[ChuckMcM]

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)

[ChuckMcM]

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.

Congrats to everyone who worked on this.

[dylan604]

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.

[cucumber3732842]

>it will explode after it does because of physics

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.

[ChuckMcM]

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.

[m4rtink]

Starship is quite a bit sturdier thanks to the stainless steel used & very efficient engines that make it possible to have the structure heavier.

We had it demonstrated in the past with Starship surviving multiple burnthroughts and now in failing to explode. :-)

[ACCount37]

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.

EDIT: Of fucking course.

[DetroitThrow]

How many times have they managed to catch it in the last 8 or so missions? There have been a few misses like this already with the boosters

[testing22321]

They only tried to catch it twice, and they caught it twice.

[baegi]

They planned on catching the booster on flight 6 as well, but aborted due to some issue with the launch/catch tower

[usehand]

I guess they also failed to explode it

[pclmulqdq]

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.

This was a great flight, though.

[chasd00]

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.

[testing22321]

They actually said they’ve been trying different techniques to not have it explode like rolling.

This way they got way more heat shield data, which is, I think, their most critical item they need to learn from and iterate.

[chasd00]

> 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.