Transcript
It has been four weeks since Starship splashed down intact, and SpaceX’s mission to bring it home has just gotten a lot more interesting. This is all while we have some fresh fiery action as we start counting down the remaining steps needed before we see Starship Flight 14 rocket away. There is a little disappointment for that, but we certainly hope it is still going on the first fully orbital. It has been another absolutely crazy week outside all that SpaceX action too! This is not a Falcon 9, believe it or not, and a major Russian rocket facility literally under attack. Yeah... this has been quite the week.
Hey, hey, Marcus House with you here, and boy do we need to just jump right into the infamous Ship 40 story, which is still out there floating in the Indian Ocean after Flight 13 four weeks ago! SpaceX announced this week that after a month at sea, they were able to successfully guide Starship toward the tiny Christmas Island, roughly 1,600 kilometers from Australia, where they have been able to rest, resupply, and recuperate to produce a plan for how to get this beast home. I’ve had such a fun week because on Tuesday morning I managed to get in touch with Chris Bray, who is this awesome international wildlife photographer living right there on site. I’ve been absolutely thrilled to be able to break some news with Chris there, and such amazing work on his channel with all his wildlife photography and these incredible tours that he runs. I’m just blown away, so I’ve got a link to his Instagram and YouTube below in the description. I must admit I’ve even been skimming his free photography course on the channel because I can certainly use some tips. Anyway, go show him some love there because there is a lot more to come as we watch the next Ship 40 steps play out.
You can see that they’ve used the bottom sea level Raptor engine to haul it along, which is pretty wild. Indeed, they don’t call that a sea level engine for no reason, my friends, and it has had a very important role to play for Ship 40. Elon even chimed in there agreeing that this was way more of a “sea level engine” than expected. Now we previously assumed they may have been hooking the tug line up to the ship’s clamping interfaces; however, hooking up to the engine does actually make a lot of sense considering the amount of forces that this needs to survive when pushing the beast into orbit and during that flip maneuver. What about how well the ship itself has held up though!? Well, I would say quite well considering the conditions it has been put through over the last four weeks! Salt water is quite abrasive and corrosive, and while we can see some of these effects on the steel and tiles across the vehicle, the payload door still appears to be shut and the hull seems pretty much airtight, keeping water out! We’re hoping that episode three of SpaceX’s docuseries includes a section about all these efforts that the team went through!
Now the island has its own dock and airport where a team of SpaceX engineers are on their way to kick off some more analysis on the Starship in these much calmer waters. And of course, they stated here that they are still wanting to return Ship 40 all the way back to Starbase in Texas! So how are they going to do this? Well, although I was searching for a vessel incoming, Interstellar Gateway managed to spot it in the data before I did, catching the vessel FORTE on the way to Christmas Island, which looks to arrive on Sunday afternoon. Nice sleuthing there, and take a look at what sort of ship it is! It is a semi-submersible monster. Now coincidentally, I just happen to have witnessed a similar vessel to this named Black Marlin here in Tasmania, and it is almost exactly the same size. About 216 meters long and 43 meters wide. More than enough to pick up the 50-meter long Starship. They essentially just use ballast systems to lower the ship down; they float the payload on board, which in this case was the amazing Hull 096 built by Incat Tasmania right here in my home state. As a side note, huge respect to the incredible team that built the world’s largest battery-electric ship here and sent it off a few weeks ago.
FORTE, assuming this is indeed the vessel, and I can’t think of any other reason a ship like this would be on the way to Christmas Island, is going to rise up with Ship 40 on board and transport it the roughly 25,500 kilometers or 13,700 nautical mile journey back to Texas. I suspect they will take this route to avoid canals, but regardless, the travel time is about the same between 43 and 48 days, so it is going to take a while.
So, if we head over to Starbase now, the news might have seemed like it had slowed down the last few weeks as SpaceX prepared the next two vehicles for Starship Flight 14. With all Raptor 3 engines now installed on Ship 41 though, it was finally time to see it emerge. The static fire stand rolled out to the ringyard on Tuesday morning and into Megabay 2 later that evening. It wasn’t long before we saw Ship 41 finally heading out for static fire. Now, it has been over seven weeks since it had its cryogenic proof testing, so this felt like a long time coming for those of us that are, well, let’s face it, utterly impatient at times. Shaun was out there watching the beast roll by as it made its way to Massey’s, and notice the new sections of ablative applied to the nose to counter heating experienced in those areas!
