the video from the booster simulated landing in the ocean was incredible!
It came in and did a soft landing vertically just touching the ocean, engines cut, it appeared to be floating for a second and then just kind of slowly fell over.
I did not think they would nail the booster landing this flight, as it was not stable all the way down on the last flight. Absolutely incredible watching this live
Boster was awesome, but the ship itself and watching heat dig through the fin slowly - that was one of the craziest moments I’ve seen out if all the launches :)
It would be better if one could vote for the first and the second stage separately. I believe that the booster has a good chance for a soft splashdown, while the Starship itself will probably explode on reentry.
Why does your software keep failing during development? Don't you have the knowledge to make it work?
It's the old, non-iterative everything-up-front method to rocket development that's weird. At least as a developer it seems obvious that a more hardware-rich approach with a high iteration rate will lead to a better outcome in the end, _especially_ when you're trying to push hard on the technological boundaries.
That's part of the innovation; don't just build a single reaaally expensive ship that has to be perfect. Instead, build a _ship factory_ and crank them out (relatively) cheaply and fast.
It is a SpaceX approach. The brain is given for you so you don't strain your limbs unnecessarily, and the limbs are given for you so you don't strain your brain unnecessarily. So try it, see how it works (or rather doesn't work), decide on how to apply your brains for the next iteration.
And maybe it is a PR strategy: it is fun to watch, the public really see the progress, so it is good for stocks.
But in any case, these all Starships are prototypes, they are meant to fail.
> Don't they already have the knowledge and tech to achieve this?
One could say they don't have all the knowledge, and they lacks some tech. Second stage got clogged thrusters and couldn't orient itself. I believe, that it was ice: there was something white on the video. Compressed gases tend to cool to really low temperatures when they evaporate. Maybe the was water in them, or they themselves started to crystallize.
The booster run into troubles with liquid oxigen filters. I cannot say what happened, but some engines didn't restart. It is much better then with the first test when engines didn't start at T-0:00, but still is not good enough.
Now the second stage will run probably into issues with its heat shield. If it will be able to orient itself properly, unlike the last time.
If they did not init the flight termination system upon water landing they would likely have a floating bomb to defuse (the explosive being the FTS). The FTS will allow for the vehicle to sink quickly and safely.
I know nearly nothing about rocketry, so ELI5 (or give me a wikipedia link!)... anyone know what those floaters are? Is it some byproduct of the fuel? An artifact of the cameras? An illusion coming through the haze of the burning rocket?
that is mostly ice. The propellent is super chilled so ice forms on the whole outside of the rocket, and then comes off during the launch and in flight.
You can also see this on the Atlas 5 + starliner launch from yesterday to a lesser degree
They did fall at the same rate, to very high precision. That booster was going like 2000 km/h! The delta is tiny, and likely down to the very low but non-zero aerodynamic accelerations that will differ between objects of different shapes and densities.
As noted by chat in EDA stream, Max Q is projected to be 10s later than previous tests:
grep -i 'max q' ift* | sed -e 's;^; ;'
ift2-timeline.csv:00:00:52 Max Q (moment of peak mechanical stress on the rocket)
ift3-timeline.csv:00:00:52 Max Q (moment of peak mechanical stress on the rocket)
ift4-timeline.csv:00:01:02 Max Q (moment of peak mechanical stress on the rocket)
None of the past tests has reached orbit (IFT3 got to orbital altitude, but not orbital velocity), so I believe SpaceX is essentially a projection that they will reach orbit this time.
"SpaceX's Starship mega rocket launched from Texas on its third test flight, reaching an altitude of 160 kilometers and achieving orbital velocity [...]"
https://x.com/CBCNews/status/1768296197846884741
If you look at the readings on the screen and do some basic physics instead of relying on the press releases of a biased party, you will realize that they were short of orbital velocity. At that altitude, orbital velocity is 27000 km/h, and IFT3 got to 21000-22000 km/h.
CNBC parrots what SpaceX's press release says, and they have no other sources (see what they do with other corporations). And yes, they got closer than I thought, but still short for 170 km. 150 km has a higher orbital velocity.
There was an in-orbit relight in the IFT3 flight plan, which failed to happen. IFT4 is somewhat more conservative - just get to orbit (happened), pseudo-land the booster (happened), and get back out of orbit (remains to be seen).
The amount of disinformation that SpaceX and Musk create around failed tests is really annoying and honestly somewhat problematic. It would be nice if SpaceX could just honestly say "this worked and this didn't," but we have to pretend that everything is a miraculous success. After the engine failed on IFT3, the immediate line was "we planned it this way" and then days later "we reached orbital velocity." Launching rockets is impressive enough that you don't have to try to gaslight us all on the way there.
As far as I can tell, my scorecard has IFT1 and IFT3 as failures based on what the flight plans said going in, and IFT2 and (so far) IFT4 as successes.
Edit: I'm suspicious of the fact that they turned off the feed right after cutting the engines and some gas vented. Previous tests have had no problem showing a video feed at this phase.
