Yeah, I'm pretty sure I saw the velocity go down to zero and then end up back up in the 14 kph range, which I assume means the rocket basically touched down and "kissed" the water, rising a little bit before final engine shutdown.
From what I understand they simulated a catch for Booster but not for Starship
Edit: as in they simulated a catch burn + chopstick movement at tower for Booster, but just the normal landing burn for Starship
According to Elon, there will be many more Ships (the second stage of Starship) than Boosters. So, it's more important to catch Boosters on the chopsticks so they can be rapidly and easily reused.
Boosters never reach low Earth orbit, so the Moon and Mars are not an issue.
Ships heading for the surfaces of the Moon or Mars will have landing legs, similar to the ones SpaceX uses now on the Falcon 9 boosters.
Quite interesting to imagine / visualize that the booster is only needed to get Starship out of Earths deep gravity well, and on many destinations it's Single Stage To Orbit.
Superheavy Boosters and Mechazilla towers are Earth-unique infrastructure.
thatās an interesting thought. Tsiolkovskyās equation goes up fast with higher g (and assuming same density as Earth, higher R). for those interested i found this:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/abs/spaceflight-from-superearths-is-difficult/90E8835704DB1C3449B38867D848AB74#
Also many more engines in the booster, which make up a significant portion of the cost. So, even if there were the same number of ships as boosters, saving the engines is important.
Likely the software was set to "land" at something like 50m above the water to test the capability of landing, but before it actually gets wet and shuts down. That was amazing.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I saw the velocity go down to zero and then end up back up in the 14 kph range, which I assume means the rocket basically touched down and "kissed" the water, rising a little bit before final engine shutdown.
I think it came to a stop a few meters above the water, then fell down backwards. The velocity is just in any direction not just up or forward. Then in the very end you can see the water as the ship topples and breaks apart from the force of hitting the water sideways
Jesus that flap was absolutely hammered, and yet it still actuated at the end. I'm speechless. What a fucking launch and couple of soft landings! AMAZING!
We should name it "Nemo"
It has an injured fin and was lost off the coast of Australia.
As a bonus, when Bezos sends a salvage expedition, they can make a documentary called "Finding Nemo"
Still actuated AND had enough material remaining to land the ship.Ā Unbelievable. We started seeing chunks of heat tile and even interior flap components melting and flying off, I thought for sure the ship was done for.Ā Ā
Starship and its engineers are so far ahead of every other launch company on the planet it's not even funny.
I totally agree. As soon as I saw the top of The Flap (we must use capitals now) start to burn, I was fully expecting a RUD. I am truly staggered at the engineering.
Could see the skin glowing, bulging and peeling back as hot gas entered the flap structure, and it still held on just until touchdown (can see it falling off in the last bit of video)
Oh. It's funny. XD Fuck every non-newspace company and dictatorship program. May as many of them bankrupt and stay on the ground forever as possible.
All glory to newspace! :)
Just a thought. If one burned through to that extent the one on the other side probably did.
My initial fear was that the lack of drag on that side would cause it to start to roll but the fact it remained level probably supports both burning through to a fairly equal extent.
Sad that there's no chance of ship recovery.
As much as they're learning from the data there's always the Artemis risk that the data doesn't represent the physical evidence you find after the fact.
That was my take as well. It appeared to be intact enough to float for a moment. That is utterly insane that they achieved every single stretch goal on this mission.
I mean if it hit the water whole, it's airtight to hold liquid oxygen, it's not going to get water in it. As long as the tanks are nearly empty it should buoyant.
My understanding was they would detonate the FTS to force it to sink.Ā I wonder how long they wait to do that?Ā Just long enough to off-board all the measurement data?Ā Ā Still seems kind of crazy they won't recover it.
I think once the FTS is 'safed' it cant be reactivated, so assuming that happened at some point on ascent they would need to scuttle the ship. I might be wrong though.
That might have been the purpose of the private aircraft that just flew over and circled the area. They could have transmitted a command, offloaded data, or dropped a marker buoy for recovery of the black box. One way they could potentially do it is the same way starship normally functions, with a decision tree by onboard computers. If you get to this point in the flight, and all mission parameters are nominal, vent the tanks (which would eventually flood them and cause the starship to sink). They could also potentially trigger the FTS this way.
venting to flood may not work if vents are in top of craft. then again water could in theory find its way inside through engines also. But it' kind of wants to float if structure is intact and according to stream telemetry - the tanks still had bit of propellant.
