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Summary from my watch: - Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.)
by Laremere 5mo ago
Summary from my watch:
- 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.
- TechPlasma 5mo agoI think the ship really punted the booster during stage separation. And caused the boost back failure from sloshing. Also I think Ship now has methane thrusters on it. They were operating with a clean blue flame in short purposeful bursts.
- generuso 5mo agoIf we look at the venting from the propellant tank (around T+16:15) it looks thick white closer to the vent, becoming more transparent and blue as it expands. That's just sunlight scattering on the particles and density fluctuations in the flow. A good cold gas thruster produces a lower density, more expanded flow, which looks blue for the same the reason the sky looks blue. One can compare this to the exhaust from various Falcon-9 engines and thrusters when it is illuminated by the sun on the backdrop of the night sky: https://youtu.be/JRzZl_nq6fk?t=193 https://youtu.be/JRzZl_nq6fk?t=193
- laughing_man 4mo agoFrom what I've read there was "unintentional mixing of fuel and oxidizer" which caused a fire in the engine section, so the engines automatically shut down. I don't thing we have official word yet, though.
- stephc_int13 5mo agoThe takeoff looked almost normal but I noticed a slight drift from vertical, likely because one of the engines was dead or dying. Overall the V3 is supposed to be an upgrade but actual progress is more or less stalling compared V2.
- Laremere 5mo agoIt is supposed to tilt away from the launch tower immediately, you can see this on previous flights. This keeps the engine plume away from the chopsticks and top of the launch tower.
- irjustin 5mo agoAlso an additional goal is to get the booster as far away from the pad as immediately possible in the event it falls back down.
- SilverElfin 5mo agoThere is a slight tilt normally, but I agree it was more than usual.
- NetMageSCW 4mo agoFlight 12 flew a different flight path than previous test flights.
- signatoremo 5mo agoThe payload (100t) is at least double that of previous flights. It’s largest spacecraft ever flew. That’s some stalling
- ericcumbee 4mo agoI have a hard time saying that its stalled. For one we don't really have the hard data to quantify the V3s vs V2s actual performance. On their first flight we lost one on the booster and one on the ship. I don't know that the boostback burn problems are related to the engine themselves given that they had multiple failures and a premature cutoff. That feels like thats a problem upstream of the Raptor.
- SJMG 5mo agoI'm concerned about the cracking clearly visible on the heat shield tiles. It doesn't bode well for rapid reusability.
- simmonmt 5mo agoI mean ... step 1 is probably fixing the part where it lands in the ocean, falls over and explodes. Once they've done that and can get their hands on the tiles I'm guessing they can continue to iterate there until they get a more easily reusable design.
- shigawire 5mo agoThat part was intentional
- idiotsecant 5mo agoDang, a random HN user solving all the world's problems yet again, what would humanity do without you random HN guy?
- WalterBright 5mo agoI thought the tiles were designed for easy replacement, so not a big concern with replacing cracked ones.
- EA 5mo agoThe tiles ablate. The shuttle returned from every mission with missing tiles.
- throwaway85825 5mo agoThe shuttle required long expensive refurbishment after each flight.
- b112 4mo agoJust made me realise, this is just like the F-35. Its turn around time is ridiculous, it has to be maintained with specialized equipment/hangers, along with external contractor assistance. Compared to the Gripen, as an example, which can land on a freeway and be up in the air again in a few minutes. One was designed to be used in war, in desperate scenarios, with no ability to coddle it. The other, the F-35? Is designed around milking the taxpayer as much as possible, and employing people in as many politician's states as possible. The shuttle was like that, I think. Which is really sad.
- irjustin 5mo agoThe videos were incredible. My favorite part was watching the booster flip in such clarity. Normally we don't get full view of it, let alone 4k.
- globalnode 5mo agoThe videos are great!, but the rest of it is never going to work lol, just never. Even without a rethink about how to get heavy payloads to another planet this is still good entertainment.
- itsthecourier 5mo agowhy won't it ever work?
- globalnode 5mo agoEven if it landed perfectly how is it going to be rapidly reusable with all those tiles breaking and needing repair? Then if that problem was magically engineered-away through some sort of materials science breakthrough, it still makes more sense to me to keep your big ships in a space staging area and your smaller ones as atmospheric gophers.
