Artemis I Wet Dress Rehearsal Update
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. (NASA PR) — NASA is planning to proceed with a modified wet dress rehearsal, primarily focused on tanking the core stage, and minimal propellant operations on the interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS) with the ground systems at Kennedy. Due to the changes in loading procedures required for the modified test, wet dress rehearsal testing is slated to resume with call to stations on Tuesday, April 12 and tanking on Thursday, April 14. Wet dress rehearsal is an opportunity to refine the countdown procedures and validate critical models and software interfaces. The modified test will enable engineers to achieve the test objectives critical to launch success.
Engineers have identified a helium check valve that is not functioning as expected, requiring these changes to ensure safety of the flight hardware. Helium is used for several different operations, including purging the engine, or clearing the lines, prior to loading propellants during tanking, as well as draining propellant. A check valve is a type of valve that allows liquid or gas to flow in a particular direction and prevents backflow. The helium check valve is about three inches long and prevents the helium from flowing back out of the rocket.
Following the modified test, the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft will return to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) where engineers will evaluate the valve and replace if needed. Teams are confident in the ability to replace the valve once back in the VAB.
NASA will host a teleconference to discuss details on Monday, April 11. Check back at this blog for an update on the countdown timeline prior to the modified wet dress rehearsal testing for the Artemis I mission. NASA is streaming live video of the rocket and spacecraft on the Kennedy Newsroom YouTube channel.
95 responses to “Artemis I Wet Dress Rehearsal Update”
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SLS seems to have a lot of teething issues for a teenager.
Regardless of how long it took and how many billions of dollars it consumed, this is a new rocket. It took SpaceX 7 or 8 years to build their launch cadence up to the point where they were able to pace their manifest. The first few years, we called them PadX because they spent so much time exploring the launch pad.
Obviously, the Orange Rocket Bad is never going to approach that kind of utility, not at billions per launch, but it is reasonable to expect lots of little issues popping up on the first try, which is what this launch campaign is.
A fair assessment.
Glitches with ICPS were reasonably expectable given that it was built years ago and has been in storage since, while the rest of SLS-Orion progressed at its customary snail’s pace.
Falcon is really small compared to sls. Comparing sls to starship is more reasonable.
1/6th the payload and 1/600th the cost but about the same age from inception. Which metric are you using??
Size. Physical dimensions of tanks, weight, and the hydrogen, dealing with that. Falcon is eelv-size, redone little fastrac engine… no pensions or other liabilities (like long-term spending in R&D done by academia.
Sls is ready. No need for trash talk anymore. Just wait for starship to beat it for 1/100 the price, or whatever the claim is.
No need? They have an unquenchable thirst for NASA-bashing and endless Death-to-SLS chants. It is their religion. Anti-government, anti-tax, far-right-proto-fascist; the ideology is Ayn-Rand-in-Space libertarianism.
I wouldn’t be too hard on them. If you read what nasa employees from different centers ay about each other… it’s not like there wasn’t inspiration from the top to lead them.
I just wonder how long it will go on. How much money will starship waste? Will nasa be able to manage a second lander program while the first fails?
How much money will go into starship? Is the loss of private capital less of a loss when compare to taxpayer money?
The burn rate on the entire Starship program is probably less than the cost of a single SLS launch. Just compare that to the $23 billion of taxpayers money spent on the SLS program to date which is equal to $189 for household in America. The money SpaceX has gotten to date for Starship is less than the rounding error on the money NASA has spent on the SLS.
The failure point of the Starship so far are the environmentalists blocking it from flying in Boca Chica, which means flights will likely have to move to the Cape or offshore.
If starship is developed it’ll cost the same as sls. More given the complexity of its upper stage. You’ll have to give them ten years.
Exactly what do you base this assumption on? Be specific.
The people that do that sort of work go through at leadt two years of school. Most have 4 year degrees, managers can have many degrees. The labs they work in are academic, but also research labs with professors being principle investigators. Where Adu trains people the same lot ma ages the LEO.
that these people all share a common institutional structure in their education is key. But also there is the foundation of work that everyone is drawing on. It’s all the same experience.
