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Space

SpaceX Confirms It's Almost Ready To Test Its Orbital Starship (engadget.com) 89

Posted by msmash from the up-next dept.
SpaceX isn't wasting much time now that Starhopper has completed its hover test. The company has filed an FCC communication permissions request that, as Elon Musk confirmed, prepares for test-flying the "orbit-class" Starship. From a report: The vehicle will fly much higher than its stubby predecessor, reaching an altitude of 12.5 miles before it comes back to the same landing pad used during earlier tests. It's not a true orbital test, then, but it's clearly much closer to SpaceX's goals. The FCC filing came days after word from Business Insider (later verified) that the FAA was effectively granting SpaceX permission to expand its Boca Chica launch facility for the sake of Starship launches. The company also hasn't tried to hide its construction work on the orbit-quality vehicle, and Musk has alluded to a September 28th update event that could show off the completed spacecraft. It's poised to launch sometime in October, possibly as soon as the 13th.
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SpaceX Confirms It's Almost Ready To Test Its Orbital Starship More

SpaceX Confirms It's Almost Ready To Test Its Orbital Starship

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  • Long March 5, New Glenn, Vulcan, etc (Score:3)

    by WindBourne ( 631190 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @12:57PM (#59181538) Journal
    All of these are playing catch-up to the Falcon system.
    And yet, it appears likely that SX will have their next generation launch system out before even SLS launches.
    The strange thing is, that SX really is moving at the same speed that America did back in the 60s. I have to wonder if Trump/GOP will finally start supporting new space and commercial space, as opposed to allowing the GOP to continue throwing our money away on SLS, and now the lunar space station.

    • Why don't you take a look at voting history for NASA funding and see how many Ds are there in the voting rolls in support...

      Clean your own house first if you think NASA support is such a mistake.

      The Trump administration may have boosted NASA some but they have been VERY supportive of private space efforts [space.com] as well.

    • Re:Long March 5, New Glenn, Vulcan, etc (Score:4, Interesting)

      by spun ( 1352 ) <loverevolutionary@@@yahoo...com> on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @01:18PM (#59181650) Journal

      The thing about the American aerospace industry is that it is a part of the military-industrial-political complex. There is a large and complicated set of deals that distribute your tax dollars to various pork barrel projects. The point is not "going to space" or "protecting the country" it is "giving politicians the power to hand out tax dollars to their supporters, in exchange for campaign donations and a lucrative post-politics career." This is why nobody cares when every single military/aerospace project goes 5x over budget. The point is not to produce capable weapons or space craft, it is to provide welfare for the very rich.

      Space X is not a part of the ecosystem of corruption, and therefore will have to work twice as hard to achieve half as much support from government.

      • Re:Long March 5, New Glenn, Vulcan, etc (Score:5, Interesting)

        by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @02:06PM (#59181860) Journal

        The point is not to produce capable weapons or space craft, it is to provide welfare for the very rich.

        There's some of that, but the bigger reason is to spread the money around to create jobs in lots of House and Senate districts, so the relevant Representatives and Senators will fight any attempt to cut the funding and kill the jobs it creates in their districts. Bringing that sweet federal pork home to the voters and keeping it there keeps the voters happy and their votes directed "correctly".

        This doesn't just create cost overruns, it sometimes even kills people. Utah's representatives managed to get the shuttle booster construction awarded to Thiokol in Utah, home of the long-term and therefore influential Senator Orrin Hatch, which meant that the boosters had to be assembled in segments short enough to ship on trains through tight mountain curves and tunnels. Segmenting the boosters meant that the segments had to be joined together with O rings. Booster O ring failure caused the Challenger to explode. Had the boosters been built in Florida, or Alabama, or pretty much anywhere in the midwest, they wouldn't have been segmented and the Challenger wouldn't have exploded. But Hatch brought home the pork.

        Do voters actually care? You bet they do. Here's an anecdote: I'm from Utah and my brother-in-law worked for several years at Thiokol (then ATK) filling booster segments with solid fuel, for $30 per hour. He had no education beyond high school and his previous job was driving a garbage truck for $14 per hour. His time at ATK ended when Obama cancelled the Constellation program, and now he's back to driving a garbage truck, now for $16 per hour or thereabouts. He hates Obama with a purple passion for killing his ATK job and loves Orrin Hatch like his own grandpa for creating his ATK job... and he tells virtually everyone he meets about both opinions.

        That's the sort of thing that really drives politicians to seek pork for their districts. Making fat cats happy for big donations is good, too, but getting votes is better than getting cash to spend on trying to get votes.

