Starship Flight Test 5. This went beyond Wow, all the way to "Holy
Crap!" It's beyond testing a couple of things, and as far as I can tell,
it met every objective. I was here to watch this and watched the whole coverage that SpaceX linked to on X. Full screen, 1080p video for just about all of it.
The quote SpaceX uses all the time is, "the payload for this flight is data;" the
whole purpose is to examine changes made since the last test with a handful of
milestones in mind. They're fond of saying that no matter what they try, only
excitement is guaranteed. That was easily exceeded in IFT-5.
After a flawless liftoff and the couple of minutes until stage separation, followed by the return to the pad at Starbase Boca Chica, we saw this:
We've known about the plans to return to the Orbital Launch Mount and desire to catch the Super Heavy booster for years. We've seen videos created by various folks depicting what it would look like. It didn't prepare me. I caught myself watching the seconds before that screen capture shown above quietly saying, "Holy Crap!" Many of us watch them land the boosters after a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy launch and say it never gets old. I think this is going to be the same way.
Bear in mind SpaceX made a video of all the failures on the way to their first
successful Falcon 9 landing called "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" - a tribute both to their work and their sense of humor. That video
was made seven years ago. There are no scenes out of today's mission for a similar video on how to
catch the world's most powerful rocket booster. Around 500 tons worth of booster.
As impressive as catching SuperHeavy in the air was, it was only half the mission. Starship was still flying a suborbital flight to the Indian Ocean, off the NW coast of Australia. Catching SuperHeavy was 6:55 into the mission, the splashdown into the ocean was almost exactly an hour later. The plasma and heating we'd seen on earlier missions was just as mind-boggling as before but the video didn't show the flap melting away as it did on IFT-4. Don't forget that this is SpaceX. They went to the spot in the ocean that they were aiming for and put some buoys with cameras on them to capture the splashdown. This is just after the still extremely hot engine nozzles dumped into the ocean.
(Screen grab from Space.com VideoFromSpace) Yes, it exploded. As one of the SpaceX announcers said, they didn't plan to recover any part of that Starship. The video leading up to that moment is from a camera pointed down at the bottom of the Starship from the top. The ocean surface becomes visible, then it apparently plunges into the ocean because the entire scene changes color.
If you haven't seen the video of the whole mission, it's worth the time. A minute or three after Mechazilla catches the booster, they go about a half hour with no chatting or narration, starting up again at about T+40 minutes. Go pick a video presenter you like or go to SpaceX's video on their own servers. It's a historic mission.
A comment I read somewhere said that with this, mankind has become a space-faring civilization. That seems a bit of an overreach to me, but it certainly made the talk about flying unmanned Starships to Mars in 2026 and sending people by 2028 sound more likely.
It was everything I expected, and more. A civilization-changing event, and I am glad it was available to watch in 1040P and real-time!
ReplyDeleteMore excitement to come, guaranteed!! GO ELON!!
One of my sons told me the news. What was wonderful was the excitement in his voice - he was thrilled. Elon has given a new generation hope.
ReplyDeleteThe rapid readiness which is the goal of catching the rocket is good only for some flights. The launch window for IFT-5 was thirty minutes. The launch window for a trip to Mars comes about every twenty-six months.
ReplyDeleteI think of it as another tool in the toolbox.
I think for this first time ever, they'll likely crawl over every part of the gantry looking for any damage or signs of potential damage. Note that the rocket flame was directed at various parts of the gantry. That suggests work hardening and embrittlement.
Catching the full weight of the upper stage and capsule at an arm creates a large moment, and in a sudden fashion.
Undoubtedly they have it all worked out, but it is fascinating.
I think the most amazing, out of an incredible amount of amazing, is that the rocket exactly balanced it's thrust to gravity so that the rocket 'hovered' while the arms closed in and captured it. Space X keeps stacking incredible performance.
They're even talking of Super Heavy being even taller, i.e, ~90 meters whereas currently 70 meters height.
Sunday's video included a lot of that noisey applause. I can't help but compare those antics to the command center of the 1960s.
