Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1798701489097183286

by thepasswordis • 2 years ago

818 851 2 years ago

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thepasswordis3• 2 years ago

Seeing it seemingly hover right over the water and then slowly tip over was amazing!

Go SpaceX! Go Starship!

bearjaws• 2 years ago

The rate of descent is absolutely astonishing, 8km -> 1km in 20 seconds, then just hovers above the water. Absolutely incredible work by the SpaceX team.

Living in central Florida I cannot wait for the new launch facility to come online. We're going to have lines of spectators into the space coast like we did for the shuttle.

If any of you are heading to Disney World you should stop by the NASA Kennedy Visitor Complex, it is so well done and not that expensive (it takes less time than 1 line at Disney world to get to :) ). It has the original launch control room for Apollo that you can tour, a Saturn V rocket that is laid horizontally and you can walk under, the crew module for the moon landing. My favorite part is the Atlantis shuttle suspended from the ceiling, they left it in its "raw" landed format with scorch marks and tiles, it looks absolutely amazing.

sixQuarks• 2 years ago

Yeah it’s hard to comprehend how powerful those engines are. The booster is relatively light without all the propellant and starship when it’s attempting to land, but it’s still 30 stories tall and I’m assuming it weighs dozens of tons.

chasd007• 2 years ago

iirc only 3 ignite for the landing burn, those engines are freaking monsters. I love how small they are, the latest Raptor revision is so slim and compact. The power density is just mind boggling.

foobarian2• 2 years ago

It blew my mind that just the fuel pump for just one engine has a power rated in the tens of thousands of horsepower/kW.

m4rtink• 2 years ago

Its 200+ tons dry apparently when landing.

gadders2• 2 years ago

It's mad how rocket landings are now more exciting than rocket launches.

cjk2• 2 years ago

They used to be far more exciting. It's the anticipation of less excitement that is nail biting :D

steve19772• 2 years ago

When I was young, there were no rocket landings.

BurningFrog3• 2 years ago

Same thing with airplanes. The landing is much more important than the takeoff.

DavidPeiffer• 2 years ago

For anyone who has been there more than a couple years back, it's worth checking it out again. They added Gateway: The Deep Space Launch Complex, and have also been expanding the Astronaut Training Experience. The exhibits are all very well done.

The bus tours are also neat, visiting and walking around launch pads from the early days of space exploration, seeing the bunker near a launch pad with ~8" thick glass and the mechanical linkage over a couple hundred feet which let them monitor the weight of the added fuel on an early mission.

I've gone 7 times since I was a child, and love the new things I find.

jzig• 2 years ago

Hello from Gainesville! Thanks for recommending the NASA Kennedy Visitor Complex. We will have to visit next time we make a trip to Orlando.

mywacaday• 2 years ago

I had the pleasure of seeing Endeavour being brought out on a Crawler-transporter in 2008 from about 300 meters away on the LC 39 Observation Gantry. Its a missed bucket list item that I never got to see one launch. The visitor complex is well worth a visit.

somenameforme10• 2 years ago

The 'worst' thing about watching space launches on streams is that you simply cannot grasp how ridiculously huge these things are. Even if, like in the stream today, you see a water tower for some scale, the size discrepancies just make it so hard to intuit. Starship is 121 meters high. That's something taller than a football field, jetting off into space! I've only gotten to see a decommissioned Space Shuttle in person, but that was also amazing. Even its fuel tank [1] makes you feel just tiny, yet it's merely 47m. Getting to see Starship live would be such an amazing opportunity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank

tim3336• 2 years ago

I've got the black and white arty photo as my lockscreen which gives you an idea https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/E46BxzjjUkpthVBNE6k8mn-192...

dotnet0020• 2 years ago

I only live close enough to be able to see Enterprise, which didn't go to space, but I like to go there at least once a year, just because seeing the sheer size of it and knowing that all the Shuttles were like that is inspiring (the SR-71 helps too). I'm planning a trip to the space coast when family visits next year though.

jaggederest2• 2 years ago

Standing next to the S-IC stage from the Saturn V at Kennedy really puts it into perspective. And the Starship full stack is larger and taller than the Saturn V!

httpz• 2 years ago

If you're in LA and want to see the first Falcon 9 that landed, you can see it displayed in front of Space X HQ.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/2LMvohTfwJ1Sq3o56

dumpsterdiver• 2 years ago

Not to mention the sight itself is much less notable than the sky-tearing pressure waves you experience when you’re on-site. As soon as those engines fire up it’s very obvious why it’s so much different from watching it on a screen - the sound. The sound is so immense that it almost acts as a sort of audio silhouette that reveals the curvature of the earth if you listen closely enough.

bradgessler• 2 years ago

It’s bonkers how quickly such a large steel object goes from 0kmh to 100kmh+ so shortly off the pad.

sandworm101• 2 years ago

Work around ships and those rockets will seem very much smaller. Try walking under the hull of a tanker in drydock. While we call SpaceX rockets "big" by aerospace standards, they land on barges we call "small" by maritime standards.

larrydag2• 2 years ago

For comparison the Statue of Liberty is 93m. Big Ben is 96m.

vl5• 2 years ago

What is even more impressive to me is that they were able to quite reliably stream all this through Starlink. This shows how mature and usable Starlink is. The fact that you can have live internet connection on re-entering space ship - truly the future is here.

IG_Semmelweiss• 2 years ago

Incredible demo of great service. If you can get reliable video from space, it makes wifi on a commercial plane look like cakewalk.

What will viasat stockholders think now?

amelius2• 2 years ago

The video isn't really live. The original may have had buffering problems, etc.

Fishpants• 2 years ago

To me,the bandwidth of the live telemetry data was the most impressive part of the whole thing. I think that's a bigger success than the whole launch.

parasense• 2 years ago

Not to down play StarLink, but actually... this amazing impressive reliable video stream is capable from any orbiting satelite. What's different here is that Starship is so massively huge, something like several meters in diameter, like maybe 7~9 meters, or something like that. Anyhoo, that the interference from the plasma envelope... does not fully envelope the whole rocket. There is a bunch of surface on the backside of the rocket not subject to the plasma, which is something liek fire made of electrons stripped from their atomic nuclus, and so causes elctromagnetic effects. Since the plasma doesn't go all around, any satelite can communicate, not just Starlink.

raverbashing• 2 years ago

Well, yeah it was reliable but with a lot of artifacts

I honestly couldn't make out much of what was being shown at those last moments. And I'm curious why SpaceX didn't have a ship there at the expected landing site to assess the landing (maybe they thought it wouldn't make it)?

It was a great event, surely, but it would have been nice to have a 3rd person view of the landing (you have the diagram at the bottom but it's not the same thing) .

dcdc123• 2 years ago

The Houston center is amazing as well! They have a tour where you get to sit in the guest theater/gallery of the original command room and watch a shortened version of the moon landing with all the controls, monitors, projectors, etc all automated to show what was presented during the original landing.

chasd007• 2 years ago

I think Houston also has the most complete Saturn V too. It's on its side in a shed out back basically.

bartread• 2 years ago

The way the booster comes down is nuts. 90km to 1km in 100 seconds, it reaches maximum velocity under gravity at a bit over 20km, then air resistance acts as a brake, and they only fire the engines to slow it down the rest of the way at 1km. Bonkers.

dylan6045• 2 years ago

The thing that tickles me is that it has to slow down to reach terminal velocity rather than the normal way of thinking about objects speeding up to reach terminal velocity.

trollerator23• 2 years ago

Finally! It only took them 4 tries!

metadat• 2 years ago

In case you want to watch from the time of liftoff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFkqZF-Ss7o&t=6250s

a012• 2 years ago

The scene from the drone looks so unrealistic, it feels like in a video game or a sci-fi movie.

rbanffy9• 2 years ago

If any of you are heading to Disney World you should stop by the NASA Kennedy Visitor Complex

To hell with Disney. KSC is a lot more interesting. And much cheaper.

And, with SpaceX's increased launch cadence, the odds of watching a rocket launch for free increase dramatically from the shuttle era.

dotnet0020• 2 years ago

That was breathtaking! Now just hoping we get even more spectacular views of Starship's reentry plasma than last time. Everything about this vehicle screams "sci-fi future".