        • You do know that SLS has the exact same solid boosters as constellation. Right? And that mostly GOP ( dems helped on this ) forced NASA to use ATK's solid booster. Right?

          • You do know that SLS has the exact same solid boosters as constellation. Right? And that mostly GOP ( dems helped on this ) forced NASA to use ATK's solid booster. Right?

            I do. But he hasn't been able to get his ATK job back.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Megane ( 129182 )

            ...except they aren't making very many of those SRBs, since SLS has been in limbo for years. Apparently right now it's not even clear what's holding it up. And even if it ever launches (you can forget about Block 2 ever happening), there isn't enough manufacturing capacity of other big parts for more than two launches a year, but it has a realistic schedule of less than one launch a year, compared to Shuttle launching multiple times a year. These delays may be good for Boeing getting paid to forever tweak C

      • Meanwhile CEO sued by the SEC for fraud at another of his companies. yeah, totally above the board..

      • The thing about the American aerospace industry is that it is a part of the military-industrial-political complex.

        What the military-industrial-political complex doesn't realize is that we now have a reusable nuclear weapons system. Imagine if you will, the US launching nukes, then the boosters land get retrofitted with new MIRV payloads and launch again. All we've got to do is get the turnaround time down and there is no effective way to stop us from nuking the world as many times as we want! Trump is brilliant!

      • You are full of crap. SpaceX is firmly entrenched in the military-industrial-political complex. They are launching military payloads all the time from the same launch sites as the other guys (on Air Force bases). Musk Nutters.

  • Thank you Elon (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @01:00PM (#59181550)
    No matter what you think about Musk, his work on Space X pushed humanity ahead. That is, some of us may have a way out if locally all goes to complete shit. At this rate in another decade humanity will be able to survive dinosaur-like event. This a very big deal.

    • We may be able to survive the initial impact of a dinosaur-like event, but without stable habitats outside Earth's gravity well, we would still be screwed over the coming decades.

      We wouldn't be able to land anywhere most likely for quite some time. Your best bet would probably be to calculate where the strike occurs, go to the opposite side of the planet, and build a bunker.

      Or devise some type of ship that can reenter and hover in the hellish atmosphere for very, very long periods of time.

    • You are insane.

    • Uh, no. You do realize that we have reached orbit before, right? You Musk Nutters are something else. You aren't leaving Earth and living anywhere else. You need to deal with reality.

      • You do realize that we have reached orbit before

        Yes, because all things are worth doing only once and afterwards they're pointless.

      • "You Musk Nutters are something else. You aren't leaving Earth and living anywhere else. You need to deal with reality."

        Sure we are. We want to get away from you.

        • Sorry dude. It isn't going to happen. I know that is what you guys want: to live in your own Elysium with Musk, but you are going to live and die here with the rest of us on Earth. Enjoy your stay and maybe try to join the human race.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by joh ( 27088 )

            You really should stop building your world view from movies that were made to tickle your emotions for commercial success and instead look at history. And history and prehistory seems to prove that people never stayed where they were. Yes, most of them did stay, but some went elsewhere, always. It would be a real pity if humankind would never leave Earth and then died with Earth and with our sun.

            • This is the problem with your logic: since one thing happened, all other things are possible. IT ISN'T UP TO ANYONE if people leave Earth or not. There is no planet that is livable within reach, unless you believe in advancements that only exist in scifi. Just because you can cross a lake, or an ocean, DOESN'T MEAN YOU CAN GO TO ANOTHER PLANET AND LIVE THERE. Space Nutters never seem to understand that. They are too wrapped up in their anti-Science scfi-fi fantasies. You have been spoiled by technological p

              • But it's their dreams and enthusiasm that drives many of the advances. Everything is not possible, but they're the ones who go ahead trying anyway, which leads us to finding out what is possible and what is not. Maybe we can't ever live on Mars, but we'll learn an immense amount by trying.

    • Humanity can already survive a dinosaur-level extinction event. That Cold War and those nutty survivalists have made sure of that. Or do you think we're stupider than the birds and shrews that outlived T-rex? Now whether human civilization and Facebook can survive the Impact, well that's another question.

      Fun fact is that the dinosaur mass extinction had a greater "impact" on land. So maybe the solution isn't outer space but inner space. Build underwater cities.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spun ( 1352 )

      Nobody has a "way out" if it all goes to shit, nor will they for hundreds of years, if then. We have the ability to survive off planet only for extremely limited times and with serious medical problems. Doing so takes the best of the best type of human, who thanks to regression to the mean, will not generally give birth to the same level of superior person. Most sober futurists who speculate on the matter think three generations is the limit for closed environments before everything goes to hell.

