| ▲ | modeless 18 hours ago |
| Successful Raptor on-orbit relight demo! That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites! Big milestone for the program. And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's still connected to Starlink too. The ship's cameras are still working underwater! I wonder if they will be able to recover it intact? We're getting some great views of the heat shield post-reentry. That's great data for the heat shield team. The heat shield is the biggest remaining question mark in the whole program. Reflight without heat shield refurbishment will be required for the whole architecture to work, and it's never been done before. None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one. Edit: Spashdown video https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2080804682918764619 |
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| ▲ | a34729t 17 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| They have a much biglier support vessel this time, almost 300ft long IIRC. So maybe they can recover it? |
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| ▲ | stinkbeetle 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It might be possible. Allegedly they had previously asked the Australian government about towing the ship back to a port. Marine recovery can be much more difficult than it might seem though. Towing this nearly 200ft structure weighing a decent fraction of the weight of the boat that is not designed to be seaworthy, potentially full of explosive gasses and that could rapidly start breaking up and taking on water, nearly 300 nautical miles back to shore, would be quite difficult and dangerous. I would be impressed if they ever do it. | | |
| ▲ | chasd00 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | yeah it's suppose to tip over, explode and sink. Not sure what they're going to do with it now. If some other country comes in and salvages intact Raptor3, flight computers, and all the other ITAR regulated tech SpaceX may have a big problem. SpaceX will probably ask the airforce to gift them a jdam delivery or something. | | |
| ▲ | aejm 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | They can relatively easily sink it, and in fact are required to be able to in order to get their US FAA launch license. As part of the environmental assessment specifically, but I could be wrong on that.
For those curious, they have recovery teams on sight who can essentially shoot it to further puncture the hull or attach explosives even. They have experience with their Starship boosters not sinking off the coast of Texas and floating into Mexican waters. |
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| ▲ | 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | agent86 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites! Mid-stream they said they were deploying 20 real V3 Starlink satellites. At the end of the stream the said all 20 had checked out as well. |
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| ▲ | FLHerne 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They were real satellites but deployed on the suborbital trajectory of this flight, so will have burned up over the Indian ocean about the time that the ship re-entered. The goal was to get about 20 minutes of testing the new satellites in space, not for them to have any chance of becoming operational. Starship hasn't been entering a full orbit so far because it would be really bad if the relight burn did fail - chunks of ship would rain down a few days/weeks later on some random area anywhere within 27° of the equator. On a much smaller scale this has been an internationally embarrassing problem for China's LM-5. | |
| ▲ | everfrustrated 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They need to be in orbit to deploy the satellites into a useful orbit. These ones only lasted for 20 minutes before breaking up. |
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| ▲ | maxlin 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My brain refuses to resolve the effect of it as anything but CGI. Event though it isn't. |
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| ▲ | cadamsdotcom 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | I mean, folks who make CGI better watch these too or they're not doing their jobs. | | |
| ▲ | smallmancontrov 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | I hope they watch some of these, because movies are full of disappointing rocket scenes that are so many orders of magnitude away from the real thing that it's like representing a skyscraper with a treehouse. There is considerable room for reality to inspire fiction a bit more on this front. |
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| ▲ | testing22321 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one. What about this one looks not reusable without refurbishment? To my eye it’s by far the best we’ve seen, no burn through on flaps, etc |
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| ▲ | modeless 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | Lots of missing tiles still. Best case is it's all infant mortality and replacing just those tiles will result in a durable heat shield for many more flights. Worst case is every flight loses that many tiles and the ablative underneath can't be reflown until replacement. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing a heat shield refurbishment attachment to the launch tower that allows technicians to access the side of the ship to patch up between flights without leaving the pad. They're going to need some kind of solution for the many back-to-back HLS refueling flights. | | |
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