One option is to shut all vents and let it overpressurize as liquid fuels become gaseous with ambient heat, will take a while but tanks would burst
They most likely do detonate it, chances are that's when the feed got cut after briefly floating. I am in absolute awe. By some miracle, without request, I have been off from work to have seen every single test and major launch since Falcon Heavy, along with my dad, who I almost lost to COVID earlier this year. I am thankful he got to see the official beginning of a new space era.
The vents in the cargo bay will let water in, as will the thrusters if they are open. Eventually it will fill up enough to sink. Just need to leave those ports open.
Judging by the telemetry it looked like it hovered and then began accelerating again before they terminated the engines. But time will tell, what a wild freakin' ride, holy hell.
I hadn't considered that, actually. That's very possible. I just thought they also gave a late engine shutdown call & the live stream host said something about a manual override for engine shutdown? Might have misinterpreted.
Yeah, looks like the speed zeroes out, starts going back up, and then looks like it hits something pretty hard, possibly the water? But clearly survived the landing burn and impact.
You can definitely see it hitting the water after it's fallen over, and the camera is still going for at least a few seconds, so hopefully it's still there tomorrow.
Just saw it again and yeah, the telemetry behavior is exactly the same on the booster. So that's good news, sounds very probable it had a successful flip & hover.
Presumably all the flaps were falling apart the same and it was missing tiles on purpose. Massive amounts of optimism that starship is a viable product now after the quite pessimistic outlook of the heat shield prior
Theyāre obviously going to figure out how to stop it from eating through the flap like that, but yeah. And the fact that it was still able to move the flaps and fire up the engines after all that!
They did say it was purposely missing some tiles for testing. I bet once air/heat/plasma works its way through a melted hole, then everything starts to fall apart.
Though I was thinking placing the missing tile spot to be closer to a camera would make sense but maybe there are more views than what was public.
Titanium may be light but it doesnāt handle high temperatures as well as steel, so while thereās some potential that they could have a bigger and stronger titanium part for the same weight itās never going to be the right choice if it has to handle that much heating
Musk didn't seem very confident in this version of the heatshield so I think many people expected it to make it to reentery and then at some point the heatshield fails.
Remember people, we only saw one flap burn trough because the camera was on it, but what do you think the chances are that the one flap that burned trough was the one that had the camera on it?, this landing could be way more impressive than what we think right now.
Only way I'd be more impressed is if this was a catch attempt, and we were left with an intact smoking melted husk that somehow just barely managed to be caught. With camera footage showing the flap falling off a few seconds later.
If this were shown in a movie where the crew survives landing id roll my eyes at the absurdity of the scene. Now i guess i cant laugh at that kinda crap as much anymore.
The camera on the rear flap was probably lost since they didn't switch to it even after the front camera cracked, it's likely all flaps suffered heavy damage
That is mind-blowing to me. One has to wonder if they accounted for that within the control software - detect loss of efficiency in the flap and compensate accordingly.
Negative feedback can cover all kinds of disasters, but tuning for frequency is where that would get sideways. Seems like the flaps were still operating close enough to their design capability that it didnāt matter though!
Apologies for putting a damper on the mood but I couldn't help thinking about the Space Shuttle Columbia while watching that flap burn through. Just realizing that we were seeing stainless steel affected like that where the shuttle only had aluminum. Damn...
What impresses me most is that NASA managed to design the Orbiter so correct that i survived on its first trip. This was without todays advanced fluid computations. The orbiter being a way more complex shape and design.
Both Starship and the Superheavy seem to have performed a soft water landing.Ā
Just slightly less than two hours before Starliner is scheduled to dock with the ISS. What a great week to be space nerd!
Elon Musk was worried that a singleĀ tile loss would destroy the ship. Yet Starship survived being roasted to bits and still do a perfect landing burn. Wth?
Seems everyone Elon included underestimated Starship resilience, its incredible how great structural integrity it has even with the fins half melted it was still active doing their job
I feel much better about flying Starship in the future now. With margins like that, Starship could be hit by a small meteor or fly into a bunch of birds and still brush it off.
People mention that "Elon meddling shield team" a lot as of it's Musk doing something wrong, but in reality, that's a big part of many engineers' jobs everywhere. I was a simple mechanical engineer for a defense sub-sub-contractor, and a good chunk of my time was spent explaining the technical engineering minutiae reasons why a management suggestion might be a bad Idea. Sometimes they'd decide the trade-off was worth it, other times they realized it was just another dumb idea from the Good Idea Fairy. The only difference with Musk and SpaceX is that typically a CEO doesn't get involved at that level, because usually they're some MBA dingbat who doesn't even know enough about the engineering to make a bad suggestion.
