Transcript
Well, my friends, at last, SpaceX has rolled a Starship out to the launch site. We’ve been desperately waiting for some more information on the next Starship Flight 14, of course, and we finally got some just yesterday while this Starship was here at Pad 2! It has in fact been a mad week of Starship vehicle hardware rolling and testing, huge movements at the launch site, and that’s just the start. We’ve seen a massive victory for Isar Aerospace and their second Spectrum vehicle launch, a mammoth surprise from Stoke Space with all of this new Nova news, and a bunch more. It is never a dull week in space! This video is sponsored by Surfshark VPN! Hey, hey, Marcus House with you here, and of course, what everybody wants to know is what on Earth is going on with Flight 14! Both vehicles were already static fired over a week ago now. The delay, I suspect, has partly at least been due to work going on at Pad 2, but as you will see, we have had a neat update on the flight just yesterday.
The SpaceX team had continued welding away at the bottom of the launch tower, making sure there are plates over all those bolts joining the tower legs to the base. As we previously mentioned, this is important to reduce the erosion from the super heavy plume lancing down here. Obviously, this was picked up as an issue to resolve over the first two flights from this new pad. Another critical addition to the tower is to protect its insides with that cladding, which is still continuing to climb up as we’ve seen over the past few weeks. In this new image from RGV Aerial Photography, you can easily compare the height that the cladding was versus how it is currently. Both sides will eventually match, and there is already cladding staged on the ground for this next side. The big question is, do they necessarily need all this to be finished before Flight 14 though?
Well, there is more they’ve been doing here before the flight. We were treated to more simultaneous retraction tests of the Ship quick disconnect, Booster quick disconnects, and the launch clamps just as they would during a launch scenario. Coupled with that, we have some more deluge tests. I’ve got to say, seeing this fire off is not getting old for me. These tests even included that top deck again, which is really crazy to see!
Now, with all this, you may recall me talking about this brand new steel structure that we’ve watched being assembled at the Sanchez area of the build site since it arrived in two pieces from the port! We had Shaun out here watching that roll out and head down to Pad 2 early this week. As always, thanks a bunch for watching along, being subscribed here, and helping us be out there. We really appreciate that. Now, remember, the idea is for this to sit within the launch mount to allow SpaceX to easily service the pad between flights where needed. For now, this was likely being moved here just for fit checks with the launch mount, but if all checks out, it should soon come in handy for those inspections after Flight 14!
When is that going to be, you might ask? Well, just late yesterday, the FAA finally published an official launch date indicating a primary launch attempt on the 18th of September this coming Friday, with a backup the next day! Taking a look at those launch windows, you’ll notice they both start at 12:15 PM UTC or 7:15 AM local time at Starbase. Recent flights, of course, have all been much later in the day to capture Starship in the daylight as it splashed down west of Australia. Remember, this is the first orbital mission to place an operational stack of Starlink Version 3 satellites into orbit, and it should also mean we will see our first Starlink deployment with Starship in the daylight! If this date holds, we should be seeing a heap of action with both Flight 14 vehicles over the coming days, including payload installation.
What has been equally surprising this week, though, is the progress unfolding in preparation for flights beyond! I had left you last week with Flight 15’s Starship, Ship 42, having completed two successful back-to-back cryogenic tests in the one night, which has, it seems, become the standard for version 3 Starships. The next step we assumed would be for it to return to Megabay 2 and receive all six of its Raptor 3 engines for static fire testing; however, for some reason, here it was rolling back out to Masseys just a few days later to resume testing. We’re not sure what’s up with that, but perhaps they just want to review something that they saw in the previous testing data. Its partner, Booster 22, also showed its face this week just as we were hoping, ready to kick off its cryogenic testing!
Here we had the thrust simulator stand rolling into Megabay 1 on Monday, followed by the Super Heavy rolling out to the Masseys test site on top shortly after. I think it’s really nice to see both Flight 15 vehicles rolling along at the same point in both of their testing campaigns, and of course, certainly nice to see the production lines beginning to line up again like this! Booster 22 was shoved right into cryogenic testing on Wednesday evening, being filled rapidly right to the top. We picked up a view of this super heavy frosted over and venting again. It is almost a little bizarre that we’ve had so much testing with the Flight 15 vehicles so far before Flight 14. They held that cryogenic level on board for hours, making sure there’s no leaking or pressure issues. On Thursday, the next day, they did another smaller cryo test with it in the evening.
