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SpaceX Starship

Next earliest flight opportunity is Friday if everything looks good to go with that valve



Then over at Starbase, Ship 30 (which will be for future flight #5) is prepped for a static fire sometime today on the test pad





And China has been moving right along with their launches at a decent cadence

 
Looks like they're going to roll the Atlas 5 back to replace the valve that caused the scrub. They must have determined it had enough cycles while oscillating to get near the qualification limit for the design. So back it goes, next attempt on the 17th



And also because of recent events, interesting timing :laughing:



Rocket Lab shared some of the first pics of their new engine Archimedes, for their upcoming reusable Neutron rocket





And some cool pics of the carbon fiber being laid up for said Neutron rocket

 
Ship 30 static fire yesterday was scrubbed during fueling, they're attempting again today. Stream is live now:



Awesome Starlink deploy during orbital sunrise:



Then an odd one, S26, a strange ship with no heat tiles and no flaps that people figured was destined for scrap, got set onto the brand new ship test fire stand and rolled out to their next upcoming ship test firing location just down the road



And it does have engines which was also something people weren't sure about:



The new test stand has a water cooled flame trench which should make it a bit more durable than engines point blank at the concrete like todays test

 
My mom called me about half an hour ago telling me to get outside she can see the northern lights. I'm like... no fucking way. It's not even good and dark yet and of all the times they've said that the northern lights might be visible in NC or VA or CO or wherever I've been living at the time I've never seen them. Anyway, I go outside and look and... oh shit look at that! Starlink satellites coming over! Oh, and mom that's just fucking twilight. :laughing:

Screenshot_20240510-215155.png
 
That's fawkin cool. And with how dense they are, those were released pretty recently. As in one of the launches in the past couple days probably.

The geomagnetic storm stuff is super interesting. Biggest one in the last 20 years, and the most recent stats look like expectations have grown. Sounds like I might have a chance to see my first northern lights tonight as well

 
Sounds like we'll have more northern lights action tonight!

3-5 weeks from the next Starship flight (IFT-4), per Elon this morning



Booster 11 was lifted onto the OLM this morning. Ship 29 is expected to come out to get stacked on top of it in the coming days. WDR (Wet Dress Rehearsal) of the full stack for IFT-4 is expected this upcoming week



Also don't know if I posted the official media from Ship 30's static fire last week (for IFT-5)



 
Cool video about the space suits being developed by Axiom for the upcoming lunar missions



The valve on ULA's Atlas 5 that scrubbed the Starliner launch has been repaired. Though they noticed a small helium leak on the Starliner itself, so they've pushed the launch date from the 17th to the 21st for more analysis

Helium leak delays Starliner crewed test flight

Ship 31 (for flight 6?) was undergoing a cryo test and had what looked to be some sort of severe elctrical short and arcing during the test. Be interesting to see more. Ship 29 was ready to be stacked on B11 (flight 4) on the main launch mount for some of its own testing, but has since returned to the production site. Due to timing, speculation is that they want to double check the same areas that S31 had an issue before stacking





ULA is getting ready for the second flight of its new Vulcan rocket:



But the air force is a bit concerned about their ability to ramp the flight rate, with how many flights they're contracted to launch over the next three years

 
BepiColumbo, an ESA/JAXA joint mission launched in 2018 flying to Mercury (expected to arrive in 2025) is experiencing some issues with its thrusters

Mission:

ESA Science & Technology - BepiColombo

BepiColombo - Wikipedia

Issue:

Glitch on BepiColombo: work ongoing to restore spacecraft to full thrust



Also I was incorrect about Ship 29, it did move away from the OLM, but didn't go all the way back to the production site. But it went back to the OLM overnight, and is being stacked as we speak





Interesting discussion from Kathy Leuders of SpaceX (previously NASA). Sounds like a new highway might be going in to Starbase among other things

 
So that flight ^^^ was pretty special, first booster to hit 21 flights. It also ended up having one of the best exhaust jellyfishes in a while (happens when the ground is in twilight, but the rocket flies up into direct sunlight, so just before sunrise or just after sunset). Crazy representation of the atmosphere getting thinner and thinner as the rocket gets higher in altitude, just by watching how fast the exhaust expands

This pic is from one of the Falcon 9 ocean recovery crew, so the rocket is flying towards the camera









 
CarterKraft said:
Do we have a pot to bet on if the Boeing rig ever makes it to space?
:grinpimp:
Click to expand...

Haha it'll happen sooner or later. But at this point, I just want the astronauts Butch and Suni to have a nice smooth test flight. All of the growing pains have made me a little wary, but fingers crossed. Currently scheduled for the 25th

Twitter is being a little weird on desktop right now, but the IFT-4 full stack (B11 S29) just completed a WDR this morning, getting fully tanked with fuel and then drained. You can rewind this live stream:



Then yesterday Blue Origins New Shepard tourist rocket launched its first humans in ~22 months after they had a booster failure during a flight that was only cargo/experiments. The flight went off pretty smooth, with the only hiccup being 1 of the 3 parachutes not inflating properly. It's designed with redundancy for that scenario, but still a little less than desirable. We'll see what comes of that, hopefully doesn't delay them for too long

 
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