One of the first things we learned about recovering SuperHeavy boosters was that with Raptor engines they can hover while the Falcon 9, with only one Merlin engine running, generates too much thrust to hover. I don't remember if that was because of the weight of the two or if the Raptor has a wider adjustment range.
DeleteSure was an impressive thing to watch!
Both, SiG.
DeleteIt made a bad personal day good for a while.
ReplyDeleteRather excellent, though I thought I saw some burn-through on one of the upper flaps. Really looking forward to the after action report.
Amazing what private industry can do when an overbearing federal bureaucracy gets out of the way.
Yeah, still gots burn-throughs. Test flights, y'know.
DeleteThey're workin' on it. It'll get solved, they aren't Boeing.
Burn thru but not catastrophic failure either time. That is some really robust engineering under the tiles.
DeleteI'd like to know if the booster was terminally guided by the gantry. If not -- if the booster was guided strictly by its own sensors -- that would make the feat doubly impressive.
ReplyDeleteWondered the same, but they pin point the water landings, so it must be internal nav to the vehicles. Maybe they use some guidance in combination at the tower, like a digital target, so the on board guidance can constantly double check and zero its location. They have a lot of practice with Falcon's.
DeleteThe rotation aspect, making those two tiny pins line up perfectly, now that is a mind blower to me.
Could they be using the net of satellites they have up? There is enough of them, with laser's maybe you create synchronization, 5 axis like with CNC, you could possibly locate everything down to angstroms. That would get you a huge margin of tolerance in relative terms, I would think.
DeleteThink of how much programming must go into mapping out the flight path of the booster, I can see some people in a room discussing how confident thier numbers are and what to expect long as all the associated systems perform within tolerances, and it is pretty tight tolerances, as the head of engineering stated, they had booster 4 down to a centimeter of where it was supposed to be. Looking at the footage from the tower, it is down to inches of accuracy in 3 axises. Plus how incredibly gentle they placed it on the shock bars, you could see the arms only moved enough to take up static weight being placed on them, there looked to be zero impact if any kind at all. It was so dainty, 550 tons like a butterfly landing, it was funny.
DeleteThe Falcon 9 booster "knows" where it is due to GPS. The barge transmits its GPS co-ordinates to the booster to match the two locations.
DeleteNo need for the tower (Stage Zero) to transmit its location, it ain't moving! So, the booster merely navigates/flies to the fixed co-ordinate in its programming.
Simple, right?
I could not believe how much cold gas boosters they where using keeping the booster lined up all the way from stage sep, it was beautiful in its own way, and that booster was coming in like a bullet, they where not pussyfooting around, if those engines failed to relight StarBase was going to become a smoking hole by the sea. You could just see the destruction would have been totally epic. Excitement Guaranteed indeed! That engineering takes some serious effin' balls. HooHa! Just loved watching and rewatching it come a screaming in, my favorite point in the entire noodle baking flight, particularly from when you could begin to see it in detail, coming in like a missile, and it really showed what kind of raw naked power those Raptors put out, as they wait till its a kilometer or less from the the tower to hit the brakes, and what a screaming contrast, from super sonic to lighting down on those arms like a butterfly on a flower. Almost looked faked because of how something so large with all that tonnage, still tons of fuel sloshing around, and it comes in the last 100 feet dainty as you please. Wow just Wow.
ReplyDeleteThey just made Blue Origin and particularly Boeing eat epic crow, now nobody can get away dissing SpaceX not after that booster catch, no sir, the FAA too. And they are not using Raptor III's yet.
ReplyDeleteJust stunning how much acceleration is created from zero to stage sep, is there even anything on Earth with this amount of raw power? Another thing, I believe they have turned the space industry on its head, because if they are doing this, what future epic things are they planning? I mean, think of what can be mounted on this booster system aside the StarShip? Want to get 50 tons of something into orbit with one stage in a hurry? Imagine the acceleration with a small payload. If you can mount it booster will get it there, then what if your going to waste a booster? They use a lot of fuel turning around and boosting back. Just for fun, you put a light weight ballistic nose cone on a booster, with Raptor III's, and light that sucker. How many G's would it create at WOT, no limits, let it rip? Might need to be careful not to "flood" the engine turbo pumps what with hundreds of tons of fuel getting rammed down the intake pipes under 12 G's.
