Starhopper Fires Its Engine
Starhopper completed tethered hop. All systems green. https://t.co/0m5Bm5slD2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 4, 2019
Starhopper completed tethered hop. All systems green. https://t.co/0m5Bm5slD2
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 4, 2019
It…begins….
We know what happens next; the iteration machine that is SpaceX starts churning. First a single engine with short hops, then 3 engine jumps.
Meanwhile, other photographers have spotted segments of a shiny Starship prototype being built…
And… @RGVaerialphotos’s Tweet from March 23. Bottom images show both larger Starship segments.
https://twitter.com/RGVaeri…
Congratulations! It looks like SpaceX just took the first step in the new Moon race. ?
And, unlike NASA, it was a step in the right direction. Once the Starship reaches orbital status, there will be no need for a lunar lander or lunar orbiter or brand new plans never carried out with each new president.
They’ve fired it up again! Hit the end of the tether this time.
https://twitter.com/elonmus…
Great! Wonder how long before the other two Raptors arrive and they really start to rock the place?
What’s the odds of SLS getting that far off the ground under thrust?
What about Dragon2 to moon first, next year?
https://forums.teslarati.co…
He’s in business. If someone pays him enough he will do it. If it’s a private flight he could even poke old space and NASA by doing a propulsive landing with it.
And Starship landing on the moon in 2021 without the need for a lander or lunar orbiter.
SX Development Program: Moving headlong into the future but never fast enough for some of us.
I’ve wondered why SX is so personally enthralling (similarly to a lot of people here, and elsewhere). Reading Eric at Ars this morning*, a commenter mentioned the nature of the rocket being built out in the open. A big, awkward and ungainly thing. A joke, really, to an uninformed passerby: “What in the world?”
In truth, under that wrinkled skin is one of the most advanced rocket systems in the world. It’s actually very far from its crude appearance. And maybe that’s the attraction.
Looking at historical or fictional figures in rocket development, who comes to mind when you picture Elon Musk? Tom Swift? Yes, in so many ways. Who else?
But more significantly Elon Musk recalls another rocket pioneer: an obsessive guy building his rockets out in the open, learning from every mistake. A guy who figured out many of the principles now used by every rocket maker in the planet. A guy going his own way.
Want to guess? I’m thinking of Robert Goddard.
The world has been waiting since 3.16.1926, almost exactly 93 years ago.
*https://arstechnica.com/sci…
Wow.
Such a disrespect to folks who developed SSME, F-1, SPS, and other American rocket engines.
OK, I can see how you’d say that. And I’d agree: the comparison is a bit fuzzy. Many other projects are deserving of a place in history. So why Goddard?
Diving in: There’s the mystique of the dreaming loner. Loner no longer, but early days deep in the southern Pacific Ocean depended on his vision and his ability to find money.
Musk is working out in the open, as did Goddard. Mistakes are there for everyone to see. No excuses.
The iterative technique is one we use in my design office. It’s a staple of great design. Alas, we don’t blow things up. In the case of SX, the work we’ve see starting with BFR, the changing names, and changing materials, is iteration at its finest. And in public. With private money. BFR will emerge from iteration into a completely new beast, perhaps cooled on re-entry in a manner similar to that used in the rocket nozzles.
Are reusable boosters in the same league as staging and liquid fuels? Goddard went on to make advancements in control systems, none obviously existing. For SX, a descending booster drove advancements in passive vector control.
Summarizing: Perhaps most importantly, Musk is revolutionizing mission architecture, eschewing bespoke, disposable devices, imagining spaceships carrying dozens.
Yes, it fits with the American tradition of the lone inventor changing the world, folks like Robert Fulton, Samuel Morse, Charles Goodyear, Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, etc. Elon Musk is seen as part of that grand tradition with SpaceX.
Yes, and it also recalls the great Robert Heinlein novels “Rocket Ship Galileo” and “The Man Who Sold the Moon” as well as his movie “Destination Moon”. We are finally seeing those novels become real. No wonder Administrator Bridenstine is trying to get NASA out of the mud and moving forward again. He knows if it doesn’t return to being the hard driving NASA of the 1960’s it is toast when Elon Musk reaches the Moon.
