** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

My money is on an automated abort at engine light, first time so many engines have been fired together there's bound to be teething issues.
 
It's oddly hard to get a sense of the scale/power, not sure why but it doesn't look more powerful than SLS but it is, damn impressive none the less.
 
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I'm amazed they haven't built a flame diverter. All that energy bouncing back up and hitting the engines can't be good no matter how much water you throw at it. There is a reason most launch pads have them, they work.
 
One assumes there must be a rationale, they are after all the ones operating the Worlds most successful launch platform and building it's behemoth bigger brother. I doubt the reason is "duh! I didn't think of that". But at first glance it isn't obvious.
 
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PlacidCasual said:
One assumes there must be a rationale, they are after all the ones operating the Worlds most successful launch platform and building it's behemoth bigger brother. I doubt the reason is "duh! I didn't think of that". But at first glance it isn't obvious.
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It can only be because its cheaper. Falcon 9 39A pad has a flame trench.

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Colonel_Klinck said:
It can only be because its cheaper. Falcon 9 39A pad has a flame trench.

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From what I’ve read, it’s because Starbase is built at sea level and there’s no spare elevation to build a flame trench because it would be below the water-line. Cape Canaveral doesn’t have this issue as the whole thing is elevated. If it ends up becoming a problem for SpaceX I don’t know what they’ll do, but I’d like to think the engineers have known about it for a long time…
 
Penfold101 said:
From what I’ve read, it’s because Starbase is built at sea level and there’s no spare elevation to build a flame trench because it would be below the water-line. Cape Canaveral doesn’t have this issue as the whole thing is elevated. If it ends up becoming a problem for SpaceX I don’t know what they’ll do, but I’d like to think the engineers have known about it for a long time…
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Ah that makes sense and would make build a trench a lot more expensive.
 
Grim5 said:
17 million pounds of thrust, houses 10 miles away were shaking

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Correction: SpaceX has now revealed that for this static fire test the engines were set to 50% throttle and 2 engines were turned off, so it produced 8 million pounds of thrust (same as the Apollo 11 Saturn V rocket) which is less than half its full potential of 17 million with all engines at 100% throttle

 
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You have to think they'll maybe have enough thrust to get it off the launch pad with less than 100% thrust and then throttle up once its far enough off the ground for the energy reflections not to be a problem. 17 million pounds of thrust reflecting back is a lot of energy hitting those engines. I guess this is only a test base and the actual commercial launches will be from Florida where the infrastructure is already in place. Can't wait to see the orbital attempt, its going to be amazing!
 
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