- s1artibartfast 4mo agoSmall ships are less efficient, especially leaving the gravity well. Thats the whole point
- JPLeRouzic 4mo agoCould you tell me more? I suppose a heavy two-stage rocket is not optimized from the point of view of the rocket equation, but I know nothing about this field.
- s1artibartfast 4mo ago
- aaron695 5mo ago[dead]
- SilverElfin 5mo agoLots of engine failures. Doesn't exactly bode well for a company looking to go public immediately. One of the engine failures was not on the booster but Starship as you noted, and that is a bit unexpected. I don't think they have spoken about it being equal in capability with one engine out, right? Those engines don't move around to compensate IIRC.
- dylan604 5mo agoNot sure how you come to that conclusion. The capabilities can overcome loss of engines. The fact it was successful with loss of engines shows it is working as designed.
- SilverElfin 5mo agoNo, it just means the mission happened to be salvageable because of its parameters. The booster is designed to have engines out and can compensate because it has so many engines and many of them are on gimbals. On starship, the vacuum engines aren’t on a gimbal. I’m not sure how it could compensate for one of three engines being out.
- echoangle 5mo agoThey explicitly said that they have engine out capability on the ship in the stream.
- SilverElfin 5mo agoThat’s for the booster (the big lower part) not for starship (the upper part that continues to space). They were surprised to have a vacuum engine out. In space there’s no atmosphere so you can’t use fins or wings to change direction. And if the engines can’t move around, you only have thrust and gravity and the tiny attitude adjusters to direct your ship.
- cwillu 4mo ago
- dylan604 5mo agoDid the landing burn light two engines as expected? It happened fast, but the graphic made it look like only one lit. If that’s true, that would be impressive as only lighting two was meant to be a test. At least according to the live stream hosts.
- jordanb 5mo ago> The amazing views of the plasma during re-entry, something never seen live before starship, are now routine. The word "live" is doing a lot of work here. Astronauts used to film the plasma going past the windows of Shuttle. I remember as a kid my science textbook had a still of it to illustrate plasma.
- dingaling 5mo ago> The word "live" is doing a lot of work here A latency of a few seconds for streaming video compared to several months for a still photo from the Shuttle seems an entirely valid use of 'live'.
- jordanb 4mo agoThe difference here is a matter of AV technology improvements in the last 40 years.
- syncsynchalt 4mo agoThe difference is having high-bandwidth signal pointed up / away from the wall of plasma.
- NetMageSCW 4mo agoAnd having such a large craft that a hole in the plasma envelope exists above the craft that can reach Starlink.
- russdill 5mo agoThe final issue that led to the scrub was that a pin that held back the QD arm got bound and would not release.
- clippy99 5mo agoSpaceX does an excellent job at videography. Sad that Nasa flew its Artemis mission with potato cameras.
- SV_BubbleTime 5mo agoHey, we have everyone watching, our funding might in part depend on interest and awe… Not just space-potatoes… but missed the separation shot on the live feed. How in the hell!?
- djeastm 4mo agoSpaceX probably spends a lot of money on marketing/public relations creating great media. I'm guessing NASA's on a shoestring budget for that kind of thing.
- dmix 4mo agoSLS was far from a shoestring budget and both NASA and Boeing/Northrop/etc have equally strong incentive to provide solid coverage for the public to keep the jobs program going. SpaceX has much better infrastructure for video with their satellites and are just generally more competent at production
- NetMageSCW 4mo agoOne of SpaceX’s founding reasons was to promote STEM and they continue to do that with their video productions.
- GMoromisato 5mo agoGood summary. I was pleasantly surprised that they nailed the re-entry target even after the ascent engine problems. The re-entry itself looks amazingly smooth compared to V2. TBD whether it's good enough for re-usability (much less rapid re-usability). But Flight 12 was definitely forward progress.
- erkt 4mo agoIt looks like the ships software did a phenomenal job compensating by adding that much longer Second stage burn time. It was also very cool to see the sea levels vector to compensate for the thrust asymmetry. All and all that ship is look really realllllly good. Seems like they just need to add some mass to Raptor to reduce the tendency to tear itself apart..