Of course, as always, thanks so much for being subscribed here and watching along so that we get to be out there to catch everything for you. We are so grateful for that every week. The ship was then rolled right over the Flame Trench at the Massey’s Test Site, preparing for that fiery action. Just 19 hours after its arrival here, Ship 41 was getting all frosted up. It ended up doing the same 25-minute hold that Ship 40 had done, and just like clockwork… Yes, this was a smooth ignition and burn of a single Raptor engine. This draws propellant from header tanks to simulate an in-space burn, which is especially critical given we expect this to be the first fully orbital mission! Check out the new and upgraded purging system firing up here on the stand too! SpaceX confirmed this was a great test and even described it as a “deorbit burn” for the first time.
This was, of course, all followed on Friday night by the full six-engine static fire. This was a very smooth looking minute-long burn here, and Shaun really wanted to record this one zoomed back a little this time so that you can really see the light show from that exhaust way out. Now, as I mentioned, we are obviously hoping to see this Starship as the first in history to go into a full orbit with a stack of Starlink version 3 satellites. Sadly though, as you may have already seen, we got this post late in the week informing us that there will be no attempt to catch this ship at Pad 2. In fact, it may even be a little worse than that because, as stated here, SpaceX are now looking to “probably catch the ship with the tower in a few months.” I suspect that may rule out Flight 15 as well. Now there doesn’t seem to be any regulatory issue, more just SpaceX deciding they are not ready. So although a bit of a shock, Flight 14 being that first full orbital mission while they try to nail that soft booster splashdown is still going to be an exciting mission.
So what about the Super Heavy to go with it!? Booster 21 in Megabay 1 should also be ready to begin its static fire process soon too. The hold up with this largely seemed to be work going on around the launch mount, but thanks to RGV Aerial Photography, we can see the scaffolding down there in the trench has been removed, and this means that we can see the shape and location of those brand new burn plates they’ve been welding in! It’s going to be interesting to see how these have held up after Flight 14, so stay tuned for that. Given that we are still yet to see the Super Heavy rolling for a static fire, it feels to us like we are still a few weeks out at this point, so it will be intriguing to see how close they are next Saturday.
The Booster Quick Disconnect Hoods were getting some final touches with the burnt coating from the last flight being ground off and then a new coat applied, so that is looking nice and clean again there. Even more cladding tabs are revealing themselves up the tower, appearing to stop just around the ship quick disconnect arm. With the cladding installed, this is going to give all the commodities lines that travel up through the tower some extra protection against the fiery plume of returning vehicles! Now this at the base of the tower is interesting too. They’ve started welding some extra plates over the bolts to add extra security to the bottom of the tower. At liftoff, the pitch over that Starship does immediately after to move away from the tower angles the plume right down into this gap between the launch mount and the tower base. That sort of acts as its own flame diverter itself, but you can actually see these bolts here were previously exposed to that plume. After enough launches, you could see that this would slowly be eroded to an unsafe degree, so this should stop that completely!
Now you may have become quite familiar with the bright red and white lights on Tower 1 about halfway up and at the very top. These are navigational lights, of course, and are required by law by the FAA. No one wants to see low-flying aircraft in the area not seeing that in low visibility conditions. Anyway, this week those have been disabled on the Tower at Pad 1, and with that now sitting in darkness, these have been instead moved over to Tower 2, which will likely remain the primary tower for quite some time given all the Pad 1 upgrades going on right now.
Speaking of, I mentioned last week that they were beginning to cut sections off from the very ends of the tower arms. Well, they have just removed this whole section and lifted an entirely new one up, which is already sporting those additional reinforcements at the bottom. Remember, these arms were previously much longer. This section had an actuator mounted to it, which was used to raise and lower the landing rail. Now that the arms have been cut short, it will now support a damper, which will compress and cushion the landing of any vehicle coming in.
So what about progress at the Orbital Launch Mount itself?
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Ok, so getting back to the new orbital launch mount being constructed for Pad 1. If we zoom in here at the Sanchez site, we can see work has suddenly started taking off again for this. All eight sections of the bottom layer are in place and look to be at least tab welded together to keep them fixed in position. That’s because they’ve already begun stacking process for the second or the middle layer! With that, over here we can see that the very first manifold has been mounted to this construction jib for one of the two water deluge buckets; even the pipes have been moved and staged nearby. Now we’ve got some fun updates around the build site this week too, especially with the future vehicles. Here we have Booster 22, which should be launching on Flight 15. With any luck, assuming flight 14 goes well for the booster, this one could be the first Super Heavy to return to launch site and be caught from Pad 2. This has finished stacking just this week and we could just see its methane tank being lifted from the middle of Megabay 1 thanks to NSF’s live cameras! In usual SpaceX fashion, this was followed under an hour later with the first three sections of the next Booster 23, presumably for Flight 16 showing up! This is the common dome, and then shortly after, the first and second sections of the liquid oxygen tank started rolling as we can see thanks to Avid Space. Now let’s just look closer at that common dome. We can see here one of the first visible changes to the Version 3 vehicle since it first began production. You can see that the ring of stringers surrounding the common dome has these tops now sloped. We’ve been working with Chameleon Circuit so that we can show a side by side comparison. This is what it looked like before, versus how it appears now! This looks like it should reduce drag on the ascent to increase performance. There’s really no need to worry about the opposite side of the stringers though because on re-entry they really want that drag.
