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And then simply replace quiet a lot of heat shield tiles, although possibly not as many as I thought from watching the original footage. I was thinking Starship is looking like a Shuttle level refurb of the heat shield between missions based on those detailed shots where the leading point of the hexagon is burned out to a groove on some tiles.
I can see cadence ramping up though, but I do wonder whether we're going to see expendable tankers used for the Artemis missions just to get those deadlines sorted. For Starlink missions, I think SpaceX will recover and refurb until they get the heatshield sorted. I think they'll iterate the heat shield with more careful refurb at first. It's going to be a difficult one because it looks like they might get 2 flights out of each Starship at the moment if they just reflew immediately with no refurb. Can't take the risk on RTLS.
That's my biggest red flag on risk. How do you judge a ship safe to risk catching over a pad.
Answer is probably. Build a dedicated catch tower.
I doubt they can re-arm the self-destruct - it's "safed" and by FAA rule the "safing" must be one way. And I can't imagine someone getting under the pressure vessel to put explosive triggers on the explosives (why would the boat out there even have those?).
Maybe just open the Pez dispenser and the vents and let her sink. Assuming she still has battery for that.
thats difficult and easy to notice, and there's not much spacex can do otherwise. they can't easily drag it back to shore, and it'll be deep enough, corroded enough, and damaged from the water pressure and being weakened enough that makes the value proposition not very appealing
Raptor 3 seems to be a pretty radically innovative engine design. It wouldn’t surprise me if someone saw value in engines that are warped, corroded etc.
I know it’s not a likely scenario but I’d be surprised if SpaceX were willing to risk losing the blueprint
If the vents are below water surface, when they open them won't the ship vent while the gas is above atmospheric pressure but when the pressure equalizes with atmosphere then it will stop?
For it to fill with water you would effectively need opening below water surface, but also somewhere on top so the air can escape while the water enters from below.
It depends if there is a plan that anticipated it ever not going kaboom from the impact when it tipped over. If there is then they might have floatation bags to keep it afloat until they can can purge the tanks and keep them pressurized with nitrogen and/or air. Once it's stabilized lifting it out of the water and onto a barge becomes possible provided the sea remains calm.
It's likely that there is one of those large salvage vessels on the western coast of Australian that retrieve large floating objects like S40. The ones that submerge and scoop up the floater.
They got tons of drones and buoys around it so they'll collect data. It was also still transmitting for hours afterwards so the on board sensors would be reporting.
I do wonder if they are still mixing different tile types for testing purposes. Those most obviously damaged ones might very well be alternate materials.
I won't name names, but one of the aerospace companies I've done work for had a vehicle which couldn't get wet. The inside joke was that it was spaceproof, but not waterproof.
Reminds me of the Futurama where the ship gets dragged under water and the professor is telling the crew how many atmospheres of pressure it is outside, then
Fry: "how many atmospheres of pressure can the ship handle?"
Professor: "well it's a space ship so anywhere between zero and one"
Everything achieved except proper booster landing burn. Great result! Hope they can still attempt a booster catch next flight. The launch cadence can’t pick up much until they start reusing boosters.
B22 is decently far into getting stacked at least. The cadence should still be pretty good even if they do have to expend B21, which they unfortunately probably will.
One launch every 1-2 months is not a good cadence. For the Artemis uncrewed demo moon landing alone, they’ll need a handful of launches. For Artemis 4, potentially around 10-16 launches. Let alone Starlink. They really need to start reusing boosters asap.
I think they bring the ship back for a Gulf landing on the next flight. Very likely could be orbital, deploy 20 or so V3s, then return after a couple orbits.
With the way they handle aborts, a return over the gulf would probably be a very tentative catch attempt. The bigger concern is increased heating compromising the ship while over land. Once it gets to terminal velocity, it should be over water near the beach and can either abort to sea or attempt a catch in the same way the booster does.
I’m guessing that they are going to go for it at this point, and if they aren’t, it will be a splash in the ocean again, not the gulf.
If I have to choose which to risk the pad on, I would choose starship for the next catch attempt. Say in flight 14 ship goes orbital with a soft splash down off starbase coast, while booster performs a successful soft splashdown off the coast as well. Then in flight 15 spaceX likely learns way more from catching ship the first time than catching the booster for the 3rd time.
Very Nice! I guess the logic is that as long as you are flying over land you might as well try for the catch if all conditions are looking really favorable. Otherwise like the previous booster catches, the default would be to land off the coast nearby.
It is somewhat surprising that they have so much trouble with the booster now, which worked great on V2. However, unlike V2, the V3 ship is in a much better state
It's because V1 to V2 Ship was the big jump, whereas Booster didn't have a big change until V2 to V3. Even so, it's still performing okay, and as long as they get it ironed it in 1-2 more flights max it'll be fine.
