The booster catch yesterday seemed more dramatic than the first one. My brain has not accepted it is viable long term. The maneuverability at the end was crazy to watch live.
Its nuts. I can't get a paper ball in the waste basket 15' away yet SpaceX is landing the height equivalency of a 20 story building with a margin of error of 1 cm.
Well, oops. Breakup about 10 minutes in for the most recent Starship. Propulsion and getting to orbit = very hard, y'all.
There is no way to sugarcoat it. That was very disappointing even though their iterative approach expects and accounts for failures. Back to the drawing board. On the other hand, the catch of a Superheavy booster is something I'll never tire of watching.
Help me out: I don’t follow this enough. What is the mission of the last two test flights? What would have happened if all went as planned? btw: did you see the picture from inside the engine bay of the missing raptor. It fell out and left a hole. Guess some DEI hire didn’t tighten down all the bolts?
Nothing. There's an assembly line of starships that get tweaked as they go along. The SpaceX rocket that NASA now uses to take astronauts to space had many fails before they got it right.
Appreciate the response, but that just describes their iterative process. When someone like @A_3PO posts “disappointment ,,, back to the drawing board” and @B-Bob Likes the comment, isn’t it natural to ask for clarification…what were they testing in the recent iterations, that was a “disappointment.” for instance, are they still primarily testing the ability to capture and reuse the booster, again. Like, did they actually launch with a booster from a previous launch? Seems that is a reasonable goal to actually reuse one. Or are the current iterations also testing other things…like, I don’t know, reentry/reuse of other stages?
Watch the Starship launch feed before launch. They explained everything. SpaceX doesn't have a problem launching Starship into orbit. They have already done that multiple times. They haven't developed a reusable starship and it doesn't sound like they have a certain path. Primary objective: Reusable starship (re-entry is the problem). Starship has survived reentry multiple times, however it is not reusable. Secondary: Catching Starship and testing deployment bay. There is not a going back to the drawing board. Its not a complete failure. Its disappointing the latest ship failed in the same manner the previous ship failed. So either the failure has not been properly identified or the solution was not adequate. Keep in mind they are more concerned with surviving reentry for reuse than it being a practical ship for use. There will be many many more iterations.
I’m asking what were the objectives of the last two iterations/flights. You make it sound like they were prepared to catch starship in the last two flights. So, if everything they planned to go right, went right, we would have seen Starship attempt both re-entry and catch? I guess I’ll watch the launch feed explanation of the last one, if I can find it.
The last two objectives -Test heat shield/tiles on re-entry. If successful, the current designed will be used for reusable Starship. Starship current design survives re-entry fine - its just not reusable. -If Starship lands exactly where they target (in the Indian Ocean), the next successful starship flight could potentially be a candidate for catch. -The last two starship's had dummy next gen Starlink satellites aboard to test the satellite dispenser. These are the three objectives that I recall. Side note: SpaceX opts for efficiency over a slow bureaucratic method. Improving thrust and removing weight is critical. Musk believes if you don't have failures, you're not trying hard enough. The first 5 minutes is dead air. The next 1 min and 15 seconds is a SpaceX promotional video. The launch itself begins at the 35 minute mark. https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-8 or
I'm no rocket scientist, but I would think that at least one of the top 3 objectives would be "Do Not Explode"
@heypartner -- thanks for asking. I have zero special knowledge about SpaceX's starship or NASA's Artemis (well, a little about artemis b/c I understand their basic engines). Since I know a good bit about getting to orbit and back, I've been worried for years about this next phase of space exploration b/c it just seems that people will not have the all-consuming obsessive compulsive check every detail 30 times mindset that the engineers did in the 1960's. That's kind of what you need for something as difficult as a rocket engine, which is basically a "controlled explosion." Maybe the new systems have a million safeguards that can bypass a need for old-fashioned human OCD, and this would not be the first time I've been lapped by whipper-snappers. EDIT: on what I "like"d -- I was agreeing with A3PO's love of watching the catch of super-heavy boosters. I feel the same way. But I don't know to what extent peeps will go back to any drawing board, or CAD program, or deep learning algorithm.
When I said go back to the drawing board, I just meant after two consecutive starship explosions, they have serious work to do to prevent a third. The timelines for in-space fuel transfers and the first starship catch attempt are at stake with Launch 9. The question is can they retrofit the current boosters already in line or have to scrap them.
At least dysentery isn't on the checklist for Oregon Trail 2.0. Emphasis rapid in unplanned rapid disassembly.