DAAAAMN looks like Starship made it! This truly fit their slogan of "Excitement guaranteed", that Starship reentry was so thrilling, falling apart, seeing the fins disintegrating, yet at the end they still moved and flipped!

melodyogonna• 2 years ago

That was incredible!

ninjamayo• 2 years ago

Incredible! Catching the booster next JIRA ticket.

chasd007• 2 years ago

Catching the booster next JIRA ticket.

someone update the status from Blocked to Ready for Dev

bell-cot2• 2 years ago

I'd put Starship Soft Landing first. That's easy and safe-ish to try in a remote location. Vs. any little oopies on a Booster Catch could damage a load of high-value infrastructure.

pixl976• 2 years ago

I'd put Starship Soft Landing first.

So that just happened. Been even better if the camera wasn't mostly melted, but looked like a slow enough landing.

mezeek• 2 years ago

they're focusing on booster reuse and ship tile slash entry reliability. Ship reuse will come after.

reason they're going hard on booster reuse is those 33 engines, they cost lotsa money to be dumping them over and over.

thebiglebrewski2• 2 years ago

Someone call Behnke to file it

dr_dshiv• 2 years ago

Wait, did it land or not? Retrieved or sunk? Couldn’t tell from the video.

ipnon• 2 years ago

It did not land. The plan was not to attempt a landing. But it maintained a controlled descent into the ocean and splashed down upright.

wilg2• 2 years ago

Hard to land if no land.

harperlee• 2 years ago

Honest question, did they sink the remaining fuel? Or did they just burnt all remaining fuel whilst hovering? I would imagine that's pretty toxic.

Edit: Thanks for the answers!

thepasswordis3• 2 years ago

It simulated a landing over the ocean, but there was nothing there to actually catch it.

mannyv• 2 years ago

Guess they didn't want to sacrifice "Of Course I Still Love You" for this test.

sbuttgereit2• 2 years ago

Plan never was to retrieve this one. It was to simulate a landing, but over the ocean and then sink. That looks like it happened successfully... of course we'll need to wait to hear if it actually did things like hover in the right spot, etc. But looked pretty good; despite what looked like some issues with engine lights.

arrowsmith6• 2 years ago

Is there a better video then the one in the link? 90% of the screen in this one is taken up by the ocean and it's not clear at all what is happening.

lupusreal8• 2 years ago

I wonder what happens to it now. Does the USN scoop it up or do they wait for some other navy's submarine to start prying at that sweet ITAR hardware?

natsucks• 2 years ago

Dear SpaceX: you guys are awesome.

wilg2• 2 years ago

The ocean landing is so cool. I believe they said that the next one they are going to try to land back at the tower? Seems plausible now.

XorNot3• 2 years ago

I think that might be a second IFT away personally: I imagine they'd like to see no engine relight issues on descent for at least one more mission first, since slamming it into Starbase would be a shame.

chasd007• 2 years ago

yeah one out on the way up and on the way down, that has to be very frustrating. It makes my issues with trying to get a stupid website working correctly seem easier hah.

bluescrn• 2 years ago

It does seem like they could do with a more isolated launch site (with the tank farm in a huge concrete bunker) before trying to catch Super Heavy

bpodgursky• 2 years ago

They could keep the option open to splash down off the coast if the relight isn't acceptable. Default splash.

rtkwe15• 2 years ago

There were definitely some big chunks tossed out during that relight so I'd also be very surprised if they tried it during the next test flight.

https://youtu.be/2G-L0u_L0qU?t=2665

chasd007• 2 years ago

I thought it was going to stay upright! that would have been very funny.

1 engine out on the way up, who would have thought getting 33 full flow combustion rocket engines to startup at the same time would be so hard.. /s

XorNot3• 2 years ago

Honestly wondering if that's a Stage 0 issue: those outer engines get primed by the launch ring AFAIK.

dotnet0020• 2 years ago

Yep, the outer ring is non-relightable and rely on the launch ring to light them. That said, part of the benefit of having so many engines is that you can tolerate a couple of failures. Similarly to how F9 is able to make orbit with an engine out. Still, agreed that they'll probably opt for one more water landing test first. Especially since the current license allows for multiple launches of this profile if the booster trajectory is fine.

chasd007• 2 years ago

oh interesting, i did not know that. Just before ignition there was a bottom up view of what looked like gaseous o2 pouring out, was that the priming? They do that to get the pumps spinning to get pressure to the pre-burners so they can ignite and then get more power to turbo pumps to bring everything up to full power correct?

idkdotcom• 2 years ago

Anybody knows what the heck is going on with the broadcast? All I see is "awaiting acquisition of signal".

Thank you in advance!

cheerioty• 2 years ago

What a massive achievement. What a time to be alive.

kemotep2• 2 years ago

I am one of the people skeptical about Elon’s specific claims of Starships abilities specifically about his Mars ambitions. Today’s test, if the Starship reentry is as successful as the booster soft landing will be absolutely a great achievement and a 100% mission success. This demonstration keeps SpaceX on schedule for their part of the Artemis 3 mission.

Keeping the mission parameters simpler (no “refueuling” or door bay demonstrations as far as I am aware, just orbital insert and reentry) definitely shows they are capable of the basic ideas of how they want Starship to work, especially for Starlink missions.

The team should be proud.

me_me_me14• 2 years ago

Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything.

The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon.

Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial.

Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?

zpeti2• 2 years ago

Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?

Pretty much, why do you think columbus set off? And he didn't even know if he'd actually find anything.

I don't understand your attitude and people like you, human beings have been explorers forever, and seem to value exploring even over survival potentially. I'd say it's pretty obviously evolutionarily coded into us. Maybe not you, but into many people.

thegrim33• 2 years ago

"Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial."

It's pretty trivial. Put mass in between you and space. It's already been researched to death and we have many years worth of data about the subject.

indoordin0saur4• 2 years ago

Ramsar, Iran has similar levels of background radiation as being on the surface of Mars. And people live completely healthy long lives there. Chronic low-level radiation isn't nearly as bad as we once thought. It's acute high-level doses or consuming radioactive substances that you really need to worry about. Mars really won't be bad at all with some easily implemented mitigation measures.

basil-rash• 2 years ago

If it’s a one way trip, the cancer might end up being a blessing.

mlindner6• 2 years ago

Anything Mars is pure BS. Just anything and everything.

It is until it suddenly isn't. Just because it's very far out still and any timelines mentioned are wrong, doesn't make it 'pure BS'. It very much has been the goal of SpaceX from the day it was founded to encourage human travel to Mars, and we're getting closer every day.

askvictor• 2 years ago

Even landing will be a huge problem. Think about the difficulties with the launch pad on Earth (engineering a launch pad for a heavy rocket is almost as hard as engineering the rocket itself). Well, to land a heavy rocket using retrofiring engines will require an engineered landing pad. Probably not quite as fancy as a launch pad, but you've got humans on the ship, so it will need to not bury itself completely, or melt the surface and weld itself to it, etc etc.

And that's before you start to think about a launch pad for the return mission. So you'd probably need to have launch a series of robots and factories to build this in advance. Maybe, but we haven't even come close to robots building something of that magnitude on Earth, let alone a planet that's quite different.

So, never say never, but it's a _long_ while off yet; long enough that social upheaval due to climate change will probably put a pause on any efforts for quite some time.

panick21_13• 2 years ago

Maybe next time you could do some research before making a bunch of claims.

The one way trip to mars is orders of magnitude more complicated than moon.

From an energy perspective its not that much more complex.

And from a living perspective, yes it is an order of magnitude, but guess what, the ship is also an order of magnitude bigger. Meaning that for a small crew you have enough space for training rooms, labs, living quarters and medical facilities and so on.

Keeping people from being riddled with cancer in 6months trip is not trivial.

That's mostly wrong. The cosmic radiation isn't much of a problem.

The only issue is the solar radiation. And solar radiation is very low most of the time. That can be measured and if its detected, the crew can go into a radiation shelter for a while.

But its not like if they are exposed to solar radiation for a few minutes, they will grow cancers instantly.

Landing and then what you plan a flag and die?

No. the plan is to send robotic ships first to deploy infrastructure. The atmosphere has useful stuff in it. And then you need to get water from the ice. With water and the atmosphere you can make rocket fuel and other useful materials, such as drinking water, plastics and so on.

Of course that requires development of methods to gather water and of course development of chemical or biological reactors to transform the material. We are pretty sure we can build that stuff technically speaking.

The other big issue is energy to run these processes. We either need a shit ton of solar or a deploy-able nuclear reactors.

Then you wait until the earth comes back around and fly back. And hopefully other people are arriving again. So you can continuously have an occupied base that you are building up over time.

