- Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.)
- Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out.
- Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and was very off target.
- Starship lost one engine shortly after stage sep. Turned into an unintentional test of engine out capability. It made it to space.
- Some weird motion and lots of off-gassing after engine cut-off, with uncertainty about if it actually got a good orbital(ish) insertion. Seems to have been benign, with the motion being a weird slow flip to the orientation for payload deployment.
- Test deployment of dummy payloads was successful, including a couple with cameras to look back at Starship.
- An in space engine relight test was skipped, presumably due to the issues during launch.
- Re-entry to over the Indian Ocean seemed to go really well. Nothing obviously burning or falling off. The amazing views of the plasma during re-entry, something never seen live before starship, are now routine.
- Starship did a maneuver to simulate how they'll have to go out over the gulf and back to the landing site.
- Nailed the target, evidenced by views from drones and buoys. Soft landing before falling over and giving us a big (expected) boom.
As far as overall progress from previous test flights goes, they're at least treading water while making many large changes. I think they were hoping to try for a tower catch and actually going orbital for next flight, but I highly doubt that now. The boostback burn failing was the largest failure, with the engine failure on Starship being a close second. Good performance despite engine out seems to be an unintentional success.
If we look at the venting from the propellant tank (around T+16:15) it looks thick white closer to the vent, becoming more transparent and blue as it expands. That's just sunlight scattering on the particles and density fluctuations in the flow.
A good cold gas thruster produces a lower density, more expanded flow, which looks blue for the same the reason the sky looks blue.
One can compare this to the exhaust from various Falcon-9 engines and thrusters when it is illuminated by the sun on the backdrop of the night sky:
https://youtu.be/JRzZl_nq6fk?t=193
The takeoff looked almost normal but I noticed a slight drift from vertical, likely because one of the engines was dead or dying. Overall the V3 is supposed to be an upgrade but actual progress is more or less stalling compared V2.
It is supposed to tilt away from the launch tower immediately, you can see this on previous flights. This keeps the engine plume away from the chopsticks and top of the launch tower.
The best part of this flight was seeing the full reentry with no visible hot spots or burn through like we've seen on every previous reentry of Starship. Seems like they have the heat shields really nailed.
The views from Ship's engine bay looked rather ominous -- with the red glow visible in multiple places, and something venting furiously from the broken engine. It was a pleasant surprise that the ship did not explode and not only that, but it even landed exactly on target. Guidance system software engineers have done a very good job!
The booster not completing the return part of the flight was disappointing. They had a similar incident in one of the previous flights, when they tried to maneuver the booster too aggressively immediately after stage separation which caused problems with the fuel supply. If it was something similar this time, it might be solvable by changing just a few details of the maneuver. So, maybe it is not that huge of a deal.
There were many cool things in the webcast, from them showing the catamarans that are deployed at the landing site, to the views form the cameras on-board of the "satellites". The first few minutes after liftoff were just amazing visually.
My favorite part of this launch that others haven't already mentioned: during reentry, the dummy payload satellites were visible burning up behind the ship!
Now the flaps don't melt! The tiles don't fall off!
It's a major overhaul of the design they've been working on for a long time. There was talk of v3 fixing the problems in early v2 test flights. The booster is v3 as well which presumably is why they had some problems. I believe this is also the first time they flew the v3 engines with the plumbing fully integrated in a single piece housing they 3D printed.
The amount of data they must have at this point running so many of those raptor engines has got to be insane...
at least 300+ engine launches now -- wow.
Five years ago SpaceX reported that they had 30000 seconds of test firing time on the Raptor, over 567 engine starts. Since them the program accelerated dramatically. Well over one thousand engines had been produced, and on an average day at McGregor test facility the Raptors are fired for about 600 seconds. That would give about a million seconds over five years. That's a lot for any engine development program.
Big takeaway for me is that the reentry and “landing” of Ship looked great. For the first time, it felt like they’re really on the path to achieving upper stage reuse. That was always the biggest “reach” of the entire program in my view, and today they took a major step forward.
Is it disappointing that they had a couple of engine outs, and also trouble with the booster relight? Sure. Do I have even a little doubt by now that they can fix these problems? None whatsoever.
Oh man, so glad I stayed up to watch it. Kind of a rough start (but it's the 1st flight w/ new redesign, new engines, etc), had an engine out on both booster and ship, but the views were absolutely worth it. They managed to get the last satellite to connect to starlink and download the footage of the ship in orbit. Even with an engine out, the ship managed to reach orbit, deploy all the satellites, re-enter, flip and soft splash into the ocean, near a buoy! And on top of that we got the drone views of the landing. Fucking spectacular views.
I'm guessing / hoping that the engine outs we're planned, or that they ran the engines with slightly different parameters to test them. If it's just unreliability then it might be a hard problem to solve.
