I don’t think any Starships for Earth landings are planned to have landing legs. I think they are supposed to be chopsticked.
Agreed.
If they touched the sea surface in a vertical attitude at near zero velocity in every direction they made a fully successful landing followed immediately by a deliberate booster disposal maneuver.
It still seems nuts to me to be risking not only the vehicle but also a very expensive landing structure every time you touch down, but on the other hand every bit of extra mass you spend on the upper stage on stuff like landing legs comes straight out of your payload.
The rocket equation is brutal. Leaving weight on the ground pays dividends at a fantastically wonderful rate of return.
Were you watching a real feed? I got caught by a fake Blue Origin stream on YouTube a few weeks ago, that had a surprise hold so an AI deepfake Jeff Bezos could steal cryptocurrency from viewers.
Launch and shockwaves.
When a rocket like this launches, aside from triggering the flight termination system, there really isn’t any ground control on the trajectory. In the launch today even with the engine out on the booster and the engine out on the ship, there was a drone streaming video right in the path of the upper stage splashdown of the in the Indian Ocean. That shit blows my mind.
Hmm, so they didn’t catch the booster because that part of the operation is considered a ‘done deal’?
Bullshit. They seem to be in ‘one step forward, one step back’ mode.
That was rather my reaction as well. The thing they failed at this time was something they’d both failed at once then succeeded at several times threafter. Suggesting reliability isn’t actually there, and success is just whenever the luck doesn’t happen to run out.
Our now absent friend @Stranger_On_A_Train used to comment that in all things spaceflight, there just aren’t enough trials to make statistical arguments about whether something is reliable or not. For e.g. Falcon 9, that might be becoming a stale argument; I don’t have the data or the math skills to know.
But for any machine of great complexity with just a few trials under its belt, “statistically proven reliability” is inherently an oxymoron.
Exactly. The same applies to that stubbornly persistent idea of powersats. A bad idea that just won’t seem to go away…
Edit: a bit off topic here, perhaps better suited to the general space exploration thread…?