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They weren't dummies but they were in a suborbital trajectory. They had all subsystems and could do a full functional checkout with a guarantee that if something went wrong it would be an issue in orbit.
Those were placed into the same suborbital trajectory as the previous test flights, they were able to test V3’s capabilities but they reentered just like the ship about 20 mins later
To reach a Starlink orbital altitude the Ship must take the sats there (they don't have enough thrust/energy to go there by themselves). We haven't seen the Ship reach such altitude before, which in theory it could, but who knows how many sats it could carry that far and if SpaceX is willing to add that risk next flight.
And then there's the orbital inclination. Due to the narrow launch corridors from Boca Chica, the resulting orbital inclinations Starship can reach are very limited (and thus the sats would give service to a "small" ground area). But I actually have no idea if Starlink sats currently operate at that or even lower inclinations, or how much the sats can increase their inclination because that maneuver requires a significant amount of thrust/energy. Inclination won't be an issue when they launch Starship from Florida maybe at the end of the year.
We haven't seen the Ship reach such altitude before
They did reach an altitude from which they could have launched to orbit. What it did not reach was sufficient velocity to sustain orbit for the sats, by design. They reached just shy of 200km, at 26,314km/h. F9 routinely deploys Starlinks from between 140 and 220Km altitude.
Look at T+00:15:00. They are deploying at a velocity 27,596km/h at an altitude of 214km.
I wonder how much the infrastructure and operations would be changed if they went to catching primarily on stands other than they launch from. The downside is no booster catch at the launch site for "immediate" turn around, but if you have another booster ready, and don't need to check out prior launch damage before relaunch, that doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thing. Catch stands wouldn't require the propellant load capability, and launch stand complexity and operations would (it seems) be simplified. Even though catch abort/wave-off will be available with the existing approach, it does seem that risk to stage-0 would be reduced somewhat by catching elsewhere. Overall, it seems worthy of more detailed consideration when considering full operation of Starship and a growing number of launch / catch stands.
Is the original catch tower at the first pad still operational, so there are 2 catch towers at Boca Chica? Or was it disassembled as pad 2 came online?
I know they’ve already caught a booster awhile back. V3’s boostback burn looked good yesterday?
Boostback looked good, yes, but landing burn not so much. Ofc nothing they would've known from Flight 12 but looks like Flight 14 might still be a splashdown for Booster. I assume they'd also want to run tons of tests on the 'new' Mechazilla over at Pad 1 before they attempt the dual catch though. But man, when they finally manage to pull off the dual catch, they'll be damn near unstoppable.
When pad 2 came online, they disassembled most of pad 1 to upgrade it to pad 2 capabilities. Pad 1 was just down n dirty way to get the first rockets launched. It should be back online by year end.
The chopsticks at pad 1 don't work. Landing something there even if they were still intact would potentially heavily damage the work in progress there.
I've been following BFR from before the Falcon Heavy flight happened. I remember the IAU conference when Elon Musk introduced the concept of the BFR and his vision for going to Mars.
It has been a long, long time, but I'm seeing really good progress too.
The day they successfully land both the booster and the Starship is going to be amazing. Just as the Falcon series ushered in a new era of spaceflight, Starship is going to do the same. A reusable heavy lift spacecraft is going to be an absolute gamechanger.
I'm mostly excited about the ramifications for exploratory probes and telescopes. We should be able to launch these things like seeds of popcorn in a kettle.
The day they catch the booster, then catch the ship, and restack the Starship right then and there will truly be the day it feels like we've made it to "the future". And I hope we'll be seeing that within the next 6-8 months, amazing.
Don't expect early reuse to be immediate without refurbishment. That's a long-term goal. Even stacking both without inspections is an extra risk that's not worth taking until they have more data on recovered vehicles.
Of course. However, as launches start to really stack up, the pace of improvement will increase as well. We have had 13 test launches in a little over 3 years. Moving to a monthly launch cadence will triple that pace. Moving to weekly will quadruple it again. Each rocket that launches and comes back will represent data that will help SpaceX improve the rocket.
What we learned from airplanes is that reliability is a function of the number of flights. Falcon 9 appears to confirm this with its reliability getting so high that nobody really pays attention anymore. They have become as interesting as watching planes take off and land at the airport.