Because one blob of these people and their experience has a ceo that’s good at keeping an audience entertained, you you wouldn’t expect such a gigantic difference in what that blob produces with respect to any of the others.
There is no reason that SpaceX could build something as big as sls for a fraction of the price. Same physics, same engineering principles, same materials, same state of the art.
Sls was 25 billion, starship is the same outcome. Or it doesn’t work at all. They’re the same people with the same history swinging around the same tools.
It’s not physics that determines costs. Anyone who thinks that is either amazingly naive or not firing on all cylinders.
If your premise is true, then F9 should cost as much per launch as Atlas V. But it doesn’t.
Look at it this way. I can buy a Phillips screwdriver from Harbor Freight or Snap-On. Same physics, same materials, but one costs several times more than the other. In my experience, both get the job done equally well, and both have a lifetime warranty. Why do you think that is?
They are not screwdrivers lee. Space forums are where all analogy turns bad and rots.
I was trying to keep analogy simple, in deference to you, Gary, and Gordon.
My username is SLSFanboy and you just trolled me and got blocked. Bye.
You’re right that they’re not screwdrivers. Or at least SLS isn’t. Screwdrivers can be reused.
So your thesis is that all aerospace companies are pretty much the same and that employee quality, company culture, management ability and perverse economic incentives have no influence. I hope you don’t have a four-year degree. If you do, I hope you keep your alma mater a secret – I’m sure they wouldn’t be happy to have word get out.
I’m more somebody that once emptied the trash at an nih funded lab. Still, I got to understand what a pi is and how the nih/dod system works.
And yes, everyone produced from a biochemistry program at any university funded by the feds is pretty much the same thing. They all go and do work financed by a corporation or a government lab.
The people working for SpaceX all have requirements (like, they have a degree, such and such type of major, etc) because they are funded by the federal government.
They’re all the same, from the same academic structure, common labs that go from one pi to the next, some staff permanent and some belonging to the pi and some other government budget.
Spacex is different because because it is young, so it can do a falcon heavy launch for 350 million, or whatever it is. They’re not supernatural.
A working starship is a reusable sls booster and a weird version of the space shuttle in a stack without solids. Yes, it’ll cost the same as sls and take longer because of that upper stage complexity.
And a bus is just your basic stage coach without the horses.?
I bet you think that a Porsche costs the same as a Ford Focus to build as they are the same size…
No. The German car is built to go fast, be stable, attract chick’s. The Ford is for autoparts delivery, government fleets, elementary school teachers.
SpaceX is largely self-funded and always has been.
It recruits the best new engineering grads because it is their #1 choice of place to work. The difference in productivity and work quality between top grads and run-of-the-mill grads is at least an order of magnitude. This was
demonstrated decades ago with respect to software engineers and is generally true of all kinds of engineering. SpaceX isn’t supernatural, but it’s a lot better than any other space company, especially the legacy aerospace primes. People are not interchangeable parts.
What you think you learned in terms of academic and government research is just wrong. SpaceX is a business, not a state-supported research lab. It is also, crucially, not a business that has become terminaly addicted to government cost-plus contracting.
You’re off by a factor of more than two on the price of even a fully-expendable Falcon Heavy launch. 25 of these can be purchased for the cost of a single SLS.
SLS and Orion have been soaking up $3 billion or more per year for over a decade. The vast majority of both the engineer time and money put into Starship has been expended over the past 2.5 years. SpaceX hasn’t spent – and won’t spend – $30+ billion on Starship development because it doesn’t have that sort of money available and doesn’t need it or the amount of time SLS has taken to get to an approximately similar level of readiness.
I know that NASA wouldn’t hire anyone without experience, so I suspect that operations like ula wouldn’t either. Maybe SpaceX would… still, I’m not sure I believe they only hire people with a 3.8& above. I’m especially not sure that would make a difference in their abilities. Gifted or not, a recent graduate is only as experienced as what they got in the labs coming up. You have a Kelly Johnson here and there, but mostly it’s rank and file.
I will concede that my experience was in NIH (and so dod circles as well). But I didn’t really dig it and was mostly a failure. I wasn’t trying to get there really, just ended up there.
