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Speaking of stage zero, I have difficulty wrapping my head around how they will test landing. The risk of damaging it seems like it would be quite high the fir

Speaking of stage zero, I have difficulty wrapping my head around how they will test landing. The risk of damaging it seems like it would be quite high the first 20 times or so they try. Interrupting launches to repair damage seems like too large of a penalty.

dotnet00 4y ago
Their plan appeared to be to test the flight profile at sea. So they would specify some precise GPS coordinates to perform a soft touchdown at off the coast of Hawaii and once they're confident with that they can test on the real thing. Additionally, part of the reason for building so many pads up front (IIRC they have two in various stages of construction at Cape Canaveral) is probably so that one failure doesn't stop everything. Besides that, the booster flies a trajectory such that it'll just crash into the water nearby if it isn't able to initiate its catch burn. On top of that, unlike F9, the Superheavy booster is meant to be able to hover meaning it has a few seconds to make any corrections that may be necessary. Catching the ships themselves will certainly be much trickier, although at least they have the somewhat uncanny looking velocity when skydiving at low altitudes.
- thinkcontext 4y ago
  I heard about how the first launch was planned to be expended near Hawaii, perhaps they'll attempt to hover before doing that. But even if they do that with the first few at some point they'll have to attempt a first catch, that will be quite a nail biter. It will be interesting to know how many they are willing to expend to get confident enough they won't destroy the launchpad. But recall earlier this year one of the droneships was damaged by a landing of a returning F9. That was after over 100 landings. Another part of this is how many successful landings are they going to do before people are allowed to be on board. How many would you want before you would feel comfortable? 5? 20? 100? To achieve all this tolerances for Starship are going to have to be so much tighter than Falcon.

dotnet00 4y ago

Their plan appeared to be to test the flight profile at sea. So they would specify some precise GPS coordinates to perform a soft touchdown at off the coast of Hawaii and once they're confident with that they can test on the real thing. Additionally, part of the reason for building so many pads up front (IIRC they have two in various stages of construction at Cape Canaveral) is probably so that one failure doesn't stop everything. Besides that, the booster flies a trajectory such that it'll just crash into the water nearby if it isn't able to initiate its catch burn. On top of that, unlike F9, the Superheavy booster is meant to be able to hover meaning it has a few seconds to make any corrections that may be necessary. Catching the ships themselves will certainly be much trickier, although at least they have the somewhat uncanny looking velocity when skydiving at low altitudes.

thinkcontext 4y ago
I heard about how the first launch was planned to be expended near Hawaii, perhaps they'll attempt to hover before doing that. But even if they do that with the first few at some point they'll have to attempt a first catch, that will be quite a nail biter. It will be interesting to know how many they are willing to expend to get confident enough they won't destroy the launchpad. But recall earlier this year one of the droneships was damaged by a landing of a returning F9. That was after over 100 landings. Another part of this is how many successful landings are they going to do before people are allowed to be on board. How many would you want before you would feel comfortable? 5? 20? 100? To achieve all this tolerances for Starship are going to have to be so much tighter than Falcon.