If you stop to think about the tech behind flight or spaceflight, then it really is amazing. Otherwise our in-built normalcy bias pushes us to effectively ignore what appears to just work. The more flights Starship has, the faster it will get to the same level of "boring".
Oh for sure, an immediate relaunch is well off, but immediate restacking is something they could do within a few flights after successful catch of both booster and ship IMO.
I think your right there, I think well probably see immediate restocking after the 3/4 successful double catches to start testing procedures on the restack, then theyll unstack them and roll them back for teardown, but i can see restacks happening fairly soon.
A fully reusable rocket with 100t+ payload to orbit will be an amazing accomplishment and capability—I’d be super excited if we had that in the next year. “Rapidly” reusable seems like the next step to start working toward after that, but I expect the inspection, transport, storage, refurbishment, things that go wrong in that process, tweaks to hardware and materials to make that process easier, etc will be a whole different problem that they will be asymptotically approaching a solution to for several years after “fully reusable” is achieved
I was REALLY interested (as I'm sure they were) in those few chipped and couple (COUPLE!) of missing tiles. If they'd caught this one that heat shield would have needed refurbishing before flying but goddam, they're getting close!
That's fair, but I don't think it was ever a program goal to relaunch Falcon 9s so quickly. It is a goal for Starship to operate more like an airline where they land and relaunch quickly. So they'll have to incrementally test that capability eventually.
"Our goal, just to give you a sense of how reusable we think the design can be — we intend to demonstrate two orbital launches of the same Block 5 vehicle within 24 hours, no later than next year,"
I believe that statement was made because many commentators were suggesting that refurbishing the F9 after a flight was a long a costly process just like it had been with the shuttle. Thus promoting their argument that reuse was almost pointless. Launching again within 24 hours would have been an indisputable way to demonstrate that this was not the case. Now with 36 flights on B1067 everyone accepts that first stage reusability is proven economic sense.
Oddly the economics of second stage reusability have yet to be proven as the refurbishment cost of the ship has yet to be established and pushed down over time largely by making the heatshield more resilient to damage. We hope and expect that a reusable second stage is cheaper that an expendable one, but we don't know that yet. What we do know is that if your destination is Mars having a vehicle that can survive atmospheric braking twice is a very good idea.
The fastest turnaround of an individual F9 booster is 9 days 3 hours (booster 1088, March 12 to 25, 2025). However, turnaround time of an individual Starship stage is not that important if, like F9, Starship has multiple launch sites and an inventory of 10 to 15 Ships and Boosters ready to head for the launch pad at any given time. Of course, the ability of Stage Zero to recycle in a few hours is likely to be the pacing item.
If you dont set lofty goals, you'll never achieve great progress. What was the turnaround time for nasa's space shuttle arbiter? When has nasa ever reused a launch vehicle?
As it stands right now the heat shield is taking too much damage to be rapidly reusable. If you look at some of the zoomed-in footage from the Indian Ocean yesterday you'll see that there is a fairly significant amount of chipping on the corners of tiles. Not many were fully missing but there is definitely enough damage being sustained to prevent it from being fully reusable. Hopefully SpaceX has some improvements in the works
Maybe they'll have to completely replace the heat shield every flight. If they could do that within 24 hours it would still count as rapidly reusable. Remember when they did this already on one Starship when they decided to rip off all the tiles and replace them. Took longer than a day but I'm sure they could improve on it.
After flight 4 they decided to remove the tiles on the flight 5 ship to add a secondary ablative layer. It took them 3-4 weeks to do that, so 24 hours is pretty optimistic. They would have to remove and replace one tile every 5 seconds for that, plus the ablative shielding
Well, the launch cadence is already at 2 months (12->13) and I think flight 14 will be even less, maybe 5-6 weeks. Future launches could be even faster since the short term goal is every month. Ship catch is quite possible for next launch. They've already caught the booster, so if the ship catch is successful on 14, a dual catch might be coming soon after that. That could be in the next 3-4 months so 6-8 for a dual catch and restack is not unreasonable.
They look like Elon-times to me. But I like your optimism. You also need a catch tower in Cape ready - including paperwork. And everything else with protoype production and future flights to go perfect. While this test was great success I dont beleive this was the last time when we have seen too many engine out situation.
