Der erste Testflug von SpaceX Starship V3 verlief weitgehend erfolgreich
https://www.engadget.com/2180020/spacex-starship-v3-first-test-flight-success/
Der erste Testflug von SpaceX Starship V3 verlief weitgehend erfolgreich
https://www.engadget.com/2180020/spacex-starship-v3-first-test-flight-success/
20 Kommentare
It’s remarkable how unremarkable V3 reentry of the ship was compared to every other one.
‚No‘ sparks.
No changing plasma colours as different metals sublimate.
No camera obscuration.
No apparent significant hardware damage.
And deployment ‚just worked‘ quite rapidly.
If booster had gone as smoothly and all six had lit, it’d have been in a real good place for setting up to be reliable enough for catch.
„It was only able to do a partial boostback burn before falling back to Earth and crashing down into the Gulf of Mexico (renamed the Gulf of America in 2025 by President Donald Trump).“
Just call it the gulf of Mexico and leave it be. Are they trying to irritate readers? Why stir up this nonsense?
Edit: just celebrate the successes of the launch, why add that bit in there at all?
I couldn’t start my engine back up too at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and needed rescue, but the trip was “Largely successful” I got extra pictures/data. I didn’t even plan on re using my car since it was a rental. Would you trust me to lead you on your next vacation?
Elon Stans need to realize this is a puff piece. These are legitimate failures that need to be acknowledged.
Amazing improvements in just a few iterations, from engines to tiles to the design of the ship and satellite launch systems. It’s shocking how fast they iterate at SpaceX.
The weight of the payload continues to be the biggest mission success, and so few people are talking about it, biggest tonnage deployed in decades.
Overall feeling ambivalent.
The good:
– Absolutely beautiful launch. They mentioned that the new version has more and better cameras located around it, and oh boy, did we get some beautiful HD live shots. Just gorgeous. Besides historical milestone imagery, the stuff we are getting here is easily the most beautiful and visually interesting spaceflight footage which is focused on the spacecraft itself of all time.
– Great moderation. I liked the people doing the cast, it was clear that they’re actually engineers and really hyped about what they do. They also didn’t shy away from speculation on stream and pointing out stuff like a failed engine or such and are generally informed enough to make correct judgement calls about what’s happening without needing it teleprompted. SpaceX is really setting the standard here for what it takes to make a good space webcast.
– Ship seemed to do reentry and landing well. Payload deployment was also very cool, and the space selfie footage we got is super slick. Absolute props to the starlink team for getting this and keeping the footage coming during re-entry.
The bad
– Multiple engine failures. Booster had one engine out on launch, and then didn’t manage a proper relight during reentry or landing burn of multiple engines. Ship similarly had a 1/6 failure. Like, I get that a lot of engines means a lot of failure points (but brings redundancy) but it’s still weird that this keeps happening?
– Feels like they are spinning their wheels in a sense. Not that v3 likely isn’t a huge step forwards behind the scenes etc but they still seem shy about actually going orbital and seem to keep repeating tests. If the next test doesn’t have a booster catch/starship landing, I’m not gonna tune in.
Engine failures on both vehicles, sub-optimal landings, no on-orbit engine relight. Only a suborbital flight with mock payloads. „Mostly successful“ seems on target if by that you mean „didn’t blow up on the pad or in the air over the Caribbean“. Otherwise you’re being a bit generous.
That’s a fairly generous use of the term “largely successful”, with the amount of Booster engines that failed to relight and the failure of a Booster Raptor and a Ship vacuum Raptor while under power.
The evolution of the heat shield tiles alone is insane. Going from shedding them like crazy a few flights ago to a clean, ‚boring‘ reentry is a massive leap. If they keep this pace up, catching the booster reliably doesn’t seem that far off.
So what actually happened ? I saw the starship, as usual, did explode again on splash down ( I guess that is a success as per SpaceX 12 flights in ?).
Did the booster catch also fail ?
Why did they not decide to catch it again? Surely these things are a tad bit expensive.
Starship’s control authority on descent was impressive.
A largely successful test flight! That’s going to piss off a lot of people.
They’re still losing boosters and that’s supposed to be the easier part to reuse?
I’d like to know how is this more succesful than any of the other suborbital flights? They’ve even tested the pez dispenser before. What’s next? Some other RUDs then make way for V4, which will perform similarly?
I feel like that largely is doing a lot of heavy lifting for their test flight. but maybe that’s just me.
Seems like re-entry performance of the pointy end was much improved over previous attempts… would love to hear more detail on how the heat shielding held up. I don’t doubt that SpaceX can land and recover a booster, but landing and recovering the ship itself without requiring major refurbishment before reuse is still the next major milestone in my view as a simpleton.
The new heat shield design looked excellent, but the v3 raptor clearly has some problems. I personally suspect the new downcomer broke when the booster made that extremely aggressive hot staging flip, which is what ultimately led to the boostback burn failing.
Has SpaceX given up with the chopstick catcher for the booster? I know this one was uncontrollable during re-entry but they haven’t tried to capture the booster in a long time now. I think they only successfully managed to do so twice?
Showerthought: when do we see **relaunch of a Ship**?
Guessing that the first re-flown Ship – after an orbital flight – will earn another SUB-orbital flight before SpaceX risks losing control of a previously-used hunk in orbit.
So, perhaps (NET…)
F13 – repeat of F12
F14 – booster catch, orbital ship, orbital payload deployment
F15 – orbital ship, ship catch
F16 – repeat F15
F17 – reflown booster, reflown ship, suborbital
F18+ – duel launch, orbital docking and propellant transfer