Recent Posts

1

Engineering / Re: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)

« Last post by Nemesis on March 06, 2025, 05:54:46 pm »

IFT 8 has flown.  Good news and bad news.

Booster - launched all 33 engines, perfect separation.  Re-ignition only 11 of the 13 engines ignited (last time it was 12 of 13).  Second re-ignition 12 of 13 engines ignited (last time it was all 13).  Final re-ignition all 3 ignited and it was a 3rd perfect catch.

Starship - Separation perfect all 6 engines.  At about 8 minutes and 5 seconds they quickly lost one of the vacuum raptors and all 3 sea level engines (needed for attitude control).  It spun out of control and lost the last 2 engines before explosion (detonated or breakup I don't know).  It was about 20 seconds from planned engine shut off.

This may be a failed fix of the IFT 7 issue (but still improved as it lasted longer) or it may be something new.

On to IFT 9.  Previous prediction was April, will it happen then????

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Engineering / Re: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)

« Last post by Nemesis on March 03, 2025, 06:00:52 pm »

IFT 8

Wed • Feb 26th, 2025 6:30 PM - 8:09 PM EST

I expect at least some delays.

1st delay

Fri • Feb 28th, 2025 6:30 PM - 8:09 PM EST

2nd delay

Mon • Mar 3rd, 2025   6:30 PM - 8:09 PM EST

Last minute abort reason unknown.  So a later launch


Provisional new date:  Tue • Mar 4th, 2025 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM EST.  Depends on weather etc. 

Revised new date:  Wed • Mar 5th, 2025  6:30 PM - 7:30 PM EST

1st Delay Thu • Mar 6th, 2025 6:30 PM - 7:30 PM EST

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Engineering / Re: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)

« Last post by Nemesis on March 01, 2025, 01:06:49 pm »

IFT 7 the cause of the 2nd stage failure has been announced as being resonances (caused by changes in the design for this 1st block 2 unit flown) resulted in components in the engine section breaking and that is what caused the leakage.  They did a long 6 engine static fire which included changes to those components (different changes on different engines to test multiple designs at once).  They also used different engine settings during the test to help isolate the problem and finding out which of the changes were best. 

Raptor 3 due to the integration of various components won't have this particular vulnerability. 

I recently heard that the head of ULA when the first pictures of Raptor 3 were released commented that SpaceX MUST have left off a lot of components to make the picture look better.  He apparently is wrong and the integration mentioned above has this resulting "clean" design. 

There are currently applications to the FAA for IFT9 which includes the option of achieving orbit and returning BOTH stages to Boca Chica for a catch with one of the stages to be caught at tower B.  April (likely late) is the target time frame.

New Glenn 2nd stage?  They planned to leave it in a "garbage" orbit (more space junk)  BUT it has broken up so it is even more junk.  Why?  First why was why not return it?  It should have had lots of fuel since it had minimal cargo so why not deorbit it?  Second why of course is why it broke up?

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Engineering / Re: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)

« Last post by Nemesis on February 21, 2025, 06:22:13 pm »

IFT 8

Wed • Feb 26th, 2025 6:30 PM - 8:09 PM EST

I expect at least some delays.

1st delay

Fri • Feb 28th, 2025 6:30 PM - 8:09 PM EST

2nd delay

Mon • Mar 3rd, 2025   6:30 PM - 8:09 PM EST

5

Engineering / Re: Snake robot fire hose

« Last post by Nemesis on February 08, 2025, 01:25:55 pm »

That sounds pretty darn cool, creative idea. 

I was looking for a different post about robots and stumbled on this one which I had forgotten.

I have to say that the idea wasn't as original as they may thinks as in the Andre Norton novel Galactic Derelict (1959 part of her Time Traders series) the ship i question travels automatically to a ancient refueling base and a snake robot hose auto attaches to refuel the ship.  So the idea has been out there for decades before being created in real life.

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Engineering / Re: Create your own private GPT

« Last post by Centurus on February 08, 2025, 08:46:44 am »

What could you do with it?  Honestly, I'd only be interested in using such a GPT tool to analyze stock price and movement and to help me determine long and short entries.

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Engineering / Re: Create your own private GPT

« Last post by Lono on February 07, 2025, 02:39:15 pm »

A coworker said he's running Deepseek on his gaming desktop. Probably even better than using Meta's LLama LLM for most gamers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-EG3B5Uj78

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Engineering / Re: COMMODORE® 64x

« Last post by Panzergranate on February 03, 2025, 07:14:41 pm »

The Sinclair Spectrum was the more popular 8 bit micro computer, in the UK, mainly due to the Z80 processor and 41 K of user memory as opposed to the C64's 38 K user memory. The C64 was a close in 2nd place, in the UK.

The Spectrum 128 +2 and 128 +3 used the CPM disc operating system, but could only address 8.5 Mbytes of hard drive, if one struggled to hitch one up and created a boot up floppy disc. (The manual explained how to do this, for the technically minded, like me). I hitched up an IBM 10 Mbyte MFM hard disc with a separate power supply. I had to create a boot floppy disc to change the Expanded Disc Parameter Base settings (in the Built In Operating System (BIOS)) in order for the external drive expansion port to set the number of heads, tracks and sectors it was going to encounter. Those were the pioneering days of home computing, back in the 1980's.

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Engineering / Re: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)

« Last post by Nemesis on January 30, 2025, 01:27:07 pm »

New Glenn FINALLY launched after 4 years of delaying their initial declared launch date. 

All those people who were claiming it would have a full success are now pretending that putting a tiny satellite in orbit and losing the booster for unknown reasons well short of the landing is a full success.

But congratulations to BO for their PARTIAL success.

That satellite?  Its purpose is to move around other satellites, boost them to final orbits and the like.  It was sent up without the ability to move itself or even be ejected from the booster.  All it does is send telemetry back. 

This makes me assume that they couldn't send up a functional Blue Ring (as I think it is called) OR it failed and they are doing the old "I meant to do that" child's trick to cover failure.

So even less impressive for BO. 

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Engineering / Re: Interesting stuff about SpaceX Starship (hate the name)

« Last post by Nemesis on January 28, 2025, 01:33:13 pm »

A new asteroid was recently added to one of the lists and then removed.  Turned out to be the Tesla the first Falcon Heavy sent towards Mars.