Texas Space Cowboys

Yazata

Yazata

Valued Senior Member
Here's something pretty cool that happened today.

Elon Musk's Mk.1 Starship prototype has been stacked.



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He plans to make a big presentation on it tomorrow afternoon in Texas. Rumor has it that the presentation will be livestreamed tomorrow, perhaps starting about 4 PM PDT here:

https://www.spacex.com/
 
he should hire a ballet troupe and some big machine operator competition winners to drive the cherry pickers around all doing a ballet around the rocket to some hanns zimmer

co-ordinated with camera drones fling in over the ballerinas and flying around the machinery as its moving with zooming in from wide angles coming back to panamarics.
preferably filmed during dawn and then during sunset
 
RainbowSingularity said:
he should hire a ballet troupe and some big machine operator competition winners to drive the cherry pickers around all doing a ballet around the rocket to some hanns zimmer

co-ordinated with camera drones fling in over the ballerinas and flying around the machinery as its moving with zooming in from wide angles coming back to panamarics.
preferably filmed during dawn and then during sunset
Click to expand...

He's already got the camera drones. They were up today filming the stacking.

They seemingly had all the cherry pickers in Texas in Boca Chica yesterday, in a frenzy to attach the nose and tail fins and prepare the nose cone for hoisting. Somebody counted at least ten of them, moving up and down and sideways. Film it in time-lapse and put it to music.

https://twitter.com/SpacePadreIsle/status/1177354272503160833

You know, this has never happened before and it's really unprecedented. Nobody has ever tried to build giant spaceships out in the open air, in a Texas field, while letting everyone who wants to watch do so and even film the whole thing step by step, mistakes and all. Amazing, and on a daily basis.
 
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Yazata said:
Film it in time-lapse and put it to music.
Click to expand...

i was pondering the time lapse thing and thought that would be better off as a separate mini film.
while having time lapse on the sun rising and setting (used as the cut in fade in green screen)with the background so that can be layered into the background of the ballerinas & cherry pickers with the Rocket sitting middle centre stage.
i thought the contrast of human elements machinery & science set to someone well versed like hans would be awe inspiring.
there is a dime a dozen time lapse build movies on the net.

no (real life robotics and human dance Art)movies with real highly skilled human body skills of ballerinas and modern mechanical interpretation of semi remote robotics heavy machinery, around and in conjunction to a REAL Space Rocket.
its never been done

technically it could be theater

the principal idea is to set aside the chase for the mechanical build paradigm (true art builds its own time & real life time becomes the slave to the observer not the other way around, though im sure some youtuber fame junkys may wish to try and suggest otherwise)and have the human elements dictate the narrative of the observer expressing human body art form as the core principal
intellectual and physical
The combined a ballet of humans & robots driven by humans creating timelessness around a Real outer space principal of mentally quantifiable reality, confronts the reality of the observer to create wonder and timelessness
 
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Gawdzilla Sama said:
Yazata you used quite the wrong cover.

1863349.jpg
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racial profiling of social trends and art depictions of what best sells
interesting
images


note the stark difference between the men
tall dark and slight mysteriousness handsome
vs
kinda round face more in-your-face and a bit porn style garish of the Ego being outwardly worn by the hero

fascinating
top picture is a Eastern European woman
bottom picture is a french-english woman

top picture
the man owns the woman
the man owns the moon
the man owns the company selling the moon
the man owns or more so has come from the space ship

the subtext narrative is vastly different from the other cover.
 
This is an animated video render of a Starship launch from the Boca Chica Starbase. It follows the booster as it ascends, separates from the second stage (the Starship proper), returns and makes its return-to-launch-site (RTLS) landing.

It also is one of the first depictions of the totally crazy catch'em-in-midair recovery scheme. They are really doing this, it isn't a joke. The catcher arms are already installed on the tower. (The tower is sort of a giant robot that Elon calls Mechazilla.)

It's mind boggling when you think that this booster is bigger (the first stage booster alone is 70 meters/230 feet tall) and has twice the thrust than the Saturn V Moon rocket.

