9545: Dec 5th 2021 at 8:48:44 AM

It's also not the same kind of risk as, say, cars, or even planes. A car crash, you can survive. A plane going down, less likely, but you can still survive.

Your rocket goes down? Almost certain death.

No, not necessarily. It depends on whether your rocket has a launch escape system or not.

Your rocket has a launch escape system: You can absolutely survive the rocket going down provided it's deployed at the right time. There was a Soyuz flight in 1983 where the LES activated barely a second six seconds before the entire rocket exploded and both cosmonauts landed safely (see below). It's risky, but it's definitely plausible.

Your rocket does not have a launch escape system: A lá Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia, this sort of thing is a little harder to survive. If it was the situation that happened during Challenger (i.e. no escape until SRB burnout), the odds were so badly stacked against you that for all intents and purposes you were dead. Same thing with Columbia - enter the reentry phase with a giant hole in your wing, allowing superheated gases to tear the shuttle apart, and you're dead either way. If it wasn't as bad as Challenger or Columbia, you could in theory survive by taking manual control, ditching all the stages except for the capsule (if you can), and deploying the parachute, but I am a programming enthusiast, not an astronaut or rocket scientist. Take anything that I say with a pound of salt.


Speaking of the Soyuz launch abort:

The two crew members were badly bruised after the high acceleration, but were otherwise in good health and did not require any medical attention.[1] Upon being greeted by recovery crews, they immediately asked for cigarettes to steady their nerves. The cosmonauts were then given shots of vodka to help them relax.[4]

Absolute Memetic Badasses.

devak They call me.... Prophet Since: Jul, 2019 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
They call me.... Prophet
#9546: Dec 5th 2021 at 8:53:52 AM

Regarding rocket satefy, keep in mind that acceptable failure rates are closely related to use. If you launch 100 rockets and one fails, you already hit that 99%. The shuttle launched 135 times. The falcon 9 has apparently hit 133. it's difficult to get 1-in-a-thousand failure rates when you don't launch 1000 times.

You can try and make a rocket as safe as possible beforehand, but there are simply limits to how much you can do about this pre-emptively. At some point, you're going to need data about how the vehicle behaves in use, and the single-use rockets employed by many companies are not helping with that. With a car, you can track it's maintenance history and learn a lot about how cars age and such. That's hard to do if your rocket is in the ocean after one use.

But also, the small launch cadence leads to relatively little data, and it's hard to carry over data from one rocket design to the next due to how complicated they are.

Cars are built by the millions, and have been for decades, so there's a lot of information about how cars behave and so a lot to be said about safety. Every rule in the aviation industry was written with blood and scrap. You can do a lot beforehand, but testing only really gets you so far; the data you get from 10 test cars is a drop in the bucket compared to 10 million on the road.

Edited by devak on Dec 5th 2021 at 5:54:25 PM

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#9547: Dec 5th 2021 at 9:04:32 AM

[up] This is very true. It's why Starship (or something like it) is so critical. The ability to fully and rapidly reuse rockets in the same way as we would a car or an airplane is fundamentally necessary to make human spaceflight as safe as those other two methods.

If it wasn't as bad as Challenger or Columbia, you could in theory survive by taking manual control, ditching all the stages except for the capsule (if you can), and deploying the parachute, but I am a programming enthusiast, not an astronaut or rocket scientist.

Any vehicle capable of surviving the failure of its launch system would use computer control, although manual controls are usually available as backups. The basic fact is that human reflexes simply aren't good enough to pilot a rocket. Shuttle landed under manual control, but it was automatic on ascent and reentry. Buran was capable of automated landing.

Anyway, if you can't separate from the rocket in a failure scenario, you are dead no matter what. Shuttle had no escape system but it was perfectly capable of ditching the external tank and gliding back to a landing site in the event that it couldn't reach orbit. For this to work required that the failure be non-catastrophic. If Shuttle's own structural integrity were compromised, it was doomed.

If I remember correctly, there was one Shuttle flight during which a main engine shut down prematurely. It was able to make it to orbit anyway.

During SpaceX CRS-7 in 2015, the Falcon 9 rocket broke up on ascent because of a faulty strut in the second-stage liquid-oxygen tank. The Dragon capsule survived the event and could have splashed down safely but it was not programmed with that scenario in mind so its parachutes never deployed. There weren't any people on board so it wasn't a high priority.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 5th 2021 at 12:08:16 PM

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megarockman from The Sixth Borough (Experienced Trainee)
#9548: Dec 5th 2021 at 10:02:01 AM

If I remember correctly, there was one Shuttle flight during which a main engine shut down prematurely. It was able to make it to orbit anyway.

STS-51-F, Challenger, July 29, 1985.

Edited by megarockman on Dec 5th 2021 at 1:02:15 PM

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devak They call me.... Prophet Since: Jul, 2019 Relationship Status: [TOP SECRET]
They call me.... Prophet
#9549: Dec 5th 2021 at 10:14:31 AM

Yea escape systems exist to ensure even a rocket launch going wrong can have a backup. On the other hand, yes rockets will likely always have more inherent risk due to being more complicated. On the other hand, air travel is safer than car travel. Mostly because we simply accept that people driving their own cars can judge their own risks when with aircraft, we don't accept that pilots make their own risk assessments and in stead follow strict procedure.

The space shuttle not having any escape system is one of the many reasons it sucked. it's basically the symbol of hubris of upper management.

Edited by devak on Dec 5th 2021 at 7:15:26 PM

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
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#9550: Dec 5th 2021 at 10:23:05 AM

The space shuttle not having any escape system is one of the many reasons it sucked. it's basically the symbol of hubris of upper management.

This one can be laid mostly on Congress. The Shuttle program was a political exercise from day zero. Its specifications were written to guarantee the maximum number of jobs for all of the big aerospace contractors. The engineers who built it did amazing work but were operating under political constraints imposed from the very top.

By the time all of those requirements were on paper, there was simply no way to safely add an escape system. Early designs had ejection seats but (a) those would only have saved the crew in the forward cabin, (b) the problem of running through the SRB exhaust was never solved, (c) they were useless over a certain altitude.

SLS suffers from the much the same "design-by-pork" problem.

Edited by Fighteer on Dec 5th 2021 at 1:24:23 PM

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

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