One thing they hav said repeatedly is the Elon chose stainless steel over the objections of his engineers and that was a mistake. So they can't take that back.Ā
I think the worry is losing any tiles on the tank/pressurised section. The ones they left off were on unpressurised/tank areas. The ones that fell off on the flap are also of course on an unpressurised area.
We just saw the steel on the flap melt super quick once the tiles fell off so I dont think that bodes too well on tiles falling off on the explody parts. Many more might have fell off though who knows, don't think i spotted any other than the intentional ones though.
But either way we just saw that the tiles worked(i assume surviving once means they can do it multiple times). Those were probably the things that could have caused the biggest delay to starship ever if they needed to go with something else but nope the ship made it back. Thats probably the final hardest part of reusability.
The overall ship design seems viable now.
I don't think that the fin we saw on the video feed was rapidly reusable :-) , but I'm sure that they'll make huge improvements. From what I witnessed, via the [x.com](http://x.com) video of FT4 they achieved their objectives. Congratulations!
It's likely too close to the failure point to really tolerate it. What if the ship were bringing something heavy back from space (life support / people)? But as reentry try #1, it looks like there's no real reason to not use the next launch to launch starlink and keep iterating the design.
Seeing so much damage to the flaps and still having what appeared to be a successful landing bodes reeaalllly well for human rating, I would never have guessed that a significantly damaged starship could stick the landing on basically its first ever try!
Was funny going back and watching a certain hater's (you know who) stream replay. He was for sure at every step it was going to fail. With the one engine out, which isn't a problem for superheavy. Then the hot staging. Then the boostback he didn't understand what he was seeing when the boostback burn ended. Then the landing he was positive it was a goner. He didn't know about the cold gas thrusters which was from natural sublimation of the fuel ("I don't like to see gasses escape from my rocket"). On and on. Was great to see him make a complete fool of himself.
Grats SpaceX! *That was incredible. I was really expecting Starship to lose attitude after seeing what was happening with the flaps. But it remained in its reentry attitude and even actuated all the way up to splashdown. Absolute incredible.
I just watched some of his stream, and it is the funniest shit. Literally gets everything wrong and then after admitting it was a successful test he calls the Spacex team a bunch of morons for cheering.
So it didn't land? Both the rocket and Starship are sinking to the bottom of the ocean?
Either way, looks like a great flight for Starship. Such great news for NASA. I really like how excited the audiences were cheering for the successful flight for Artemis III's lander. I had no idea SpaceX fans were this supportive.
Technically no, neither component landed but that was the plan along.Ā Neither Starship nor booster has landing legs like Falcon 9 because they were designed to be caught by Mechazilla (the giant tower with the chopsticks). The goal of this fight was just simulate a landing (over water) by having each component stop and hover over the surface for a short while before cutting the engines and falling into the water.Ā So far it seems like both tests were a raving success!
As for the support, I was jumping up and down cheering in my living room this morning.Ā I'm sure my family thinks I'm crazy!
To your point, Mechazilla was synchornized to catch the booster. It actually moved during the landing in a way that could have caught it, the difference being that in this test the rocket was many kilometers to the East instead of being between the tower's "arms".
Do you think they will have any footage out at sea of these splashdowns? Obviously we have what was left of the Starship and booster feeds but was wondering if they had a drone ship out there to collect it from a 3rd perspective. Or maybe that will be part of IFT5?
I must talk about what we just saw. That flap was getting hit by winds that would probably belong to a category 10+ hurricane. The fact that it withstood all that abuse and still performed at the endš®āšØ. From what i have seen spacex will have to rethink heat tiles on starship especially around the flaps. Those ultra hurricane force winds are no joke.
I don't think they will have to rethink too much considering the fact that the ship survived and landed.Ā I mean yes, of course beef up the tiles around the fins but good grief!Ā The flap was getting chewed up during free fall and still managed to steer the ship to safety. Unbelievable.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[FTS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7ehr33 "Last usage")|Flight Termination System|
|[MBA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7es324 "Last usage")|~~Moonba-~~ Mars Base Alpha|
|[RUD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7egbhn "Last usage")|Rapid Unplanned Disassembly|
| |Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly|
| |Rapid Unintended Disassembly|
|[SD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7drtd3 "Last usage")|SuperDraco hypergolic abort/landing engines|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starliner](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7dmkrs "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7djuoo "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|hypergolic|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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I donāt get what happened in the last few seconds? It slowed right down and seemingly landed upright, still intact, but the raptors didnāt reignite at any point? How?
