Successful Raptor on-orbit relight demo! That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites! Big milestone for the program.
And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's still connected to Starlink too. The ship's cameras are still working underwater! I wonder if they will be able to recover it intact?
We're getting some great views of the heat shield post-reentry. That's great data for the heat shield team. The heat shield is the biggest remaining question mark in the whole program. Reflight without heat shield refurbishment will be required for the whole architecture to work, and it's never been done before. None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one.
It might be possible. Allegedly they had previously asked the Australian government about towing the ship back to a port.
Marine recovery can be much more difficult than it might seem though. Towing this nearly 200ft structure weighing a decent fraction of the weight of the boat that is not designed to be seaworthy, potentially full of explosive gasses and that could rapidly start breaking up and taking on water, nearly 300 nautical miles back to shore, would be quite difficult and dangerous. I would be impressed if they ever do it.
yeah it's suppose to tip over, explode and sink. Not sure what they're going to do with it now. If some other country comes in and salvages intact Raptor3, flight computers, and all the other ITAR regulated tech SpaceX may have a big problem. SpaceX will probably ask the airforce to gift them a jdam delivery or something.
They can relatively easily sink it, and in fact are required to be able to in order to get their US FAA launch license. As part of the environmental assessment specifically, but I could be wrong on that.
For those curious, they have recovery teams on sight who can essentially shoot it to further puncture the hull or attach explosives even. They have experience with their Starship boosters not sinking off the coast of Texas and floating into Mexican waters.
They were real satellites but deployed on the suborbital trajectory of this flight, so will have burned up over the Indian ocean about the time that the ship re-entered.
The goal was to get about 20 minutes of testing the new satellites in space, not for them to have any chance of becoming operational.
Starship hasn't been entering a full orbit so far because it would be really bad if the relight burn did fail - chunks of ship would rain down a few days/weeks later on some random area anywhere within 27° of the equator. On a much smaller scale this has been an internationally embarrassing problem for China's LM-5.
I hope they watch some of these, because movies are full of disappointing rocket scenes that are so many orders of magnitude away from the real thing that it's like representing a skyscraper with a treehouse. There is considerable room for reality to inspire fiction a bit more on this front.
Lots of missing tiles still. Best case is it's all infant mortality and replacing just those tiles will result in a durable heat shield for many more flights. Worst case is every flight loses that many tiles and the ablative underneath can't be reflown until replacement.
I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing a heat shield refurbishment attachment to the launch tower that allows technicians to access the side of the ship to patch up between flights without leaving the pad. They're going to need some kind of solution for the many back-to-back HLS refueling flights.
They've intentionally flown a number of times with missing heat tiles in sensitive spots, and many of those don't have the ablative coating. One of the benefits of steel over aluminium.
Summary: almost, but not quite entirely successful.
Launch successful. Booster separation and boost back burn looked good. Booster failed to relight some of its engines and hit the water hard. Successfully deployed the 20 starlink satellites. Successfully reignited an engine in flight to prove potential for de-orbit burn on future flight. Re-entry looked good and less spicy that some previous attempts (subjective). Such a soft landing that the ship flopped into the water without exploding and floated for a good long while (possibly still floating for all I know). Got some great drone footage flying over the heat-shield.
So the ship itself is looking increasingly good (so far) but they still seem to be having some issues with the booster.
Speaking of which, are there any fan theories on why the boosters seem to have persistent issues? Or is the plumbing still churning fast enough that we keep seeing N=1 issues for successive designs?
Until the past couple launches it was the ship that had the issues. Had to be blown up a couple times, failed to relight in vacuum, lost an engine and nearly failed to get to the suborbital trajectory last time. Meanwhile the booster had the most spectacular success in the catch, and has yet to result in a catastrophic failure.
The leading theory, from what I can tell, is slosh. The flip on separation is relatively violent, and while there's not much fuel left compared to the amount at launch, it's still heavy enough to do damage.
Oof, yeah, one good slosh at 11G is probably all it takes. On the bright side, there is probably a trajectory that works and I wish them luck in finding it!
It’s interesting the cognitive dissonance this brings out in me. As much as I think Musk carries a fairly reprehensible aura, I would still like to see SpaceX succeed. Space has a funny, transcendent way of inspiring us.