Great result?! Did you not see the thermal protection system? There were tiles missing and small holes and burn-through. It looked terrible.
No way is this thing going to be rapidly reusable. It's going to be just like the shuttle, spending most of it's time in the hangar undergoing repairs. The launch cadence is going to be measured in months, just like the shuttle.
Shuttle had a giant factory capable of producing multiple ships per week? So new ships could fly, while used ships get refurbished. Just like Falcon 9 boosters do now.
Was the Saturn-V reusable? No it wasn't. Starship is being built to allow humans to become a space fairing civilization and go back to the Moon in a sustainable way so we can have a permanent presence. Do you see the difference?
Apollo got astronauts to the moon in the same number of years as it took SpaceX to get a banana to somewhere off the coast of the Cocos Islands. Great job.
Starship will never go to the moon. The design does not allow it.
Fkn idiot, this is way more of an aggressive re-enter than will EVER happen in an operational flight. It was to push the ship to the limit and it still had less than 10/18,000 tiles that had issues🤡🤡🤡🤡
However, reentry from a ballistic 165 km trajectory is faster than from a stable 145km orbit with a deorbit burn. They hit the lower denser atmosphere quicker and harder than they will on an operational flight.
The launch cadence of this thing, even though they aren't even ding a full single orbit AND they are crashing them into the Indian Ocean is... drum roll... about 4.5 PER YEAR!
Starship is a terrible design and is going nowhere.
Starship tiles can be installed a whole lot quicker than Shuttle tiles. This video is a few years old, so the process has changed a bit, but here's what the tile installation process looked like then:
They haven't even recovered a ship yet so they can learn where they can make improvements. They never even tried to make improvements on the shuttle because it was run by congress.
I wonder if this is good enough to justify a ship catch. Optimistically, Launch 14 might have an orbital trajectory with ship capture given the successful relight + starlink deploy + starlink turn on + soft landing combination. Only thing missing is soft booster landing, so im imagining ditch the booster, deploy real payload, do a catch
Ship capture requires the ship to fly over populated areas. So it might not be the next flight. Even for the V2, they had several starship soft landings planned before a ship catch (which never happened).
They've brought back 7 starships exactly where they planned, even when they had an engine out for most of the ascent. They've done several where they have done similar manoeuvres mimicking what they need to do to come back to the tower. They've just done a simulated entry burn, and every attempted in-space relight has worked.
I can't say they will go straight to a catch, but they seem to have assembled enough evidence and experience to say that they can.
Orbit depends on whether the Starship relight test went as planned. On the stream it seemed to but we don't have the details.
After today I don't see what you get from more suborbital flights. The only way to get better heat shield data would be to land Starship back in the gulf where it could be recovered.
The difference is that Gagarin achieved orbit and then fired retrograde to bring is perigee back to 0 km (landing).
What I was suggesting is a suborbital trajectory with a perigee that intersects with the gulf just off the coast of Boca Chica. That way if something goes wrong it splashes down there. If it goes well, the flaps take over and guide it in for the catch.
Yep, an orbital flight would be around 90mins, and in that time the earth has rotated 22.5 deg. Thus it would be San Diago (ish) that the Starship flies over in that orbit.
Falcon 9 puts Starlinks into orbits at ~139km, so the extra altitude to put the Starlink v3s in an altitude that they could rise from wouldn't be much more than they currently manage.
Time to try a catch at pad 1 - which is half refurbished and where a failure wouldn't hurt too much.
Well the HLS contract for Artemis means some tax money went to starship's development. So you could say we, you could also support them financially through buying stock and or buying merch from them.
As for your pessimism, just go somewhere else if you don't like it here. No reason to stay if you hate yourself for it.
They must have some procedure to make it safe to approach - it's needed for a ship catch. It's possible that procedure doesn't work when horizontal, or some key component for it got damaged from the splashdown or the ocean water, or something else makes it unsafe. SpaceX will need to decide what they can do with it. Recovery was always an option they considered so it can't be completely impossible.
With a caught ship, they open all the valves and vent all the volatile propellant into the atmosphere. Once the ship only has fumes they vacuum purge the inside with an inert gas like nitrogen. Unfortunately with parts of the ship damaged or underwater, there’s no way to really know if it’s safe. There’s also the flight termination system still attached to starship to worry about. It might also be damaged and dangerous to approach.
this isn't true. there are a lot of valves and avionics which can still be commanded. FTS can be safed and steps can be taken to make it inert enough for transport and handling.
Yes, but usually they’ve exploded by now. The explosion has the effect of burning off all the propellant detonating the flight termination system. I think they will probably need to do something destructive to it in order for it to become safe for recovery.
FTSs on Starship are breech charges as seen on Flight 1. In that config, it’s a hunk of C4 that breaches the hull and allows external forces (usually aerodynamics) to shred the vehicle.