The whole point of what SpaceX is trying to build is a railroad to Mars. The opposite of flags and footprints.

panick21_13• 2 years ago

I mean of course Mars colonization is crazy. Being skeptical is reasonable, even Musk himself is skeptical and gives it a low chance of success. But we know for sure we will not get there if we don't try.

That the ship in principle is capable of landing on Mars doesn't seem that crazy. They are designing with that in mind from the beginning. Again, that's difficult but very possible with current technology.

The more difficult problem would get to get the energy on Mars and the necessary water to do the chemical processing. But all of that of course is only even worth really investing in fully if you can get some significant payloads to the surface.

AtlasBarfed2• 2 years ago

I still think:

Starship

Moon Base

Orion Pulse Nuclear ships launched from the Moon

Mars Base

Is the winning formula, because the Orion payloads are so huge and the transit time so greatly reduced.

kemotep2• 2 years ago

Musk held an event earlier this year where he outlined how SpaceX was going to get 1 million people to Mars by the 2050’s. That’s not really being skeptical. The plan he outlined is so ambitious that it is entirely unrealistic to the point of being almost straight fantasy.

The number of Starships needing to be built, the amount of launches necessary to send that many people, and other details don’t line up.

I am not skeptical that SpaceX could do a mission to Mars by the 2050’s, sending a small team to explore the planet and come back. I am skeptical of SpaceX being able to launch hundreds Starships loaded with a hundreds of people and everything they need for building a self sufficient colony, by 2026.

The plan Musk outlined has SpaceX sending people to Mars at the same time they send people to the Moon.

Here is a link to the presentation: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1776669097490776563

ProfessorZoom• 2 years ago

i love hearing the spacex team cheer and roar together over being excited about a shared goal, it makes me feel good

cletus5• 2 years ago

So I'm excited to see this tech develop but I wonder how much of a market there really is for super-heavy lifters. I can't wait to see a future version where they land the various stages rather than just dumping them into the sea. The first Falcon Heavy launch was super impressive.

SpaceX already has the Falcon Heavy and there have only been a handful of launches, primarily military.

I guess the argument is it'll open up new opportunities but will this really replace the Falcon 9 workhorse, which at this point is I believe the most successful launch system in history?

Won't someone make a fully reusable smaller launch vehicle that'll suit commercial needs?

multimoon• 2 years ago

There’s lots of things that are just too big and heavy and need launch vehicles like that.

It might be overkill for satellites, but space stations and habitats need the payload capacity of something like this to become anything resembling economical.

seydor2• 2 years ago

how many of those things are there?

mavhc3• 2 years ago

Has to be large to be reusable due to scaling factors.

We can finally start sending useful amounts of things into space, millions of solar panels for one

simiones11• 2 years ago

How is putting solar in space more useful than putting it on Earth? You still have the problem of a capricious atmosphere between the source of the beams and the place where you need the electricity. Sure, you can slightly modulate and do a few things, but the extra energy is extraordinarily unlikely to make up the extra costs even if the transport costs were 0.

creshal6• 2 years ago

FH had the problem that it had a comparatively small fairing compared with an upper stage that's "only" okay-ish for deep space insertions, so you can neither put really huge LEO payloads on it, nor can you give a deep space probe a really big kick stage to make up for the deficits of the upper stage.

Starship solves all these issues: The upper stage is more fuel efficient, and it has more room for really big payloads and/or kickstages.

Won't someone make a fully reusable smaller launch vehicle that'll suit commercial needs?

Half of the people tried went bankrupt already due to F9: It is already too big for most payloads, so it does a lot of rideshare missions that pool multiple smaller launches together. It's very hard to compete with that.

So even if, for some reason, commercial customers don't really want to exploit the capabilites of Starship (ignoring the fact that multiple did already), SpaceX can again offer ride shares at a larger scale for F9-class payloads.

rtkwe15• 2 years ago

Starship might honestly have a similar payload issue with the weird door design, the way it hinges up means you need a more complex release plan than most which just pop straight off the front of the booster.

During the third test flight they also tested their weird side eject design for Starlink (or other flat pack style satellites) and the video looks like the door completely ripped itself apart.

TkTech2• 2 years ago

Yes, there won't be as many customers purchasing 150-200 tons of lift, but that's the point of "rideshares". All that really matters with space launches is the cost per kg and if it's capable of lifting multiple payloads into multiple orbits, it'll have 10-15 customers per lift, not one. The current model has a kind of pez-dispenser but for chucking out multiple payloads.

There are purchasers for the full lift capacity too, like ISS modules and major telescopes.

cletus5• 2 years ago

If you think about this, it doesn't make a lot of sense because different satellites are going to sit in very different orbits.

Geosynchronous satellites are an obvious case where satellites will collect into a limited number of orbits but they vary on what point of the Earth they sit over. Also getting to geostationary orbit takes a lot more fuel so the rocket has less room for payload than, say, low EArth orbit. I'm not sure one rocket can launch a geostationary satellite above the Americas and above Europe in the same mission.

But you can't really launch a satellite in a polar orbit and an equatorial orbit in the same mission, for example. Likewise, how economic is it to deploy one at 150km and another at 250km?

Starlink is a special case because it's a related constellation of satellites where a number of satellites are in the same orbit.

mjh2539• 2 years ago

Eventually it will get cheap enough to where people can be buried on the (shot at the) moon.

datameta5• 2 years ago

Talked about this with my partner this week. Somebody is going to yeet their ashes into the regolith some day.

simiones11• 2 years ago

I believe that is illegal in every country, putting human remains on foreign bodies.

lazysheepherd• 2 years ago

Payloads are designed according to available spacecraft capabilities. When this thing flies, market will form around it in no time.

cletus5• 2 years ago

I'm skeptical because satellites, like pretty much any technology, tend to get smaller over time. I remember reading about how it was profitable for someone to buy up 4 geostationary slots and replace 4 satellites with 1 that was probably smaller than any of the 4 (because geostationary slots can be incredibly valuable).

There are large bespoke payloads (eg JWST) but these are inherently so expensive anyway the launch vehicle costs almost don't matter.

I'm not yet convinced there's a huge demand for super heavy payloads.

gravescale• 2 years ago

Why is there's always an Akin's law?

38. Capabilities drive requirements, regardless of what the systems engineering textbooks say.

https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

bryanlarsen3• 2 years ago

in no time

Sure, if a decade is "no time".

5 years from concept to prototype, another 5 years to operational and then another 5 years to full capacity.

Starlink was super quick, but it's design started in 2014.

Iterations on existing concepts like telecom or imaging will be quicker, but truly new fields like mining or tourism are at least a decade out before they're using substantial lift capacity.

qsi• 2 years ago

The vision is that the cost per unit of mass to orbit will come down massively with Starship, once it's launching like the Falcon. That will open up hitherto unimaginable missions and markets. And customers. It's all about the the cost!

simiones11• 2 years ago

Like? What industry really needs things floating in space that are only constrained by cost to launch? I can see lots of science mission perhaps, but even that seems somewhat limited.

the8472• 2 years ago

It's not only about cost per kg but also maximum payload mass. If you can build bigger satellites then you don't need to optimize for weight as hard and can use cheaper components/standardize. Which means both launch cost and sat costs will come down.

tjpnz• 2 years ago

It will make space tourism viable for people who aren't super wealthy, an influencer or both.

jwells89• 2 years ago

For one, Starship+Superheavy will enable launching of large objects like space telescopes without forcing object in question to be engineered with expensive, delicate, failure-prone folding mechanisms (like the James Webb Space Telescope was). Just build the thing as big as it needs to be and launch it in its final form (aside from minor folding bits like solar panels).

It could have similar impact on other scientific missions like rovers and probes. The ceiling for what’s possible is much higher when you’re not having to question the worth of every gram and square millimeter.

cletus5• 2 years ago

So JWST has (IIRC) a 6.5 meter mirror once deployed and yes, it was a challenge to develop that tech. Plus it added risk of failure. The Starship Super-heavy seems to have a max payload dimension of 9 meters. I imagine some buffer is required (ie it won't just allow a static 9 meter mirror) but I could be wrong.

So that's larger but not that much larger. Remember the JWST was a huge step up from Hubble's 2.4 meter mirror.

I expect NASA/ESA will take the opportunity to deploy even larger mirror by using the folding tech they've developed.

But here's the main point: these kinds of flagship missions don't support and sustain a commercial launch system. There are only so many JWST 2.0s that you can and will build, launch and deploy. Your bread and butter is going to be commercial communications satellites and other than deploying large constellations like Starlink, I'm not sure what the market is here.

