January - February 2019
Why the Starship is Built of Stainless Steel
.So SpaceX is making a huge rocket out of stainless steel. As far as we know, this marks the first time the material has been used in spacecraft construction since some early, ill-fated attempts during the Atlas program in the late 1950s.
We know he is doing this because, after weeks of rumors about a tweak to the design, a few days before Christmas Musk revealed that there would be much more than a tweak. The state-of-the-art carbon fiber forming the body of the Starship rocket (formerly known as the BFR, or Big Falcon Rocket, or Big F-other-word Rocket) and its Super Heavy booster would be replaced by 300-series stainless.
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Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This is an actual picture, not a rendering. pic.twitter.com/k1HkueoXaz
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2019
On January 10, Musk tweeted a photograph of a test version of Starship—essentially a prototype that can be used for suborbital VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) test flights, reaching around 16,400 feet. He is calling these “hops.”
Since the quasi-unveiling, Musk has briefly answered some direct questions from the curious space-watchers of cyberspace via Twitter. But two weeks before the announcement he sat down with Popular Mechanics editor in chief Ryan D’Agostino at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, for an exclusive interview in which he discussed, in great detail, the thinking behind the change. He talked about a lot more than that—we’ll be bringing you more soon. For now, here’s what he said about the big change.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/spa...ainless-steel/
SpaceX fits Starship prototype with tank bulkheads as hop test pad progresses
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SpaceX workers have begun installing fuel and oxidizer tank bulkheads inside the first BFS/Starship prototype at the same time as the vehicle’s nearby ‘launch’ facility continues to sprout important infrastructure and slowly morph from a giant pile of dirt into something capable of supporting rocket hop tests.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-sta...-pad-progress/
50 mph winds blow off the top of new SpaceX rocket
.SpaceX’s shiny new rocket got blown over in Texas.
CEO Elon Musk confirmed that 50 mph winds broke the mooring blocks of the Starship Hopper test rocket late Tuesday and the fairing was blown over.
“Will take a few weeks to repair,” Musk said in a tweet.
The fairing is the top portion of the rocket, which on normal launches would hold the payload. The bottom portion of the rocket was undamaged, Musk said.
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Bottom half of SpaceX "starship" prototype bolted down to pad and still standing. Detached top half heavily damaged. Looks like you need a hurricane-proof building to do this work in Texas. Sets back project a few months. Photo credit: NSF BocaChicaGal. pic.twitter.com/FW4ERg0hJl
— Bruce Perens K6BP (@BrucePerens) January 23, 2019
The rocket was rolled out earlier in January at the company’s Boca Chica, Texas launch site. The Starship Hopper will eventually perform suborbital vertical take-off and landing tests similar to how the company tested a Falcon 9 rocket called the Grasshopper in 2012.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/spac...123-story.html
Nosecone Damage
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/in...507#msg1904507
STARSHIP NOSE CONE DESTROYED IN WINDSTORM - Repairs to take only a few weeks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_m1o8sfjsY
(Can't see much.)
Upper half of Starship hopper blown over by winds
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-th...over-by-winds/
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk explains Starship’s ‘transpiring’ steel heat shield in Q&A
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Speaking in a late-December 2018 interview with Popular Mechanics’ editor-in-chief, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared considerable insight into the thought processes that ultimately led him to – in his own words – “convince” his team that the company’s BFR rocket (now Starship and Super Heavy) should pivot from an advanced composite structure to a relatively common form of stainless steel.
Aside from steel’s relative ease of manipulation and affordability, Musk delved into the technical solution he arrived at for an advanced, ultra-reusable heat shield for Starship – build it out of steel and use water (or liquid methane) to wick reentry heat away.
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When going to ~1750 Kelvin, specific heat is more important than latent heat of vaporization, which is why cryogenic fuel is a slightly better choice than water
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 22, 2019
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-ceo...eld-interview/
Bulkhead on!
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/in...088#msg1905088
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk teases white-hot Starship heat shield testing in video
.SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has shared a video showing what looks to be the early stages of testing for Starship’s (BFS) unprecedented metallic heat shield, recently described as a double-layered steel sandwich that will be regeneratively cooled by cryogenic liquid methane.