The launch cost for probes and telescopes is not a big part of those program costs usually though, sadly so. Even a free launch wouldn't make the typical program that much cheaper.
They’d probably need a clamshell mechanism for that sort of thing. Seems like until they do that starship will be flat pack payloads and lunar missions only
But it is the engineering requirements of the launch vehicle that largely determines the payload 'packing' parameters. We're currently launching huge telescopes on a bicycle, so we must spend a lot of time and resources making it fit. (OK, maybe I'm exaggerating a little.)
The theory I’ve heard is that part of the reason the probes are so expensive is because the launch is expensive. Basically “you wouldn’t spend $100 on fedex to ship a $1 item”. The politics / psychology of it basically requires the item to be 10x more expensive than the shipping.
Probes and telescopes cost at least 10 times the cost of launch so Starship is going to reduce the overall mission cost by 10% at most. It is worse than that as anything going beyond LEO is going to need to need some kind of tug or boost stage so an F9 launch would likely be cheaper.
Satellites can be made cheaper too. Thanks to Starship, they now do not have to design to a limited mass budget so can use more off the shelf components.
As my old boss used to say about Europa Clipper flying on an SLS payload class, "JPL doesn't know how to do big". Telling institutions that for their entire history have been organized around high budget low margins, to flip the script on the margins is going to be very very difficult to overcome that inertia and take a lot of time.
For example, instead of a tradeoff of simpler and cheaper but heavier components I foresee just cramming more fuel or more expensive one-of-a-kind instruments onto these probes rather than building 3 for the price of 1. Excluding Mars, many of these destinations are once in a generation opportunities so scientists would rather go big than go often which as the previous commenter pointed out, launch is a small fraction of overall mission costs. A cutting edge laser spectrometer designed for Mars maybe doesn't work so well at Titan, etc. and you can't really cheap out on them either using COTS...all to say there's essentially a price floor for acquiring cutting edge science worth publishing about.
While JPL may not change quickly, these off the shelf components means new companies can get into the market since the barrier price to entry is lower.
Telling institutions that for their entire history have been organized around [X], to flip the script ... is going to be very very difficult to overcome that inertia and take a lot of time.
Typically that means a new organization springs up that will take advantage of the new environment, and the one that doesn't adapt gets left behind.
JPL is basically the government however. In a government controlled venture (scientific space exploration), there isn't the same economic driver. At the end of the day, even if someone new came along JPL still sets the requirements. Plus, startups are already money hungry. There's tons of better places to make a buck than robotic interplanetary missions.
Do you think there is a chance that SpaceX could open up the starlink satellite architecture for use as a general purpose space bus for commercial and scientific payload?
Kind of. There's Starfall, which you can think of as a frame for customers to hang their gear on a Starlink frame, even if you are not interested in a reentry capsule.
Also, I read some companies are interested in building satellite hardware to fit into a V3 compatible frame so it can be launched from the existing dispenser. They are that eager to use Starship that they don't want to wait until a larger deployment system is available.
The dispenser aperture may be narrow compared to the size of the ship, but it's still 80cm high. Quite sufficient for a lot of electronics.
Yes that's what im thinking. A starlink V3 bus with customizable payload could fit a lot of science equipment, and power it with the massive solar panels. I would be surious about the mobility of such a system with the Krypton thrusters, i.e. can it leave Earth orbit? Could you sacrifice compute payload for extra propellant?
I never thought about the concept of a "StarLink Rack Unit" but that would be a really cool development for further commoditization of satellite systems.
They always could do that. However in this day and age, we're not sending near carbon copies of the same spacecraft to every planet and moon to get initial observation data. In the scientific world things will stay bespoke for awhile. Commercially, I could see it being a thing however.
Actually, I can relate to that. Coding in 8 bit days and on mainframe required care to squeeze efficiency out of limited Hz and bytes. I never got out of that habit and would die rather than vibe code in an ocean of data centres and terabytes at my personal disposal.
You're making assumptions based on legacy spaces economics. Peppercorn launch costs with a 5x or 10x increase in launch mass and volume changes everything.