Ajay-p3• 2 years ago

Ever seen the incredible classic Moonraker? Larger satellites, larger rockets, it's about more at a lower cost. Bigger trucks, bigger ships, bigger lifters.

nialv7• 2 years ago

Won't someone make a fully reusable smaller launch vehicle that'll suit commercial needs?

Rocket Lab is doing that.

panick21_13• 2 years ago

Rocket lab is not building a fully reusable vehicle.

The only company building a fully reusable vehicle are SpaceX and Stoke Space.

jve• 2 years ago

Ask yourself what is the market for a super heavy lift vehicle that may cost 2M to launch... even if it turns out 20M, thats much cheaper whatever you get today and still order of magnitude cheaper than yesterdays options.

somenameforme10• 2 years ago

Here's where things get really counter-intuitive. If Starship lives up to even a fraction of its potential, it's likely Falcon 9 will be completely retired, because Starship will cost less to launch! The entire point of the Starship is complete and instantaneous reuse. The idea is to have it launching something up, landing right back into its launch pad slot, and then going again. The ridiculous cost saving potential is what makes all of this so much more revolutionary than most realize.

This isn't just a new big rocket. This is the most powerful rocket ever built, with the goal of launching it for less than the cheapest rockets cost. The current goal is to aim for $10 million within a few years, and then keep pushing it lower. For contrast, a Falcon 9 currently costs about $67 million to send 18 tons to orbit. Rocket Lab's Electron micro-rocket costs $7.5 million to send 0.3 tons to orbit. Starship can deliver 150 tons to orbit, a number that is planned to increase substantially.

The thing about space is that the potential is infinite, but it only becomes possible to start doing stuff once you get launch costs really low. Falcon 9 has brought launch costs down by orders of magnitude, but most people don't even realize this because unless you're a giant telecoms company or something, then $2000/kg doesn't sound that different than $50,000/kg --- wayyyyy too expensive for anything. But now imagine a world where you could launch things for $10/kg. Suddenly the entire universe opens up to expansion and exploitation, and life as we know it would basically change overnight.

concurrentsquar2• 2 years ago

Calculating the cost per kilogram for LEO with Starship gives me a new startup idea: small business (or even personal) interplanetary postal service.

It only costs $150 per kg in the near future to send objects into space with Starship; so I could, for example, send a Raspberry Pi (47 grams) into LEO for ~7 dollars (as long as I also had 149 tons of other objects from other people to send). A more useful use case would sending fully automated manufacturing facilities (probably either for semiconductors (https://www.nasa.gov/general/the-benefits-of-semiconductor-m...) or crystals (https://uofuhealth.utah.edu/newsroom/news/2017/07/proteinxl))

positr0n• 2 years ago

What are some example applications that could change life overnight, besides planet-wide connectivity?

vitiral• 2 years ago

Why build the transcontinental railroad when there's hardly a market for it?

- dude on the internet in the early 1800s

simiones11• 2 years ago

The second stage is basically gone, so it seems the new heat shield failed pretty badly, though still better than the previous one.

Congrats on the booster, still an awesome achievement! Still a long way to go, unfortunately.

Edit: seems I was premature in thinking that pieces melting off would mean it exploded. A partial success, ultimately!

consumer4515• 2 years ago

They are still getting telemetry at this very moment, it looks like they landed it.

My question: is the US Navy going to blow up this largely intact Starship, or are we just going to leave it on the floor of the Indian Ocean for another country to find?

Actually, it's probably just floating there at this moment.

simiones11• 2 years ago

Given how many pieces were being burned away, the fact that the camera and telemetry survived is amazing.

moffkalast2• 2 years ago

It just landed (though difficult to say how softly), with a partially melted front canard stil actuating lol. This thing is built.

pixl976• 2 years ago

You didn't hang around till second stage relight I see... somehow the smoking remains landed lightly in the ocean,

rtkwe15• 2 years ago

It actually made it through the belly flop and maybe made the landing burn which I also was not expecting. We got some better looks at the flap near the end and it had a huge chunk burned out but seems enough remained for it to keep working and keep the craft under control.

pixl976• 2 years ago

What the hell, half melted starship actually did the landing flip and hit the ocean slow!!!

That was amazing!

openmarmot• 2 years ago

yeah that was absolutely incredible to watch. Starships fin was melting away like the terminator robot in the smelting pot but it still did its job. Absolutely excited about the future of humanity and spaceflight!

bamboozled2• 2 years ago

same

themgt• 2 years ago

That was seriously some of the most dramatic television I've ever watched. Video of Starship being melted/torn apart by supersonic plasma, the broadcast stream dying multiple times maybe due to ship destruction, then finally back online, peeking through the cracked camera to see the nearly destroyed grid fin STILL ACTUATING. The announcers laughing about the ship being "maybe held together by some nuts and bolts" and then it still pulled off the fucking landing burn!

Absolutely wild and historic.

mavhc3• 2 years ago

You can tell the ship still exists because the telemetry still updates

kevstev• 2 years ago

I have never rooted for a flap so hard, and likely never will. I am ready to buy flap merch. The energy of the SpaceX employees gave me goosebumps, this was great, it was hard not to get caught up in it- you know this is the culmination of years of hard work that is mostly theoretical until tests like these.

rtkwe15• 2 years ago

Really wish the camera housing had held up to get a complete video of the fin being eaten away. I wonder if any of the other cameras got good footage too because they stayed on the camera with the obliterated lens for a long time which makes me think the others also fair pretty poorly. There wasn't much to see on the fin cam after the housing broke until right at touch down.

zizee• 2 years ago

A friendly fyi just in case it wasn't a slip of the tongue: grid fins are only on the booster.

codeulike• 2 years ago

Holy crap, you're right, about 1h45m in the video (about T+1hr04m mission time): camera is nearly out but you can see engines relight and flap moving at Starship goes below 1km altitude. It got through re-entry and did a soft-ish landing! edit: From the telemetry at the bottom of the screen you can also see that it righted itself to vertical just before hitting the water

https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1798098040588480826

datameta5• 2 years ago

Absolutely beautiful! The hypersonic plasma flow was like no footage I've seen!

bufferoverflow• 2 years ago

Their older fairing reentry plasma also looked really cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ke_QI7_UtA8

consumer4515• 2 years ago

Do we have Navy assets nearby to destroy it, or is it just going to bob around in the Indian ocean? Or will we trigger the abort system now?

georgeecollins• 2 years ago

Gulf of Mexico

datameta5• 2 years ago

I believe they said they would trigger the abort on splashdown.

mhandley3• 2 years ago

The fact that it managed the flip and landing burn means the fuel tanks (i.e. most of the fuselage) must have suffered no burn-through, despite what happened to the front flap. They've obviously got some redesign needed on the thermal protection around the flap hinges, but broadly, the thermal protection system and aerodynamic control during reentry seem to have worked well enough. It's finally starting to feel like Starship could actually work!

tocs32• 2 years ago

One of the NSF commentators commented the fuel for the landing burn comes from the header tanks (little extra tanks for this kind of thing). Still, I would think if one of the closed up sections had a hole that it would cause all sorts of other troubles.

proaralyst3• 2 years ago

Impressive the flap actuators held up too!

notact4• 2 years ago

Can someone explain why reentry must be so hellish? The energy gained during the rocket burn into orbit must be bled off during reentry, and that energy is enormous. However, why must reentry occur so quickly? It seems if the descent into the atmosphere was slower, the heat shield would be able to radiate the heat energy away more effectively, thus lowering skin temperatures, and significantly reducing the engineering challenge.

tocs32• 2 years ago

They use the atmosphere to help slow the ship down. It takes most of the tank of fuel to get up there and moving so fast. It would take most a tank to slow down. So, they would need about double the fuel plus some for landing.

P.S. I have not done any of the math (I might be able to figure it out but it might take a week or two to figure it out).

P.S.S : Maybe if they could refuel in space efficiently (asteroid mining?) it might be worth looking at but it will be a while before I would expect anything like that. It would just be the ship.

yalue• 2 years ago

The velocity of a spacecraft in low earth orbit is over 15,000 miles per hour. Smashing into the atmosphere is perhaps the most fuel- and cost-efficient way to slow down to a speed at which landing is possible.

garaetjjte• 2 years ago

If you are coming at higher speed eg. from the moon, then it's possible to slow down to get reentry equivalent to low earth orbit one. But you can't really slow down much more because you would just plunge into atmosphere at steeper angle. Some vehicles utilize skip reentry trajectories, where it does high altitude pass through atmosphere and then goes in second time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ballistic_atmospheric_entr...

bagels3• 2 years ago

It would take a tremendous amount of fuel to do what you're imagining, probably to the point of making the craft impossible to build with current technology.