But I did notice that physics and chemistry has pretty much the same structure going on, that everything is funded from high & above, that there’s a pi, a lot of scientists, and huge populations of technicians.
Falcon heavy is something like 350 million to put up gateway. Young company, no pensions, not a lot of lab participation yet, only a couple really bad accidents, a bunch of people that were around for dcx (good software), and fastrac with their boy from TRW.
What would delta 4h go for? A bit more with all those legacy costs.
Which one would be less likely to blow up during boost?
In ten years, Starships will be landing in the dozens on both the Moon and Mars. Starship won’t cost the same as SLS because Starship is being developed to make money and SLS is being developed to cost money. That’s the difference between rational development on one’s own dime and cost-plus development on the taxpayer’s dime.
Starship will go on until SpaceX, or some other entity, invents something even better.
Starship will waste no money. The taxpayer money involved in the lander will get Americans back on the Moon – big time.
By “manage,” I assume you mean can NASA pay for a second lander program. That’s going to depend upon what the bids are and what Congress cares to spend. NASA will be “managing” lander programs only in the sense of evaluating each agreed milestone set out in the fixed-price contracts. NASA will not be micro-managing design or implementation.
Given that Starship is costing a small fraction of what SLS and Orion have cost – and will continue to cost – even if Starship was an utter failure, the total loss to the economy would be in the same proportion. SLS – if we are fortunate – will not fail in service and kill anyone, but it will fail and be canceled because it simply isn’t a practical solution to any problem America faces in expanding into space. The taxpayers will take the entire hit. One hopes it occurs relatively soon so the hit doesn’t have a chance to get much bigger.
The tanker fleet for the shiny is a flag that it is not going to fly. You would have to be bought off to launch a dozen SHLV missions to allow one landing if there is an alternative. How anyone signed off on it is the mystery.
If any company can manage to submit a decent proposal NASA will dump the 14 story office building in a heartbeat.
It’s a good thing the money NASA is investing into the SLS and Orion is only a fraction of what it’s spending on lunar Starship.
Starship has to make progress for the company to get paid. They also are consuming private money, so that and what kind of hidden support starship gets from dod… I expect no more than 1 billion wasted on it.
It just sucks because it’s delaying the production of a real lander. Possibly it’s destroyed this opportunity for a real human lander.
I also agree, no money will be wasted on Starship. It’s an excellent investment compared to the SLS, Orion, Gateway, or the National Team lander.
Do you have technical objections to Starship, backed by even first-order calculations, or do you object on ideological and aesthetic grounds? As you’ve said in the past that you prefer continuity of design, keep in mind that no other proposed lunar lander is much like the LEM, and the LEM itself had no prior art (unless one counts robotic landers). Sometimes obsessively imitating the past is a trap.
The national team hls was very much like the lm. It had a tug stage, but was simple and could be launched on existing systems. The ascent stage looked like the most difficult part, but it’s shared part of Orion so it looked doable.
I guess they didn’t just push forth Altair again because the design with gateway was going to be very different. That and blue already has a lot of work done on the decent stage.
Starship is going to fail because it’s not a lander. It’s like a new space shuttle, but integrated to the vehicle as a second stage. It needs a booster with 28 engines. The engine e is new and not ready. It has to be refueled in orbit; that’s not routine. The manufacturing process for the thing is very young; they’re welding steel together in giant sheds, or outside.
If all of that is worked out it’ll take a decade (best case) and cost more than sls.
It is going to fail. Gateway is going to be a program without a human lander unless somebody qualified builds a lander.
Ideological and aesthetic reasons, as expected.
Whatever lands next will look like the lm. The designers will face the same problems limited by the same laws. Itll end with the same conclusions and basic appearance. Itll have to be launched on eelv, or comanifest on sls with something else, so it’ll be small, or each stage will get its own ride, dock automatically or by remote.
Starshipn was designed for Mars; it’s origins have nothing to do with landing on the Moon. And their lander requires a gigantic booster like sls! They’ll be building a tower jig to friction stir weld for weight and it’ll just go on forever, give the next generation something to bitch about.
Itll be 25 billion, take 10 years or longer. Probably would end up cancelled anyway for engine or weight issues.
Gateway is the future of deep space transport. The more I think about gateway the more I think it’ll be great in spite of the human lander program failing.
