Successful Raptor on-orbit relight demo! That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites! Big milestone for the program.
And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's still connected to Starlink too. The ship's cameras are still working underwater! I wonder if they will be able to recover it intact?
We're getting some great views of the heat shield post-reentry. That's great data for the heat shield team. The heat shield is the biggest remaining question mark in the whole program. Reflight without heat shield refurbishment will be required for the whole architecture to work, and it's never been done before. None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one.
They were real satellites but deployed on the suborbital trajectory of this flight, so will have burned up over the Indian ocean about the time that the ship re-entered.
The goal was to get about 20 minutes of testing the new satellites in space, not for them to have any chance of becoming operational.
Starship hasn't been entering a full orbit so far because it would be really bad if the relight burn did fail - chunks of ship would rain down a few days/weeks later on some random area anywhere within 27° of the equator. On a much smaller scale this has been an internationally embarrassing problem for China's LM-5.
I imagine they built these a long time ago (anticipating fewer test flight problems) and have probably improved the design since then making these obsolete. They are going to build thousands so they can't be too precious.
Around 20 minutes into the flight, they deploy 20x v3 sats. Google search tells me those cost more than 1M USD each. Yikes... they burned up 20M USD for a "few tests". Damn, space is expensive! The official video says that SpaceX only had twenty minutes to test the deployed sats before they fall back to the atmosphere.
It might be possible. Allegedly they had previously asked the Australian government about towing the ship back to a port.
Marine recovery can be much more difficult than it might seem though. Towing this nearly 200ft structure weighing a decent fraction of the weight of the boat that is not designed to be seaworthy, potentially full of explosive gasses and that could rapidly start breaking up and taking on water, nearly 300 nautical miles back to shore, would be quite difficult and dangerous. I would be impressed if they ever do it.
yeah it's suppose to tip over, explode and sink. Not sure what they're going to do with it now. If some other country comes in and salvages intact Raptor3, flight computers, and all the other ITAR regulated tech SpaceX may have a big problem. SpaceX will probably ask the airforce to gift them a jdam delivery or something.
They can relatively easily sink it, and in fact are required to be able to in order to get their US FAA launch license. As part of the environmental assessment specifically, but I could be wrong on that.
For those curious, they have recovery teams on sight who can essentially shoot it to further puncture the hull or attach explosives even. They have experience with their Starship boosters not sinking off the coast of Texas and floating into Mexican waters.
Not sure. As far as I know the US is very supportive of SpaceX for space supremacy and Australia would almost certainly go along with what the US administration asks. If it hasn't happened yet it's more likely because SpaceX didn't/couldn't do it than Australia denying the request.
I hope they watch some of these, because movies are full of disappointing rocket scenes that are so many orders of magnitude away from the real thing that it's like representing a skyscraper with a treehouse. There is considerable room for reality to inspire fiction a bit more on this front.
Lots of missing tiles still. Best case is it's all infant mortality and replacing just those tiles will result in a durable heat shield for many more flights. Worst case is every flight loses that many tiles and the ablative underneath can't be reflown until replacement.
I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing a heat shield refurbishment attachment to the launch tower that allows technicians to access the side of the ship to patch up between flights without leaving the pad. They're going to need some kind of solution for the many back-to-back HLS refueling flights.
They've intentionally flown a number of times with missing heat tiles in sensitive spots, and many of those don't have the ablative coating. One of the benefits of steel over aluminium.
Summary: almost, but not quite entirely successful.
Launch successful. Booster separation and boost back burn looked good. Booster failed to relight some of its engines and hit the water hard. Successfully deployed the 20 starlink satellites. Successfully reignited an engine in flight to prove potential for de-orbit burn on future flight. Re-entry looked good and less spicy that some previous attempts (subjective). Such a soft landing that the ship flopped into the water without exploding and floated for a good long while (possibly still floating for all I know). Got some great drone footage flying over the heat-shield.
So the ship itself is looking increasingly good (so far) but they still seem to be having some issues with the booster.
Speaking of which, are there any fan theories on why the boosters seem to have persistent issues? Or is the plumbing still churning fast enough that we keep seeing N=1 issues for successive designs?
Until the past couple launches it was the ship that had the issues. Had to be blown up a couple times, failed to relight in vacuum, lost an engine and nearly failed to get to the suborbital trajectory last time. Meanwhile the booster had the most spectacular success in the catch, and has yet to result in a catastrophic failure.
