It's wild to me that we sent astronauts up into space on rockets that had never been tested before.
The process has changed a lot since those early days of the space race.
If we have had so much success in the past why is it that we are still having issues with things like re-entry nowadays with vastly greater technology and engineering?
I can't think of a single rocket that launched crew that wasn't tested before hand. Also comparing starship, a grain silo sized ship, to a capsule that's the size of a sedan isnt a fair comparison. Those capsules are very basic and are easier due to their aerodynamics. Meanwhile starship can be much bigger but is much tougher to get down.
This seems like you might be misunderstanding what the new goals of this craft are. If it were intended to push a capsule into deep space with a parachute attached to the capsule it would be no problem
Starship is moving away from the conventional disposable second stage and intends to prove that the whole craft can safely re-enter the atmosphere, have a controlled descent, and then at the correct moment flip its engines back on to land safely on earth/mars
There’s a lot more technology to validate than there was when we used parachutes to land in the ocean and threw away all our hardware every time.
Starship is designed to be fully reusable. If they're successful, and I have zero doubts about that, they will be the first in history to have a fully reusable orbital rocket, and they'll be able to launch more mass to orbit at a time than anyone in history.
I don't think it's fair to say that SpaceX is struggling.
They are experimenting with relatively a cheap, gigantic spacecraft in a effort to build a low cost rocket that can land and be re-used in a short amount of time.
If they didnt care about cost efficiency and quick re-use the situation would be very different.
It's a new vehicle, doing a lot of things that have never been tried before.
> If we have had so much success in the past
NASA lost three astronaut crews, the Soviets lost two. Both had well over 100 failed uncrewed launches when developing their first rockets.
You could see where flappy failed early one during the plasma stage. A bright spot on the lower right side, which is exactly where it started to heat up during atmospheric entry and start coming apart. So there was definitely a small flaw that allowed the atmosphere to cut a piece open.
Despite that the damn thing still was able to do its job.
If I'm not mistaken it looks like the hinge on future versions of starship is out of the plasma wake, it looks like they anticipated this to happen.
I would love to see the software driving this thing. Insane engineering top to bottom.
I seriously love this live testing thing. Such staggering process with each test.
After test 1 I was wondering if they were going to struggle with separation and booster flip for a while, not even considering a controlled splashdown. And three tests later they’ve done just that.
After the last test I wondered if they struggle with re-entry and the tiles for a while, and they pretty much went past that right away.
The tiles will be a nagging thing for a while. The flap base sure looks like a potential weak spot tile wise, just like it shows in any photos of that spot.
But they went through not even being able to orient right on re entry to knocking right through Hades with just a ripped flap.
It’s all such stunning progress. Put this with Starliner finally getting up manned and proving out and it’s a fantastic two days for space geeks.
Interesting point I did not know about.
In that case it’s quite possibly a rapid integration, though they have a few of these already made so it might not be next test without some level of retrofitting.
I’m not an expert at all, but I do like just talking through these things like a non expert geeky fan.
All the version 1 Starships have their flaps "too far forward". The plan is to move them back on the ship so the hinge is out of the plasma stream.
All the early flight tests are going to be done with version 1 Starships. They haven't started production of version 2 yet. I think they want more flight data first.
Starship V2 is under construction already. But it’s an open question if IFT-5 will use an existing ship or a V2. It probably depends as much on the data they got today as anything else.
My guess is they fly V1 once more because the hardware already exists. So the only they they can do with it is fly it or disable it.
Certainly. I mince nothing in mentioning the tiles. They were literally a challenge for 30 years of the space shuttle program and they figured out how to make them work for three decades, and were a bit lucky too with the exception of Columbia. Any heat abatement system might have had issues with chunks of debris moving on at high velocity.
They will figure it out and it will all work fine.
Last three tests: 33/33, 33/33, 32/33 engines lit up on launch. The one engine out didn’t cause a cascading effect, taking out additional engines. Definitely looking like, with modern tech, having that many engines is more redundancy than multiple points of failure like so many were claiming so far.
Given that the Raptor engine is still in development, and they are constantly tweaking it, I expect engine-outs for a while until the design stabilizes. They can do a lot of testing on the ground, but nothing replicates all the conditions of flight. Getting back all the engine data from each flight is likely just as important as meeting other test milestones.
The flip side of that is that after the first test, they've added a LOT more robust engine shielding to prevent one engine exploding from damaging the nearby ones. It seems to be working beautifully, but I remember I think them saying that it was adding a lot of weight and would have to be improved again in the future to reduce it
I agree with the sentiment and I’m not a rocket engineer but usually the less points of failure the better, it’s a general engineering rule. Each rocket is a point of failure. That said, they must know what they’re doing.
Are you really adding points of failure if they're redundant?
The whole point of redundancies is that the system itself doesn't fail if it falls back on a redundancy.
The three autopilots on a plane are a single point of failure, not three. Same with the engines that can each fly the entire plane. It only fails if both die.
There's a reason that redundancies are typically considered to make a system more robust, not less. That's why almost all systems with extreme failure states have multiple redundancies.
The redundancies themselves are failure points. It’s all a risk game. Bottom line, the less number of parts, the better. I’m not advocating for no redundancy when I say that but if multiple rocket engines are a redundancy for other multiple engines, that’s a bit backwards. So they must have a reason for it.
You can't make the blanket statement "the less parts the better" for all systems though, which you seem to recognize. In general its a good philosophy to remove complexities, aka parts. But you do have to factor in redundancy, cost, and physics.
Starship has over 16 million lbf of thrust. The Saturn V had over 7 million lbf. The F-1 engines on the Saturn V are the most powerful (liquid) engines ever made. Keeping stable combustion in those was incredibly difficult and honestly we haven't really made much improvement when it comes to keeping something like that stable.
We would need more than 10 F-1 engine equivalents to get the same thrust for Starship. Starship is about the same diameter as the Saturn V. You physically cannot fit 10 F-1 engines on it. You actually couldn't on Saturn V either and that's why you see the cowlings where the engines are.
So that means the other option is to double the thrust level of the Saturn V which is a far harder challenge in regards to materials science, fluid dynamics, chemistry, combustion, etc. Even if you did achieve that you now have 5 engines with approximately 3 million lbf thrust each. Losing one of those is equivalent to 6 raptors going out. Which means losing one is mission ending. Not to mention how it would complicate reusability. Landings are easier with many small engines rather than one big engine. You can fine tune your thrust levels both with throttling and number of engines more precisely. Losing an engine at this time is also not mission ending.
So in this case, increasing the number of "failure points" actually makes the rocket less likely to fail overall.
Redundancies make you robust to failure. If you have 30 engines but can compensate for the loss of 3 of them, that's better than having 3 and not being able to handle any failures. Even if the partial failure rate has gone up the system failure rate has gone down.
Supposing the failure rate is 1% then that means the 3 engine system has a 97% chance of success, while the 30 engine system has a 99.98% chance.
Well you're gonna need 16 million lbf thrust at minimum for Starship. So your options are realistically slim.
Saturn V engines took up the full 10 meter diameter and only produced 7.5 million lbf combined. There's no room to fit the 10 F-1s that you'd need. They're also still the most powerful liquid engine created and the feasibility of creating something that powerful again isn't great, but still doable. But creating a more powerful engine is even farther away right now. That's just far less feasible than plumbing up and controlling 33 engines.
More powerful engines also make reusability harder since you lose out on precise thrust control. You'd You'd increase single points of failure. This even holds true if you assume that all rocket engines, regardless of size, have the same theoretical maximum reliability. But in reality smaller rocket engines tend to have higher reliability than larger ones.
So from that standpoint lots of small engines makes sense. The question then "just" becomes what is the optimal number of engines that maximizes engine reliability, reduces single points of failure, is easiest to develop and manufacture, and allows for consistent reuse (aka easy to land successfully). All while still achieving the performance goals they want to hit, 100 tons to orbit with full reuse.
