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Space

SpaceX Will 'Hopefully' Launch First Orbital Starship Flight In January (cnbc.com) 50

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Elon Musk on Wednesday said SpaceX is "hoping" to launch the first orbital flight test of its mammoth Starship rocket in January, a schedule that depends on testing and regulatory approval. "We'll do a bunch of tests in December and hopefully launch in January," Musk said, speaking at a meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Space Studies Board.

The company's next major step in developing Starship is launching to orbit. First, the company needs a launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration for the mission, with the regulator expecting to complete a key environmental assessment by the end of this year. Musk noted that he wasn't sure if Starship would successfully reach orbit on the first try, but emphasized that he is "confident" that the rocket will get to space in 2022. "We intend to have a high flight rate next year," Musk said.

SpaceX aims to launch as many as a dozen Starship test flights next year, he said, to complete the "test flight program" and move to launching "real payloads in 2023." He stressed that creating a mass production line for Starship is crucial to the program's long-term goals, noting that the current "biggest constraint" on rocket manufacturing is how fast the company can build the Raptor engines needed for Starship. "I think, in order for life to become multiplanetary, we'll need maybe 1,000 ships or something like that," Musk said. "The overarching goal of SpaceX has been to advance space technology such that humanity can become a multi-planet species and, ultimately, a spacefaring civilization."
SpaceX received a $2.9 billion contract from NASA to develop Starship for delivering astronauts to the moon's surface, but Musk said the company is "not assuming any international collaboration" or external funding for the rocket program. "[Starship] is at least 90% internally funded thus far," Musk said.
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SpaceX Will 'Hopefully' Launch First Orbital Starship Flight In January

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  • by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @08:31PM (#62000703)

    Space launch services are now a commodity.

    • by Ksevio ( 865461 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @09:28PM (#62000795) Homepage

      They're suppose to launch soon at least - all the rocket parts are out in FL now.

      Whether they choose to launch a second one is a bit questionable since at this point SpaceX is already many times cheaper and if they get starship the difference will be even more, but I guess SLS is more of a tax-payer funded jobs program than an actual space program

      • SLS is more of a tax-payer funded jobs program than an actual space program

        Rather than spending the money on a spacecraft we don't need, they could have spent that money on infrastructure improvements which would also employ people but also produce something of actual benefit, unlike SLS.

        • Rather than spending the money on a spacecraft we don't need, they could have spent that money on infrastructure improvements which would also employ people but also produce something of actual benefit, unlike SLS.

          SLS uses solid fuel rockets, while no one else does or wants to, especially when launching humans. A solid fuel rocket failure has killed American astronauts, in the Challenger disaster. Congress mandates it in order to keep what was Thiokol Chemical, now a division of Northrop Grumman, in the solid fuel rocket business. ICBMs are solid fuel rockets. SLS allows continued development of ICBMs without using the ICBM initialism and upsetting people.

          SLS is a weapons development program in sheep's clothing.

          • SLS allows continued development of ICBMs without using the ICBM initialism and upsetting people.

            The budget gives the military $10B they didn't ask for and they can engage in these programs in secret by just disappearing any successfully nosy activists.

  • ...and listen to all the crabs whining as they die in a bucket!

  • by Klaxton ( 609696 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @09:47PM (#62000833)
    The years of experience perfecting the Falcon rockets is letting SpaceX make incredible progress on this new generation. I wish there were more details available on this generation of rocket engines and how they are able to make so many. Seems like they are just able to expend them as needed and take risks. Also forming and building the stainless cladding and internal structures of these rockets seems like a massive undertaking, but they appear to have a solid pipeline of them and don't mind losing a few. Meanwhile NASA is still struggling to make one big expendable, with everything riding on it.
    • by AlanObject ( 3603453 ) on Thursday November 18, 2021 @10:14PM (#62000869)

      I'll tell you I can't wait until they light up that roman candle with 29 engines installed. It will be epic.

      They made so much progress because they were willing to not only do simulations, but live-fire exercises that yield data that no simulation can. Yes they do blow up prototypes now and then, and when that happens you can expect the usual "bwhaa-haa incompetent fools" type of posts here and wherever else the topic shows up.

      But the adults in the room see it differently.

      Although they joke about "rapid unscheduled disassembly" they spend their brain power on examining it to make sure it doesn't happen again. Result: rockets that are more reliable than those engineered the "old way" and you ultimately get them faster.

      • by quenda ( 644621 )

        Result: rockets that are more reliable than those engineered the "old way" and you ultimately get them faster.

        It's not about reliability. You can't beat the Soyuz rocket for that. And old-method rockets like the Saturn V, Shuttle or SLS worked perfectly the first time.
        Rather, as Elon says, it is all about re-usability and reduced cost.
        Reuse requires much lower safety margins. Too low to meet in the design stage without iterative testing.
        The "old way" was to design the rocket first, then figure out how to build it. And don't assemble the rocket until each component has been thoroughly tested.

        The "new way" is like

        • by necro81 ( 917438 )

          old-method rockets like the Saturn V, Shuttle or SLS worked perfectly the first time

          You seem to be unaware (or glossing over) the painful development history of the F-1 engine. Before the first Saturn V was built, a great many F-1 prototypes were built, tested...and self-destructed. CuriousDroid on youtube [youtube.com] has an excellent video on the subject. By that measure, "old-method" looks an awful lot like the build-test-fail-try again approach of SpaceX.

