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Thursday, March 14, 2024

Grading IFT-3

Not perfect.  Not an "A plus plus." Maybe an A minus or a B plus.  Merely my opinion.  As everyone knows, Starship 28 and SuperHeavy booster 10 were launched on Integrated Flight Test 3 this morning

SpaceX's third towering Starship rocket, standing some 397 feet (121 meters) tall and wider than the fuselage of a 747 jumbo jet, lifted off at 8:25 am CDT (13:25 UTC) Thursday from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast east of Brownsville. SpaceX delayed the liftoff time by nearly an hour and a half to wait for boats to clear out of restricted waters near the launch base.

Much better than IFT-2 in November, Ship 28 achieved orbital altitudes and traveled across the Indian Ocean toward the western shores of Australia, exactly as planned.  The booster didn't RUD after MECO and stage separation. S28 didn't vent oxygen onto hot engines and RUD. S28 tested transfer of liquid oxygen in zero G, tested the gross operation of the "Pez dispenser" they plan to use to deploy Starlink satellites Really Soon Now (and sooner than it seemed to be yesterday), and more, but somewhere along the way, they decided not to reignite one or more of S28's Raptor engines in orbit to reduce velocity.   

Starship and its Super Heavy booster climb off the launch pad at Starbase, Texas. Part of the Orbital Launch Mount visible at the left. That massive Mach diamond gets repeated once the booster is far enough up. Image Credit: SpaceX. 

The bad point is that they lost both halves - like both flight tests before this one.  They just achieved much more.

"Starship reached orbital velocity!" wrote Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, on his social media platform X. "Congratulations SpaceX team!!"

While the Starship and booster platforms are intended to be rapidly reusable, Booster 10 made it closer to splashdown than the previous two missions, it plunged into the Gulf of Mexico uncontrolled. It was supposed to have reignited some number of engines and softly dropped into the Gulf of Mexico. I was captivated watching the video of the grid fins gyrating and didn't look at the lower left of the video screen until after it was said the booster was lost.  At that point, one of the 33 engines showed as being on by their telemetry.  I don't know if more engines were ever on, if they were on at the right times and so on. 

My suspicion is that booster landing and recovery are going to take a while to perfect.  After all, they're the only company in the world doing it consistently and perfecting it. To every other entity in the world, a booster is garbage once it's dropped. It can be forgiven if they throw a few away getting it to work; I mean, they lost a bunch of Falcon 9s and now they're at something like 280 consecutive successful landings.

Beginning around 46 minutes after launch, Starship beamed down what might have been the most spectacular imagery from the flight. At this point in the mission, the 165-foot-long (50-meter) ship was speeding across the Indian Ocean and rapidly falling as Earth's gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

Starship's flaps, there to provide aerodynamic control during the final phase of descent, folded up against the ship's main body. Then, black ceramic tiles attached to the ship started glowing orange as a sheath of plasma enveloped the vehicle. Temperatures outside Starship climbed higher than 2,500° Fahrenheit, and the ship appeared to be under control during the first moments of reentry.

This was absolutely riveting to watch. I'm not going to say nobody alive has ever seen the plasma forming on surfaces during re-entry, but I bet the number people that have seen it went up a million-fold today.

Beginning around 46 minutes after launch, Starship beamed down what might have been the most spectacular imagery from the flight. At this point in the mission, the 165-foot-long (50-meter) ship was speeding across the Indian Ocean and rapidly falling as Earth's gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

Starship's flaps, there to provide aerodynamic control during the final phase of descent, folded up against the ship's main body. Then, black ceramic tiles attached to the ship started glowing orange as a sheath of plasma enveloped the vehicle. Temperatures outside Starship climbed higher than 2,500° Fahrenheit, and the ship appeared to be under control during the first moments of reentry.

