That was unbelievable! Goodness gracious, the things we can do.
A more distant perspective:
That thing is coming in fast as hell until the last moments. And it just slides right in.
That was one of the most amazing things I can recall seeing, ever.
WOW!!!
Absolutely incredible. The replays look like they are playing at 2x speed until they slow that rocket down. And the shots of the sonic boom interacting with the clouds… just wow.
And as hard as the acceleration looks, it’s even harder than it looks. You simply can’t appreciate how enormous the booster is.
Reentry is starting! See some plasma.
Couple of missing tiles. Hope it survives. But they also have an ablative layer that might help.
God, I love how those plasma shockwaves look. Beautiful.
Some good views of a toasty stainless flappy. Nice rainbow oxidation effect. No burn-through yet!
Through peak heating. Funny how the most firey-looking phase is actually past peak heating.
Uh-oh! I see some hinge burn-through.
Still on a good trajectory, though. Not nearly as burny as Flight 4. Seemed like just the middle of one of the hinges.
Ha ha! They put a buoy out at the landing zone. Nice boom as it fell over. Huh, they might even recover some pieces. (and you know they nailed the landing position this time since otherwise the buoy wouldn’t be there)
Absolutely incredible flight. Still needs some work on reentry, but they’re making progress even there. And that catch was amazing.
Getting good heat shielding on a moving part is proving understandably complicated. If they want this thing to be reusable I presume that replacing every heat tile after each reentry is somewhat of a limitation. Though of course that’s quite a bit of an improvement compared to having to build a whole new rocket!
I believe this is the last Ship with the old hinge placement. The new ones will be smaller and more leeward, hopefully taking the hinge out of the hottest part of the plasma stream. But they wanted to fly the ships that they’ve built.
They’re licensed for a Flight 6 already, according to the FAA. But I wonder what they’re really going to push for this time. Another try of the same flight path with new hardware? Or something new entirely? They’ll need a different license if they change the reentry position, for instance.
Now they’ve caught one, how long before we see them reuse one of the boosters? That’ll be cool.
I never really doubted that they’d get returning the booster to the launch pad to work, although if there had been a glitch first time that would have been understandable. Heat shielding is what will make or break the whole Starship concept. It can’t go drastically overweight (what tanked decades of proposed reusable designs), and it can’t require weeks of nursemaiding in the hanger while tiles are painstakingly replaced (one of many things that tanked the Space Shuttle).
Back up after a good nap…
I went to bed almost having forgotten that they have a recovered a booster now. The catch itself was unforgettable but I hadn’t yet internalized that yeah, in principle they could refly this one. At the least, they have to get rid of it somehow! The dog that caught the car.
Yes and no. 100% reusability is absolutely the goal. But they have an extremely viable rocket now that they’ve closed the booster reusability loop. I mean, it was viable before given that no one else supports reusability, but Starship is big enough that they at least need booster recovery to have viable clients (such as Starlink).
I dunno how long it’ll take them to perfect Ship reusability, but the latest flight gives them a lot of headroom. They can complete Artemis with the current system if they have to.
So much incredible imagery.
You can see the mid-ring of 10 engines gimbaled outward to give the inner three their own max gimbal range. And they really used that range on the landing.
Why would it be different than the government charging any other kind of “application fee”?
Aside from my kids being born, I think this was probably the most amazing thing I’ve seen in my life.
I watched it from South Padre Island beach with weather that was absolutely perfect. You could see the booster the entire flight with the naked eye. When watching the booster’s last few km of travel I thought it was going way too fast but holy shit, it could not have looked any smoother when it was caught.
The sonic booms hit me right as it entered the chopsticks which confused my brain for a split-second thinking it hit the tower. Scarred from SN4 and SN10, the ‘small’ fire that remained on the booster after landing had me a bit worried but obviously it turned out ok.
I believe there is one more Ship with the ‘old’ style flaps. However they may decide to skip it and start the v2 test flights.
Congrats on getting to see it in person! Everyone involved with the project should be exceptionally proud. It’s in the top 10 engineering accomplishments humanity has ever undertaken.
The main SpaceX stream really exaggerated the movements. I thought it was swinging pretty wildly at first. But in other views you can see that it comes in very smoothly, and then does a perfect lateral powerslide to ease into the chopsticks. Plenty of clearance with the tower.
And yeah, it looks like it’s coming in way too fast! Well, it was decelerating at over 5 gees at one point. It scrubs off velocity crazy fast when all 13 engines are lit.
I’ll definitely make another trip down there at some point. I just wish we got a little more warning!
Maximum burn at the last possible moment is the way to economize on fuel. One science fiction story once described this as akin to catching an egg on a plate.
KSP players call it a suicide burn. If you’re a fraction of a second late, you lithobrake. If you’re a fraction of a second early, you’re at zero velocity far above the surface with no fuel left.
But there’s no F9 in real life…
Starship is back on the launch mount as if nothing had happened:
Just as a point of comparison, a Falcon 9 booster would still be a couple days away from arriving at port by barge, and getting it back to the launch mount takes weeks longer.
That is one of the two main reasons for the catch: not just reusability, but rapid reusability. Of course, it requires that the booster be able to refly without significant refurbishment.
The other reason is just that it saves mass. Landing gear pretty much always costs 5-10% of your mass. It’s around 8% on Falcon 9. The more robust you make it, the heavier it gets. SpaceX can make a very heavy system that has no mass penalty because it’s all on the tower.