Booster 13 on the launch mount today being prepared for upcoming static fire testing ahead of Starship test flight 6.

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That is just astonishing!

Thanks MH, an infinitely more useful response than Turin's unnecessary unpleasantness.

Re the Ship exploding upon landing it seems hardly surprising as they've dumped running rocket engines into water, the back pressure spike that they're not designed to withstand must be huge, not to mention the disruption to the structure likely to be caused by the impact of its toppling over.

Irony Alert!!
If you hadn't been so unpleasant and mysoginistic about the SpaceX engineers presenting the launch we could all stick to useful information, but you keep repeating the same nasty jibes.
If you can't take it don't dish it out.

Video. STATIC FIRE! Booster 13 fires up ahead of Flight 6 of Starship. Its partner, Ship 31, has already been Static Fired.

This has happened less than two weeks after Flight 5.

QED...

Pad must have been in pretty good nick after IFT5 - that's encouraging

Space X crew returned to Earth.
There have been many technological advances to space travel but re-entry is still brutal.
Back on Earth: NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 Mission Splashes Down Off Florida - NASA
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Starship 33 has been revealed!

This is the first next generation design Starship and is expected to fly on flight 7.

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Flight 6 is focussed on Booster risk reduction, not Ship envelope expansion - Flight 5 booster came within 1 second of an abort and crash-landing beside the tower because of a problem and another 100 items could have led to an abort. This and more in the link belowNEWS: Small excerpt from @SpaceX Starship Flight 5 debrief and upcoming Flight 6 readiness conference call with Elon Musk.

Funny how these ships look very much like Fireball XL5. That show was way ahead of it's time.

You want something that someone with a crystal ball did back in 1966?

See Pegasus and Selena,,,,

Pegasus VTOVL

Pegasus VTOVL stage

Project Selena

Crystal Ball? Fireball XL5?

Ideas and concepts often come early way before the technology is developed to make them a practicality.

vide the development of the gas turbine, first proposed in almost complete but completely recognisable form by one John Barber in 1791.
Wiki goes on to say,

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• 1899: Charles Gordon Curtis patented the first gas turbine engine in the US.[7]
• 1900: Sanford Alexander Moss submitted a thesis on gas turbines. In 1903, Moss became an engineer for General Electric's Steam Turbine Department in Lynn, Massachusetts.[8] While there, he applied some of his concepts in the development of the turbocharger.[8]
• 1903: A Norwegian, Ægidius Elling, built the first gas turbine that was able to produce more power than needed to run its own components, which was considered an achievement in a time when knowledge about aerodynamics was limited. Using rotary compressors and turbines it produced 8 kW (11 hp).[9]

Aviation, computers and robots share a similar lengthy flash-to-bang development history.

Aircraft took 50 years before they became a really practical form of transport rather than a rather exotic niche curiosity and rocketry, despite being orders of magnitude more complex is developing on a not too disimilar timescale in which the vision of Musk and SpaceX is proving a historic scene-shifter.
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Scott Manley's review of the week with some pertinent information about IFT5 and IFT6.

Booster 12 has been moved to the Starbase rocket garden.

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Easy to miss how big those damn things really are....

Announced today, SpaceX has developed HLS Starship crew cabins, sleeping quarters and science lab mock-ups in prep for the Artemis III Moon landing mission in 2026.

These may be located inside the HLS nosecone mockup at Starbase.

The interior design of the HLS Starship airlock has already been released, as seen in Image 2, so it’ll be exciting to see what futuristic design SpaceX has in store for the rest of Starship’s crew cabin.

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The "rocket garden" looks a bit like seals on a beach.

More details regarding the Starship HLS mockup revealed.

- Consisting of two floors, there are 5 space station-style crew quarters plus a storage area, with up to 20 crew quarters per Starship rings.
- Four flight seats with command screens like Crew Dragon.
- Hallway in the center with ladder, and a ~40 foot ceiling for maximum lunar gravity fun.

Lower floor consists of a functional life support system.

For the real Starship HLS, there will be at least two floors, with one being the airlock where the astronauts will ride an elevator to the lunar surface.

It’s exciting to think that we are going from a tiny lunar lander to an apartment sized spaceship landing on the Moon.

Summary of interview by Spaceflight Now: @SpaceflightNow has released an interview with the deputy manager for NASA's Human Landing System program which included some new information about Starship:

- Ship to Ship prop transfer campaign planned to start in March 2025
- Ship to Ship prop transfer test planned to be completed over the summer
- NASA is looking for a bi-weekly cadence with only the Boca pads at first and then later getting 39a online
- NASA helped SpaceX test their MMOD (Micro Meteoroids & Orbital Debris) tiles which will be used in space
- NASA helped SpaceX improve cryogenic valves and other internal cryogenic cooling components - SpaceX uses testing capabilities at Glenn and Marshall and expanded that relationship
- Design update in November, critical design review next year
- Astronauts have a meeting with SpaceX once a month to improve the HLS design
- There are HLS crew cabin, sleeping quarters, and laboratory mock ups at Boca Chica

Thanks ORAC.
A huge difference in design philosophy compared to previous and other current ideas. (Looking at you Blue Origin).

Comparison of Blue Moon, Starship HLS and Apollo LEM.

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Obviously, greater intelligence than my feeble brain is inventing this stuff, but we see three actual/potential landers standing upright on an unprepared, lunar, brownfield site.

Am I alone in looking at the height-to-base relationship of Starship's perceived CofG, then comparing it to the Apollo LEM, and feeling a certain unease?