Agreed. Separating those thoughts are valuable here and in life in general.
But like a lot of tech, the cool shit can have serious negative effects as well and it's important to be able to, again, acknowledge both appropriately.
The success of SpaceX has made him the richest man on the planet, and his money makes him dangerous.
He's only dangerous if you operate a legal system that allows people to be dangerous. Elon Musk has never been the problem. As long as he's not breaking the law it's all good.
Billions of AI capex for a model that’s consistently forgettable and space computers, presumably data centers in space, are funding SpaceX?
Isn’t the opposite?
SpaceX has an extremely profitable launch program and a profitable Starlink. It’s a straightforward would be better off financially without X and X.ai.
instead of having an enterprise AI strategy, they've become a landlord, renting capacity directly to competitors on a month to month basis, competitors who are building their own compute and can cancel this rental contract at any time.
so they'll use that to try to print rosy revenue numbers, except the size of the contract is until 2029 and the month to month payments can be cancelled at any time.
and they only have capacity to rent out because they don't have an enterprise AI strategy, they overspent on GPUs for an audience that never showed up for Grok, it has abysmal usage and its radioactive because it creates CSAM and is based af. It's just outdated Nvidia hardware that they are trying to recoup just a little bit of value from.
and if you believe in space datacenters, I've got a bridge in brooklyn to sell you! actually space datacenters are the 21st century bridge in brooklyn, whoever is selling you about it thinks you are stupid.
Elon Musk doesn't believe the total addressable market of SpaceX's other business lines are that value in comparison. 25 trillion TAM for enterprise AI applications, 3 for everything else. ruh roh
Actual, literal Nazis got us to the Moon and frankly no one cared. Not then, not now. Try separating politics from the advancement of humanity, you'll feel better.
"Do you know that your closest colleagues (including von Braun) have stated in company at Zinnowitz that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of he rocket? That they had worked, under pressure from yourself (Dornberger) at the whole business of development and only in order to obtain money for their experiments and the confirmation of their theories? That their object all along has been space travel?"
The men had been arrested by the Gestapo and were going to be executed. Dornberger was also threatened with arrest, but he managed to get von Braun and the other released.
Another interesting factoid about the V2 program is it accelerated the collapse of the Reich.
How can that be, you might ask?
The V2 program was an incredibly expensive program, and sucked up enormous resources. But the V2 proved to be an inconsequential weapon, and did very little damage, because its guidance system was primitive.
The V1, ironically, was effective. Not because it wreaked critical damage on Britain, but because it was cheap to build and deploy, and the British spent a great deal of resources trying to stop it.
It reminds me of the current drone warfare.
Hitler also demanded that it be used to attack London, blowing up civilian homes, when it would have been much more effective attacking the staging areas for D-Day.
You're implying that von Braun was still a nazi when he was working in the US (he wasn't) and you imply that Elon Musk is a nazi in the first place when he's done nothing to indicate that.
You don't need to virtue signal your dislike of Musk-the-person to be allowed to show your admiration for the exploits of SpaceX. I don't care what you think about Musk and I'm pretty sure I'm far from the only one. Yes, SpaceX is doing great, hopefully other companies will follow their clear lead and make space access more reliable and 'affordable' so that those great wheels-in-the-sky may one day become reality.
I fucking _loathe_ Trump. I still hope he makes America better. But god I fucking hate him. I think his policies are garbage, but I'd love to be proven wrong. All I see is bribery and nepotism... but yknow, he (finally) nominated Jared Isaacman. I'll fucking take it.
Musk is anathema. But yknow, I'm glad he's started the companies he has.
Starship is the SpaceX Cybertruck - lots of impressive engineering, but still doomed by terrible design choices from you-know-who. Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large. Doomed the whole enterprise.
I know launches are exciting. Landings, doubly so. But eight launches to get to the moon is not a good rocket. Sorry.
Aluminum alloy and carbon fiber, because both have high strength to weight ratios. Steel is denser, so its specific strength isn't as high. But it retains strength at both lower & higher temperatures, and it's much cheaper. It's also cheaper/quicker to modify a steel design, as welding is easier than aluminum (at least for low carbon steels used in Starship). And if the same structure were made of carbon fiber, it would likely have to be fabricated from scratch.