- NetMageSCW 4mo ago1 out of 33 failing hardly seems like a tendency - probably some minor issue. Relight was likely an issue with new downcomer that was supposed to improve boost back engine feeds for its flip maneuver - that seems to need work.
- rogerrogerr 5mo ago“seems to have hit the water harder than expected and was very off target.” SpaceX’s people were saying it was on target, and it seems to have landed in about the same position relative to the camera buoy as previous flights. I don’t think there’s any evidence to call it off target. The landing and toppling looked the same as previous flights too.
- zardo 4mo agoYou've mixed up the ship and booster.
- rogerrogerr 4mo agoYep, I did. Thanks.
- ChuckMcM 4mo agoNice work by SpaceX engineering. Good summary. The booster appeared to hit the water at 1400 km/h (a bit under 900 mph) so not really survivable :-). Engine out on ship seems to left them with just enough fuel to land but not enough to do the hover thing (simulates being caught by chopsticks). They notched it down to two engines (vs planned 3) on the landing it seems? Basically if they can figure out the engine issues, it looks like they should be able to do a full end to end flight. That's reasonable progress. Given the IPO this was a pretty important flight and I don't think they hurt it (like blowing up on the launch pad would have). So their one step closer it seems.
- dzhiurgis 4mo agoIs there videos of booster crash?
- mrandish 4mo agoI doubt it since many of the booster engines didn't seem to relight, the location of touchdown wasn't near any pre-positioned cameras (if there were any).
- ChuckMcM 4mo agoNot that I have been able to find, the 1400 km/h number comes from the telemetry on the video just before it contacted the water. Presumably one could estimate the return point if you had access to the telemetry and perhaps a platform in the Gulf might have eyes on it. Depends on how far east it got.
- Gagarin1917 4mo agoLanding on two engines was the plan. V3 Raptors are too powerful, they no longer need three engines to land. They are only going with two from here on out. So I think it’s unlikely that they altered any aspect of the landing test due to lighting only two engines… as they was the plan anyway.
- ChuckMcM 4mo ago
- metalman 4mo agoBooster is a totaly new rocket. It did launch with acarity and by any other standard did well, but the failure to relight could be anything, but I am going for the giant fuel feeder tube bieng the failed part, based on nothing more than how tickled they were with it,and tank baffling bieng a dark art. The slosh of the fuel durring the flip is going to produce an internal tidal wave, lots of stuff gets "tested" there.
- singingtoday 4mo agoFantastic summary. Thank you! They've made great progress but have a bit left. It's always the last mile, isn't it? It's so cool seeing progress in this space (sorry).
- moralestapia 4mo agoThank you for your service! You nailed every single detail. This was as good, if not better, than the livestream itself!
- isodev 4mo agoAnd the “side effect” of polluting the ocean? SpaceX is more of a let’s only do things half way kind of company it seems.
- hvb2 4mo agoYou do realize that every company so far has been doing that to every booster for every launch, right? There's 2 options if you don't want to drop stages back on earth. You don't launch, you land the stage. SpaceX is the company that pioneered propulsive landing of a booster. You can say a lot about them but not that they pollute with dropping stages in the ocean. Even in absolute sense that doesn't happen often and that's ignoring that they put over 90% of all the weight in orbit nowadays
- MetallicDragon 4mo agoPolluting with what? It's mostly stainless steel and other inert materials.
- erkt 4mo agoIt was also noticeably wayyy faster off the launch mount. These V3 raptors are pretty fierce. It took off so fast it seems destined to be stretched imminently.
- ericcumbee 4mo agoV2 they were bring them up in groups. V3 they start them all up at once.
- NetMageSCW 4mo agoFirst item is wrong - scrub was due to hydraulic pin on launch QD arm not releasing (apparently when released it caused an arm vibration that triggered a re-lock) and they had to improve arm stabilization when pin releases. Also Ship reached original intended orbit. A tower catch was never in the plans for this flight.
- tcp_handshaker 4mo ago>> As far as overall progress from previous test flights goes, they're at least treading water while making many large changes. What a kind take on what is again the continuous trend of: Every flight fails for a different reason. And they still cant make the most basic use case: https://www.instagram.com/p/DWzTFAEAhSe/ https://www.instagram.com/p/DWzTFAEAhSe/
- tana_shahh 4mo agoThanks for the summary It was a good read and you nailed it!