Thread by @Tazerface16

SpaceX is scheduled to attempt another Starship launch again tomorrow morning (Saturday) at 8am EDT from their facility in Boca Chica, Texas.

Here are my thoughts and predictions.

A thread 🧵

The first launch attempt occured on 4/20 of this year, and resulted in massive damage to their launchpad, as well as the ultimate destruction of the rocket itself.

Here's my thread about it.

https://twitter.com/Tazerface16/status/1649443447164776450?t=A4GA_Eydf95MqjZEs7fNxQ&s=19

For tomorrow, much has changed from the first attempt.

For one, a steel plate with a water deluge system has been installed underneath the pad, and the entire mission profile of the rocket flight has been adjusted to increase the likelihood of success.

So will it work?

Let's talk about the launchpad first.

The core of the SpaceX launchpad design is reusability.

Since a SINGLE trip to the moon for Starship will ultimately require up to 20 launches from Boca Chica to make happen, this is critical.

And they have to make those repeated launches on a quick turnaround timeframe from that single pad in order to make this work.

They have no other choice.

Otherwise it won't be possible, by the plan they've laid out themselves.

After the first launch, the pad took months to repair and modify.

By SpaceX's own requirements, this is not acceptable since they will need to make 16 - 20 consecutive launches, every 12 days, to support a single moon mission.

So will the water cooled steel plate work?

Probably not and tomorrow's launch will definitely demonstrate that.

Even if it survives without completely being destroyed, it will be damaged.

Probably heavily.

And it will definitely not be fixable enough to support another launch 12 days later.

But even then, the steel plate won't truly be tested under a moon mission launch scenario tomorrow.

Why?

Because tomorrow's launch has been designed for optics only.

The flight profile of the rocket has completely changed from the first time it was launched in April.

First off, the flight tomorrow is suborbital and there will be no payload aboard.

That means the entire rocket will be much lighter than it would be for a moon mission launch.

It also means the rocket can use much less thrust to take off from the pad.

This means that tomorrow the water cooled steel plate will face much less stress than it would in a normal moon launch.

Now, let's talk about the flight profile itself for the rocket.

The biggest change that's been made from the 1st launch is how long that booster will fire.

As we saw in the first launch, progressively more and more engines of the 33 started to fail the longer the booster was running.

It fired for approximately 4 minutes in the first launch in April

Tomorrow is supposed to fire for only ~2.5 minutes.

Big change.

Why did they do this?

Well, as we saw in April the longer the booster was running, the worse the situation became with engines failing.

So how will they compensate?

By relying on a longer burn from the six engines in Starship itself to make the suborbital flight possible.

The booster will hold much less propellant this time, and Starship will hold much more.

So none of what happens tomorrow is going to demonstrate anything that's useful to meet their goal of going to the moon.

It's just for show.

It's to make Elon happy.

In fact, this launch tomorrow is no different than the single flight of the Spruce Goose by Howard Hughes back in 1947.

Hughes had promised to make the plane fly or he'd leave the country.

And he made it fly.

For three minutes.

It never flew again.

And this doesn't even address the idea that there's a better than 50/50 chance the Starship will blow up again.

The Starship booster is immensely complex, specifically because it has 33 rocket engines on it.

That's a lot of additional complexity.

With many additional points of potential critical failure, the chances of reliable success goes down.

So do I think it will blow up tomorrow?

Probably.

But that's not what's really important here.

Everything is being done to make this flight look like a success to the world.

And none of it is reflective of how this hardware will actually be used to meet its mission requirements.

It's being done this way for only one reason.

To salvage this dude's image.

So watch tomorrow with that type of eye, and don't listen to how SpaceX, the MSM, or Elon himself tries to spin it.

Now go enjoy the show.

End of thread. 🧵