SpaceX reveals plans to catch Super Heavy on first launch attempt! JWST baffles science world!

SpaceX reveals plans to catch their first Super Heavy Starship booster on the first attempt. Parts for a third Starship launch tower spotted at Kennedy Space Center and James Webb is 5% away from viewing the Universe's beginning. Let's dive right in! My name is Felix, and I am your host for today's episode of What about it!? Sorry for the absence. The whole family was down with Covid. Lucky for us, the space industry didn't stand still at all. So, there's a trove of topics to talk about today. Starship Updates Why is back, and as much as our studio has improved while we were on sick leave, SpaceX has not been standing still at all either. The biggest sensation while we were on hiatus might have been the Booster 7 explosion. While creating a lot of fancy headlines again in worldwide news outlets, the SpaceX community carefully analyzed the incident and tried to predict as well as possible how much this would delay the orbital launch. Ten days after the incident, many question marks can be answered already. First of all, even though it looked very destructive, the damage was not terrible. Mechazilla, even though standing next to the explosion, took no meaningful damage. The launch mount itself charred. The main structure itself wasn't damaged much. The electrics and hydraulic systems took some damage. Nothing an overhaul couldn't fix though. After all, the orbital launch mount will have to take the beating of 33 Raptor engines on every launch in the future. Not with such a strong shock wave, but with more heat. The next big question obviously surrounds the state of Booster 7. Did it survive? Yes. Was there a lot of damage? No. Will it fly to orbit? Tentative yes. Musk gave Booster 7 a personal inspection on July 13th. Was just up in the booster propulsion section, damage appears to be minor, but we need to inspect all the engines. Best to do this in the high bay. Musk commented on the reason behind the explosion as well. Cryogenic fuel is an added challenge as it evaporates to create fuel air explosion risk in a partially oxygenated atmosphere like Earth. That said, we have a lot of sensors to detect this. More later. Fuel evaporated from inside the engines right before a static fire attempt. Since there are so many engines under the booster, it was enough to create the powerful explosion. When working on rockets, explosions occur, especially when working on rocket prototypes, since Super Heavy is the largest rocket booster prototype ever to be manufactured, even a little leak can create a large explosion. This is footage of the STS-114 shuttle mission. What you're looking at is a camera pointed at the RS-25 main engines right before ignition. Do you see the sparks flying under them? They are being thrown out under the hydrogen powered engines to ignite any dangerous leaked gases before they can accumulate and eventually create a similar explosion as to what happened under Booster 7. This is one way to deal with this kind of problem. Ignite the leaked fuel before it gets dangerous. And for SpaceX and its Starship, this could be the solution as well. Musk mentioned sensors under the boosters. So, SpaceX has the means of detecting dangerous mixtures, even though that seems to not have worked for Booster 7. But what good is it, if you can't eliminate the gases even if you detected them? I would not be surprised, if a similar system would now find its way into SpaceX's launch mount design. On July 14th, SpaceX lifted Booster 7 off the OLM and rolled it back to the production site. Since then, a lot of work has been done. On July 18th, SpaceX took out many, maybe even all, Raptor engines from under the booster. Checks must be performed on every single one of them, as they were the closest to the blast and are similar to delicate clockworks. Judging by the incredible pictures, Sheev took for why they appear to be in great shape visually. No bent bells, no parts missing. Of course, this is just our visual inspection, and SpaceX engineers can do much more than this. X-ray inspections will likely be performed. Parts will be inspected as close up as possible to make sure that everything on every single engine is as it should be. Perfect. And Sheev also took pictures of the reason for SpaceX wanting to be very thorough with the inspections. The same day SpaceX unmounted the Booster 7 Raptor 2 engines, they also loaded Starlink V2 satellites into the satellite loader. Of course, it's not 100% sure yet, but it does definitely look more and more like SpaceX indeed does want to send Starlink V2 satellites up into space right on the first ever Starship orbital launch. Why not show the world, that the system can deliver right on that first launch? It does sound good to me, and the first launch gets even crazier. There is evidence that SpaceX might try to catch the Starship booster right on the first flight. Do you like today's episode so far? Then click the like button right now, subscribe to the channel or become a channel member by hitting the join button right below the video! Or head over to Patreon by following the link in the description and become an active supporter! Or buy yourself a new shirt in the WiWare store if you fancy cool space merch! Thank you so much! The Starship Super Heavy test flight will originate from Starbase, Texas. The booster stage will separate and will perform a partial return and land in the Gulf of Mexico or return to Starbase and be caught by the launch tower. This is a quote from a recently published SpaceX FCC filing for Starship's first orbital launch attempt. Crazy! A picture provided in the filing shows the booster launch profile. After separating from the Starship, it will then relight its engines as indicated by the red color in the flight path and boost back to the landing site and as you can see, the loop starts and ends at the same spot with a small dock leg maneuver. To me, this seems like SpaceX will check the booster in flight with their Starlink data connection, which this FCC filing is for. If everything does check out and all the data SpaceX receives from the returning booster looks good, they will go for it. So, we won't only see a payload delivered by Ship 24. We might also see the first booster catch attempt if everything plays out as SpaceX wants it to. Can you even imagine the level of excitement? With all the booster talk, we should of course not forget about Ship 24, which is undergoing tests at this moment. As