The orbital relight test was not a factor in the fact that Starship was not intended to reach orbital velocity. You may have noticed that the flight plan indicated that Starship was to land somewhere in the Indian ocean and usually reaching orbital velocity vastly increases the difficulty of doing a planned reentry. The flight plans had them turning off the engines before they actually reached orbital velocity
They scrapped the relight test when they realized that they were losing control authority. The relight test was not meant for reaching orbit, it was to prove they COULD relight the engines on Starship while in space.
The original IFT-3 flight plan had them reaching orbit and then doing the in-orbit relight as a de-orbit burn. At that altitude, there's enough drag that you will de-orbit pretty quickly if you are in orbit and your de-orbit burn fails, so there was no risk of a big piece of space junk.
The disinformation I mentioned is why everyone keeps being "wrong" about SpaceX. It's incredibly difficult to be right.
All the info about IFT-3 pre launch always mentioned that they were deliberately not actually going to enter orbit, so as not to need an unproven de-orbit burn to avoid 100t of space junk.
100t of space junk that would then re-enter at some unpredictable time. Bad idea.
So they were on a trajectory that would automatically have the vehicle re-enter the atmosphere and splash down in some ocean, even if it were fully inert.
A 150 km orbit has enough drag to de-orbit you very quickly if you don't propulsively stay in it. The atmosphere doesn't just suddenly stop at 100 km, it gets exponentially thinner and thinner, and at 150 km there's still plenty of atmosphere to slow down a big chunk of stainless steel. Even 3x higher there's enough atmosphere that tiny satellites can essentially turn their solar panels into sails and deorbit with no propulsion within a few weeks. The ISS at ~400 km has to regularly burn their engines to stay in orbit.
Read the IFT-3 pre-flight materials, preferably from a source that comes from before the flight. They clearly intended to enter an orbital trajectory and then get out of it. SpaceX's historical revisionism muddies the waters. At the very least, they would not have announced (ie lied about) successful orbital insertion (which they didn't do) if they had no intention to get there.
1. At step 4 for Starship, they write "Once S28 has reached orbital velocity..." Not trajectory. Not orbit.
2. At step 8, we have the "relight demo". Note the last sentence, the one in parentheses: "for an actual deorbit burn, the ship would need to yaw 180º first".
So there is no deorbit burn in the flight plan. The relight demo was just supposed to show that they could relight, and thus hopefully could do a deorbit burn. Note also that the ship deorbited despite the fact that there was no relight demo (never mind no deorbit burn).
Orbital velocity = orbital speed + orbital trajectory. Velocity is a vector. Orbital velocity + orbital altitude means orbit. That is, unless you think that everyone at SpaceX misspoke and they were only aiming for orbital speed (which they did not achieve with IFT3), and just wanted that speed in any direction.
Sounds like the plan to de-orbit was then to just go belly forward and let drag take you out of orbit. That is pretty much how every object in LEO de-orbits.
The trajectory of the actual flight was suborbital, but the planned trajectory of the flight involved burning all the way to orbital insertion (hence the "orbital velocity" being on the flight plan). Once again, velocity is a vector, and "orbital velocity" means "a heading and speed suitable for orbit."
By the way, I agree that they never intended to complete an orbit, just that they intended to get into (and promptly out of) an orbit. IFT4 did that, for example.
After IFT3 failed to achieve orbital insertion (probably because a leak caused it to run out early), SpaceX announced that not only was the plan to not get to an orbit, but also that they had achieved orbital velocity. They claimed both things!
Both of those claims seem to be lies, and it is also logically inconsistent to claim that you never wanted to reach orbital velocity and also that you got there.
You are overlooking the easier explanation: they used "velocity" in the more colloquial sense meaning speed, not in the vector sense. Suddenly everything is logically consistent.
And everything matches what they said, what they filled with FAA prior to the fight, etc.
All I see is a video from after IFT-3 that parrots SpaceX's post-hoc rationalization about the fact that their craft could not reach orbital velocity. If you look at the GAO report on Artemis, one of the big issues they mentioned is that Starship has not proven that it can reach orbit, and SpaceX is very interested in making sure that the narrative is that it can and did. It was only after the fact that they said that the never intended to reach an orbital trajectory with IFT-3.
And actually, people rely on drag to deorbit huge objects in space in a controlled manner all the time. It's the preferred way to do it, and is basically the only way it's done - any satellite with fuel left will just stay in orbit. They have it down to a science. Usually they aim for the middle of an ocean. Sometimes they miss and chunks fall in a backyard.
> All I see is a video from after IFT-3 that parrots SpaceX's post-hoc rationalization about the fact that their craft could not reach orbital velocity.
Given that the video was posted 4 days prior to that test, it is downright prescient that they are parroting a post-hoc rationalization.
Just watched it, I had my dates mixed up. The trajectory this guy drew on the map does not involve starship reaching orbital velocity anywhere on it, which is inconsistent with SpaceX's publications. SpaceX's claim was that IFT3 would enter an orbit and then leave it, not that it would follow a ballistic trajectory to the indian ocean.
It's possible that SpaceX made the mistake of using the words "orbital velocity" and this YouTuber is right, though.