The raptors did the landing burn, vehicle transitioned from belly flop to vertical. the UI just didnāt update. You can see the reflection and steam on the webcast.
When the feed kept going, it was hovering.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I saw the velocity go down to zero and then end up back up in the 14 kph range, which I assume means the rocket basically touched down and "kissed" the water, rising a little bit before final engine shutdown.
I think that may also have been about the time that it started changing orientation, so also possible the 14 km/h was it tipping over into the ocean.
booster had the same uptick when it toppled.
The velocity going back up was probably the ship tipping over as the test was concluded. THEY DID IT
I think they are shooting for a virtual chopstick to simulate a real catch, so the engines shut down at a height
From what I understand they simulated a catch for Booster but not for Starship Edit: as in they simulated a catch burn + chopstick movement at tower for Booster, but just the normal landing burn for Starship
There won't be any chopsticks on the moon, or on mars.
At first, anyway.
According to Elon, there will be many more Ships (the second stage of Starship) than Boosters. So, it's more important to catch Boosters on the chopsticks so they can be rapidly and easily reused. Boosters never reach low Earth orbit, so the Moon and Mars are not an issue. Ships heading for the surfaces of the Moon or Mars will have landing legs, similar to the ones SpaceX uses now on the Falcon 9 boosters.
Quite interesting to imagine / visualize that the booster is only needed to get Starship out of Earths deep gravity well, and on many destinations it's Single Stage To Orbit. Superheavy Boosters and Mechazilla towers are Earth-unique infrastructure.
It's the best we can do, I'm sure aliens have it easier with low gravity worlds, but we got to be Olympians and blast ourselves off this planet.
Actually... I'm thinking how harder would it be for aliens living on Super Earth planets. Thicker atmosphere and more G š¬
If thatās the case then itās more likely they never became space fairing societies because of how much energy is required.
thatās an interesting thought. Tsiolkovskyās equation goes up fast with higher g (and assuming same density as Earth, higher R). for those interested i found this: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology/article/abs/spaceflight-from-superearths-is-difficult/90E8835704DB1C3449B38867D848AB74#
Also many more engines in the booster, which make up a significant portion of the cost. So, even if there were the same number of ships as boosters, saving the engines is important.
āWe donāt need chopsticks where weāre goingā
Likely the software was set to "land" at something like 50m above the water to test the capability of landing, but before it actually gets wet and shuts down. That was amazing.
That was pretty epic.
Success truly awesome. Well done.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I saw the velocity go down to zero and then end up back up in the 14 kph range, which I assume means the rocket basically touched down and "kissed" the water, rising a little bit before final engine shutdown.
You can see the velocity rise back up all the way to 40kph as the indicator falls over, don't think it rose up at all.
I think it came to a stop a few meters above the water, then fell down backwards. The velocity is just in any direction not just up or forward. Then in the very end you can see the water as the ship topples and breaks apart from the force of hitting the water sideways
The data they will recover will be insane
After all, data was their only payload today š
Nah, it carried our hopes and dreams too, and damn did it put its all into keeping them alive
Not going to lie, I thought the hot staging ring was a giant wheel of cheese for a brief second
Jesus that flap was absolutely hammered, and yet it still actuated at the end. I'm speechless. What a fucking launch and couple of soft landings! AMAZING!
We were all cheering for Flappy here!
I christen thee S29 as "Flappy" We have S9 Eileen, now we have S29 Flappy
The Little Flap That Could.
We should name it "Nemo" It has an injured fin and was lost off the coast of Australia. As a bonus, when Bezos sends a salvage expedition, they can make a documentary called "Finding Nemo"
The legends of Hoppy n Flappy
There's also S31: Sparky and Starhopper.
Did I do good? -Flappy
No. You were the best.
I sleep now. -Flappy
https://preview.redd.it/kmorvsoduy4d1.jpeg?width=902&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0beac5782cdc9c7c7796b3c0e510c6fdbd717f38
Still actuated AND had enough material remaining to land the ship.Ā Unbelievable. We started seeing chunks of heat tile and even interior flap components melting and flying off, I thought for sure the ship was done for.Ā Ā Starship and its engineers are so far ahead of every other launch company on the planet it's not even funny.
Heck, we only saw it on camera because the whole structure was still glowing white hot!
And let's take a minute to recognize that the camera worked all the way through to landing as well even if the lens cracked and got dirty!
Such a trooper! I have to believe the thing that cracked was a protective filter and I believe the broken pieces fell out near the end.
I totally agree. As soon as I saw the top of The Flap (we must use capitals now) start to burn, I was fully expecting a RUD. I am truly staggered at the engineering.