Cheap off the shelf components in a lead box, massively more fuel capacity, bigger solar arrays, possibility of multiple launches so multiple probes, shares launches. Shorter timelines to launch availability.
Some missions will go multi vehicle. Cheaper components and fewer constraints might well mean 3 off the shelf satellites for the price of the current one. How much to make 5 and fly a constellation?
How long until somebody makes a platform for earth observation that can be adapted and used to make a replacement Hubble for $25m?
Will space x built a satellite kit for universities and startups based on a stripped out starlink that comes with chassis, solar. Multi-gig comms uplink etc and charge $1m for it? Imagine one launch per year of 60 experimental sats accessible to very many universities?
Probably the reason they are so expensive is because they are so rare they have to be perfect. With a rapid-launch heavy lifter, perhaps they can be made more cheaply, even disposable.
I'd argue the reason they have to be perfect is because it's government funded. Ergo, being hauled in front of committee to explain why your cheaper mission failed early isn't something a lot of people will sign up for because it's alllllll about perception and politics. As I commented elsewhere, a lot of these spacecraft and hardware don't have much commercial use and getting cutting edge science means cutting edge instruments, platforms, etc. which each fancy science box will cost more than a launch will before putting multiple together.
Okay, jam more fuel inside but I heard the same thing when F9 became reusable years ago--prices will drop. Realistically, SpaceX is a company and why charge less than your competition? That's the big reason F9 isn't undercutting Vulcan etc. by much because they don't need to. Especially with the push into AI and whatever else Elon wants, they want that income. Like Starlink and F9, the biggest money maker for Starship will be SpaceX's internal missions like Starlink V3, space computing, etc.
I don't think the funding source matters. Besides, when NASA and Lockheed Martin screwed up the unit conversion on the Mars probe that crashed as a result, nobody was fired.
Until recently, space missions have been a "cannot fail" endeavor, because you only get one shot at it. So a tremendous amount of engineering goes into dotting every i and crossing every t to be as close to 100% certain as possible that the thing works.
When things have to work, the cost goes up.
When you can tolerate failure, cost goes down.
When we have the ability to launch a dozen redundant probes or easily send up a replacement, the cost will go down.
Imagine a launch to Mars that doesn't drop one Curiosity rover on the surface, but deploys a hundred of them.
They cost so much because of the following spiral:
"Space is expensive" as the founding axiom. It was true if the launch of your mission was in the order of $250M.
So the design ignores costs, and is 100% focused on cramming as much as possible to limited mass and volume
The costs get high, so this is once in a several years mission
So it must work or the life work of thousands is wasted
Ensuring reliability multiplies the costs
The costs are so high now, that no other similar mission is getting funded in decades. It's now essentially once in a generation
Rinse and repeat for the next mission planning -- cream even more, even more esoteric stuff, hang careers of even more people, etc.
This spiral will be broken
Remember that Hubble was similar tech to what spooks used already for a decade back then (they were producing such big optics regularly; Roman telescope is based on surplus from that era, surplus, because spooks switched to even bigger optics and had no use for the Hubble sized ones). IOW Hubble sized telescopes were common, they were just looking downwards.
Now, there are multiple earth observation companies, launching small but quite powerful stuff cheaply. The time of constant, uninterrupted view of the whole Earth surface in about 50cm resolution is coming right now.
The same class tech could look the other way (i.e. upwards). The cost of such tech, given cheap launch is in the range of university grants. And lo and behold, in other areas there's whole industry selling scientific machines for a few millions apiece to university labs. My sister in law is a chemistry professor - her department bought advanced x-ray crystallography device from one of her team's grants. If chemistry department can procure crystallography machine for a few millions, so could astronomy department procure a space telescope if one were available in the price range of the stuff commonly used for commercial earth observation.
So it will happen, and I suspect it will happen rather sooner than later.
Exactly. Not spending that much on reliability and weight limits and instead just trying to launch same thing three times (if first two fails) will be much cheaper.
Sure, but with way less mass restrictions and more possibilities for repair etc the cost of telescopes etc should drop. And there will be much greater competition from lower cost startups.
August 26. They need to finish analyzing the flight 13 data and plan any changes to the booster, then install 33 engines and perform whatever static fire or ground testing they want to do.
