pigeonberry

Same to you, bud! I figure I'll keep blowing on the embers. Either the flame will catch (& I get to boast "I was into Lemmy before it really took off"), or my lungs will get too tired.

So the big news of the day and night was what is believed to be the center plate of the water deluge system. It is thought that it will be placed directly under the Orbital Launch Mount.

@[email protected] already posted (at top level) "CSI Starbase video on new Deluge system", a deep dive part 1. The URL I see for the post is https://lemmy.world/post/879748 , because that's how I access this. The canonical one is https://lemm.ee/post/530280 .

CSI Starbase SPMT Tracker @SpmtTracker posted a tweet with a picture of what is very likely to be a vertical stand for the center plate. The image is on Imgur. The tweet is here. Ryan Hansen Space @RyanHansenSpace tweeted a rendering of how it might look under the OLM. This should be the image:

@[email protected] posted below (if sorted by new) a link to a 13-minute video by Starship Gazer, of people working in the tent on the center plate. https://lemm.ee/comment/534238 . Someone commented that, from 4 minutes on, it's comedy gold. People were grinning around them. I'm told that someone is standing on top of the cheater pipe at one point.

NASASpaceflight posted a video of the rollout of the center. It's about 1 hour 26 minutes long. The stand / jig was on the first truck; the center plate with some people on it was on the next truck. The clearest views are about 17 minutes on.

I also saw this in The Other Place:

[Meta] Twitter is now throwing up a nag screen to force users to log in to view content, supposedly on a temporary basis. Since a lot of the content here links to Twitter, this could be inconvenient to those without an account.

A simple solution is to link to the embedded version of the Tweet, like so. Simply type:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=xxx

And replace xxx with the Tweet id.

The other solution is to link to an archived version of a tweet.

(I think the last is like Internet Archive.)

Oh, I saw a reference to that and checked in Chrome incognito mode. Yeah, you have to login to see a tweet.

But it looks like pictures are not locked down yet.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fz6ES2PXwAEuTAH?format=jpg&name=medium

What about it!? @FelixSchlang tweet from 3:03 PM - Jun 29, 2023:

It happened!!!

SpaceX opened the wall to the inventory tent and revealed one of the water deluge plates to us up close and countless other things in there!

High res pictures for supporters on all platforms coming soon!

The image alone.

In a reply, they said it looks to be upside down.

In The Other Place, u/warp99 wrote,

Looks like the segments are around 400mm thick and constructed from 40mm (38mm=1.5"?) steel plate The overall shape is a hexagon about 10m across the flats with each corner notched out.

They also speculated on how to weld the edges together: maybe put them on a stand above the final location, weld them from above and below, attach cranes and remove the stand, lower into place.

Starship Gazer (as seen on Nitter) had more pictures.

New tank who dis? Methane tank inbound, according to Zack Golden @CSI_Starbase: "This will be the 8th storage tank for the methane section of the Orbital Tank Farm." He was retweeting a video from Anthony Gomez @AnthonyFGomez.

(For those who don't know, Cameron County is around Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas. I happen to know that off the top of my head because there's a rocket research center there.)

S25 lost about 11 tiles during the first static fire.

Musk tweeted "Three center Raptors of Booster will fire at ~50% thrust during hot staging - 8:27 AM - Jun 27, 2023"

CS Starbase tweeted that the concrete pour on the Orbital Launch Mount is not done.

SpaceX tweeted more glamor shots of the recent ship 25 static fire here. In particular, several people have commented about how spectacular the first one is.

Also Musk tweeted an impressive top view. Just the picture. Also the tweet it was in.