You assume what cannot be adduced – for a comparison, think of the variety in flight. While yes, flying vehicles rely on known physical laws, there’s immense variety among them: from tiny Cessnas to the enormous 747s. Spaceflight, especially landing on the Moon, is nowhere near so mature as flight, so there’s plenty of time to derive best practices.
Designing for Mars doesn’t make it unusable for the Moon; the Moon is easier, lacking an atmosphere. All SpaceX need worry about on that front is navigation, and having sufficient propellant and thrust to effect a landing. You also assume that SpaceX’s productivity is as low as Boeing’s, despite over a decade of evidence to the contrary. Why is this? Vehicles being similar in physical size is not nearly sufficient justification for this belief.
There is no evidence for your cost or time estimates. Boeing’s performance does not apply.
Gateway is underpowered and far too small. If you want a good electric spacecraft, something like Alex Tolley’s spacecoach is better in virtually every category – crew safety, radiation protection, artificial gravity, available energy, cost – the list goes on.
Starliner was “ready” until it flew. Still waiting for it to repeat its flight.
Starliner is commercial crew like dragon and dreamchaser. Sls is different.
SLS was built by the Boeing Company just like Starliner…
Yeah, but starliner is commercial, so how management works is different. Like boeing, they got involved with cst100 thinking that they would make money putting up civilians, private experiments, like SpaceX is doing now. But with sls, they’re not thinking there will be any income other than the nasa contract.
Nasa owns sls. Dreamliner is owned by boeing. These differences extend into how they were built and tested.
Sls is done and it’s going to work. Dreamliner is a real mess and probably vant be profitable (if the Russians walk from ISS).
Boeing worked on both, but they’re very different and can’t be compared.
Yes, they can
Well, I mean you can, but sls is a working system and we’re short a lander.
SLS has never launched. Until it does successfully, neither you nor I know if it will work. Given the wet dress rehearsal problems, it isn’t looking good for SLS.
By the time SLS can actually send anyone toward the Moon, there will be a lander.
The Boeing Dreamliner is a commercial airliner, the B787, not a spacecraft.
The Dream Chaser is built by Sierra Space, a design that SpaceDev was working on about 20 years ago.
I think it’s supposed to go next month.
“Redone little Fastrac engine” – right. About the same as “re-doing” a Ford Falcon by jacking up the radiator cap and driving a GT-40 underneath. The Fastrac used an ablative nozzle. Merlins on F9 were always regeneratively cooled. The Fastrac produced 60,000 lbf from a dry mass of 910 kg. The Merlin produces 190,000 lbf from a dry mass of 470 kg.
I don’t know what SpaceX’s pension plan is, but it likely has at least a 401-K offering. Given that its employees also get stock grants that vest with time-in-grade, I’m sure that alone outclasses any pension plan at either NASA or its legacy contractors.
I don’t know what the reference to “long-term spending in R&D done by academia” is supposed to be about. SpaceX has used some NASA technology but so do the legacy contractors including Boeing. That’s what NASA is supposed to do – develop technology and pass it along to industry. How much of that technology has roots in academe, I don’t know. But academic research is mostly done by poorly-paid grad students so any such R&D would likely have been the cheapest such, not the most expensive.
SLS will be ready when it is – which isn’t yet. Ditto for Starship. I don’t think a comparative assessment of “readiness” conducted a year from now is likely to favor SLS.
In all fairness SpaceX did start out using an ablative nozzle but found early that was a very stupid idea and threw it out in favor of a regenerative cooled engine.
It’s more like comparing a turboprop to a pure jet in terms of performance and reliability.
SpaceX is ahead in wet dress rehearsals, which is all they have been able to do for what, the past year? The Green Run (TM) puts the SLS core stage ahead in hot fires. SpaceX leads in explosions and is likely to accelerate away in that category as soon as licensing or sufficient infrastructure at KSC permits. It’s still an apples and oranges thing, though, when you start to pick it apart.