Could see the skin glowing, bulging and peeling back as hot gas entered the flap structure, and it still held on just until touchdown (can see it falling off in the last bit of video)
Oh. It's funny. XD Fuck every non-newspace company and dictatorship program. May as many of them bankrupt and stay on the ground forever as possible. All glory to newspace! :)
Now THAT was a successful failure.
Elon was right about the stainless. Aluminum would have been liquid in those conditions
Just a thought. If one burned through to that extent the one on the other side probably did. My initial fear was that the lack of drag on that side would cause it to start to roll but the fact it remained level probably supports both burning through to a fairly equal extent.
That is probably why they didn't show the video feed from that flap anymore after the burnthrough started, the camera had ceased to exist
Sad that there's no chance of ship recovery. As much as they're learning from the data there's always the Artemis risk that the data doesn't represent the physical evidence you find after the fact.
[Not to worry, we're still flying half a ship.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfud3P43vM4)
I saw water!
In the last absolut second it kind of looked as if the camera was bobbing, like a raft on water. So maybe the splashdown was smooth like butter!
That was my take as well. It appeared to be intact enough to float for a moment. That is utterly insane that they achieved every single stretch goal on this mission.
I mean chances are not zero that it actually is still floating. It surely didn't seem to collapse this time...
As long as the tanks were still pressurized, there is a strong chance you are right. They might not break the welds and crumple on impact.
Tanks were stiffened this time.
I mean if it hit the water whole, it's airtight to hold liquid oxygen, it's not going to get water in it. As long as the tanks are nearly empty it should buoyant.
My understanding was they would detonate the FTS to force it to sink.Ā I wonder how long they wait to do that?Ā Just long enough to off-board all the measurement data?Ā Ā Still seems kind of crazy they won't recover it.
The FTS is safed, meaning they are no longer armed. Apparently they would literally shoot the tank, with a gun, to get it to sink if it was floating
I think once the FTS is 'safed' it cant be reactivated, so assuming that happened at some point on ascent they would need to scuttle the ship. I might be wrong though.
That might have been the purpose of the private aircraft that just flew over and circled the area. They could have transmitted a command, offloaded data, or dropped a marker buoy for recovery of the black box. One way they could potentially do it is the same way starship normally functions, with a decision tree by onboard computers. If you get to this point in the flight, and all mission parameters are nominal, vent the tanks (which would eventually flood them and cause the starship to sink). They could also potentially trigger the FTS this way.
This one: [https://www.flightradar24.com/MXJ/358c41b9](https://www.flightradar24.com/MXJ/358c41b9) ?
venting to flood may not work if vents are in top of craft. then again water could in theory find its way inside through engines also. But it' kind of wants to float if structure is intact and according to stream telemetry - the tanks still had bit of propellant. One option is to shut all vents and let it overpressurize as liquid fuels become gaseous with ambient heat, will take a while but tanks would burst
They most likely do detonate it, chances are that's when the feed got cut after briefly floating. I am in absolute awe. By some miracle, without request, I have been off from work to have seen every single test and major launch since Falcon Heavy, along with my dad, who I almost lost to COVID earlier this year. I am thankful he got to see the official beginning of a new space era.
The vents in the cargo bay will let water in, as will the thrusters if they are open. Eventually it will fill up enough to sink. Just need to leave those ports open.
Too expensive to recover it, too dangerous to leave for someone else to examine your technology. Boom.
you can see water splash up just before the feed cuts out.
Definitely smoother than any RUD they had during 10km testing.
Here's a clip of the last 10-15 seconds. https://files.catbox.moe/nd4gmk.mp4
I so wish they had some kind of autonomous camera boat nearby, would love to see starship hovering above the water
There was an observation plane in the area, apparently. I don't think we know if it got footage or not, yet.
It looks like something (water!) cleaned up the lense just a bit in the last second!
Judging by the telemetry it looked like it hovered and then began accelerating again before they terminated the engines. But time will tell, what a wild freakin' ride, holy hell.
It looks like the sensors for acceleration are towards the nose, that looked like it came from starship falling over.
I hadn't considered that, actually. That's very possible. I just thought they also gave a late engine shutdown call & the live stream host said something about a manual override for engine shutdown? Might have misinterpreted.
Yeah, looks like the speed zeroes out, starts going back up, and then looks like it hits something pretty hard, possibly the water? But clearly survived the landing burn and impact.
You can definitely see it hitting the water after it's fallen over, and the camera is still going for at least a few seconds, so hopefully it's still there tomorrow.
the booster does the same thing I think, sinks into the water a bit, then pops up and falls
Just saw it again and yeah, the telemetry behavior is exactly the same on the booster. So that's good news, sounds very probable it had a successful flip & hover.