Your orbit would have to be high enough to do a burn to cancel your orbital velocity (lots of fuel), then you have to burn against gravity for a slow vertical descent (lots of fuel). The rocket equation says... you'll need a larger craft and more fuel to carry the extra fuel in to orbit. It gets pretty out of hand.

Instead of using fuel to slow down, spacecraft make a small burn to have the orbit intersect the atmosphere, and then use drag instead of fuel to slow down.

saratogacx• 2 years ago

Scott Manley has a good video looking at this question and goes into a bit of a dive into the physics and engineering issues involved

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kl2mm96Jkk

CarVac• 2 years ago

To get a gentler reentry, you need a greater lift-to-drag ratio.

To have a better hypersonic lift-to-drag ratio you need significantly more wing area, which is dead weight (and drag and a control problem) on the way up.

jtriangle• 2 years ago

If you want to do slow star-trek style landings, you need star-trek level tech. Namely, propulsion tech that doesn't exist.

That doesn't mean that it's impossible, just means that it'd require things that don't exist yet.

Worth mentioning that, additionally, reentry heating isn't a huge problem, and you're not going to create new propulsion tech to counter it, you're just going to make better heat tiles. What you need new propulsion tech for is doing expanse type stuff, where you can accelerate for months at 1G so you essentially have artificial gravity and can get places extremely fast. If you're into sci-fi, the show/books "The Expanse" goes into what that looks like in practice fairly well.

chasd007• 2 years ago

Slowing down from Mach 20-something takes a huge amount of energy in its own right.

dotnet0020• 2 years ago

You need to balance peak heating and heating duration. Shallower reentry means lower peak heating, but higher heating duration. Steeper entry means higher peak heating, but lower heating duration.

The heat shield material can handle a certain amount of heat and a certain maximum temperature before it starts to ablate away, so you're forced to thread the regime where both variables are within its tolerances.

friend_and_foe• 2 years ago

So, speed of reentry is directly a consequence of surface area (or energy expended by fuel to counter, in the case of the booster which does not use friction with the atmosphere to slow down) of one side. You'll produce the same amount of heat (and sound, light, but let's keep the model simple so we can understand better) no matter how fast you come in and no matter how wide your surface area is (assuming the same mass), it's just the thermal properties of the material and the surrounding environment dictate how quickly that heat dissipates, and the surface area determines how distributed the heat is, and the speed it's entering determines how quickly the heat is generated.

So to slow down more evenly and have less heat at the max point per square inch, you need wider surface area (or you need to expend fuel firing engines in the opposite direction of travel, what both parts do at the end to slow to 0, and a problem due to the rocket equation, fuel has mass and so increases the amount of kinetic energy you must dissipate), and that means more mass and more engineering and a bigger vehicle. The goal ultimately is of course optimizing all these variables.

robertsdionne• 2 years ago

You are not riding the atmosphere down, the atmosphere is riding you.

magicalhippo2• 2 years ago

I tried what you said in the most realistic simulator we have, Kerbal Space Program, assuming like you that a gentler approach would be better. And I learned that no, that most certainly is not better.

What you need to protect is on the inside of the heat shield. Heat conduction is based on temperature difference and time[1] and the conduction of the material[2]. Since the heat shield tiles have a very low thermal conductivity, it takes a long time for significant heat to pass through.

Yes a more aggressive approach will lead to a greater temperature, but it'll also provide significantly greater drag, thus the the extreme temperatures only exist for a relatively short amount of time, and thus it doesn't have time to pass through the tiles and heat up the inside.

A very shallow approach has significantly less drag, and you spend significantly longer slowing down. The temperatures might be a fair bit less, but the much longer time spent decelerating means it has a chance to make it through the heat shield tiles.

It's not entirely unlike iron meteorites which can still be cold when landing, as they only spend a brief time in the atmosphere[3] and thus don't have time to heat up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation#Interpretation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_conductivity_and_resis...

[3] https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/127/what-te...

stevage2• 2 years ago

If you're reentering from say the moon, you don't really have a choice. If you reenter too slowly, you won't end up landing at all, and will skip out the other side. Or you would have to do multiple passes, which would take days to weeks.

GMoromisato• 2 years ago

Not sure if you got an answer already, but the reason is gravity. Gravity pulls the ship down, so you have to move very quickly horizontally so that the curvature of the Earth starts falling away from you. For LEO that's something like 25,000 kph.

If you move slower, you are no longer in orbit and your trajectory will intersect the ground.

If you tried to slow down more gradually, your orbit would keep dropping until you suddenly hit the ground.

Think of it this way: orbital speed is the speed required for a ship to stay in orbit without thrust. If you had infinite thrust, you could land on the ground at any speed you wanted. But without thrust, you have to go from orbital speed to 0 in less than one orbit.

tsimionescu4• 2 years ago

It's because slowing down from 26000 km/h to something that wouldn't cause extreme heating (say, 1000km/h) would only be possible by firing thrusters in the opposite direction. Otherwise, any contact with a medium that could slow you down would lead to the same extreme heating.

And of course, the thrusters you'd need would add huge complexity for the shape, and need extra fuel in the stage 2 itself, greatly reducing its cargo capacity.

ReptileMan2• 2 years ago

The guy that designed the flaps of the main starship needs a raise. The thing was glowing red hot, almost disassembled and still functioned and they managed to do a second splashdown. Amazing work from the Spacex team.

andruby2• 2 years ago

The fact that the flap survived is amazing design indeed!

I wouldn't assume it's 1 guy though, probably a team, or a woman for that matter.

ceejayoz18• 2 years ago

Holy shit, that was incredible.

One of the fins burned half away and still managed to control for a soft splashdown. https://imgur.com/a/zNXUjbt

malfist3• 2 years ago

It was crazy seeing that thing show back up in the camera

XorNot3• 2 years ago

Sometimes the test works and it's exciting, sometimes it goes wrong and suddenly I'm hugely invested in the drama of a stainless steel aerodynamic control surface.

Laremere• 2 years ago

The other external view we got was mounted on one of the other flaps, and we didn't get footage from it even after the camera we did get was obscured. So some amount of damage/overheating on multiple fins is likely.

mulmen7• 2 years ago

I was wondering how much video bandwidth they have. Do they have all angles streaming all the time and they switch in the booth or can they only capture one video feed at a time? With that fin melting they may have just elected to stay focused on it.

neverrroot5• 2 years ago

Incredible. And still, the guy who makes things possible again and again gets a lot of poison thrown his way.

Human nature at work. On both sides.

thebiglebrewski2• 2 years ago

How about the other 10K+ people who did the actual work to make this happen? Or is it all about that one guy? :)

neverrroot5• 2 years ago

It's not his work alone, but indeed it's all about one guy.

admissionsguy2• 2 years ago

If not for Musk, they would be working at Boeing, Blue Origin and such...

madaxe_again2• 2 years ago

Those 10k+ people would all be doing something different if it weren’t for that one guy - so ultimately, yes.

tssva• 2 years ago

Getting things done and being a shitty human being aren’t mutually exclusive.

neverrroot5• 2 years ago

One of the humans who did the most for humankind. Being called names.

Shame.

snapplebobapple• 2 years ago

I cant think of any modern examples of people that did a rapid wealth ascent that dont also have a substantial number of haters (modern being after the low hanging fruit of basic service provision as a path to wealth being filled in the 2 decades after ww2, leaving only disruption through much better business process paths to wealth ascent). So i think being viewed as a shitty human by a subset of people and getting things done probablly are mutually exclusive.

admissionsguy2• 2 years ago

Wait for the so called "mainstream media" headlines: Another Starship lost after falling into the Indian Ocean

neverrroot5• 2 years ago

I'm not sure about the headline, but they will for sure play this milestone in the history of humankind down.

ReptileMan2• 2 years ago

Also lost the booster and emitted copious amounts of CO2

thanzex• 2 years ago

Seeing the fin still moving and keeping attitude despite being chewed trough was amazing

mulmen7• 2 years ago

As soon as I saw heat on that fin I knew it was over. Then it was… fine? Clearly I’m not a rocket scientist.