Falcon Heavy sat on the pad for a few days before its first launch while the team chased down gremlins, didn’t it? That might be a closer analogy. But SpaceX had built their operational cadence by then, and the Falcon Heavy is just a Falcon 9 with two extra cores. I don’t mean to minimize that accomplishment. I’m just pointing out that incremental iteration gives one some advantages over the cathedral building approach. And when you are trying new things that way, you get those nifty (or intolerable, depending on your point of view) explosions.
SpaceX’s current problem and likely their next one is that Fish and Wildlife find those explosions to be intolerable, and failure-is-not-an-option KSC may feel the same way.
Those are all-too-possible scenarios. Fortunately duheagle will chime in shortly and reassure us that it’s not gonna go down like that. My cynical paranoia is lining up in your corner…and my giddy optimism is throwing in with duh. It’s not easy being me.
Chin up there, Sinker. SpaceX, like life, will always find a way.
Thanks. I feel better already.
I believe that the epa and faa will grant permits. SpaceX is a dod contractor and they’re probably spending properly on everything all the agencies want.
Sls is super expensive in the same way webb is expensive. They spent money to make sure it doesn’t fail. It’s engines started flying when I was in 4th grade. It’s going to go get tested and then fly people to the vicinity of the Moon on the second flight. If there was a lander, humans could land on the moon 3rd sls flight.
Starship is weeded stainless steel plate with engines that have no history. It has 28 of these on a booster that has done nothing. It also has a second stage made of welded steel plate that that has done a couple low altitude ascents and demonstrated software. It is not going to the Moon on its 3rd flight.
Sls is super expensive in the same way webb is expensive. They spent money to make sure it doesn’t fail.
Yet they’ve already had several failures of valves, and they haven’t even been able to complete the wet dress rehearsal.
I think SS/SH will have a lot of teething problems. But I also don’t believe that spending tons (literally) of money on SLS is any guarantee whatsoever that it is failure proof.
When I say failure I mean like crs7, or the dragon explosion that happened after its iss mission. Total loss of a vehicle, not malfunctions during development.
Given the very low cost of Starship vehicles, compared to SLS, and their much faster production cadence, plus their reusability, Starship will be able to be tested much more thoroughly and frequently than SLS can ever be. SLS Block 1 is slated to carry crew on its second-ever flight. The SLS Block 1B is slated to carry crew on its first-ever flight. Starship will have notched up a flight history in at least double digits by the time any version of it actually carries crew. It will be able to do this because it is cheap and quick to both build and test. By any rational standard, Starship has to be considered the safer ride.
EPA is not involved.
The FAA’s web page for the “SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Project at the Boca Chica Launch Site” says this with regard to DoD preferences:
But there is no indication that DoD or State has involved themselves in this matter, which would probably have to happen were the FAA to waive requirements on the basis of national security concerns. Such a move would have to pass muster in the courts and would therefore require more substantiation than Wayne Monteith’s personal convictions.
The launch site permitting is now slipping 1 month per month. It looks to me like FAA is trying to get this deal done and, so far, not succeeding. FAA wants to get it done. Fish & Wildlife and National Parks, not so much. DoD and State appear to be content to allow events to unfold without their input.
The State Department has no reason to be involved since it involves no ITAR or space treaty issues. Since it is not a military project DOD has no reason to be involved.
Just because it isn’t a military project doesn’t mean the military does not want it. Falcon Heavy wasn’t a military project. But who is actually using it?
No Starship, no Starship Troopers.
To a point, I suppose. There has been no point to any DoD intervention as yet because the real delays are all technical – mostly with Starbase GSE. If the GSE bugs all get squashed and the FAA is still being held up by FSW and/or the Park Service, then the DoD might reasonably choose to put its two cents in.
I don’t think the GNC issue plays into this at all. The SpaceX development paradigm is build/test/fail/iterate to a solution. They have not been able to do the next test for a year. So they have kept building. But they have been forced off their critical path, burning time and other people’s money without advancing, without the crucial test/fail components of their development process, without switching to the cathedral building process of Old Space, landing somewhere in the muddy middle as a holding action.
Maybe DoD does not know this or does not care, or the Biden admin has told them we are not bending laws and regulations for a non existent DoD program that a sizable contingent of Biden’s political base characterizes, accurately, as ‘billionaires in space.’ Or maybe the DoD has weighed in but the lawyers at FAA don’t see their efforts as sufficient to tip the scales. “It would be cool to have this” may not suffice. We are not at war.
