On today's episode, we are getting into the latest space news, including SpaceX
has built a new launchpad for starship Falcon Heavy, completes its biggest mission yet,
and Sierra Space wins a Space Force contract for a secret engine design.
This is the space race. Progress at the launch facilities at the SpaceX testing
grounds in Bokachika, Texas hit another milestone on July twenty eighth, when the
company technicians completed a full strength test of their newly installed water deluge system.
SpaceX observers have been following the progress of the deluge system's construction for the last
several weeks now. The huge metal plate forming the central showerhead of this system,
as well as the outward plates protecting the water hookups, were installed at
the end of June and into the beginning of July, causing a fair amount
of excitement. A lot of speculation had been buzzing around the community, and
folks like Ryan Hanson were rightfully happy to see that their thoughts on the device
and its proportions were mostly correct. Then, on July seventeenth, before the
apparatus had been completely installed, the SpaceX team conducted their first test, and
even with a missing water tank. The plates put out an impressive flood of
water. The very next week, on July twenty sixth, the remaining tank
and pressure vessels were installed and linked into the last took ups under the orbital
launch mount. In the background of all this was the testing of Booster nine.
More on that later, but the important thing to note here is that
SpaceX had a launch candidate booster on the stand above their new delution system,
an opportunity which was too good to pass up, and on July twenty eighth
they turned the water on. We were treated to some great footage from SpaceX
themselves, and in it we can see that at full power, the delue
system works more or less the same way the simulations predicted it would. A
colossal amount of water is shot upwards and outwards from the center of the om,
avoiding hitting the engines of the booster sitting directly above the plate, even
though the water is jetting out of the system so hard that it was shot
clear over the tank farm's protective berm. Luckily, the site's drainage seems to
have taken care of everything just fine, so this was a very successful test.
The Deluche system is fully operational. Now. Whether or not it's able
to effectively manage the liftoff thrust of super Heavy will have to be discovered in
testing. During the April twentieth flight test, super Heavy's massive array of Raptor
V two engines tore a deep crater into the launchpad under the om, launching
concrete debris into the launch tower and much further afield. SpaceX had designed a
water cooled steel plate to sit under the OLM to absorb all the heat and
pressure, but it hadn't been built in time for the test, and the
engineering team underestimated the damage Super Heavy was capable of. Now in their defense,
the physics behind rockets at plumes and cratering is still being worked out by
leading physicists in the field, so it's not an easy thing to predict by
any stretch. The basic premise is that a steel plate on concrete could likely
take the beating that an array of Raptor V two's would dish out. The
heat is another matter, but the water should take care of that in theory,
and now that we've seen it in action, it's hard to think that
this reverse showerhead idea won't do the trick. But we won't have to guess
for long, as the next thing the SpaceX team is likely gunning for is
a static fire right on the OLM, and given how quickly the rest of
the site's work is progressing, it seems possible that we might be seeing one
of these by the end of August at the latest. The build team needs
to let that concrete fully cure, but with the deluge plate working they may
not have to worry about that so much. That being said, there are
a couple of other things standing in the way of a static fire and of
course another test launch. The first is testing the OM and booster systems.
The launch apparatus took a beating on April twentieth, and the repairs have gone
well, but still need to be tested to make sure they are operational.
Going with that, the new launch Candidates nine has to go through the usual
process to ensure it can handle being the next booster to try and get Starship
into space. On July twenty third, Booster nine was put through cryogenic proof
testing, the test where the team fills the boosters fuel tanks with liquid nitrogen
to test pressure, stability, and the plumbing. Some of you might remember
that the Super Heavy uses liquid methane, but doing a pressure cryotest with such
a volatile fuel is not exactly the smartest thing to do on your only launch
apparatus, so they use nitrogen, which, while not being quite as dense
as methane, won't explode if something bad happens during the tanking procedures. Another
blocker to launch is the modifications needed for hot staging the process. SpaceX has
recently decided to add to Starship a large ring events and tank shields will sit
in between the first and second stage, allowing Starship's engines to start up before
fully separating from its super heavy booster, leading to a smoother separation maneuver.
