15 comments

• Richard M

  March 6, 2026 at 3:49 pm

  Re: The case before the Texas Supreme Court

  A telling point in the oral argument:

  Justice Young asked if SpaceX were to only conduct one launch per year, would her argument be the same. Perales said their argument, based on the plain language of the Constitution, would be the same.

  Really gives the game away: the goal is to drive SpaceX out of the state, make it impossible for them to operate there.

  Unfortunately, this absolutist reading of the amendment text doesn’t give the court much to work to with, even if a majority of justices were looking for a middle ground. And judging by the tone and line of questioning by the justices, it’s not likely to end well for petitioners.
• Richard M

  March 7, 2026 at 1:31 pm

  I’d like to highly recommend Zack Golden’s new deep dive video on Starbase’s launch pad nightmares, which I think might be the best thing he’s ever done:

  https://youtu.be/Xh-QBWtP444?si=kOz5vYAhM0aB6fmH

  The text on the tin only teases what he does here: “After the early Starship test flights exposed the brutal reality of launching the most powerful rocket ever constructed, SpaceX was forced to rethink the entire philosophy behind their launch pad.” It’s an hour and 12 minutes, but if you have any passion at all for Starship, it’s an hour and 12 minutes well spent.
• Jeff Wright

  March 7, 2026 at 11:46 pm

  Just as much as mess as the SLS pad—just on the cheap/shoddy side.

  I think the guys behind the ALS concept had it right.
  It would take some doing, but a longer, SH type vehicle with SS or SLS as a side-mount second stage would make the best use of the SLS pad, and would eliminate the hot-staging ring.

  I’d like to see OldSpace and NewSpace work together.
• Jeff Wright

  March 8, 2026 at 7:44 pm

  Big aerospace advance:
  https://techxplore.com/news/2026-03-hybrid-super-foam-3d-struts.html

  Well, they finally did it:
  https://x.com/BabakTaghvaee1/status/2030526489284764084

  I’m turning into an old woman…now I just want to eat some ice-cream and go to bed…
• Dick Eagleson

  March 8, 2026 at 9:02 pm

  Richard M,

  Zack G. is, indeed, a treasure.

  Given all of the headaches SpaceX has had with Ground Support Equipment (GSE) over the last few years, Jeff Wright’s indictment above seems broadly correct. I think there may initially have been a simple lack of respect within SpaceX for civil engineering as a discipline – as opposed to aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical and electronics engineering, avionics and software engineering, chemical engineering and metallurgy. That led to more than a few own-goals which were expensive in both money and time to fix. I’m guessing the civil engineers on staff these days no longer have to eat at the kiddy table.

  Jeff Wright,

  Still looking to ride the rocket “horses” sidesaddle, eh? Bad idea for several reasons.

  1. A side-slung 2nd stage could not be stacked using the chopsticks. That would radically compromise turnaround time and materially interfere with SpaceX’s cadence goals for Starship.

  2. A considerable amount of the total Thrust Vector Control (TVC) travel on the booster’s engines would need to be cranked in at lift-off to keep the stack ascending vertically. Cosine losses would compromise payload capability.

  3. Both the booster stage and the 2nd stage would have to be braced, internally, to handle the side-loading in addition to the unavoidable vertical loads. That would add a significant amount of dry mass to both. More hits to payload.

  4. The external structure needed to mate two round stages side-to-side, top and bottom, would be an additional dry mass penalty that would constitute yet another hit to payload.

  5. Hot-staging allows for more payload. With the current vertical stack, the only mass penalty is the support ring and the extra armor on the booster’s upper dome. Even with these penalties, hot-staging still nets out considerably on the positive side anent payload mass increase.

  6. Hot-staging a side-saddle 2nd stage would require extra TPS mass of some sort on the side of the booster where the 2nd stage’s plume would impinge and would likely also still require some extra beef on the upper dome. It also might not be possible to straightforwardly use the hot staging as a way to orient the booster stage correctly for the boostback burn. Yet more hits to payload.

  7. Anent the notion of using the Space Launch System (SLS) core stage as a side-saddle 2nd stage, there are three big issues and a medium-sized issue. The big issues are that the SLS core stage would still be insanely expensive to build, still be entirely expendable and still have a pathetic production cadence. The medium-sized issue is that the SLS’s RS-25 engines are, in current trim, startable only on the ground, not in flight. Making them air-startable is possible, but – again – would involve more parasitic mass.
• Jeff Wright

  March 8, 2026 at 10:26 pm

  Having that internal bracing allows for more dry use.

  While folks take shots at orbital wet workshops….people don’t mind the idea of lying Starship down on the Moon and covering it with regolith.

  I would submit that parallel staging/piggyback structure:

  1.) Allows for propellant transfer testing more quickly

  2. Strengthens the vehicles.

  3. Aids horizontal transport.

  4. Reduces the likelihood hood of post staging contact (from below certainly)

  The concept of rockets AS payloads just needs its own Elon.

