Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Starship
2. TikTok
3. Rapinoe
4. Adams
5. NuScale
6. Haley
7. Fiber
1. Starship. SpaceX launched their second Starship stack bright and early Saturday morning from Starbase in south Texas. This time around, the beast flew for over 8 minutes, staged, and the upper stage Starship section made it within 15 – 30 seconds of its planned suborbital velocity before it self-destructed. SpaceX video of the launch can be found below:
From here, it was a magnificent failure. As with all developmental testing, there was a lot of good news and no small amount of bad news. Happily, SpaceX is real good at learning from failures and rarely has the same one twice. Still, space is and continues to be hard, so there will be more failures as they move toward operational capability with the stack. Explanation: when describing elapsed time below, I am using minutes+seconds notation. 2+30 means two minutes, 30 seconds.
- The good news was that it got off the pad without destroying or digging a crater below it. The fixes following the first launch worked. Superheavy (Booster) left the pad with all 33 engines lit. They burned for the entire 2+45 of flight before staging when all but three were shut down. Hot staging seemed to work, as both vehicles were intact afterwards, with the first stage (Booster). Maneuvering for its boostback burn. Boostback is a powered burn done by Falcon 9 to return first stages back to the launch site. We normally see this with Falcon Heavy launches. The operational plan for Booster is to have it return back to the launch pad, hover briefly, and be caught by a pair of beams on the tower, not unlike the scene in Karate Kid where Miyagi catches a fly with chopsticks. Booster will be airborne for around 5+00 when operational.
- After staging, Booster immediately flipped, and lit a subset of engines for its boostback burn. It started venting propellent / LOX and started losing engines. Shortly after the engines went out, it self-destructed.0+20 – 0+30 following staging. SpaceX referred to the destruct as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD).
- Following staging, all appeared to work well with the upper stage, Starship (Ship) the portion that was supposed to make it all the way beyond Hawaii in a suborbital flight. This is essentially the same flight path used by the Shuttle External Tank following the Challenger accident. All worked pretty well until 7+10 after launch, when there was a flare in the plume. The plume shape changed a bit and acceleration continued until a second flare in the plume around 7+45. All engines went out and telemetry stopped around 8+10. Ship blew almost immediately afterwards at 86% orbital velocity and an altitude of 148 km.
- Speculation is that Ship suffered some sort of leak in the aft end, as it started using LOX perhaps twice as fast as it had previously following the first flare. We won’t know until SpaceX completes its analysis of telemetry. The stack was heavily instrumented for telemetry, which is why there was no onboard video like we see regularly from Falcon 9 launches and recoveries. Onboard video eats up a lot of bandwidth.
- I use two locations for coverage of these launches, Robert Zimmerman’s Behind the Black and Space.com. Zimmerman’s site is more for space insiders and the comment section is pretty good (if you like that sort of stuff). Space.com is more oriented to a mass market audience.
- Coverage of the flight was also interesting, with the NYT headline on the flight: “Elon Musk’s Giant Moon and Mars Rocket Makes Progress in 2nd Flight”. WSJ’s headline was less positive: “SpaceX’s Second Starship Test Flight Ends in Another Explosion.” I think the WSJ has decided they don’t like Musk much anymore.
- A number of amateur astronomers were downrange in the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico. Both got some pretty good telescopic video of Ship in flight. That video will be useful to SpaceX as they troubleshoot what happened and decide what to do about it.
- Expect SpaceX to concentrate on getting the stack into orbit for the next flight. If they can get anywhere close to controlled, powered descent to a water landing, they will be ecstatic. They reportedly have the resources available to run a test every month. Note that Starship development and testing has been entirely privately funded. It is not out of the question that they will use Starship to launch their new version Starlink satellites before they figure out how to reliably recover both pieces.
2. TikTok. Shortly following the 10/7 Hamas attack, it appeared that the Iranian mullahs had decided not to roll out the mobs in support of Hamas, perhaps fearing for their lives. Yet over the last few weeks, those mobs have grown in size and ugliness in the western world, particularly Europe and the US. And who is leading those mobs? Young, single, college age, educated women. Who propagandizes those women today? The CCP via their TikTok brainwashing tool. While some funding for the mobs is coming courtesy of Soros-funded groups, it is the CCP via TikTok pushing the majority of anti-Semitism tearing the democrat party apart. It is past time to ban TikTok before it triggers some even uglier actions, brainwashing young skulls full of mush than we are currently seeing.