I think choosing steel has helped Starship, as it allowed the ship to survive reentry and land in the ocean despite heat shield failures. Had the ship been made of aluminum, I'm certain earlier missions would have broken up when the aluminum heated up and lost its strength.
Does this mean you think Starship HLS will fail? It will use a steel structure and is planned to be part of future Artemis missions.
Also are you willing to stake money on that claim? How about this: If before July 25th, 2036, any version of Starship made primarily of steel (HLS, future Mars versions, etc) has an apogee above 2,000km, you pay me $1,000. If not, I pay you $1,000. If you like, we can bet some other amount up to $10k. And if you prefer, the loser could donate the amount to a non-profit/charity of the winner's choosing.
They juiced the engines up big time with the Raptor 3 upgrade. The rest of the stack is leaner and meaner too, but engines are the single biggest upgrade.
It's why they have plans to elongate the stack further. If they have this much TWR to go around at liftoff, they can afford to cash in that extra thrust to pack more fuel.
Given how little payload is onboard at the moment, what an empty can starship is, i sure hope for their sake there is a lot a lot a lot of zip to spare right now.
Yup. Some of the Youtubers (like NASA Spaceflight) had video of it hitting the water pretty fast and hard. That said, this is the only test failure so far. I'm cautiously hopeful they get Ship to touch down. (it will explode after it does because of physics but stepping lightly onto the ocean will be a win)
And I sit corrected as it was able to lay down without rupturing the tanks and 'sploding. So that's another win.
What I find really amazing and cool is that while its reentering the engineering team can drive it around and look at heating effects on tiles/spars/etc all while retrieving telemetry by Starlink. What many people don't realize is that early capsules were the shape they were because that was the limit of what they could simulate for re-entry forces. The ability to get real time confirmation of systems response in re-entry is a capability that we've never had. So there's that.
So at this point it looks like they are down to un-reliabile raptor relights on the booster.
The size of ship being big enough to create a hole in the ionization to continue to communicate with Starlink is something that I think gets underappreciated.
Is this just a fancy way of saying lightweight fragile aerospace tube with hot stuff all over the outside and flammable stuff on the inside will not respond well to falling on it's side or is there some other thing going on here I don't know about.
Sort of? Everything is weight. And since it isn't a design feature to lay down in water there isn't any weight budget for making that modality survivable? So typically when it falls (and this thing is really tall) the interior tanks detach from their mounts and hit the inside walls and rupture. The skin is still hot, oxygen and remaining fuel mix and it goes boom. This time we had fires but no boom. I look forward to hearing what was different.
No, that's exactly what happens. Most of the time.
There was a couple of times when SpaceX accidentally soft landed a Falcon 9 first stage into the ocean, and had it just float around. They're yet to do that trick with Starship though.
I am pretty unconvinced that any of the past explosions of starship used that feature. It’s very convenient to have an “explode” button so you can say all of your rocket detonations were intentional, but they are often leaking fuel or dropping chunks before they explode.
from what i understand it kind of is a failure. It's suppose to tip over, explode, and sink. That way you don't have all this ITAR regulated tech floating around in international waters.
> They actually said they’ve been trying different techniques to not have it explode like rolling.
interesting, i had no idea. I was going off the info i remembered about when those unexploded parts floated into Mexican waters. It's exciting to see Startship v3 have a perfect test flight. Hopefully the next launch will be fully orbital and they can start making productive use of the capability.
The actual objective was to crash very slowly into the water, and to that end, I believe they planned for about 13 out of 33 to light for the "landing burn". But only about 5 lit up at that time, giving them a higher-speed crash-landing. However, the landing site was exactly where they needed to be, and done in complete safety, so that is good.
They had been explaining the post-ignition abort from last week, and showed how 4 out of 33 engines had failed to light on the first stage. This was due to some kind of pump malfunctions. They said that if 1 or 2 fail, it's OK to launch, but more than 2 is an automatic abort. So they were able to replace the finicky motors and fully test them out.