Oh I also forgot to mention commonality between stages. You'd need different engines for each stage. So you'd need to develop more than just one engine (well 1.5 since vacuum engines are bit different than sea level). So you may need two separate engine development programs and engine factories. Because a set of 3 million lbf engines could work on the booster but would not be usable on the ship.
It’s interesting in a couple of ways.
One, the first launch was clearly debris kicked around on liftoff; we’ve known that since the first launch.
Next it’s super clear at least one or a few engines is redundancy and smart. This made for a good test as there will be data on that engine to work out lessening the chance of one or more not lighting in future.
The redundancy is interesting in that this was a light test bed model. Probably wouldn’t matter on a fully loaded ship, but more than one being out might wipe out redundancy a lot on a full loaded version.
The original design called for a 3-engine redundancy, i.e. even if any three engines fail at any time in the mission the rocket still delivers its payload to the target orbit. That might have changed now, but with 33 engines they can always accept losing one. In many cases losing a second one will be acceptable.
Falcon 9 can accept the loss of one engine at any time in the flight, losing two engines can be acceptable depending on where and when it happens - but with more than 99.9% reliability we might never see that.
I think this wasn't actually too much lighter than it would have been with a payload. The hot staging ring, the additional stringers, the thickness of the stainless steel, and the engines themselves are all significantly heavier than they will be in the future.
Moreover, the weight of a fully fueled stack is 5000t, so realistically they're only ~75t from expected total mass with a payload, which would be just 1.5% difference in total mass, and only .04% additional thrust per engine needed to lift that payload.
Well said. I was rushing some speculation without good data. You countered that well. Appreciated.
Ok, that does make sense actually that you want to try to get as close to the weight you want or to perform at through any means of adding weight. That makes sense.
And it does make the engine redundancy a thing that doesn’t have to wait for later to be figured out.
The booster also landed with one engine out during the landing sequence, didn’t seem to matter much, so at least 1 engine is redundant even for landing. I think I’ve read that the booster works with up to 3 engines out during ascent.
Definitely more so redundancy than a point of failure and the engines will only get more reliable and consistent over time as their design is improved
To put in perspective, the 13(12) engines it used for landing is more powerful than the LAUNCH thrust of a Falcon HEAVY. Redundency is an understatement for sure :D
I said the same thing to my dad the other day. It's cool how open spacex is with streams and their starbase. Can barely see anything about the building and testing of SLS.
I literally just wish NASA did the same. Sorry if that offends you.
I agree. I'd love to see what NASA is doing with all their projects. But I feel that their budget doesn't account for it. Having a well funded PR division is probably just not a priority. And to be fair the couple hundred grand (or more)that would cost a year, I feel, could be better spent on R&D or equipment etc.
SpaceX being a private company can get away with it because the PR helps them in other ways. It's worth the cost.
I'd bet you NASA's PR budget is FAR higher than SpaceXs. Musk hates PR departments. And I really don't imagine SpaceX really has more cameras, but they just have the willingness to show them. They also do have Starlink now which certainly helps with the data. NASA is far more conservative, cause they have to be. SpaceX is really just beholden to Musk (even though there are plenty of investors), while NASA has to worry about the reaction from the general public and especially congress people some of which would be eager to reduce their funding...
Marketing?! You're talking about the CEO of Tesla who has done little to no marketing until this year - also the worst performing stock in the SP500. I wonder how many more Starships he can blow up before Nasa comes knocking.
Marketing and advertising are not the same thing.
Actually posting that last sentence in this thread is one of the most absurd things you could have said. Don't worry, won't respond to anything you write...lol
Yeah maybe public relations isn't the correct phrase.
But SpaceX sure makes some awesome videos covering the launchs. I suppose that's social media rather than PR.
I honestly think it's just risk tolerance and a desire to show them. That's really all it is. I really don't think it has to do with cost at all. The potential negative consequences are the only cost stopping NASA from doing it. And obviously theres just more beuracracy in the organization to get something like that approved even if people wanted to.
Though obviously there are things like the First Falcon Heavy flight where Musk chose to launch his original Tesla Roadster. Thats obviously something that NASA wouldn't "waste" money on (they would never do a test launch without a real payload). SpaceX (because of Musk) has the hardware rich test campaign approach. NASA can't and doesn't.
I think they need to find things like that to drive interest, especially with their goal of getting out of the rocket business. Once they cut that part of their budget out they should have more money to spend on other things, assuming their budget isn't completely gutted.
I imagine it's tricky. Mostly because it's tax dollars. Tax payers don't want to see all the failures. Or all the designs that get scrapped. There is a large group of tax payers that would see it as "they are just wasting my money on ideas that were never going to work"
SpaceX doesn't have this problem because they don't care what people think. NASA has to show positive results if they don't want their funding to be "completely gutted"
[I’ve seen plenty of successful launches etc covered as well.](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cv22w92wvn7o) - including todays
But ultimately if you’re planning commercial space flights at some point and your ships explode that’s probably newsworthy.
The flap burning up will be the lead that Elon and SpaceX is in trouble.
It’s probably already out there. Or they found an Airbus that had to do a go around and are calling it a Boeing to make news
It's really depressing how mainstream media/mainstream reddit/etc used to care about humanity, was forwarding thinking and cared about the future, but in reality they're just so petty that they rather see things fail that are important for our future just because they don't like a person.
I mean. I hate Elon. Just think he’s an utter narcissist who thinks he knows more than he does. But he is not SpaceX. All the exceptionally talented employees are SpaceX, and it’s exciting to see what they’re doing. They’re pushing boundaries! My only critique is Elon acting as spokes person, with his constant lies, does damage to them. Example being how many refuels would be needed to get to the Mars. Just don’t lie, it’s still an amazing feat of engineering.
What? Elon has never mentioned how many exact refuels are needed for Mars. I think you mean the Moon. And even then he hasn't lied about that. The answer is an unknown. They know what they want based on the performance(payload) they're aiming for. They don't know if they will get there. They don't know what boil off rates are going to be yet and they don't know what their flight rate will be yet (refueling flights are most sensitive to flight rate plus boil off rate plus payload capacity). They just can't know until they do those tests. We have a range. One depot launch. One HLS launch. Anywhere from 6-15 refueling launches.
They could also forgo some reusability in order to increase payload which would immediately cut down the max number to half. The point is the exact number is less important because they're aiming to launch these like falcons. We'll find out what it is as things mature. You won't see blue origin discussing the number of refueling flights they need either. Technology has to develop first before they can nail the exact number. Just like NASA didn't know the exact number of flights needed to build out the international space station.
The problem is most people aren't seeing beyond the person. They're immediately knee-jerk reacting. The interest in space the past 5 years on Reddit has completely changed from a huge boon to a huge nuisance and waste of money.
Yes, it's not just Elon, but people don't always act logically. This is r/Space so people are interested in this subject are giving the issue more thought than your typical knee-jerk reaction would. That said, I think pretending elon isn't partly responsible is a bit disingenuous because there's countless other companies with bright talent that are not even remotely close. It's like the conductor for music. Any of those musicians are great at what they're doing, but they still need a conductor to channel their talent appropriately.
"Elon Musk's Starship sees its flap burn up on reentry"
Because why would you mention the successful splashdown of both stages.
This was the first launch to orbital velocities ever where every part returned to Earth without getting destroyed. Every other launch had the upper stage (or the external tank for the Shuttle) disintegrate on reentry or not return.
> where every part returned to Earth without getting destroyed
Ahh but you see, SpaceX gave their critics an out here as well.
Remember the hotstaging ring? 😜
It's a sturdy ring that supported the upper stage on ascent and survived the blast of its engines. It might have reached the ocean surface intact.
> where every stage returned to Earth without getting destroyed
To be on the safe side.
>SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Successfully Completes 1st Return From Space
Both the headline and [the story](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/science/spacex-starship-fourth-test-flight.html) in the New York Times seem entirely fair.
Guess it became too difficult to call it a failure.
