What an absolute shit show. Why SpaceX isn’t getting raked over the coals for not being able to even maintain control on reentry is insane. That is like the least difficult challenge they face in getting Starship to work and they failed spectacularly. Not to even mention losing tiles that high up in the atmosphere.
My bet is that, just like with Falcon 9, Starship will become expendable with first stage reuse. They’ll continue to pump out Starlink for their primary customers, governments, and Musk will eventually talk himself into securities and espionage charges. At which point sober responsible adults will take over SpaceX and drop his pet project that is costing them billions. Raptor may or may not be repurposed.
I very much disagree with you. SpaceX has a completely different approach than NASA. NASA plans everything ahead and the first flight is expected to work flawlessly. That takes years and years of preparation. While SpaceX sends half finished prototypes knowing they will not finish their journey. The then iterate to fix the issues they discovered on the previous iteration. This was how they worked on the Falcons as well. Remember how they even started sending satellites on commercial flights as well as Starlinks before they were even able to safely land a booster? They knew their vehicle was able to reach orbit (from the many previous attempts and failures) and were still figuring out landing while they were using them.
You do remember that they signed a contract with NASA to have a lunar lander ready this year, right? A lander that requires more than a few launches and reuse of both the first stage and tanker Starships?
These launches are less about iteration than they are marketing. They are burning money and need to maintain interest in their magic Starship. They need just as many years as NASA and they need NASA’s money. The difference is, SpaceX have not demonstrated they can achieve their technical goals and they gloss over all the challenges while at the same time they waste money and Raptor engines on these publicity flights.
Remember, Falcon 9 was earning them money while they experimented with landing. And they hyped up its capabilities and cost before eventually under delivering. Starship will be different in that it may not even male them money.
They may not have a lunar lander this year but they are making strides towards it. I it’s current state, it seems Starship is already apt to perform Starlink V2 (non mini version) launches since the launch worked up to that point without issues. The landing only matters to bring people back. We’ll get there in time. All that matters for now is getting to send that school but into space. If you can’t understand that then I’m sorry.
There is no part of space travel that is easy. Do not so easily dismiss the challenge. Nor demean the progress SpaceX has made to solving those challenges. The starship has no near-peer competitor.
This test got further than the prior test and nothing unexpected was lost.
I’m no fan of Musk, and I’m not a big fan of SpaceX, but credit where credit is due, they are bringing progress and leading an industry that was once very stagnant.
The primary mission was a successful orbital trajectory, the secondary mission was a fuel transfer experiment. For the transfer experiment they had vent the hot gas to get starship rotating for the transfer. They ran out of hot gas which is fine, the trajectory was already set for re-entry. There was literally no risk here and it all went exactly as planned.
This made my dizzy and that doesn’t help with the fact that I discovered you can get nausea and headaches from drinking matcha on an empty stomach an hour ago
The whole point of this video is to emphasize the rotation of the vehicle. Speeding it up does help with that. You can watch the official feed of you want to watch in real time.
It’s an excellent video. The realtime feed made it look like everything was great, fully under control. This shows that it really wasn’t near the end, and it’s loss wasn’t truly “unexpected”
Most advanced video compositors/editors have stabilization features. What you do is you give the program a couple of reference points that you know aren’t moving, and the program will automatically track those points over time
There used to be a great subreddit for image stabilisations, always enjoyed seeing stuff from there and people would sometimes go into detail about the tools and techniques they used .
There probably still is, but there used to be too.
It’s a standard feature in nearly all common video editors (i.e. DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere).
Usually, stabilization goes over all video frames and tries to find image transformations (rotation + translation + zoom) that make a frame match as closely as possible with the previous frame. That’s an oversimplified explanation, but from a user point-of-view, these tools are mature enough to be applied with just a few clicks.
This video is definitely the result of that, as, whoever did it, didn’t even bother to insert a cut when the feed switches between left side and right side camera, thus making the stabilization spazz out momentarily.
Where do you see the camera switch side? The fin on which the camera is mounted moves every now and then, but I think we only ever see the perspective of one camera.
You could see how uncontrollable it was even on the stream itself. They have graphics showing the positioning of the ship. Seems like RCS packed it up and decided to go home (burned to crisp)
Yeah to me it looked like they didn’t really have any sort of attitude control system (eg RCS thrusters) for while they were in space. As soon as the rocket stopped firing it was spinning, albeit very gently at first.
I’m more interested in knowing what happened with the booster after it’s boost back burn, where some of the engines seemed to shut off on their own before the rest were cut. This issue is likely also responsible for the failed suicide burn. Also, why they didn’t try the orbital relight of the Starship engines. If the orbital relight was skipped because of orientation issues, then shame on them for not remembering that you can stablise your craft in KSP with just a little bit of vectored rocket burn.
These are apparently still just flying grain silos, a long way away from the full finished product. However it does seem like they’re at the cusp of having a viable satellite launch vehicle, even if the re-entry stuff is still bugged.
So apparently they can’t use it to launch satellites into orbit until the reentry buggy stuff is solved.
If they can’t bring it back into the atmosphere in a controlled manner, it’s to big, and designed not to break up, to allow it to reenter anywhere from a failure.
No one wants raining starship parts over a populated area.
It won’t matter if it’s expendable, but they gotta be in control of reentry.
Yeah I still think that’s within their grasp with only minor modifications. Obviously, not testing the engine relight is a big hurdle, but beyond that it’s just about a little bit of attitude control and then they can de-orbit into the ocean as before.
Actually getting the craft to survive re-entry, and even land and be re-used is a much bigger task, but it wouldn’t take too much to get Starship in the position where it can launch Starlink V2’s.
KSP doesn’t simulate the fuel floating into a big blob in zero g. irl you need working RCS to create a little g force to push the fuel down to where the engine intakes are before you can try starting them.
That’s a very good point and quite likely along the lines of what happened. Could be a challenging thing to fix, and may also have implications for orbital fuel transfers.
The actual solution is probably some control surfaces for the atmosphere, reaction wheels for space (both for steering) and upscaling to the biggest rocket available with no more than 2 largest size fuel tanks for each rocket. SRBs are your friend until they aren’t. Stabilizers save more fuel than imagined.
I think it’s the thumper booster that I determined to be the cheapest one. So I got over 20 of those, run like six of them at first, when they run out of fuel, dump them and activate four of the others, dump them when they run out, etc. It’s 100% cheap boosters until I get into space.
After adding many many craters to the mun, I eventually managed to leave a fully crewed cabin with no fuel tanks, solar panels, engines or legs on the mun.
Yep, and the rescue mission process kinda alternates between A- leaving more crewed cabins on the surface and B- spraying the surface with exploding fuel tanks etc…
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