Now, its friend over here must have completed any of the additional checkouts the team may have wanted because Ship 42 began its journey back down Highway 4 and into Megabay 2. Yeah, they’ve certainly been rolling vehicles right through the week. The game of Starship chess didn’t stop there either because, as it turned out, they were just heading in to move it from the thrust simulator stand onto a regular transport stand. What!? Yeah, none of us predicted this. They rolled it right back out to head to the launch site! What on Earth for, though? Well, it seems its role at the launch site is a simple but important one: to test out some of the ship catch systems on the tower arms! They first positioned the ship right in the middle of them here, which is closer to the tower than usual. This was done so that they could lift the ship just a few feet off of the stand and test out the pusher system on the landing rails. What they are checking, we believe, is that they can maneuver the ship back to the stacking position at the ends of the arms safely after a future Starship catch. It can then be lowered to the ground. In this case, the transport stand was just moved over slightly to meet the ship’s new setting position.
Anyway, with all of that complete, both Ship 42 and Booster 22 were scheduled to return to the production site in the early hours of this morning, where they should both, we hope, be about to have their Raptor engine installation kicking off. Now, just because Ship 42 momentarily took us away from the Masseys test site, there are a few other neat points to take a look at. Since the S43.1 nosecone test article turned up a few weeks ago, it has been hooked up to all sorts of different actuators and piping! We’ve seen venting coming from this article, which is a likely sign SpaceX is filling the header tanks and pushing it through a bunch of dynamic loads across the entire structure. So far, it is obviously meeting, and we hope, exceeding all those expected limits!
Now, looking over at this spot right here, you may notice they seem to be digging a rather large patch of piles for something quite sizable. Perhaps another test stand or cage will appear here, but we are keeping our eyes on that. Okay, so, as we know by now, SpaceX is going to be transporting Starships and Super Heavy Boosters off to Florida to launch from the Pad at 39A, and perhaps other pads here too. It may not just be Florida in the future too, with the plans already put in place in Louisiana. Who knows where in the world Starship launch infrastructure could pop up in the more distant future? Australia? I’d certainly love to see it.
Anyway, SpaceX needs to get in some practice laying the vehicles down and raising them up again to ensure the design stands up to everything they need to do. Shipping can get hairy too, with rough seas, of course, so there is a lot to consider. Thanks to these images from above, we’ve seen SpaceX setting up this rig at the port! Before operating this system with a flight-ready vehicle on top, they can first try the process with something much smaller! For this, a steel bracket has been installed to anchor the two sets of Self Propelled Modular Transporters together. These two pivot points down here are, we think, the main point of interest. A closure appeared on Monday, and it was taken to the production site for the first time. Unfortunately, we saw very little of this process from the cameras with it sitting low to the ground. Once arriving, though, it rolled right around the bays and parked in the ring yard. We saw them moving the booster aft breakover jig around beside that, and just recently, they also delivered a pair of these booster breakover fins! They certainly seem to be gathering all the pieces to experiment with that process soon, and it doesn’t stop with Boosters either because check this out!
On NSF’s live cameras capturing the Florida cape action this week, we saw them loading up a barge to travel to Starbase in Texas. This frame, as you can see, is labeled Starship Horizontal Transport, Ship Aft Frame. This is what will, in theory, connect to the aft of the ship and pivot to allow the translation from vertical to horizontal! With that, on the barge, is a super heavy workstand for the Starbase Gigabay and a section of Pad 1’s top deck manifold! So there is a big mixture of stuff coming over here. Speaking of Pad 1 parts, the construction of the launch mount for that is now finally screaming along. This week, we can see all 8 segments of the middle deck are in place, having been temporarily welded together with steel bars in between just to keep everything nicely aligned. To go with that, the brand new replacement ship quick disconnect arm is finally beginning assembly. It has been delivered in all these smaller pieces that have to be aligned and welded together, but just as we’ve seen them doing in the past, once these components are ready to go, SpaceX can quite literally have the whole thing fully assembled in just weeks. At the pad itself, we were hoping to see the massive new roof lifted into place! And that is just what they did this week!
[ad text redacted]
Ok, getting back to the gigantic new roof being lifted here at Pad 1 being rapidly upgraded. Shaun was out there bright and early on Wednesday morning as they lifted this giant section into place. You will likely first notice that they’ve painted the sides black. This is different from the bare grey look on Pad 2, so we’ll have to wait to see if this gets replicated across the other pads or whether this could be one of Pad 1’s unique defining features!