HPsquared10• 2 years ago

It was like that on the earlier test launch with the flying concrete and several failed engines.

mechhacker• 2 years ago

The upper stage re entering was the craziest thing I've seen live. Can't believe it was burning thru the flap and still had a gentle splash down.

pixl976• 2 years ago

Yea, when I saw the flap melt I had wrote it off and was waiting for the explosion. The explosion never came and I was awestruck.

delichon• 2 years ago

Watching pieces of the ship melt off, but then seeing it make a relatively controlled landing, is perversely confidence building. If it can survive that kind of damage on a control surface maybe it's a quite robust craft.

ceejayoz18• 2 years ago

Yeah, and what a useful recording for "where do we buff up the heat protection?"

liamkinne• 2 years ago

Survivorship bias!

amoss• 2 years ago

Part of the build up said that they had deliberately weakened / thinned some of the tiles in order to test what the tolerance was. It seems that they must have gotten some incredible data about the mode of failure.

idontwantthis3• 2 years ago

It looked like plasma got between the flap and the body. I wonder if that means something broke/melted to allow that, or if the design just allowed it accidentally.

api2• 2 years ago

I’ve said for a while that we won’t be ready for the real space age until you can have a rusty pickup in space.

What I mean by that is that we have it down well enough that the tech exceeds tolerances and can degrade gracefully.

You see this in some sci-fi where there are rust bucket old ships that work.

ryandvm• 2 years ago

You have to be careful how much wisdom you glean from fiction.

The sheer hostility of space kind of precludes the "she's a good ol' ship" trope. When your door doesn't shut on your pickup, you can bang on it a bit. When your door doesn't shut on your spacecraft, you've got a ship full of corpses that look like a blob fish brought up from the Marianas Trench.

Zigurd• 2 years ago

That doesn't work IRL. Space is insanely unforgiving. While Starship has a vastly better chance than STS had of achieving rapid reusability, you really can't launch with a rocket that isn't up to spec because adding robustness adds weight. Unlike a multi-stage expendable rocket, Starship uses all its fuel to get to orbit. To go to the moon or beyond, it requires refueling by several other Starships that also just get to orbit. If the payload spec can't be met you need even more refueling launches. If reusability isn't rapid, you need a starship for each refueling launch. If cost goals are not met, the cost difference vs expendable rockets shrinks. Everything has to go right.

echoangle2• 2 years ago

I would compare it to Airplanes, and there are not a lot of rust-bucket airplanes, because just like in space, failures can lead to unavoidable death very quickly. That’s not comparable to a reliable pickup

hot_gril2• 2 years ago

We also won't be ready for the sci-fi-style space age in real life unless there's a use case for it. Imagine Star Wars except there's no life on any reachable planets, what would they even do with their spaceships?

And Star Trek doesn't have "good old rust-bucket" ships in it, but the whole premise of it is that they found a way to move faster than the speed of light.

grishka• 2 years ago

This is unlikely. We don't really do this on airplanes, where servicing procedures and airworthiness criteria are very strict, and space is orders of magnitude more unforgiving than flying in the atmosphere at ~10km altitude.

If there's cabin decompression on a plane, you get an oxygen mask and land safely in the nearest airport. If there's cabin decompression on a spacecraft, you're dead. If there's a problem with engines on a plane, you can still glide and land somewhere. If there's a problem with engines on a rocket, guess what, you're dead.

merek• 2 years ago

Agree, a successful mission needn't be a perfect mission

Simon_ORourke• 2 years ago

Any mission you land and can walk from is a successful mission.

golol• 2 years ago

Exactly. Everyone was worried about reentry, but perhaps more concerning than the question of whether the headshield tiles work was the question how well the material below can handle failures. Now we know significant failures of tiles do not have to lead to mission loss.

cryptonector4• 2 years ago

Failure of the tanks would undoubtedly have been catastrophic. Partial failure of a flight control surface proved survivable.

dotnet0020• 2 years ago

Reminiscent of the booster in IFT-1 just doing spins in the air, refusing to break up even after the flight termination system was triggered. Completely unlike KSP with its wobbly rockets.

aeternum3• 2 years ago

A KSP with more realistic physics would just be amazing. Unfortunately from the KSP2 vids it looks like they instead doubled-down on wobblyness.

_nist• 2 years ago

This is one successful landing. I think its robustness needs a lot more successful landings than this. Plus, its not even landing like it was originally designed to land, its just landing in the ocean like any other rocket expect with thrust vector control rather than parachutes.

mulmen7• 2 years ago

With a successful propulsive splashdown will the ship be recovered for examination?

ceejayoz18• 2 years ago

Only one of the SpaceX Falcon 9 boosters stayed afloat after a gentle touchdown (they weren't quite sure what to do with it, with a persistent rumor the Air Force used it for target practice); there's usually enough propellant left to make it kaboom when it tips into the water. I'd also imagine they didn't put a boat close to the landing target this time around for safety reasons.

I'm hoping they had a reconnaisance aircraft out there, though.

voidUpdate2• 2 years ago

Well, I guess we finally know kinda what it looked like from the inside of Columbia... ouch. I did think the colours looked like some kind of metal fire, but I didn't think that was going to happen

mckirk• 2 years ago

'The little flap that could'...

Watching the stream and hearing the excitement of the whole team in the background honestly made me tear up a little. Congratulations!

matthewpick2• 2 years ago

A bit more exciting than my standard day at the office! Production outage is about as spicy as it gets…

jrs235• 2 years ago

Reminds me of playing Lunar Lander[1] back in the day.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lander_(video_game_genre...

gibolt3• 2 years ago

Here is a reminder that the only other rocket that can survive re-entry is Falcon 9.

Now we have the 2nd!

mulmen7• 2 years ago

Falcon 9 cannot survive re-entry. The first stage doesn’t reach orbit and the second is expended. The Dragon capsule can survive re-entry but that’s not unique among spacecraft.

namlem2• 2 years ago

The Falcon 9 second stage doesn't survive reentry and the booster only needs to get through a partial reentry at much slower velocity.

gibolt3• 2 years ago

It is not fully reusable. But partial reentry is reentry, something no other rocket had been able to do.

astral_drama• 2 years ago

That's a nice big ladder for getting to the heavens and back.

ironyman• 2 years ago

Some highlights:

Booster splashdown at about T+7:30, Ship engine cutoff at 151 km: https://x.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1798700946983358535

Starship splashdown in Indian Ocean, mostly intact, with landing burn just before splashdown; landing burn: https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1798715665916014715

Full flight profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_integrated_fli...

mhandley3• 2 years ago

Also at T+57:20 or so, watching the front flap start to come apart: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1798098040588480826

toephu22• 2 years ago

How do they recover the booster? It doesn't sink to the bottom of the sea?

dave782• 2 years ago

They are not recovering it this time. Once they demonstrate that it can achieve a controlled "landing" at sea, then they will move on to trying to land it back at the launch site.

krustyburger2• 2 years ago

That flap showed the kind of tenacity and courage under (literal) fire we need in our leadership. I hope it will consider entering the presidential race.

HPsquared10• 2 years ago

Funnily enough, the Simpsons did it:

https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Inanimate_carbon_rod

krustyburger2• 2 years ago

I’ll show you inanimate!

nomilk• 2 years ago

Full video: https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1798689697184764071

Various shades of plasma visible during re-entry:

Reddish/orange: 1h 26m

Blue/purple: 1h 28m

White/blue: 1h 34m

Yellow: 1h 37m.

The forward flap visible in camera view starts melting away around 1h 38m (until basically the end of coverage).

(the two stunning minutes from 1h 27m to 1h 29m were the highlight for me)

xnx2• 2 years ago

Big respect to that camera lens cover. The drama of seeing the camera get obscured and then have the cover crack was peak.

mlindner6• 2 years ago

Everyone said it cracked, but it didn't look like cracking to me. It looked like carbon vapor deposition/metal vapor deposition.

xnx2• 2 years ago

That's how it started, but there was a specific moment where it suddenly cracked. Further deposition and debris may have obscured that crack later.

Ajay-p3• 2 years ago

Imagine being the engineer who designed that flap.. Wow. What an incredible spectacle.

chilling• 2 years ago

It was such a well-done engineering drama! Everyone had already written off the main hero, but he returns from the dead.

okdood64• 2 years ago

Absolutely incredible how we were able to see live, on-board video of virtually the complete flight and re-entry with the help of Starlink.

jmward01• 2 years ago

This is the 'more awesome' side of the world we need a lot more of.

doctoboggan2• 2 years ago

Despite Elon's recent turn into divisive politics, I am still very happy he is pushing spacex development forward. I love watching these livestreams, and always look forward to Scott Manley's analysis a day or two later.

doctoboggan2• 2 years ago

Looks like Scott Manley has been working hard and was able to release his video very quickly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m0TY6i1Kuo

jlangenauer• 2 years ago

A seriously incredible achievement, and I'm sure everyone at SpaceX is very happy with what they've done right now.