Like to know booster's power converted to HP.
ReplyDeleteI've got to say I've never thought of that before. A quick search shows online calculators to do it for you. You enter thrust and velocity, which suddenly complicates things. You're getting less thrust as the vehicle slows to hover so at zero velocity you're getting zero HP.
DeleteThere seems to be a good explanation at https://aerospaceweb.org/question/propulsion/q0195.shtml.
Maybe another way of expressing the engine performance would lead to something more intuitive.
A five second google shows that a Raptor engine at full thrust is 11 million horsepower. That's just one.
DeleteTo John's point, even I - a space flight occasional at best - was wowed by this.
ReplyDeleteThis is what we need to invigorate the imagination and the space program. What is sad is that people cannot get over their dislike of a man to see the engineering model that he has inspired, executed, and funded. Once upon a time we celebrated such accomplishments.
I now have hope our DNA will not die out on this planet....
ReplyDeleteI was watching on a Lab Padre channel with Marcus House as one of the commentators. Marcus does a weekly video released each Saturday on his YouTube channel and it’s very good. One of the commentators stated that the precision of the landing software was managing down to 0.5 cm. On the basis of the catch, I’m inclined to believe the claim.
ReplyDeleteI have to say, I was grinning like Cheshire Cat throughout the mission, but the catch brought a tear of joy. Magnificent achievement!
Half a centimeter, 5mm, out of a 70 meter tall booster? In all axes? The smallest dimension is diameter at 9m and 5mm is 56 milli-% (.056% error). Vertically, it's .007%.
DeleteNo matter how you look at it, it's far into the "holy crap!" domain. If you're not amazed, you don't understand the question. I didn't tear up watching it for the first time, but did later on - as it continued to sink in.
Thinking similar assumptions, it may be a quite practical use of what is basically 5 axis CNC programming, it has all the essential guidance in an X-Y-Z plus two imaginary axises in space, that is the area of "catch", it's A point the dead nuts center of the arms in the prime position.
ReplyDeleteOr the reverse and the booster is the tool, the tower the part being shaped? What would be the tool path then, the booster or Mechazilla arms?
A thing of engineering and improvisational beauty not witnessed in modern times very often, making it that much more exceptional achievement. The funny thing with SpaceX no matter how advanced their engineering is, the second it is working as intended it becomes old hat and they have another rabbit they are ready to pull out if their hats.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing that struck me is Raptor 3 engine with its additive machining construction, it has an alien tech look to it, like they are literally using some alien engineering, to which I say something seems very strange about it's design, can't put my finger on it. It seems to be at the least too many iterations been jumped in too short a time frame, unless they worked in this model under wraps for sometime as they employed the Raptor 2 configuration.
I can say this because at one time I worked one on one with a NASA engineer, we where doing the rigid tube test assemblies for a bootleg system on RL10 engines, and during that period of time this NASA Engineer/Doctorate-Professor explained and described how the RL10 functions, it is a beautifully simple, incredibly light weight compact engine. The b/p's state 1956 as when the drawings where certified. They barely needed to modify it, some minor tweeks here and there, till the bootleg in 97-98, and all it was was a more uniform distribution of liquid hydrogen to the engine bell, it also incorporated a modified ventury due to the change in pulse frequency from employing a two point manifold off a Y block. Boosted fuel efficiency due to increase/improvement of regenerative cooling. So it was basically just making use of the available power in the engine. I was told it was along the lines of $4 billion worth of increased geo stat satellite orbit time, as the RL10's frequently are used on many geo stat satellites as it was for a long time the only reliable vacuum restart engine available small enough to fit those kind of vehicles.
Funny thing is the Raptor3 looks like a suped up crazy alien sci-fi tech RL10 engine.