We have lost the data from the second stage…
SpaceX/ Twitter.
The much-anticipated launch was scheduled to take place yesterday, November 17, but had to be delayed by a day to swap out one of the Super Heavy first-stage booster’s grid fins.
Category: space travel – Page 82
SpaceX Starship 25 and Super Heavy booster 9 launched to orbit on Nov. 18, 2023 from the Starbase facility in South Texas. Following the launch, the booster had a Rapid Unplanned Disassembly (RUD) shortly after separation.
Starship consists of a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and an upper-stage spacecraft known (a bit confusingly) as Starship. Both of these elements are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. SpaceX thinks the vehicle will make the settlement of Mars — a long-held dream of company founder and CEO Elon Musk — economically feasible in the not-too-distant future.
When fully stacked, Starship stands nearly 400 feet (122 meters) tall. It’s the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.
Broadcast Courtesy: SpaceX
SpaceX is targeting Saturday for the second flight of Starship. The company has received regulatory approval for the flight. The flight will feature the newly added hot staging ring, allowing the Ship to separate from the Booster while the Booster engines are still firing. The stack features multiple upgrades compared to the first flight, including 63 upgrades SpaceX submitted to the FAA to mitigate issues from the first flight. Ahead of the launch, SpaceX will close the road, evacuate the village and surrounding area, and clear the potential blast radius.
Booster 9 will attempt a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, while Ship 25 will attempt to fly around the earth before performing a reentry and hard splashdown in the Hawaiian area.
Window Opens: November 18th at 7AM CST (13:00 UTC)
Window Closes: November 18th at 7:20AM CST (13:20 UTC)
Mission: Starship’s second fully integrated test flight.
Vehicles: Booster 9 and Ship 25
Recovery: No recovery. Booster will attempt soft splashdown, Ship will not and instead will impact the ocean.
Stats:
· SpaceX’s 85th launch of the year and the 6th launch of the month.
· SpaceX’s 2nd space launch from Starbase.
· Starship will, once again, become the largest, most massive, and most powerful rocket every created breaking its own record.
Forum link: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=57219.0
SpaceX’s launch page: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-2
NSF Starship merch: https://shop.nasaspaceflight.com/collections/starship-orbital-flight-test.
NSF Launch Article: https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2023/11/ift-2-launch/
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BERLIN — As SpaceX prepares for its next Starship test flight, a NASA official said that the use of that vehicle for Artemis lunar landings will require “in the high teens” of launches, a much higher number than what the company’s leadership has previously claimed.
In a presentation at a meeting of the NASA Advisory Council’s human exploration and operations committee Nov. 17, Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy associate administrator in NASA’s Moon to Mars Program Office, said the company will have to perform Starship launches from both its current pad in Texas and one it is constructing at the Kennedy Space Center in order send a lander to the moon for Artemis 3.
SpaceX’s concept of operations for the Starship lunar lander it is developing for the Human Landing System (HLS) program requires multiple launches of the Starship/Super Heavy system. One launch will place a propellant depot into orbit, followed by multiple other launches of tanker versions of Starship, transferring methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the depot. That will be followed by the lander version of Starship, which will rendezvous with the depot and fill its tanks before going to the moon.
Sierra Space, one of the sector’s most valuable private companies, laid off several hundred employees and contractors this week, CNBC has learned.
A Sierra Space spokesperson confirmed the company let go of about 165 employees on Thursday, but declined to specify the number of contractors affected. Former Sierra Space employees told CNBC that the layoffs included a significant number of contractors, with the cuts including hundreds of personnel in total.
The laid-off employees received two weeks of paid non-working notice, plus four weeks of severance pay and health care benefits through the end of the year. Sierra Space had about 2,000 employees before reducing its workforce, the company spokesperson said.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket system is on the launchpad once again, preparing for its second test flight after a fiery explosion ended its first attempt in April.
United Launch Alliance has its missing rocket piece in hand at Cape Canaveral and all systems are go for a Christmas Eve launch to mark the debut of its Vulcan Centaur rocket.
A new Centaur upper stage arrived by barge to the Space Coast on Monday, a replacement for the stage ULA originally planned to fly on the Certification-1 mission this past May. That initial flight, already delayed for nearly two years, was again put on hold after an issue with a test version of the Centaur stage was destroyed amid a massive fireball in the spring, requiring design changes to ensure a repeat didn’t happen during actual liftoff.
“The path to flight 1 is clear,” said ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno. “All we need to do is integrate the stage onto the vehicle. We do all kinds of system testing anytime we touch it, so we’ll have to pass all of that, get through the [wet dress rehearsal] and then integrate the payload, and off to space,”
SpaceX delayed its second test flight of a Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster to no earlier than Saturday (Nov. 18), to replace a rocket part.
The blue hue of the Advanced Electric Propulsion System (AEPS) is seen inside a vacuum chamber at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland during recent thruster qualification testing. This 12-kilowatt Hall thruster is the most powerful electric propulsion thruster in production, and it will be critical to future science and exploration missions at the Moon and beyond.
The blue plume is a steady stream of ionized xenon gas ejected to produce low, highly efficient thrust. These electric propulsion systems accelerate spacecraft to extremely high speeds over time using only a fraction of the fuel chemical propulsion systems require, making electric propulsion an excellent choice for deep-space exploration and science missions.
Three AEPS thrusters will be mounted on the Power and Propulsion Element, a foundational component of Gateway. The small lunar space station is critical to the agency’s Artemis missions that will help prepare for human missions to Mars. The Power and Propulsion Element will provide Gateway with power, high-rate communications, and allow it to maintain its unique orbit around the Moon.
A robotic AI-Chemist@USTC makes useful Oxygen generation catalyst with Martian meteorites. (Image by AI-Chemist Group at USTC)
Immigration and living on Mars have long been depicted in science fiction works. But before dream turns into reality, there is a hurdle man has to overcome — the lack of essential chemicals such as oxygen for long-term survival on the planet. However, hope looms up thanks to recent discovery of water activity on Mars. Scientists are now exploring the possibility of decomposing water to produce oxygen through electrochemical water oxidation driven by solar power with the help of oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalysts. The challenge is to find a way to synthesize these catalysts in situ using materials on Mars, instead of transporting them from the Earth, which is of high cost.
To tackle this problem, a team led by Prof. LUO Yi, Prof. JIANG Jun, and Prof. SHANG Weiwei from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), recently made it possible to synthesize and optimize OER catalysts automatically from Martian meteorites with their robotic artificial intelligence (AI)-chemist.