Starship Flight 2

[Dr Mordrid]

The Starbase PadRats have been putting in 24-hour days, looking like an ant hill on speed. What's interesting is almost all of the new equipment had already been built, as if they were waiting for Flight 1 to get off the pad before starting installation. Given the many changes between that booster and ship and B9/S25, it's plausible.

Starship Flight 2

https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1668659299197804545

Chris Bergin - NSF@NASASpaceflight

Elon says the next Starship launch is in 6-8 weeks. And this is where the replies to that timeline are all "No chance, bruv!" Not impossible. Pad mods are in the final stage now. Ship 25 is about to Static Fire. Install steel plates and deluge system, do some OLM testing. Get the Tank Farm ready to rock and roll. Rollout Booster 9. Static Fire B9. Stack the vehicles. More testing. FAA says "Ye!" Send it.
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Elon Musk ? Elon Musk@elonmusk
Replying to @TeslaSynopsis

6 to 8 weeks

[Dr Mordrid]

Update,

A new concrete pad has been poured, 1000 cubic meters of reinforced thermal concrete under the Orbital Launch Mount. That's about 2,500 tonnes.

Above this pad will be a steel structure, two large plates welded together with channels between them and upward facing sprayers. This world constitute the deluge system, spraying large masses of water into the plume to mitigate both heat and acoustic effects. This was mostly built before the first launch, but not installed because they didn't have enough data to finish the job. Getting this data was largely the reason why they launched the first flight.

Today Ship 25 did a static fire in preparation for Flight 2.

[Dr Mordrid]

Six engine test right out of the box, and elsewhere more talk about a nine engine Starship.

Drone video of the static fire at the tweet


Elon Musk ? @elonmusk

Key milestone completed for flight 2
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SpaceX @SpaceX

Ship 25 completes a six-engine static fire test at Starbase in Texas

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1673564912948326400

[Dr Mordrid]

Multiple angles of the iron plate water deluge test. Flight Test 2 should be a few weeks away.

[Dr Mordrid]

NASA was present for this flight.

Perfect lift off, no pad damage

All 33 engines ran through main engine cut off, and hot staging occurred on time.

The booster flight termination system fired after it did the flip to come back and do a water landing. It appears this was a timing issue, and will be corrected on the next flight.

Starship had a nominal burn until a few seconds before engine cut off, at which time the flight termination system fired. It appears this was a performance issue, it was drifting out of the flight track. The debris fell Northeast of the Turks.

They achieved the vast majority of goals for this flight, mainly to get through hot stage, so Flight 3 is planned for a few weeks from now.

Flight 3 will use Booster 10 and Ship 28, which are in final preparations to roll out now.

Several other boosters and ships are already in production for subsequent flights.

Drone shots

https://www.youtube.com/live/s-ZwElJpTTs?si=e6r4unSQ2uwdYsrO