31–40 of 75 posts
What I find odd is: when this thing is operational, passengers are supposed to ride through this "flip to land" maneuver?
Well apparently they’re looking into ways to catch the rocket with a landing arm looking platform. Really I think they need to get those engines to fire in any circumstance. But with N=2 it’s hard to know anything.
Second stage has always been about that flip, be it on the Moon, Mars or Earth
What I find odd is: when this thing is operational, passengers are supposed to ride through this "flip to land" maneuver?
Well apparently they’re looking into ways to catch the rocket with a landing arm looking platform. Really I think they need to get those engines to fire in any circumstance. But with N=2 it’s hard to know anything.
Starship (the 2nd stage) will always do that flip & land on legs, as it also needs to do it on Mars.
Looks like 1 of the engines failed to re-lit during the landing. At least this time 1 of the engines was functioning correctly all the way to the explosion. This is an improvement over SN8 where all the engines failed to re-lit properly.
SN8: https://youtu.be/ap-BkkrRg-o?t=6884
SN9: https://youtu.be/_zZ7fIkpBgs?t=704
With SN8, you can clearly see two engines lighting and burning properly until just before it (crash) lands.
With SN9, you can clearly see one engine lighting and burning properly, but the second engine did not light cleanly and did not stay lit.
It felt much less eerie as it had commentary this time (and probably because it wasn't the first Starship high-altitude flight), but on the face of it, it looked to be a rougher 'landing' than SN8. I'm sure they got a lot of data from it, but it looked like some of the debris was headed towards SN10 - definitely squeaky bum time then! Can't wait to see this work, though, it really will be a step change for space expl…
Yeah - it really looked like they just got lucky with the debris somehow avoiding SN10. I wonder what the reasoning was behind them even having SN10 on the other pad during this launch - surely it would have been safer to just keep it in a hangar until afterwards?
Looked to me like they didn't rotate all the way back to vertical, either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well apparently they’re looking into ways to catch the rocket with a landing arm looking platform. Really I think they need to get those engines to fire in any circumstance. But with N=2 it’s hard to know anything.
The catching arm is for the first stage, IIRC Second stage has always been about that flip, be it on the Moon, Mars or Earth
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the suicide burn will be dropped for passenger flights, but the flip is an integral part of the braking maneuver.
What would they replace it with?
Amazing to witness this, although I must say I preferred the camera angles we had in the SN8 stream. Seeing SN8 flip from a distance was great but with SN9 we had to watch it from underneath.
Looks like 1 of the engines failed to re-lit during the landing. At least this time 1 of the engines was functioning correctly all the way to the explosion. This is an improvement over SN8 where all the engines failed to re-lit properly.
I've plotted a graph with these two data points and predict that it will successfully re-light all three engines in only two more tries.
SN8 was really close. Only a couple more seconds before the engine ate itself would do. :)