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Hacker News Hacker News- Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.)
- Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out.
- Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and was very off target.
- Starship lost one engine shortly after stage sep. Turned into an unintentional test of engine out capability. It made it to space.
- Some weird motion and lots of off-gassing after engine cut-off, with uncertainty about if it actually got a good orbital(ish) insertion. Seems to have been benign, with the motion being a weird slow flip to the orientation for payload deployment.
- Test deployment of dummy payloads was successful, including a couple with cameras to look back at Starship.
- An in space engine relight test was skipped, presumably due to the issues during launch.
- Re-entry to over the Indian Ocean seemed to go really well. Nothing obviously burning or falling off. The amazing views of the plasma during re-entry, something never seen live before starship, are now routine.
- Starship did a maneuver to simulate how they'll have to go out over the gulf and back to the landing site.
- Nailed the target, evidenced by views from drones and buoys. Soft landing before falling over and giving us a big (expected) boom.
As far as overall progress from previous test flights goes, they're at least treading water while making many large changes. I think they were hoping to try for a tower catch and actually going orbital for next flight, but I highly doubt that now. The boostback burn failing was the largest failure, with the engine failure on Starship being a close second. Good performance despite engine out seems to be an unintentional success.
They are willing to have "negative outcome learning experiences" to gather data quickly. and, of course, data, data, data.
I like it because I know what insane amount of red tape has built up to do anything similar in a Gov (any Gov).
The booster not completing the return part of the flight was disappointing. They had a similar incident in one of the previous flights, when they tried to maneuver the booster too aggressively immediately after stage separation which caused problems with the fuel supply. If it was something similar this time, it might be solvable by changing just a few details of the maneuver. So, maybe it is not that huge of a deal.
There were many cool things in the webcast, from them showing the catamarans that are deployed at the landing site, to the views form the cameras on-board of the "satellites". The first few minutes after liftoff were just amazing visually.
Is this enough progress to keep a 2028 crewed landing? Don't know.
I'm curious whether they are going to try to recover a Starship before trying for in-space refueling (or the reverse). Either way, I think both have to work before they can try for an uncrewed lunar landing (presumably in 2027).
The big question is re-usability. How close are they to relaunching a Starship? They may not know for sure until they can get one back intact. If they can launch at least once a month, maybe they'll make it.
If they can re-fly a Starship this year AND demonstrate in-space refueling, then 2027 can be all about an uncrewed landing attempt. That would make me feel good about a 2028 crewed landing on the moon.
At a minute in you can see the satellites being ejected out one by one.
It seems to give the booster a real kick - what's that do to turbo's and fuel movement?
You've got hot exhaust onto cold cryo fuel tank header?
You've got to carry more mass in terms of protection for the tank?
Is doing MECO and then push and then get 100 yards apart or something before second stage / ship engines kick on a big enough penalty to justify all the extra complexity?
Is it disappointing that they had a couple of engine outs, and also trouble with the booster relight? Sure. Do I have even a little doubt by now that they can fix these problems? None whatsoever.
The success of Ship 39 today was a big, big deal.
Most obvious improvement was having no re-entry heating problems, secondmost was deploying with zero issues and with a faster pace. It appears they decided to pause the "horizontal" movement of the pez dispenser before a final push away, probably to avoid vibration causing those "bonks" on the payload door, like we had once before.
Flight 12 was a relative success. Some engines failed to light but that's an unintended good test. Rockets are typically designed such that they can have a certain number of engines fail and still achieve their mission.
At this point, the entire SpaceX project is a bet on telecommunications services, specifically direct-to-satellite handheld Internet. That's the only market that will recoup the program costs.
We don't have exact figures for the current true cost of a Falcon 9 launch factoring in reuse but many think it's somewhere betweenm $10 and $20 million. Well, SpaceX has spent 100 F9 launches on Starship so far and that's how you have to look at it. Say F9 is $20M and Starship once it starts launching Starlink is $10M that's 150-300+ launches just to break even.
You might be tempted to say there are other missions for Starship but there really aren't. Satellites aren't that bug, as evidences by there being ~1 Falcon Heavy launch per year (usually for the military and/or to geostationary orbit AFAICT). You can't economically put multiple payloads in one Starship because they all have different orbital parameters.
F9 is rated for human spaceflight. It's a long road for Starship to be certified for human spaceflight. SpaceX hasn't even begun to test in-orbit refuelling yet. Gases are weird in microgravity.
F9 is the cash cow funding all this and that too might go away if Blue Origin or one of the other wannabes ever gets a reusable launch platform to commercial operation.
There are big launches like interplanetary missions but those are few and far between.
It would be fascinating if what ends up dooming SpaceX is actually Twitter.