Have we seen any sign that B9 has been/is being modified with the additional hot-stage ring and the new FTS ? Right now, to me this seems to be the long pole, more than the OLM.
I’m sure that this is just a temporary thing until the ring is fully integrated into future booster versions. There’s been changes to Booster that’s bumped its mass up quite a bit I believe.
I’m sure one of the videos from the known commenters noted that this means it’s a fair bit heavier but future ones reduce weight. Due to how fast they iterate and build the changes are being applied to a few boosters from now but they’ll just make do with what’s coming before that.
Everyone thought it was going to explode at somepoint. Even the enthusiastic and hopeful hosts were talking about how long it’s going to last. Then it made it.
This isn’t a long-standing problem being persistently ignored, this is a test flight designed specifically to discover such problems. They were so keen to test how the system handled problems like this that they deliberately damaged the heat shield before the flight (somewhere other than where this particular problem occurred).
The implication that this partial failure of the heat shield is damning evidence of negligence is either ignorant or deliberately deceptive
There’s no way he didn’t completely lose his shit in those final seconds when Starship successfully relit. His neighbours must have heard a dictionaries worth of new swear words.
That was some Columbia-level damage that Starship experienced during reentry, and yet it successfully retained control authority, completed a soft landing, and everything was live streamed. Amazing!
The booster seems to be almost ready for the first catch attempt (depending on the accuracy of the landing).
I wonder to what extent they can retrofit Ship 30 to reinforce the hinge of the flaps, and how long that is going to take? On the other hand, the ship did survive, so maybe they will just repeat the launch without any major fixes, and try a few different things? (Deorbit burn, maybe even suborbital test-mass deployment, or more aggressive tests of the heat shield?)
The next-generation Starship design has less exposed flaps with reinforced hinges already. But is it already in production?
If it’s only the on-screen flap that had issues, hopefully that points to a minor fix instead of a major one. I wonder what sort of data they have on this. How many thermal tiles were lost on each flap? Where did the issues start? Are the other flaps alright? Hard things to track.
On the one hand, you’d definitely want a look at the landing. On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d want to be anywhere near the possible impact spot in case of failure.
They used a drone launched from a ship to the film The First falcon 9 landing almost a decade ago so I don’t see why that would be out of the realm of possibility.
They’re called drone-ships, but they’re more drone-barges. You absolutely couldn’t take them all the way out into the Indian Ocean in anthing but amazing weather, and they were delivered to their current home on top of another ship.
That’s not to say you couldn’t have some kind of unmanned observer nearby, but it’ll have to be something else. Any yacht with a camera and a good drone would do the trick, you don’t need to spend (and risk) millions on custom ships for that.
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