SpaceX Tuesday...

[Beati Dogu]

shalmaneser said:

Smiljan said:

That is a great looking rocket.

Only 3 days short of the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's space flight - on a very similar looking rocket.

[Dog Star]

Here's a question... I've been wondering about this from day one....

There must surely be a decent chance that SN15 is going to land. So what are they going to do with it (or whichever one makes it)?

- scrap it
- fly it again and again til it blows up/crashes etc to gather data (eg. see if they can do a rapid turnaround). Maybe the airframe is too stressed to re-use?
- stick it in the corner with Starhopper
- stick it outside the office like that Falcon on the streetcorner (Hawthorne? I forget).

[N0ddie]

Didn't realise they were scrapping BN1 already? I thought this would have been used for all manner of testing (Excluding flight). I assume if SN15 lands intact they will attempt a 2nd flight.

[annodomini2]

Higher altitude and supersonic possibly, depending on the outcome of the nose cone tests on the stand

[GTO-3R]

Yeah surely SN15 will launch again if it lands successfully and possibly higher if they're allowed to?

[MartG]

Crew Dragon Endeavour moved ready for stacking

https://spaceflightnow.com/2021/04/14/spacexs-crew...

[MiniMan64]

Didn’t realise SN15 was coming up so quick. I thought with the jump in prototype numbers and a change in design (right?) there was a delay until the next one?

When are they going to have a go with the full stack?

[Flooble]

They seem to do one Starship a month, give or take. Possibly a little longer for this one given they don't have any engines installed yet.

Superheavy on the other hand they took about six months for the first one (first rings appeared in September), albeit that was more of a boilerplate (no engines, probably not all the plumbing, no grid fins, probably no avionics ...). Parts for the second Superheavy appeared in January so it seems reasonable to imagine June at the earliest for it to be ready to the same state as the first one, but you would expect fit-out of parts to probably take a few more months after that, and then I would expect them to make some test flights with just the booster rather than immediately trying to launch the entire stack.

My suspicion is it will be near the end of the year before there is any prospect of a Superheavy + Starship stack launching. We'll see!!

[annodomini2]

Re SN15 there was a licence request for the starlink dish on the side of SN15 saying it won't go higher than 12.5km, so maybe not high altitude with SN15.

BN3 parts have been spotted as well.

BN1 has been scrapped, so expect assembly of BN2 to begin soon.

SN16 tank is being stacked in the mid bay.

Also reports that SN20 will not have a full heat shield so if they do take it to orbit, they may not be expecting to recover.

[eharding]

annodomini2 said:

Re SN15 there was a licence request for the starlink dish on the side of SN15 saying it won't go higher than 12.5km, so maybe not high altitude with SN15.

I'd missed the news that they were putting Starlink on SN15.

I wonder if the Dishy debug diagnostics will be enhanced over the ones the rest of us have:

"alerts": {
"motorsStuck": false,
"thermalThrottle": false,
"thermalShutdown": false,
"explodedIntoCloudOfBurningChunks" : true
},

[RizzoTheRat]

I seem to have missed the reasoning behind skipping a few SN's have they had a major redesign and scrapped some that were part built?

[anonymous-user]

As far as I know they never started building SN12, 13 and 14. Not exactly sure what happened, but maybe the success of SN8 (apart from the landing) was a surprise and they felt they could move on faster than planned.

[Beati Dogu]

SN15's Raptor engines have arrived at the pad:



- Cosmic Perspective


Engine serial numbers 54, 61, 66.

[S6PNJ]

Beati Dogu said:

SN15's Raptor engines have arrived at the pad:

Engine serial numbers 54, 61, 66.

Have the engines in-between those numbers been used previously or why the non-sequential use (if you know)? Have these been previously used on other launch vehicles (obvs not the ones that suffered RUDs!)?

[RizzoTheRat]

SN9 and 10 both had engines swapped out after the initial engine test so I'd guess they fix any issues and put them back in the queue.

[annodomini2]

F20CN16 said:

As far as I know they never started building SN12, 13 and 14. Not exactly sure what happened, but maybe the success of SN8 (apart from the landing) was a surprise and they felt they could move on faster than planned.

The testing of SN8 & 9 probably demonstrated enough issues to warrant the transition to the redesign.

[GTO-3R]

They’re not going to be able to launch the booster without Starship on top are the? Can’t see how it would work unless they put some kind of mini nose cone on top of the booster?

[Beati Dogu]

They probably could do, if they gave it a nose cone. Makes more sense to loft a Starship while they're at it though.

Don't think about sneaking in to find out though:





- Cosmic Perspective

Edited by Beati Dogu on Friday 16th April 16:58

[annodomini2]

GTO-3R said:

They’re not going to be able to launch the booster without Starship on top are the? Can’t see how it would work unless they put some kind of mini nose cone on top of the booster?

I'm guessing they'll hop BN2 like SN5&6

[anonymous-user]

Beati Dogu said:

Don't think about sneaking in to find out though:





- Cosmic Perspective

Edited by Beati Dogu on Friday 16th April 16:58

That’s brilliant.