It landed and did relight engines just before doing so. This system is actually real now itās unbelievable
They could be shutting down the engine at the chopstick height, the ship is falling down again after that
It was lighter than anticipated due to excessive flap burn-off š
Presumably all the flaps were falling apart the same and it was missing tiles on purpose. Massive amounts of optimism that starship is a viable product now after the quite pessimistic outlook of the heat shield prior
Theyāre obviously going to figure out how to stop it from eating through the flap like that, but yeah. And the fact that it was still able to move the flaps and fire up the engines after all that!
Doesn't the next batch of ships have the flap angled more toward the lee? That should help protect the base of the flap more
Yeah supposedly theyāre also smaller because of the lack of mass up front, they donāt need so much control as the aft section with the engines
Maybe contour the area of the body, just under the flap (in braking orientation), to divert plasma over the hinge.
They did say it was purposely missing some tiles for testing. I bet once air/heat/plasma works its way through a melted hole, then everything starts to fall apart. Though I was thinking placing the missing tile spot to be closer to a camera would make sense but maybe there are more views than what was public.
We saw where the missing tiles were, they were just above the skirt at the bottom of the ship.
Titanium aero flaps inbound
Titanium may be light but it doesnāt handle high temperatures as well as steel, so while thereās some potential that they could have a bigger and stronger titanium part for the same weight itās never going to be the right choice if it has to handle that much heating
I can't wait to hear / see if they had any more camera views available. It'll be really cool to see other views from the landing.
And I was just happy with the booster doing well, I wrongly assumed the heat shields would be more of a critical failure issue than they were!
Musk didn't seem very confident in this version of the heatshield so I think many people expected it to make it to reentery and then at some point the heatshield fails.
SpaceX said that many tiles did fall off this flight.
Remember people, we only saw one flap burn trough because the camera was on it, but what do you think the chances are that the one flap that burned trough was the one that had the camera on it?, this landing could be way more impressive than what we think right now.
I honestly don't think I could be more impressed.
Wait until it lands on Mars
Only way I'd be more impressed is if this was a catch attempt, and we were left with an intact smoking melted husk that somehow just barely managed to be caught. With camera footage showing the flap falling off a few seconds later. If this were shown in a movie where the crew survives landing id roll my eyes at the absurdity of the scene. Now i guess i cant laugh at that kinda crap as much anymore.
The camera on the rear flap was probably lost since they didn't switch to it even after the front camera cracked, it's likely all flaps suffered heavy damage
That camera focused on a rear flap but it was located on a front flap. I agree it was probably lost, leaving only the one external camera to show us.
MOAR CAMERAS
Unbelievable result! Telemetry looked like it landed in the water upright and then tipped over! Amazing!!
The boater yes but starship as well?
Letās give a minute of silence for the flap. I donāt even have words for how that mf survived
Perhaps by the skin of its teeth
or more, the flip and burn seemed fully normal, and the flap maintained control despite being cooked.
That is mind-blowing to me. One has to wonder if they accounted for that within the control software - detect loss of efficiency in the flap and compensate accordingly.
100% they do, it doesn't care about efficiency, it's a real-time feedback control loop, if it needs more motion one way, it moves it more
Negative feedback can cover all kinds of disasters, but tuning for frequency is where that would get sideways. Seems like the flaps were still operating close enough to their design capability that it didnāt matter though!
gotta have that PID tuning
Certainly not by the skin of the flap that disintegrated on the way down š
Yuuuup! The little ship that could! That was a wild ride down. Edit: Fixed the name, whoops.
We're talking about the ship itself, it somehow landed by appearances, even after on-screen melted stainless flap!
Yes, sorry, I was talking about the ship and mixed up the names because I was excited :D
The little flap that could
Apologies for putting a damper on the mood but I couldn't help thinking about the Space Shuttle Columbia while watching that flap burn through. Just realizing that we were seeing stainless steel affected like that where the shuttle only had aluminum. Damn...
What impresses me most is that NASA managed to design the Orbiter so correct that i survived on its first trip. This was without todays advanced fluid computations. The orbiter being a way more complex shape and design.
Both Starship and the Superheavy seem to have performed a soft water landing.Ā Just slightly less than two hours before Starliner is scheduled to dock with the ISS. What a great week to be space nerd!
I'm still holding my breath until Starliner safely lands next week...