Who knows what caused the underthrust for the landing burn, but at least all 33 engines were operational at launch, and they got plenty of data from this test run, and all Starlink v3 satellites have been deployed successfully for their "suborbital speedrun", so this test flight is doing really awesome!
Damn so this probably means another identical suborbital flight in 6-8 weeks. It is looking less and less likely that we will see either prop transfer or a ship catch this year.
i don't think so - the ascent looked good. i don't think they need to put the ship on another suborbital trajectory because the booster landing burn failed. also, i don't think this impacts prop transfer or ship catch - both are separate problems.
I think this is technically true but that they want a seamless suborbital flight (like the last two for the Block 2) before they move forward on those other goals.
Why wouldn’t they only care about seamless ship flights, to get some value out of the launches, while they’re still learning and figuring out how to light booster?
Yes, because it would have landed a few hundred meters out from the chopsticks. It swings in towards the catcher as part of its slowdown. If it doesn't slow down, that doesn't happen.
Its amazing to see this beast and think that all the firey stuff isn't the primary energy source (although totally necessary to pushing the mass out the back fast enough).
The reason it’s very small is that almost all of the energy in hydrogen and oxygen is not stored in the chemical binding energy of these things going together.
The vast majority of it is stored in just the rest mass energy of the protons and the neutrons, which chemical burning doesn’t affect at all.
Successful Raptor on-orbit relight demo! That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites! Big milestone for the program.
And the ship landing was so soft it didn't even explode! That's never happened before. And it's still connected to Starlink too. The ship's cameras are still working underwater! I wonder if they will be able to recover it intact?
We're getting some great views of the heat shield post-reentry. That's great data for the heat shield team. The heat shield is the biggest remaining question mark in the whole program. Reflight without heat shield refurbishment will be required for the whole architecture to work, and it's never been done before. None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one.
Edit: Spashdown video https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2080804682918764619
They have a much biglier support vessel this time, almost 300ft long IIRC. So maybe they can recover it?
It might be possible. Allegedly they had previously asked the Australian government about towing the ship back to a port.
Marine recovery can be much more difficult than it might seem though. Towing this nearly 200ft structure weighing a decent fraction of the weight of the boat that is not designed to be seaworthy, potentially full of explosive gasses and that could rapidly start breaking up and taking on water, nearly 300 nautical miles back to shore, would be quite difficult and dangerous. I would be impressed if they ever do it.
yeah it's suppose to tip over, explode and sink. Not sure what they're going to do with it now. If some other country comes in and salvages intact Raptor3, flight computers, and all the other ITAR regulated tech SpaceX may have a big problem. SpaceX will probably ask the airforce to gift them a jdam delivery or something.
They can relatively easily sink it, and in fact are required to be able to in order to get their US FAA launch license. As part of the environmental assessment specifically, but I could be wrong on that. For those curious, they have recovery teams on sight who can essentially shoot it to further puncture the hull or attach explosives even. They have experience with their Starship boosters not sinking off the coast of Texas and floating into Mexican waters.
> That should clear the next flight to go to orbit and deploy operational satellites!
Mid-stream they said they were deploying 20 real V3 Starlink satellites.
At the end of the stream the said all 20 had checked out as well.
They were real satellites but deployed on the suborbital trajectory of this flight, so will have burned up over the Indian ocean about the time that the ship re-entered.
The goal was to get about 20 minutes of testing the new satellites in space, not for them to have any chance of becoming operational.
Starship hasn't been entering a full orbit so far because it would be really bad if the relight burn did fail - chunks of ship would rain down a few days/weeks later on some random area anywhere within 27° of the equator. On a much smaller scale this has been an internationally embarrassing problem for China's LM-5.
They need to be in orbit to deploy the satellites into a useful orbit. These ones only lasted for 20 minutes before breaking up.
My brain refuses to resolve the effect of it as anything but CGI. Event though it isn't.
I mean, folks who make CGI better watch these too or they're not doing their jobs.
I hope they watch some of these, because movies are full of disappointing rocket scenes that are so many orders of magnitude away from the real thing that it's like representing a skyscraper with a treehouse. There is considerable room for reality to inspire fiction a bit more on this front.
