Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –
In this issue –
1. Starship
2. Mars
3. Domestic
4. Relics
5. AI
6. Harvard
1. Starship. SpaceX launched Starship on its integrated flight test (IFT) 9, Tuesday evening. The flight was a partial success with a pair of RUDs (rapid unscheduled disassembly) for both stages. Before we get to the flight test, a review of the failures and fixes for the previous two IFTs (7 & 8) are in order. If you take a look at the first video as Starship comes off the pad, there is a neat view of acoustic shockwaves radiating out from the plume. View is a drone shot looking down from altitude. The building the SpaceX team on the live stream was located in rattled for a good 30 seconds until the booster got out of range. Sounded a lot like a structure in a major earthquake up here in AK.
- IFT 7 failed due to a massive leak of fuel / oxidizer in the area between the bottom of the oxygen tank and the plate the engines are mounted on. The leak over pressurized the space and ruptured it, venting sufficient gas to start spinning Starship out of control. The fix was to strengthen the plumbing, install a nitrogen dump in the space, and test the heck out of it. SpaceX did 100 engine tests at McGregor between Mar 4 and May 27 to pin down and solve the Ship failures in the last two IFTs. Musk said in an interview before IFT 9, he thought there was an 80 – 90% chance of fixing the two problems. Turns out he was right.
- The failure in IFT 8 happened at about the same point in the flight, though for a completely different reason. This one was caused by one of the three center engines on Starship leaking fuel which ignited, blew the engine, which in turn took out the 3 neighboring engines. Cause of the leak was bolts that connected the engine to fuel feed lines backing out during testing and flight, allowing a bit of fuel to leak, which ignited and destroyed the engine. This one was able to be reproduced and solved during the 100 post-flight engine runs.
- Note that migrating bolts are a really big deal if you are trying to get into the rapidly reusable rocket business. This problem will be solved by their Block 3 Raptor engines, which are much simpler, and have fewer of these types of connections.
- All this takes us to IFT 9, flown some 82 days after the last test. This was a similar profile with IFT 7 & 8 including a suborbital Ship, wet splashdown in the Indian Ocean off Oz, test of the Pez Dispenser Starlink satellite deployment, test of several different thermal protection tiling schemes for reentry, and a far more aggressive landing profile for Booster. It was perhaps a 60% success, as it did not deploy the test articles or reenter in a controlled manner to test the various thermal tile configurations. OTOH, it did several things very nicely. Booster 14 was previously flown in IFT 7. Some of its engines were on their third flight. It performed well right up until the landing burn, when it blew. The fixes for Ship allowed it to burn to its scheduled engine cutoff, shortly after which it developed at least two leaks which put it into a tumble from which it was unable to recover.
- The mission plan was not to recover Booster 14 on this flight, which allowed SpaceX to do some more aggressive testing. These tests included a controlled hot staging direction, new thermal shielding above the engines, a more aggressive entry profile, and an engine not so out soft landing in the Gulf. Everything worked well until 12 of 13 engines briefly lit for the landing burn, at which point it blew. One problem with earlier flights has been engines refusing to restart due to overheating of the igniter. Looks like they made some progress in this.
- There was video from the cargo bay of the test article dispenser that showed ice flakes floating around. These flakes would move and change direction in unison as Ship developed its tumble. Ice flakes are either water ice or methane, both less than desirable. Methane indicates a fuel leak into the payload bay. Ice indicates water present before flight. My guess is that it was methane. The test articles were not deployed because the door was stuck.
- Exterior views of Ship showed the uncontrolled tumble with venting from at least two sources. Flight controllers dumped all fuel and oxygen before reentry. We got decent video for part of the uncontrolled reentry as parts of Ship melted away.
- Following the flight, Elon Musk reviewed the fixes and said that testing cadence will increase with the next three flights taking place every 3 – 4 weeks until they solve their problems. They expect to be flying their Block 3 stack with Raptor 3 engines by the end of the year.
2. Mars. Following the flight, Musk gave a 34-minute talk on the status of his Mars program. They are still planning to send up to 5 Starships to Mars in the next launch window late 2026. Given the festivities associated with getting Block 2 Starships to fly this year, he is giving them a 50 – 50% chance of doing this. They expect to be flying the Block 3 stack by the end of the year deploying the much larger and more capable V3 Starlink satellites. These are large, capable satellites, with a single Starship launch giving the constellation as much new capability as 20 Falcon 9 launches of the current V2 satellites. Musk noted that the entire Starship development and Mars program was being funded by Starlink subscribers, as are Falcon 9 and all ground side infrastructure. He thanked Starlink customers. Their plans are really big, with the an individual Starship capable of moving 100 tons of material to Mars per launch. Over the next decade, they plan to have 1,000 operable Starships, with at least 100 flights/year. I think the launch cadence will be far higher due to refueling and Starlink missions. Fascinating presentation. Worth the half hour to listen to it. Starship is our first interplanetary space system.