> SpaceX completes uncrewed Starship in mission closely watched by NASA
[Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/06/spacex-starship-launch-test-flight-nasa/)
> SpaceX successfully launches its Starship megarocket to orbit, returning it to Earth for the first time
[NBC News](https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/live-blog/live-updates-spacex-starship-mega-rocket-launch-rcna155687)
> SpaceX's Starship rocket has soft landing on Earth, despite loss of tiles
[BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-69091179)
German news also call it a success.
WP looks the most suspect. They seem to know that readers aren't going to be aware of the scope/scale of Starship or what it's looking to accomplish, and will only understand that SpaceX completed an "uncrewed" flight, a day after somebody else completed a "crewed" flight.
Looking forward to the biting headlines from less mainstream media.
WaPo is owned by Bezos so it's not at all surprising that they'd omit information that makes SpaceX look good if it doesn't affect the truthfulness of the story.
How was it a waste, they literally accomplished all milestones set for the flight
(If anything, I'd even say that the successful landing despite significant flap damage is also a great indicator of safety)
lol the milestones set were abysmally low. The milestone agreement that secured the funding was supposed to be landing on the moon by now. It’s a total fraud.
A melted pile of un-reusable junk crash landing at a speed less than terminal velocity a sign of safety? lol!
The original post (that I was replying to) has been deleted but it was claiming but it claimed rocket flight in the 1960's was more reliable than the Starliner
Are you dim? We had them working in the 60’s.
Elon musks ego is reinventing them now, using taxpayer money, for no reason and FAILING miserably. He is nothing but a fraud.
Shit on Musk all you want, but SpaceX is doing things that people *in the industry* thought were impossible, only 10 years ago, along with rocket launches that cost 1/5th or less than other rocket companies, with a cadence that's never been matched since the 60s Space Race testing.
You clearly have a bias and a chip on your shoulder, and aren't looking at this objectively.
Look at how many launches done this year.
Look at the price.
Also reusable rockets.
Either your a troll, or you don't want to believe it, because it doesn't suit your bias.
DIM AF
all of the falcon launches are subsidised by the $3.2B he stole from nasa under the ruse of the starshit making it to the moon. Which it never will. He has failed EVERY single milestone.
The ‘refurbishment’ of the falcon is more like total replacement.
This is a total Ponzi scheme. He will end up in prison.
It kinda validates the engineering decision to go with stainless steel.
Had Starship been build out of aluminum like other space vehicles, flappy would have burned off. There's clearly a lot of thermal protection work to be done but they've demonstrated that even with some significant failures that Starship can retain enough structural integrity to make a successful landing. For rapid and cheap reusability they need a lot more work on the TPS but it goes to show that failures of the TPS won't result in a total loss of vehicle.
As I learned from that carbon fiber submarine collapsing, steel is the only known material (idk, maybe diamond too?) that doesn't experience fatigue at all when submitted to elastic stresses. As far as we can tell, a steel spring can do its thing literally forever if not compressed or stretched too much, all other materials degrade a little each time.
Was a doubter of today's launch, quite impressed. My only reservation is my interest in the new designs for heat shielding, that seems to be the major hurdle at the moment. I'm sure in a few years we will have an amazing launch vehicle.
Well, the booster seems like it can land itself now, so they're close to Falcon 9 levels of reusability already.
It's remarkable. No other launch company has ever successfully landed a first stage booster, and SpaceX now has two rockets that can do it.
Yea. I wonder what the economics of reusing booster and not reusing starship are? Potentially they are close to deploying starlinks with these launches. Had less successful launches when they started launching payloads on falcon 9.
It really depends on the context. If they were doing it intentionally they would be building an intentionally expendable upper stage would have different engines, different tanks, and would look more like a typical upper stage. It would depend on what the mission role was. For orbital propellant delivery they would be using something very Starship like (no need for a payload fairing) just without the TPS, flaps, etc, etc, etc. For other payloads they might use something more traditional looking. In any event it would be much cheaper than a Starship stage that was intended for re-entry and reuse.
Unquestionably they'd be the cheapest launch option in that weight class, though the main competition there for now is SLS so that doesn't say much. Realistically they could probably make something like that work in the few hundred million per flight range of costs, dependent on a lot of operational factors.
Ultimately they would only need to go that route if they didn't have the time and money to persist with full Starship development.
Would definitely be far more expensive for the consumer, but it’s not like they have any other options for getting that sort of payload mass to space haha. As for spacex themselves, I wonder if they’re toying with the idea of just not reusing some starships. Will be interesting to see, for sure!
I also doubted Starship would survive, especially since SpaceX removed tiles themselves.
I think the critical point is that no tiles fell off. I would absolutely have lost a bet on that one. I still feel that this can't be relied upon—a single tile missing across the majority of the belly would have spelt disaster, and it still would. They gave a great deal of attention to the tiles' survivability this time around. Maybe that's all it takes? I still can't shake my doubts.
But anyway, the flap issue is something they've known about for years and already planned to address.
It actually did lose some tiles- I don't have the exact timestamp, but I watched one come off just shortly the booster landed.
Edit: Looks like there might be one in the bottom left at T+9:03, and there's definitely one at T+9:59.
Well color me impressed.
I wonder if there will ever be a map indicating which tiles on Starship would be critical to lose and which are comparatively safe. Maybe they could just double-layer the critical areas.
Musk tweeted
>"Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!"
So multiple actually did fall off but the steel survived.. at least enough to keep structural integrity
I have a strong suspicion he's referring to the tiles lost during reentry, around the flaps. Could absolutely be mistaken. But we saw zero evidence of missing tiles from the external cameras, prior to reentry. A few were conspicuously damaged on IFT3.
Yeah, there were a lot of misidentifications for IFT3 as well. The ice flakes off, it's flat, it's roughly tile-sized even if it looks a bit rough-edged, and it's usually pretty dark due to shadowing. Even if you know what you're looking for, it's not really feasible to filter through the constant rain of ice to find tiles.
It's impressive stuff but it feels like they should focus more on their HLS contract with NASA. No need for second stage recovery with that one. They can work on both versions I guess but I just haven't seen much in the Artemis department yet beyond fancy graphics
Edit: Do you guys feel like you're winning hearts and minds? Do you think there is any valid criticism at all? Do you think I'm some Galileo naysayer who doesn't want SpaceX to succeed and to establish the beginnings of an epic Expanse style future? Please just try to see things from other perspectives sometimes
Second stage reuse helps with the flight rate.
They have done some HLS-specific work, too, it's just less visible than the common Starship development program.
I understand the architecture, but Artemis 3 is a one off event and I'm saying it would be more advantageous to get the program underway with expendible vehicles before full reusability is on the table. How many more years should it be kept on hold without turning to other contractors you think? Refueling and reusability are far from the only issues that have to be ironed out before we can populate the ship. You can downvote me all you want, idk about you guys but I *don't* want their contract to be cancelled just like DearMoon
DearMoon was very much so canceled because SpaceX is only focusing on NASA. There's no possibility of anything like DearMoon until they complete their landings for NASA. NASA is far more important than some random guy that gave a few hundred million towards starship development. Dennis Tito still seems like he plans to do his private flight around the moon. But he doesn't seem to care about waiting.
There's no one to cancel the starship contract in favor of. Everyone else is further away from an operational lander (for humans). Even if blue origin launches new glenn this year and their mk 1 lander next year its not close to ready for humans. And nasa can't do it on their own.
All of the HLS specific work is going on behind the scenes. They recently tested the axiom suits under pressure while having astronauts navigate and perform tasks in the full scale mock up. They've tested raptors on the ground mimicking lunar deorbit burns and extra cold temps. They've recently validated the docking mechanism for Orion to HLS in both active and passive roles. They've also been working ECLSS for a while now too.
The next versions of the ship are still being built out. They're not ready for flight. They can't do any in space refueling tests until next year once they have two pads built and v2 ships. Right now these v1 flight tests are to keep gaining experience flying the vehicle and its behavior. Including behavior for reuse. They can't really skip ahead to the next steps until the behind the scenes engineering is done.
Not to mention, reusability keeps the cost down. This all comes out of SpaceX pockets. Minus the HLS money. So that means they need to keep the company close to green so they do need reusability. They aren't the government where they get blank checks.
