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SpaceX Starship

bigun said:
Okay I take it didn't go as planned
Click to expand...
It kinda did.
This was a test flight that took the craft higher and beyond any speeds ever attempted before. They did a bunch of tests and was able to collect the data for them.

As far as man-less test space flights go, I would call it a success. 🤷‍♂️

I hope someone got videos of the booster and craft coming back down haha
 
bigun said:
Okay I take it didn't go as planned
Click to expand...

In the grand scheme it actually went great. But the ship didn't survive reentry, and the booster hit the ocean hard due to not being able to relight a good amount of its engines.

But the booster successfully flew its planned mission, the ship hot staged successfully, ship burned the full duration as intended. Then while coasting they were able to test the payload door and complete a propellant transfer demonstration to complete a contract. So if they had enough attitude control (which they may not have) they would have been able to successfully deploy a payload if there was one onboard. Then they were hoping to also test a ship engine relight in vacuum which they ended up skipping, and it burned up during reentry.

5 or 6 more flights this year to get it right, fail forwards iterative learning.

 
bigun said:
Okay I take it didn't go as planned
Click to expand...
It was a resounding success by any measure. If they were trying to build a non reusable rocket, they would have been able to put 200 tons into orbit had they wanted to vs the current max of 17 tons.

They also proved that a fuel transfer in space is possible which wins them a 53 million dollar contract(award?).
 
I did notice the speed was still increasing well into the atmosphere and was thinking that was not a good thing
 
Thanks, I knew it was unmanned, but didn't know if it went kaboom before it made it out of the atmosphere or after
 
And I thought I had already posted this one but doesn't look like it. The footage we have of the plasma forming at the start of reentry is spectacular



And the views from Mexico were as excellent as last time

 
These pictures of it could be straight off the cover of an old sci-fi novel. :smokin:
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The amount of force in those pictures.... dang.
Love how the vapor wraps the exhaust.
 
Treefrog said:
I'm not so sure that is official. That seems to be some random kid who is trying to be a YouTuber. There doesn't seem to be any official statement out yet.
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He is young but seems to attempt honesty. He just screenshotted the statement from the SpaceX website. I should have added the SpaceX link too, but tweets are convenient haha.

SpaceX
 
Fuzzydog said:
The failure of the booster to soft land aside, this is an awesome day. Congrats to SpaceX and to all the future space pioneers. I bet Bezos, NASA, ROSCOSMOS, Arianne, ULA and all the rest got a wake up call this morning. This is the future.
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This and fuck the naysayers rooting for failure!
 
And there was a Falcon 9 Starlink launch from Florida tonight as well

Main video:



Launch clip:



Landing clip:



And a pretty cool perspective from the baseball game, where cameras caught the launch and the announcer was enjoying it

 
So this is two weeks old at this point, but now that Ship 28 and Booster 10 have flown, you may be wondering the state of the hardware for the next flights. Besides some testing, Booster 11 and Ship 29 are complete and ready to go, along with their successors very far along. While that 5-6 more through the year might be a stretch, they're definitely lined up for a good few

 
Roscosmos aborted a launch to the ISS with 3 astronauts with 20 seconds to go
Spacex has a scheduled cargo flight to the ISS later today.
Sounds like this abort is a bit of PITA now because I guess they don't want them both arriving at the same time

It's getting busy up there

With an abort at 20 seconds, I wonder if the astronauts are relieved, as in "whew, glad they caught that before they lit the candle.."
Or pissed as in"oh come on, let's go. It's just a faulty gauge!!!":confused:
 
Fuzzydog said:
Roscosmos aborted a launch to the ISS with 3 astronauts with 20 seconds to go
Spacex has a scheduled cargo flight to the ISS later today.
Sounds like this abort is a bit of PITA now because I guess they don't want them both arriving at the same time

It's getting busy up there

With an abort at 20 seconds, I wonder if the astronauts are relieved, as in "whew, glad they caught that before they lit the candle.."
Or pissed as in"oh come on, let's go. It's just a faulty gauge!!!":confused:
Click to expand...

Well crap! Honestly, I think they'll be glad they didn't launch. There's a saying "better to be on the ground wishing you were flying, than flying wishing you were on the ground" or something along those lines haha. And ~5 years ago there was an in flight failure of Soyuz with 3 astronauts/cosmonauts aboard when one of the 4 boosters that detach part way through flight came back and hit the center stage of the rocket destroying it. The abort system worked, but definitely not the kind of thing they want to test again lol.

Video of the old failure:



Also from this morning, Rocket Lab had a successful launch from Wallops, Va after a delay from late last night





 
Sweet.

Soyuz launch went off smooth earlier this morning (Fuzzy's link), the reason for the previous scrub was a low voltage condition due to some ground-side equipment or something along those lines? But good now, and the 3 people are on their way to the ISS.

SpaceX also launched a Cargo Dragon to the ISS a couple days ago (bigun's link), which just docked to the ISS this morning. The really cool thing about this, it's the first Dragon launch from pad 40 with all of the new crew/cargo dragon launch hardware. Until now, 39a was the only pad that had everything necessary for the modern Dragon 2 including crew access arm and staircase/elevator to get up to it. Now both pads are fully capable. Which also gives NASA a lot more confidence, because the first Starship pad being built in Florida is right next to 39a on the same piece of property, so a Starship failure could interrupt SpaceX's ability to fly their contracted Dragon missions.

And then, the Starlink launches march on today! (bigun's latest link). Interesting thing about the last Starlink launch, it had two classified sats onboard that weren't part of the disclosed total. Looks to be some (of the first?) Starshield sats. Modified Starlinks for govt purposes

Starshield:
Space Force Awards Contract to SpaceX for Starshield, Its New Satellite Network

Cargo Dragon launch from 40:





The crew escape system from 40 is a deployable slide, versus the baskets on cables that 39a uses. The onboard view was actually the company president Gwynne



Then Dragon docked to the ISS this morning



 
And Starbase pics, because why not. Ship 29 for the next flight has been moved to its test stand, with tests scheduled this upcoming week. Their cadence is looking great for speeding things up, at least so far.





Interestingly enough speaking of the Florida Starship launch pad in the previous post, It looks like they just dismantled one of the legs for the launch mount. Wonder if there was something with that one particular leg, or they're doing a redesign on them all after learning from the first flights from Starbase.

 
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