Now we had the Falcon 9 action for the week kicking off here from Vandenberg Space Force Base on this very beautiful Sunday morning. This was Starlink Group 15-24 launching the one and only Starlink mission of the week. Booster 1088 was on its 19th mission here and with such an awesome uninterrupted onboard shot which took us all the way to stage separation, how can I not make a timelapse of that one? Brilliant!
A few minutes after stage separation, there was that landing on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You. Now that just left the one remaining Falcon 9 launch with USSF-153 on Thursday morning again from Vandenberg Space Force Base. As another classified mission for the United States Space Force and with Booster 1081 on its 27th mission here, the onboard cameras were only ever going to show a view of the first stage itself after stage separation. As usual, this is because the payload itself is classified. But even though this is speculative, this seems to be another batch of SpaceX’s Starshield satellites. We can sort of tell these things based on how far downrange the droneship is stationed for the catch. In this case, it is very similar in position to what we see with Starlink Group 15 launches, just as an example. These sorts of missions though, do give us a nice full-screen view of the booster doing that landing burn. The droneship Of Course I Still Love You had already done the round trip to be back out again. That means there were no Cape flights at all this week although there is the O3b mPower 11-13 Mission launching from Space Launch Complex 40 in a few days, so stay tuned!
We have some really big news and success this week for Isar Aerospace, of course. Here they were, at their pad in Norway, preparing for their second attempt to launch the Spectrum rocket after a series of delays throughout the year. You may recall they had this quite spectacular launch anomaly on their first mission attempt back in March last year. As far as rocket mishaps go though, that one was a pretty beautiful end to a failed mission. This week though, the countdown was on again for the mission named Onward and Upward. They were sadly being bugged by unwanted boats, issues with pressure vessels, and weather, but on Saturday night, everything was looking good to go from this gorgeous location! NSF were helping to host this one which was awesome to see, and the final seconds were soon on before the big event! Yes, there it was, roaring away into the night sky, but this time continuing on its way to orbit. Just the exhaust there lighting up the scenery was astounding, I think.
Its nine engines on the first stage burned away there in full force, and a little after the one-and-a-half-minute mark, Spectrum had passed Max Q, even with some onboard views popping up. Just seconds later, the booster separated, leaving that single upper-stage engine to take over the mission. Now this vehicle uses liquid oxygen and propane for both of the rocket stages’ propellant. For comparison, propane is denser than, say, methane, although methane can offer somewhat higher specific impulse. That makes this a less ordinary choice, so it will be interesting to see how they go with this as we see more frequent launches. Now despite launching after 10 PM, we got this gorgeous jellyfish effect. Remember, we’re way up above the Arctic Circle here, and twilight hangs around incredibly late at this time of year. While the launch site was already quite dark, Spectrum was already catching direct sunlight, brilliantly illuminating that rapidly expanding exhaust.
Now when we were watching that single vacuum engine on the second stage through the onboard camera, those cables dangling there made it seem like there may have been some sort of problem, but it kept on going! A little over seven minutes in, everybody let out that sigh of relief as Spectrum reached orbit for the first time with that satisfying engine cutoff. Spectrum is designed to carry up to 1 metric ton to low Earth orbit, and on this flight, it was carrying five CubeSats, along with one experiment named Let It Go which stayed attached to the upper stage! All of these were from European companies and universities, supported by the European Space Agency’s Boost Program. Now there was still another second stage burn to do in order to finalize that orbit, but they had chosen to end the live stream before that and report in as the mission continued. I’ve got to say it was really awesome seeing Das there just helping to nail that stream for this exciting mission. Really well done. And as confirmed later, the payloads were successfully deployed. It’s a pretty amazing story just after their second attempt, I think, and actually their upcoming vehicles for missions 3 through to 7 are already in production. With the opening of the new 40,000-square-meter production facility, Isar Aerospace will eventually have the capacity to manufacture up to 40 launch vehicles per year!
Now we had a surprising announcement from Stoke Space earlier this week working hard to get their Nova rocket ready for launch. Announced here, they just closed a massive 1 billion-dollar Series E financing round, but more interesting was their future plans to scale up the Nova! As we clearly know, launch demands are growing. We need to see cheaper flights to space on rockets with more capacity, greater availability, and payload flexibility. More so, however, it is complete reusability that is key, as we’ve known for years watching the Starship program going through its paces. Now there are only a few companies working on fully reusable rocket designs, and Stoke Space is an exciting one. We have been intrigued all this time watching them update us with progress on their Nova-C. This, by the way, has just been renamed to Nova Pathfinder, which makes sense because it is now going to be a stepping stone to help them pave the way towards their much bigger and more ambitious Nova Block-2. Check this out!
