SpaceX is repairing and upgrading the launchpad that was damaged. There are images and video from NASA Spaceflight.
Lab Padre is also has cameras at Boca Chica, Texas where the SpaceX Starbase rocket launch facility is located.
I'd put my money on space-x betting blue. Blue sucks.Another company is racing to launch the first commercial space station. Vast is partnering with SpaceX to launch its Haven-1 station as soon as August 2025. A Falcon 9 rocket will carry the platform to low Earth orbit, with a follow-up Vast-1 mission using Crew Dragon to bring four people to Haven-1 for up to 30 days. Vast is taking bookings for crew aiming to participate in scientific or philanthropic work. The company has the option of a second crewed SpaceX mission.
Haven-1 is relatively small. It isn't much larger than SpaceX's capsule, and is mainly intended for science and small-scale orbital manufacturing for the four people who dock. Vast hopes to make Haven-1 just one module in a larger station, though, and it can simulate the Moon's gravity by spinning.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/05/s ... hrust.html
SpaceX Raptor 3 is an improved and more powerful rocket enigine. It has reached 350 bar of pressure and 269 tons of thrust.
Raptor 2 engines were achieving 230 tf (510,000 lbf) of thrust consistently by February 2022, although SpaceX expects to be able to tune engine parameters and design over time to achieve at least 250 tf (550,000 lbf). Moreover, Musk indicated that the engine production cost was approximately half that of the Raptor 1 version SpaceX had been using in 2018–2021. In June 2022, Musk tweeted that 250 tons was achievable.
The Saturn V rocket generated 34.5 million newtons (7.6 million pounds) of thrust.
The Starship Super Heavy Booster with Raptor 3 engines would have 2.56 times the thrust of the Saturn V.
SpaceX is making a water spraying metal plate for the launch pad.
SpaceX is certifying its Falcon 9 booster for 20 reuses. Several SpaceX Falcon 9 Boosters have been reused dozens of times each and one has been used 15 times.
SpaceX plans to launch up to 100 missions in 2023, which is nearly double what it launched in 2022. Reusability will enable the company to complete the ambitious launch manifest.
More reuses lowers the cost to SpaceX for its launches. The first stage booster is 70% of the cost of the Falcon 9.
SpaceX’s vice president for build and reliability, Bill Gerstenmaier, described the Falcon 9 goals at the Axiom Space’s press conference on May 15. Axion Space plans the second all-commercial mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 21st, 2023.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... ss-launch/SpaceX on Sunday launched a crew of private astronauts, including two representing Saudi Arabia, in a mission to the International Space Station that was chartered by another private space company, Axiom Space.
The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 5:37 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, marking the second group of private citizens to fly with Axiom to the space station and offering a reminder of how quickly human space flight is evolving from the days when only national governments had the wherewithal to train and launch people into space.
The crew is expected to arrive at the space station at about 9:30 a.m. Eastern Monday for an eight-day stay, performing research and science experiments. Axiom has not said how much the mission cost, but members of the previous mission paid as much as $55 million each.
Axiom conducted the training for this flight and commissioned the SpaceX launch. Axiom’s long-term goal is to build its own space station in low-Earth orbit and continue to send people from all over the world to it. It also holds a contract from NASA to build the spacesuits that astronauts will wear on the surface of the moon as part of the space agency’s Artemis program.
Ryan Hansen completely redid all his models related to SpaceX water cooled steel plate launch system. The supply pipes and manifolds have been measured and accurately modeled. He was able to gather enough reference photos to get many of the dimensions for the plates and have sized those accordingly.
Elon says SpaceX Starship with improved Raptor 3 engines should lift 300 tons in expendable mode which should mean mean 180 tons in reusable mode.
The International Space Station weighs about 420 tons and took about fifty space shuttle launches to build. The Starship upper stage has more volume than the International Space Station. A larger, stretched Starship upper stage could be built and launched to enable larger space stations by just leaving Starships in orbit.
An older SpaceX design was the Interplanetary Transport System. This older design was larger than the Starship Superheavy. ITS would outperform the Saturn V by a factor of 4.1 on the mass delivered to Low Earth Orbit. In a fully expendable configuration, ITS would loft a LEO payload of 550 metric tons while the reusable booster can send 300 metric tons into orbit. The improving Raptor engines are getting to 60% of the proposed ITS capability.
If SpaceX achieved a further 20% improvement in the Raptor engines could enable about 360 tons in expendable mode and 216 tons in reusable mode.
https://www.space.com/spacex-crs-28-car ... -june-2023
SpaceX launched its 28th cargo mission to the International Space Station for NASA on Monday (June 5) after a two-day weather delay.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched a robotic Dragon cargo capsule toward the orbiting lab on Monday at 11:47 a.m. EDT (1547 GMT) from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Nine minutes later, the Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth for a pinpoint touchdown on the SpaceX droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas, which was stationed off the Florida coast. It was the fifth liftoff and landing for this particular booster, SpaceX said in a mission description.