I was absolutely certain it wasn't going to make it when I saw chunks breaking off the flap.

namlem2• 2 years ago

I'm sure NASA is thrilled as well, since this is great news for the Artemis program.

bradley13• 2 years ago

I hope they have footage from ships. It would be great to see actual videos of the soft landings.

One dumb question I have: There was no payload, and yet starship used essentially all of its fuel to achieve this trajectory. How does this compute?

dirkc• 2 years ago

I don't think they fueled it up all the way. But I do thing the booster and maybe also starship itself is a little heavier than they plan to have it at the end.

*update* if you check the video just before launch (39:54), you can see that the fuel bars for both the booster and the ship is not 100% full: https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1OwxWYzDXjWGQ

inglor_cz7• 2 years ago

Not a dumb question, they simply didn't fill the rocket completely up.

HPsquared10• 2 years ago

That thing is built like a tank, in more ways than one. (Get it? Tank?)

mrandish4• 2 years ago

Just watched the recorded live stream and... wow! What a show. Incredible views of a test that appears to have successfully achieved all potential objectives through reentry, rotation maneuver, relight, landing burn and upright water landing in the Indian Ocean.

The only unfortunate bit was some debris cracking the camera lens during the last part of reentry so the view for spectators was occluded but SpaceX maintained their live data feed all the way through, which is the important part. As they say, for these tests "the data is the payload."

salesynerd• 2 years ago

The real-time view of the re-entry through the plasma was phenomenal!

world2vec• 2 years ago

Seeing the Starship's flap visibly burning in the reentry heat and still survive well enough to move around and get to a splashdown was just incredible. Amazing progress in just four test flights.

baq5• 2 years ago

yeah the thing did a soft splashdown with a leaking flap, the fluid in question being molten stainless steel.

this was hard sci-fi, streamed live for everyone to see.

marmakoide• 2 years ago

That flap is already a legend, kept at it even mangled by hot plasma, crazy accelerations and pressures, spitting molten steel at the camera. What a role model, the little flap that could.

thelittleone5• 2 years ago

Someone on the Everyday Astronaut live stream named it "Flap Norris".

amelius2• 2 years ago

Makes me want to play flappy bird.

seydor2• 2 years ago

And let's not forget about the other flap, toiling away away from publicity

gpm2• 2 years ago

Also lost an engine at startup and another engine during the landing burn on the booster. Judging by the debris maybe a third engine during landing burn shutdown (or maybe that was the second engine just exploding a bit more).

Still a successful test, still a lot of work to do before they can meet their promises for Artemis (which require >10 back to back launches for one lunar mission...)

thelittleone5• 2 years ago

True. Heard SpaceX commentator today saying they plan 4 launch towers in near term. Hopefully the major issues that lead to FAA investigations are resolved and the cadence can ramp up. Probably won't be long before Starship's launch as often as Falcon 9s today.

kobalsky• 2 years ago

saw that and wondered how do they go from there to reusable. is the shileding ablative and replaced on every flight?

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

Was Starship empty or did it have a simulated payload?

dividedbyzero• 2 years ago

SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis moon program

So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface?

nyokodo2• 2 years ago

So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface?

That's the idea, yes. [1]

1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/20...

shmoe2• 2 years ago

Because the SLS can't do anything close to what the Saturn V did, yup.

Rebelgecko• 2 years ago

Is that in addition to taking a pit stop at the lunar gateway?

jlmorton• 2 years ago

The eventual plan is to build an orbiting space station, the Lunar Gateway. Astronauts will then launch on SLS/Orion, which will perform a Trans Lunar Injection.

However, before that, a Starship will be launched into LEO. There will then be something like 17 (the actual number is not clear, but it is a lot) Starship tankers that will launch to re-fuel the original Starship.

The Starship then does a Trans Lunar Injection. The Orion docks with the Lunar Gateway, Starship docks with the Lunar Gateway, the astronauts transition to Starship, which does a propulsive landing on the moon.

cubefox13• 2 years ago

More precisely, those ~17 ships will fill a propellant depot ship, and once that is done, they can launch the HLS ship, that will then be filled with propellant from the propellant depot.

pants2• 2 years ago

Seeing Live HD video of the outside of the ship on reentry is just incredible. Here's a link to the timestamp: https://youtu.be/8VESowgMbjA?t=35093

idontwantthis3• 2 years ago

Wow I actually got served the Elon crypto deepfake scam as an ad on that video.

adolph6• 2 years ago

Elon crypto deepfake scam is the new rick-roll

dave782• 2 years ago

The difference in presentation between the launch of Starliner yesterday vs Starship today was stark.

For most of the Starliner launch, all we got to see was a Windows desktop showing some basic animations that look like they're from the late 90s and unexplained telemetry with about a 1Hz update rate. Perhaps interesting to hardcore space nerds but not very exciting for John and Jane Public. Also, the "timeline" at the bottom of the webcast looked broken most of the time since it only updated when a couple major milestones occurred. Boeing even tried to address some of this in the press conference stating that video of the crew riding up to the station will be available after they download it post-flight (which, at that point, hardly anyone will care about).

Meanwhile, Starship had nearly-continuous live HD-quality feeds of video from multiple cameras from both the booster and spacecraft including all the way through reentry, producing some absolutely incredible views, some of which have probably never been seen before. Also, SpaceX puts very user-friendly telemetry displays on the bottom of their webcast that are easy to understand and seemingly have high update rates.

Maybe in the end it doesn't matter. On the other hand, if you were a potential future aerospace engineer, I think the Starship launch this week was the one that would have created most of the interest and enthusiasm. SpaceX is winning in the public-relations battle and a lot of that is because they've put focus and attention into their webcasts for a long time. Old space needs to learn a thing or 2 from them.

shmoe2• 2 years ago

We did get a lot of those Starlink views on flight 3 before the ship was destroyed, but yes -- definitely first time we've ever gotten to visualize re-entry live. Crazy stuff.

They are so far ahead if you're paying attention it's not even funny.

bryanlarsen3• 2 years ago

hardcore space nerds

Can confirm. My coworkers are hardcore space nerds and datavis nerds, and they took over our #random slack channel yesterday really digging the Starliner visuals.

baq5• 2 years ago

flap leaking steel in almost-space is definitely a first for live TV.

inglor_cz7• 2 years ago

Stainless steel is one helluva material.

Already the first launch of Starship a year ago showed how tough the rocket was. It was out of control, spinning wildly in high winds, and yet it still held together and had to be blown up remotely. Anything made of aluminium or aluminium alloys would have been torn to tiny pieces by the sheer aerodynamic force alone.

And now, the melting flap that was still capable of actuation and steering the ship towards a successful landing...

One day, this sturdiness is going to save some lives.

ericcumbee2• 2 years ago

Already the first launch of Starship a year ago showed how tough the rocket was. >It was out of control, spinning wildly in high winds, and yet it still held >together and had to be blown up remotely.

and even when they blew it up, it just laughed until it depressurized enough to break up.

ein0p• 2 years ago

How did Boeing fall so far behind?

baq5• 2 years ago

cost-plus.

ceejayoz18• 2 years ago

Starliner is very notably not cost-plus.

yayitswei• 2 years ago

Booster executed a successful landing burn and had a soft splashdown. Starship survived reentry, did the flip and landing burn, and splashed down. There was visible damage to the flaps.

toephu22• 2 years ago

How do they recover the booster? After the soft splashdown isn't it going to sink to the bottom of the sea? Or they have nets or something?

jantissler2• 2 years ago

They don't right now, because they are still testing. They can't risk bringing the booster or the ship back over land, because they don't know yet how well and precise they can steer and maneuver them. When they've figured that out, we will see the first landing of a super heavy booster for recovery and that will be pretty spectacular I bet …

mjamesaustin• 2 years ago

Booster is designed to land directly on the launch mount, but that won't be attempted until they are confident it won't blow up the whole base.

Starship is designed to land on any flat surface (earth, moon, mars) but again they won't attempt ground landing until they feel confident in the design.

liuliu• 2 years ago

How come the stream not cutting off during re-entry "blackout" period? Is it because the re-entry is low / slow enough so no thick plasma layer, or because it is streamed through StarLink which happens to be on the other side of the plasma layer?

the_duke• 2 years ago

They indeed started streaming through Starlink on the third (previous) test flight.