      We do not h

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by urusan ( 1755332 )

        Space colonies aren't closed environments, they get energy from the sun and can mine resources from their host planet/moon as well as importing from the rest of the solar system.

        More importantly, the scale of the colonies that we'll be able to build in space soon after we go there to stay will quickly become staggering, because we don't have to lift all the material to build the colonies, we can get it from mining and refining new resources in space. These newly built colonies will be unlike anything we've

        • You don't have to struggle against gravity, but you need to contain one atmosphere of air (or less if you change the gas mixture), and the entire structure must be gas tight.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by urusan ( 1755332 )

            That's an interesting point, though it's still a force towards building larger overall structures.

            The larger a structure is, the less impact a thick outer shell has on the usable space. A 10 meter thick wall of material is not feasible on something with the scale of the ISS, the walls would be bigger than the whole station. On something as massive as an O'Neill cylinder though, 10 meter thick wall material would actually be pretty thin. If the lightly armored stations of today can withstand micrometeorite h

    • Significant engineering challenges would need to be solved before any colony could exist anywhere other than on or in low orbit near Earth. To say that is decades away would be optimistic. Likely chemical propulsion wouldn't be used, nuclear would

  • So between the Mooncake festival and Halloween, we can expect some mid-season fireworks?

  • Blinding Speed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Wednesday September 11, 2019 @01:40PM (#59181762)

    It's just a little bit ridiculous that SpaceX can design, build, and launch a to-space-and-back-again hopper in 2 years, while switching from carbon fiber composite to stainless steel 9 months in to construction. The first hop is only to 20 km altitude, but knowing Elon Musk it will have the fuel and oxidizer capacity to reach the 100 km mark just fine once all the engines are installed.

    We all know how absurdly slow the incumbent military industrial contractors are, but consider for a moment that Blue Origin was founded in September of 2000 (they just celebrated their 19th birthday 3 days ago), and still hasn't done more than that. All they've built so far is a suborbital hopper. SpaceX now delivers orbital cargo to the International Space Station routinely. And was founded 2 years later.

    There are only FCC licenses for 1 million Starlink ground stations in the first batch. Where do I get in line? I'ma buy me a tent...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by XXongo ( 3986865 )

      It's just a little bit ridiculous that SpaceX can design, build, and launch a to-space-and-back-again hopper in 2 years,

      Well, while I'm a great fan of Space-X, they haven't done that. Yet.

      I am prepared to be impressed, but I will reserve giving kudos for what they do until after they actually do it.

    • Well they haven't done it yet, but all this stuff was done over 40 years ago (yeah, even VTOL reusable rockets isn't new). But carry on. It is all new to you I guess. Must be nice to be ignorant of history.

      • "Well they haven't done it yet, but all this stuff was done over 40 years ago (yeah, even VTOL reusable rockets isn't new). But carry on. It is all new to you I guess. Must be nice to be ignorant of history."

        such a typical slashdot remark, i remember when Facebook started to make it big and we saw comments like "psh i could written facebook over the weekend". Nothing even approaching the speed and magnitude of concept->R&D->Engineering->Delivery like what exists at SpaceX has been done before

        • Total BS. The US LANDED A PERSON on the moon in 1969 only 8 years after it was announced as a goal. They started from scratch. Christ. Musk Nutters are so ignorant. All that Musk does is redo a bunch of work and you zealots lap it up.

          • The US LANDED A PERSON on the moon in 1969 only 8 years after it was announced as a goal. They started from scratch.

            It was not from scratch. The F-1 engines had been in development since 1955 [wikipedia.org]. You are right, though, that the bulk of the work was done within that time span. And it is worth noting that the person to whom you are responding also falsely says SpaceX built/developed this lander in two years, when the engine has been in development since, at the latest, 2009.

            The point is that the engine is the hardest, most critical part. If you fundamentally change the engine then you will have to change much of the rest of

      • Well they haven't done it yet, but all this stuff was done over 40 years ago (yeah, even VTOL reusable rockets isn't new). But carry on. It is all new to you I guess. Must be nice to be ignorant of history.

        I can read too, Space Nutter King. And no, it wasn't. No one has ever built a working full-flow staged combustion rocket engine and put it on a rocket before. And development of the F-1 took a decade, from 1953 to 1963. Development of the Saturn V took 5 years, not 2. Let me reiterate, development of a rocket on a wartime footing with the full weight of the US Federal government behind it took twice as long as this did. But you just go on thinking it's still 1963. I'm sure it was a good year for you.

        • Development of the Saturn V took longer BECAUSE THEY WERE STARTING FROM ZERO. You guys don't get it: Musk is just redoing all the shit that has ALREADY BEEN FIGURED OUT. I dislike Musk Nutters because they are ignorant of history.
           