you can see here on LabPadre's camera, spin-up tests have been performed successfully. All six engines spun up. Next, we should see static fire attempts, hopefully with fewer explosions. Which leaves us with the verdict. With SpaceX already performing checks on Booster 7 and the visual inspection of the damage to the OLM and Mechazilla being on the low end, we should expect Booster 7 to roll back to the launch site in the next few days. SpaceX doesn't seem to have lost much time and another valuable lesson was learned. I expect an orbital launch to happen somewhere between late August and mid-October. Take it with a grain of salt though. This is prototyping and predictions are hard. On we go with SpaceX's efforts at Roberts Road and Pad 39A. Starbase 2 or SpaceX Florida, however you want to call it, things are ramping up in Florida. These are fresh pictures from Greg Scott's latest flyover at Cape Canaveral. Activity at Roberts Road is speeding up further and further. Besides more Mechazilla segments, almost fully assembled catch arms or chopsticks and first buildings undergoing construction, Zach from CSI Starbase was able to spot something exciting. This is a picture of our Florida Y cams showing segment number 4 of the Florida Mechazilla Starship launch tower being rolled out to Pad 39A for stacking. It's the first segment after some time, but it shows the progress SpaceX is making on their second Starship launch tower at Kennedy Space Center after the one in Texas. And Zach found this in a recent picture taken of Mechazilla 2 at Pad 39A. Look, how the first segment is mounted on the concrete socket with these brackets. That's Zach's first clue to something rather astonishing. Now look very closely right next to one of the built segments. Let's zoom in on it. Do you see these brackets? Those look like mounting brackets for the first segment on the concrete base. And you need these exactly once per Mechazilla. Now, it's hard to tell if these really are those brackets, but if they are and Zach from CSI Starbase is right, this could be the first sign for a third Mechazilla. The second one in Florida. Possible locations for a built site could either be Pad 39A, Slick 40 or the proposed LC-49, which SpaceX wants to build north of the SLS Pad 39B. NASA and SpaceX are already working on project details, and after that come reviews. So, it's not far along. What do you think? Is Zach right? And if so, where would that third Mechazilla be built? As always, tell me in the comments! In general, SpaceX's dominance in the launch industry is growing more by the day. On July 14th, they launched CRS-25. 25 cargo dragons to the ISS since the contracts with NASA started. This launch would have been my first opportunity to report directly from the press site at Kennedy Space Center and with NASA's permission, unfortunately, I was sick with Covid and could not attend. Nonetheless, the launch and landing were flawless and CRS-25 reached the ISS safely. To put it into perspective, up until now, SpaceX has completed 31 missions so far this year. They delivered roughly 351 metric tons of useful payload to low Earth orbit. By the number of launches, SpaceX has now broken its record from last year and we're just in July right now. SpaceX could possibly launch more than 52 rockets this year. Last but certainly not least, 351 tons to low Earth orbit is more than twice of what the rest of the world combined has launched so far this year. As soon as Starships are operational, SpaceX could be in the position to launch more payload mass to space in a single week than all of Earth's launches in a year combined. Sometimes though, mass is not as important as the kind of payload. James Webb and the beginning of the Universe. The moment we've waited for. The Universe as never seen before. Bold words and not an understatement. NASA has finally released the first images from the now fully operational James Webb Space Telescope, and the world is in awe of the results, even though these are just the first images. Every image is a new discovery, and the telescope will give the world a view of the Universe as we've never seen it before. These are the words of acting NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. Again, he's not overstating it. A first deep field image revealing the most distant galaxies we've ever laid eyes on. The current record holder in the image? 13.1 billion years. Not only does this show us these galaxies, but it also shows us what our Universe looked like only 700 million years after it was created. That's about as long as higher evolved life exists on our own planet. In the greater timeline of our Universe, that's only around 5% of the total age of the Universe. 5%. That's all that's left to the Big Bang itself. One of my favorite images, the Southern Ring Nebula, was previously inspected by Hubble in the mid-90s. Now, and with James Webb's capabilities, the Southern Ring Nebula reveals much more detail. With its infrared cameras, it is not only able to take high-resolution pictures, but also to reveal details hidden from Hubble's view. Since James Webb is operating at the Lagrange L2 point, shielded from the Sun's rays, it is able to view into the infrared spectrum much more than Hubble ever could, revealing details from inside the nebula. This is just the first batch of images. Thanks to a perfect orbit insertion back in December of 2021, James Webb is left with an excess amount of fuel, likely expanding the science lifetime way beyond the 10-year mark. It is hard to imagine, what kinds of images we might see from JWST in the future, but it's safe to say, that scientists and amateur space fans alike will get countless moments of joy and excitement from its discoveries to come over the next decade. Today, I'd like to thank Surfshark VPN for sponsoring this WAI episode. When I'm on public Wi-Fi, I always use VPNs just to mask my identity. But did you know, that VPNs can be used for much more than that? Did you know, that they can also help you save tons of money? Do you travel? If you do, have you ever noticed, that flights, cars and hotels seem to get more and more expensive, the more you search for them online? It's called price discrimination. What a lovely word. Even though all those price search portals you can find online always state, that you will find the cheapest flights and hotels possible, they of course want to make the most money too. So, they implement tracking cookies and IP tracking. 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