Democrats protect the environment, or at least engage in political theater along those lines. Republicans tell us that freedumb and the Bible tell us that it is right and proper to despoil the environment. We’ll all be dead soon and it will be someone else’s problem. Right now, it’s the Democrats turn. It could be as simple as that.
It ain’t GNC. SpaceX has a big problem that may prove to be intractable.
…Democrats protect the environment, or at least engage in political theater along those lines…
Well said.
… Republicans tell us that freedumb and the Bible tell us that it is right and proper to despoil the environment…
As a political independent, I’ve never heard a Republican running for the House, Senate or White House utter those sentiments. If you’ve got some quotes handy, I’d be most enlightened and entertained (or appalled) to take a look at them. Thanks.
See dueagle’s comments above.
GSE, not GNC.
An inability to fully test does not make it impossible to continue iterating the design. SpaceX has done that for both Starship and Super Heavy.
Part of chasing GSE problems involves actually using the GSE. SpaceX recently completed the first full-up cryo pressure test of a Super Heavy using its troubled GSE and the B7 prototype booster. It appeared to be a success and B7 is now being prepared for additional proof testing on the “can crusher” rig.
In the end, it may well prove the case that the delayed hot-fire and launch testing has simply eliminated a few RUDs from the test program that would have been suffered by less mature designs of both Super Heavy and Starship that have now been superseded.
DoD interest in Starship is hardly “non-existent.” SpaceX already won a $100+ million contract to study ways of integrating point-to-point Starships into DoD logistics chains.
DoD interest in Starship extends beyond this too. High-rankers in Space Force and the other services seem to be showing up at Starbase almost as frequently as NASA astronauts. This all seems very much a less hush-hush, and sort of inverted, version of Jimmy Stewart being ushered into a secret hangar to see an early-production B-47 in Strategic Air Command.
If bureaucratic obstacles persist once SpaceX’s current GSE technical challenges are extinguished, then the thesis that there is a political problem for SpaceX becomes hard to gainsay.
The duration of such a problem might well be brief. Certainly the all but inevitable evisceration of current Dem majorities in the Congress come November is likely to give at least modest pause to progressive bureaucrats who’ve spent the past 15 months indulging in a frenzy of arbitrary overreaches.
With specific respect to Starbase, the entire Rio Grande Valley is rapidly flipping from deep Blue to equally deep Red over Joe Biden’s Come-One, Come-All Invitational Invasion of Illegals of All Nations. Starbase would be a major collateral beneficiary of an anti-DC-elites “insurrection” by newly re-registered Hispanics tired of malignant interference in their lives by distant and disdainful nose-in-the-air Democrat DC-ans. Any real-life Katniss Everdeen from the TX border districts seems more likely to look like Jennifer Lopez than Jennifer Lawrence.
Oh, I know that. The Space Force and Air Force both are very interested in Starship. But a study is not a program. It could become a program, eventually.
The obstacles SpaceX is running into are not novel. There’s a sad excuse for a national park which is, nonetheless, a national park. The National Park Service is supposed to preserve and protect that park. That’s their job. Blame Teddy Roosevelt.
There is a wildlife preserve, home to more than one endangered species. There’s a fragile wetlands environment. The laws and regulations governing usage of such areas are not new. There is lots of precedent, lots of case law. Every natural gas terminal project goes through this sort of thing. Enforcing those laws and regulations is the norm despite the fact that in each and every case someone’s ox is getting gored.
Blame Apollo 8. That photo got the environmental movement off the ground. The EPA was established by Richard Nixon in 1970.
There is No park at Boca Chica, it’s merely a State beach administered by FWS by an agreement with the State of Texas. South Padre National Seashore, the nearest park is on the other side of the resort at South Padre Island.
There is some obscure Civil War site, a patch of marsh, that memorializes what local would be tourist vendors forlornly claim was the last battle of the war, though it occurred some time after the war concluded (no one won).
And the environmentalists in their attack on the best prospects in decades to create jobs in the region is rapidly turning the valley anti-green. I expect that it will only be a matter of time before we start seeing sea turtle soup and grilled plover beach parties from the locals.?
