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SpaceX Starship

Sweet! Hopefully they get enough up there to ship my pre-order before we make the move to the new place in Maine.
 
plym49.2 said:
My God! That looks like a giant flying.......

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El‘ BJ? Maybe I am too young to get the joke, or did you mean to post Nixon? Totally opposite note, I really need to get signed up for star link so I don’t miss it. My cable Internet fucking blows
 
Does anyone know of any Instagram accounts for peeps who fab the engine parts?
 
Yep, last nights Starlink launch was badass! What's crazy within a couple hour period last night Arianespace's Vega launch vehicle returned to flight successfully after a launch failure in November, China launched the first piece of their next space station on a Long March 5 rocket, and SpaceX launched this batch of Starlinks not 20 minutes after that



Scott, that's way badass you guys had parts on Hopper! That is one of the few test vehicles that looks like it's going to stick around for a while.

Carter, I'd be surprised if there are any accounts leaking too much behind the scenes engine parts, if you take pictures of the wrong stuff on an engine you violate ITAR regulations and get in federal trouble. Artistic people have created their best interpretations though which are pretty slick

 
AgitatedPancake said:
Carter, I'd be surprised if there are any accounts leaking too much behind the scenes engine parts, if you take pictures of the wrong stuff on an engine you violate ITAR regulations and get in federal trouble. Artistic people have created their best interpretations though which are pretty slick
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My white collar brother thinks the engines are fabbed/welded by robots so not much labor is lost when one blows up.
I wanted to try and figure they out if they are hand fabbed/welded or some robot assembly. I vote manual methods.
 
CarterKraft said:
My white collar brother thinks the engines are fabbed/welded by robots so not much labor is lost when one blows up.
I wanted to try and figure they out if they are hand fabbed/welded or some robot assembly. I vote manual methods.
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A professor of mine started a Hall Effect Thruster company. They are up in the bfe U.P. and they use a ton of robots for manufacturing and testing of the thrusters. It’s called Orbion Space Technology. Pretty sweet deal they have. When I was in school he was still developing these thrusters.

 
ThePanzerFuhrer said:
A professor of mine started a Hall Effect Thruster company. They are up in the bfe U.P. and they use a ton of robots for manufacturing and testing of the thrusters. It’s called Orbion Space Technology. Pretty sweet deal they have. When I was in school he was still developing these thrusters.

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Thats pretty cool BUT that thruster looks like it is 1 millionth the part count of one of these raptor engines. I see A LOT of tig welding .
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CarterKraft said:
My white collar brother thinks the engines are fabbed/welded by robots so not much labor is lost when one blows up.
I wanted to try and figure they out if they are hand fabbed/welded or some robot assembly. I vote manual methods.
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I'd say for now they still have a lot of hands on manufacturing in each engine. The engines themselves are still in development so they're continuously making revisions and improvements. Once they freeze the design I could see them automating as much as possible, but hard to do while things are changing on the fly. They've built 60 some-odd raptors so far, so the price per unit is still going to be extremely high. Once they've frozen the design, automated the process and are building hundreds, price per engine will start falling pretty fast
 
Alrighty I've got a Starship related bump for the thread. SN15 has a launch window tomorrow afternoon if the weather plays nice. I'll try to get the live stream links up here if it's looking like a go. If it doesn't launch tomorrow it may launch Saturday (but probably not, they try to avoid weekends), or the beginning of next week.

This one has higher hopes than the last few. SN 8, 9, 10, and 11 were of one family of revisions with only small incremental changes between each. SN 15, 16, and 17 are the next large incremental improvement across all aspects of the rocket. They haven't given specifics, but Elon has mentioned that it has hundreds of improvements over the last ones we've watched.

Here's a chart showing the status of the Starships currently in construction as of this week. SN15 is on the launch pad, SN16 has all of the components but some aren't welded yet (note air gaps in diagram), SN17 has about half of it's parts with most of the rest in construction. SN20 is the one they want to sit on top of a booster and actually go orbital with. Then the 3 boosters currently in construction

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Haha while I'm eager for them to light this candle, I hope they launch in decent weather conditions so we don't get another SN11 explosion lost in the haze. Jealous that you'll be out there though!
 
Here's the livestream for the NASASpaceflight journalists. We don't have a launch time, but it's looking like later in the day, if it's going to happen today (hours from now). They're live now though and plan to be through the full extent of the launch window.

 
Todays attempt was cancelled last night I believe, weather is looking to be the biggest challenge right now as they have all the licensing and approvals they need for the flight. It looks like they're targeting Monday and Tuesday right now, with Tuesday being less windy
 
So very cool, so my fast speed internet out here in the Boonies is going to be soon? :)

This shit is beyond science fiction stuff I read as a kid, really hard to believe it is real.

Awesome time we live in!
 
Haha yes Starlink is expanding rapidly, and this upcoming is showing a really impressive launch cadence. And we had 4 astronauts splash down in their Dragon capsule from a 6 month stay on the ISS last night/early this morning. Crispins this sci-fi style future we're moving toward is just awesome. Like or hate the guy, one thing Elon Musk circles back to frequently in his discussions is inspiration. How are you supposed to get excited about waking up in the morning if you aren't inspired by a promising outlook of the future of humanity.

The crazy thing about how rapidly Starlink will be expanding soon, once they start getting orbital test flights with these Starships, they're going to start flying hundreds of Starlink sats per flight versus the 60 on each Flacon 9 right now. I've heard it could be around 300 per Starship launch, but that was speculative.


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bobbywalter said:
That is too much junk in orbit.
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At 550km, they’re at some of the lowest orbits of any satellites used today. If anything were to happen Kessler syndrome style, all of the starlinks would naturally deorbit within just a couple years. Compared to the hundreds of years or more for most satellites which operate at extremely high (mostly geostationary) orbits.
 
"BocaChicaGal" seems to be a good source for info.

"SpaceX will conduct Space Flight Activities on May 3rd from 12pm to 8pm.

:smokin:
 
Just set up are starlink this weekend. All I can say is it's a game changer for us. Hughes net was running at about 5 mbps and the starlink is anywhere from 75 to 150 mbps.
 
BocaChicaGal is a great resource, she actually lives there in Boca Chica village since before SpaceX, and is one of the primary photo/video sources for the latest.

So far it looks like they have potential openings for tomorrow, Weds, and Thurs. Weather does seem to be playing a part, but it looks like they're taking some extra time to ensure the readiness of the first of these next generation starships.

This youtube channel from the NASASpaceFlight journalists puts a new video up every day with the latest footage from BocaChicaGal
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSUu1lih2RifWkKtDOJdsBA
 
Signs are good that they're going for an attempt today, fingers crossed! Here's the NASASpaceFlight livestream, and I'll get the SpaceX official livestream link as soon as it goes up

 
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