First off, it is obviously much bigger. It has double the number of Zenith engines powering the first stage going from 7 on the Pathfinder to 14 here on Block 2. The great thing is they are planning to use the same architecture as Pathfinder for the Block-2, so every single Zenith engine that they build, test, qualify, and fly on Pathfinder directly advances the Block 2 program as well. Both the Pathfinder and Block 2 use the stainless steel tanks and skin and carry forward the same propellants, propulsion architecture, manufacturing, and operating principles overall, so it really is a huge scale-up. Looking at the payload differences, the Pathfinder was only two and a half tonnes to Low Earth Orbit. Block 2 is instead 15 tonnes, so this is a massive six-fold increase. The incredible Andromeda upper stage is the super unique part of the Nova design, of course, and I can’t wait to see it in action. Block 2, just like the Pathfinder, will have the thrust chambers distributed around the base’s circumference. That then has the actively cooled metallic base. That means there is no separate heat shielding needed because the cryogenic liquid hydrogen propellant will be pumped through the cooling channels in the metallic heat shield to absorb the enormous heat of reentry. We have been wanting to see this tested ever since the design was shown off the first time. Where this active cooling plan doesn’t really seem practical with a complex body like Starship, for a capsule design, it makes a lot more sense.
Now I suspect you will find this super interesting. Both the Andromeda upper stage designs have the 24 thrust chambers. The setup with that Block 2 though is quite different. The Pathfinder has all of those chambers fed by a common set of turbopumps. On Block 2 though, they are instead having 12 independent engines, each with two thrust chambers and its own turbomachinery. That is important because they don’t need to scale up one massive common turbomachinery when they just want to change the engine setup. Each pair is just independently driven now. Now the Stage 2 thrust has gone from 25,000 pounds of force on Pathfinder to 150,000 pounds of force on the much bigger Block-2. Yes, that’s another whopping six-fold increase. The other obvious benefit is that a single engine failure won’t potentially kill the entire propulsion system. With this setup, they will be able to shut down a failed engine more effectively and continue on with the mission. You will notice, of course, that they are switching the iconic capsule-like shape of the second stage to the more typical cylindrical design. That means they can shove this 5-meter payload fairing on top to allow much better delivery options. Similar to what we watch SpaceX do with Falcon 9’s fairing recovery, this will be reused as well, presumably pulled from the ocean by recovery vessels.
Now with this much bigger upper stage, to recover that, they will need to manage sidewall heating during the base-first reentry a lot more. Stoke Space at this point at least seems quite confident that the base heat shield and the vehicle’s reentry geometry should be enough to shade the sidewalls from the peak heating. I wonder if they may just get it rotating slowly on entry to make sure any unevenness in the plasma flow is at least moved continually around the walls rather than being able to build up on one side. What do you think? This to me seems like the most interesting challenge with this style of base entry.
Now, in order to support all of this, of course, at Stoke Space’s Moses Lake Test Site, they are working on expanding their footprint from 75 acres to 550 acres. Meanwhile, over at Space Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral, a new payload processing facility is also underway to support both Pathfinder and Block 2. This is going to allow them to prove out their process on Pathfinder while simultaneously setting up the capacity for Block 2. Along with all of that, their offshore recovery platform is being designed and built to support both vehicles. And even more exciting, they’re planning for multiple flights of Pathfinder next year and even in 2028, and that is even before the Nova Block 2 is getting ready for its first flight, planned no earlier than 2029. Now, it really doesn’t seem like they plan on retiring Pathfinder once they begin flying Block 2, just FYI. Both vehicles should suit different customer payloads and missions. What do you think? Will they have Pathfinder flying next year? I sure hope so!
Anyway, my friends, that is another week done and dusted. I hope you enjoyed this video! If you did, don’t forget to hit subscribe so we get to keep making them. Again, a massive thank you to Surfshark VPN for helping us put in all the work we can into these videos. If you want to continue with more space goodness, help us out by checking out this video here next. And thanks for watching all this way through as always! That helps a huge amount. I’ll catch you next weekend!