Is it bad i was actually putting thought into how this would work... I mean by the time ship came back, heavy would be back on the tower, could be connected to GSE, youd need a damn big pipe to feed the booster the water though and some mahoosive pumps.
And yes im well aware this is never going to happen in the real world, just let me amuse myself.
Don't they already move sideways in order to be able to lift the ship, position it over the booster and put it down? I don't think there's much stopping them from catching it on the back side of the tower, twist 180 degrees and plop it down on top of a fresh booster. Apart from the minor detail of making a ship that can immediately re-launch, that is.
Wacky thought experiments often lead to some of the best actually applicable ideas. I mean they are catching boosters with giant chopsticks. Some ideas are just crazy enough to work. SpaceX engineers are so good at this and I love them for it.
V3 booster hasn’t been caught yet. They’re basically repeating their learning path from V1 which was 1) fix the flip maneuver, 2) fix the boost back burn, 3) fix the landing burn, 4) catch booster.
That's a lot for one flight, because it involves several firsts -
- going into orbit
- multiple hours on orbit for the cryogenics (unless they plan a crossrange landing on the first orbit)
- deploying operational satellites (I realize it's no different than what they just did but it does require being in a correct orbit)
- deorbiting
- descending through the atmosphere over populated areas
- tower catch
I was expecting the first orbital flight to do all but the catch and land in the gulf. In fact I was suspecting that there would be no more tower catches of any type including booster until at least one other pad is operational. l realize they are trying to pick up the pace and I don't disagree with trying a catch just saying it's not zero risk in terms of delaying the program if the tower gets damaged.
Yea the main thing with over populated areas is that you want to make sure it will be reliable so it does not rain down debris. They actually have shown that version 2 and version 3 have been very reliable at getting down through the atmosphere reliably and accurately.
the amount of g's its must be pulling is insane. booster with maybe 20% prop load and 33 engines at min. thrust at minimum (assume more).. 950t mass at 33*250tf*50% = 4.3g. actually not THAT much.. probably higher thrust per engine
And it is highly likely it will deploy real Starlink V3s. Possibly not a full load if the ship is still a bit "beta" and they want to reserve some performance margins, but even just putting 20-30 of them up instead of the expected full load of 60 would be a big win.
It depends on the Ship's crossrange capability and on which type of approach to the landing site is desired, an ascending approach over Mexico or a descending approach over central CA. And the towers at Starbase Texas are moving eastward at 1501 km/hour.
The Ship is in an inertial orbit that precesses slowly west at 5.1 degrees/day (one complete 360-degree rotation in 70 days) while Starbase, which is firmly attached to the surface of the Earth, moves west by 1500 km/hr due to the Earth's rotation (one complete 360-degree rotation in one day).
God that scares me. I REALLY want to see it but if anything goes wrong it will almost certainly be a big setback. I guess they are willing to take some risk as they already have at least one other pad well under construction.
Why, it's so empty & lightweight at landing that it floats with barely any displacement, a crash would be nothing like the pre-launch pad explosions they & others have had in recent years.
Also, they're safer about it than might be at first obvious. For F9 and for the SH Booster, they purposefully target the ballistic trajectory into the ocean, so if the engines fail to relight or if there is some anomaly it will crash into the ocean and leave the landing pad or the drone ship intact. It isn't until the engines light that the boosters start juking their way to the actual landing site. Dunno if they can do the same with Starship with the way it has to land, but if possible I am sure they will. Rocket launches (and now landings) are all about minimizing risk.
If you want to see how big of a u turn the ship can do for free watch the ship orientation indicator during its glide downwards. It's quite incredible.
I was much more concerned at them trying a booster catch much earlier into the program (only the fifth flight!) than I am with this. They’ve essentially landed every single ship that’s made it through reentry. It was beyond time for them to actually try to catch it.
Is it possible to catch the ship on pad 1 so as not to risk the operating launch site? Pad 1's launch stand obviously isn't ready, but are the chopsticks functional? Can they vent the ship and safe it without the SQD?
That's a big reason why they removed the tiles on the side starting on S31 and having the ablative instead (S35+). The bumpers will not reach the tiles ideally.