You are a romantic at heart, Professor.
And so was Bob Heinlein, a man of so many contrasts it was difficult to keep up and in whom ideas from the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ very often merged into something different- not a ‘center’, exactly, but an obvious middle ground defined largely by pragmatism.
Like lots of people, I read Heinlein as a youngster, moved by the action, and not so much by the ideas (well, except in the case of ‘Friday’, and a few others which contain quite avant grade notions). Reading him later, the ideas carry the (ahem) ‘story.’
I wonder what he would think of our current hyper-polarization.
He did refer to the “crazy years”’in his Future History series. ?
Yeah, but Musk isn’t using a thorium-powered nuclear thermal rocket engine…YET! (Yes, I’m old enough to have read “Rocket Ship Galileo” in middle school!)
I have to say it’s not just Bridenstine who is pushing. I heard a talk by Thomas Zurbuchen a few days ago and he was notably willing to be critical of the sort of obstruction he sees. The video of that talk is expected to be made public. When it is, I’ll share it with Keith.
Which reminds me of a previous comment that bears repeating:
Ever break up with a girl/boyfriend, only to hear though in your social circle admit never understanding what you ever saw in your ex? It’s happened to me, long ago; one of my best friends admitting to struggling whenever the ‘former’ was in the same room.
And now we have The Administrator talking dirt about SLS. Oh, not ‘dirt’, precisely. Something like “Remember that hot chick back in grad school? The one everyone wanted? I always thought she’d end up with you. Back then you could have your pick!”
Awkward silence follows. Best friend would never have said that before, at least not to your face, and particularly not if the two of you are struggling to ‘make things work’.
So now the Administrator wants NASA to meet the moon-landing schedule – which has to be amongst the funniest thing from the Land of Presidential Appointees, ever. He makes a couple of speeches pointing out how great the SLS alternatives might be, giving simultaneously tacit permission to talk about the unthinkable.
Suddenly everyone is afraid that they have SLS-stink. Anyone who has participated in one of the many forms of ‘therapy,’ too, will recognize the pundit behavior following Mr. Bridenstine’s speech, in which he gave permission to not only have unSLS feelings, but to talk about them as well.
For me it was the nozzle trimming episode, they had me after that. The first COTS demo flight (can it really be almost nine years ago?) was in jeopardy because during inspection after the static test fire cracks were found in the second stage nozzle extension. Any other space agency, not just NASA, that would have meant weeks of delay at a minimum. But SpaceX decided they could just trim the nozzle. By hand! Flew their lead machinist out there, if I remember correctly. They barely got him to go because he was deathly afraid of flying. Perhaps even more incredible is they convinced NASA of their tinsnip solution, they did this by providing the results of their software analysis which seemed to be accomplished practically overnight. Nozzle trimmed, rocket launched, capsule flown and recovered less than a mile from the target. Oh yeah they also launched some nanosats. Oh yeah after payload separation they did another firing of the second stage sending it up thousands of miles. Oh yeah and for ballast they flew a wheel of cheese.
Suddenly space was fun. Risky and dangerous, Musk often makes that very clear. But I realized after COTS 1 that this was not your father’s rocket company. The subsequent eight plus years have proved that out, with more to come.
In the early days of the Mercury program they found that the heat shield of one of the Mercury capsules was slightly too large to fit on the adapter that sat on the top of the rocket.
So what did they do?
They went to the local hardware store bought a router and use it to trim the heat shield.
Now that’s the way you get things done.
Except in the risk averse world we now live in, that would certainly not fly (no pun intended) for long. The difference between “I’ll just rout this out to trim it and we’ll be good to go” and “this has been a catastrophic fatal disaster” can be very slim, especially in space, where even a somewhat minor incident can have far reaching unwanted results.
For better or worse, root cause analysis has made flying (especially on the government side) more stringent. You’d be surprised how often the results of an incident investigation ended up with the results being “Accident caused by non-standard/approved procedure done because it was thought to get something done quicker.” Remember when Space X blew up a pad (and a fairly expensive payload) because they didn’t understand everything going on with their new untested fueling procedure?