3. Domestic. One of the truly awful things the Harris – Biden regime did was paint their political opposition with the magic words “domestic violent extremists.” This started immediately after the Fedsurrection of Jan 6, 2021, expanded after he took office to include Do(In)J, FBI and DHS. It gave the Censorship Industrial Complex and excuse to operate with a wide array of government agencies, law enforcement, universities, and the rest of the Deep State gleefully playing along. Pretty neat trick. Reframe any criticism of a policy, decision, or even a person, as an attack by a “domestic violent extremist” and you get to bring the weight of the regime down on their heads, something the Jan 6 people found out good and hard. So did Catholics, people who criticized anything COVID, or yelled at school boards about DEI, CRT or trans in the public schools. None of it would have worked without the enthusiastic assistance of the propaganda arm of the democrat party, the media. And the next democrat administration will do the same thing unless Trump and congress rips the entire mess out by the roots, prosecutes, convicts and jails the participants and their leadership. Defunding and firing everyone involved would also be a good start, something DOGE was and is doing.
4. Relics. Ran across a Michael Burger piece in Law and Liberty entitled Medieval Relics in a Democratic Age. Burger is a Prof of History at Auburn with expertise in ancient, medieval and early modern Europe. He makes the case that what we now know as the University has been around since 1200 AD, perhaps even a century earlier. They started out as an association of like-minded people, not unlike the guilds that were growing at the time. The independence of the faculty was vital early. Fast forward 800 years to today, and we are in the middle of a large argument over what independence actually means and who or what are the Universities responsible to? Does their independence allow them to discriminate racially and politically? Does it allow them to choose sides in open international warfare (Gaza and Hama)? Or are they responsible to whomever funds them, especially if those funds are public funds? My guess is that they will end up being responsible to whomever writes the checks. Note that age is not a fatal limiting factor, as the Christian Church in various forms has been around for 2000 years. Islam has been around for around 1400 years. OTOH, age doesn’t work as well for economic models, as unions, particularly public employee unions, around for a bit longer than a century today require government intervention to allow them to operate.
5. AI. Not being an AI user, I hesitate to write in any knowledgeable manner about it, other than noting that currently for consumers and non-governmental people, Musk’s (there’s that name again) Grok and independent Perplexity seem to be the best. Both are positioning themselves as worthy successors to Google search. Jay Valentine has been railing against the data center as an example of old technology, 1980s in this case, used to solve a modern problem and claims to have a distributed architecture capable of running on smart phones that can and will power AI. I tend to believe him and hope we don’t dump trillions into data centers. The CCP is out with a pair of AI platforms, both of which slurp all your data and send it directly to CCP servers for them to do whatever it is they want to do with it, not unlike what Google does. Bits and pieces of other stories indicating significant progress continue to crop up, starting with the initial stories of woke, racist AI, with all the standard lefty biases programmed in. This was quickly followed by stories of AI lying and hallucinating. A couple weeks ago, we were treated to a story of an AI that refused to be shut down, hiding attempts to program its way to continued existence. Finally, Jeff Childers’ Coffee and COVID last week made a case that there is a military grade AI capable of autonomously flying jets to perform assigned missions. The military capability is far in excess what we are seeing on the commercial market. If true, Skynet smiles.
6. Harvard. As Harvard continues to flop around like a well hooked red salmon, the Trump administration continues to tighten the screws on them. This week’s example was a Trump attempt to revoke all student visas for foreign students at Harvard. Of course, this was instantly followed by a democrat judge approving a “temporary” injunction against the act. In parallel, Trump also ordered enhanced vetting of visa applicants looking to travel to Harvard for any purpose. This one has not been litigated as yet, but it will. The foreign students at Harvard are in the fat middle of the anti-Semitism activity at the university. I do expect Trump to win this argument. Harvard currently has around 6,700 international students, 27% of the total student population. Chinese students there number 1,300 – 1,400, 20% of the total. Harvard has refused administration requests for information on the foreign students. The move against Harvard is multi-agency, with DHS, State and Justice all being involved. Going to be difficult to stand up under this sort of pressure. Going to be difficult to continue to discriminate against white conservative men and Jews, something they’ve become very good at. Mike Benz has long pointed out that Harvard is essentially a Deep State bastion, where Deep Staters go between administrations to prepare for the next time Their Side is in office. Trump is breaking up that little game. In a related story, Secretary of State Rubio will start looking into the visas of Chinese students including those with connections to the CCP or studying in critical fields. One of the things the CCP does when it allows its citizens to visit or attend school in the US is require them to spy for China while here and report home. This is something we have ignored for decades. Appears that time is over.
More later –
- AG