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Testing metallic heat shield at 1100C (2000F) @SpaceX pic.twitter.com/frP5eZ5a0z
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 25, 2019
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-ceo...testing-video/
SpaceX workers cap Starship with tank dome as Raptor arrivals and hop tests near
.SpaceX employees and local contractors continue to outfit the aft section of the first full-scale BFR prototype with a variety of important components, recently culminating in the installation of the Starship hopper’s top propellant tank dome,
Critical to the arrival and installation of its Raptor engines and the craft’s first hop tests, this work continues despite the premature demise of Starhopper’s apparently fragile nose cone (fairing), toppled on January 22nd when fairly mild winds of around 50 mph (80 km/h) encountered the shoddy rigging meant to keep the huge but lightweight hardware on its concrete stand.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-sta...econe-setback/
Why SpaceX ditched lightweight Carbon Composites for Stainless Steel to make a sweaty Starship
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LogE40_wR9k
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk reveals photos of Starship’s first completed Raptor engine
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Shortly after Teslarati reported that the first operationalized Raptor had shipped to McGregor, Texas for its first full-scale static fire tests, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to post the first official photos of the “radically redesigned” engine preparing for its critical debut test fire in Texas.
Designed with extreme reliability, efficiency, and reusability in mind, the Raptor seen in Musk’s photos is rated for just shy of 2.5 times the thrust of Merlin 1D at 200 tons (450,000 lbf) and has been commonized across both stages of BFR (Starship and Super Heavy) to spread out development costs and speed up the next-generation rocket’s orbital launch debut.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-ceo...raptor-engine/
SpaceX sends “radically redesigned” Starship engine to Texas for hot-fire tests
.SpaceX has shipped one of the first of a group of Starship engines known as Raptor, described last month by CEO Elon Musk as “radically redesigned”. A culmination of more than 24 months of prototype testing, the first flight-worthy Raptor could be ignited for the first time as early as February.
According to Musk, three of these redesigned Raptors will power the first full-scale BFR prototype, a Starship (upper stage) test article meant to conduct relatively low-altitude, low-velocity hop tests over the southern tip of Texas. Those tests could also begin next month, although a debut sometime in March or April is increasingly likely.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-rad...-fire-testing/
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk arrives in Texas for milestone Starship engine test
.On Saturday evening, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk landed in Waco, Texas – perhaps along with additional SpaceX propulsion engineers – for the critical static fire debut of the first “radically redesigned” Raptor engine, built to power BFR’s Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster.
If the first operationalized Raptor’s static fire tests go well, there are several possible routes the test program could take, all of which will end up with this engine and several others being tested and ultimately installed on the Starship hopper (Starhopper) prototype under construction roughly 500 miles (800 km) south of SpaceX’s Raptor test cell.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-ceo...p-engine-test/
SpaceX Super Heavy and Starship updates
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1...pdates/page/9/
SpaceX’s first redesigned Raptor static fire paves the way for Starship’s hop test debut
.After years of development, multiple prototypes constructed, and more than 1200 seconds of cumulative static fire testing at durations longer than what is needed to land on Mars, SpaceX propulsion engineers and technicians have successfully built and static-fired the first flight-worthy Raptor for the first time ever.
This is an incredibly important step towards BFR (Starship/Super Heavy) launch operations and is even more directly encouraging for the first integrated hop tests of SpaceX’s Starship prototype (unofficially deemed Starhopper), which could very well be the next host of the pathfinder Raptor engine pictured below.
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-suc...-hopper-debut/
Elon Musk Unveils SpaceX's 1st Rocket Engine Test for Starship Rocket (Video)
.SpaceX just took another step toward Mars.
The company has test-fired the flight version of its new Raptor rocket engine for the first time, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced yesterday (Feb. 3).
"First firing of Starship Raptor flight engine! So proud of great work by @SpaceX team!!" Musk said via Twitter. [Images: SpaceX's Giant Spaceship for Mars Colony & Beyond]
The billionaire entrepreneur also tweeted out several videos of the 3-second test, which took place at the company's development facility in McGregor, Texas.
https://www.space.com/43218-spacex-r...est-video.html
SpaceX Starship's Raptor Flight Engine Test-Fired For First Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl2i...ature=youtu.be
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