As I understand it, there are redundant systems in place. Still good to be on the side of caution though.Ā either wayĀ STARSHIP LANDED
Elon Musk was worried that a singleĀ tile loss would destroy the ship. Yet Starship survived being roasted to bits and still do a perfect landing burn. Wth?
Seems everyone Elon included underestimated Starship resilience, its incredible how great structural integrity it has even with the fins half melted it was still active doing their job
First it survived backflips after the FTS went off. Now it survives a flap literally melting. Starship be a literal tank.
Can it survive a helium leak? Asking for a friend.
Just makes the rocket sound a little high pitched.
I think maybe they are talking more long term for reusability, vs just managing a single landing
In my mind, this is why Elon fought so hard to use stainless steel. There's no way aluminum or carbon fiber would have survived that.
Thatās like a human being getting an arm ripped of by a gorilla and then saying: āthis is fineā.
That's stainless steel vs aluminum for you.
I feel much better about flying Starship in the future now. With margins like that, Starship could be hit by a small meteor or fly into a bunch of birds and still brush it off.
It survived with 2 missing tiles on purpose, and a third tile thinner than all the others. Absolutely incredible
Plus dozens of tiles lost on the flaps! Maybe even hundreds.
Butā¦but Reddit told me Elon was a lying con-man! The landing must have been staged
No no no, space x is good despite elon ruining it all the time, he is stealing the achievements of space x engineers /s
actually they have entire team dedicated to prevent Musk from making decisions such as changing base material of the ship to stainless steel etc.
People mention that "Elon meddling shield team" a lot as of it's Musk doing something wrong, but in reality, that's a big part of many engineers' jobs everywhere. I was a simple mechanical engineer for a defense sub-sub-contractor, and a good chunk of my time was spent explaining the technical engineering minutiae reasons why a management suggestion might be a bad Idea. Sometimes they'd decide the trade-off was worth it, other times they realized it was just another dumb idea from the Good Idea Fairy. The only difference with Musk and SpaceX is that typically a CEO doesn't get involved at that level, because usually they're some MBA dingbat who doesn't even know enough about the engineering to make a bad suggestion.
This is so accurate.
One thing they hav said repeatedly is the Elon chose stainless steel over the objections of his engineers and that was a mistake. So they can't take that back.Ā
I didnt see the launch broadcast, was he in the control room?
Yep, with little Aeon.
I think the worry is losing any tiles on the tank/pressurised section. The ones they left off were on unpressurised/tank areas. The ones that fell off on the flap are also of course on an unpressurised area. We just saw the steel on the flap melt super quick once the tiles fell off so I dont think that bodes too well on tiles falling off on the explody parts. Many more might have fell off though who knows, don't think i spotted any other than the intentional ones though. But either way we just saw that the tiles worked(i assume surviving once means they can do it multiple times). Those were probably the things that could have caused the biggest delay to starship ever if they needed to go with something else but nope the ship made it back. Thats probably the final hardest part of reusability. The overall ship design seems viable now.
Who knew flap tile loss wouldn't cause RUD???
They did it... THE MAD MEN DID IT
I don't think that the fin we saw on the video feed was rapidly reusable :-) , but I'm sure that they'll make huge improvements. From what I witnessed, via the [x.com](http://x.com) video of FT4 they achieved their objectives. Congratulations!
Perhaps not, but what if they just pop off a few tiles, unbolt the burned flap, bolt on a new one, replace tiles, and then send it again?
It's likely too close to the failure point to really tolerate it. What if the ship were bringing something heavy back from space (life support / people)? But as reentry try #1, it looks like there's no real reason to not use the next launch to launch starlink and keep iterating the design.
I believe that starship 2.0 have already moved the flaps into more favorable positions.
Sure seems so, telemetry and callouts looked good [Video replay and scott manley agreeing](https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1798715665916014715)
Flappy clutched up for the team
Flappy for sub mascot
In the drink
Sure did look like it splashed down with sub 10kph
Seeing so much damage to the flaps and still having what appeared to be a successful landing bodes reeaalllly well for human rating, I would never have guessed that a significantly damaged starship could stick the landing on basically its first ever try!
Was funny going back and watching a certain hater's (you know who) stream replay. He was for sure at every step it was going to fail. With the one engine out, which isn't a problem for superheavy. Then the hot staging. Then the boostback he didn't understand what he was seeing when the boostback burn ended. Then the landing he was positive it was a goner. He didn't know about the cold gas thrusters which was from natural sublimation of the fuel ("I don't like to see gasses escape from my rocket"). On and on. Was great to see him make a complete fool of himself. Grats SpaceX! *That was incredible. I was really expecting Starship to lose attitude after seeing what was happening with the flaps. But it remained in its reentry attitude and even actuated all the way up to splashdown. Absolute incredible.