  SuperHeavy is not balloon tank, but it isn’t R-7 or Sea Dragon either. The shuttle External Tank just wow-ed me with what it could withstand….and I’d prefer humanity to retain that know-how.

  What’s troubling me now is Bernie Sanders’ and his billionaire tax idea to give everyone three grand. Now just because someone is worth X doesn’t mean you will get X…not everything is liquid.

  This didn’t happen under Obama when he had a favorable House and Senate—-and no higher min wage either.

  But I see an out—a compromise.

  Warren Buffet is talking about donating his fortune anyway—and he’s about ready for the grave. Where Elon gave the world SpaceX and Tesla (which would not exist if Bernie had his way)—-I have no use at all for Bill Gates, who went on record as also saying he should pay more in taxes—like Buffet has.

  I see a bipartisan bill in the making to soak Bill Gates (and keep that money from going overseas) and Buffet—but exempting Musk.

  The Left gets its hooks in a despicable Bill Gates, and the Right gets an opportunity to teach folks that the power to tax is also the power to destroy.

  I figure with Gates wiped out, there will be just enough to fund Pyrios, and it would keep the mouths of the Buffets of the world shut before they EVER say crap about needing to pay more taxes.

  That or all Gates’ money leaves the US and goes to some Third World hell-hole…accomplishing nothing.

  Microsoft made money off America—and that money needs to STAY in America by gum.
• Dick Eagleson

  March 9, 2026 at 4:01 pm

  Jeff Wright,

  Adding more dry mass just adds more dry mass with concomitant diminution of payload capacity. It doesn’t enable any additional use cases. And, assuming something like a pointlessly heavier Space Launch System (SLS) core stage could make it all the way to LEO on every launch and stay there as a wet workshop, what, exactly, would be done in all of those wet workshops? Even given the SLS core stage’s pathetic production cadence, you would have the things showing up on-orbit a lot faster than reasonable use cases could be found for them. For any use case you could identify, purpose-built hardware would be the conceptual competitor to SLS core stage-based wet workshops and would win pretty much every time.

  Not every Starship lunar lander will be repurposed as hab space. Perhaps none will – we don’t know yet. Should that ever be done it will be on an as-needed basis. The lunar settlers will not have to lay down, then figure out a use for, every HLS lander that arrives. Most will fly an open-ended number of subsequent round trips between the lunar surface and lunar orbit. Taking SLS core stages to orbit imposes post-arrival use-finding as a burden for every such mission.

  As for the rest of your claims:

  1. How would side-saddle 2nd stages hasten propellant transfer testing? By eliminating the capability of using launch tower chopsticks to stack the 2nd stages, achievable cadence would be horrendously compromised. And on-orbit refilling calls for multiple tanker missions to fill each depot. Your notion would vastly slow this process, not speed it up.

  2. The extra strength imparted would be entirely to compensate for the seriously sub-optimal staging arrangement and would simply subtract from payload capacity.

  3. Starships and Super Heavies are already strong enough to handle horizontal transport in required circumstances. That’s how SpaceX intends to get Starship stacks from Starbase, TX to FL for launch prior to the construction of a second Starfactory at Roberts Road. There is no need at all for Starship stages to be moved horizontally on strictly local trips. The current arrangement of using Self-Propelled Mobile Transporters (SPMTs) to move them vertically works just fine.

  4. Potential stage re-contact after notional separation would not be diminished by side-saddle staging and might even increase relative to strictly vertical stacking without adding more parasitic mass in the form of either very strong side-pushers or separation charges. The only way re-contact could occur given the current hot-staging setup is if the Starship’s engines stumble after ignition – which would likely doom the mission in any case.

  Yo are correct that Super Heavy – and Starship for that matter – are not balloon tankage craft. They’re rolled-sheet-with-stringers craft. That makes them self-supporting if even slightly pressurized and allows selective strengthening of specific areas.

  The best way to stave off the nut-bar wealth taxes now being proposed by the Congressional commies is to see to it that they remain a minority there and – ideally – a non-presence at all at some none-to-distant point. The Democratic Party stands revealed as a treasonous criminal syndicate and should be treated as such. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
• Edward

  March 9, 2026 at 7:48 pm

  Dick Eagleson wrote: “Adding more dry mass just adds more dry mass with concomitant diminution of payload capacity. It doesn’t enable any additional use cases.”

  As has long been noted, it is called “the tyranny of the rocket equation.” The entire idea is to find ways to reduce dry mass so that more payload can reach orbit. Adding mass just so the rocket can look neat-o is counterproductive.