> None of the heat shields so far looked reusable without refurbishment, including this one.
What about this one looks not reusable without refurbishment?
To my eye it’s by far the best we’ve seen, no burn through on flaps, etc
Lots of missing tiles still. Best case is it's all infant mortality and replacing just those tiles will result in a durable heat shield for many more flights. Worst case is every flight loses that many tiles and the ablative underneath can't be reflown until replacement.
I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing a heat shield refurbishment attachment to the launch tower that allows technicians to access the side of the ship to patch up between flights without leaving the pad. They're going to need some kind of solution for the many back-to-back HLS refueling flights.
They've intentionally flown a number of times with missing heat tiles in sensitive spots, and many of those don't have the ablative coating. One of the benefits of steel over aluminium.
Musk tweet:
“We got all the heat shield data we needed and then some! ”
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2080812297694409014
Also they plan to catch the ship next time! Excitement guaranteed!
Summary: almost, but not quite entirely successful.
Launch successful. Booster separation and boost back burn looked good. Booster failed to relight some of its engines and hit the water hard. Successfully deployed the 20 starlink satellites. Successfully reignited an engine in flight to prove potential for de-orbit burn on future flight. Re-entry looked good and less spicy that some previous attempts (subjective). Such a soft landing that the ship flopped into the water without exploding and floated for a good long while (possibly still floating for all I know). Got some great drone footage flying over the heat-shield.
So the ship itself is looking increasingly good (so far) but they still seem to be having some issues with the booster.
Speaking of which, are there any fan theories on why the boosters seem to have persistent issues? Or is the plumbing still churning fast enough that we keep seeing N=1 issues for successive designs?
The 12th flight was the first to use the third generation Raptors, so this is only their second flight test.
Until the past couple launches it was the ship that had the issues. Had to be blown up a couple times, failed to relight in vacuum, lost an engine and nearly failed to get to the suborbital trajectory last time. Meanwhile the booster had the most spectacular success in the catch, and has yet to result in a catastrophic failure.
The leading theory, from what I can tell, is slosh. The flip on separation is relatively violent, and while there's not much fuel left compared to the amount at launch, it's still heavy enough to do damage.
The cast I was watching said that during the flip and boost-back the booster is pulling 11 Gs. That's a pretty hard hitting water-hammer for sure.
Oof, yeah, one good slosh at 11G is probably all it takes. On the bright side, there is probably a trajectory that works and I wish them luck in finding it!
It’s interesting the cognitive dissonance this brings out in me. As much as I think Musk carries a fairly reprehensible aura, I would still like to see SpaceX succeed. Space has a funny, transcendent way of inspiring us.
I’m glad that of all places, HN is still able to grudgingly put aside red/blue team sports to appreciate really cool science and engineering.
Agreed. Separating those thoughts are valuable here and in life in general.
But like a lot of tech, the cool shit can have serious negative effects as well and it's important to be able to, again, acknowledge both appropriately.
The success of SpaceX has made him the richest man on the planet, and his money makes him dangerous.
He's only dangerous if you operate a legal system that allows people to be dangerous. Elon Musk has never been the problem. As long as he's not breaking the law it's all good.
The tiny part of SpaceX that is actually about space, yes. Unfortunate that it has been bolted onto the hulk of Musk's AI fever dreams.
It is still about space. AI and space computers are just the vehicle to fund it all.
The graveyards are full of blockchain companies who said something similar.
Not many that launched rockets or anything like that.
Billions of AI capex for a model that’s consistently forgettable and space computers, presumably data centers in space, are funding SpaceX?
Isn’t the opposite?
SpaceX has an extremely profitable launch program and a profitable Starlink. It’s a straightforward would be better off financially without X and X.ai.
Cash: rockets fund AI
Equity: AI funds rockets
Of all the places that money parted from fools winds up, this is not the worst of them.
