FAQ
- When (first) orbital flight? First integrated flight test occurred April 20, 2023. “The vehicle cleared the pad and beach as Starship climbed to an apogee of ~39 km over the Gulf of Mexico – the highest of any Starship to-date. The vehicle experienced multiple engines out during the flight test, lost altitude, and began to tumble. The flight termination system was commanded on both the booster and ship.”
- Where can I find streams of the launch? SpaceX Full Livestream. NASASpaceFlight Channel. Lab Padre Channel. Everyday Astronaut Channel.
- What’s happening next? SpaceX has assessed damage to Stage 0 and is implementing fixes and changes including a water deluge/pad protection/“shower head” system. No major repairs to key structures appear to be necessary.
- When is the next flight test? Just after flight, Elon stated they “Learned a lot for next test launch in a few months.” On April 29, he reiterated this estimate in a Twitter Spaces Q&A (summarized here), saying “I’m glad to report that the pad damage is actually quite small,” should “be repaired quickly,” and “From a pad standpoint, we are probably ready to launch in 6 to 8 weeks.” Requalifying the flight termination system (FTS) and the FAA post-incident review will likely require the longest time to complete. Musk reiterated the timeline on May 26, stating “Major launchpad upgrades should be complete in about a month, then another month of rocket testing on pad, then flight 2 of Starship.”
- Why no flame diverter/flame trench below the OLM? Musk tweeted on April 21: “3 months ago, we started building a massive water-cooled, steel plate to go under the launch mount. Wasn’t ready in time & we wrongly thought, based on static fire data, that Fondag would make it through 1 launch.” Regarding a trench, note that the Starship on the OLM sits 2.5x higher off the ground than the Saturn V sat above the base of its flame trench, and the OLM has 6 exits vs. 2 on the Saturn V trench.
Quick Links
RAPTOR ROOST | LAB CAM | SAPPHIRE CAM | SENTINEL CAM | ROVER CAM | ROVER 2.0 CAM | PLEX CAM | NSF STARBASE
Relevant Reddit threads (though these likely won’t be accessible during the blackout).
Starship Dev 46 | Starship Dev 45 | Starship Dev 44 | Starship Dev 43 | Starship Thread List
Official Starship Update | r/SpaceX Update Thread
Status
Road Closures
No road closures currently scheduled
No transportation delays currently scheduled
Up to date as of 2023-07-09
Resources
- LabPadre Channel | NASASpaceFlight.com Channel
- NSF: Booster 7 + Ship X (likely 24) Updates Thread | Most Recent
- NSF: Boca Chica Production Updates Thread | Most recent
- NSF: Elon Starship tweet compilation | Most Recent
- SpaceX: Website Starship page | Starship Users Guide (2020, PDF)
- FAA: SpaceX Starship Project at the Boca Chica Launch Site
- FAA: Temporary Flight Restrictions NOTAM list
- FCC: Starship Orbital Demo detailed Exhibit - 0748-EX-ST-2021 application June 20 through December 20
- NASA: Starship Reentry Observation (Technical Report)
- Hwy 4 & Boca Chica Beach Closures (May not be available outside US)
- Production Progress Infographics by @RingWatchers
- Raptor 2 Tracker by @SpaceRhin0
- Acronym definitions by Decronym
- Everyday Astronaut: Starbase Tour with Elon Musk, Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
- Everyday Astronaut: 2022 Elon Musk Interviews, Starbase/Ship Updates | Launch Tower | Merlin Engine | Raptor Engine
I’ll attempt to keep this post current with links and major updates, but would be greatly helped by information supplied by the community. I hope this can be an alternate place to discuss Starship development. While the Starship Development Threads on Reddit are not party threads, Lemmy is still small enough that I don’t imagine that strict moderation will be needed in the short term.
New comment from /u/santacfan on Reddit:
Okay, I was 3 hours into watching the replay and counting trucks when I noticed Rover 2 chat has picked up the count again. So let’s go with their numbers instead of me going cross eyed trying to watch this for 12 hours.
Rover 2-
12:45pm- 144 trucks
13:15- 150 trucks
13:32- First pump truck leaves site. 151 trucks
13:43- Second pump truck leaves site. 152 trucks
14:25- 160 trucks
15:00- It’s the pour that never ends It goes on and on my friends Some trucks started pouring, not knowing how deep it was And they’ll continue pouring because 33 raptors tried to dig to china
15:01- 168 trucks
15:23- 3rd pump truck leaves. The concrete trucks though, they keep coming. 170
15:35- 4th back up pump truck leaves. Truck 171 pulls in
15:45- 174 trucks in. 5 trucks have left with their tag wheels down though indicating they are still full. So they might be done.
16:00- I’m calling it. The last truck was stopped and diverted down to the electrical trench.
174 trucks in. 6 trucks left loaded. So 168 trucks overall. Add in the 132 from the last big pour and we’re at even 300 truck loads.
Starbase Live-
12:23pm- First pump truck lowers
1:13pm- Second pump truck lowers
3:12pm- Third pump truck lowers
(This gets synced)
Hey all, I’m trying something new here – I spoke with @[email protected] on Reddit and they said that while they’d like to continue posting here, they don’t have the time – but we do have permission to copy the data to Lemmy if we want.
I’ve set up a small automation on Val Town to automatically copy over their comments here. Let me know what you think – if feedback is bad then I’ll just disable it again.
Great work! My initial reaction is that I’ve never interacted with something like this before, and I’ll have to spend some time with it before forming opinions. But in theory I love it!
(I’m guessing you know this, but your automation posted the same thing a bunch of times)
Yeah sorry about that! I’m not sure exactly what the bug is/was, I think something related to how Val Town works, but it wasn’t “writing” to the database properly, and thus creating a new comment every time.
I hope I fixed it now, but unfortunately deleted comments still show up, so don’t think we can do anything about it…
Any update on where the wrecker went, and what it did went it got there? Inquiring minds want to know ! /s
Seriously, thanks for helping to make it easier to not have to go back to ‘that other place’ ever again!
When I deleted a comment, it showed to me as something like [deleted], so you might try.
There’s a more fundamental problem that there’s no context to the comment, and I can’t think of a good way to provide it. I think it might all be infeasible.
Yeah I meant to only publish comments that are “updates”, since hopefully those are relatively context free (like this one about the pour).
Ideally I’d be able to edit the comment but keep the syncing going, but that requires a bit more work on my side.
This is great work. Much appreciated.
Thanks for setting this up!
Just a heads up that both r/SpaceX and c/SpaceX have switched to Starship Dev thread 47, so you might need to tweak your scripts a bit.
Thanks, updated!