The leading theory, from what I can tell, is slosh. The flip on separation is relatively violent, and while there's not much fuel left compared to the amount at launch, it's still heavy enough to do damage.
Oof, yeah, one good slosh at 11G is probably all it takes. On the bright side, there is probably a trajectory that works and I wish them luck in finding it!
Its amazing to see this beast and think that all the firey stuff isn't the primary energy source (although totally necessary to pushing the mass out the back fast enough).
The reason it’s very small is that almost all of the energy in hydrogen and oxygen is not stored in the chemical binding energy of these things going together.
The vast majority of it is stored in just the rest mass energy of the protons and the neutrons, which chemical burning doesn’t affect at all.
They juiced the engines up big time with the Raptor 3 upgrade. The rest of the stack is leaner and meaner too, but engines are the single biggest upgrade.
It's why they have plans to elongate the stack further. If they have this much TWR to go around at liftoff, they can afford to cash in that extra thrust to pack more fuel.
Given how little payload is onboard at the moment, what an empty can starship is, i sure hope for their sake there is a lot a lot a lot of zip to spare right now.
The ship had a little over 34 tons of payload, but there should be almost no difference in thrust to weight ratio at launch for an empty vs full payload bay. The stack itself weighs over 5,000 tons at launch. Assuming it’s 5,000 tons at liftoff, adding another 65 tons of payload would change the thrust to weight ratio from 1.65 to 1.63.
The actual objective was to crash very slowly into the water, and to that end, I believe they planned for about 13 out of 33 to light for the "landing burn". But only about 5 lit up at that time, giving them a higher-speed crash-landing. However, the landing site was exactly where they needed to be, and done in complete safety, so that is good.
They had been explaining the post-ignition abort from last week, and showed how 4 out of 33 engines had failed to light on the first stage. This was due to some kind of pump malfunctions. They said that if 1 or 2 fail, it's OK to launch, but more than 2 is an automatic abort. So they were able to replace the finicky motors and fully test them out.
Who knows what caused the underthrust for the landing burn, but at least all 33 engines were operational at launch, and they got plenty of data from this test run, and all Starlink v3 satellites have been deployed successfully for their "suborbital speedrun", so this test flight is doing really awesome!
Damn so this probably means another identical suborbital flight in 6-8 weeks. It is looking less and less likely that we will see either prop transfer or a ship catch this year.
i don't think so - the ascent looked good. i don't think they need to put the ship on another suborbital trajectory because the booster landing burn failed. also, i don't think this impacts prop transfer or ship catch - both are separate problems.
I think this is technically true but that they want a seamless suborbital flight (like the last two for the Block 2) before they move forward on those other goals.
Why wouldn’t they only care about seamless ship flights, to get some value out of the launches, while they’re still learning and figuring out how to light booster?
Yup. Some of the Youtubers (like NASA Spaceflight) had video of it hitting the water pretty fast and hard. That said, this is the only test failure so far. I'm cautiously hopeful they get Ship to touch down. (it will explode after it does because of physics but stepping lightly onto the ocean will be a win)
And I sit corrected as it was able to lay down without rupturing the tanks and 'sploding. So that's another win.
What I find really amazing and cool is that while its reentering the engineering team can drive it around and look at heating effects on tiles/spars/etc all while retrieving telemetry by Starlink. What many people don't realize is that early capsules were the shape they were because that was the limit of what they could simulate for re-entry forces. The ability to get real time confirmation of systems response in re-entry is a capability that we've never had. So there's that.
So at this point it looks like they are down to un-reliabile raptor relights on the booster.
The size of ship being big enough to create a hole in the ionization to continue to communicate with Starlink is something that I think gets underappreciated.
Is this just a fancy way of saying lightweight fragile aerospace tube with hot stuff all over the outside and flammable stuff on the inside will not respond well to falling on it's side or is there some other thing going on here I don't know about.
Sort of? Everything is weight. And since it isn't a design feature to lay down in water there isn't any weight budget for making that modality survivable? So typically when it falls (and this thing is really tall) the interior tanks detach from their mounts and hit the inside walls and rupture. The skin is still hot, oxygen and remaining fuel mix and it goes boom. This time we had fires but no boom. I look forward to hearing what was different.
No, that's exactly what happens. Most of the time.