          "No one has ever built a working full-flow staged combustion rocket engine and put it on a rocket before"
           
          Whatever that means.

          • >>I dislike Musk Nutters because they are ignorant of history.

            Maybe you just dislike yourself, you should reach out for help aside from this wack posting to /.

          • No idea if you are trollying or just cynic or sarcastic again.
            The Saturn V program did not start from zero.

            You had all the POWs from Germany the Russians did not get and all the work from Werner von Braun - including himself - to make it.

            Bottom line Saturn V is just the continuation of the German Space program during WW II. So if I want to be cynic it took you damn 29 years to make it ... or 35 even, depending where you want to place the "start date" and you needed POWs to do it is no one in the US had the

            • Give me a break. Everything builds on what came before. I wasn't being literal. The point is that Musk isn't even where the Saturn V was (not even close). Yet you guys drool over everything he does. He launches a rocket and you guys think it is amazing. Yet we have been launching rockets for 60 years. He builds a tunnel and you guys gasp in amazement.

          • "No one has ever built a working full-flow staged combustion rocket engine and put it on a rocket before"

            Whatever that means.

            This is just sad. Here you are, on slashdot, bragging about your ignorance. What the fuck?

            Go read something [wikipedia.org] and educate yourself.

            • "As of 2019, only three full-flow staged combustion rocket engines had ever progressed sufficiently to be tested on test stands; the Soviet Energomash RD-270 project in the 1960s, the US government-funded Aerojet Rocketdyne Integrated powerhead demonstration project in the mid-2000s,[6] and SpaceX's flight capable Raptor engine first test-fired in February 2019.[7]"

              Yeah, thanks for the info. Was done in the 1960s. Christ. But you guys think it is AMAZING right? Just because of Musk.

              • When I suggested that you go read something, I had wrongly assumed you possessed the ability to comprehend what you read.

                GP, who you replied to and quoted, said "No one has ever built a working full-flow staged combustion rocket engine and put it on a rocket before".

                on a rocket.

                You'll note the excerpt that you quote here refers to full-flow staged combustion engines that had ever progressed sufficiently to be tested on test stands, including the RD-270 engine from the 1960s.

                on test stands.

                I do th

          • Development of the Saturn V took longer BECAUSE THEY WERE STARTING FROM ZERO

            They were not starting from zero. The F-1 engine already was in development since the 1950s. If they really had started design from scratch in 1961 then there is simply no way they would have resolved the combustion instability problems in time for Apollo 11 to fly during the 1960s.

        • Space X is standing on the shoulders of that U.S. federal government tech, from electronics to engines to talent pool. And they use over 3000 aerospace suppliers.

          They'd be nothing and nowhere without all the U.S. space program (and sure german nazi space program) that came before

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      It (will be) an impressive achievement, but it's maybe not quite *that* impressive. The hopper itself is mostly just some tanks sitting on some engines. The engines are impressive, but their development goes back farther. The landing software is also impressive, but again, it goes back farther.

      The systems integration is impressive, and that was done on your timeline. It also shows what can happen when you put some effort into improving critical components.

      • I guess if you stand far enough away and squint just right... a telephone pole might look like a tree

        Similarly, close inspection of SpaceX work proves to be truly 'agile'

        Take a look at the first test firing of Hoppy in April

        They had already started production line work on Raptor, when they identified an issue in the first static fire of Hoppy

        The issue was identified, corrected and implemented back into their production line in about 2 weeks

        Pretty freaking impressive, can you outline where NASA made a simila

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          My first sentence said it was impressive. It's not as impressive as building a fully functioning spaceship from scratch in a couple years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      I suppose it is a bit easier if you don't to worry about launching humans and getting them back whole and functioning. Care to be the first test bunny on Elon's ship? Maybe he'll volunteer himself.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by joh ( 27088 )

        People do dangerous things all the time. And no, I didn't want to be on the first launched ship. But people climb Mt Everest despite having a chance of about 5% to die on the way, in fact they pay lots of money to try. I don't see any reason why this should be very different for going to Mars (note that I think that the timelines Musk likes to throw around are utterly optimistic).

        • It is different because there is a 100% chance you will die on Mars. 100%. You cannot live on Mars. Ever. The differences of gravity and radiation will kill you, no matter what "scifi solutions" you come up with. Everest is a paradise compared to Mars. Musk is selling you a line of BS, but that is what he does.

    • because they didn't, it's been 17 years for Space X to get where they are, and this particular Starship thing hasn't even done the first test of going 1/5 the way to space

      You fanbois are funny

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