It would be reasonably easy to put a 'self leveling' system on the landing gear to insure that - after landing - the Starship is (and remains) perfectly vertical. Heck, at least on this side of the pond, large motorhome type vehicles have such a system.
Remember, the LEM was done in a very minimalistic fashion - both due to technology of the day and the need to absolutely minimize the vehicle weight (the drive to minimize the LEM weight was why the astronauts stood during descent and landing - not only did it get rid of the weight of the chairs, it allowed the (heavy) windows to be much smaller while allowing the needed field of view while landing.

When the LEM was designed nobody knew the composition of the moon’s surface - it was feared it would be a thick layer of dust in which the feet could sink.

Sink the Apollo missions it is known it is a hard surface and, by choosing the appropriate landing sites, the risk of toppling is insignificant.

Even cold gas thrusters on the nose will have a lot of say in if the thing stays upright once it's engines off. Long moment arm there.

It would be interesting to hear how they've assessed the hazard from rock debris flying around under the ship during landing.

NASA has been working on that for years.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-fac...g%20visibility.

https://www.nasa.gov/general/rocket-exhaust-on-the-moon-nasa-supercomputers-reveal-surface-effects/

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-lunar-missions-moondust.html

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/...dings%20v1.pdf

A Just for info - I forget when the LM gear design was frozen but as I recall it the dust theory was never really a major consideration or a driver for the LM gear design or spec..that was a pet theory amongst certain astronomers, Thomas Gold almost made a career out of it…and of course the media picked up on it

Coping with landing on a sea of very thick fine dust ended up not being a major consideration in the way gear design evolved, especially after the first close up, fine detail pictures of the surface started coming back came back from ‘64 onwards.

The two main drivers behind the final gear configuration were concern about surface gradients (knowledge of which was poor at the time) and/or toppling due to excessive horizontal velocity on touchdown…two things that I suspect will still be of concern to some extent and I’m sure will have been factored into the design of the HLS and subsystems.

SpaceX: Flight 6 November 18 - (now an update on the SpaceX site).

4 pm Local window opening. Allows for Ship flip and burning landing in daylight.

Raptor relight added as an objective, along with TPS and other test objectives!

Oh, and a Mechazailla booster catch again, of course!

https://www.spacex.com/launches/miss...rship-flight-6

…..Starship’s upper stage will fly the same suborbital trajectory as the previous flight test, with splashdown targeted in the Indian Ocean. An additional objective for this flight will be attempting an in-space burn using a single Raptor engine, further demonstrating the capabilities required to conduct a ship deorbit burn prior to orbital missions.

Several thermal protection experiments and operational changes will test the limits of Starship’s capabilities and generate flight data to inform plans for ship catch and reuse. The flight test will assess new secondary thermal protection materials and will have entire sections of heat shield tiles removed on either side of the ship in locations being studied for catch-enabling hardware on future vehicles. The ship also will intentionally fly at a higher angle of attack in the final phase of descent, purposefully stressing the limits of flap control to gain data on future landing profiles. Finally, adjusting the flight’s launch window to the late afternoon at Starbase will enable the ship to reenter over the Indian Ocean in daylight, providing better conditions for visual observations.

Future ships, starting with the vehicle planned for seventh flight test, will fly with significant upgrades including redesigned forward flaps, larger propellant tanks, and the latest generation tiles and secondary thermal protection layers as we continue to iterate towards a fully reusable heat shield. Learnings from this and subsequent flight tests will continue to make the entire Starship system more reliable as we close in on full and rapid reusability.

Apollo 16 missed a huge crater by sheer luck. John Young and Charlie Duke flew over a rather large crater which was obscured by exhaust blown dust, landing just beyond it. The first they knew of the crater was on the moonwalk where they wandered around to the rear of the vehicle. Had they put down slightly earlier then it could have ended badly. The boulder field encountered by Apollo 11 was a bit of a surprise, partly due to Aldrin inadvertently overloading the guidance computer that stretched their landing. I'm not sure that Nasa either knew of or anticipated its existence. There was some knowledge of soil mechanics thanks to the surveyor missions which were equipped with scoops and cameras, not to mention images of the lander pads on the lunar soil. The distribution and depth on a wider scale was still an unknown.

Full automation also has issues, not least of which was a recent US robotic lander where the radio altimeter went off the scale due to crossing a crater. The system judged that the sensor was faulty and locked it out with unfortunate results.

The next manned landers have a difficult choice in landing somewhere safe but bland, or more challenging and interesting.

Sounds like they're going to push it hard - wouldn't be surprised if this one doesn't make it to a controlled landing!

That’s about one launch every 2 weeks….

I agree. This sort of destructive testing may seem wasteful to some but they need to get as much data as possible to finalise the design. Especially the heat shield.

Indeed. I think this is the last of the Block #1s that'll fly, so stressing the common components between that and V2 would be a sensible use of the flight for sure.

Still a stockpile of Raptor 2s to use up before we see Raptor 3s being used.

Starship 33 Raptor engines are being installed today. Both Sea Level and Vacuum variants. This is the first Next gen design Starship and is expected to fly on flight 7.

11/9/24

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Starship 31 has rolled out of the high bay today preparing for upcoming test flight 6 in T-minus 7 days.

11/11/24

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Booster 13 has rolled out of Megabay 1 today and is expected to rollout to the launch complex overnight for upcoming Starship test flight 6 at T-minus 5 days and counting!

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Booster 13 lifted onto the launch mount at sunrise today at T-minus 4 days and counting!

11/14/24



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I'm sad that pretty soon this'll be routine. I remember watching every F9 landing and got a bit emotional when Heavy launched the first time, but now I barely notice them :/

"Progress", I guess.