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-p ... socialflowabout 13 hours ago
NASA is worried that SpaceX's giant new Starship vehicle won't be ready to carry astronauts to the surface of the moon in late 2025, as currently planned.
In 2021, the agency selected Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — to be the first crewed lunar lander for its Artemis program of moon exploration.
Starship will put astronauts down near the ice-rich lunar south pole on the Artemis 3 mission, in humanity's first return to the moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972. Artemis 3 is currently targeted to lift off in December 2025, but it's unlikely Starship will be able to meet that timeline, NASA officials said.
December 2025 "is our current manifest date, but with the difficulties that SpaceX has had, I think that's really, really concerning," Jim Free, NASA's associate administrator for exploration systems development, said on Wednesday (June 7) during a joint meeting of the U.S. National Academies' Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and its Space Studies Board.
"So, you can think about that slipping probably into '26," he added.
SpaceX will finish the water cooled steel plate and complete reconstruction and construction of other launch structures. SpaceX will be ready and approved for another Starship orbital launch attempt in 6-8 weeks.
Elon Musk told Ashlee Vance on a Twitter Space, that SpaceX had recently decided to switch to a “hot-staging” approach where the Starship upper stage will ignite its engines while still attached to the Super Heavy booster.
Musk said, describing the switch to hot staging. “There’s a meaningful payload-to-orbit advantage with hot-staging that is conservatively about a 10% increase.” This will be done on the next Super Heavy Starship launch. This was discussed 36 minutes into the Twitter Space.
Hot-staging hasbeen used on Russian launch vehicles for decades. The engines of one stage are ignited while still attached to its lower stage. Musk said that, for Starship, most of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster would be turned off, but a few still firing, when the engines on the Starship upper stage are ignited. Doing so, he said, avoids the loss of thrust during traditional stage separation, where the lower stage shuts down first.
SpaceX will need another six weeks or so to finish implementing hundreds of changes to its Super Heavy-Starship rocket and the gargantuan booster’s Texas launch pad before it will be ready for a second attempt to reach orbit, company founder Elon Musk said Saturday.
That’s assuming Federal Aviation Administration clearance to fly in the wake of the Super Heavy’s dramatic maiden launch April 20 in which the rocket blew itself up after multiple engine failures and the Starship upper stage’s failure to separate from the first stage booster.
In a Twitter Spaces discussion with author Ashlee Vance, Musk said SpaceX is implementing “well over a thousand” changes,” and “I think the probability of this next flight working, getting to orbit, is much higher than the last one. Maybe it’s like 60 percent. It depends on how well we do at stage separation.”
The reusable Super Heavy first stage is equipped with 33 methane-powered Raptor engines while the Starship second stage features six. The original design called for the Super Heavy’s engines to shut down after boosting the Starship out of the lower atmosphere. The Starship then would separate and ignite its own engines to continue on to orbit.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is a chronically online billionaire, which leads to abundant controversies. An upshot of this behavior is that we get to hear about what SpaceX engineers are doing on an almost daily basis. In a recent Twitter Spaces stream, Musk talked about some of the 1,000 changes coming to the Starship before its next test flight.
Starship is SpaceX's big bet on the future—emphasis on big. At 394 feet (120 meters) tall, it's the largest rocket ever to fly. Imagine a mid-sized apartment building lifting off the ground and flying into space. That's Starship. It needs a lot of power to reach escape velocity, so it's also the most powerful rocket, with more than 16 million pounds of thrust at launch. However, the vehicle's first flight in April of this year ended abruptly at an altitude of 24 miles. Instead of dropping the Super Heavy first stage and continuing on to space, Starship lost control and began spinning. SpaceX opted to destroy the vehicle remotely, but officials still consider the test a success.
The fate of that first launch-ready Starship is probably due to many factors, including the flying concrete. SpaceX chose not to have a flame diverter in place, and the rocket's exhaust was so intense that it obliterated the launchpad, hurling bits of concrete thousands of feet away. Several of the Super Heavy's 33 Raptor engines were out by the time the rocket lost control, but Musk notes that the vehicle had a "hodgepodge" of engines built and tested at various times. The next test flight will include all-new engines with several improvements, like electric thrust vector controls and improved manifolds to keep hot gas from leaking back into the system.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/08/s ... ction.htmlSpaceX had a static fire of 29 out of 33 Raptor 2 engines and the test also used the water deluge launch pad protection system.
The water protected steel plate and launch pad were undamaged after the 29 engine static fire
There is clear evidence that the modified Starship upper stage that SpaceX has been working upon for months is the first version of human landing system lunar Starship.
This system has different door openings and other modifications.
TheSpaceEngineer has a rendering of what is believed to the first lunar starship prototype.
Youtuber Felix Schlang at WhatAboutIt has brought together all of the pictures of the SpaceX lunar starship prototype construction.
