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SpaceX is planning to attempt its highest hop ever of its new Starhopper prototype. This rocket is designed to test out certain capabilities and performance characteristics that will inform the development of SpaceX's upcoming Starship rocket (formerly known as BFR — Big 'Falcon' Rocket).
It looks like Elon Musk's Starship prototype, dubbed "Starhopper," has the green light to make its highest hop yet as soon as Monday.
SpaceX had planned to test the single-engine version of its eventual Mars vehicle with its second short flight last week, but the launch was abruptly canceled. Musk later tweeted that the Federal Aviation Administration required a bit more "hazard analysis" and Starhopper "should be clear to fly soon."
Now the FAA has posted a new airspace closure for the area around the SpaceX test facility in Boca Chica, Texas, beginning Monday afternoon and running through Wednesday night.
So it looks like we could finally see Starhopper make some serious maneuvers. Its last test hop was a short, nighttime 20-meter (66 feet) liftoff, hover and landing that was mostly obscured from view by fire, smoke and darkness.
This time the hope is that Starhopper will reach an altitude of around 650 feet (198 meters) before returning to the ground.
The NOTAM (Notices to Airmen) linked above specifies:
Reason for NOTAM : TO PROVIDE A SAFE ENVIROMENT FOR ROCKET LAUNCH AND RECOVERY
[...] Altitude: From the surface up to and including 8000 feet MSL
[...] Effective Dates:
From August 26, 2019 at 1900 UTC To August 27, 2019 at 0500 UTC
From August 27, 2019 at 1900 UTC To August 28, 2019 at 0500 UTC
From August 28, 2019 at 1900 UTC To August 29, 2019 at 0500 UTC
Also at: space.com.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 23 2019, @10:00AM (2 children)
Artemis is the first book released by Andy Weir after achieving 'The Martian' fame. I found it pretty disappointing in that it was a pretty overt effort to grab a Hugo award by directly appealing to their current trend for hardcore identity politics. The protagonist is a Muslim Saudi Arabian super-powered can-do-anything girl who likes to sleep around, tell everybody about it, and also writes about her escapades with her pen pal in Kenya which in Weir's world also happens to be the center of the space revolution. At first I also dismissed that as more identity politics, but there's actually some logic there. It's equatorially located (awesome for launches) but there's something that the book also talks about. There were no real rules or regulations and so it helped the industry boom (... no pun intended) and foment within the nation.
It just seems absurd that a private company with an extremely well established record is unable to launch their rocket a couple of hundred meters in the sky because a regulatory agency gets cold feet at the very last moment. It's absurd. If we had as many regulatory agencies in the 1800s as we do today, I suspect America would never have come to become the great power that it is. For Musk who now has billions of dollars and significant governmental influence, this is just a mild annoyance. But these sort of regulatory agencies can, and do, completely destroy or deter newer companies simply because they don't have the resources to jump through the million hoops required to do, in general, exactly what they were going to do to start with anyhow.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday August 23 2019, @10:38AM
It was looking a lot worse [teslarati.com] earlier and Musk never took to his readily available soapbox to badmouth the FAA. All he said was "Good conversation with head of FAA Space. Need a bit more hazard analysis & should be clear to fly soon."
Starhopper is rapidly approaching obsolescence as a testing platform for Raptor engines since two (sub)orbital prototypes are within weeks or months of being able to fly. These will be more representative of the final Starships. If the authorization delay had continued, Starhopper may have never flown again. Whether that matters is up to you to decide. But more interesting than a 200 meter hop (to me) was the August 24th update presentation on Starship. That has apparently been delayed [twitter.com] until mid-September.
The opposing view to your point about regulations would be that SpaceX is moving faster than any aerospace company has in decades. Bureaucracy just looks extra slow in comparison.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday August 23 2019, @11:04AM
> It's absurd
... until someone gets a rocket landing on their house.