Stayed up late last night and now about to undersleep again. I really hope they launch early in the window tonight!
Weather still only 55% favorable… but that’s better than yesterday, which was only 45%. And they didn’t delay the start of propellant load this time. They can wait a bit just before launch, but not long enough to clear a whole swath of bad weather.
ETA: Woo! Weather is currently green (along with everything else).
Less than 2 minutes. Livestream here:
Very clean looking launch so far. IIRC, some of the engine outs on booster were intentional, to test various engine out scenarios. Anyway, clean splashdown.
Yeah…that was an intentional crash of the first stage to test engine failure and still land somewhere no one would be hurt (ocean) or, more likely I think, to not damage the launch/landing pad.
I was aware that they were targeting the ocean, but I wasn’t 100% sure that they were still planning an intentional engine-out. In any case, these boosters are already obsolete, so it’s better to stress test them than bother landing them.
Niiiiice. Payloads are deploying. I think I saw one tilt a little and bounce off the door a tad, but I suspect everything is designed to handle a little jostling (the normal Starlinks are designed like this).
Some damage on the way down, and a pretty impressive blowout on the aft skirt, but that was also where they removed the most tiles as a test. Past peak heating, and it still looks pretty stable.
Gonna be interesting if it successfully relights. Those engines must have taken a few hits.
Good relight and a very gentle-looking water touchdown. (Except for the expected rapid disassembly after the tanks breached).
Perfect flight. Hit all the objectives, and ended with a precision landing. Burn-through on various components was totally expected–with the skirt having the most intentional damage (since they knew it was the least critical part).
Ref @Lumpy’s various comments over the last few days…
The goal here wasn’t end-to-end success as NASA always strove for. It was pushing out the corners of numerous subordinate envelopes along the way.
A different and more nuanced measure of merit to be sure.
Whether they succeeded in that on this flight is still a semi-open question to my limited knowledge. But IMO it is important to use the correct scorecard on the effort.
Indeed. They have no need or motivation for a “perfect” flight end-to-end. They intentionally pushed the envelope in multiple ways and it would have been surprising if there weren’t some less-than-optimal events along the way. Last flight, they learned the structural margin on the downcomer pipe. They were a little less aggressive this time and didn’t have the same problem. So they’ve bounded the envelope.
And now, we see that there isn’t a great deal of excess margin on the tiles, which is hardly unexpected. Though the craft as a whole does have impressive margin, given that it had a successful pinpoint landing despite the damage.
At some point they’ll want to wrap a tidy bow on everything and have a perfect, clean flight, all within the envelope. But for now there’s no point.
Hard to be sure since we don’t have full camera views on all flaps 100% of the time, but I didn’t see any damage to the front flaps, which were the problematic ones on earlier flights. The Starship v2 moved the front flaps leeward a bit to get the hinges out of the airstream, and that looks to have done the trick. The damage we saw was all at the rear where we know they intentionally degraded the TPS.
At least we got an actual test of the TPS, and the stage is recoverable for analysis. If they weren’t trying for and didn’t expect an undamaged orbiter I’ll give them this as a success.
“Recoverable” is a stretch, given the explosion after tipover. But they’ll be able to collect a bunch of tiles and other debris to help drive the analysis.
The Ship looked noticeably orange as it landed. I’m not sure what the cause is but I speculate that ablated metal or other material deposited on the surface of the tiles.
I mean, public perceptions do matter. There probably would be benefit in doing a flight without anything intentionally-degraded, with the goal of end-to-end easily-visible success. The question is just whether there’d be more benefit to that than in a flight where they push the envelope in various ways. Eventually the answer will be yes. When? I dunno.
If the test was successful enough that they don’t need to make any major redesigns, what launch cadence may we expect?
Minor redesigns take time too. They have unusually patient capital.
But when they’re confident we’ll see a rate ramp for sure.
Given the reusability goals, whipping out a bunch of prod version 1.0s w a lifespan of 3 launches each would be silly uneconomic while still developing towards v2 w a 10-launch lifespan and v3 in design for a 30-launch lifespan.
It’s a different engineering model. If it works. And if, unlike NASA or ULA, you have the patient money to get there.
Do they? SpaceX’s budget is only very indirectly affected by public perception. SpaceX is affected by regulations, which could be influenced by the public, but so far there’s no evidence that the FAA or anyone putting their finger on the scale somehow. Perception could affect hiring, but I don’t think they want to hire anyone that would be turned off by a few failures.
Eventually, perceptions will matter–say, when it comes to funding the Artemis program–but by that time, everyone will have forgotten any failures in the test program, as they do for everything. Who talks about all the failures in the Falcon 9 booster landings today (except for me)? Who talks about that time that Crew Dragon exploded on a test stand, or when they suffered numerous ongoing parachute failures? Just completely forgotten about, as will the 9 months of partially stalled Starship progress once the thing is flying regularly.
Both the Booster and Ship are obsolete already, not to mention the Raptor. They’re all in the process of moving to their equivalent of “version 3”. These are all major redesigns, though they keep the basic Starship characteristics (diameter, material, propellant, etc.). It was certainly useful to finally demonstrate that their redesigned flaps were effective (not to mention the payload door), but they’re very far from freezing anything about the design except in the broad strokes.
One thing that we knew about but Musk brought up again is that Ship will move from 6 to 9 engines. My suspicion is that this is not just for performance but also reliability. The current design can’t handle an engine out of a vacuum engine due to imbalanced thrust–the vacuum engines can’t gimbal and they are too close to the edge. But with 6 vacuum engines, they can handle a failure by turning off the opposite engine. The thrust of the remaining 4 engines should be sufficient, at least to get to an abort mode.
Picture of a bunch of the missing tiles:
Really they’re all over the place. I haven’t worked out the geometry of the aft section view, so I don’t know which of these, if any, contributed to the mini-RUD, but there’s a good chance they’re related. There are also some missing tiles on the aft flap hinge section.
Good sign for the resiliency of stainless steel that it can survive that level of damage.