  The only reason to increase the launch mass of the rocket and reduce the payload is to decrease the price per pound of payload. Elon Musk taught us that, and with the reduced price to orbit, we now have far more payloads being launched, we have far more capability to launch them, and space is now being put to far more uses by far more companies and operators than ever before.
  _________
  Jeff Wright wrote: “While folks take shots at orbital wet workshops….people don’t mind the idea of lying Starship down on the Moon and covering it with regolith.”

  I don’t recall either of those topics being discussed much on this site. One company proposed making space stations out of spent upper stages, but it didn’t get very far, suggesting that the idea is not yet ready for prime time. Using Starships for lunar or martian habitats may be a good idea, although this may not be the most efficient way to build habitats and seems wasteful of the useful Starship. Maybe one or two could be used this way just as a quick and dirty way to start a lunar base.

  Eating the rich may seem like a good idea, but what does the government do after it eats all the rich people? Worse, when the rich have to sell off assets in order to make the tax payments, my assets lose value, too, and I lose out on my dream to be a millionaire, then I have to work more years, since I can no longer afford retirement.

  It isn’t just the rocket equation that is a tyrant; so is the law of unintended consequences.
• Jeff Wright

  March 10, 2026 at 12:11 am

  About the CSI Starbase segment on ground infrastructure…Zack talked about the lower part of the trench not taking as much abuse due to exhaust running parallel.

  This makes me wonder if horizontal launch is best in terms of frequent access to space, with infrequent launch of the largest rockets used to just put Starship or whatever in LEO.

  I think there was a YouTube video recently that–as an intellectual exercise–talked about lobbing a Falcon in the air with some kind of counterweight.

  Perhaps there are other ways to reduce the impingement of rocket exhaust on ground support equipment.

  Are there any proposed launch sites where you have hard rock, so as to eliminate piles and such?

  I remember a very deep quarry in South Africa that makes me wonder if mining sites where years of rock removal left something like a trench that could be utilized in some manner… allowing connections and umbilicals higher up on the rocket.

  R-7’s “tray” slides back to where the LV is supported mid-air… dangling over a vast pit.

  Any locations where there is granite along the shoreline?

  The Panti Remis tin-mine suffered an immense landslide that allowed the Indian Ocean to invade.

  Are there similar geoforms/coves where you can float a jack-up rig over the top of a pit like structure that could be drained.

  We see locks in the Panama Canal–might a variation of that tech work for space launch?

  I could see that set up allowing for rockets larger than SuperHeavy….float over…drain…refill….launch…fill…then land like Big Onion.

  A bit like Sea Dragon/FLIP ship in terms of handling large cores….but they would not be pressure-fed.

  I think it is likely that Pyramid blocks used hydraulics….canals cycle more often than the busiest launch pads.

  Instead of fighting against water….make it work for you.
• Richard M

  March 10, 2026 at 10:52 am

  Hello Dick,

  Jeff Wright’s indictment above seems broadly correct. I think there may initially have been a simple lack of respect within SpaceX for civil engineering as a discipline – as opposed to aerospace engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical and electronics engineering, avionics and software engineering, chemical engineering and metallurgy. That led to more than a few own-goals which were expensive in both money and time to fix.

  The first thing to say here, I think is that we’re just scratching the surface on this subject: this video is the first of three Zack has planned to explain just how it appears that SpaceX worked through these problems. And of course, because it is speculative (although, to be sure, superb, well founded speculation) it will necessarily be an incomplete picture.

  But what it does suggest is that Elon’s close control over decision making combined with his impulse toward minimal solutions has a lower risk ceiling when it comes to civil engineering. On multiple occasions, he seems to have opted against more robust solutions where ground stabilization and blast mitigation were concerned. Each time, the results suggested that the solutions chosen did not work as well as expected, and SpaceX was forced into more robust ones . , . which is what we can see on Pad 2 with its massive flame trench, heavily up-armored launch mount, and more thorough subsoil preparation (among other things).

  Still, they learned, and they adapted — Pad 1 ultimately turned out to be only a limited time iterative experiment — and Elon certainly did not double down on sunk cost fallacies once the truth became evident. The results is a revised launch complex architecture that is much more empirically proven and optimized than anything NASA has on offer for SLS right now, to put it mildly!

  Hello Jeff,

  It would take some doing, but a longer, SH type vehicle with SS or SLS as a side-mount second stage would make the best use of the SLS pad, and would eliminate the hot-staging ring.

  A sidemount Shuttle-Derived Heavy Launch Vehicle (SDHLV) architecture *was* the fastest and cheapest SDHLV solution to pursue, back when NASA was actually trying to settle that question back in 2003-05. It had its drawbacks, but if the goal was to leverage what we had to create a new HLV solution for deep space missions — which after all is kinda the point of a SDHLV — then this was the easy shot on goal to take, as even the DIRECT guys admitted.

  Unfortunately, Mike Griffin wanted no part of that. He wanted to eliminate even the smallest chance that the Shuttle could be kept going, and a sidemount/Shuttle C architecture left that possibility open.