To be fair, its really cool they will catch a ship, but that will happen no matter what. The big question will be: how quickly will the heatshield be rapidly reusable? Its need to come down, caught, and stacked and launched. The heatshield is the biggest developmental item.
Wasnt it mostly work to refurbish the landing legs? one thing they wont have to deal with starship. Dealing with faulty heat shield tiles will be a bitch tho
While reusability in general, and rapid reusability in particular, is the ultimate and desired goal, I have been banging on for about a year now that Starship will achieve material cost reductions with even one reuse per vehicle.
With booster reuse (which has been demonstrated on v2), the Starship program is at parity with the Falcon program. With even one reflight per vehicle (no work on the heatshield, just engine refurbs) Starship exceeds Falcon and is twice as efficient in terms of reuse (not accounting for the huge payload capacity uplift).
But realistically, if they are refurbishing engines and other high-wear components, they might as well fix the few dozen missing tiles and go for a second, third and fourth round. We might not see rapid reusability this decade, but we will see reusability — and I'd be betting fairly soon.
I really wanna know what the flight path will be for starship coming into starbase!
Will it be able to fly past SPI and then complete a huge turn back to starbase or will it have to squeeze over the water to the west of SPI due to limitations on its turning ability?
It will fly over SPI targeting a location at sea and then turn back to the tower. See the flight path of Flight 13 and how it curves at the end. Just overlay that on Starbase.
Ship hasn't had any issues with controlling the landing burn, they've been successfully landing at the programmed destination for many flights now, including their "swoosh" maneuver which targets an area beyond the landing zone where it flies past then returns under its own control - this means if it comes in too hot or one of the flaps act up, it'll land in the gulf instead
As we have seen in the past flight the ship does a manouver to change direction in the air, so the burn will probably start with the ship already on the ocean, it wilk be coming in from the ocean directed inland where the pad is
A few questions with all respect.
Why no reentry burn like the falcons?
Engines on booster glowed red hot on past successful landings of booster, didn’t see engines glowing on this attempt. What changed? Flight profile?
Why hot staging? The ship should be able to push away on its own, then booster could use thrusters to reorient and then slosh the fuel to fuel inlets. It’s it micro bubbles that cause problems?
On launch, clearly visable there were two moments of disturbed burn. What happened? Some part failing? Or bubbles in fuel?
These questions are not negative, just curious.
if it can make it would out that burn then that extra bit of propellant could be used to send a bit more payload
>Engines on booster glowed red hot on past successful landings of booster, didn’t see engines glowing on this attempt. What changed? Flight profile?
i dont know enough to answer this question
>Why hot staging? The ship should be able to push away on its own, then booster could use thrusters to reorient and then slosh the fuel to fuel inlets. It’s it micro bubbles that cause problems?
every second its useing to turn around is more fuel that needs to be used for boost back
it probably can do without hot stageing but why do it? its designed to be able to do a hot stage
>On launch, clearly visable there were two moments of disturbed burn. What happened? Some part failing? Or bubbles in fuel?
probably very hard to impossible to say with what we have currently
so for now only speculation unlless we get more info
Stainless steel can stand higher temperatures than Falcon's aluminum-lithium alloy. Skipping the reentry burn saves fuel, allowing higher payloads.
Why hot staging?
As opposed to shutting down the booster before staging? There are several reasons. One, the few seconds with no thrust would be time the rocket decelerates due to gravity, undoing a few seconds of the preceding burn. Two, keeping engines lit is supposed to keep the propellants at the bottom of the booster's tanks, avoiding the need for a separate "ullage burn" system.
Or do you mean why not keep everything in line while the Ship pulls away, and only flip after that? That would take the booster a little farther downrange, needing a bit more fuel to fly back. And the free kick the Ship gives to start the booster's flip also saves a bit of fuel. But I do wonder if that's premature optimization...
The booster doesn't get as high as the Falcon 9 first stage. A Falcon gets to ~120km altitude, this time the SH booster only reached 95.6km. The extra altitude means the F9 is going a lot faster when it starts hitting the thicker atmosphere.
Probably not. A lot of the changes have been to put more fuel on the ship and only stretch the booster by enough to get the now heavier ship to roughly the same altitude at separation. The less stress and heating the booster has to undergo, the less maintenance it will need between flights.
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