Interesting. But if dod has interest in raptor, or for some reason starship, I have to believe there are avenues for guys to work out concerns. The space program is really huge. And in reality, letting them blow up some more stuff there isn’t going to really hurt anything.
Isn’t there something with epa though? That they can complain and cause it to stop or slow down? I thought they were players.
I want to se all permits granted. Everyone call the pot and make these people share their cards.
In the case of launch sites, FAA is the controlling authority, but they are constrained to follow the same laws and regulations that the EPA enforces on industries that are less closely regulated than rocket launches.
I’m sure FAA, Fish & Wildlife and the National Parks Service are showing their cards to SpaceX. That’s why we don’t hear Elon Musk complaining about the delayed finding. The delay is the FAA trying to find a way to make it work. FAA has been sitting on the finding because it’s not the finding they want to issue, and SpaceX knows that.
And at some point, when a decision has been reached and the ink has dried, then we’ll get that finding along with the rationale for the finding. And with each passing month, it looks more and more like it’s going to be a big setback for SpaceX.
As I’ve noted several times before, SpaceX quit squawking about the FAA about the time it realized it had serious GSE issues. There’s no point in complaining about bureaucratic delays when you have real-world delays that supercede any paperwork issues.
Fish & Wildlife and the National Parks Service have no issues that could justifiably result in a permanent ban on further launch activities at Starbase or even the conduct of an additional Environmental Impact Review. Both agencies are simply throwing their weight around because we are currently saddled with a barely ambulatory Root Vegetable in Chief in the White House and an army of ravening woke green Luddite bureaucrats in DC and the field offices who think the October Revolution has occurred and that they can hereafter do whatever they want.
The real danger is not from FWS but the radical environmentalists who will file lawsuits to challenge any FAA decision they disagree with, both on the process followed and results. Those lawsuits are what is going to be used to block Starbase. It is a tactic of economic warfare the environmentalists are masters of having perfected it to destroy the nuclear power Industry.
“Radical environmentalists.” Would that be radical in the same sense as the overwhelming majority of Senate Republicans who marched out in indignation at the most recent Supreme Court Justice confirmation? What were they? The radical right? We have a shorter term for “radical right,” but it escapes me at the moment. Let’s just call them Republicans. That’s descriptive enough.
That sounds like reality.
I’m still optimistic that they get approval, the delay related to the process. I’ve read that it can take 10 years to approve construction of a new runway.
No, it is with the FWS which merely administers Boca Chica State Beach under an agreement with the State of Texas. Texas, as the owner of the land has the right to kick out the FWS at any time they wish.
Starship is more sheet than “plate.” The 3 – 4mm stainless SpaceX uses for Starships is approximately equivalent to 11 – 9 gauge U.S.
The Raptor engines have a lot of history including even some flight history, though no full-ascent spaceflight history as yet. The Super Heavy boosters for the Starship stacks will sport 33 engines, not 28.
It is true Starship will not be going to the Moon on its third flight. Various other kinds of Starships will have made an unknown, but probably fairly large, number of flights before the first HLS Starship is tested in space.
But the bare-bones testing regime intended for SLS is not a feature, it’s a bug. You are trying to portray something as a virtue that is merely a sad necessity. Given SLS’s ultra-slow production cadence and insane expense, it simply cannot be tested to anywhere near the degree that Starship can in any comparable amount of time.
The early catch tests will still likely be at Starbase. But if this turns out to suddenly be a long-term proposition – once the FAA report comes in – perhaps SpaceX might start building a second tower away from LC-39A just for catch tests. Test launches could still be done from the LC-39A Starship facility as no Starship capable of doing more than short hops has ever blown up on ignition or during ascent. Such a second tower would fit nicely between SpaceX’s extant LZ-1 and LZ-2. SpaceX has already had an explosion at LZ-1 so there is some precedent. And, as SpaceX has already built 1/3 of a launch support/catch tower for LC-39A at its Roberts Road factory area, building one more entire tower wouldn’t be a problem. It could start such construction as soon as the first section of the LC-39A tower is carted away for stacking.