100% true. But that doesn’t mean you can’t take risks with unmanned prototypes. Clearly NASA wouldn’t have allowed hand-trimming of a manned capsule like they did on COTS1, and I’m certainly not going to say they should allow such a thing. But without SpaceX, today’s NASA wouldn’t have even thought of the possibility of hand-trimming an unmanned capsule because they are so risk-averse in everything they do, past the point of paralysis.
If we can learn to accept the occasional kaboom on unmanned launches, we can iterate designs so much faster and get to the safest solution in a fairly short timeframe, but we have to be willing to accept occasional bad optics, something that seems impossible for today’s political leaders.
Do you have the particulars on that? I can only find brief snippets, one said it was in 1959. The first Mercury test launch was in July 1960 so that would mean the router incident maybe took place during an early stacking test. There’s the capsule on a mattress on a pickup truck story also. I don’t doubt the stories but that was sixty years of bureaucratic layers ago, and seems more like what is now going on in Boca Chica.
I read it in one of the many books setting on my bookshelf about the early days of the space program and unfortunately I don’t remember which book has the story. The story stuck in my mind because when I read it I thought, “That would never happen today”.
You may be correct in that it may have been one of the early test flights.
The point I was trying to make, in a round about way, is that NASA used to do things that way along time ago in a galaxy far far away…….
I think I read that story in Into That Silent Sea, a history of the early space program, from 1961 to 1965, by French and Burgess. That’s part of the series of spaceflight histories University of Nebraska Press did, and they’re usually well-referenced. But I’m having Kindle reader problems which keep me from doing an easy search for the page number.
“But SpaceX decided they could just trim the nozzle. By hand! Flew their lead machinist out there, if I remember correctly. They barely got him to go because he was deathly afraid of flying. “
Marty, the immortal Blue Tape Guy ?
Image taken after he rode a cherry picker to the interstage hatch.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
It strikes me that SX tends to conduct the work needed at the level needed. Some orgs might do this early dev work out of a clean room and the like – Not a bad way to do it, but likely a slower way.
Funny, I read all the Tom Swift jr books that were current when I was a kid… never made that connection, nor Robert Goddard… Howard Hughes maybe. What I find enthralling is the audaciousness, creativity, and the willingness to go to hardware relatively quickly. Reminds me of the Apollo era. In particular I think of the F-1 development where they triggered combustion chamber instability with explosive charges. Only thing missing is the sense of doing this together as a country, but it’s not a bad substitute… it’ll be interesting to see how NASA responds.
I think of Robert Truax ..
Elon isn’t going to wait for NASA to screw around.
Now if he can just avoid going broke, or to jail, because of Tesla…
Unlikely, yesterday the Judge told the SEC to stop telling her how to do her job and to just work things out with Elon Musk before she sees them again.
In my view, Mr. Musk deserves some criticism for his activity over at Tesla. The company has largely transitioned from focus on invention and design to focus on operational issues (yes, I know about the semi, and the pickup, and other projects).
Mr. Musk has proven that a reasonably intelligent guy (that would be Elon) can, given sufficient motivation and an achievable dream, come to master and dominate a foreign realm (and that would be rocket science).
Is he sufficiently interested in the nuts and bolts of large scale factory production? There is evidence on both sides, but I’d rather see him realizing previously-goofy notions than concerning himself with tents on a wharf.
Gwynne Shotwell has been admirably effective at SX operations. At Tesla, it is time to call in a car guy.
I actually agree. He does need to find someone who is as good as building cars as he is at creating them. But where do you find someone? Not at the old car firms, they don’t seem able to run the factories they have…
A fun fact. Before joining the Aerospace Corp. Gwynne Shotwell was working at Chrysler. So maybe Elon can persuade Gwynne to take over Tesla after SpaceX getting Super Heavy and Starship operational.
Tesla actually has major car guys running production.