  It’s too late now to pursue that possibility.
• Richard M

  March 10, 2026 at 11:00 am

  Breaking: NASA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has released a new report: “NASA’s Management of the Human Landing System Contracts”

  https://oig.nasa.gov/office-of-inspector-general-oig/audit-reports/nasas-management-of-the-human-landing-system-contracts/

  As Scott Manley notes, the report finds that it’s not going way over budget, but is not on time. (None of which is a surprise. It’s a firm fixed cost contract, and its timelines were woefully unrealistic, because politics required them to be unrealistic.) Also, SpaceX and NASA disagree on the nature of manually flying a Starship! Obviously, they’re going to have to reach an agreement on that, and reach it soon. There was a similar debate between NASA and SpaceX over Crew Dragon back in 2014-15, by the way, and SpaceX mostly won that debate in the final design. Given the higher risks involved with lunar landing, I would not assume that history will repeat itself here; but we shall see. Jared may personally intervene on this question.

  I am getting ahead of Bob, however, as he may well want to devote a special post to this.
• Edward

  March 10, 2026 at 4:29 pm

  Richard M,
  Thank you for the Zack Golden link. I have not checked SCI Starbase in a month or so, so it is good to get up to date.

  You wrote: “— Pad 1 ultimately turned out to be only a limited time iterative experiment —”

  I’m not convinced that SpaceX intended Pad 1 to be the final design and may have always been intended to be iterative. They knew that they were trying the impossible, but didn’t realize just how impossible it was for the concrete, and I noticed that Musk stopped calling Super Heavy the world’s largest blow torch right after the first integrated test flight demolished the surface. They almost certainly knew that the mount could not be the final design.

  As with their earlier versions of their construction buildings (tents, sometimes), I suspect that Pad 1 was also done on the cheap because it was intended to be changed later, too. It sounds as though they got bit in the butt anyway.

  I am still amazed that flight hardware, so poorly protected during storage and assembly, worked so well.

  I noticed that Zack mentioned a version 4 for Starship. I think that is the first time I heard of that iteration.
• Jeff Wright

  March 10, 2026 at 6:23 pm

  Thanks to Mr. Eagleson for giving kudos to civil engineers….they face thankless tasks.

  Long before Katrina, pre-Mythbusters Discovery Channel had a disaster documentary called “Hurricane X” or something.

  Unlike tax cuts or social programs….things like flood control are too brown for Greens and too FDR.

  After Katrina, some bloody robe named Stanwood Duval slimed the Army Corps of Engineers…even though he was forced to throw lawsuits out against them.

  They can’t whistle up better levees from the ether.

  The brother of my late lady friend Debra worked for Jefferson County for years…motorists spewing epithets every which way when cones were up.

  Nothing but mad respect for hard hats.
• Dick Eagleson

  March 11, 2026 at 12:08 pm

  Richard M,

  For whatever reason, Mistakes Were Made with Gen 1 Ground Support Equipment (GSE) at Pad 1. Fortunately, Elon Musk probably comes closer to the Platonic ideal of an Ego-less Engineer than anyone else on the planet. Pad 2 incorporates countless Lessons Learned, including a lot more side armor for the two faces of the launch tower in direct sight of the launch mount and an armored roof for the launch tower as well. Pad 1 will be upgraded to match as will the tower at LC-39A and the two new towers to be erected at LC-37 at Canaveral.

  Anent the NASA/SpaceX squabble about “manual control” of Human Landing System (HLS) Starship, I think the matter of touchscreens vs. joysticks is a minor sideshow compared to the question of what the “sensor suites” would be for each.

  For the Apollos, the “landing sensors” were a pair of Mk1 Mod 0 human eyeballs. The Lunar Module (LM) was flown by crew who were standing and had an essentially straight-down view of the ground over which they were descending through the outward-angled viewports of the LM.

  Neither of those things will be true of the HLS Starship. The HLS Starship will also be much taller than the LM so the view of ground coming up out of any of the craft’s line of windows would be far more distant than that from the much shorter LM. The HLS Starship needs, at a minimum, downward-pointed cameras feeding monitors or a helmet Head-Up Display (HUD) or Virtual Reality (VR) headset if the notional joystick being argued about is to have any usefulness at all.

  The quality and fidelity of landing sensors is, if anything, even more utterly crucial for any notional automated-only landing system. Perhaps, as with Tesla cars, multiple cameras would be sufficient for a lunar lander equivalent of Full Self-Driving (FSD) with no other sensor technologies being required. The various failed or partially-failed lunar landers equipped with radars and/or lidars certainly did not find them to be a foolproof route to accurate soft landings.
• Jeff Wright

  March 12, 2026 at 12:41 pm

  Paper on Mars terraforming
  https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.00402