On the upper stage Starship side of production, with Ship 41 having done its thing at Masseys, Ship 42 was never going to be alone in Megabay 2 for long. Indeed, Ship 43’s nosecone, payload bay dispenser, and forward dome all rolled out of the tall Starfactory door and made their way over so that SpaceX could begin that stacking operation too! Indeed, slowly but surely the new Starships are starting to roll out more frequently. Their production rate, of course, won’t be fully unlocked until this monster of a building in front is finished. It is getting much closer now though. This has been a really nice milestone to see this week. The very last horizontal truss section for the roof was lifted into place on Sunday, and the team climbed up here and posed for a neat group shot to celebrate that achievement. From the sides, we can see the cladding is almost at the top of the building, and above that, all the sheet metal for the roof is being placed already. You may recall a few weeks back that I talked about SpaceX beginning to remove the parapet wall from the edge of the Starfactory. This is so that the construction of an extension to join it to the Gigabay can get underway and we are already seeing evidence of that right here with steel piling up in front and being moved into place. Shaun even spotted a nice little delivery while watching this Gigbay work and these look to be two brand new grid fin adapters. It is a little speculative still, but we think that these are going to be used in the breakover process for the Super Heavy when they lay that down for transport! That is going to be a wild thing to see in real life after all these years of vertical integration, but thanks again to Chameleon Circuit we can see these should give the lifter 180 degrees of movement so that it can rotate the booster 90 degrees either way.
Now, we had some sweet back-to-back Falcon 9 action this week. And when I say back-to-back, I really mean it. Falcon 9 set a new record for the shortest time between two flights, with just minutes separating these beasts roaring into the sky from opposite ends of the country. Under 40 minutes apart, in fact! The first was away on Saturday evening from Space Launch Complex 40 with Globalstar 2-R Mission 1. Booster 1090 lit up the sky on its 14th flight, but this was no usual Starlink mission. A few minutes into the flight, we got the usual stage separation, and check this out. The short Merlin Vacuum nozzle was back, which saves cost due to less material needed on the engine bell, but it isn’t quite as efficient. Obviously, in this mission, the payload was reasonably light because SpaceX also had the margins to return the booster all the way back home without needing a droneship. Now, we don’t tend to see a lot of these return to launch site missions done in daylight sadly. It was heading back to Landing Zone 40 in this case, touching down there just seconds before the upper stage was due to hit that target orbit. Now on board were eight satellites for the Globalstar network, and with that mission still ongoing and live, SpaceX kicked off another livestream in parallel with the next Falcon 9 counting down from the West Coast. This might seem a bit odd because with that three-hour time difference it was still daylight from there at Vandenberg Space Force Base. For this mission though, it was sadly a classified US Space Force mission with USSF-366. Booster 1088 was on its 18th flight, and without seeing the second stage again after separation, we just had the booster returning successfully there on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You. That stream ended right there, leaving everybody still awaiting the deployment from the first Globalstar mission here. All 8 satellites were deployed, of course, and interestingly, they were all using Rocket Lab’s Lightning platform. Here is a neat shot from one of them in orbit actually. That is a cracker shot. Now, this just left Starlink action, Group 17-50 was away on Tuesday evening with Booster 1097 on flight number 12. This was another flight from Vandenberg Space Force Base, so Of Course I Still Love You was back out again already. Starlink Group 10-39 was away from Space Launch Complex 40 on Friday morning with booster 1078 touching down for its 30th time. There was even a 5th mission for the week booked in a few hours before this video went live. So yeah, it has been another super busy week for Falcon 9!
Now speaking of remember, earlier this month an old Falcon 9 second stage impacted on the lunar surface!? Well, we have now had the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter sending back the impact location. I think it is just so cool that we can see detail like this and with the space industry accelerating like crazy, this is going to be nothing compared to what we will soon be able to do. You can very clearly see the new crater roughly 18 meters in diameter and a little under 3 meters deep it seems. You can even see the material that has been ejected in this pattern down here. Just amazing! Now check this out! It is not another Falcon 9, but my gosh does it look like it!
Rewinding a little, Land Space here was launching their ZhuQue-3 rocket, and this is a methane-fueled rocket with a reusable booster. Falcon 9 uses RP-1, which is essentially refined kerosene; of course, instead, this was designed to use the cleaner methane, which is why the plume looks more like a Starship exhaust. It has 9 of these TQ-12A engines on its first stage and one TQ-15 vacuum engine on the second. Another difference from Falcon 9, which is largely made from an aluminum-lithium alloy, is that this is primarily made of stainless steel. Lots of, let’s say… design elements borrowed from both SpaceX’s rocket designs.
