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It was a significant progress, but I won't call it "nailed it". As there was an damage or explosion on re-entry where the skirt of the starship got damaged. And

• stetrain 1y ago
  Yes, although it was stated before the flight that they were intentionally flying with some heat tiles removed and with a more aggressive profile to test some outer limits.
  • ballenf 1y ago
    They even removed some near fuel tanks. In the past the missing tiles were in less critical areas. I'm surprised they didn't take less risks just to avoid a narrative of failure.
    • ndr 1y ago
      Why would they need to care about narrative at this point? It's privately own, might as well learn as much as possible with each dollar spent.
      • DoesntMatter22 1y ago
        I'm certain they don't care about the narrative because ultimately even though yesterday was a big success some places had headlines that really downplayed it
    • NitpickLawyer 1y ago
      > I'm surprised they didn't take less risks just to avoid a narrative of failure. That's the advantage of being privately owned. "Vibes" (hah) don't matter. Public opinion doesn't matter. What matters is executing on your vision / goals. And they're doing that. The fact that they're bringing in loads of cash from Starlink surely helps. They haven't had the need to raise money in a while, now.
      • iwontberude 1y ago
        [flagged]
        • avmich 1y ago
          I think you're wrong saying they are cash flow negative. Both Starlink and payload launching business are profitable in SpaceX.
          • boxed 1y ago
            He means that they are cash flow negative if you discount all government income and at the same time include all costs with those launches :P
            • avmich 1y ago
              > He means that they are cash flow negative if you discount all government income and at the same time include all costs with those launches :P That would be a strange evaluation.
              • boxed 1y ago
                I've seen worse from SpaceX haters. I've had a "conversation" here on HN by someone who claimed that SpaceX doesn't land boosters anymore for example. Conspiracy theories basically.
            • iwontberude 1y ago
              Bingo they aren’t anywhere near the solution to return the investment and will be raising debt or begging for more government money. They will be (progressively) nationalized to justify the additional cash infusions to keep the mission from being a complete failure. NASA wants their moon base I guess.
        • WalterBright 1y ago
          Selling rockets to the government is not receiving gifts of taxpayer money.
    • pfannkuchen 1y ago
      Does it really seem like Elon cares about public opinion at this point?
      • anthem2025 1y ago
        [dead]
      • apercu 1y ago
        He acts like he cares a lot, comes across to me as someone deeply insecure and unhappy but I’m not qualified to diagnose him.
    • somenameforme 1y ago
      That's probably the first step on the path to stagnation. There's a lot more eyes on them now a days, and Musk is much more well known, so it creates a lot more drama - but they've done the exact same process with everything. They even published a montage of failures [1] on the way to their first successful landing 'back in the day.' It was fiery, but mostly peaceful. They didn't even hit a shark! [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
    • jjk166 1y ago
      Unless they took extra risks to hedge against the string of failures continuing. "Yes we blew up three times in a row, but this time we meant to do that, so it's a success" sounds an awful lot better than "We did everything we possibly could to prevent it from blowing up this time but it still did"
• megaman821 1y ago
  I think this launch showed they were very robust. Engines went out on booster and ship which they can compensate for. A small explosion and a half melted fin didn't seem to affect the splashdown sequence or target.
  • m4rtink 1y ago
    I think there was just one unexpected engine out on the booster during launch. Starship engines worked without any issues on this flight AFAIK. :)
    • megaman821 1y ago
      The flight looked good, but I was wondering if the ship splashdown burn was the ideal one or an alternate one from a damaged engine. To me it looked like they were working around a damaged engine.
      • terminalshort 1y ago
        The splashdown burn was specifically set up that way to test the fallback scenario for a failure of one of the inner ring engines. The fact that the ship landed almost on top of the target buoy shows it was a success.
• gcanyon 1y ago
  The explosion was unexpected and (as far as I know at the moment) unexplained, but they flew the mission at the edge of the envelope, and with a variety of different materials/missing bits on purpose, to better understand where the edge is. Everything that happened (maybe even including the explosion, we'll see in the final analysis) was, as far as we know, within the plan. The biggest can't-miss milestone was the flawless engine restart. That gives them the go-ahead to hit orbit on the next flight.
  • ge96 1y ago
    The deployment system was interesting, how the last one in the layer would go back then forward before releasing.
    • foobarian 1y ago
      It looked like something one would cobble together from a garage opener and weld together a bunch of rebar
      • NitpickLawyer 1y ago
        You should have seen the first tech demonstrator for the Raptor engine (the family that powers Starship). It was basically a water tower (built out in the desert, welded by people specialising in building water towers). But it flew, and it landed, and then it served as a lights & camera mount for the field for a few years.
        • m4rtink 1y ago
          Starhopper is still there, on a parking lot next to the launch site. :) https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/Starhopper https://starship-spacex.fandom.com/wiki/Starhopper
      • Culonavirus 1y ago
        Keep in mind the ship diameter is like 30 feet. It may not seem like that from a camera view, but that pez dispenser is pretty massive.
