To quote Marvin the Martian from the Looney Toons world, "Where's the Kaboom? There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!"
Of course, my real target of this quote was Flight Test 13. Watched the whole thing from about 30 minutes left in the countdown until NASA Spaceflight's video coverage dropped off. That's from about 6:15PM to 9:20PM EDT video coverage.
If I was going to be more respectful to the mission as opposed to my odd sense of humor, I'd say what I did right after Flight Test 10: "OK - THAT was incredible". Much like FT-10, we knew this was about more than just testing the ship and the suborbital landing in the Indian Ocean, off the west coast of Australia. The quote from Marvin popped into my head when booster didn't blow up. I was expecting the big kaboom.
The booster fixes focused on stopping the booster from moving so fast during staging that it couldn't get fuel to the engines and couldn't fly properly. Not flying and decelerating properly was a problem again and the booster didn't do the planned hover over the GoA near Starbase, crashing into the water at too high a speed.
After that, the rest of the mission went incredibly well. We were able to get fantastic views during reentry of the ship being heated, with no evidence of heat shield tiles coming off (of course, we can't see them all). To my surprise (as well as everyone else's), Ship 30 survived falling over into the ocean and while there was some flame around the ship during the first minute or two, a few minutes ago, NSF was showing a live map showing the ship was still floating and communicating (via Starlink) a full hour after splashing into the ocean.
Before the launch I didn't get a really clear feeling about how much success this test flight would need to have before they'd make FT-14 the first orbital Starship flight, but to my way of interpreting this flight, it was an amazing mission and (IMO) losing the booster doesn't mean anything big to the next mission. I expect FT-14 to be in end of September to early October time frame. The booster for FT-14 was in process today.
I couldn't watch real-time, but I have read the early returns. Wonderful mission! Still a hitch in the booster, but that will be analyzed and fixed. Do you think that they will be able to recover Starship and do a complete, detailed inspection of the heat sheild tiles? I honestly don't know. I don't think they expected Starship to survive intact like that.
ReplyDeleteAt T+9:40ish, what looks like black smutz on my screen turns out to be a couple tiles falling away into the distance.
ReplyDeleteNeat to see them flex the forward wings in order to bring the cameras mounted on the trailing edge of said wings to show more of the Starship. Though it would be nice, especially for the launching of the satellites, for there to be mounted some spotlights and floodlights so SpaceX (and us) can see what's happening when it's dark outside.
And the whole Starship survived! Amazing burn marks on the shield, but it all survived!
Whoooo!!!
I see a couple of black dots moving around near the ship and in the distance at closer to T+ 9:00, and by 9:35, they move onto the map display. I couldn't begin to tell whether those were tiles or crap from around the engines.
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