> SpaceX's claim was that IFT3 would enter an orbit
You are claiming that, SpaceX never claimed that, only "orbital velocity" meaning "orbital speed" in this context. They wanted to test if the Starship is capable of reaching orbit, but w/o entering orbit for safety reasons. For that they wanted to achieve "orbital velocity" but of course not in an "orbital trajectory".
The max q, or maximum dynamic pressure, condition is the point when an aerospace vehicle's atmospheric flight reaches the maximum difference between the fluid dynamics total pressure and the ambient static pressure.
Correct, but the time and velocity when you reach max Q (and the flight plan CSV) indicate something about your path to orbit. I was extrapolating from previous starship tests.
I was wondering this too. The length is about half of ISS, and the altitude is about half or lower, so it seems plausible that it could be quite visible from some places.
I wonder if the proposed flight path for these tests is published anywhere?
The stream has ended now. I'm editing the comment to provide guidance for the next time that someone wants to watch a SpaceX stream via VLC:
Get the URL by going to the Twitter feed (e.g. via spacex.com/launches if you don't want to search for it) and extract the appropriate URL using the network traffic developer tools of your browser. It might be hosted on pscp.tv, the domain of the old Periscope live video streaming service that Twitter took over some years ago.
Playing this stream with VLC:
VLC -> Media -> Open Network Stream (Ctrl+N) -> Network -> "Please enter a network URL:" -> <insert URL here>
The hard bit coming up in 25 minutes. Going forward getting to this point in the flight plan is now basically table stakes. What a marked difference from V1. Love to see it.
edit: It looks like there is a YouTube link available (see comment below mine), and what Elon meant is that SpaceX themselves would be streaming exclusively on Twitter. Apologies for confusion.
The youtube video is third party footage, which can also be interesting, but it's definitely not the same as the official broadcast, which is _not_ going to be on youtube (unless you want to watch a badly faked video of Musk giving away bitcoin instead of the launch).
I’m going to watch an alternative stream (probably Everyday Astronaut’s or NSF’s) on my TV just because I can’t be bothered with working out how to stream X to it. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
IFT-3 I ended up watching some random restream of the official X stream on YouTube, which was actually less delayed/buffered than X on my phone was
Everyday Astronaut is going to try to get tracking footage of the booster all the way from launch to the landing burn. That might be better than the official footage.
If you have an Apple TV (or possibly also Android TV?) it's quite easy with the tvOS VLC app. The top comment here posted the stream link, https://prod-ec-us-west-2.video.pscp.tv/Transcoding/v1/hls/G...
Just paste that into the network stream option in the tvOS VLC app and bam, good to go. It's really kinda magical with an iPhone, as you can just paste the link into the popup on your phone!
Same here. Not a fair move from Musk, but I guess he needs to use all tricks to bring some users back to X (did someone say porn?). I'll watch it later on other channels.
The account hijack -> rename to spacex -> push crypto scam livestream thing has been going on for years. I wonder how much money Google gets from those because I see no other reason Youtube doesn't have some "if account with x subscribers changes name to spacex and starts live streaming" alert.
There are hypothetically advantages. The affiliated company would be more inclined to promote them, so they could get in front of some people who otherwise might not have seen it. Conversely, a company that competes with the affiliated company might be inclined to do the opposite to avoid promoting a competitor's businesses, so the countervailing costs of exclusivity are lower for their company in particular.
They also might be wary of platforms like YouTube which host "Elon Musk wants to give you Bitcoins" scam videos, which Twitter has a stronger incentive to be aggressive in removing because of who owns it, and then there is value to the company in being able to say "none of the YouTube videos are legitimate, you can only see it here."
Im sure SpaceX's investors love being used to promote a single private social media platform. Sounds like another case of the CEO enriching themselves to the detriment of investors.
Maybe but you could at least see a whole thread instead of only the tweet you clicked on without being logged in, and you could see posts on someone's page in chronological order instead of leaving it up to The Algorithm™
> like you have to be logged in to do anything on the musk hellsite these days?
Why be on HN calling things names while being stupid? These style of comments are constant on HN now.
I get it's autism insulting the users of the site you want help on, but not the stupidity.
But it's a free account for Twitter. A lot of OSINT is on Twitter. A lot of tech info is on Twitter.
If dumb just do what everyone else does for fucks sake or don't ape the media like an NPC with stupid insults. Pretend you are smart, fake it till you make it.
Yes you need a login. There are always other livestreams on youtube.
Yes! my point exactly. Amazing how these posts are stifled and disappear quickly. Yet, multiple culture warrior / dogecoin accounts posting a spacex rocket photo gets pumped into my timeline.
There is no comparison between starship and Boeing. The comparission would be a Crew Dragon and Boeing.
When Crew Dragon first launched back in 2020 it was news -- i.e. it was literally NEW. They were the first people to launch into space from the US since the shuttle retired.
Crew Dragon last launched in March, and I certainly didn't see anything about it, it's business as usual.
https://launchcountdown.live/
https://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/launch?iso=20240606T07...