Even at $38/share it will still be number 20 on the fortune 500 by marketcap
Too bad for Elon gullibles its at $113/share
but its a great company at $38
Depends a bit on how the AI stuff goes.
right.
instead of having an enterprise AI strategy, they've become a landlord, renting capacity directly to competitors on a month to month basis, competitors who are building their own compute and can cancel this rental contract at any time.
so they'll use that to try to print rosy revenue numbers, except the size of the contract is until 2029 and the month to month payments can be cancelled at any time.
and they only have capacity to rent out because they don't have an enterprise AI strategy, they overspent on GPUs for an audience that never showed up for Grok, it has abysmal usage and its radioactive because it creates CSAM and is based af. It's just outdated Nvidia hardware that they are trying to recoup just a little bit of value from.
and if you believe in space datacenters, I've got a bridge in brooklyn to sell you! actually space datacenters are the 21st century bridge in brooklyn, whoever is selling you about it thinks you are stupid.
Elon Musk doesn't believe the total addressable market of SpaceX's other business lines are that value in comparison. 25 trillion TAM for enterprise AI applications, 3 for everything else. ruh roh
Actual, literal Nazis got us to the Moon and frankly no one cared. Not then, not now. Try separating politics from the advancement of humanity, you'll feel better.
In "V2" page 179 Dornberger writes:
"Do you know that your closest colleagues (including von Braun) have stated in company at Zinnowitz that it had never been their intention to make a weapon of war out of he rocket? That they had worked, under pressure from yourself (Dornberger) at the whole business of development and only in order to obtain money for their experiments and the confirmation of their theories? That their object all along has been space travel?"
The men had been arrested by the Gestapo and were going to be executed. Dornberger was also threatened with arrest, but he managed to get von Braun and the other released.
From by Tom Lehrer's "Wernher von Braun"[1],
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department!" says Wernher von Braun
1. https://youtu.be/QEJ9HrZq7Ro?t=14
Good info Walter, but I wasn't trying to get too deep.
Point is to not judge a book by its cover.
Another interesting factoid about the V2 program is it accelerated the collapse of the Reich.
How can that be, you might ask?
The V2 program was an incredibly expensive program, and sucked up enormous resources. But the V2 proved to be an inconsequential weapon, and did very little damage, because its guidance system was primitive.
The V1, ironically, was effective. Not because it wreaked critical damage on Britain, but because it was cheap to build and deploy, and the British spent a great deal of resources trying to stop it.
It reminds me of the current drone warfare.
Hitler also demanded that it be used to attack London, blowing up civilian homes, when it would have been much more effective attacking the staging areas for D-Day.
You're conflating politics and ethics.
Von Braun used the Nazi war machine to make his rockets. Musk ran DOGE. They’re both political figures by their own choices.
The important factor isn't politics. It's ethics. Saying it's about politics is obfuscation.
Perhaps it takes a Nazi to make a good rocket?
You're implying that von Braun was still a nazi when he was working in the US (he wasn't) and you imply that Elon Musk is a nazi in the first place when he's done nothing to indicate that.
> nothing
Heh.
You don't need to virtue signal your dislike of Musk-the-person to be allowed to show your admiration for the exploits of SpaceX. I don't care what you think about Musk and I'm pretty sure I'm far from the only one. Yes, SpaceX is doing great, hopefully other companies will follow their clear lead and make space access more reliable and 'affordable' so that those great wheels-in-the-sky may one day become reality.
I apply this mindset to Trump/politics too.
I fucking _loathe_ Trump. I still hope he makes America better. But god I fucking hate him. I think his policies are garbage, but I'd love to be proven wrong. All I see is bribery and nepotism... but yknow, he (finally) nominated Jared Isaacman. I'll fucking take it.
Musk is anathema. But yknow, I'm glad he's started the companies he has.
Not me! I'm rooting against SpaceX lol
Starship is the SpaceX Cybertruck - lots of impressive engineering, but still doomed by terrible design choices from you-know-who. Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large. Doomed the whole enterprise.
I know launches are exciting. Landings, doubly so. But eight launches to get to the moon is not a good rocket. Sorry.
which rockets have you worked on? are you in the aerospace industry?
Your takes are hotter than a launch pad with all 33 raptors firing!
and costs taxpayers billions compared to our working models 60 years ago. Great innovation
I remember the Saturn V being caught by chopsticks in mid air too.
Starship is fantastic value for money compared to Artemis!
Saturn V didn't take 8 launches and 9 orbital fueling operations to get to the moon.