Extraordinarily good photographic quality render:

[video=youtube]
 
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Yazata said:
This is an animated video render of a Starship launch from the Boca Chica Starbase. It follows the booster as it ascends, separates from the second stage (the Starship proper), returns and makes its return-to-launch-site (RTLS) landing.

It also is one of the first depictions of the totally crazy catch'em-in-midair recovery scheme. They are really doing this, it isn't a joke. The catcher arms are already installed on the tower. (The tower is sort of a giant robot that Elon calls Mechazilla.)

It's mind boggling when you think that this booster is bigger (the first stage booster alone is 70 meters/230 feet tall) and has twice the thrust than the Saturn V Moon rocket.

Extraordinarily good photographic quality render:

[video=youtube]
Click to expand...

Love it. Thanks

Had not heard about catch it in midair

Cheers

:)
 
Yazata said:
It also is one of the first depictions of the totally crazy catch'em-in-midair recovery scheme. They are really doing this, it isn't a joke. The catcher arms are already installed on the tower.
Click to expand...
They must be getting confident that their rockets will remain upright as they land, since any collision with the tower would be damaging, to say the least.
 
James R said:
They must be getting confident that their rockets will remain upright as they land, since any collision with the tower would be damaging, to say the least.
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That's for sure. I think that their confidence comes from their experience with their Falcon 9's.

The video is a little inaccurate in that it shows the booster with a downward velocity as it passes the catcher arms, which have to grab it very quickly as it goes by. The plan actually seems to be for it to zero out its downward velocity at the level of the arms. So it just kind of stops in midair where the arms grab it. It sounds outlandish, but that's how the Falcon 9's land They zero out their velocity precisely when their altitude above the landing pad is zero. It's trivial to adjust the control software to do it a bit higher up.

And I think that SpaceX is confident regarding x-y accuracy too, based again on their Falcon 9 experience. They are able to land them very close to the center of the pad every time.

And Falcon 9 shows that they can control roll very precisely.
 
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They conducted motion tests on the crazy catcher arms last night. Exciting to watch, even though the video below is time lapse and the motions were much slower.

If you look closely you can see the booster quick disconnect moving on the launch platform as well. And there's a small red light that buzzes around in the air for a while. That was the SpaceX photographic drone.

[video=youtube]
 
B1058 launched today for the 10th time. It launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and its payload was a dedicated rideshare mission called Transporter 3. It carried more than 100 (!) small cubesat-sized satellites for organizations and universities in many different countries, all sharing the cost. Which is probably comparatively low since B1058 no doubt earned back its own cost launches ago, so apart from the processing and refurbishment costs, continuing to use it is pure profit for SpaceX.

And to celebrate its 10th flight, B1058 conducted an RTLS (return to launch site) landing, coming in for a spectacularly successful landing on its lovely landing pad at Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, next door to CCSFS where it departed a few minutes earlier!

The tweet below is absolutely great video from SpaceX. And scroll down and watch the next little video too, since it shows what the landing looked like to people there. I especially love the characteristic double sonic booms.

https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1481651163753693191
 
Yazata said:
The video is a little inaccurate in that it shows the booster with a downward velocity as it passes the catcher arms, which have to grab it very quickly as it goes by. The plan actually seems to be for it to zero out its downward velocity at the level of the arms. So it just kind of stops in midair where the arms grab it. It sounds outlandish, but that's how the Falcon 9's land They zero out their velocity precisely when their altitude above the landing pad is zero. It's trivial to adjust the control software to do it a bit higher up.
Click to expand...

Elon more or less confirmed that in a tweet today:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1484012192915677184
 
More news: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...-launch-year-awaiting-FAA-approval-March.html
All being well, March launch.
I'm disappointed, though, that both stages will be lost - i.e. destructive splashdowns. I know they're working toward everything being reusable, so hopefully they will make best use of the re-entries... e.g. Starship going through some routines (double-pike with tuck etc), and it would be nice to think that the launch stage would end up hovering over the ocean as if it was about to be grappled by the tower's arms (the ultimate aim is for the launch tower to cushion and capture the hovering launch stage, ready for re-use). Time will tell what actually happens, though.
 
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