Are they really planning to reuse that booster immediately? If I were in charge I’d want to tear that puppy apart to see how well all of its components fared, and use a different booster for the next test.
No, a bunch of engines are bent out of shape and there’s some other damage. But they wanted to see if they could maneuver it back onto the launch mount while it’s up there. They’ll probably do various systems tests and then take it down and tear it apart. Eventually, though, they will just plop it back down on the mount, stack on another Ship, and launch within the hour.
That’s another consequence of having recovered the booster: They can get all sorts of data from it. I mean, they’ve pulled others out of the ocean, but then you don’t know what happened on re-entry, versus what happened when you smacked into the water.
I did not follow this triumphant latest flight in detail. That’s for tomorrow.
So can we indeed close out this thread and start a new one on Starship development and progress because Starship did indeed reach orbit this year? Even if “this year” has been redefined along the way as 2024, not 2022? 
We’ve totally skipped past several intermediate thresholds as well. “Will the hot staging technique work out this year?” ,“Will the Super Heavy booster be caught this year?”, “Will the Ship successfully reenter and perform a backflip this year?”, etc.
So many milestones to go, though. Actual payload, orbital refueling, and catching the Ship are some biggies, though.
Boop. It’s so gentle when the contact point touches down.
Well, relatively speaking. That contact point would certainly kill my cat, and I don’t even have a cat.
Went back and reread the high points of this thread. It’s been a long couple of years, with worrisome delays, and frustrating partial successes. But I think we’ve turned the corner. It will take a lot of work yet, but I don’t think anyone dismisses Starship as a pipe dream anymore.
IMO, it’s actually been a remarkably smooth development program. Sure, there have been some delays, some from the FAA and some from SpaceX, and because they have a “hardware rich” program we’ve gotten some nice views of things blowing up in various ways. But each test has made significant forward progress in several ways. Huge challenges like hot staging and the tower catch just worked on the first try. There’s still plenty to do but if they can simply keep up the current rate they’ll have an extremely capable vehicle in a couple of years.
I finished Eric Berger’s book Reentry a couple weeks ago, which told the story of a fair number of current and ex-SpaceX employees. There was one attitude that came up more than once: the person was working through an exceptionally difficult problem, but they thought that if the company could just get through that particular hurdle, then maybe they would let off the gas a little and take a breather.
But they never let off the gas. It’s just unrelenting forward progress at the maximum possible rate. Many burn out. But… even the burnouts appreciate their time there, and some get pulled back in, as with an addiction.
It doesn’t look to me like they’re letting off the gas. It almost seems like they’re accelerating. I still can’t believe they just caught a 250 ton booster in mid-air on the first try. It wasn’t even a sketchy seat-of-their-pants thing; it just worked perfectly, with every component working exactly as expected. On the same day as IFT-5, Blue Origin was scheduled to have a suborbital flight… which they delayed due to a GPS issue. Just the most basic shit imaginable. SpaceX had zero technical issues that day, with only a slight delay due to a boat in the exclusion zone (every damn time!).
They now have the first and second landed orbital-class booster designs before the competition even has one (before some of them even have one on the drawing board!). They’ve lapped the competition and are still going. It’s incredible.
Oh, and did anyone else notice that the video feeds worked perfectly this time? They were good with IFT-4, but perfect with IFT-5. A dozen high-def video streams transmitting through the rear of a goddamed plasma sheath on a spacecraft returning from orbit at mach 25 while maneuvering to a pinpoint landing… with zero dropouts. This is of course the same technology that the FCC said a year earlier was not reliable enough to serve a few rural broadband customers.
I enjoy threads like this but really, the comments (including my own) are mostly just noise. They miss the broad picture. Sometimes I wish I could just wake up in 5 years to see the progress that’s been made (I don’t really wish this; I actually like to see the intermediate progress). It would wash away the noise and really show off the full direction of the program. I think many have still not quite figured it out yet.
As the OP, I would be perfectly happy if a moderator renamed it to something like that.
But it’s probably worth keeping the previous posts for historical perspective?
Moderator Note
I have updated the thread title.
Great footage from Mexico:
Dios mío!
Probably the best public viewing area since you can get closer than you can on the US side. Though I’ve heard it’s not particularly safe.
I knew it was going to be a success and it was still nail-biting to watch. Thanks.
It really resembles a helicopter landing. Come roaring up to the LZ, slam on the “brakes” to a near halt a couple/few vehicle-lengths away from the planned touchdown point, then carefully hover into the right 3D spot and orientation, make contact, and shut down.
In one sense the remarkable thing isn’t the control required, but simply the excess power to carry the excess fuel to permit hovering at the end of the flight and still deliver meaningful payloads to orbit.
For sure having enough excess also depends on computer speed & precision of control so the time spent hovering is short. If that maneuver was hand-flown by a human it’d have to be done at 1/10th the speed = 10x the fuel burn. Which margins even Starship doesn’t have.
From DOUBLE STAR by Robert Heinlein, 1956:
Our Moon being an airless planet, a torchship can land on it. But the Tom Paine, being a torchship, was really intended to stay in space and be serviced only at space stations in orbit; she had to be landed in a cradle. I wish I had been awake to see it, for they say that catching an egg on a plate is easy by comparison. Dak was one of the half dozen pilots who could do it.
I’ll be curious to see what they find out or do about the very small anomalies that showed up when Super Heavy returned:
- Methane leakage from the fueling port
- Damage to one of the lower chines
- Visible discrepancies in the 2nd engine ring during landing
- Reported engine bell damage from aerodynamic forces in the outer engine ring
Leaving unstated the rather expensive process of learning who couldn’t do it. 
Although they have the licence to do that flight again I don’t think I can ever remember a time in which SpaceX successfully tested something and then merely repeated the same thing again. So I’m not sure we’ll get another flight as quickly as people seem to think, unless they can find some worthwhile new test within the existing launch licence.
There are two big reasons for the two-stage landing that you noticed:
The first, as you guessed, it’s that the most efficient landing is at max thrust with min hover time. The ideal would be that you burn at the last possible moment such that your velocity reaches zero at exactly zero altitude. But the engines can’t throttle that rapidly, and there is too much margin for error. So instead they scrub off almost all the velocity in a big 13-engine burn (at roughly 5 gees!), then reduce to 3 engines for the final landing.
The 3-engine landing looks very delicate, but only in comparison… I haven’t checked, but I suspect it’s still at least half a gee. Each engine has ~250 tons thrust, and the dry mass is about 250 tons, so even with some residual fuel and the engines throttled down, there’s still plenty of acceleration.
The second big reason is that they want one last check that everything is in order before completing the landing. And so the 13-engine burn happens with a lateral translation vs. the tower. If something fails, you don’t have a 250-ton object colliding with the tower at 1000 km/h. It hits a field or concrete pad nearby, which will still do some damage but not nearly as much.
Only if things look good does it translate over, which it does with 3 engines and a relatively low velocity.
Sort of ironic. They had the license to do the same thing again, assuming everything succeeded. But they’d only do that if something failed, denying them the license. If everything succeeded (as it did), there’s no reason to do the same thing again.
But as you said, maybe it’s possible they’ll find something new to do within the scope of the license. I’m not sure what it says exactly.
Not only can they catch a rocket, they can catch-22!