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FAA statement

(Mar 13, 2024 09:19 PM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ][...] License or no license, space nuts are pouring into south Texas [...]

I'd wait for the second attempt. Something is bound to fizz, or else idiots will be boating or whatever or in an area they shouldn't be.

https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1LyxBnOvzvOxN

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Ship 28 is in orbit!

The booster boosted perfectly, hot-staging worked great, the booster performed its boost-back, the grid fins controlled reentry, but the landing burn didn't seem to go as planned and the booster impacted the Gulf of Mexico at close to mach 1.

Once in orbit, S28's cargo bay door appears to have opened, unclear if it completely closed.

The fuel transfer experiment is completed.

The in-space engine relight didn't happen.

And reentry got into peak heating, then comms were lost. Unclear if it's the plasma blackout.

There wasn't any re-acquisition of signal and S28 has been lost.

So bottom line is that launch, staging and orbital insertion appear to have been near nominal. All the failures concerned recovery and reusability. Which means that Starship is close to establishing itself as an expendable orbital heavy lifter, the largest and most capable of that breed. But recovery and reuse still need quite a bit of work. That's not unlike Falcon 9, which was already flying commercial payloads to orbit before they succeeded in landing one.

View from Isla Blanca park on South Padre Island

https://twitter.com/SpacePadreIsle/statu...8530142339

NASA astronaut at Isla Blanca likes it

https://twitter.com/zenanaut/status/1768309553068679630

Dr. Z likes it

https://twitter.com/Dr_ThomasZ/status/17...9921370356

NASA administrator likes it

https://twitter.com/SenBillNelson/status...9694642398

Liftoff from SpaceX feed

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1768267464062943676

Video clip by Zack from the SpaceX feed showing the booster grid fins struggling to control B10 as it descended and its impact with the Gulf of Mexico at just under Mach 1 when the landing burn failed to relight. (Cuz of fuel-slosh?)

https://twitter.com/CSI_Starbase/status/...8442623073

Views of plasma during S28 reentry over Indian ocean

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1768279990368612354

SpaceX photo of ascent from Gwynne



Drone shot from Elon



Reentry plasma beginning to form over the Indian ocean from SpaceX feed. In the video it gets *much* more intense and camera is eventually fried before communications were lost.

Starship Gazer got in as soon as they opened it up and photographed the launch mount. It shows no sign of damage and seems to be saying "What? Did something happen today?"



Meanwhile the establishment "news" media are trying to spin a triumphant day into defeat. The takeaway seems to be that Elon Musk's giant rocket suffers another failure. Despite it being a successful demonstration of the largest-payload orbital heavy lifter in the history of spaceflight. (At 5,000 tons, it was the largest flying object in human history.)

If you want real Starship news, watch the damn livestreams and follow the alternative media, not these idiots.



And not to be outdone by the "news" media, the FAA weighs in

"A mishap occurred during the @SpaceX Starship OFT-3 mission that launched from Boca Chica, Texas, on March 14. The mishap involved both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship vehicle. The FAA will oversee the SpaceX-led mishap investigation. https://bit.ly/4ccYzaT ."

https://twitter.com/FAANews/status/1768303183862927810

It's just stupid to treat every milestone not achieved as if it was an airliner crash, calling for a crash investigation. They don't do it for every expendible booster that dumps its stages in the sea, so why now? (Probably because Elon's politically unpopular in Washington DC)

Marco Langbroek of the Aerospace Engineering dept at Technical University of Delft calculated S28's position when plasma first appeared and where it was when communication was lost

The launch catches some spring breakers at the McDonald's drive thru in South Padre Island by surprise (about 5-6 miles from Starbase). Isla Blanca park at the south end of SPI was filled to overflowing with space nuts, but some of the spring breakers at this Gulf coast beach resort were oblivious to the history being made.

https://twitter.com/Truthful_ast/status/...5733590105

In orbit. From the looks of it, the tiles withstood the rigors of launch and staging pretty well, without all of them popping off.



The internet (the internet is infallible, right?) is already gravitating to the theory that S28 burned up on reentry because it was tumbling uncontrollably as it reentered.

Here's the video as it played on the SpaceX feed where the camera is fixed to the ship with the Earth spinning in the background. It's sped up, the rolling was slower than this in real time.

https://twitter.com/CSI_Starbase/status/...5463604444

And here is the same sped-up video with the Earth stabilized and the ship's motion relative to it shown. It illustrates very well that the ship was rolling on more than one axis when it entered the atmosphere and hot plasma started to form from air friction heating. Obviously the heat shielding tiles wouldn't be effective if they weren't oriented into the windstream.

My infalible layman's intuition suggests to me that the reason the heat shielding didn't work well enough is right here in this video for all to see.

I'm actually quite heartened by this, since it would suggest that the problem isn't a fundamental weakness in the heat shield design but rather a much more easily fixed failure of the attitude control system to keep the vehicle stable.

https://twitter.com/ophello/status/1768481359209849070

And some are jokingly blaming Tim Dodd... (Of course we don't know if the tumbling theory is correct or if the attitude control thruster system is what failed. Or even if it did, if it had anything to do with what Tim said to Elon that day... but it's funny.)

https://twitter.com/BingoBoca/status/176...1895822815

Eric Berger hits one out of the park at Ars Technica explaining what yesterday's Starship launch means and why it was so revolutionary.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/th...-to-space/

Excerpts:

"This was the third test flight of Starship, and for the second time in a row, the Super Heavy booster completed a full-duration burn and executed a successful "hot staging" separation from the Starship upper stage. This is significant because it means the most powerful first stage ever built can now be considered operational...