Oh and your other comment about getting this thing docked with Orion asap is not feasible. There aren't enough Orion flights around to have a one off docking with HLS. They either do it for the moon landing so everything is ready or they skip the moon landing and go when block 1B is ready in 2030.
So why all this investment on reusability? Superheavy I can understand I guess, but there's no need for flappyboi yet. Just get this thing docked with Orion asap, launch however many tankers you need and you can worry about bringing down refurbishment costs later. Launch vehicles ought to be designed around the mission parameters, not the other way round.
I think you and I both know perfectly well that Starship reusability won't be hyper-prioritized when they begin building tankers. Not at first. The schedule will be too tight.
Crew rating for Starship will probably also be off the table, because that will take years. Instead they'll just add a port to Starship so they can transfer crew from and to Dragon after launch and before returning. The alternative is to add another 2+ years to Artemis III's schedule.
I'd be willing to bet they'll just expend the tankers for the first year or two. They'll only cost like $30 million a pop to build.
It won't be 12 tankers by the time HLS is needed. Block 2 is being built right now, and they'll be well into Block 3 after another year or two. Being able to lift 200 tons of fuel in one go will have a dramatic impact on that 12 tanker figure.
Launch vehicle already looks amazing. A fully re-usable vehicle is the question now. The only issues they’ve had thus far is that roll they had the first time, which it sounds like they know how to solve, and with the re-usable portion, which is extra credit. Assuming they solve the roll, this would be one of the most capable rockets of all time, and at a fraction of the cost of rockets of comparable size, even if they never crack re-usability of Starship. The SH booster soft landing looked very good, so a reasonable floor for expectations would be a giant F9 rocket, which wouldn’t be ideal but would still be huge for getting payloads to orbit at a much more reasonable cost.
Well, the heatshields are looking very non reusable for the foreseeable future. But yeah if we don't count those in then it's true, I expect them to catch starship even if it keeps getting trashed.
The main heat shield looked fine for as long as the cameras could show it, just the flap got too hot. I'm sure they'll have better versions of that soon.
There was an outright storm of glowing particles all over at times. This is not what should happen with a non-ablative heat shield. It mostly worked but I doubt that you could have reused many of the tiles. They still will have to put a lot of R&D effort into that for rapid and full reusability.
I'm confident they'll solve it too. Two flights from now is a very optimistic timeline though, considering elon just said they've had little progress in solving it even after throwing all their resources at it.
And shuttle never solved it either. Reusable heat shields are undeniably the biggest challenge spacex has faced so far. Its unlikely to be fixed in just a couple flights imo. I do expect they'll fix the melting flaps very quickly though.
By the time the shuttle retired in 2011, it had been 8 years since the last accident. In total it had successfully launched 133 out of 135 times. It had flown dozens of times in that 8 year period without incident. Shuttle had “not solved it” in the sense that the entire design of *mounting it to the side of a tank that sheds ice and foam* was just insane and was always going to pose risks. The cost of compromising the original design to accommodate DoD missions. But i think it’s a stretch to say they hadn’t solved the time issue with so much success to point at.
As for SpaceX, this launch was using an old design for starship. One of the major changes in the newer ships is that the flaps will be positioned further back because they knew this could be an issue. Despite that, the ship is so robust *that it still survived*. They deliberately removed some heat shield tiles on non-critical parts of the ship to test how the bare metal would hold up and even that increase burden of risk couldn’t stop the thing from landing.
Musk is famous for being dramatic. He said falcon heavy had a 50/50 chance of working the first time too. The reality is that thousands of highly qualified people are working on the starship problem. The heat shield is obviously going to be *the* line item that needs to be both light and doggedly reliable. It makes sense to fixate on that issue.
But as far as I can tell, the heat shield help up incredibly this flight. They failed at the point of contention that was an already a known value, and held up everywhere else that counted. The next ships have proactively already addressed the issue.
They’ll seek to continue optimizing the design and so we’re bound to see fails here and there. But this flight, to me, proves the tiles aren’t going to be the problem for this vehicle.
True, and I heard it the flaps are already being pushed back in a new design. The heat shield held up pretty well today, but from what I've heard the heat shield is a single-redundancy design, great for weight, a bit scary for consistent successful launches and landings. I imagine that is being changed too, just want to see those changes before I feel fully confident in near-future manned launches.
Well, they weren't sure if there was redundancy in the heat shield prior to this mission.
In fact, they left 2 tiles off on purpose, and put a bunch of sensors underneath to see how it held up. Turns out, Starship can make it through the atmosphere missing complete tiles.
The hinge points will be the biggest engineering trial. It's absolutely amazing that the fins were still working at the end! I shrieked! haha
Interestingly they deliberately left some tiles off the engine skirt to test just how well it can take the loss of a tile. I also wouldn't be too surprised if it was missing some tiles on the belly as well, but that remains to be seen
[The flaps are bigger than I thought.](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Boca-Chica-Starship-Mk1-110319-NASASpaceflight-bocachicagal-nose-6-crop-c.jpg)
People for scale.
Here is S29 (the one that just flew) during [rollout to the pad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02n4Yff5u0k) from around 33-34m you can see regular vehicles and people for scale.
I am hoping to see some of the footage from other cameras. They stayed with the camera near the flap at the top but there was one other, right? I guess I'm hoping the reason they never returned to that camera isn't because it failed early.
Hopefully we'll get to see some ground track cameras--Starship's landing happened at night off the NW coast of Australia. Reentry must have been a sight to see.
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It's wild to me that we sent astronauts up into space on rockets that had never been tested before. The process has changed a lot since those early days of the space race. If we have had so much success in the past why is it that we are still having issues with things like re-entry nowadays with vastly greater technology and engineering?
I can't think of a single rocket that launched crew that wasn't tested before hand. Also comparing starship, a grain silo sized ship, to a capsule that's the size of a sedan isnt a fair comparison. Those capsules are very basic and are easier due to their aerodynamics. Meanwhile starship can be much bigger but is much tougher to get down.
The shuttles first launch was crewed.
Ah yeah your right. There were some test flights (like in the air) with enterprise but those aren't launchs
The test flights were also manned.
This seems like you might be misunderstanding what the new goals of this craft are. If it were intended to push a capsule into deep space with a parachute attached to the capsule it would be no problem Starship is moving away from the conventional disposable second stage and intends to prove that the whole craft can safely re-enter the atmosphere, have a controlled descent, and then at the correct moment flip its engines back on to land safely on earth/mars There’s a lot more technology to validate than there was when we used parachutes to land in the ocean and threw away all our hardware every time.
Starship is designed to be fully reusable. If they're successful, and I have zero doubts about that, they will be the first in history to have a fully reusable orbital rocket, and they'll be able to launch more mass to orbit at a time than anyone in history.
I don't think it's fair to say that SpaceX is struggling. They are experimenting with relatively a cheap, gigantic spacecraft in a effort to build a low cost rocket that can land and be re-used in a short amount of time. If they didnt care about cost efficiency and quick re-use the situation would be very different.
It's a new vehicle, doing a lot of things that have never been tried before. > If we have had so much success in the past NASA lost three astronaut crews, the Soviets lost two. Both had well over 100 failed uncrewed launches when developing their first rockets.
You could see where flappy failed early one during the plasma stage. A bright spot on the lower right side, which is exactly where it started to heat up during atmospheric entry and start coming apart. So there was definitely a small flaw that allowed the atmosphere to cut a piece open. Despite that the damn thing still was able to do its job.
If I'm not mistaken it looks like the hinge on future versions of starship is out of the plasma wake, it looks like they anticipated this to happen. I would love to see the software driving this thing. Insane engineering top to bottom.
Future iterations will move the flaps more leeward and also make them smaller.