>> Stainless steel is just such a terrible choice for a rocket this large.
Honest question, but what do they usually use?
Aluminum alloy and carbon fiber, because both have high strength to weight ratios. Steel is denser, so its specific strength isn't as high. But it retains strength at both lower & higher temperatures, and it's much cheaper. It's also cheaper/quicker to modify a steel design, as welding is easier than aluminum (at least for low carbon steels used in Starship). And if the same structure were made of carbon fiber, it would likely have to be fabricated from scratch.
I think choosing steel has helped Starship, as it allowed the ship to survive reentry and land in the ocean despite heat shield failures. Had the ship been made of aluminum, I'm certain earlier missions would have broken up when the aluminum heated up and lost its strength.
you should come back to this comment in 10 years. stainless steel starship will not have left LEO.
Does this mean you think Starship HLS will fail? It will use a steel structure and is planned to be part of future Artemis missions.
Also are you willing to stake money on that claim? How about this: If before July 25th, 2036, any version of Starship made primarily of steel (HLS, future Mars versions, etc) has an apogee above 2,000km, you pay me $1,000. If not, I pay you $1,000. If you like, we can bet some other amount up to $10k. And if you prefer, the loser could donate the amount to a non-profit/charity of the winner's choosing.
Starship landed in the ocean intact and only slightly on fire!
That just seemed to be standard venting, methane if I'm not mistaken.
Whoa the acceleration from the start surprised me. It’s huge and it just … zipped off the pad like a bullet (ok not real bullet but still).
They juiced the engines up big time with the Raptor 3 upgrade. The rest of the stack is leaner and meaner too, but engines are the single biggest upgrade.
It's why they have plans to elongate the stack further. If they have this much TWR to go around at liftoff, they can afford to cash in that extra thrust to pack more fuel.
> they have plans to elongate the stack further
Elongate the stack.
Pun employed intentionally.
Felix on the "what about it" YouTube channel says flight 14 will be even faster. That's going to be something to see.
Given how little payload is onboard at the moment, what an empty can starship is, i sure hope for their sake there is a lot a lot a lot of zip to spare right now.
The more you accelerate early instead of later, the less fuel you have to subsequently carry to get to the same speed so it's more efficient.
Seems like the booster landing burn did not light all the engines and so it crashed into the water.
Yup. Some of the Youtubers (like NASA Spaceflight) had video of it hitting the water pretty fast and hard. That said, this is the only test failure so far. I'm cautiously hopeful they get Ship to touch down. (it will explode after it does because of physics but stepping lightly onto the ocean will be a win)
And I sit corrected as it was able to lay down without rupturing the tanks and 'sploding. So that's another win.
What I find really amazing and cool is that while its reentering the engineering team can drive it around and look at heating effects on tiles/spars/etc all while retrieving telemetry by Starlink. What many people don't realize is that early capsules were the shape they were because that was the limit of what they could simulate for re-entry forces. The ability to get real time confirmation of systems response in re-entry is a capability that we've never had. So there's that.
So at this point it looks like they are down to un-reliabile raptor relights on the booster.
Congrats to everyone who worked on this.
The size of ship being big enough to create a hole in the ionization to continue to communicate with Starlink is something that I think gets underappreciated.
>it will explode after it does because of physics
Is this just a fancy way of saying lightweight fragile aerospace tube with hot stuff all over the outside and flammable stuff on the inside will not respond well to falling on it's side or is there some other thing going on here I don't know about.
Sort of? Everything is weight. And since it isn't a design feature to lay down in water there isn't any weight budget for making that modality survivable? So typically when it falls (and this thing is really tall) the interior tanks detach from their mounts and hit the inside walls and rupture. The skin is still hot, oxygen and remaining fuel mix and it goes boom. This time we had fires but no boom. I look forward to hearing what was different.
Starship is quite a bit sturdier thanks to the stainless steel used & very efficient engines that make it possible to have the structure heavier.
We had it demonstrated in the past with Starship surviving multiple burnthroughts and now in failing to explode. :-)
No, that's exactly what happens. Most of the time.
There was a couple of times when SpaceX accidentally soft landed a Falcon 9 first stage into the ocean, and had it just float around. They're yet to do that trick with Starship though.
