It already did with IFT-3. That it (again) reentered before one complete cycle is irrelevant–it hit orbital velocity. Actually going into a circular orbit would not have required more performance or something working that didn’t work. But since they aren’t yet deploying payloads, it’s safer to pick a trajectory that intersects the Earth at some known spot.
Geostationary Transfer Orbit insertions often have a perigee so low (Falcon 9 is baselined at 185 km) that it’s not actually a stable orbit (intentionally: you want the second stage to come down on its own). No one thinks that’s suborbital, though.
Certainly, lots of payloads end up in circular orbits, even if the second stages that brought them there don’t wind up staying there (since it’s usually junk). The Shuttle of course spent lots of time in roughly circular orbits. And the Starship propellant depot will be in a permanent circular orbit. The tankers that fill the depot will necessarily have to match orbits for a while to transfer the propellant, and it’ll probably take longer than the ~90 minutes it takes to go once around, though maybe not that much longer.
In general, there’s no clean dividing line between rocket and payload. The Shuttle and Starship of course combine reentry-capable craft with part of the rocket. But even traditional rockets often leave some of the final insertion to the payload, whatever it is.
Well, I suppose congraulations are in order - Elmo’s finally caught up to what NASA was able to do in 1958. Maybe if we’re lucky Artemis 3 wilk be ready in time for the Tricentennial.
It is neat, though, and my space-obsessed nephew is definitely happy about it.
The Falcon 9 is by far the most reliable rocket that’s ever been built. They’ve had more consecutive successful landings than any other rocket has had successful launches. Starship will almost certainly achieve the same level of success over time.
I would imagine they’re going to be spending some fairly serious efforts on those flaps. They got away with it this time, but that was not at all nominal.
More thrilling than Furiosa, which I saw a few days ago. Really one of the most thrilling things I’ve ever seen on video. The couple of video dropouts just added to the drama! Watching the velocity counter go down while the flap is being progressively destroyed was nail-biting. Plus the plasma show was simply beautiful.
Someone on Reddit put together this cute Starship vs. Starliner comparison:
Ok, granted, Crew Dragon docking is just as boring as Starliner. Still.
Musk actually said the day before that the hinge area was one of the main risk areas. They already have a new flap design that, among other things, moves the hinge part leeward, so it’s at least partially in the shadow of the main body (with respect to hot gas flow). So that should help, but they undoubtedly learned a lot on this mission that should help further refine things. The good news is that there’s a lot of resiliency in the design, and most of the tiles at least worked well.
Sadly, they cut off the money shot (tipping over after landing). Amazing shot nevertheless. And proof that they really did land right where they needed to.
Musk confirms that they’ll shoot for a catch next time:
Starship booster makes soft landing in water, next landing will be caught by the tower arms
Incidentally, you can pretty clearly see the failed engine in the video above. That same engine actually worked fine for launch and the boostback, so there was probably something that changed to make it fail here.
My prediction is that it had something to do with the reentry environment. Unlike Falcon 9, Super Heavy doesn’t perform a reentry burn. So it both reenters at a higher velocity, and it doesn’t get the shielding effect from the rocket thrust. The Raptors do have some heat shielding, but it may not have been quite enough. The Raptor 3 will simplify the external components and possibly not need shielding at all, but for now they might have to beef things up.
Flight 5 is in “about a month”. They’re completely replacing the heatshield, adding an ablative secondary layer and tiles that are “twice as strong” as last time.
Schedules should be taken with the usual grain of salt. SpaceX is speeding up (less than three months between the last two tests) and it looks like IFT-4 met the requirements for avoiding an FAA mishap report. But still–Elon time. My observation is that he tends to interpret projections like “end of next month” as “about a month”. End of July seems doable.
Unclear exactly what he means by “twice as strong”; he’s speaking casually so it may be something like fracture resistance. Regardless, good to hear that they’re improving things. The secondary ablative shield is interesting. They surely don’t want to actually use the shield since that would interfere with full reusability. But if it’s lightweight enough, it may be a good option to increase survivability if something goes wrong (as it did here).
That’s my current worry- that making the upper stage able to survive reentry will add so much weight that payload will take a huge hit. That’s what has bedeviled reusable designs since the early 1960s: the payload fraction dropping to zero as the orbital stage gets heavier and heavier.
The FAA assessed the operations of the SpaceX Starship Flight 4 mission. All flight events for both Starship and Super Heavy appear to have occurred within the scope of planned and authorized activities.
It’s going to be a trick. They do at least have the advantage that they aren’t trying to combine it with an SSTO. It might be possible to do one of these or the other, but not both.
Musk said this the other day:
Left flap also got very hot, but was less damaged.
Rear flaps seemed to be ok, based on their control authority, but probably lost some tiles.
Good to know the flap we saw got the worst of it. It’s hard to imagine that all the flaps were nearly destroyed, given that it obviously retained a fair amount of control authority. But if the left flap isn’t in quite as bad shape, then they’re probably close to the edge (i.e., it won’t actually take much to fix), and possibly the stuff they already have cooked up will solve the problem.
Elon has said they plan to move the flaps leeward, make them a bit smaller and toughen up the heat shielding. The new flap design is supposed to mean a greater lifting capacity without affecting control. Plus they will be more protected from the heating on reentry.
I think those changes won’t be seen until flight 6 however. But will they dare put the flaps through that again in the next flight?
I suppose it depends on exactly what happened. The ablative undershield they’re installing should help with tile loss effects. But the flap damage looked to be more from hot gases going under the hinge, and it doesn’t seem like an ablative layer would help much there. Maybe they have a different fix in mind. It’s possible that something simple like reducing the gap would help. Or maybe they can install a gas purge system of some kind.
They probably don’t need much since obviously the stainless steel can survive quite a lot. Something that just blunts the worst of the heating might get them through it.
Flight 5 may be more about the booster catch than reentry. Reentry is still the long pole, but as you say the expected redesign won’t happen until 6. They have enough hardware that they can do other experiments in the meantime. And they can at least learn some new things about reentry, like whether the ablative layer even works (though it turns out that the missing tiles already included this layer, so they have some data already).
