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On February 28, SpaceX's SN01 Starship prototype imploded and exploded during a pressurization test (Mk1 failed in November). A day later, Eric Berger from Ars Technica visited SpaceX's facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. Some highlights from the story include:
- SN01 was not destined to fly, only to serve as a platform for static fire testing. (Elon Musk had previously tweeted that the wrong settings were used on the welding equipment used to build SN01.)
- SN01's failure has been attributed to bad welding on the thrust puck, which is welded onto the bottom tank dome of Starship and connects the Raptor engines to the rest of the rocket.
- The quality team raised concerns about the thrust puck to an engineer who did not act upon them. They have been instructed to contact Musk directly with design concerns.
- SpaceX went on a hiring spree in February that doubled its workforce in Boca Chica to over 500. The goal is to build a production line for Starships.
- SpaceX aims to build a Starship every week by the end of 2020, with a goal of building one every 72 hours eventually.
- SpaceX engineers have built an in-house x-ray machine to look for imperfections in welds.
- Construction costs for a single Starship could eventually drop to as low as $5 million.
- The Boca Chica site will operate 24/7, with workers alternating between three and four 12-hour shifts per week.
- A 20 km flight is planned for this spring, and an orbital mission could happen before the end of 2020.
In other news:
- SpaceX to Raise Hundreds of Millions of Dollars Through a Funding Round That Will Value It at $36 Billion
- SpaceX Could Earn $30 Billion Annually From Starlink, 10x Of Sending ISS Supplies – Elon Musk
- SpaceX's latest Starship test was uneventful and that's great news for its flight debut
- Astronauts capture SpaceX cargo capsule with robot arm for final time
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Another Starship Prototype Explodes, but SpaceX Isn't Stopping
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday March 11 2020, @08:35PM (2 children)
No. The rockets they've promised would have had heavy lift capabilities. What they delivered on is a market lead in putting commercial satellites in orbit. Which their competitors all promised as much at lower costs.
But don't get me wrong. I'm not signaling out Musk. He's not doing anything new. In fact, practically anything to ever actually get done in government comes from those sorts of consumer-market shenanigans where some marketeer bamboozles congress to finance their pet project and barely manages to deliver anything close to usable. I'm just bringing up the fact both the left and right fields of American politics tend to get swept away by well marketed fantasies and the thing about any dream, let alone the American one, is that you have to wake up at some point and face reality.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday March 11 2020, @10:43PM (1 child)
Falcon 9 can lift more than double to LEO than what it was originally planned to. Falcon Heavy is a "heavy lift" launch vehicle.
You are throwing around platitudes.
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(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday March 12 2020, @03:56PM
LEO is for commercial satellites. Falcon Heavy is below the specs of what SpaceX's competitors promised at higher costs being an afterthought following SpaceX's failure to "tie" the rockets together.
To be fair, SpaceX and Tesla weren't just competing against honest startups but also against Lockheed and GM so it's likely it wouldn't have been the good startups but the too-big-to-fail F35 style disasters winning over.
It's the only reason Musk gets a pass from so many people who know the score. He's probably the lesser of two evils.
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