EDIT: Of fucking course.
How many times have they managed to catch it in the last 8 or so missions? There have been a few misses like this already with the boosters
They only tried to catch it twice, and they caught it twice.
I guess they also failed to explode it
I am pretty unconvinced that any of the past explosions of starship used that feature. It’s very convenient to have an “explode” button so you can say all of your rocket detonations were intentional, but they are often leaking fuel or dropping chunks before they explode.
This was a great flight, though.
from what i understand it kind of is a failure. It's suppose to tip over, explode, and sink. That way you don't have all this ITAR regulated tech floating around in international waters.
They actually said they’ve been trying different techniques to not have it explode like rolling.
This way they got way more heat shield data, which is, I think, their most critical item they need to learn from and iterate.
> They actually said they’ve been trying different techniques to not have it explode like rolling.
interesting, i had no idea. I was going off the info i remembered about when those unexploded parts floated into Mexican waters. It's exciting to see Startship v3 have a perfect test flight. Hopefully the next launch will be fully orbital and they can start making productive use of the capability.
Re-light seems to be one of their biggest remaining obstacles in a lot of these flight tests.
It was going in the water anyway, but yeah, it touched visibly faster than it should have.
The actual objective was to crash very slowly into the water, and to that end, I believe they planned for about 13 out of 33 to light for the "landing burn". But only about 5 lit up at that time, giving them a higher-speed crash-landing. However, the landing site was exactly where they needed to be, and done in complete safety, so that is good.
They had been explaining the post-ignition abort from last week, and showed how 4 out of 33 engines had failed to light on the first stage. This was due to some kind of pump malfunctions. They said that if 1 or 2 fail, it's OK to launch, but more than 2 is an automatic abort. So they were able to replace the finicky motors and fully test them out.
Who knows what caused the underthrust for the landing burn, but at least all 33 engines were operational at launch, and they got plenty of data from this test run, and all Starlink v3 satellites have been deployed successfully for their "suborbital speedrun", so this test flight is doing really awesome!
Damn so this probably means another identical suborbital flight in 6-8 weeks. It is looking less and less likely that we will see either prop transfer or a ship catch this year.
i don't think so - the ascent looked good. i don't think they need to put the ship on another suborbital trajectory because the booster landing burn failed. also, i don't think this impacts prop transfer or ship catch - both are separate problems.
I think this is technically true but that they want a seamless suborbital flight (like the last two for the Block 2) before they move forward on those other goals.
Why wouldn’t they only care about seamless ship flights, to get some value out of the launches, while they’re still learning and figuring out how to light booster?
They don’t have to catch the booster to test any of that.
The “chopstick” catcher arrangement seems awfully fragile. Would the ground equipment have survived this if it had been a real catch?
Yes, because it would have landed a few hundred meters out from the chopsticks. It swings in towards the catcher as part of its slowdown. If it doesn't slow down, that doesn't happen.
They generally initiate landing aiming just off shore and only adjust to the landing pad after everything is nominal. So yes.
Rockets have a self destruct feature to avoid exactly this type of contingency
Real time reentry plasma field will never get old. Amazing
Goosebumps.
And the visuals from Starlink for the entire journey is freakin' awesome.
With a decent soundtrack as well instead of the boring atmospheric stuff associated with space themes
You can also track the progress in text: https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/24/science/live-news/spacex-star...
Incredible. I missed the launch but exciting to see the remarkable success. Boy am I hoping we go to the Moon and to Mars and to all the other places!
Its amazing to see this beast and think that all the firey stuff isn't the primary energy source (although totally necessary to pushing the mass out the back fast enough).
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/adam-brown-gr[Edit note: Starship and Booster are methalox, yes. The physicist is talking generically, not about this launch specifically)
Just watching the live-stream, does SpaceX only hire young guys in their 20's?
I got a job offer in May and I'm about to be 40 in a week, so you can definitely get hired if you are older.
>Just watching the live-stream, does SpaceX only hire young guys in their 20's?
Basically. It's a rough work-life balance at SpaceX and as people get older, they want to live their lives and not live at work.
earth is looking beautiful
spacex is a really cool company