There was a couple of times when SpaceX accidentally soft landed a Falcon 9 first stage into the ocean, and had it just float around. They're yet to do that trick with Starship though.
I am pretty unconvinced that any of the past explosions of starship used that feature. It’s very convenient to have an “explode” button so you can say all of your rocket detonations were intentional, but they are often leaking fuel or dropping chunks before they explode.
from what i understand it kind of is a failure. It's suppose to tip over, explode, and sink. That way you don't have all this ITAR regulated tech floating around in international waters.
> They actually said they’ve been trying different techniques to not have it explode like rolling.
interesting, i had no idea. I was going off the info i remembered about when those unexploded parts floated into Mexican waters. It's exciting to see Startship v3 have a perfect test flight. Hopefully the next launch will be fully orbital and they can start making productive use of the capability.
Yes, because it would have landed a few hundred meters out from the chopsticks. It swings in towards the catcher as part of its slowdown. If it doesn't slow down, that doesn't happen.
By the time that the booster returns to the landing zone, the Flight Termination System (FTS) is AFAIK no longer active and cannot be reactivated. Which makes sense because it is a bunch of high explosives, now nearing some valuable equipment.
The SpaceX solution is to steer carefully and have the default trajectory end in the sea. Only if everything looks good, is the booster redirected to the tower.
I wonder what happens when things go wrong after everything looks good. They punched a good number of holes in their landing barges when they were perfecting Falcon 9 landings. And I imagine this crazy catch tower is a lot more expensive than a barge with a flat surface.
Falcon 9 engines (Merlins) cannot throttle down, they either run on max power or they don't. Which means that any attempts to land are incredibly risky. You have to reignite them at the precise moment to slow down the rocket to zero at the height of the landing platform, or else. That is why the maneuver is called "suicide burn", and it is incredible that someone actually perfected something as crazy as this. The landing legs can absorb a tiny error, but anything over that = Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (Monty Python theme starts to play in the background...)
Raptors are much more finely controllable and both stages of Starship can even hover when necessary, so the total control envelope, while not perfect, is much larger. That is why they can even try to land into a steely embrace, with no landing legs used.
It’s interesting the cognitive dissonance this brings out in me. As much as I think Musk carries a fairly reprehensible aura, I would still like to see SpaceX succeed. Space has a funny, transcendent way of inspiring us.
Agreed. Separating those thoughts are valuable here and in life in general.
But like a lot of tech, the cool shit can have serious negative effects as well and it's important to be able to, again, acknowledge both appropriately.
The success of SpaceX has made him the richest man on the planet, and his money makes him dangerous.
He's only dangerous if you operate a legal system that allows people to be dangerous. Elon Musk has never been the problem. As long as he's not breaking the law it's all good.
The last 18 months have proven that the rule of law doesn’t apply to those who are rich enough to ~bribe~ lobby anyone who would enforce the laws.
(A donation to the presidential library, a new RV for the judge, a PAC that runs campaigns for the senator and rep - and Bob’s your uncle. Might cost 0.001% of your assets if you are a trillionaire. Cheap at ten times the price.)
It's always a trip to see the people who practically fetishize the law -- the archaic language, the written form, the pressed uniforms -- turn around and not only develop a self-serving selective blindness to their own team's violations of the law, which is the kind of nonsense you expect in politics, but also employ "stop punching yourself" logic to blame the law itself for those same violations. Absolute madness.
Billions of AI capex for a model that’s consistently forgettable and space computers, presumably data centers in space, are funding SpaceX?
Isn’t the opposite?
SpaceX has an extremely profitable launch program and a profitable Starlink. It’s a straightforward would be better off financially without X and X.ai.
instead of having an enterprise AI strategy, they've become a landlord, renting capacity directly to competitors on a month to month basis, competitors who are building their own compute and can cancel this rental contract at any time.
so they'll use that to try to print rosy revenue numbers, except the size of the contract is until 2029 and the month to month payments can be cancelled at any time.
and they only have capacity to rent out because they don't have an enterprise AI strategy, they overspent on GPUs for an audience that never showed up for Grok, it has abysmal usage and its radioactive because it creates CSAM and is based af. It's just outdated Nvidia hardware that they are trying to recoup just a little bit of value from.
and if you believe in space datacenters, I've got a bridge in brooklyn to sell you! actually space datacenters are the 21st century bridge in brooklyn, whoever is selling you about it thinks you are stupid. Elon Musk just wanted the trillionaire print by all accepted metrics, and got that, so he said anything and disclosed it properly, and 4.9% of the shareholders bought that plan because they were greedy hoping for a pop. The pop came. now they're underwater.