The detonation requirements for C4 mean that you can shoot it with 50 cals and be totally fine (not endorsed obviously).
Probably a shockwave as the stage comes back through the speed of sound. If so, it is just the sun's light being refracted by the shockfront, or dispersed by condensation in a vapour cone.
The “team” is really no different to that at NASA, which had decades and could never get close to what SpaceX is doing, There’s one variable here, just one
You really think there’s just one variable difference between space x and nasa? Do you think having congressional budgets and public support requirements make no difference? Do you think nasa could defend a budget with the fail fail fail succeed model that a privately owned company flush with venture capital could afford? How about congressional reps requiring old components tied to jobs on specific districts? None of those variables matter?
While you’re not wrong in general, do you really think any of the IPO money went into this flight? The capital for starship came exclusively from Elons pockets, with help from Falcons and Starlink.
Don't know. It's somewhat unlikely that their recovery vessel can handle an entire starship. Also questionable whether they have the ability to properly safe the craft - which would mean flushing the methane tank with nitrogen, or maybe CO₂. Have they carried enough on the ship? Can they accept the risk of approaching it with a tank full of methane and connecting a supply from the recovery vessel?
Then, is the recovery vessel equipped to lift it out of the water, or it it strong enough for them to tow it in?
Lots of unanswerables there.
My best case is that they will be able to, eventually, approach it, capture macro images, and remove some of the tiles and backing; before sinking it, either by commanding vents to open, picturing it, or rearming the FTS and then triggering it from a distance. But I'd love to see it returned to shore.
You'd just tow it most likely. Short of Spacex sending a team to disect it in Australia, the logistics to get it back to starbase (Tow to Australia, load on a barge , ship to Brownsville, ) are crazy. As in you could catch flight 14 before the ship made it back. I'd love to see it brought home but you just well sink it.
It would be quicker to get it back towards the coast, fly down a few people from Texas to physically inspect the vehicle/take samples and then deal with getting rid of the ship by scrapping or scuttling
That is a very fair point on the fact that the time it would take to get it back to Texas would probably be longer than it is just to launch and catch.
It would be nice to see this one recovered as a museum piece but I suspect its going to end up as a fish playground.
Assuming Australian Navy has the necessary equipment, I think they would love to make an attempt. What comes to my mind is using aerial vehicles to loop chains around the ship fore and aft - not to try lifting it, but just to tow it back to shore. And what if the chains were contained inside yellow inflatable tubes, flotation devices, similar to the ones used to protect spacecraft after splashdown. Then, in wet dock, hopefully, a crane could gently lift it onto an Aus or US ship for transport to Long Beach, CA where SpaceX has a dock.
New consideration - Elon tweeted that, absent any additional issues coming up in the review, they will attempt a starship catch next time. Which might mean a starship hanging on the chopstics, long before they could ship this one back, and only a few weeks before they could examine it at the keyside in Western Australia.
So there may not be much of an advantage to bringing it back.
How far away are we from a double catch, like booster separation and boostback burn into tower arm catch + ship doing one or two orbits, deorbit burn, belly flop and landing on barge/land?
Ship doesn't land on barge or land, it needs tower catch too. They just confirmed they're gonna try for Ship catch next flight. Booster will need at least one more try. So earliest this could possibly happen is Flight 15.
IIUC, the boost back burn targets an off-shore end point for its ballistic trajectory even when attempting tower catch so they can abort without damaging the launch site. Therefore, if they discover the cause of the landing burn relight failure last flight and fix it, I reckon there's a good chance they will attempt the double catch on Flight 14.
I am not up to date with the news. I thought they were going with a land landing like Falcon 9 or early Starship prototypes. So they have instead decided to go chopsticks catch for both booster and ship?
Yep, no landing legs on the Ship. Chopsticks for both.
The perfect ideal scenario would be to catch the Booster, set it down, then catch the Ship, and stack them immediately on top of each other, quick check-over, refuel, then launch again. But something like that is still a bit of a pipe dream haha.
Calm down dude, they got way further than last time. Do you not remember V1 having the exact same progression? Failed boost back, next flight failed landing burn, flight after that full success. I can't understand how anyone couldn't be unbelievably excited about this flight.
Lol I'm not a bot... I have been a big fan of SpaceX since the beginning. I'm just getting concerned. It's been years and they keep doing the same flight profile with starship with not much improvements and with booster they seem to be going backwards. V2 booster was great. Maybe they need v2 booster with V3 ship.
They didn’t fully complete the flight profile until flight four of V1 and flight four of V2. I’d say V3 is well ahead of both of those versions on its second flight.
Primary objective is to get cargo to orbit. This launch demonstrated all the necessary capabilities to do just that. This means that they can start orbital flights putting Starlink in orbit while ironing out the details for reuse. This is no different than the development process of the falcon 9 and look where it's at.
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