Earth' Largest Rocketship
Good morning everyone. Not much to see here. A @SpaceX #Starship was stacked over night. This is now the tallest and most powerful rocket that anyone has ever built. That's all. Have a nice day. https://t.co/GrudLO6Xz6
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) August 6, 2021
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Putting aside the rocket for one moment, my brain has trouble just comprehending the crane!
And if you look closely next to the rocket there are some white sticks, those are cherry pickers with workers in them who are monitoring the stacking, they were a few feet away from the attachment point as the two pieces came together. The baskets that the workers are riding in are 100 meters in the air.
Yeah, the crane is one thing, but those spindly little robot arms just reach up there with people at their end. Makes me wonder what we’ll get up to in orbit and on Mars/Luna with Starship’s capabilities.
I’d be more afraid of going up one of those cherry pickers than in a Starship.
Having been up on an 85 foot boom lift, I’ll bet there’s a bit of sway and bounce in those lifts when the wind blows. And you’re not going to want to be dancing around vigorously.
And the LR 11350 is not Liebherr’s largest crane! That would be the LR 13000.
That the cranes are ‘off-the-shelf” equipment kind of messes with my head, too.
LR 13000
Max. load capacity: 3,000 tonnes
Max. hoist height: 236 m
Max. radius: 200 m
Well, I don’t know that they stock the cranes, but certainly, it’s a build on order with no redesign needed.
and to think . they offer an even bigger model
They have unstacked it already.
I already got my full measure of enjoyment and pleasure out of it! Wait for the orbital attempt. Exciting times!
Fit check is done, and SS/SH can’t stay there while they install the catcher arms (aka Mechazilla).
for tens years SLS PAO has been touting them being the biggest and most powerful ever and they lost the title before even rolling a full stack out to the pad. worse they lost it to a rocket and booster that was built in under 2 months.
The more I think about the decades-old systems that are going into SLS and the multi-year timescale for assembling even a single test article, the more ludicrous the whole enterprise sounds. How could anyone argue that it’s anything more than a jobs program with anything resembling a straight face?
And then there’s the insistence that it’s necessary for lunar exploration…in an architecture that involves using it to throw Orion into NRHO (because that’s as far as it can get it), transferring crew to a Starship, landing that Starship on the moon with up to ~100 t of payload, returning the Starship to orbit, and transferring the crew back to Orion to go back home while more Starships come and go to resupply the lunar Starship.
It gets even worse when the Tollbooth gets introduced. They’ll have already done missions without it, showing it to be an unnecessary complication, and a reusable lunar Starship will mean standard Starships coming and going to resupply it, while this dinky little station just sits there being useless.
SLS won’t just lose its title. It’s going to be obsolete as soon as Starship flies people and cargo into space.
SLS was obsolete when it was designed.
Shall we take bets on whether Starship or SLS launches first?
Unless the FAA holds things up with red tape. I think starship is the natural front runner for getting to orbit first and it might not even be this booster/starship but the next or the one after it.
Not at even odds. SLS has a chance of launching before next spring. And there is a chance SpaceX will be required to do a new environmental impact statement, which would delay them beyond next spring. Overall, I wouldn’t take a bet on it unless you offered 2:1 in favor of SpaceX.
Take administrative FAA obstacles out of the picture and I will bet on Starship.
SLS doesn’t benefit from winning that race if it wins that way. In fact, in might even work out worse it PR wise.
It’s a great time to be alive,.
I’ve posted this before but I’ll do it again: This is a huge gamble on Musk’s part. It could be catastrophic for the HLS and Starship program as a whole if it goes wrong. However, the dividends if it goes right would be greater still.
Yeah. If that thing blows on the pad, I’m not sure there’ll be anything left of the launch tower, and will likely set the program back for a long time.
Given the tower and starship/booster were all built in the last few months not sure an explosion will set them too far back. Since December they built, flew and blew up or landed or didn’t use 6 starships.
If it “blows on the pad”, it’ll be pretty much like AMOS-6, except with the fuel burning off more quickly. Mainly a lot of fire damage to fix. It’s something more like Cygnus Orb-3 that’s really worrying…that excavated a new pond right next to the launch site and would have done a lot more damage if it’d hit directly. That’s largely addressable by sufficiently paranoid use of a FTS system.