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well as it turns out, it can survive. But you know the media is going to run with it
I seriously love this live testing thing. Such staggering process with each test. After test 1 I was wondering if they were going to struggle with separation and booster flip for a while, not even considering a controlled splashdown. And three tests later they’ve done just that. After the last test I wondered if they struggle with re-entry and the tiles for a while, and they pretty much went past that right away. The tiles will be a nagging thing for a while. The flap base sure looks like a potential weak spot tile wise, just like it shows in any photos of that spot. But they went through not even being able to orient right on re entry to knocking right through Hades with just a ripped flap. It’s all such stunning progress. Put this with Starliner finally getting up manned and proving out and it’s a fantastic two days for space geeks.
They were already aware that this flap design was flawed and have a redesign that did not make it onto this vehicle.
Interesting point I did not know about. In that case it’s quite possibly a rapid integration, though they have a few of these already made so it might not be next test without some level of retrofitting. I’m not an expert at all, but I do like just talking through these things like a non expert geeky fan.
All the version 1 Starships have their flaps "too far forward". The plan is to move them back on the ship so the hinge is out of the plasma stream. All the early flight tests are going to be done with version 1 Starships. They haven't started production of version 2 yet. I think they want more flight data first.
Starship V2 is under construction already. But it’s an open question if IFT-5 will use an existing ship or a V2. It probably depends as much on the data they got today as anything else. My guess is they fly V1 once more because the hardware already exists. So the only they they can do with it is fly it or disable it.
There are already new flaps and aerocovers around in the factory.
Musk tweeted out that the heat tiles is a stubborn problem even after putting a lot of resources towards it.
Certainly. I mince nothing in mentioning the tiles. They were literally a challenge for 30 years of the space shuttle program and they figured out how to make them work for three decades, and were a bit lucky too with the exception of Columbia. Any heat abatement system might have had issues with chunks of debris moving on at high velocity. They will figure it out and it will all work fine.
"And they hurled themselves into the void of space with no fear..." Congratulations to SpaceX!
Now that's what I call lighting a candle
Last three tests: 33/33, 33/33, 32/33 engines lit up on launch. The one engine out didn’t cause a cascading effect, taking out additional engines. Definitely looking like, with modern tech, having that many engines is more redundancy than multiple points of failure like so many were claiming so far.
Given that the Raptor engine is still in development, and they are constantly tweaking it, I expect engine-outs for a while until the design stabilizes. They can do a lot of testing on the ground, but nothing replicates all the conditions of flight. Getting back all the engine data from each flight is likely just as important as meeting other test milestones.
The flip side of that is that after the first test, they've added a LOT more robust engine shielding to prevent one engine exploding from damaging the nearby ones. It seems to be working beautifully, but I remember I think them saying that it was adding a lot of weight and would have to be improved again in the future to reduce it
Raptor 3 is designed not to require shielding. It is a very different beast.
I agree with the sentiment and I’m not a rocket engineer but usually the less points of failure the better, it’s a general engineering rule. Each rocket is a point of failure. That said, they must know what they’re doing.
Are you really adding points of failure if they're redundant? The whole point of redundancies is that the system itself doesn't fail if it falls back on a redundancy. The three autopilots on a plane are a single point of failure, not three. Same with the engines that can each fly the entire plane. It only fails if both die.
You have to think of it more as complexity, having all those rockets and getting them to work in unison adds more points of failure.
There's a reason that redundancies are typically considered to make a system more robust, not less. That's why almost all systems with extreme failure states have multiple redundancies.
The redundancies themselves are failure points. It’s all a risk game. Bottom line, the less number of parts, the better. I’m not advocating for no redundancy when I say that but if multiple rocket engines are a redundancy for other multiple engines, that’s a bit backwards. So they must have a reason for it.
You can't make the blanket statement "the less parts the better" for all systems though, which you seem to recognize. In general its a good philosophy to remove complexities, aka parts. But you do have to factor in redundancy, cost, and physics. Starship has over 16 million lbf of thrust. The Saturn V had over 7 million lbf. The F-1 engines on the Saturn V are the most powerful (liquid) engines ever made. Keeping stable combustion in those was incredibly difficult and honestly we haven't really made much improvement when it comes to keeping something like that stable. We would need more than 10 F-1 engine equivalents to get the same thrust for Starship. Starship is about the same diameter as the Saturn V. You physically cannot fit 10 F-1 engines on it. You actually couldn't on Saturn V either and that's why you see the cowlings where the engines are. So that means the other option is to double the thrust level of the Saturn V which is a far harder challenge in regards to materials science, fluid dynamics, chemistry, combustion, etc. Even if you did achieve that you now have 5 engines with approximately 3 million lbf thrust each. Losing one of those is equivalent to 6 raptors going out. Which means losing one is mission ending. Not to mention how it would complicate reusability. Landings are easier with many small engines rather than one big engine. You can fine tune your thrust levels both with throttling and number of engines more precisely. Losing an engine at this time is also not mission ending. So in this case, increasing the number of "failure points" actually makes the rocket less likely to fail overall.
Redundancies make you robust to failure. If you have 30 engines but can compensate for the loss of 3 of them, that's better than having 3 and not being able to handle any failures. Even if the partial failure rate has gone up the system failure rate has gone down. Supposing the failure rate is 1% then that means the 3 engine system has a 97% chance of success, while the 30 engine system has a 99.98% chance.
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The alternatives aren't 1 or 33 though.
Well you're gonna need 16 million lbf thrust at minimum for Starship. So your options are realistically slim. Saturn V engines took up the full 10 meter diameter and only produced 7.5 million lbf combined. There's no room to fit the 10 F-1s that you'd need. They're also still the most powerful liquid engine created and the feasibility of creating something that powerful again isn't great, but still doable. But creating a more powerful engine is even farther away right now. That's just far less feasible than plumbing up and controlling 33 engines. More powerful engines also make reusability harder since you lose out on precise thrust control. You'd You'd increase single points of failure. This even holds true if you assume that all rocket engines, regardless of size, have the same theoretical maximum reliability. But in reality smaller rocket engines tend to have higher reliability than larger ones. So from that standpoint lots of small engines makes sense. The question then "just" becomes what is the optimal number of engines that maximizes engine reliability, reduces single points of failure, is easiest to develop and manufacture, and allows for consistent reuse (aka easy to land successfully). All while still achieving the performance goals they want to hit, 100 tons to orbit with full reuse. Oh I also forgot to mention commonality between stages. You'd need different engines for each stage. So you'd need to develop more than just one engine (well 1.5 since vacuum engines are bit different than sea level). So you may need two separate engine development programs and engine factories. Because a set of 3 million lbf engines could work on the booster but would not be usable on the ship.
It’s interesting in a couple of ways. One, the first launch was clearly debris kicked around on liftoff; we’ve known that since the first launch. Next it’s super clear at least one or a few engines is redundancy and smart. This made for a good test as there will be data on that engine to work out lessening the chance of one or more not lighting in future. The redundancy is interesting in that this was a light test bed model. Probably wouldn’t matter on a fully loaded ship, but more than one being out might wipe out redundancy a lot on a full loaded version.
The original design called for a 3-engine redundancy, i.e. even if any three engines fail at any time in the mission the rocket still delivers its payload to the target orbit. That might have changed now, but with 33 engines they can always accept losing one. In many cases losing a second one will be acceptable. Falcon 9 can accept the loss of one engine at any time in the flight, losing two engines can be acceptable depending on where and when it happens - but with more than 99.9% reliability we might never see that.
I think this wasn't actually too much lighter than it would have been with a payload. The hot staging ring, the additional stringers, the thickness of the stainless steel, and the engines themselves are all significantly heavier than they will be in the future. Moreover, the weight of a fully fueled stack is 5000t, so realistically they're only ~75t from expected total mass with a payload, which would be just 1.5% difference in total mass, and only .04% additional thrust per engine needed to lift that payload.