Elon Musk doesn't believe the total addressable market of SpaceX's other business lines are that valuable in comparison. 25 trillion TAM for enterprise AI applications, 3 for everything else. ruh roh
You should look at the S1 they filed with the SEC. All of their space related stuff including starlink shows a total possible market of 2 trillion, whereas they show AI as over 26 trillion. Basically almost all of their value is AI, not space related activities.
You don't need to virtue signal your dislike of Musk-the-person to be allowed to show your admiration for the exploits of SpaceX. I don't care what you think about Musk and I'm pretty sure I'm far from the only one. Yes, SpaceX is doing great, hopefully other companies will follow their clear lead and make space access more reliable and 'affordable' so that those great wheels-in-the-sky may one day become reality.
Actual, literal Nazis got us to the Moon and frankly no one cared. Not then, not now. Try separating politics from the advancement of humanity, you'll feel better.
"Do you know that your closest colleagues (including von Braun) have stated in company at Zinnowitz that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of he rocket? That they had worked, under pressure from yourself (Dornberger) at the whole business of development and only in order to obtain money for their experiments and the confirmation of their theories? That their object all along has been space travel?"
The men had been arrested by the Gestapo and were going to be executed. Dornberger was also threatened with arrest, but he managed to get von Braun and the other released.
Another interesting factoid about the V2 program is it accelerated the collapse of the Reich.
How can that be, you might ask?
The V2 program was an incredibly expensive program, and sucked up enormous resources. But the V2 proved to be an inconsequential weapon, and did very little damage, because its guidance system was primitive.
The V1, ironically, was effective. Not because it wreaked critical damage on Britain, but because it was cheap to build and deploy, and the British spent a great deal of resources trying to stop it.
It reminds me of the current drone warfare.
Hitler also demanded that it be used to attack London, blowing up civilian homes, when it would have been much more effective attacking the staging areas for D-Day.
You've mentioned Dornberger's book to me in a previous conversation regarding Von Braun, and though I haven't yet had a chance to read it I just did some research on it.
From what I can tell it looks like like an amazing source for technical details of the V2 rocket but there are many problems with it that make it unsuitable for the kind of argument that you're attempting to make here.
First of all, the book wasn't written by Dornberger -- it was ghostwritten by a Nazi propagandist and aerospace enthusiast named Franz Ludwig Neher[0]. Neher is an interesting fellow, having been imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp for 18 months in the early 1930s and later enjoyed a career writing numerous Nazi propaganda biographies for 'Unsere Jagdflieger', a pulp booklet series issued on Hermann Göring's authority.
Looking at Neher's biography page on the German wikipedia we see that from 1951-1962 Neher was the press officer for the 'Gesellschaft für Weltraumforschung' or 'the German spaceflight society' in English, and even served for a time on its board. In 1952 Von Braun commissioned Neher to work on a Mars-project novel named 'Menschen zwischen den Planeten' which was published in 1953 apparently with poor reception by the public. Some reprints have a pretty cool looking cover though.[1]
I don't have time right now to dissect the actual claims made in V2 by Dornberger/Neher regarding von Braun but it's safe to say from everything I found that this is a very unreliable source for the argument that you're making as the man writing Dornberger's memoir was simultaneously the paid publicist of the German spaceflight lobby and von Braun's hired novelist.
Even in a first year history course essay assignment there's absolutely no way that this book would be considered an acceptable source to reference for non-technical details. Any instructor who was knowledgeable about the subject or who actually researched the sources would underline that passage in the essay with fat red lines and would scrawl the same kind of criticisms that I just made above in the margins in red pen. If your argument was the central thesis of the paper and this source was the evidentiary corner stone of that thesis you'd at best receive a C, but more likely a D grade.
In reciting this Werhner Von Braun apologia you have fallen for Nazi propaganda. Don't feel bad about it though -- we've all bought the big lie at one point or another. It's hard not to -- as the Nazis were pretty much the Wayne Gretzky of propaganda.
I'd like make this a teachable moment by introducing you to the concept of historiography[2] and one particularly important (and coincidentally German) author in the field: Leopold von Ranke.[3] It isn't always easy but proper analysis of sources is critical for making accurate claims and analysis of historical events.
