Not Perfect, But Success!!

This afternoon's static fire of booster B7 was deemed a success despite a couple of engine issues that might have mattered in an orbital launch (depending on the payload).  Elon Musk tweeted:  

There are good videos both at Musk's account - a view from a drone overhead - and SpaceX's official account, which has a long video from a different perspective.  I'll bet there are more, and probably more still as time goes by.

Note that if you go to the longer video, the action occurs well after the 7 minute mark in a 13:12 minute video.  Like this:

When the video starts, the first seven minutes are with their countdown clock at T-40 seconds and holding, until just before this screen capture image.  

What does it mean?

For starters, it appears the things that people were worrying over were fine.  Things like the Orbital Launch Mount surviving and the concrete under the engines not going flying.  Was this the most powerful rocket in human history?  Possibly, but we don't know.  There were 31 engines firing today, which set a new record, breaking the existing record of 30 from the old Soviet N1 from the late '60s early '70s.  The N1 never successfully made orbit, but it set the record for the most thrust produced by a single rocket, generating up to 4500 tons (9.9 million lbs) of thrust at liftoff. 

Could Starship have exceeded that 9.9 M lbs of thrust?  Absolutely.  Divide that by 31 engines to find each engine only had to produce a little over 319,300 lbs and the Raptor 2 is capable of producing over 500,000 lbs.  If the engines were set to 64% of throttle, they would have produced more thrust than the N1.  Seems pretty likely they did this, for at least some of the five or six seconds they burned.  We just haven't been given those numbers.  The engines can be set lower than 64%, though, as low as 40%, so we just don't know.  

Except for one unofficial tweet by Former SpaceX executive Tom Mueller, the so-called Father of  the Raptor, who congratulated the team for breaking the world record for the most thrust from a single booster.

So now what?  

During her talk at the FAA's Commercial Space Transportation Conference mentioned yesterday, Gwynne Shotwell said the big picture is to analyze all of the results from today and proceed with the task of getting into orbit.  She said that it was reasonable to expect a launch by the end of March.  Since Shotwell doesn't seem as prone to giving overly optimistic lead times as Musk, that's probably very reasonable.  Not Elon Standard Time.  Not a NET (No Earlier Than) date and maybe not NLT (No Later Than), just a reasonable estimate.