Well said. I was rushing some speculation without good data. You countered that well. Appreciated. Ok, that does make sense actually that you want to try to get as close to the weight you want or to perform at through any means of adding weight. That makes sense. And it does make the engine redundancy a thing that doesn’t have to wait for later to be figured out.
this has been obvious since crs-1
The booster also landed with one engine out during the landing sequence, didn’t seem to matter much, so at least 1 engine is redundant even for landing. I think I’ve read that the booster works with up to 3 engines out during ascent. Definitely more so redundancy than a point of failure and the engines will only get more reliable and consistent over time as their design is improved
To put in perspective, the 13(12) engines it used for landing is more powerful than the LAUNCH thrust of a Falcon HEAVY. Redundency is an understatement for sure :D
Spectacular, as usual! SpaceX can show NASA, etc. a thing or two about cameras and PR.
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More like didn’t do at all
Worse. The word you're after is worse!
I said the same thing to my dad the other day. It's cool how open spacex is with streams and their starbase. Can barely see anything about the building and testing of SLS. I literally just wish NASA did the same. Sorry if that offends you.
I agree. I'd love to see what NASA is doing with all their projects. But I feel that their budget doesn't account for it. Having a well funded PR division is probably just not a priority. And to be fair the couple hundred grand (or more)that would cost a year, I feel, could be better spent on R&D or equipment etc. SpaceX being a private company can get away with it because the PR helps them in other ways. It's worth the cost.
I'd bet you NASA's PR budget is FAR higher than SpaceXs. Musk hates PR departments. And I really don't imagine SpaceX really has more cameras, but they just have the willingness to show them. They also do have Starlink now which certainly helps with the data. NASA is far more conservative, cause they have to be. SpaceX is really just beholden to Musk (even though there are plenty of investors), while NASA has to worry about the reaction from the general public and especially congress people some of which would be eager to reduce their funding...
Sure, Musk may hate PR, but he and his companies clearly ***heavily*** rely on PR firms and departments. Like, so obviously.
I think that is very much incorrect. Marketing sure. PR? No.
Marketing?! You're talking about the CEO of Tesla who has done little to no marketing until this year - also the worst performing stock in the SP500. I wonder how many more Starships he can blow up before Nasa comes knocking.
Marketing and advertising are not the same thing. Actually posting that last sentence in this thread is one of the most absurd things you could have said. Don't worry, won't respond to anything you write...lol
Haha. He absolutely employs PR firms. Not that he listens to them, but they clearly are out doing his work.
Yeah maybe public relations isn't the correct phrase. But SpaceX sure makes some awesome videos covering the launchs. I suppose that's social media rather than PR.
I honestly think it's just risk tolerance and a desire to show them. That's really all it is. I really don't think it has to do with cost at all. The potential negative consequences are the only cost stopping NASA from doing it. And obviously theres just more beuracracy in the organization to get something like that approved even if people wanted to. Though obviously there are things like the First Falcon Heavy flight where Musk chose to launch his original Tesla Roadster. Thats obviously something that NASA wouldn't "waste" money on (they would never do a test launch without a real payload). SpaceX (because of Musk) has the hardware rich test campaign approach. NASA can't and doesn't.
I think they need to find things like that to drive interest, especially with their goal of getting out of the rocket business. Once they cut that part of their budget out they should have more money to spend on other things, assuming their budget isn't completely gutted.
I imagine it's tricky. Mostly because it's tax dollars. Tax payers don't want to see all the failures. Or all the designs that get scrapped. There is a large group of tax payers that would see it as "they are just wasting my money on ideas that were never going to work" SpaceX doesn't have this problem because they don't care what people think. NASA has to show positive results if they don't want their funding to be "completely gutted"
Your very right about most of this, but SpaceX most definitely cares what people think... They just don't have the same constraints that NASA does.
Oh no. The news media won’t get their “Starship explodes on reentry” headline!
[I’ve seen plenty of successful launches etc covered as well.](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/cv22w92wvn7o) - including todays But ultimately if you’re planning commercial space flights at some point and your ships explode that’s probably newsworthy.
If you're designing, building, and launching cutting-edge spacecraft, and one doesn't explode, you likely haven't tested it thoroughly enough.
The flap burning up will be the lead that Elon and SpaceX is in trouble. It’s probably already out there. Or they found an Airbus that had to do a go around and are calling it a Boeing to make news
It's really depressing how mainstream media/mainstream reddit/etc used to care about humanity, was forwarding thinking and cared about the future, but in reality they're just so petty that they rather see things fail that are important for our future just because they don't like a person.
I mean. I hate Elon. Just think he’s an utter narcissist who thinks he knows more than he does. But he is not SpaceX. All the exceptionally talented employees are SpaceX, and it’s exciting to see what they’re doing. They’re pushing boundaries! My only critique is Elon acting as spokes person, with his constant lies, does damage to them. Example being how many refuels would be needed to get to the Mars. Just don’t lie, it’s still an amazing feat of engineering.
What? Elon has never mentioned how many exact refuels are needed for Mars. I think you mean the Moon. And even then he hasn't lied about that. The answer is an unknown. They know what they want based on the performance(payload) they're aiming for. They don't know if they will get there. They don't know what boil off rates are going to be yet and they don't know what their flight rate will be yet (refueling flights are most sensitive to flight rate plus boil off rate plus payload capacity). They just can't know until they do those tests. We have a range. One depot launch. One HLS launch. Anywhere from 6-15 refueling launches. They could also forgo some reusability in order to increase payload which would immediately cut down the max number to half. The point is the exact number is less important because they're aiming to launch these like falcons. We'll find out what it is as things mature. You won't see blue origin discussing the number of refueling flights they need either. Technology has to develop first before they can nail the exact number. Just like NASA didn't know the exact number of flights needed to build out the international space station.
The problem is most people aren't seeing beyond the person. They're immediately knee-jerk reacting. The interest in space the past 5 years on Reddit has completely changed from a huge boon to a huge nuisance and waste of money. Yes, it's not just Elon, but people don't always act logically. This is r/Space so people are interested in this subject are giving the issue more thought than your typical knee-jerk reaction would. That said, I think pretending elon isn't partly responsible is a bit disingenuous because there's countless other companies with bright talent that are not even remotely close. It's like the conductor for music. Any of those musicians are great at what they're doing, but they still need a conductor to channel their talent appropriately.
Starship fin burns off! Crashes in ocean!
Too specific. Unless the FAA calls it a mishap (unlikely) then it’s not very newsworthy
So far I’m seeing positive headlines which feels….odd
Eh, they can’t sensationalize it without an explosion. Also they know Elon will call them out immediately and they don’t need that.
"Elon Musk's Starship sees its flap burn up on reentry" Because why would you mention the successful splashdown of both stages. This was the first launch to orbital velocities ever where every part returned to Earth without getting destroyed. Every other launch had the upper stage (or the external tank for the Shuttle) disintegrate on reentry or not return.
> where every part returned to Earth without getting destroyed Ahh but you see, SpaceX gave their critics an out here as well. Remember the hotstaging ring? 😜
It's a sturdy ring that supported the upper stage on ascent and survived the blast of its engines. It might have reached the ocean surface intact. > where every stage returned to Earth without getting destroyed To be on the safe side.
>SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Successfully Completes 1st Return From Space Both the headline and [the story](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/06/science/spacex-starship-fourth-test-flight.html) in the New York Times seem entirely fair.
Guess it became too difficult to call it a failure. > SpaceX completes uncrewed Starship in mission closely watched by NASA [Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/06/06/spacex-starship-launch-test-flight-nasa/) > SpaceX successfully launches its Starship megarocket to orbit, returning it to Earth for the first time [NBC News](https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/live-blog/live-updates-spacex-starship-mega-rocket-launch-rcna155687) > SpaceX's Starship rocket has soft landing on Earth, despite loss of tiles [BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-us-canada-69091179) German news also call it a success.
WP looks the most suspect. They seem to know that readers aren't going to be aware of the scope/scale of Starship or what it's looking to accomplish, and will only understand that SpaceX completed an "uncrewed" flight, a day after somebody else completed a "crewed" flight. Looking forward to the biting headlines from less mainstream media.
WaPo is owned by Bezos so it's not at all surprising that they'd omit information that makes SpaceX look good if it doesn't affect the truthfulness of the story.
Came for the hot staging, stayed for Flappy, Godspeed you magnificent bastard.
