Starship’s third full stack flight test is just around the corner and with the first two tests achieving some merits of success and progress, the third flight with Booster 10 and Ship 28 has made some pretty substantial upgrades and changes to not only the hardware but also the flight profile.
00:00 - Intro
00:42 - Pad Upgrades
01:28 - Booster Upgrades
02:38 - Ship Upgrades
04:43 - Mission Changes
06:52 - Summary
For a more detailed rundown on all the exact changes, may I recommend checking out this incredible article by my friends at Ringwatchers - https://ringwatchers.com/article/s28-b10-updates
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- Starship's third full
stack flight test is just around the corner and
with the first two tests, achieving some merits
of success and progress. The third flight with Booster 10 and Ship 28 has made some
pretty substantial upgrades and changes to not only the hardware, but also the flight profile
and the mission itself. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, and today I just wanted to
do a really quick overview of these changes and
upgrades as we prepare for what's always guaranteed
to be an exci
ting launch of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket ever
flown. Let's get started. - Let's start off with the launchpad and the stage zero infrastructure because there have been some huge upgrades since the last flight. SpaceX can now load LOX on
the booster in less than 40 minutes, and methane in 41
minutes, both took about an hour and 37 minutes before, and now they can load LOX
on the ship in 53 minutes instead of an hour and 13 minutes and methane in 51 minutes
instead of one hour an
d 17 minutes. These are ridiculous fill rates, considering it's about
10 times more propellant and fills it into similar
time to a Falcon 9. Thanks to additional coolers and pumps, there are some new tanks that will be used on
future flights to help with additional storage needs. The pad also received a few upgrades and additional heat
reinforcement on the launch mount and tower, and a few small tweaks here and there to hopefully
reduce refurbishment time between flights. Okay, onto the rocket i
tself, the FAA has signed off on
SpaceX's mishap report on Starhip's second flight, which
ended in both the ship and the booster being terminated. SpaceX listed 17 upgrades to the ship and booster that would address the issues that cropped up during IFT-2. There's ten upgrades and
changes for the ship and seven for the super heavy booster. So here's a quick overview of some of those changes on the booster. There's a few noticeable
changes on the outside. First off, you may notice the
grid fins o
n Booster 10 look different than Booster 9, but SpaceX actually walked
back a small design change and returned to the grid Fin
design from prior vehicles removing a small strip
along the outer edge, there have been upgrades
to the Starling terminals that will hopefully help improve data connections to the vehicle. There's a slightly
different common dome design that's debuting on Booster
10 that's more rounded and less rampy. There's a small tweak to the
stability mount that they use during lift
ing, and
there's likely some changes to filtration and potentially
slosh baffles in the booster as some kind of blockage in
the oxygen line of a raptor. was the demise of Booster 9 but the booster will mostly
see changes in software and engine control
algorithms that should help. It better cope with the flip
maneuver after hot staging. While the booster doesn't
seem to have a ton of notable hardware changes, S 28 is quite a bit upgraded
over its predecessor S 25. In fact, IFT-2 which flew Booste
r 9 and Ship 25 was a bit of a mismatch as S 25 was already a
fairly outdated vehicle design when it flew. In fact, Ship 28 started life
completely differently when it was stacked in reverse
order from top down, which allowed the vehicle
to always be attached to the crane, reducing rigging
time during construction. It also finally caught up to
its booster friend by upgrading to Raptors that have electric actuators for its thrust vector control system. Instead of the older hydraulic ones. This gr
eatly tidied up
the engine compartment and helps reduce the risk of fire, which fire reduction risks
is generally another upgrade. S 28 has many tweaks and changes to help prevent
fire on the vehicle, which is what took down S 25. There's also just the simple change to not dump oxygen in
the same manner, which is what helped feed the fire onboard S 25. The oxygen vents inside
the aft skirt have changed and it speculated their angle could help with attitude control as well. More obvious changes o
n the
outside include some changes to the heat shield placement and pattern similar to the booster. It also gets a mighty upgrade with Starlink dishes now
featuring four dishes instead of one, which again will
help provide better data and hopefully get us some beautiful views while it's in space. The flaps added some small static wicks to help discharge static electricity. Side note, the front flaps
are actually older than S 25. They were taken off of
S 22, which never flew. S 28's aft flaps hav
e
beefier mounting points compared to S 25 and the body has been strengthened with 24 new reinforcement
stringers inside the oxygen tank. Another fairly obvious change between S 25 and S 28 is the vents
on the propellant tanks. A bunch of them have moved in location and the cowbell style thruster
ish vents have completely been removed from the middle of the ship and now the nose vents do feature that cowbell style thruster-ish vent. But maybe the coolest change
we see on S 28 is something that I
've been waiting to see for a long time on one of these tests. S 28 finally has its payload
door operable instead of being welded shut, which brings us to the changes in the mission that we will hopefully
see occur on IFT 3. And there's actually
some fairly large changes that are completely
different from IFT 2 with that payload bay not welded shut. It means we're hopefully going
to see it open a little more than three minutes after ship
engine shutdown at 11 minutes and 56 seconds, there is a
S
tarlink dispenser installed, but since this is a suborbital mission, there will be no payload actually deployed Then we'll hopefully see another
first first with Starship. They plan to try and relight
a raptor engine in space. Now at the moment we don't
know if they will do this prograde or retrograde so either slightly extending