This is fine progress for just the third test flight... Starship will clearly take longer. It is the more difficult technology...

Just to put a fine point on this, Starship this week did what every rocket in history this side of the Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, and Space Shuttle has done before: achieved a nominal orbital insertion and lost its first and second stages.

The flight "failed" only because SpaceX is pushing Starship for full reusability...

But even with those caveats, Starship is already the most revolutionary rocket ever built. Because of a relentless focus on costs and cheap building materials, such as stainless steel, SpaceX can likely build and launch a fully expendable version of Starship for about $100 million. Most of that money is in the booster, with its 33 engines. So once Super Heavy becomes reusable, you can probably cut manufacturing costs down to about $30 million per launch.

This means that, within a year or so, SpaceX will have a rocket that costs about $30 million and lifts 100 to 150 metric tons to low-Earth orbit...

For fun, we could compare that to some existing rockets. NASA's Space Launch System, for example, can lift up to 95 tons to low-Earth orbit. That's nearly as much as Starship. But it costs $2.2 billion per launch, plus additional ground systems fees. So it's almost a factor of 100 times more expensive for less throw weight. Also, the SLS rocket can fly once per year at most...

But it's not just the cost or the payload. It's the cadence. SpaceX has four more Starships, essentially, ready to go. We have already seen SpaceX's proficiency with the Falcon 9 rocket. Does anyone doubt we'll see double-digit Starship launches in 2025 and many dozens per year during the second half of this decade?...

This is the future into which we got a glimpse this week."

This says it all (SpaceX photo)

Elon says:

Max payload of Starship V1 in expendable mode (like the other rockets) is ~200 tons.

V3 is expected to be ~200 tons with full reusability and ~400 tons expendable. Length will grow by 20 to 30 meters and thrust to ~10k tons.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1768543877756060148

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SpaceX says:

Starship returned to integrated flight testing with its third launch from Starbase in Texas. While it didn’t happen in a lab or on a test stand, it was absolutely a test. What we achieved on this flight will provide invaluable data to continue rapidly developing Starship.

On March 14, 2024, Starship successfully lifted off at 8:25 a.m. CT from Starbase in Texas and went on to accomplish several major milestones and firsts:

For the second time, all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy Booster started up successfully and completed a full-duration burn during ascent.

Starship executed its second successful hot-stage separation, powering down all but three of Super Heavy’s Raptor engines and successfully igniting the six second stage Raptor engines before separating the vehicles.

Following separation, the Super Heavy booster successfully completed its flip maneuver and completed a full boostback burn to send it towards its splashdown point in the Gulf of Mexico.

Super Heavy successfully lit several engines for its first ever landing burn before the vehicle experienced a RUD (that’s SpaceX-speak for “rapid unscheduled disassembly”). The booster’s flight concluded at approximately 462 meters in altitude and just under seven minutes into the mission.

Starship's six second stage Raptor engines all started successfully and powered the vehicle to its expected orbit, becoming the first Starship to complete its full-duration ascent burn.

While coasting, Starship accomplished several of the flight test’s additional objectives, including the opening and closing of its payload door (aka the pez dispenser,) and initiating a propellant transfer demonstration. Starship did not attempt its planned on-orbit relight of a single Raptor engine due to vehicle roll rates during coast. Results from these demonstrations will come after postflight data review is complete.

Starship went on to experience its first ever entry from space, providing valuable data on heating and vehicle control during hypersonic reentry. Live views of entry were made possible by Starlink terminals operating on Starship.

The flight test’s conclusion came during entry, with the last telemetry signals received via Starlink from Starship at approximately 49 minutes into the mission.

While our team reviews the data collected from this flight, Starship and Super Heavy vehicles are preparing for upcoming flights as we seek to increase our launch cadence throughout the year.

This rapid iterative development approach has been the basis for all of SpaceX’s major innovative advancements, including Falcon, Dragon, and Starlink. Recursive improvement is essential as we work to build a fully reusable transportation system capable of carrying both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, help humanity return to the Moon, and ultimately travel to Mars and beyond.

Thank you to our customers, Cameron County, spaceflight fans, and the wider community for the continued support and encouragement. And congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting third flight test of Starship!

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/...p-flight-3

(Mar 15, 2024 10:08 PM)Yazata Wrote: [ -> ]Elon says:

Max payload of Starship V1 in expendable mode (like the other rockets) is ~200 tons.

V3 is expected to be ~200 tons with full reusability and ~400 tons expendable. Length will grow by 20 to 30 meters and thrust to ~10k tons.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1768543877756060148 [...]

Here's a visual comparison between the two:

https://twitter.com/FelixSchlang/status/...7168410039

Left: Current SpaceX Starship Design

Right: Proposed V3 Starship. (150m)

Speechless. What do you think of this?