7 thoughts on “Congrats To Firefly”

1. I happened to wake up on time to watch the landing coverage. Firefly did a good job with the coverage and the landing was a great achievement.

   I’ve heard the weather forecast for Monday at Boca Chica are marginal with fairly strong winds. The forecast is better later in the week.

   1. Maybe, should plan a wet dress rehearsal, but if wind happens to be good, launch.

2. Sooner or later, it’ll have to be an all-weather LV. At least it’s a 5,000+ metric ton pole with a lot of control authority.

   1. It’s still pretty early in the Starship flight test program. They know the designed wind limits of SuperHeavy and Starship, just like aircraft designers know the crosswind limits of new planes. However, early flights are usually flown in relatively calm conditions* and they work towards the wind limits gradually. I’m hoping they fly today, but I understand if they decide to wait for better conditions. A crash into the launch tower while trying for capture could delay the next launch for weeks or months.

      *An exception were the Wright Brothers first powered flights at Kitty Hawk in 20+ MPH winds. Even they later realized that was crazy.

   2. I just did some math on the crosswind force on a Superheavy, which is a 71m by 9m cylinder.

      At sea level, the coefficient of drag is going to transition from about 1.0 to 0.3 as the crosswind shifts from 1 to 2 knots, which produces trivial forces. At 5 knots the Reynolds number is about 2 million, and at 40 knots it’s close to 16 million. The Cd should be around 0.3 throughout the range.

      So the total side force varies from 177 lbsf at 5 knots to 11,300 lbs at 40 knots.

      You could completely compensate for up to 40 knots crosswind in all directions with a set of four thrusters on top (letting the main engines vector to handle the bottom), if each of the four top thrusters could produce 4,000 lbsf. I’d mount them 45 degrees around from the grid fins so they don’t blast directly on the tower.

      And that should let it land in anything short of a strong gale (force 9).

3. https://x.com/Firefly_Space/status/1896561229151305925

   “Also Sprach Zarathustra” is now playing in my head.

4. “If one were cynical, one might suggest that the traditional space contractors and some government bureaucrats helped engineer Polyakov’s ouster because Firefly had gone from a super risky venture to standing a rocket on a pad,”

   That isn’t cynical enough and there is likely a paper trail to which politician’s family benefited the most.

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