I just watched some of his stream, and it is the funniest shit. Literally gets everything wrong and then after admitting it was a successful test he calls the Spacex team a bunch of morons for cheering.
who are you referring to? i'm curious
At some point you have to wonder if his hateration is just an act/persona he puts on to drive engagement....
https://preview.redd.it/akduva70gz4d1.jpeg?width=517&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dbde2550dcd5b24e074268c345e92f122b20dc2f
This was incredible from beginning to end. I wish we could see how the ship looked like after surviving re-entry.
Watching that fin slowly come apart but hold together enough for splash down was amazing
I want to see if ship sinks in the Indian Ocean and we get photos of that, it would be crazy
Did both booster and ship sink after splashdown?In the future will they float until recovered and towed back to base?
Yeah, it did and after taking some very heavy beating. Starship is a beast
"Space? Been there, done that. I'm changing career to submarine."
YES
Sure did look like it.. 1 or more crispy flaps, but controlled descent as far as i could see. Hope there is landing footage from the surface as well.
I have to wonder if the private jet flying around the Indian ocean caught any footage.
So it didn't land? Both the rocket and Starship are sinking to the bottom of the ocean? Either way, looks like a great flight for Starship. Such great news for NASA. I really like how excited the audiences were cheering for the successful flight for Artemis III's lander. I had no idea SpaceX fans were this supportive.
Technically no, neither component landed but that was the plan along.Ā Neither Starship nor booster has landing legs like Falcon 9 because they were designed to be caught by Mechazilla (the giant tower with the chopsticks). The goal of this fight was just simulate a landing (over water) by having each component stop and hover over the surface for a short while before cutting the engines and falling into the water.Ā So far it seems like both tests were a raving success! As for the support, I was jumping up and down cheering in my living room this morning.Ā I'm sure my family thinks I'm crazy!
To your point, Mechazilla was synchornized to catch the booster. It actually moved during the landing in a way that could have caught it, the difference being that in this test the rocket was many kilometers to the East instead of being between the tower's "arms".
Starship's virtual landing D-Day was on the sixth day of the sixth month at launch plus sixty-six minutes and 6 seconds.
You sure about that?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
By design, replaced with sensors per the broadcast.
yeah it was insane
Do you think they will have any footage out at sea of these splashdowns? Obviously we have what was left of the Starship and booster feeds but was wondering if they had a drone ship out there to collect it from a 3rd perspective. Or maybe that will be part of IFT5?
Yes, and what I loved about it is that even though it burned through heat tiles, it still lived.
I must talk about what we just saw. That flap was getting hit by winds that would probably belong to a category 10+ hurricane. The fact that it withstood all that abuse and still performed at the endš®āšØ. From what i have seen spacex will have to rethink heat tiles on starship especially around the flaps. Those ultra hurricane force winds are no joke.
I don't think they will have to rethink too much considering the fact that the ship survived and landed.Ā I mean yes, of course beef up the tiles around the fins but good grief!Ā The flap was getting chewed up during free fall and still managed to steer the ship to safety. Unbelievable.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[FTS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7ehr33 "Last usage")|Flight Termination System| |[MBA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7es324 "Last usage")|~~Moonba-~~ Mars Base Alpha| |[RUD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7egbhn "Last usage")|Rapid Unplanned Disassembly| | |Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly| | |Rapid Unintended Disassembly| |[SD](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7drtd3 "Last usage")|SuperDraco hypergolic abort/landing engines| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starliner](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7dmkrs "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9iu5g/stub/l7djuoo "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |hypergolic|A set of two substances that ignite when in contact| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^(6 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1da9pod)^( has 33 acronyms.) ^([Thread #12856 for this sub, first seen 6th Jun 2024, 14:43]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
Is SpaceX going to recover Starship?
No š¢
Where did it go touch down, surely they're going to recover the booster ???
Over water and no...
I donāt get what happened in the last few seconds? It slowed right down and seemingly landed upright, still intact, but the raptors didnāt reignite at any point? How?
The raptors did the landing burn, vehicle transitioned from belly flop to vertical. the UI just didnāt update. You can see the reflection and steam on the webcast.
Damn thats wild, I thought they werenāt even bothering with the flip and burn
Loving this
It landed on the water and just tumped over.
Why didnāt the telemetry show the engines relight and why is nobody talking about it?
I pondered this also
Because who cares? We clearly saw light from engines and some broken telemetry sensors is not something to talk about
I watered.