This rear-facing camera, mounted inside one of the forward flaps on Starship, shows plasma building up around the underside and rear flaps during reentry over the Indian Ocean.  Image credit: SpaceX 

Not too long after pictures like this started getting interrupted and interfered with, the Starship went into a radio blackout.  Not a surprise, re-entry is known for that.  The excellent downlink of video they got was because of using their own Starlink system and antennas on the cooler side of S28.  At some point, that video went away and the onscreen telemetry stopped updating.  Around five minutes later, they announced that they had lost all telemetry from the ship; both Starlink and NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) at the same time.  They had to conclude they had lost the ship. 

What's next?  I don't think they're ready to start flying Starlink satellites in Starships or any other operational things; more test flights are definitely in the offering.  They most likely will focus on the things like the cryogenic fueling experiments, although a transfer between Starships can't happen until there's a second Starship launch pad, whether there in Boca Chica or here at the Kennedy Space Center. 

Bear in mind that Musk set the target for six Starship flights by the end of this year in a post to X.

I don't know how long this will be there, but if you didn't watch the flight and want to, SpaceX still has the video of this morning's launch here on their Launches website. It's the full 1 hour 43 minute video stream.  The lift off isn't until about 34 minutes on the timer.  The booster separation about 3 minutes later and booster loss about T+7 minutes.  Starship engine cutoff at T+8:25 and 8:35.  The really dramatic re-entry video starts around T+45 minutes. 



12 comments:

  1. It was... most excellent to watch it launch and reenter. Will be very interesting to see the after action report as to what went wrong and how they're going to fix the issues.

    Admittedly, I knew what happened before watching because 6am is an ungodly time so I watched a 'live feed' at 2pm...

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  2. You learn more from imperfect missions. The major goals were attained, and study of the telemetry will show where things went wrong, or less than nominal. I'm sure the engineers already have alternate procedures, design changes ready to implement on the next test flight, because that's what these are, TESTS! Take a look at NASA's history and look at how many birds they blew up. Anyone remember Project Vanguard? Or look at how many A-4 (V-2) rockets blew up or simply fell over on the launch pad when von Braun was doing his pioneering work.

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  3. The flap beginning to glow before the plasma starts to burn has to be one of the best space flight images in history.

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  4. Eggs will be cracked...but the cake is going to be marvelous

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  5. I'm going to posit that they lost their RCS on the ship, and they skipped the engine test for fear of un-photogenic violent instability. The rolling moment was never negated at any time during the flight.

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    1. That's an interesting take. Very possible. I think it was the NASA Spaceflight guys that I heard saying they thought it was deliberately rolling, and called it barbecue rotation. I think the idea was to present both the absorptive black tiles and the shiny steel to the sun and see how much it conducts into the fuel tanks.

      Watching the video again last night, I noticed a lot of what appeared to be venting from the engine bay of Starship visible in the sunlight once it was in orbit. I wondered about that, too.

      Going to the 0956 comment, I didn't see the clouds! I must have not been looking when they were visible. Time for another watch of the video with emphasis on the parts I skipped over.

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    2. Ding ding ding! I don't know if the "barbecue roll" mode was purposeful, bt it ended up that they did NOT have enough control authority to stop nor control the spin. Eventually it killed the reentry. The booster decided to RUD for some unknown (at this time) reason less than 500 meters above the ocean, I hope they have video of it.

      Stay tuned, the fun has begun!! FAA should have fewer qualms about issuing a launch license, the analysis' necessary to make them happy will be rather quick, methinks...

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  6. The clouds in the cabin during the door test were interesting also. The test looked a little wonky, and it might have been due to a minor amount of residual pressurization. There were clouds! It's a huge volume, and they might have to think a little bit more on how to vent it before exercising the cargo door.

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  7. Scott Manley discusses the clouds here:
    https://youtu.be/8htMpR7mnaM?t=492

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  8. If I was the USN (or PLAN) I would have some ships & aircraft out observing near(ish) the splashdown sites. A good opportunity to track an ICBM(ish) target. Tho the USN in the Indian Ocean is probably kind of busy.

    Still, we may get some imagery at some point.

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    1. Having been stationed on DG for 8 months, I can unequivocally state that the USN would not have been very busy. MORE than able to get some observers out there, aircraft-based!

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