Good idea. I expect that as soon as the next two Falcon 9 flights go from LC-39A we will see the tower go up very quickly in the interim as they are converting over to the next Falcon Heavy flights.
Given the likely need for another dress rehearsal for the SLS we could be treated to the sight of the world’s three largest rockets next to one another.
A real photo for the ages of the quest to reach space.?
This could take some time.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
That’s more like what a Starship passenger will look like when landing legs fail as the tank empties.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Nifty art. What’s that from?
https://wallhere.com/en/wal…
Remember, NASA isn’t SpaceX. If something goes wrong with SLS on launch and it fails you are looking at SLS being shutdown for 2-3 years until the investigation teams, program reviews, and Congressional Hearings to find who was responsible are over.
If Starship/Super Heavy blows up, and does no serious third party damages, they will quickly determined what happened with no finger pointing and in a few weeks the next Starship/Super Heavy will be launched. And if it blows up, they will just fix what went wrong, save the video for the blooper reel and launch another, and another and another until it works.
And that is why SpaceX chose Boca Chica over KSC, and why Fish & Wildlife does not want to allow SpaceX to proceed at Boca Chica. It’s the explosive iteration that some folks find objectionable.
Interesting times we live in.
Yes, they forget the good old early days of rocket development. 450 RUDs according to this video…. But environmentalists in those days were focused on protecting actual natural areas, not stopping technology that will benefit the environment.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
FWS finds it objectionable because its employees no longer have free access to every square inch of the wildlife reserve 24/7/365, not because explosions are bad for the wildlife. There have been a number of sizable explosions at Starbase over the past couple of years. The wildlife have taken no casualties from any such to the best of my knowledge.
Of course that could be easily fixed by the State of Texas simply withdrawing from its contract with FWS to manage Boca Chica. Remember, all of the public land there belongs to the State of Texas, not the federal government.
If Texas withdraws from its agreement than FWS folks will have no reason to access Boca Chica, except to join tourists partying on the beach.?
Maybe, but SLS is not going to blow up the same way Webb isn’t failing.
I’ve read that the starship booster will burn enough methane to heat Chicago for hours (5 or 8?) in the depth of winter. All those engines… I think when it blows up its going to be a major loss, not a Toyota with crash test dummies destroyed into a wall.
You know how they have to build a power plant and fuel farm. I haven’t seen anything written about the scale of the oxygen.
Which is probably less than the Methane needed to produce the Hydrogen used in a single SLS launch. Methane is the source of most of the Hydrogen produced in the United States according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency.
https://www.eia.gov/energye…
Hydrogen explained
Production of hydrogen
“Natural gas is the main methane source for hydrogen production by industrial facilities and petroleum refineries.”
At least Starship will not kill any fish or birds from the acid exhaust like the SLS will every time it launches. How many dead birds is it worth putting astronauts around the Moon?
Yes, but I’m talking about them having to build the infrastructure, not about environmental concerns.
They already have tanks for fueling it. It’s a short drive of a few minutes from the Port of Brownsville where they have access to all the Methane or LOX they need to fill those tanks. The local utility is running power out to them so they no longer need a power station.
It’s built. The tank farm is there. So is the LOX plant. I don’t know if the methane refinery is in place yet or not.
The same blow-up nonsense was written about Falcon Heavy – especially the bit about “all those engines…” Those writers didn’t win any Nostradamus awards either.
Super Heavy will hold 2,800 tonnes of LOX and 800 tonnes of LCH4 at ignition. 800 tonnes of pure methane would equate to somewhat more mass of natural gas. Let’s be generous and say 1,000 tonnes. As near as I can figure it, based on average natural gas usage per household per year in Chicago, and figuring 80% of that is burned over four months of winter, the natural gas refined into a full methane load for a Super Heavy would heat all of Chicago for abut 90 minutes on a winter day.
SpaceX has already built a sizable propellant “farm” at Starbase.
That is more along the lines I expected it to be.
BTW, Any idea on how many tons of natural gas is needed to make the Methane that is used as a source to make the Hydrogen used on the SLS? I understand it also uses a significant portion of energy to free the Hydrogen from the Methane in the process they use.
You are doomed to serial disappointment.