But Booster nine and Ship twenty five don't have this modification, and the quick
disconnect for the fuel line on the launch tower has already been raised to accommodate
for the new height, so SpaceX is going to have to install these events
before even committing to a full wet dress rehearsal with the new stack. So
where is it? Luckily, the folks at what about It managed to catch
sight of a Starship ring segment that looked a bit different from what we're used
to that Coupled with the fact that Ship twenty seven, which was recently disassembled,
had some of its parts sent back to the production tense instead of being
scrapped in the rocket garden, it makes a lot of sense for the SpaceX
engineers to recycle an unused starship prototype for this purpose, so we could see
a whole new starship, or more likely a modified end piece that will be
swapped on to a ready to fly starship. But the real blocker right now
is likely the FAA investigation, which still hasn't been completed and will likely have
a list of demands for changes that SpaceX will have to complete before even test
firing a rocket at Boca Chica. Once again, we'll have to wait and
see what those conditions might be, but in the meantime, SpaceX seems determined
to put on a show. On July twenty eighth, the Falcon Heavy launched
into the sky on its seventh ever mission. The heavy lift rocket carries its
enormous payload into space on its central booster, expending the entire thing to get
into the correct geostationary orbit, while the rockets twin side boosters made their usual
picture perfect landing back at Cape canaveral and what was riding inside the upper fairing
of the Falcon Heavy this time, well, the Jupiter three EchoStar twenty four
communications satellite, coming in at a whopping nine metric tons of load. There's
not many rockets that could get the Jupiter three into orbit, much less geostationary,
but that's what Falcon Heavy was built for, and it did the job
even if it had to use all the fuel in its central booster, so
no recovery for that one. The Jubiter three was made to be a massive
Internet hub, expanding the hues that satellite service to a projected eighty percent of
the people living across the Americas. It's equipped with three hundred spot beams to
achieve this sort of coverage and reportedly has a five hundred gigabits per second.
The Falcon Heavy upper stage made three more burns to lift the satellites orbit before
detaching and leaving the rest of Jupiter's onboard propulsion enough to get the vehicle into
geostationary, where it can be the most useful. EchoStar leadership has said that
geostationary orbit is the ideal height to project broadband signals from and has designed their
Jupiter satellites to operate from those positions more than thirty five thousand kilometers above the
Earth's surface. Previous Jupiter EchoStar missions that were of similar size and had made
use of both Area and five and the Ula Atlas five rockets, both of
which are no longer in service, leaving just the SpaceX Falcon Heavy. The
current SpaceX Heavy lift vehicle hasn't had much cause to be used. Friday's launch
was only the third this year, compared to its smaller variant, the Falcon
nine, which has already been up fifty times as of July twenty eighth.
To be fair, there aren't a whole lot of giant payloads to send into
space right now. That's going to be changing, though, as soon as
commercial companies start launching their own space stations, and by then we might have
access to the starship. But it's likely that Falcon Heavy will still be seeing
some use for exactly this sort of mission, lifting large, custom built apparatus
into geostationary orbit. At least we hope so. Because washing those boosters land
side by side is never going to get old. Sierra Space is getting the
funding they need to design a more efficient engine, which company leadership says will
be the major driving force for their entire range of operations, from our applications
and destination sector to space transportation with our dream Chaser plane. On July twenty
fifth, the Colorado based aerospace company confirmed that the US Air Force had just
handed them two point six million dollar contract to finish the design and testing of
their newest upper stage engine, the VR thirty five KA. The engine is
designed to work on the orbital stages of rockets and so has a very good
thrust efficiency, using liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuels to produce thirty five thousand pounds
force of thrust. Sierra Space's chief technology officer and vice president, Rusty Thomas,
says that the VR thirty five k A provides more thrust and higher performance
in a smaller package than any other upper stage engine currently on the market,
and knowing that their prototypes have already gone through some testing, they likely have
the numbers to back that up. Back in August twenty twenty two, the
company completed a critical design review which apparently impressed the Air Force brass enough to
hand them this new twenty two million dollar contract. Sierra has understandably not released
much about the engine, other than the use of a fuel mixed stage combustion
cycle and something called vortex. A staged combustion cycle is when a small portion
of an engine's propellant is fed into a preburner chamber. This ignites the small
amount of mix into a fuel rich gas and sends it into the turbines to
get the power to the pumps before being fed into the main combustion chamber and
burned with the rest of the mix. This is very easy on fuel use.
Vortex is a bit of a mystery, though we are told that it
refers to a thrust chamber design, which is meant to increase the pressure of
the engine's exhaust in a smaller volume, but that's all we know. Thomas
reports that this design will be able to deliver thirty percent more payload mass to
orbit and will be used with their partners launch vehicles, which is unsurprising.
During an investor conference on June twenty seventh, Sierra's executive spoke about the company's
goals to build out a series of modules and vehicles so that they wouldn't have
to rely on other companies to ferry their dream chaser spaceplane into orbit, and
that is probably going to take a while to become reality, but a twenty
two million dollar contract certainly gets them closer to that goal. And then outra