its reentry location or slightly shortening it but I'd speculate they'd
want to practice a retrograde deorbit burn, but we'll
have to wait and see. This time, instead o
f making about three
quarters through an orbit and then landing in the
Pacific Ocean near Hawaii, Starship is now targeting a
good bit shorter trajectory and it will land in the
Indian Ocean near Australia. The reenter corridor is fairly large and I'm guessing it's that big, so they can accommodate whether or not Starship completes
that Raptor relight test as to why exactly they're
aiming shorter than before. We don't really know the difference between the two points
is marginal in terms of tota
l velocity, so perhaps
just reentering in a bit more of a remote location is preferred and it just adds a touch
more margin to the profile. The ship will still just
do a belly flop landing as there appears to be no
attempt at a propulsive flip maneuver likely because they're just not
even sure if it's going to survive reentry. So they might as well wait to try and program all those maneuvers until they know the ship can
make it back in one piece. Lastly, one more exciting change is that SpaceX w
ill be attempting
to transfer propellant between a header tank and
a main tank wall in space. This is part of the "Tipping
Point" contract for NASA to demonstrate this
technology for a milestone for the Artemis Program's
Starship Human Landing System. While propellant transfer isn't new, it's usually done in a
relatively small amount between two vehicles like the ISS and a resupply vessel like
ROSCOSMOS' Progress vehicle, which is a hypergolic propellant and not cryogenic
propellant like on Star
ship, successfully completing this
test is worth $53 million. So we really hope they nail this one, but that's pretty much everything. Okay, so now for my thoughts and expectations at this point, you can tell SpaceX has higher
expectations than before and they should because
it's really to the point now where this vehicle needs to start honing in on achieving
some of its lofty goals. But of course, do keep in mind that this is still just a test
vehicle and a test flight. So it's not detrimental
if
this would fail spectacularly again, because of course
there's no shortage of rockets in production
waiting for their chance to fly. However the clock is ticking, and of course, NASA needs
this rocket in order to land humans on the moon
for the Artemis program. So yeah, it's it's time to
start, you know, seeing progress and getting closer and closer to some of those big milestones. So personally, I hope we see
the booster safely come back and do a landing burn
for a soft water landing. I thin
k that'd be great. I also hope the ship gets
through its main burn and completes its three demonstrations of relight door operations
and propellant transfer. If it does survive
reentry, that'd be awesome, but for that one, I'm
a little more 50 / 50. But what do you think? Do you think it's going to
do better than last time? About the same? What
are your expectations? Let me know your thoughts or your questions in the comments below. And don't forget to join us live whenever this thing launches.
We already have our 4K live stream up, which I think we're the only
true end-to-end 4K Stream available since SpaceX no
longer streams on YouTube. Our last stream was amazing, honestly, and we've made even more upgrades and spent hundreds of
hours literally working to make this next stream incredible. So I hope we see you there. And now it'd be a great time
to consider becoming a Patreon supporter, a YouTube member, or an X subscriber, so you can get access to our 4K multi-view clean feed, and y
ou can have your very own
mission control in your own house on launch day. That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut
bringing space down to earth for everyday people.
Comments
Two sources were misspelled and I deeply apologize: Randolph* Visuals and Chameleon Circuit*
TBH I really miss more frequent content from your channel and while I find the "regular" spacex channels that do videos twice a week and therefore scrape for content to be boring, I really like you doing this one. This is important, info dense, and up to your usual quality. I think you could do more of these, when there's real news to share :)
Cannot wait for launch day! GO STARSHIP!
Thank you for making a shorter video that I can actually watch on a whim.
YouTube has a lot of enthusiasts posting weekly updates. Some of them are interesting, but YOURS is by far the best produced and has the highest quality content. I will be there watching your livestream whenever it occurs.
Thanks for the timely update, Tim!
WHOA, Tim's back in the business of making update videos? We finally have the perfect trifecta of purely update videos with WAI doing 2x week of super deep dives, Marcus House 1x week going a bit broader and Everyday Astronaut coming in once a month or two with a ultra-brief and concise summary. It's a good day to be alive and following spaceflight!
This is a really great and concise Starship update! It's much appreciated.
I would not be surprised to see this thing complete its flight profile as planned. I'm really looking forward to seeing this happen.
Very excited for IFT-3.Hoping for some cool onboard footage.
Thanks Tim and team. This was a great balance between detail and being concise with several changes covered.
Same with you on predictions. Hoping to see booster “survive” and for ship to at least make it to reentry.
Thanks Tim, that was a nice brief capture of some of the changes.
Pointey end up, flamey end down!
Tim, you’re killing it! We always love the deep dives, but these intermittent short forms are such a pleasant treat. Keep it up!
IMO, surviving re-entry is the most important test. If the heat tiles don't work (or just fall off), or the mass to surface area ratio is too large for it to bleed off enough speed before it hits the thickest parts of the atmosphere, then it's a serious problem. That's not something that software updates or slight adjustments to hardware will fix. It's critical to the whole point of starship that it can survive re-entry.
Currently celebrating 3,years 2 months and 27 days for being a supporting member. Thx for everything
Fantastic summary ! Thanks !
Man! That staging footage at 0:03 just never gets old to me! Outstanding shot! So beautiful!
Thanks for the updates! Havnt been following the program as much lately, this was a super helpful summary! Good luck to spacex for the upcoming test 🙌