3. Rapinoe. While I generally stay away from sports injuries, having undergone a few myself, I don’t wish that sort of pain on anyone. But a story about US Women’s National Team soccer player Megan Rapinoe caught my attention last week. Rapinoe has been central in turning the women’s soccer team from a widely celebrated group of athletes representing the nation to near pariahs with her embrace of wokeness, demands for more money than the men are making, and kneeling during the National Anthem. Rapinoe loudly and belligerently led those efforts. While she got what she claimed she wanted, these actions damaged the team. Sports is fundamentally entertainment. When that entertainment is no longer entertaining, nobody will care who you are and what you are doing, making it really difficult to sell tickets, a harsh lesson Disney is in the process of learning. And sports fans have long, long memories. With that in mind, Rapinoe suffered an injury in her last soccer game of her career, reportedly blowing out an Achilles tendon. Her reaction? That the injury was proof there is no God, once again a headlines grab. While I am sorry for her pain, the entire affair reminded me of a scene from Caddyshack, where the Bishop has the best round of his life in a driving thunderstorm, misses the last shot, complains about it to Heaven, and gets struck by lightning. He ends up drunk in the bar, ending with “There is no God.” Caddyshack was a fun movie depending on your (or my) juvenile sense of humor. For Rapinoe to remind me of that scene is something I would only expect out of the Babylon Bee. Perhaps she has reminded us that not only is there a God, but that He has a sense of humor.
4. Adams. NYC Mayor is now on the radar of Biden’s political enforcers from the Do(In)J. FBI raided his home a few weeks ago, seizing laptops, I-pads and cell phones. They are supposedly investigating campaign finance charges. Given how dirty NY politics are these days, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was something there. But given the transition of the FBI and Do(In)J into political destructors, the enforcement arm of the regime, I think Adams is in political rather than criminal cross hairs. Adams has been increasingly vocal about the influx of illegals into NYC, something the regime doesn’t like a lot. He has started shutting down services for New Yorkers, citing costs of the illegal influx. His constituents are about to get what they claim they want as a sanctuary city and get it good and hard. The regime isn’t going to allow anyone to wander too far off their reservation, which explains both the investigation and the raid.
5. NuScale. NuScale Power is a small modular reactor (SMR) manufacturer looking for the first place to deploy its 50 MW reactors. The first project was to be a 462 MW from 6 x 77 MW SMRs in Utah. The regulatory minefield had been successfully passed, with NRC licensing in hand. The problem was substantial cost overruns and delays. The Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), a group of local electric utilities had agreed to purchase power from the new plant to fill their renewable energy / clean power commitments. Costs and the schedule no longer penciled out, so they backed out of the deal. Expect this sort of setback as we pivot from wind and solar to the SMR world. These haven’t been widely manufactured nor used in the US as yet and it will take a while to figure out how to produce, install, operate and retire them. Costs are important, as are schedules. If the reactor advocates (and I consider myself one of those) want widespread adoption of SMRs, everyone involved will have to figure out how to affordably, safely get them rolled out, installed, operated, and retired. The target baseline competition today is the natural gas-powered turbine.
6. Haley. Nikki Haley had her Dukakis moment last week demanding that social media ban anonymous users because they are a national security threat. She wants all users identified, apparently making it easier for her supporters in the Deep State to identify its critics. Haley is one of a quickly dying wing of the Republican Party that still trusts the intel community and the national security apparat. Over the last 20 years, they have demonstrated little other than contempt for Republican voters (or democrat voters, for that matter). They really like their enablers and supporters in congress, however. I think Haley just torpedoed her campaign. I think she realizes it, as she quickly tried to walk back the comments a few days later. Vivek Ramaswamy nicely captured Haley at the last debate calling her Dick Chaney in 3-inch heels.
7. Fiber. Each state has its own special little form of graft, grift and corruption. Here in Alaska, the most recent example comes in the form of broadband for widely separated, small Bush villages. The game played is the congressional delegation gets pork inserted in various pieces of legislation. Telcom companies then receive grants for the work and express their gratitude to the delegation laundering some percentage of those grants into campaign donations, essentially the same game unions and democrats have been playing for nearly a century. The first attempt at broadband for the Bush was transmission towers and repeaters. There was some talk about tethered airships a couple decades ago that went nowhere. The Powers that Be (state and national politicians, agencies and broadband companies) finally arrived at a solution (fiber) right about the time Starlink went live. The problem with this from a taxpayer perspective is that fiber is hellishly expensive over long distances, fragile, and prone to breakage. Sea ice gouging sea bottom offshore the North Slope broke a fiber cable last winter that took nearly half a year to repair. This outage would have played havoc with the oil business on the Prudhoe Bay oil fields. Starlink filled the gap. The producers aren’t expected to return to fiber. Neither are a bunch of North Slope residents and businesses that made the same transition. Funding for broadband in the Bush was a signature piece of the infrastructure legislation passed in Biden’s first year in office. All three of our congress critters lined up to take credit for it. Not unexpectedly, it turned out to be a boondoggle, with the first village, Nuiqsut in Prudhoe Bay, getting hooked up. The village has 520 people, 125 households. The contractor received grants $25 – 40 million. Do the math, and broadband hookup cost taxpayers $200,000 – $320,000 per household. No word on who pays the monthly fees. First term congress critter Mary Peltola lauded the hookup as a great deal for residents and (of course) called for more. Note that today, you can get worldwide broadband coverage with Starlink at $120/month. You need to purchase a receiver at $599. There are more expensive plans for higher up/down speeds, roaming, and mobile coverage. When the government steps in to “solve” a problem, that solution is invariably outdated, expensive, and irrelevant (look at NASA’s Space Launch System as another example). But that free money lubricates a lot of campaigns for incumbents, especially up here.
More later –
- AG