The Starship has landed. Latest SpaceX test comes back to Earth without igniting fireballs
- Reference: 1620281757
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/05/06/spacex_starship_lands_without_exploding/
- Source link:
On Wednesday, US time, Starship serial number 15 (SN15) ascended to 10,000 metres, turned off its three raptor engines, and then belly-flopped back toward Earth.
The belly-flop phase of the flight was intentional: the craft has four flaps that let it control its descent.
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The craft’s rockets eventually restarted, as planned, the craft righted itself and then landed, with just a small methane fire giving immediate concerns to ground crew.
Here’s a vid of the flight’s final minute.
[4]Youtube Video
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Previous test flights of the Starship have had little problem going up, but lots of trouble coming down. In March 2021, another prototype [6]blew up on landing. A February 2021 effort [7]landed and then blew up a few minutes later.
A December 2020 effort also ended with [8]rapid unplanned disassembly .
The versions of Starship used in all four tests use the expected dimensions of the eventual production craft, and fewer engines. SpaceX also used Starship alone, despite plans to place the vehicle atop the biz's forthcoming Super Heavy rocket.
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Flights that end with fireballs are therefore not entirely desirable, but also not unexpected.
Starship’s spec calls for it to handle payloads of 100 metric tonnes or more, inside a faring capable of carrying cargo nine metres in diameter and eighteen metres high. By way of contrast, remember that China last week [10]launched a 4.2m x 16.6m section of its new space station, and it weighed just 22.5 tonnes. But while SpaceX aims for Starship and the Super Heavy to be re-usable, China’s Long March rocket [11]might fall on you this coming weekend.
Also on Wednesday, SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 rocket that it has now reused nine times. ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/30/spacex_starship_sn11/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/02/spacex_starship_explodes/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/spacex_starship_launch_fiery_end/
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[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/29/tianhe_tiangong_3_launch/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/04/china_rocket_long_march/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Previous test flights of the Starship have had little problem going up, but lots of trouble coming down
Technically, they had no problems in coming down. The problem was stopping coming down.
Icon 'cause that's what happens when you can't stop a rocket coming down.
"I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London"
- Wernher von Braun
Wunce the rockets are up who cares where they come down. That's not my department!
(Credit to Tom Lehrer)
That is like when people tell me they are afraid of flying. Why are you are afraid, I ask. Not flying is the problem.
Thunderbirds are go!
The Starship design looks like it comes straight from the Thunderbirds.
Who knew they were so close to reality!
It is difficult to fully fathom the scale of the Starship. Looking forward to seeing it deliver some payload soon.
Re: Thunderbirds are go!
Elon is aiming for an orbital flight in July with SN20 / BN3. That may be a little optimistic, but it won't be long now.
Re: Thunderbirds are go!
I always have the Thunderbirds March in my head when watching them land.
Re: Thunderbirds are go!
Definitely Gerry Anderson, but more the Fireball XL5 look.
Coming in high
Based on the chatter among the tank watchers so far, it appears that the landing flip was begun a bit earlier than before, presumably to give the craft more time to iron out any issues. Even so, it landed right on the edge of the landing pad. Any closer to the edge and it might have toppled over.
Still, this landing shows that SpaceX wasn't exaggerating SN15's new & improved features which warranted scrapping SN12 through SN14. The entire flight from what we could see (mostly hear) was controlled and the landing flip & burn was textbook. It relighting its three engines without sputtering or flaming out and then for the first time landing with two engines active all the way down for the slowest landing yet.
In the case of SN10, it nearly made it as well, but one of the engines failed to re-ignite, causing the craft to come in too hard and too fast, which ultimately damaged and ruptured internal structures, causing the ground-based RUD. After the low header tank pressure issues of SN8 (with engine-rich burn as a result), the re-ignition issues of SN9 (fail and swinging through the landing flip), the re-ignition issues of SN10 and the explosive turbo pump failure of SN11 (Starships In The Fog), I think that the SpaceX engineers had a fairly good idea of all that could go wrong.
So for the low-low price of four full-scale prototypes, they got a lot of crucial information that allowed them to fix issues in the Raptor engines and the Starship prototype as well.
Fail early, fail fast, then clear the debris field and try again. It's not crazy if it works, and you're based in a county which is more than happy to allow you to mess around like that :)
Re: Coming in high
>>Fail early, fail fast, then clear the debris field and try again.
Many SpaceX/Musk haters conveniently forget that these hops are testing of development prototypes not testing of the final product and, as such, the fail to land isn't a hard fail - it provides useful live model experience/data to modify future prototypes (as indeed happened, hence scrapping SN12-14).
I guess the SpaceX competitors run old school, non iterative, design methods, with varying degrees of success.
Beer for all the SpaceX rocket scientists and engineers for all their hard work - now they just have to iron out the wrinkles.
Re: Coming in high
The whole flight seemed to be shorter in length,but the cloud layer and the glitchy onboard video made it difficult to see when the flip happened to compare with previous flights.
And it was fairly windy at ground level 18-22knots, I'm not surprised the targeting was a bit off but how insane is this stuff that the general publics/media reaction to something roughly the height of Nelson's column,or 4 london double decker buses stacked on top of each other to use El Regs standard sizes, launches as a rocket 10km up in the air and then successfully lands relocated to a landing pad is led by well it didnt blow up.
Are we so used to something like this tech now which for decades was pure science fiction,that it doesnt even excite people when it works.
What on earth are they going to make of it when NASA launches their SLS and the thing just falls in the Indian Ocean taking 4 hugely expensive and historic rocket motors with it.
A pedant notes...
Also on Wednesday, SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 rocket that it has now reused nine times
According to Wikinaccurate the booster used on Wednesday has flown 9 times so it's 'only' been reused 8.
Re: A pedant notes...
I think "used 9 times" would cover it.
How fast the nozzles move on their gimbals whilst providing so much thrust is really quite amazing. Or maybe it's just me.
Their definition of "small fire" is slightly different from mine. I think that fire would have engulfed our house.
Very happy though that things are moving along!
The confidence of landing so near to the next one on the (literal) production line!
Yep that was a huge fire, those fins for scale are as tall if not taller than most peoples houses, so that's a whole building on fire sized fire they had. But they got it under control,probably just a propellant leak from a pipe somewhere that they can fix easily enough.
The correct desciption is "there's a fire - its smaller than last time".
In future it will just be "Starship has landed, the fire at the base is nominal"
Someone programmed the initial upward pan of that main camera rather over-optimistically – a trigonometric miscalculation perhaps? I guess that's why they're on the camera team and not the design team (I hope)...
It's so you don't see the switch from live launch video to the CGI "flight" as they test modern video technology ready for the moon/mars/studio "landing"
Never get tiered
Of seeing these landings. But did really enjoy the big blowy up ones :)