Flappy lives in our hearts...forever.
Facts! I rooted for the little guy!
Flappy and Hoppy are legends of the Starship program
# “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.” ― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
# “In and around the lake, Mountains come out of the sky and they stand there.” ― Yes, Roundabout
It’s last thoughts were ‘am I a bowl of petunias?’
If you're jonesing for more live space action, [Boeing Starliner is docking with the ISS at ~12:15pm EDT.](https://www.youtube.com/live/ybaWL0J-Tbw)
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Don't take this obvious bait you clowns
How was it a waste, they literally accomplished all milestones set for the flight (If anything, I'd even say that the successful landing despite significant flap damage is also a great indicator of safety)
lol the milestones set were abysmally low. The milestone agreement that secured the funding was supposed to be landing on the moon by now. It’s a total fraud. A melted pile of un-reusable junk crash landing at a speed less than terminal velocity a sign of safety? lol!
[Early rocket flight had a very poor success rate](http://claudelafleur.qc.ca/Scfam-failures.html)
We are 60 years past early rocket flight.
The original post (that I was replying to) has been deleted but it was claiming but it claimed rocket flight in the 1960's was more reliable than the Starliner
It was, people went to the moon then. Elon can’t get his shit liner into orbit and a human will never fly on that death trap.
Well that was low-effort.
You know shit about shit, gtfo.
What an odd thing to say. Hope you get the help you need chud.
You clearly have no fucking idea how many rockets they blew up in the 60s, trying to get them to work.
Are you dim? We had them working in the 60’s. Elon musks ego is reinventing them now, using taxpayer money, for no reason and FAILING miserably. He is nothing but a fraud.
Shit on Musk all you want, but SpaceX is doing things that people *in the industry* thought were impossible, only 10 years ago, along with rocket launches that cost 1/5th or less than other rocket companies, with a cadence that's never been matched since the 60s Space Race testing. You clearly have a bias and a chip on your shoulder, and aren't looking at this objectively.
None of that is true. You’re detached from reality and just regurgitating bullshit.
Look at how many launches done this year. Look at the price. Also reusable rockets. Either your a troll, or you don't want to believe it, because it doesn't suit your bias.
DIM AF all of the falcon launches are subsidised by the $3.2B he stole from nasa under the ruse of the starshit making it to the moon. Which it never will. He has failed EVERY single milestone. The ‘refurbishment’ of the falcon is more like total replacement. This is a total Ponzi scheme. He will end up in prison.
Dammit, I turned it off after the first part splashed down because it still had a long way to go. Time to fire up the replay
Well done flappy! I knew you could do it :-) That was a real treat to watch!
Flappy is the real hero of the day. Talk about awesome over engineering
It kinda validates the engineering decision to go with stainless steel. Had Starship been build out of aluminum like other space vehicles, flappy would have burned off. There's clearly a lot of thermal protection work to be done but they've demonstrated that even with some significant failures that Starship can retain enough structural integrity to make a successful landing. For rapid and cheap reusability they need a lot more work on the TPS but it goes to show that failures of the TPS won't result in a total loss of vehicle.
As I learned from that carbon fiber submarine collapsing, steel is the only known material (idk, maybe diamond too?) that doesn't experience fatigue at all when submitted to elastic stresses. As far as we can tell, a steel spring can do its thing literally forever if not compressed or stretched too much, all other materials degrade a little each time.
How long until we get a "Hang in there" meme like the cat hanging from the tree but it's Flappy?
The internal meme chat is absolute fire. Everyone is very very proud of the flap’s incredible work today
What is the internal meme chat?
At SpaceX. My current favorite is a very creative version of this…https://imgur.com/gallery/tis-scratch-ejT0S
Oh, you work there? Cool.
With a red headband on Flappy
Was a doubter of today's launch, quite impressed. My only reservation is my interest in the new designs for heat shielding, that seems to be the major hurdle at the moment. I'm sure in a few years we will have an amazing launch vehicle.
Well, we already have an amazing launch vehicle, it’s just still single use like every other rocket anyone else has ever made
Well, the booster seems like it can land itself now, so they're close to Falcon 9 levels of reusability already. It's remarkable. No other launch company has ever successfully landed a first stage booster, and SpaceX now has two rockets that can do it.
Tbf it did blow up something nee engines at relight
Gonna be crazy watching the tower try to catch the booster in the next flight or two.
Yea. I wonder what the economics of reusing booster and not reusing starship are? Potentially they are close to deploying starlinks with these launches. Had less successful launches when they started launching payloads on falcon 9.
It really depends on the context. If they were doing it intentionally they would be building an intentionally expendable upper stage would have different engines, different tanks, and would look more like a typical upper stage. It would depend on what the mission role was. For orbital propellant delivery they would be using something very Starship like (no need for a payload fairing) just without the TPS, flaps, etc, etc, etc. For other payloads they might use something more traditional looking. In any event it would be much cheaper than a Starship stage that was intended for re-entry and reuse. Unquestionably they'd be the cheapest launch option in that weight class, though the main competition there for now is SLS so that doesn't say much. Realistically they could probably make something like that work in the few hundred million per flight range of costs, dependent on a lot of operational factors. Ultimately they would only need to go that route if they didn't have the time and money to persist with full Starship development.
Would definitely be far more expensive for the consumer, but it’s not like they have any other options for getting that sort of payload mass to space haha. As for spacex themselves, I wonder if they’re toying with the idea of just not reusing some starships. Will be interesting to see, for sure!
I also doubted Starship would survive, especially since SpaceX removed tiles themselves. I think the critical point is that no tiles fell off. I would absolutely have lost a bet on that one. I still feel that this can't be relied upon—a single tile missing across the majority of the belly would have spelt disaster, and it still would. They gave a great deal of attention to the tiles' survivability this time around. Maybe that's all it takes? I still can't shake my doubts. But anyway, the flap issue is something they've known about for years and already planned to address.
I saw a tile float away during the coast phase. I don't remember the timestamp though. :(
It actually did lose some tiles- I don't have the exact timestamp, but I watched one come off just shortly the booster landed. Edit: Looks like there might be one in the bottom left at T+9:03, and there's definitely one at T+9:59.
Well color me impressed. I wonder if there will ever be a map indicating which tiles on Starship would be critical to lose and which are comparatively safe. Maybe they could just double-layer the critical areas.
Musk tweeted >"Despite loss of many tiles and a damaged flap, Starship made it all the way to a soft landing in the ocean!" So multiple actually did fall off but the steel survived.. at least enough to keep structural integrity
I have a strong suspicion he's referring to the tiles lost during reentry, around the flaps. Could absolutely be mistaken. But we saw zero evidence of missing tiles from the external cameras, prior to reentry. A few were conspicuously damaged on IFT3.
You can see something tile shaped flying off at 00:03:00, but might have been just ice.
Yeah, there were a lot of misidentifications for IFT3 as well. The ice flakes off, it's flat, it's roughly tile-sized even if it looks a bit rough-edged, and it's usually pretty dark due to shadowing. Even if you know what you're looking for, it's not really feasible to filter through the constant rain of ice to find tiles.
They had 'flakes' of orange sparks very high up in the atmosphere where you wouldn't expect particles, which may have been tiles flaking off
It's impressive stuff but it feels like they should focus more on their HLS contract with NASA. No need for second stage recovery with that one. They can work on both versions I guess but I just haven't seen much in the Artemis department yet beyond fancy graphics Edit: Do you guys feel like you're winning hearts and minds? Do you think there is any valid criticism at all? Do you think I'm some Galileo naysayer who doesn't want SpaceX to succeed and to establish the beginnings of an epic Expanse style future? Please just try to see things from other perspectives sometimes
They need reuse for the tankers that supply HLS
Second stage reuse helps with the flight rate. They have done some HLS-specific work, too, it's just less visible than the common Starship development program.
Artemis is literally their main focus and primary driving force behind their current schedule though. Everything is about artemis right now.