          To its credit, the Shuttle appears to have gone throug

          • by Megane ( 129182 )

            Don't forget the failures of Boeing's Starliner to reach ISS. They were supposed to be the "sure thing", in case SpaceX, the new guy on the block, wasn't able to make it work on time. Now they've reached a point where available docking ports on ISS will be a limitation... if they can ever get it to launch again. This while SpaceX has already completed three of the six launches in its contract.

            And then there's the problem of launch vehicles. Right now there's two of them depending on "Below Orbit" to delive

          • by Agripa ( 139780 )

            To its credit, the Shuttle appears to have gone through its development - through first flights - without any catastrophic failures.

            That is because NASA redefined turbine failures as a maintenance issue after they found that all of the engines were coming back with cracked turbine blades. This also contributed to high refurbishment costs; the engines were not reusable.

            And then there were the solid rocket segments which were so out of round from the bending moment at lift off, that they could not be straightened within specifications, so the workers refurbishing them ignore the specifications.

        • It's not about reliability. You can't beat the Soyuz rocket for that.

          Actually, you can, as Falcon 9 has shown in recent years. When was the last time that Soyuz had a hundred-long successful flight streak? Oh, wait, that was twenty five years ago...

          • by quenda ( 644621 )

            Actually, you can, as Falcon 9 has shown in recent years. When was the last time that Soyuz had a hundred-long successful flight streak? Oh, wait, that was twenty five years ago...

            Falcon 9 is doing well, but when was the last time a Soyuz blew up on the pad :-)

    • by k6mfw ( 1182893 )
      Musk in a YT interview with Everday Astronaut that the rocket factory and launch facilities [stage 0] is the most difficult thing. Rocket itself [stage 1, 2,...] are easy. Maybe he organized SpaceX to account for this and among other things. I don't think anyone outside SpaceX management knows as this is a private company (companies don't share their internal workings). In this same interview series it was mentioned Starship was designed to have iterations unlike the Shuttle in 1975 was basically frozen in
      • by Klaxton ( 609696 )
        Well I think investors and anyone in the stock market knows SpaceX is private. And even if they were a public company the trade secrets would be closely kept I am sure. But still I would like to get some small hints at how they do all this, and down in the tail end of Texas where there's basically nothing.
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's interesting that they are going down the route that the USSR did with having a large number of smaller engines. The Soviet attempts ended in failure, which is a shame as they might have got people to the Moon otherwise, but the basic concept is sound.

      • but the basic concept is sound.

        I wouldn't be so sure about that. It very much depends on the nature of engine failures. If your engine tends to explode and take out the surrounding engines, then fewer engines is going to be better. If failures can be contained, then more is better, from a reliability point of view.

        In the end, SpaceX didn't have much choice because they would not have had the funds to develop a large first stage engine as well as raptor. But whether, in the face of unlimited funding (or even the funding they have now), th

      • by Megane ( 129182 )
        The Soviet attemps ended in failure, because there was no way to test-fire the N1 engines, especially the plumbing. They had to launch it just to find out if it would work. In contrast, the mounted Raptor engines have had quite a few static test fires while waiting for the FAA to get its head out of its ass, and that was after multiple successful launches, and sometimes even a successful landing.
    • They are definitely slowing down though. Just like with software projects, whacking up some impressive gui demos can happen quite fast, but as you dive further and further into getting a system production ready things get gummed up quickly.

      The problem they have now is that a failure of the rocket has the potential to take out 35 expensive raptor engines, months of work, and their entire launch system, which has taken a long time to build. With the previous prototypes it would just take out 3 raptors and a c

      • by Megane ( 129182 )
        The actual problem they have right now is not being allowed to launch. Meanwhile, they haven't stopped making engines, and are well on their way to stack another booster and spaceship. The booster they've had waiting for a few months now was never expected to return to land, though I'm sure they will try a "sea landing".
        • I'm actually surprised they haven't gone for launching and landing a booster first, rather than the whole stack. I would have thought the risks of destroying the launch system would have made it worth building a test booster with less engines and landing legs and perfecting the operation of this (basically doing what starship was doing but with grid fins) until they had it landing back on the launch tower. At that point they could test with progressively more engines until they were launching and landing a

    • I wish there were more details available on this generation of rocket engines and how they are able to make so many. Seems like they are just able to expend them as needed and take risks.

      From recent video interviews with Musk, rapid manufacturing of the Raptor engines seems to be a bottleneck. A Raptor 2 [youtube.com] is coming that will reduce complexity and improve manufacturability. [youtube.com]

  • Starship is literally THE most exciting engineering project on this planet. And you can watch it happen live on the internet. What amazing times we live in... ...and then Jeff Bezos tries to hold back Starship in the courts, and you go to watch the video and Google demands you give them your private information to see it, and the idiot tokens working as hosts fuck up the introductory video, and a silly bint asks an outdated whine of a question about Starlink. And you remember that a lot of this planet su
    • The above post was spaced correctly when I previewed it. Slashdot is broken in so many ways, and no-one there gives a shit.
      • by ac22 ( 7754550 )
        Try going into Settings > Posting and selecting "Plain Old Text" ... Otherwise your line breaks won't do anything, unless you manually insert a BR tag
  • Elon's timelines are always bullshit.
  • Its not a Starship until it orbits another star

  • Yeah, Its going to launch very soon!

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

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