- 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.
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.
The problem was never solved and turned what was supposed to be a few days into weeks or months. Every mission the shuttle had to go back into the assembly building and have all tiles inspected and potentially replaced.
Also I think Ship now has methane thrusters on it. They were operating with a clean blue flame in short purposeful bursts.
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
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.
It's a major overhaul of the design they've been working on for a long time. There was talk of v3 fixing the problems in early v2 test flights. The booster is v3 as well which presumably is why they had some problems. I believe this is also the first time they flew the v3 engines with the plumbing fully integrated in a single piece housing they 3D printed.
At a minute in you can see the satellites being ejected out one by one.
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.
It might, but it certainly helps having a ton of them around. Given that they used 42 of them today and 2 failed in some fashion, we'll call that a 1:21 failure rate. On a more typical rocket with say 10 engines (eg falcon 9), there's a good chance they wouldn't have seen the same failure till flight 3.
20+10+3=33 on the booster, 3+3=6 on the Ship, total 39.
I remember Elon said they want to add 2 engines to the first stage, but that still would be 41. Where's the 42th supposed to be?
The whole point of Starship is that it's a reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance. And in particular it's supposed to be different than the other reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance, which turned out to be sort of a boondoggle.
Yet, they've now hand-built and destroyed twelve of these things across multiple redesigns, and it still hasn't completed its design mission once. In fact basically every launch has unexpected major failures.
As poor as its safety record ultimately ended up being, the shuttle launched successfully on its very first try. And we only had to hand-build five of them. And lost two, sure, which is still a lot less than twelve.
Yes yes, I understand that iterative design has merits and that the ability to rapidly prototype and try things in the stratosphere allows for less conservative tolerances and better ultimate performance.
But does it really take 13+ tries?! At what point to we start wondering if we have another boondoggle on our hands?
I think blowing up a handful of rockets is a fine idea. But at some point you have to ask yourself if it will ever work? Why are we on a another engine redesign? Why is this the third iteration of the second stage? How many more?
And what number is that point? Six? Nine? I'm thinking thirteen may be getting into the danger zone.
Here we have a cutting edge rocket design - scale, sophistication of engines, design goals - and a commercial evaluation, which path would get to the intended success cheaper. NASA doesn't like public embarrassments, and, as Henry Spencer reminds us, when failure is not an option, the success could be quite costly. So NASA spends billions and many years for a fragile system. If the goal is an airline-like operations, the design should be thoroughly shaken up. It's known that no simulation, no static testing can equate the actual flights in the ability to get the data best describing what conditions the system will encounter in real use. And also, given the industrial scale of Starship production, each flight hardware costs way less than if we'd built them manually, in quantities justifying naming each unit separately.
In Soviet Union, where rocket departments were part of artillery, the testing with actual launches seemed logical. In this case the approach to run a massive test flight program seems logical too, and we can't complain about the lack of progress - first Starship had way less capabilities and performed way worse. In USA we had more than 1000 tests for injector head for F-1 engine in Apollo program, and this number was justified at that time. Starship is way bigger - but the progress is also undeniable, and it would be odd to stop test flights now, when the 3rd iteration of design looks promising.
So, while we can't pin a particular number of tests, I don't think we should worry yet. This year and the next one should be important for Starship program, given SpaceX commitments to help NASA Artemis. If we won't have orbital Starship then - we can come back to this question.
Just looking at it should tell you a lot about why:
https://www.metal-am.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2024/08/...
It’s cheaper and faster to make in volume. It doesn’t require nearly as much shielding, because it’s less fragile, which saves a lot of weight. The engine itself is lighter. And on top of that, it develops more thrust, at higher fuel efficiency.
The net result is cheaper and lifts significantly more mass to space, which significantly drops the cost per kg to orbit.
It already worked, they’re making it much better, and getting it ready for a level of mass production that we’ve never seen anything close to in the space industry, even from SpaceX. They are much more ambitious than I think people who haven’t been watching them closely understand. The US grid is 1.4 TW of generation, they’re aiming to put up 1 TW of AI compute every year. Maybe they’ll stop well short of that, but their stated goal is insanely ambitious.
SpaceX have already proven that the iterative approach works with Falcon 9, literally the most successful rocket program ever. SpaceX have also proven that this specific Super Heavy/Starship rocket design isn’t a dead end. Criticising them for failing to succeed in the future is a valid but uninteresting opinion.
For reference, SLS has been in development for 5 times as long, and cost 15-20 times as much, as Starship, and they still haven’t landed people on the Moon, which has been one of the stated goals since the Constellation program in 2005.
I don’t see how the number of failures matters if the end result still happens faster and cheaper than anything else.
It worked out in the end, but I can’t imagine being so confident in a new system, no matter how much money and brainpower has been spent to make it safe.
That's undeniably true. Nonetheless "Better than the shuttle, which sucked" isn't the design goal.
The question is not even just "is it better to blow up 12 Starships?", which would probably still be true. It's "Why isn't Starship working yet?" and the implied "Maybe Starship sucks too?!".
2018.. Young brilliant engineer starts working for spaceX, absolutely the most exciting space company, on an awesome new rocket that will finally be a better launch vehicle than Saturn 5 and be able to enable all sorts of cool space stuff. Just a naive young nerd, dont really know anything about Elon, not into social media.
2024.. The Elon stuff in the media is unavoidable and obvious, the guy is a freaking nazi, suporting trump, supporting right wing parties in EU.. The talented engineer either leaves or stops giving a shit and quiet quits.
This process times several 100, in an experimental rocket design project, where any tiny flaw can make the whole thing fail.
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.
I seriously doubt that. Just for example, mining a single asteroid has the potential to flood the market for any number of metals. I don't pretend to know how expensive it would be to achieve that in practice; my point is that there are quite a few different ways to recoup program costs at some handwavey point in the future.
There's also a military angle here. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to look into Musk's history with Michael D. Griffin from the Reagan SDI/'Star Wars' program.
Assuming they deliver the same payload, sure, but that’s very much not the plan.
But I cant separate space-x from elon. He is, for want of a better word, evil; supporting trump, supporting extreme right party in Germany, DOGE illegally and irresponsibly causing chaos, stopping USAID, flouting the law at every turn. He is a tech-fascist. If we want democracy and egality its imperative that people like him are stopped.
I want everything elon does to fail more than I want starship to succeed. It's fine, the rocket tech genie is out of the bottle now, someone else will make a good rocket.
