Starship Flight test 10 was simply incredible. Going into the mission we knew they were testing far more than just getting Ship 37 to a suborbital flight and lots of things we might consider negative outcomes could simply mean a test of some idea was concluded. Maybe the results were positive, maybe they were negative, we simply won't know but at the end of the flight, when Ship 37 landed on its tail in the Indian Ocean then exploded it was obvious that the mission was the big win that we were saying SpaceX needed.
We watched the launch, watched the booster to see if it could land vertically in the Gulf, which it did before it exploded. Thousands of degrees temperature difference between the engines, hardware and the Sea Water will do that. That was followed almost immediately by the deployment of 8 mockups of Starlink satellites up at the Starship on its suborbital flight. The last time we were close to watching that, the door to the "Pez dispenser" wouldn't open because some air in the ship's body generated enough pressure to keep the door closed. So the simple fix was to drain the air out of the ship through another port before trying. Looked excellent.
Once the Starlink satellites (size and weight mock-ups) were in Space, attention turned to the ship re-entering. We got very good views of that whole process, part of which was to test different heat shield materials and ways of applying them. I expected the hull to burn through in places, but I only saw some molten areas in corners of the flaps, like we did on last year's Ships.
The ship never lost control and looked as stable as a building - going 25,000 km/hr. We'll have to wait a bit for SpaceX's content to hit, but this video contains the full flight. To help you reduce your time looking for the big events, the launch is around the middle of the slider bar (which gives times from the end of the video not from the start) and the end of the mission is around 66 minutes after the launch. The mission timer in the upper left corner is more valuable than the video slider bar at the bottom.
This is around the last fraction of a second of this booster's life. Screen
capture from the NASA Spaceflight video. Image credit: SpaceX
Forgot they launched today. And thanks for posting the vid. Will be enjoying that later.
ReplyDeleteWhen I saw the glow fading from the melted areas I knew they'd made it. BZ, SpaceX!
ReplyDeleteI thought that I heard that this was something like the 9th time for that booster. Very effective and cost efficient. The future of space exploration is for certain going to be done by the private sector in cooperation with the USA's NASA. That is the best way to do it. Private sector companies have a greater motive than the government. Profit.
ReplyDeleteSo they will seek the most cost efficient way of doing things. That includes not just the primary cost savings like reusable boosters, etc. But also things like making certain that the failures that often plague NASA are eliminated. Failure is something that is not tolerated in the private sector, partly due to the loss of valuable hardware, but mostly due to the entire economic costs, of which corporations have a monumental hatred.
Plus the private sector can hire the best and the brightest with financial incentives, something that the Fed.gov. is a bit limited at, if my thinking is right. I was born in 1960, and so remember fondly the space race to the moon. Yet I am just as excited with our space programs now as I was then. It truly is a great time to be alive for anyone interested in reaching out towards the stars.
That was a huge win. I hate that the shitegeist is presently anti-anything Musk-related, because this was a major step in our move to space and it's not getting attention.
ReplyDeleteI'm excited to see what the up gripes were on the flight beyond the new data for materials science. "it worked despite..." is always wonderfully fertile ground in iterative processes.