As planned, hoped for and scheduled, Ship 42 - "Don't Panic" - returned to a picture perfect landing on the exact same launch pad tower it flew from 22-1/2 hours earlier.
Multiple camera views of the Ship on the pad around 45 minutes after the capture. Image screen capture from the NASASpaceflight.com. coverage.
The way I see it (and I've gotten that impression from various other platforms) this was the most important goal of Flight 15 and it marks one of the most important milestones of any space company since the early days of spaceflight. One giant step closer to the "rapidly reusable" vision for Starship. Launch a Starship, recover the booster, and then the ship a day later, or whatever the mission allows. The ambitious goal is to make space travel more like air travel and every other form of travel. Yes, the harsh reality of the Rocket Equation dictates that some of the safety margins airplanes work with are bigger than space travel allows. My naivety insists that should end with, "...bigger than space travel allows that we know of now."
As for losing the booster yesterday, the bigger name tech outlets are saying SpaceX is still investigating, but the web has zeroed in on a couple of things that may be behind it. In my post yesterday on the mission, the photo I used has an important clue: one of the 33 main engines is shown as not running in the little image of info the booster radios down during the flight. The top center dot is gray not white like the other 32. Now 1/33 isn't a major issue, it's a 3% degradation, but the way the ship can get around that is to run the engines a little longer to make up for that loss of power and achieve its required orbital velocity. Could the differences in handling between having all 33 engines running and just 32 have ended up with fuel and LOx dumping without burning for 3% more time?
Early this morning, I ran into a "short video" from Scott Manley who concludes it seems to be they ran out of fuel. He shows a slowed down video of the landing and the flame turns visibly green for a short time, which he says indicated oxygen rich flame; not enough fuel. Before the ship Flight Termination System blows up the booster, you see it collapse, being crushed by atmospheric pressure - another indication they were out of normal operating amounts of fuel.
All that said, the main reason losing the booster doesn't really alarm me is that they've recovered boosters three times already. Sure, it would be super cool if the booster had been recovered, but it doesn't leave me with doubt that they'll ever achieve their goals.
Over at Ars Technica, I went looking to see if they covered this today or would put up a post tomorrow. It's there now and I find Eric Berger seems to think of it the way I do.
We are dazzled
This was a breathtaking feat; a brilliant technical achievement that required the best engineering minds to think through a million different, difficult problems. And on Saturday evening, following a handful of practice runs into the Indian Ocean, they did it before the entire world.
Watching Starship launch from here a little less than a day earlier, and knowing it had orbited the planet multiple times, added to the sense of unreality in seeing this spaceship return to Earth under its own power, and be captured by the tower.
It felt like stepping into the future. SpaceX has dazzled us before, by landing rockets on barges and returning humans to space with Crew Dragon. But this flight took things to another level. Starships are huge. They carry a huge amount of energy coming back from orbit. And until a few years ago, it seemed beyond fantastical to think about capturing a rocket with what are essentially outsized chopsticks.
Nevertheless, it happened.
I'm dazzled, too.
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