DarmokJalad17013• 2 years ago

There is a "hole" in the plasma in the wake of the re-entering Starship due to its shape. They used Starlink terminals to beam the data up to Starlink satellites. Starlink also uses higher frequency signals than older systems and that also helps.

spdif899• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if they have shared details but I assume this leaves a relatively narrow window over the ship that they need to put a satellite, which would be really cool to see more on logistically.

Like how do you move a satellite or satellites to a certain area, at the right time, avoiding other space objects, and then keep them there for 45 minutes during the mission or at least 15 minutes during the blackout zone. I'm sure it takes a huge amount of planning, math, coordination with various entities....

moffkalast2• 2 years ago

Starship is so absurdly massive that the plasma doesn't fully encompass it, and can get the starlink signal through to the satellites above.

hulitu• 2 years ago

Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

I see a lot of newspeak used with Musk's firm. Is this intentional ?

elevatedastalt2• 2 years ago

What?

Which word in that is Newspeak? Unlike other companies Tesla and SpaceX usually use very straight-speak.

avmich12• 2 years ago

The 4th Starship test flight was absolutely great test, which really pushed the state of the art - both in general (after all, Starship 2nd stage is 1.5-2 times heavier - when empty - than a Space Shuttle returning from orbit) and specifically for developing the Starship as a robust launch system.

Regarding return from orbital (and above) velocities - there was a flight ( https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/irdt-fregat.htm ) in 2000 when the payload was returning from orbit using inflatable heat shield, which would tolerate much less of heat flow than Starship. The approach was to dissipate a lot of energy in high enough atmosphere, so that while temperature (measure of gas molecules kinetic energy) is high, the heat flow (amount of gas molecules with that kind of high energy to the ship) is low and so heat effects on the ship are also low.

Another approach was used e.g. in Zond-6 flight ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zond_6 ) when the spacecraft entered the atmosphere, shed some speed and got heated, then ballistically exited the dense atmosphere layers, cooled down a bit, then got into atmosphere again with less speed and so less heat load.

The point is we still have some tricks up our sleeve to fight the problems of atmospheric reentry.

computerdork• 2 years ago

The Orion capsule (in 2022) used atmospheric bounce during reentry to cool off the craft:

https://www.livescience.com/orion-capsule-lands-in-ocean

gabesullice2• 2 years ago

Something like this is what I've been thinking about post flight. In the heat of the moment ;), I was thinking about what SpaceX was learning about the ship's hot spots.

After more reflection, I realized that the bigger picture is learning about how quickly it decelerates and how quickly it heats up. With that data, they can design a different reentry profile. E.g. maybe it's better to "plunge" to lower altitudes and experience higher peak pressure for a shorter duration or maybe it's better to have a very gentle but slow reentry to minimize peak pressure. After seeing how robust the ship is (and knowing SpaceX :P), I wouldn't be surprised if they decide to go for a higher peak pressure/temp.

A better reentry profile is like massless heat shielding!

Maybe more challenging than the profile or optimizing the heat shield though: how are they going to reject heat from the flap joint?

Maybe relocating the flaps leeward, like Elon's been saying for a while, will do the trick

thelittleone5• 2 years ago

As an ex-army guy who never misses a launch, I was both surprised and delighted to choke up and almost cry while witnessing today's historical launch. Thank you SpaceX for reconnecting me with my inner child.

Thank you Flap Norris.

mlindner6• 2 years ago

For some reason the main hacker news article keeps getting deleted and merged with this one. The link should be changed to: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1798715759193096245

Also the title is wrong for the subject. It should be about Starship, not Super Heavy. I don't know who did this but you did it wrong.

dotnet0020• 2 years ago

It was posted when the booster had just landed and the ship was still coasting. I guess the mods figure the topic should be contained here for being the first related post.

mlindner6• 2 years ago

But there was already a growing post with the other link, they forcibly merged that one into this one rather than the reverse.

vl5• 2 years ago

There is a full launch video on the SpaceX website: https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-...

szundi• 2 years ago

All enthusiast people, just buy the Kerbal Space Program (1, not the 2), play it through. Then play it without reloading saves. That’s something!!

And then, install the RP-1 mod and get blown away.

I have 2k hours in this game, worth every of those hours.

itslennysfault• 2 years ago

After a TON of trial and error I made it to orbit. I decided that was "beating the game" for me and never played it again. Ain't nobody got time for a moon mission.

dotnet0020• 2 years ago

Don't forget Principia! The stock orbital mechanics make RSS too easy.

philomath_mn• 2 years ago

I always get chills hearing the live viewing audience just losing their minds during these recordings. Must be an incredible feeling to be a part of such a massive accomplishment.

sfblah• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the "We Stand Tall" Scientology video.

riffic• 2 years ago

for context which is often lacking in posts like this, this is what a Super Heavy is (I had to look it up lol because it's not really obvious from the title alone):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Super_Heavy

meta but it absolutely would not kill anyone to include some context in your submissions here.

mlindner6• 2 years ago

There WAS more context, but some moderator of hacker news merged in the post with more context into this link that was posted first. That erased all the context.

Also the significance is not Super Heavy landing in the Gulf of Mexico, but Starship landing in the Indian Ocean.

resolutebat• 2 years ago

Both are very significant events, since previous tests didn't get even close to soft landing.

sam_goody• 2 years ago

I kinda feel bad for Boeing. SLS should be docking about now to the ISS, and instead everyone is watching their competition.

SmartJerry• 2 years ago

Mayba a dumb idea, but given we have regenerative braking on cars, why not harness the heat energy produced while landing to store and/or use the energy generated for whatever mechanism that might help counter the heat.

stephenitis• 2 years ago

Have you tried to use the steam heat from boiling a pot of water to operate a turbine to cool down the pot of water?

fernandopj• 2 years ago

I've been trying to find an "outside" view of the landing, as it is usual with SpaceX' dropships. So far no luck, they just haven't showed it yet or because it was middle of the ocean they probably don't have one?

cubefox13• 2 years ago

They didn't have them either for the previous flight test. Neither for the booster (Gulf of Mexico) nor the ship (Indian ocean I believe).

bamboozled2• 2 years ago

Anyone else excited for being able to ride one of these into space while remaining in their cybertruck and then driving off the craft and through the McDonals Mars drive through all while using StarLink internet?

throwaway2037• 2 years ago

About landing the Super Heavy booster, Wiki[1] says:

    > [S]hortly before landing,[67] it ignites its engines to slow sufficiently to be caught by two mechanical arms attached to the tower.

Does anyone know the reason to choose "two mechanical arms", instead of landing like the Falcon 9? And has SpaceX announced any plans to test these arms? In my mind, it sounds more wild to try to "catch" the landing booster with arms, rather than land on a pan. Anyone else?

hahn-kev• 2 years ago

IIRC the plan is for rapid reuse, the idea being that it can land on the launch pad.

synecdoche2• 2 years ago

Weight savings and less complicated rocket without the legs makes for higher payload capacity.

yetihehe2• 2 years ago

They were originally trying to land on pad, but they couldn't get legs light enough and strong enough not to bend while landing, there were also problems with maintaining structure around those legs. It was simpler to have two hardpoints and legs be more massive but on the ground.

speedylight• 2 years ago

When people hundreds of years from now watch these videos, they’re gonna think that Aliens helped us build this amazing craft in the same way some people today think that aliens helped the Egyptians build the pyramids!

8bitsrule• 2 years ago

As I recall, the spaceships in the -movies- gently lowered themselves onto the land, or even into a porthole, on a well-formed plume of flame. Without flaps! So watching these images of things flapping and flailing and sputtering causes mental discordance.

yetihehe2• 2 years ago

I recall that going through atmosphere was always the most shaking moment. With some creaking from time to time and having to hold your steering instruments really tight.

matheusmoreira• 2 years ago

I watched the atmosphere eat away at the stainless steel in real time and in first person point of view. Beautiful gradients of plasma... And then this thing somehow still managed to maneuver, lit up its engines and splash down gracefully. Astonishing.

Isuckatcode• 2 years ago

Can they recover the booster back to shore for an investigation?

alex_muscar• 2 years ago

Just curious who pays for cleaning up the debris after one if these landings.

MaxikCZ• 2 years ago

The Future. But honestly, there is less to clean up than if an empty sea ship would sink.

Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

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