> If it's just unreliability then it might be a hard problem to solve.
It might, but it certainly helps having a ton of them around. Given that they used 42 of them today and 2 failed in some fashion, we'll call that a 1:21 failure rate. On a more typical rocket with say 10 engines (eg falcon 9), there's a good chance they wouldn't have seen the same failure till flight 3.
It’s something like up to 6 can fail and it keeps going, seems pretty good. I know they did some stuff like remove a heat tile to get failure feedback, wonder if engine was planned or accidental
Which is true, but at the same time: this is Starship Flight 12.
The whole point of Starship is that it's a reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance. And in particular it's supposed to be different than the other reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance, which turned out to be sort of a boondoggle.
Yet, they've now hand-built and destroyed twelve of these things across multiple redesigns, and it still hasn't completed its design mission once. In fact basically every launch has unexpected major failures.
As poor as its safety record ultimately ended up being, the shuttle launched successfully on its very first try. And we only had to hand-build five of them. And lost two, sure, which is still a lot less than twelve.
Yes yes, I understand that iterative design has merits and that the ability to rapidly prototype and try things in the stratosphere allows for less conservative tolerances and better ultimate performance.
But does it really take 13+ tries?! At what point to we start wondering if we have another boondoggle on our hands?
The point was more that there is a point where (to borrow the software terminology) "iterative design" becomes "death march". Trying a few times in the early days and being willing to throw stuff out and start over is a powerful tool.
I think blowing up a handful of rockets is a fine idea. But at some point you have to ask yourself if it will ever work? Why are we on a another engine redesign? Why is this the third iteration of the second stage? How many more?
And what number is that point? Six? Nine? I'm thinking thirteen may be getting into the danger zone.
So what if they blow up literally 100 rockets, if they can eventually perfect it faster and more cheaply than the traditional approach, recently typified by SLS.
SpaceX have already proven that the iterative approach works with Falcon 9, literally the most successful rocket program ever. SpaceX have also proven that this specific Super Heavy/Starship rocket design isn’t a dead end. Criticising them for failing to succeed in the future is a valid but uninteresting opinion.
v3 is the first version that was made with the intention of being used for actual payload delivery. The versions before were about testing and proof of concept.
But all of those 12 launches happened in just 3 years, and cost a tiny fraction of other major spaceflight development programs.
For reference, SLS has been in development for 5 times as long, and cost 15-20 times as much, as Starship, and they still haven’t landed people on the Moon, which has been one of the stated goals since the Constellation program in 2005.
I don’t see how the number of failures matters if the end result still happens faster and cheaper than anything else.
Moreover the two lost shuttles included human lives. Better to blow stuff up with demo payloads now before sending up large contracted payloads or worse human beings!
That's undeniably true. Nonetheless "Better than the shuttle, which sucked" isn't the design goal.
The question is not even just "is it better to blow up 12 Starships?", which would probably still be true. It's "Why isn't Starship working yet?" and the implied "Maybe Starship sucks too?!".
I couldn’t believe my ears when I first heard that the second ever flight of SLS was going to be crewed.
It worked out in the end, but I can’t imagine being so confident in a new system, no matter how much money and brainpower has been spent to make it safe.
I wonder if the hot separation was supposed to be that hot. Going at mach 5 and doing a quick U turn while there was some weird orange color on the side of the Super Heavy, then (possibly?) losing most engines from it seemed extra chaotic
Having a faultless payload deploy and a pinpoint landing after losing a whole vacuum engine (one of 3) so early was an unexpectedly amazing performance. I suppose they gimballed the inner non-vac engines to the max and burned longer, next level adaptability.
Most obvious improvement was having no re-entry heating problems, secondmost was deploying with zero issues and with a faster pace. It appears they decided to pause the "horizontal" movement of the pez dispenser before a final push away, probably to avoid vibration causing those "bonks" on the payload door, like we had once before.
Summary from my watch:
- Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.)
- Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out.
- Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and was very off target.
- Starship lost one engine shortly after stage sep. Turned into an unintentional test of engine out capability. It made it to space.
- Some weird motion and lots of off-gassing after engine cut-off, with uncertainty about if it actually got a good orbital(ish) insertion. Seems to have been benign, with the motion being a weird slow flip to the orientation for payload deployment.
- Test deployment of dummy payloads was successful, including a couple with cameras to look back at Starship.
- An in space engine relight test was skipped, presumably due to the issues during launch.
- Re-entry to over the Indian Ocean seemed to go really well. Nothing obviously burning or falling off. The amazing views of the plasma during re-entry, something never seen live before starship, are now routine.
- Starship did a maneuver to simulate how they'll have to go out over the gulf and back to the landing site.
