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The test is essentially a success at this point. Starship can take payload to orbit and open/close the payload doors. The remaining things are icing on the cake. They can refine re-usability while flying payloads.
Not quite: the apogee burn they had planned didn't happen (no word as to why yet), so the ship didn't technically demonstrate the capability reach orbit. It came back down in the Indian ocean on its original suborbital trajectory, essentially like an ICBM.
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Fuel transfer with what? That would require things like docking
Transfer internally between tanks in the bottom and top of the ship. This was one of the planned tests, I have not heard whether it was accomplished though.
Edit: On the other hand tweets from Gwynne suggest that they still need to review the data to see if it was a success.
The test is essentially a success at this point. Starship can take payload to orbit and open/close the payload doors. The remaining things are icing on the cake. They can refine re-usability while flying payloads.
I wouldn’t classify the re-entry survival problem as icing. But otherwise, I agree with you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite: the apogee burn they had planned didn't happen (no word as to why yet), so the ship didn't technically demonstrate the capability reach orbit. It came back down in the Indian ocean on its original suborbital trajectory, essentially like an ICBM.
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I wouldn’t classify the re-entry survival problem as icing. But otherwise, I agree with you.
Yeah, breaking up in-air during re-entry (at 65 km going by last telemetry) seems like a potential big issue to fix.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not quite: the apogee burn they had planned didn't happen (no word as to why yet), so the ship didn't technically demonstrate the capability reach orbit. It came back down in the Indian ocean on its original suborbital trajectory, essentially like an ICBM.
That is a matter of the trajectory they chose on purpose for this test flight. A different flight profile would have given them a perigee above the atmosphere (rather than -50 km)
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There's a fake SpaceX YouTube account that looks official because they included videos from the real channel in playlists to get verification ticks & have managed to harvest thousands of subscribers. YT's interface is a bit dumb for including the verification ticks in that use-case.
YT's interface fights negative feedback harder than a spoiled toddler. Hiding downvotes, squirreling the "block channel" feature into a dot menu, breaking it completely on recommended pages, and then breaking search pages... it's almost like they don't want to fight spam.
Why remove spam and clickbait when it means less money? Youtube is the stereotype of post-hype company that is just milking its users to increase their bottom line, driving the entire product to a slow death.