When (first) orbital flight?First integrated flight test occurred April 20, 2023. "The vehicle cleared the pad and beach as Starship climbed to an apogee of ~39 km over the Gulf of Mexico – the highest of any Starship to-date. The vehicle experienced multiple engines out during the flight test, lost altitude, and began to tumble. The flight termination system was commanded on both the booster and ship."
What's happening next? SpaceX has assessed damage to Stage 0 and is implementing fixes and changes including a water deluge/pad protection/"shower head" system. No major repairs to key structures appear to be necessary.
Why no flame diverter/flame trench below the OLM?Musk tweeted on April 21: "3 months ago, we started building a massive water-cooled, steel plate to go under the launch mount. Wasn’t ready in time & we wrongly thought, based on static fire data, that Fondag would make it through 1 launch." Regarding a trench, note that the Starship on the OLM sits 2.5x higher off the ground than the Saturn V sat above the base of its flame trench, and the OLM has 6 exits vs. 2 on the Saturn V trench.
I'll attempt to keep this post current with links and major updates, but would be greatly helped by information supplied by the community. I hope this can be an alternate place to discuss Starship development. While the Starship Development Threads on Reddit are not party threads, Lemmy is still small enough that I don't imagine that strict moderation will be needed in the short term.
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.