Now, even though this was only the second flight, this had onboard the Honghu-03 internet satellite as the payload. Now, on their first mission, Land Space didn’t make that first stage landing attempt. Could they do it for the second mission though!? Well, a little over seven and a half minutes later, these were the scenes from LandSpace’s Landing Site Number 1, which is 390 kilometers or 242 miles downrange from the launch site. Check this out. Wow, they really nailed that! Here you can clearly see the booster switching from the three engines to just the central one. There flips out the landing legs, and just looked a little too easy. That is nowhere near as aggressive as the suicide burn that Falcon 9 does, but I’m sure that they’ll keep dialing this in. Now, this of course means that the ZhuQue-3 has become China’s first commercial rocket to both reach orbit and have its first stage recovered. Well, kind of, because a short time later, it sadly fell over due to a fire which weakened one of its four landing legs. Regardless, this is the first rocket to ever touch down on land for China.
What about the Long March 10b, you may ask? Indeed, this also pulled off this incredible catch just last month, but this was caught in the ocean with that peculiar cable capture system, not touching down on land. Now, this can sometimes be a sensitive topic to talk about. Regardless of what anybody may think of the Chinese missions and vehicles, we’ve got to be paying attention to this technology screaming away. Yes, we saw Falcon 9 do this over a decade ago, and this is obviously… let’s say heavily “inspired” by that. Even still, this is the competition for the moon and beyond coming, so we want to make sure we are seeing that annual US space budget increase to stay well ahead. I think one thing that really irks me currently is the plan to decommission the International Space Station in four years while China has a brand new one up there being used all the time. All I can say about that is let’s hope those commercial options come online very quickly.
Now, speaking of the station, we’ve had lots of spacewalk action going on. Recently, NASA’s astronauts Jessica Meir and Anil Menon were heading outside the International Space Station to continue preparing for the installation of the next set of IROSA roll-out solar arrays. In fact, Anil was back outside again for his second-ever spacewalk early this week, and this time alongside ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot. Sophie was actually on her first-ever spacewalk here, so big congratulations on that. She has also become the first French female to ever do this, which is awesome. The task on this mission was to head out and replace a failed Space-to-Ground antenna. The job turned out to be a little more tricky than expected though, because they needed to spend extra time disconnecting electrical cables and loosening bolts. Now, this meant that they didn’t have time to actually install the replacement antenna. So instead, they removed the failed unit, secured it to the station’s truss, and wrapped up the mission there after close to six and a half hours outside. That replacement installation is now planned for a future spacewalk, and another is coming for more maintenance and station decommissioning preparation.
We even had Rocket Lab back with another Electron mission for iQPS, launching one more SAR satellite this week to their growing constellation. A beautiful nighttime launch for ‘The Lightning God Defends’ mission taking off from New Zealand. A few minutes in, we had a neat view of the payload at stage separation, and this was followed by the kickstage doing its thing, which circled halfway around the pale blue dot before deploying the satellite right at the 50-minute mark.
Now finally today, and I’ll admit this is not something that I would normally report on, you may have heard about this significant missile strike roughly 900 kilometers deep inside Russian territory. Ukraine hit the Progress Rocket Space Center, which is one of the most important facilities for Roscosmos. Volodymyr Zelenskyy later confirmed the attack, saying the Ukrainian-made FP-5 “Flamingo” cruise missiles were used against the facility. Now, what may this mean for Russia’s space programs? Well, the Progress Center is responsible for producing Russia’s Soyuz-2 rockets, as well as the newer Soyuz-5. Plenty of satellites for the Russian military too, I believe, but it’s still unclear how much damage has been done here. I mean, Roscosmos has already been struggling to keep up with demand for the Soyuz rockets, so if the damage at Progress turns out to be substantial, it could put even more pressure on this system and even their trips to the International Space Station.
I tell you what, it is a very good thing that we have seen SpaceX’s success with Crew Dragon over the last seven years or so, because if it were only Starliner in play right now, you would have to wonder what this would mean for the ISS. If the Soyuz becomes a real significant issue, you’ve got to wonder if SpaceX will be requested to help with more Cosmonaut seats. What do you think?! So on that note, that is it for the week, my friends! I hope you enjoyed this video! If you did, don’t forget to hit subscribe so we get to keep making them. If you have a little more time to help us out and want to continue with more space goodness, check out this video here next. Thanks as always for watching all this way through! That helps a huge amount. I’ll catch you next weekend!
