“Asked for an update on the progress of this regulatory approval, an FAA spokesman said Wednesday morning that additional information may be provided soon.”
betting time! Will it be able to:
- pass the launch tower?
- get through MaxQ? <– the high score so far
- Properly separate stages? (hot staging this time!)
- get to orbital velocity?
- complete its partial orbit?
- survive re-entry forces?
- hit the specified “landing” zone? 7b. Will the booster hit its landing zone?
wildcard: will the self destruct work properly this time?
I’m a simple man, I just want hot staging
I think it’ll reach separation (3), but too many engines will have shutdown to reach orbital velocity(4). Self destruct will be beautiful and immediate this time.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Tuesday, SpaceX stacked its Starship rocket on top of a Super Heavy booster in South Texas, beginning final preparations for a second launch attempt of the massive vehicle.
After the stacking operations were complete, SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, that “Starship is ready to launch, awaiting FAA license approval.”
The FAA has been reviewing data from that accident, including the environmental implications at the launch site and the delayed activation of the rocket’s flight termination system.
After reviewing the report, the FAA will identify corrective actions that the company must make ahead of its second test flight to ensure the safety of people, property, and wildlife near the South Texas launch site, which is surrounded by wetlands and the Gulf of Mexico.
During the first flight in April, the lack of a sound suppression system led to significant damage, including the rupture of concrete chunks from the launch pad that rained down debris for miles around the Starbase location in South Texas.
Under a nominal flight, Starship will complete nearly three-quarters of an orbit around Earth before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, north of the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
The original article contains 488 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Scott Manley had comments starting with Sep 7, 2023 · 12:42 AM UTC:
Elon: we’re ready, just waiting on the license from the FAA
FAA: funny you should say that, we’re just waiting on you guys to fix the problems you had.
Sure it’s easy to think of the FAA as being a bunch of bureaucrats who should loosen up and cut SpaceX some slack, but after the rock tornado and wimpy FTS SpaceX has used up any slack it might have had.
Furthermore, the FAA is being sued alleging that it cut SpaceX too much slack on the environmental review surrounding Starbase. Any action they take could end up in court and they need to be sure it’s defensible before a jury https://www.space.com/spacex-faa-seek-dismiss-starship-lawsuit
Though someone else replied,
Setting aside that this answer is the same the FAA would give regardless of whether it was the day after IFT-1 or the day before they issued a license.
and Scott replied, “Correct”.
The story was edited.
(Note: at 6 pm ET on Wednesday, the FAA issued the following statement).
“The SpaceX Starship mishap investigation remains open,” the agency stated. “The FAA will not authorize another Starship launch until SpaceX implements the corrective actions identified during the mishap investigation and demonstrates compliance with all the regulatory requirements of the license modification process.”
that is a pretty deliberately broad statement. the obvious mitigations are all in place, like the water deluge system and the new self destruct. There may be plenty of other, smaller issues though.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters FAA Federal Aviation Administration FTS Flight Termination System MaxQ Maximum aerodynamic pressure
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 18 acronyms.
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