Scott Manley pointed out that it seemed to flip in the wrong direction, with one of the grid fins passing through the plume and inducing a roll. Will be interesting to hear more about that.
The videos are great!, but the rest of it is never going to work lol, just never. Even without a rethink about how to get heavy payloads to another planet this is still good entertainment.
The hardest problem in the entire design had yet to be solved. Having a robust human rated tile system that can be rapidly turned around is a huge engineering challenge that kind of breaks the whole point of the design if it doesn't work. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually give up and go back to a cheaper throw away second stage, or throw out the tile design completely and try for some evaporative cooling approach, again.
Bear in mind that a lot of what's happening to the tiles now is deliberate experiments to see how much weight they can shave off and how many failed tiles they can survive. Given that the vehicle is routinely surviving reentry at this point, it doesn't seem "hard" to make the tiles more robust by paying for it with added weight. The question is whether they'll have enough weight budget to pay for it? But at this point...probably? Not my area ofc.
Human rating is irrelevant to what they want to do, it is only a NASA rating - if NASA wants to ride they will have to come up with a rationale but private astronauts can fly on it.
I really hope to see the evaporative cooling make a comeback but it seems unnecessary when it’s returning to earth right now.
It would also be interesting to see them do shallower dips into the atmosphere then pull back out and repeat. Like a skipping stone. Lots of expansion contraction, but might work better without tiles.
They’ve already shown they can replace all the tiles in a couple of days with removal and new install. No reason they couldn’t do even faster turn around with just re-install if that was needed.
And human rating is a NASA requirement they won’t have to worry about for a few years.
Even if it landed perfectly how is it going to be rapidly reusable with all those tiles breaking and needing repair? Then if that problem was magically engineered-away through some sort of materials science breakthrough, it still makes more sense to me to keep your big ships in a space staging area and your smaller ones as atmospheric gophers.
All what tiles breaking and needing repair? There was remarkably little visible damage this time around compared with previous flights.
There's no materials science breakthrough needed -- the shuttle used ceramic tiles successfully its entire service life. What's needed is engineering work, and that's what SpaceX has been doing.
You know a whole the size of a quarter can wreck the entire spacecraft and make it effectively throw away? Also, you'd want to use this many times. Making a system robust while not requiring months of refurbishment is really really hard.
Deliberately testing its survivability with that failure mode over different parts of the vehicle has been one of the major foci throughout the entire test campaign, and it has proven remarkably resilient. That generalisation pretty much does not hold for starship.
Weren't the tiles one of the worst obstacles to quick turnaround times for the shuttle? It was something like 18 months before one could be launched again, and that's if they were in a hurry.
SpaceX has been specifically engineering both the tiles themselves (e.g. manufacturing) and the way that are used on the ship to be much more rapidly repairable than the Shuttle.
Could you tell me more? I suppose a heavy two-stage rocket is not optimized from the point of view of the rocket equation, but I know nothing about this field.
In short, the more stages the better to discard mass once it isnt necessary, and the larger to the better to improve the ratio of (ship+payload) to fuel.
The design is wrong in a fundamental level. The rocket equation says it all. By adding so much extra weight for “reusability” (which they don’t release numbers on in terms of cost and means nothing when the rockets end up in the Indian Ocean) they nerf the performance.
Hence tens of launches to make the moon and zero payload to orbit in a dozen flights.
This forum is full of fanboys but their arguments don’t hold up to reality. Saturn 5 had men on the mock. This much time and this many rockets in. Starship has launched a dozen times for $15B - over a billion per launch - and it hasn’t made orbit.
Say what you want about SLS, it works.
Musk is a conman and Starship is a failure. Like the F-35 supposed libertarians and conservatives will happily throw money at it until it achieves its targets, after multiple redesigns, and then claim success as if the neigh-sayers weren’t right all along.