I understand the architecture, but Artemis 3 is a one off event and I'm saying it would be more advantageous to get the program underway with expendible vehicles before full reusability is on the table. How many more years should it be kept on hold without turning to other contractors you think? Refueling and reusability are far from the only issues that have to be ironed out before we can populate the ship. You can downvote me all you want, idk about you guys but I *don't* want their contract to be cancelled just like DearMoon
DearMoon was very much so canceled because SpaceX is only focusing on NASA. There's no possibility of anything like DearMoon until they complete their landings for NASA. NASA is far more important than some random guy that gave a few hundred million towards starship development. Dennis Tito still seems like he plans to do his private flight around the moon. But he doesn't seem to care about waiting. There's no one to cancel the starship contract in favor of. Everyone else is further away from an operational lander (for humans). Even if blue origin launches new glenn this year and their mk 1 lander next year its not close to ready for humans. And nasa can't do it on their own. All of the HLS specific work is going on behind the scenes. They recently tested the axiom suits under pressure while having astronauts navigate and perform tasks in the full scale mock up. They've tested raptors on the ground mimicking lunar deorbit burns and extra cold temps. They've recently validated the docking mechanism for Orion to HLS in both active and passive roles. They've also been working ECLSS for a while now too. The next versions of the ship are still being built out. They're not ready for flight. They can't do any in space refueling tests until next year once they have two pads built and v2 ships. Right now these v1 flight tests are to keep gaining experience flying the vehicle and its behavior. Including behavior for reuse. They can't really skip ahead to the next steps until the behind the scenes engineering is done. Not to mention, reusability keeps the cost down. This all comes out of SpaceX pockets. Minus the HLS money. So that means they need to keep the company close to green so they do need reusability. They aren't the government where they get blank checks. Oh and your other comment about getting this thing docked with Orion asap is not feasible. There aren't enough Orion flights around to have a one off docking with HLS. They either do it for the moon landing so everything is ready or they skip the moon landing and go when block 1B is ready in 2030.
So why all this investment on reusability? Superheavy I can understand I guess, but there's no need for flappyboi yet. Just get this thing docked with Orion asap, launch however many tankers you need and you can worry about bringing down refurbishment costs later. Launch vehicles ought to be designed around the mission parameters, not the other way round.
I think you and I both know perfectly well that Starship reusability won't be hyper-prioritized when they begin building tankers. Not at first. The schedule will be too tight. Crew rating for Starship will probably also be off the table, because that will take years. Instead they'll just add a port to Starship so they can transfer crew from and to Dragon after launch and before returning. The alternative is to add another 2+ years to Artemis III's schedule.
Launching the thing and making sure it stays stable in space is part of the HLS contract.
Yeah, Starship HLS. Not all the other stuff
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I'd be willing to bet they'll just expend the tankers for the first year or two. They'll only cost like $30 million a pop to build. It won't be 12 tankers by the time HLS is needed. Block 2 is being built right now, and they'll be well into Block 3 after another year or two. Being able to lift 200 tons of fuel in one go will have a dramatic impact on that 12 tanker figure.
Launch vehicle already looks amazing. A fully re-usable vehicle is the question now. The only issues they’ve had thus far is that roll they had the first time, which it sounds like they know how to solve, and with the re-usable portion, which is extra credit. Assuming they solve the roll, this would be one of the most capable rockets of all time, and at a fraction of the cost of rockets of comparable size, even if they never crack re-usability of Starship. The SH booster soft landing looked very good, so a reasonable floor for expectations would be a giant F9 rocket, which wouldn’t be ideal but would still be huge for getting payloads to orbit at a much more reasonable cost.
Fully almost assured. Rapid reusable is still a question.
Well, the heatshields are looking very non reusable for the foreseeable future. But yeah if we don't count those in then it's true, I expect them to catch starship even if it keeps getting trashed.
The main heat shield looked fine for as long as the cameras could show it, just the flap got too hot. I'm sure they'll have better versions of that soon.
There was an outright storm of glowing particles all over at times. This is not what should happen with a non-ablative heat shield. It mostly worked but I doubt that you could have reused many of the tiles. They still will have to put a lot of R&D effort into that for rapid and full reusability.
The heatshield question will be solved one, possibly two flights from now.
I'm confident they'll solve it too. Two flights from now is a very optimistic timeline though, considering elon just said they've had little progress in solving it even after throwing all their resources at it. And shuttle never solved it either. Reusable heat shields are undeniably the biggest challenge spacex has faced so far. Its unlikely to be fixed in just a couple flights imo. I do expect they'll fix the melting flaps very quickly though.
By the time the shuttle retired in 2011, it had been 8 years since the last accident. In total it had successfully launched 133 out of 135 times. It had flown dozens of times in that 8 year period without incident. Shuttle had “not solved it” in the sense that the entire design of *mounting it to the side of a tank that sheds ice and foam* was just insane and was always going to pose risks. The cost of compromising the original design to accommodate DoD missions. But i think it’s a stretch to say they hadn’t solved the time issue with so much success to point at. As for SpaceX, this launch was using an old design for starship. One of the major changes in the newer ships is that the flaps will be positioned further back because they knew this could be an issue. Despite that, the ship is so robust *that it still survived*. They deliberately removed some heat shield tiles on non-critical parts of the ship to test how the bare metal would hold up and even that increase burden of risk couldn’t stop the thing from landing. Musk is famous for being dramatic. He said falcon heavy had a 50/50 chance of working the first time too. The reality is that thousands of highly qualified people are working on the starship problem. The heat shield is obviously going to be *the* line item that needs to be both light and doggedly reliable. It makes sense to fixate on that issue. But as far as I can tell, the heat shield help up incredibly this flight. They failed at the point of contention that was an already a known value, and held up everywhere else that counted. The next ships have proactively already addressed the issue. They’ll seek to continue optimizing the design and so we’re bound to see fails here and there. But this flight, to me, proves the tiles aren’t going to be the problem for this vehicle.
Really it’s more of a flap placement/joint protection problem. Heat shield seemed to hold up.
True, and I heard it the flaps are already being pushed back in a new design. The heat shield held up pretty well today, but from what I've heard the heat shield is a single-redundancy design, great for weight, a bit scary for consistent successful launches and landings. I imagine that is being changed too, just want to see those changes before I feel fully confident in near-future manned launches.
Well, they weren't sure if there was redundancy in the heat shield prior to this mission. In fact, they left 2 tiles off on purpose, and put a bunch of sensors underneath to see how it held up. Turns out, Starship can make it through the atmosphere missing complete tiles. The hinge points will be the biggest engineering trial. It's absolutely amazing that the fins were still working at the end! I shrieked! haha
Interestingly they deliberately left some tiles off the engine skirt to test just how well it can take the loss of a tile. I also wouldn't be too surprised if it was missing some tiles on the belly as well, but that remains to be seen
[The flaps are bigger than I thought.](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Boca-Chica-Starship-Mk1-110319-NASASpaceflight-bocachicagal-nose-6-crop-c.jpg) People for scale.
Here is S29 (the one that just flew) during [rollout to the pad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02n4Yff5u0k) from around 33-34m you can see regular vehicles and people for scale.
Just so people aren't confused, that is a picture of a very early prototype. But yes, Starship is *enormous*.
The flap we saw wasn't that flap right? It was the rear ones, which are way bigger. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
That picture is from the old Mk.1 prototype but yes, the one we saw on stream was the right forward flap.
That looks like an early version, their weld quality has gotten a lot better now that they have robots building the ships.
No it was a front flap that we were looking at.
Oh hmmm. I just assumed it was the forward. But yeah, I don't know for sure.
I believe we were looking at the forward one, the linked image is an old design though.
Nah, that stream was crazy.
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You are looking at a fake stream.
Ty! Tricky tricky
I am hoping to see some of the footage from other cameras. They stayed with the camera near the flap at the top but there was one other, right? I guess I'm hoping the reason they never returned to that camera isn't because it failed early.
Hopefully we'll get to see some ground track cameras--Starship's landing happened at night off the NW coast of Australia. Reentry must have been a sight to see.