- Nailed the target, evidenced by views from drones and buoys. Soft landing before falling over and giving us a big (expected) boom.
As far as overall progress from previous test flights goes, they're at least treading water while making many large changes. I think they were hoping to try for a tower catch and actually going orbital for next flight, but I highly doubt that now. The boostback burn failing was the largest failure, with the engine failure on Starship being a close second. Good performance despite engine out seems to be an unintentional success.
I think the ship really punted the booster during stage separation. And caused the boost back failure from sloshing.
Also I think Ship now has methane thrusters on it. They were operating with a clean blue flame in short purposeful bursts.
If we look at the venting from the propellant tank (around T+16:15) it looks thick white closer to the vent, becoming more transparent and blue as it expands. That's just sunlight scattering on the particles and density fluctuations in the flow.
A good cold gas thruster produces a lower density, more expanded flow, which looks blue for the same the reason the sky looks blue.
One can compare this to the exhaust from various Falcon-9 engines and thrusters when it is illuminated by the sun on the backdrop of the night sky: https://youtu.be/JRzZl_nq6fk?t=193
[delayed]
The takeoff looked almost normal but I noticed a slight drift from vertical, likely because one of the engines was dead or dying. Overall the V3 is supposed to be an upgrade but actual progress is more or less stalling compared V2.
It is supposed to tilt away from the launch tower immediately, you can see this on previous flights. This keeps the engine plume away from the chopsticks and top of the launch tower.
The best part of this flight was seeing the full reentry with no visible hot spots or burn through like we've seen on every previous reentry of Starship. Seems like they have the heat shields really nailed.
The views from Ship's engine bay looked rather ominous -- with the red glow visible in multiple places, and something venting furiously from the broken engine. It was a pleasant surprise that the ship did not explode and not only that, but it even landed exactly on target. Guidance system software engineers have done a very good job!
The booster not completing the return part of the flight was disappointing. They had a similar incident in one of the previous flights, when they tried to maneuver the booster too aggressively immediately after stage separation which caused problems with the fuel supply. If it was something similar this time, it might be solvable by changing just a few details of the maneuver. So, maybe it is not that huge of a deal.
There were many cool things in the webcast, from them showing the catamarans that are deployed at the landing site, to the views form the cameras on-board of the "satellites". The first few minutes after liftoff were just amazing visually.
Seeing both the Starlink mass simulators deploy and the camera view from the last simulators looking back at Starship was really cool.
My favorite part of this launch that others haven't already mentioned: during reentry, the dummy payload satellites were visible burning up behind the ship!
Glad you mentioned this. I was puzzled by the starry looking background during reentry
I don’t keep up with them. What’s different compared to v2?
Now the flaps don't melt! The tiles don't fall off!
It's a major overhaul of the design they've been working on for a long time. There was talk of v3 fixing the problems in early v2 test flights. The booster is v3 as well which presumably is why they had some problems. I believe this is also the first time they flew the v3 engines with the plumbing fully integrated in a single piece housing they 3D printed.
Quite a bit has changed. Here's the highlights: https://www.spacex.com/updates#starship-v3
The amount of data they must have at this point running so many of those raptor engines has got to be insane... at least 300+ engine launches now -- wow.
Five years ago SpaceX reported that they had 30000 seconds of test firing time on the Raptor, over 567 engine starts. Since them the program accelerated dramatically. Well over one thousand engines had been produced, and on an average day at McGregor test facility the Raptors are fired for about 600 seconds. That would give about a million seconds over five years. That's a lot for any engine development program.
Sort of... this was version 3 of the engine, a fairly big redesign and for version 3 this was the first flight.
Some footage: https://youtu.be/CiWX1nsvqBs?si=lE5autC2y2b8ez2X
At a minute in you can see the satellites being ejected out one by one.
Big takeaway for me is that the reentry and “landing” of Ship looked great. For the first time, it felt like they’re really on the path to achieving upper stage reuse. That was always the biggest “reach” of the entire program in my view, and today they took a major step forward.
Is it disappointing that they had a couple of engine outs, and also trouble with the booster relight? Sure. Do I have even a little doubt by now that they can fix these problems? None whatsoever.
The success of Ship 39 today was a big, big deal.
It lifts off so rapidly, it’s truly incredible
Cool splashdown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiWX1nsvqBs&t=173s
Oh man, so glad I stayed up to watch it. Kind of a rough start (but it's the 1st flight w/ new redesign, new engines, etc), had an engine out on both booster and ship, but the views were absolutely worth it. They managed to get the last satellite to connect to starlink and download the footage of the ship in orbit. Even with an engine out, the ship managed to reach orbit, deploy all the satellites, re-enter, flip and soft splash into the ocean, near a buoy! And on top of that we got the drone views of the landing. Fucking spectacular views.