That covers the “going to jail” part :_>
The danger of Tesla going bankrupt isn’t from U.S.or Europe sales, it most likely from the factory he is building in China. China’s debt load is getting heavier and like Enron, the Chinese won’t be able to “cook the books” forever and avoid a massive recession and just maybe civil war.
https://www.vox.com/world/2…
Everyone warns of China’s rise. But its decline could be even worse.
“It’s frightening to think about,” a prominent scholar said.
By Alex Ward
Dec 12, 2018, 2:00pm EST
The problem with centrally planned economies is that the longer the natural markets forces are held down, the greater the pressure builds until, like the old Soviet Union and Venezuela, the lid blows off and things get very, very ugly. Add in the “re-education camps for Uighurs and the poverty that continues in the rural areas and things could get real ugly in China real fast. Maybe not the civil war discussed in this article, but nasty just the same.
Its no wonder the wealthy in China are buying homes in the West, sending their kids here for “education” and buying T-Bills. The see what is coming and are making sure they have an escape plan.
Returning this to the topic, its why I see the real race to the Moon as being between SpaceX and old Space being led by NASA. Its also why the testing of the Hopper is being watched by so many folks.
Here’s something about China that has me flummoxed: the widespread ‘panic’ when economists predict 5-6% growth rather than 8%, like the sky is falling.
It’s parochial, I understand, but still. 6% does not make a recession.
No, but like Enron it’s about keeping up appearances. But also that number is self-reported. When analysis look at other “indicators” of GDP like counting the containers at ports or energy use the numbers are far lower than they should be for that level of GDP.
That was my first impression as well, but now that you mention it, there are ways where thinking ahead can cause problems. The Chinese government does plan ahead. The economy isn’t as centrally controlled as it was fifty years ago, but quite a bit of their economy is based on long-term government plans. And they do invest in infrastructure. And all that is based on how and how quickly they expect their economy to grow.
Over the course of ten years, the difference between 5% and 8% is about 30% in economic growth (160% versus 215%.) That means investing in infrastructure which won’t be needed. If you were to look at what parts of their are growing faster or slower than expected, it probably also means they aren’t spending that money on the right sorts of infrastructure. We’ve had similar debates in the US over tax reforms. The impact a particular proposal would have on the federal budget depends on what growth rate is assumed.
It’s worth mentioning that Iridium SSC did go bankrupt in 1999 (an excellent example of a great engineering idea with a really poor marketing followup…) Their assets were bought up in 2001 by Iridium Satellite LLC, now Iridium Communications Inc., and they’re doing quite well. If Mr. Musk has financial problems, it may affect Spaceship, but Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Dragon are here to stay. As are vertical landing, reusable first stages and electric cars.
No argument at all about the lasting value of those technologies. I want Musk to stay solvent and in control so that one day he can demonstrate landing a BFS in a cornfield :_>
But hasn’t he been doing that, in several cases? The requirement for additional test flights before man-rating, for instance? Or deleting powered capsule landing?
Each has a sufficiently foggy backstory, it’s true, but taken together a trend emerges. I’d say that Mr. Musk excels at lighting his lip.
Too bad SpaceX has to get permission from the FAA, the Coast Guard, Air Force, and probably the FTC or gawd knows what other acronym agencies to launch anywhere. If SpaceX wanted to send it’s own Falcon Heavy rocket and Dragon 2 to land on the Moon , would they even be “allowed” to ? Does embarassing SLS and ULA on the one hand, and obsoleting SLS and ULA on the other in any way impede SpaceX’s operating ? What lies between l’aiisez faire and strict regulatory requirement when it comes to spaceflight and you own the rocket, payload, AND the launch site outright ?
That is why what the National Space Council is proposing in terms of modernizing and streaming regulations for space is so important. For example, SpaceX used to have to turn off its cameras once the rocket reached “space” because he didn’t have a license from NOAA for imaging the Earth. That nonsense has already been deposed of.
