RUD

SpaceX Starship: Launch Confirmed!
What about it?

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas. SpaceX might actually launch SN8 (Startship prototype Number 8) this week.

Acronym of the day: RUD - Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly, in other words a catastrophic explosion.

We pray that such event does not happen when SN8 finally launches, but if it does, the launch will still be something to celebrate. Nobody else has gotten so far in the space exploration game. And we won't even mention how little it cost to get here, relatively speaking. It only took a few months to build one prototype, it will certainly not take any longer to build another one and I think we can be confident that regardless of what happens with this flight, there will be another one.

The video opens with some excellent aerial footage of SpaceX's facility in Boca Chica. There is water nearby which makes me think stuff could be shipped in by boat. Brownsville is a deep water port and there is a ship channel that leads from the coast right into the city. The channel is about two miles from the launch site. I don't imagine they will need to bring big ships right up to their site. Barges could bring everything they need and barges don't need deep water like ocean going ships do.

Around the 5:30 minute mark he's talking about the fins and I realize that this is very big test. SpaceX has launched dozens of rockets and they seem to have the hover-slam-landing down to a science. It's pretty obvious that they know what they are doing. But. This whole business of using flaps to control the attitude of the ship is something no one has tried before, and certainly not with such a large test vehicle.  I imagine that the designers ran a bunch of simulations on their computer systems that convinced them that this would work, and when they were convinced they told Elon, and Elon looked at them and saw that they were convinced, and that combined with his knowledge of the character and abilities of these people persuaded him to okay the project. If this flight succeeds, computer simulations will deserve a big gold star.

I'm watching this video and our host Felix Schlang is going over "the 4 essential elements that make the SpaceX Starship program possible". The 2nd point is whether rocket fuel can be produced at the destination. I'm watching this video and (around the 6:50 mark) he's comparing rocket fuels and he tells us Kerosene can't be produced on Mars because it has no oil. Well, there are no proven oil reserves on Mars which isn't surprising since no one has been there, much less looking for oil. We start going to Mars on a regular basis and you can bet oil companies are going to there, looking for oil. Yeah, yeah, I know, no life, no dinosaurs so there should be no oil. But! Maybe you don't need dinosaurs to make oil. Aren't the scientists telling us that once upon a time Mars had an atmosphere and water? Okay, it was a zillion years ago, but life could have evolved, dinosaurs could have lived and died and piled up to enormous depths that were then covered over by shifting sands. Or maybe oil is just a natural result of large deposits of carbon, maybe you don't need dinosaurs or any form of life.

Actually it doesn't matter. If there is carbon in Earth's crust, it stands to reason that there is carbon in Mar's crust, and if there's carbon any half-decent chemist, equipped with a multi-million dollar hydrocarbon synthesizer should be able to pump out kerosene by the barrel. Okay, that's all foolish, wishful thinking, but it's the kind of thing that keeps me amused. Methane is a much more realistic choice.

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I'm watching this video and I'm thinking that these guys, whoever they are, have put a lot of work into making that video. It's nice that Felix thanks them (around the 13 minute mark).