No, the arrest most certainly happened, it's corroborated from enough sources that this isn't in question, though from what I can tell the arrest report no longer exist, but there are contemporaneous notes made by Alfred Jodl. Additionally from a cursory search there are conflicting reasons given for the arrest including what you've mentioned and even communist accusations.
When I said "Nazi" earlier I should have been more precise, I was referring to von Braun, Dornberger, and his ghostwriter as "Nazis" even though AFAICT von Braun was the only actual card carrying Nazi of the bunch.
With that said, the problems with this source remains. The ghostwriter has a financial conflict of interest with the subject which would bias him to make as flattering of a portrayal of the subject, and the people involved are all intrinsically untrustworthy because well... look at the bunch... a Nazi propagandist, a Major General from the Wehrmacht, and an actual Nazi.
Look at the circumstances around this, you have the Nuremberg trials having only recently taken place which saw a bunch of dudes these guys personally knew publically shamed and hanged, These guys themselves were directly targeting civilians with these weapons, It's the middle of the McCarthy Era -- There's no way these guys could tell anything remotely close to an objective truth.
Everything they're going to say in this context is to save their skin. They're gonna write "Oh yeah, arrested by those evil Nazis for being too peaceful and science-minded" not something more realistic like "von Braun made a deal with the devil that was an absolutely psychotic and dysfunctional authoritarian regime and the deal almost blew up but that von Braun is so damn lucky he must have a horseshoe up his ass."
An adjacent topic that I've wondered about for years is his come to Jesus stuff after the war. It's plausible that he had a serious reckoning with his world view from his experiences during the war but it also seems just a little bit too convenient, you know?
I do wonder whether much of USAID and similar programs are an instance of a road to hell paved with good intentions. If professional NGOs hollow out existing local organizations and destroy local ability to organize on the cheap, they may be basically condemning entire countries to perpetual dependence on someone's else's politics and budgets.
You're implying that von Braun was still a nazi when he was working in the US (he wasn't) and you imply that Elon Musk is a nazi in the first place when he's done nothing to indicate that.
Well, the Nazi party was banned permanently by the Allied powers on Oct 10, 1945, so technically every member still alive became an ex-Nazi at that point. Including the leaders later hanged in Nuremberg, and, of course, Wernher von Braun.
Of course some people say that once a Nazi, always a Nazi.
I fucking _loathe_ Trump. I still hope he makes America better. But god I fucking hate him. I think his policies are garbage, but I'd love to be proven wrong. All I see is bribery and nepotism... but yknow, he (finally) nominated Jared Isaacman. I'll fucking take it.
Musk is anathema. But yknow, I'm glad he's started the companies he has.
Starship is the SpaceX Cybertruck - lots of impressive engineering, but still doomed by terrible design choices from you-know-who. Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large. Doomed the whole enterprise.
I know launches are exciting. Landings, doubly so. But eight launches to get to the moon is not a good rocket. Sorry.
Aluminum alloy and carbon fiber, because both have high strength to weight ratios. Steel is denser, so its specific strength isn't as high. But it retains strength at both lower & higher temperatures, and it's much cheaper. It's also cheaper/quicker to modify a steel design, as welding is easier than aluminum (at least for low carbon steels used in Starship). And if the same structure were made of carbon fiber, it would likely have to be fabricated from scratch.
I think choosing steel has helped Starship, as it allowed the ship to survive reentry and land in the ocean despite heat shield failures. Had the ship been made of aluminum, I'm certain earlier missions would have broken up when the aluminum heated up and lost its strength.
Does this mean you think Starship HLS will fail? It will use a steel structure and is planned to be part of future Artemis missions.
Also are you willing to stake money on that claim? How about this: If before July 25th, 2036, any version of Starship made primarily of steel (HLS, future Mars versions, etc) has an apogee above 2,000km, you pay me $1,000. If not, I pay you $1,000. If you like, we can bet some other amount up to $10k. And if you prefer, the loser could donate the amount to a non-profit/charity of the winner's choosing.
And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's still connected to Starlink too. The ship's cameras are still working underwater! I wonder if they will be able to recover it intact?
We're getting some great views of the heat shield post-reentry. That's great data for the heat shield team. The heat shield is the biggest remaining question mark in the whole program. Reflight without heat shield refurbishment will be required for the whole architecture to work, and it's never been done before. None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one.
Edit: Spashdown video https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2080804682918764619