That depends on how it goes wrong. Most failures wouldn’t make a difference. Look at the Starship high(ish) altitude flights earlier this year. They launched (it worked), it did its pre-landing aerodynamic belly flop (it worked) and the vehicle crashed on landing (so they found some things they had to fix.) They just repeated it four or five times until they got it right. If the first launch gets as far as staging, and then everything else goes wrong, I don’t think that would slow SpaceX down at all. Something like an accident which damaged the launch facilities might be more serious, but they did manage to build them in a very short time. Rebuilding them would be an annoying delay, but I don’t think it would be a catastrophe.
It’s getting real… Elon just estimated it would take 2 weeks to install the rest of the tiles, insulation for the booster engines, and quick disconnect for ship. So probably more like 1-2 months, but it’ll be incredible when that launches, no matter what the outcome, it’ll be memorable. Great time to be alive indeed.
We’ve certainly seen exciting things going on in Boca Chica lately. I can’t wait for this thing to launch. It’s going to be epic!
Just curious. Has anyone commented on what the noise levels are going to be when that thing launches? I’m guessing it’s going to be deafening for a wide radius.
It’s going to be loud, but perhaps not quite as loud as you might expect. I don’t remember the details but it has something to do with using many small engines compared to a few large ones. So it isn’t expected to be as loud as a Saturn V. (Not to say the Saturn V wasn’t really loud.) This has been discussed in greater details in Ars Technica comments and is also part of the environmental analysis which is in progress. The later is necessary for launch licensing, since the site was originally approved for Falcon 9 and Heavy launches.
ISTR for blast effects it follows the cube square, so you need 8x the energy release to double the blast radius. Acoustic effects similarly non-intuitive?
Acoustic effects close up are inverse square, but are complicated at greater distances by reflection from terrain, atmospheric layers, absorption by the air, etc. However, the sound amplitudes at the rocket are lower with larger numbers of engines. The engines are producing uncorrelated noise that doesn’t just constructively add together.
N engines produce N times as much sound power, but sqrt(N) times the sound pressure level. 5 F-1 engines are 2.2 times as loud as F-1 engine, 33 Raptors are 5.7 times as loud as a single Raptor.
Assuming engine noise scales directly with thrust, the Superheavy would be about 90% as loud as a Saturn V. It’s not going to scale exactly with thrust, but it’s a good enough approximation to say that they should be roughly similar.
Normalized to thrust, the Raptor might be noisier because of the higher exhaust velocity, but that might also mean more of the noise is in high frequencies that experience more attenuation. And it might be quieter at lower frequencies due to its smaller combustion chamber. And I’m sure there’s other factors I’m not aware of.
Thank you!
Well this is just an awesome comment to nerd out on.
There are folks that run that LabPadre live stream constantly, watching every little move. I hit it like once every month or two.
I hit it this morning and I be like Whoa!
An hour later I went to show it to a friend and they’d been de-stacked. I had to rewind.
Only once a month? I check it out daily.
Well, I’ll be checking it more often now. I almost missed a historic screen shot opportunity.
I noticed that the President, the Vice President, and the NASA Administrator were left speechless by this great accomplishment.
NASA is pretty much silenced by the GAO comment blackout. Even though the protest is resolved the blackout doesn’t end until August 12.
Once Starship Super Heavy flies successfully, especially once it demonstrates full reusability, I think SLS becomes untenable as a path for human space flight. NASA and Congress will hold on to it, but it will be the proverbial millstone around their necks, sucking in funds and resources that could be better spent elsewhere. In the meantime, Starship Super Heavy will begin low-cost regular flights into space, including to the Moon. SLS – will launch once a year at huge cost. How any Administration could defend such an utter waste of money is beyond me.
Decisions on SLS come back to Congress, as the author of the budgets and appropriator of funds. If they embed SLS funds in their appropriations bills, I can’t imagine that the Biden administration will want to die on the hill of having that money removed. I also imagine that Biden, as an experienced Senator, knows the value of a good trade and will be happy to see SLS continue to get funds if it means he can trade his support (acuquiecense) for votes on something else that’s more important to him. I expect to see a number of SLS stacks get off the pad before the plug is finally pulled, but it will take a few more years.
Elon said if it doesn’t blow up on the stand it will be a success. So everything after it leaves the pad is gravy