It really was an amazing sight to see.
I'm guessing / hoping that the engine outs we're planned, or that they ran the engines with slightly different parameters to test them. If it's just unreliability then it might be a hard problem to solve.
> If it's just unreliability then it might be a hard problem to solve.
It might, but it certainly helps having a ton of them around. Given that they used 42 of them today and 2 failed in some fashion, we'll call that a 1:21 failure rate. On a more typical rocket with say 10 engines (eg falcon 9), there's a good chance they wouldn't have seen the same failure till flight 3.
> Given that they used 42 of them today
20+10+3=33 on the booster, 3+3=6 on the Ship, total 39.
I remember Elon said they want to add 2 engines to the first stage, but that still would be 41. Where's the 42th supposed to be?
It’s something like up to 6 can fail and it keeps going, seems pretty good. I know they did some stuff like remove a heat tile to get failure feedback, wonder if engine was planned or accidental
Accidental since they didn’t make the sub-orbit they were aiming for and thus couldn’t test engine re-light.
Very first flight of a brand new engine type (Raptor 3) with totally reworked heatshielding/plumbing/sensors/control systems/etc.
Which is true, but at the same time: this is Starship Flight 12.
The whole point of Starship is that it's a reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance. And in particular it's supposed to be different than the other reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance, which turned out to be sort of a boondoggle.
Yet, they've now hand-built and destroyed twelve of these things across multiple redesigns, and it still hasn't completed its design mission once. In fact basically every launch has unexpected major failures.
As poor as its safety record ultimately ended up being, the shuttle launched successfully on its very first try. And we only had to hand-build five of them. And lost two, sure, which is still a lot less than twelve.
Yes yes, I understand that iterative design has merits and that the ability to rapidly prototype and try things in the stratosphere allows for less conservative tolerances and better ultimate performance.
But does it really take 13+ tries?! At what point to we start wondering if we have another boondoggle on our hands?
If you can afford it, I'm sure anyone developing a rocket would prefer to do it this iterative way. I don't really understand the complain.
The point was more that there is a point where (to borrow the software terminology) "iterative design" becomes "death march". Trying a few times in the early days and being willing to throw stuff out and start over is a powerful tool.
I think blowing up a handful of rockets is a fine idea. But at some point you have to ask yourself if it will ever work? Why are we on a another engine redesign? Why is this the third iteration of the second stage? How many more?
And what number is that point? Six? Nine? I'm thinking thirteen may be getting into the danger zone.
So what if they blow up literally 100 rockets, if they can eventually perfect it faster and more cheaply than the traditional approach, recently typified by SLS.
SpaceX have already proven that the iterative approach works with Falcon 9, literally the most successful rocket program ever. SpaceX have also proven that this specific Super Heavy/Starship rocket design isn’t a dead end. Criticising them for failing to succeed in the future is a valid but uninteresting opinion.
v3 is the first version that was made with the intention of being used for actual payload delivery. The versions before were about testing and proof of concept.
But all of those 12 launches happened in just 3 years, and cost a tiny fraction of other major spaceflight development programs.
For reference, SLS has been in development for 5 times as long, and cost 15-20 times as much, as Starship, and they still haven’t landed people on the Moon, which has been one of the stated goals since the Constellation program in 2005.
I don’t see how the number of failures matters if the end result still happens faster and cheaper than anything else.
Moreover the two lost shuttles included human lives. Better to blow stuff up with demo payloads now before sending up large contracted payloads or worse human beings!
> Better to [...]
That's undeniably true. Nonetheless "Better than the shuttle, which sucked" isn't the design goal.
The question is not even just "is it better to blow up 12 Starships?", which would probably still be true. It's "Why isn't Starship working yet?" and the implied "Maybe Starship sucks too?!".
I couldn’t believe my ears when I first heard that the second ever flight of SLS was going to be crewed.
It worked out in the end, but I can’t imagine being so confident in a new system, no matter how much money and brainpower has been spent to make it safe.
I wonder if the hot separation was supposed to be that hot. Going at mach 5 and doing a quick U turn while there was some weird orange color on the side of the Super Heavy, then (possibly?) losing most engines from it seemed extra chaotic
This is amazing.
Having a faultless payload deploy and a pinpoint landing after losing a whole vacuum engine (one of 3) so early was an unexpectedly amazing performance. I suppose they gimballed the inner non-vac engines to the max and burned longer, next level adaptability.
Most obvious improvement was having no re-entry heating problems, secondmost was deploying with zero issues and with a faster pace. It appears they decided to pause the "horizontal" movement of the pez dispenser before a final push away, probably to avoid vibration causing those "bonks" on the payload door, like we had once before.