I think SpaceX only had problems with the camera once (the camera angle and view of Earth were an issue as I recall), and the requirement was almost immediately eliminated. I know it isn’t the Super Bowl, but a fair number of people do watch those launches online and they tend to be people who care enough to contact elected officials. My impression was that enough people heard about the camera thing, and complained, that someone was quickly and firmly told he was being an idiot and to stop it. The real regulatory issues aren’t nearly as visible or obviously stupid. That’s makes them harder to resolve.
Unfair. Every agency has the responsibility of effectuating its mandate; when this involves a projection into an area entirely unforeseen, or indeed unforeseeable, it is time for the mandate to be revisited.
Had the agency not acted, pending some sort of revisitation, voices from the right would have criticized it for inaction.
BTW NASA also test fired one of the engines for the EM-1 flight. Congratulations on a successful test.
https://www.business-standa…
NASA test fires SLS rocket engine for Moon mission
Washington Last Updated at April 5, 2019 13:57 IST
Yes, but aside from the new model controller, that is still an RS-25 from the Shuttle Program (unless the test firing was on one of the new non-reusable engines). Iteration versus innovation!
You mean one of those old Space Shuttle engines that were reusable that we spent $$millions more on to make them disposable? So we could throw them away?
No wonder that’s not looked at quite as gloriously as what SpaceX is doing.
WITH RESPECT, NASA IS ON LIFE SUPPORT. TIME TO DISBAND IT, AND TURN TO NEW SPACE TO MAKE THINGS HAPPEN.
Ok, I’ll say it:
NONSENSE.
With respect, Michael, NASA is an old cat lady, wistfully remembering the good old days, while living in a house of squalor, and eating they same food as her cats. SpaceX and Blue Origin are the new developers, making an offer to set her up in a new, modern, and clean residence, where she will be greatly cared for, then bulldoze her shack in favor of new, energy efficient, long-lasting homes with an ever appreciating value.
To refuse to acknowledge this reality, is to further entrench the very problems which got NASA using 50 year old tech and infrastructure, reminiscing about the halcyon Apollo days, and living on local fast food. Old Space is watching their dominance in the industry wane, and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are dynamically doing things we should have been doing 30 years ago.
This is what is happening. No amount of debate will change it.
Hi, great post
Elon had a grand vision when founding SpaceX. He named the company Space Exploration Technologies, not Space Launch Technologies, for a reason.
Personal opinion: NASA has done things no one else has done, and they must operate within government-defined procedures and budget rules. I’ve been a NASA fan a good 50 years. But surely there are lessons to be learned in the way SpaceX designs, builds, and tests hardware in the time it takes a government agency to coordinate a briefing deck.
NASA tries to “streamline” things as best as can be done inside the FArS, with every development contract. But the same old nitpicking oversight creeps right back in.
(Matt: Everything here is ‘personal opinion.’ That’s part of why it is interesting).
I’ve made the case elsewhere on why I think comparing private and public efforts. But I would say that NASA is benefiting from SX’ efforts. Publicly, this is at least in part through the purchase of services, as a single example. I have no way of knowing if the thinking amongst the high-level people at NASA is changing, except to say this: that while the Administrator and his circle live in a very charged political environment, they are also very intelligent people fully capable or reading handwriting on the wall.
Whether or not they actually read it is another question.
High level people at NASA are put in place to do one thing… feed the beast. From the top down pick by the senate of the Administrator and then hires on down the line. They are hired because they know what side their bread is buttered. They do not get hired to try and swim upstream .. they get hired to swim with the congressional current.
A fairly cynical POV, but: top level people are hired to effectuate Administration policy. Isn’t that why we have elections?
Any dispassionate observation would point out that the particular skill set might vary with the circumstances. Betsy DeVoss is raising hell at Education largely because the Administration favors the introduction of religious schools and/or curriculum into the mainstream, for instance. Mr. Bridenstine has particular capabilities with respect to Congress.
It’s fair to oppose these actions or these appointments. I certainly do. But a deep understanding of why these people do what they do is essential to effective opposition, no?
“A fairly cynical POV, but: top level people are hired to effectuate Administration policy. Isn’t that why we have elections?”
