I wouldn’t say that’s too hard to believe. It’s with the caveat of no payload and no reentry or landing hardware. A stripped-down Falcon Heavy booster could likely also make orbit–run the rocket equation on the engines and probable mass fraction, and it can just make it.
Still, it is impressive because even a stripped-down Starship is a more capable vehicle than a FH booster. It carries its own fairing and can naturally survive a more energetic reentry (not orbital, but more than a typical booster reentry).
Tomorrow will indeed be fun if they launch on time. Boca Chica residents (like four of them) are warned to stay away from windows since they may break as a result of an “overpressure event” (nice euphemism).
The limiting factor on an SSTO using chemical rockets is that they just can’t have any useful payload. The rocket equation is a cruel mistress. To get your 9.4km/s delta V using engines with an Isp of 350 or so your mass fraction is just minuscule. I’m pretty confident that SpaceX has neither found a way around the rocket equation nor dramatically increased the Isp of the Raptor engine, so I’m equally confident that Starship isn’t going to be useful in any theoretically possible SSTO configuration.
For those interested, Youtube channel Everyday Astronaut is going to be livestreaming the test tomorrow. SpaceX may also, I guess - they streamed the aborted test the day before the previous hop, but didn’t stream the following day when they actually did hop.
Very cool! That engine was certainly doing a lot of gymbaling. I noticed that the Starhopper was sitting at a bit of an angle after landing. I’m guess one of the crushable pads crushed. Maybe it landed on one leg first. But still, that’s got to be considered a successful test.
Turns out that slight angle after landing was more significant than we thought. It sounds like something may have gone wrong with the engine just before landing. The exhaust suddenly changed color, some kind of fire appeared under the rocket, and we didn’t see the rest because of dust, but you can see a composite pressure vessel come flying out of the dust cloud at one point, and then you see the hopper sitting at an angle.
Closeup views show that one of the feet was completely missing and another one crushed. So maybe an early shutdown and a hard landing. Hopefully it was a Starhopper plumbing problem, and not a design problem in the engine.
There seems to be a lot of speculation about the change in color. I think it’s just dust, and it gets entrained into stream close to the nozzle due to circulation effects (imagine a circulating toroid of air and dust). Regardless, I doubt it’s a big deal. The craft probably landed a bit hard because they’re still working the kinks out of their engine throttling and control systems, and because there’s not a lot of play in their damping system).
There’s no way the Superheavy is ready in that time, so they must have an SSTO flight in mind. It’s going to be pretty much a stunt IMO, though maybe they’ll capture enough data that it’s still worth it even though it won’t land. Clearly, the construction costs of the rocket itself are pretty damn cheap. The engines are the only expensive part, but they’ll need a decent production setup anyway, so maybe it won’t be so bad.
That’s twice the diameter of the current system. For a given number of stages and propellant combination, rockets have a maximum height, so I don’t expect the height to go up much here, but that’s still 4x the cross-section. I said earlier (maybe in another thread) that I expect to see 1000 ton rockets eventually, but if this is even on the drawing board, then we’ll hit that point faster than expected (the 18m design should hit 500 tons to orbit, so only a half-step past that gets to 1000 t).
Fantastic operation! SpaceX is now likely to beat Boeing in ferrying astronauts to the ISS.
It’s also a nice move forward for Starship, because I’m willing to bet that at least initially, Starship wil be launched unmanned, and the crew will be sent up on Falcon 9 rockets. Man-rating Starship launches is going to be a bitch.
I was out snowshoeing this long weekend, but I managed to just catch the launch from the hotel WiFi just before we left. Amazing!
This pic has to be my favorite. I love the symmetry of the explosion, and how it looks like it somehow fired the capsule out in the process.
Surprisingly, the trunk landed mostly in one piece. It’s pretty lightweight, but still–it landed without chutes, and must have tumbled in the ocean for a while.
I was disappointed to see the New York Times report the event as SpaceX rocket explodes during safety test. I think they changed the headline later, but that was a mind-bogglingly deceptive headline. I don’t know whether to ascribe it to malice or stupidity. Most sites were better, but many didn’t really emphasize enough that the exploding rocket was fully expected.
Speaking of explosions, apparently the second stage separated somewhat intact, making it to the ocean before itself exploding.
At any rate, another huge success for SpaceX. Although I’m sure NASA has to finalize some more paperwork, and the actual crew launch is still upcoming, I think we can say now that the US has finally regained manned spaceflight capabilities.
Launch scheduled tonight at 11:50 head for The Space Station. Rocket due back at LZ1 8 minutes later. I should be in position to view both. Weather people think there is a decent chance of a scrub due to high winds. However, right now I’m seeing just 4 MPH winds a few miles south of the launch pad, SLC 40. Of course upper atmosphere wind might be different. So…light the candle.
I’d love to see that launch! We traveled to Titusville to watch the STS-31 launch on our honeymoon. That was the shuttle that took up the Hubble Space Telescope. But the launch was scrubbed with just four minutes to go, and didn’t launch for 14 days after, and we were long gone. That was a huge disappointment.