• ekianjo 1y ago
  > And we could see pretty significant damage on one of the fin They specifically said they're testing lighter fins to see how much they would hold. Let's not invent problems when it's an experiment that was clearly stated.
  • gtirloni 1y ago
    Is it common to plan an explosion to test how something will react in these launches? Honest question, I know nothing about rockets. In SRE, we have chaos engineering so I'm wondering if it's the same concept.
    • GeekyBear 1y ago
      It's very common for extremely hot metal pressure tanks to rupture when plunged into water.
      • gtirloni 1y ago
        I understand but I'm asking more from a process perspective. If these are planned.
        • baq 1y ago
          In complex systems testing by perturbing the environment is the easiest, simplest and uncovers most relevant issues with design. They knew something would fail, but not necessarily what exactly or in which sequence. They can now reject or accept their hypotheses and improve their models.
          • m4rtink 1y ago
            Testing to destruction is used quite often to discover the final limits of materials and machines.
    • stetrain 1y ago
      I don't think "plan an explosion" is quite right. They planned a test that would subject various components to stress levels outside of the normal mission profile. The various specific failures that resulted from that may be within expectations but not necessarily planned. In engineering you want to know that a design will not just succeed at its rated limit, but have some margin percentage of safety above that. To measure that margin often involves destructive tests. SpaceX's development methods differ a bit from more traditional rocket development by performing some of these potentially destructive tests with full-scale articles in real flight scenarios as part of an iterative process.
• bpodgursky 1y ago
  For Starlink deploys (or other commercial launches) re-entry isn't too critical. Starship is still an order of magnitude cheaper than other launch vehicles even without Stage 2 re-use. They'll need a higher bar for Artemis but frankly Starship is not the only critical bottleneck there and it's not SpaceX's main financial driver.
• moralestapia 1y ago
  This guy ... MEGA lmao. To the contrary, I am fascinated by what SpaceX has accomplished so far. I wouldn't just say they "nailed it" they completely blew past all expectations I had. "Why didn't just get it right on their first test", really? People can't even get a regex right the first time. Are you aware of the size of this rocket? That it reached orbit? That it hovered over the ocean instead of just crashing into it? That it came back into a point with such precision that a buoy with a camera was already waiting for it? From orbit (that its 30,000km/h and 150km high)? Your comment is just ridiculous.
  • stetrain 1y ago
    > "Why didn't just get it right on their first test", really? People can't even get a regex right the first time. The comment you replied to didn't say that. And this isn't the first test. I think their comment was reasonable. It was a successful mission that met the stated objectives and demonstrated progress. But it wasn't perfect, and there is definitely more progress to be made for Starship to be a reliable operational launch system.
• enraged_camel 1y ago
  I view it differently. The ship not only survived, but also accomplished all of its mission objectives despite those issues. What this shows is that it has remarkable resilience, which is a really important considering the types of forces it will be subject to during future missions.
• 762236 1y ago
  They compromised the ship to study failures of that nature.
• rubzah 1y ago
  The damage was visible long before the explosion, during ascent (not sure if anyone has explained how it happened). Though your point still stands. I was very surprised that that flap still held up during the stress testing on atmospheric re-entry.
• stronglikedan 1y ago
  Nah, they nailed it.
• thisthis2 1y ago
  [flagged]
• terminalshort 1y ago
  Fin damage isn't ideal, but even if they had to replace the fins every flight, the cost would be quite low in comparison to replacing the entire second stage, which is necessary on the Falcon 9.
• m4rtink 1y ago
  I would say they nailed it based on achieving all the objectives they stated before the launch.
• themgt 1y ago
  SpaceX has two big things going for it: Starship/Raptor factories churning them out cheap, and themselves as a paying customer in Starlink who can dogfood a risky new launch platform. Now that they're demoed pez-dispensing v3 dummy Starlinks, I'd assume they'll start launching real ones within ~1-3 months. At that point as long as they can deliver payload to orbit and catch the booster the program is operational and they'll start switching their own Falcon 9 launches over. The HLS timeline is definitely dicey, but whether Starship winds up being the blocker remains to be seen. Otherwise they've now succeeded enough to "lean launch" Starship with equal/better capabilities to any other existing orbital rocket, and Starlink can fund indefinite further tests/iterations on the rest of their roadmap features (which no one else has).
  • Ajedi32 1y ago
    > I'd assume they'll start launching real ones within ~1-3 months I think it's still a bit early for that given that they've only had one successful flight and are still testing lots of new design changes, but I think you're right that the capabilities they've already demonstrated are probably enough to make Starship commercially viable even if literally none of the other revolutionary improvements they're working on pan out. Falcon 9 doesn't recover the 2nd stage at all, and it's already by far the least expensive rocket out there in terms of cost/kg.
• tw04 1y ago
  The fins were intentional… they said on the live stream they were testing different types of tiles and missing tiles to see how the substructure would behave.