Wellll, no. Elections form Administrations that will *propose* policy to be funded, and convince the Legislature to fund it. In the original highly limited government, that design worked well enough, because it seldom disposed of enough resources to be worth fighting over. In the current extent of government, commanding a substantial percentage of the resources of society, those resources are enough to help politicians buy elections from their voters, which shapes which kind of politicians hold on to their offices longest. That accumulates a type of politician that in turn shapes Congress.
Richard Shelby’s behavior is exemplary of that trend. Inside Alabama’s political hierarchies since 1963, he learned what bought his voters early on. Inside a government disposing of a large portion of society’s resources since the 1970s, he acquired the levers to direct those resources to his voters. *Then* he switched to a Republican. He hasn’t changed much at all in that switch.
And he would NOT vote someone who is advocating the elimination of his pork. That is my point on who the Senate confirms for NASA administrator.
Indeed, IMHO, Senator Shelby expected that his power would be sufficient until he retired, to keep his pork flowing to his vassals. I really doubt that it is a coincidence that all the changes in NASA policy are coming into the open in the weeks just *after* the Mueller Report took one of the thumbs off the scales that had reduced the power of the WH so much. Will it be enough to force this through?? Sit back and get some popcorn. The maneuvers have only begun!
That’s idealizing the early history of our government. Consider the first six frigates, which formed the core of the US Navy. They were built in six different states and by six different contractors, specifically to spread the money and economic benefits around. Congress went back-and-forth approving construction, putting it on hold and resuming work. There was a fair amount of infighting between the designers and contractors. And the project ended up about costing about 250% of the originally authorized budget. And, once built, there people who wanted to be the captain or officers on one of them were competing to pull in political favors with congressmen and administration officials.
“Consider the first six frigates, which formed the core of the US Navy…..”
Indeed, that is why I said “that design worked well enough,”, not that it worked at all perfectly. Still, it did less then, than what we have now, to disrupt the process that Toynbee described:
“When a society moves from allocating resources by custom and tradition (moderns read here, by politics) to allocating resources by markets, they may be said to have undergone an industrial revolution” Arnold Toynbee-1884
So you are saying Senators are in the habit of voting to appoint people that will directly effect their pork and take it away? Really?
Shocking, isn’t it.
A good example of NASA learning from SpaceX was the early F9 reentry burns. NASA was seeking data on Mars atmospheric entry, and there wasSpaceX seeking data on high altitude earth atmospheric entry for their F9 1st stages. Pretty much the same thing. They co-operated and both learnt a lot.
Looks like the streak is continuing. Congratulations to SpaceX on the successful test firing of the Falcon Heavy Block 5. Elon Musk also reports that the FH Block 5 will have 20% better performance than the prototype launched last year. That is the SpaceX way, constant improvements in performance.
https://www.teslarati.com/s…
SpaceX fires up Falcon Heavy Block 5 for the first time, launch date announced
By Eric Ralph
Posted on April 5, 20
And the SpaceX fans are on the way. Over 100,000 are expected to see the launch.
https://www.orlandosentinel…
Space fans descend from around the world for the launch of SpaceX’s powerful Falcon Heavy
By Chabeli Herrera
Orlando Sentinel
April 4, 2019, 7:00 a.m
Imagine the crowds when the Starship/Super Heavy starts flying…
I can’t wait until the Starhopper actually gets off the ground. Those tests will be stunning.
The Starhopper is very exciting. I am equally as enthusiastic about the Raptor engine. It is an amazing technology developed in incredible time at a budget. Entire countries have not been able to build such an advanced machine. If the specifications are to believed it is the most capable rocket engine ever built and reusable. There ought to be some engineering awards given to that design team.
It’s easy to see how innovative and successful SpaceX has been in it’s wonderous adolescence. Almost every other rocketmaker in the world is copying them now. Look at Blue Origin and it’s offshore landing barge for New Glenn. The Chinese and European Ariane Group/CNES are cloning the Falcon and it’s landing legs system as well . Remember how the likes of Boeing Lockheed and their ULA poo-pooed SpaceX’s schem or even said it couldn’t be done. Now they are all ten years behind, while Mars seems closer than ever…