I mean, it didn't nearly land. It landed. For certain values of that verb.
High temperature lithobraking?
SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
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Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#22HN: "SpaceX Launches and Nearly Lands Starship on Its First Suborbital Flight" vs Article: "SpaceX Launches—and Crashes—Its Starship Mars Rocket"
For whatever reason, Wired preferred the clickbait title, but the opening sentence of the article is: "On Wednesday afternoon, SpaceX successfully launched—and nearly landed—a fully-assembled prototype of its next generation Starship rocket on a suborbital flight from its facility in south Texas."
The Wired article was full of misleading information (implying that the rocket failed to reach space, when that was never a mission objective) and outright lies (stating that the Starship is a scaled-up Falcon 9, the name of the Starship+SuperHeavy combo, the number of engines that the system will have, etc, etc).
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#23>nearly lands (crashes)
>protests mostly peaceful (until riot broke out)
I am so tired of this media doublespeak.
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#24Does anyone know if the engines cutting out one by one was planned? Or was something going wrong with the engines?
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#25If you watch the last few frames, it looks like the ship indeed landed. From the perspective that for a split second the entire vehicle was upright and in touch with the ground, that is. I’m not one to be a pedant, but you can claim a landing if you squint at it long enough.
a) "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing" b) "Any landing where you can re-use the equipment again is a great landing" Old aviation sayings. :) Oh well. ;)
Also "you can only ever tie the altitude record for lowest flight."
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#26i know they got the data they needed/wanted but can you really call it a success with that ending? on a side note: how much money do they lose whenever they have a crash landing like that?
It is a great success. They launched the Starship on 3 Raptors, most importantly perfectly controlled the descend and correctly executed the flip and vertical landing. If the fuel pressure had been correct, even the landing would have worked, but that is a really small thing to correct.
The main thing, and that is why it was a success, was the in-flight control, especially on the descent and before the landing. Only real loss was 3 engines they might have reused otherwise. But as the Starships themselves are extremely cheap to build - the next one is already mostly finished - it was basically considered expendable for the test.
Beyond understanding and fixing the fuel pressure issue, they just can proceed with their testing plans as scheduled.
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#27Looks like someone left a tarp in it that caught fire at one point.
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#28Great flight! Elon tweeted that the header tank pressure was low: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1336809767574982658 There was also a substantial green flame coming from the raptor engine used for landing. Group consensus over on /r/SpaceX is that it was copper burning. We're amazed the engine didn't explode sooner.
I think it was purging leftover hypergolic fuel, which is used to ignite the engines. Or, maybe the engine sensed the engine was abnormal (because of low fuel), so it tried to re-ignite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylborane
TEA-TEB is not used on Starship. What you saw was an oxygen rich burn due to the low pressures in the header tank, the engine was eating itself and burning copper in the process. Copper burns green.
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#29Great flight! Elon tweeted that the header tank pressure was low: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1336809767574982658 There was also a substantial green flame coming from the raptor engine used for landing. Group consensus over on /r/SpaceX is that it was copper burning. We're amazed the engine didn't explode sooner.
For those who don't want to click the tweet:
> Fuel header tank pressure was low during landing burn, causing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD, but we got all the data we needed! Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!!
Re: SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight
#30i know they got the data they needed/wanted but can you really call it a success with that ending? on a side note: how much money do they lose whenever they have a crash landing like that?
Elon Musk tweeted this a few weeks ago:
> Goals are to test 3 engine ascent, body flaps, transition from main to header tanks & landing flip.
Considering they achieved all their goals, I would say it was a success.