Thursday, Alain Fournier murmurred ...
Post by Niklas HolstiPost by Alain FournierPost by Niklas HolstiPost by Alain FournierPost by The Running ManNASA won't be too happy with this since it will make a 2025 Lunar
landing all but impossible. Even 2026 is dubious.
I wouldn't say that. Reusing the stages isn't required to reach the
moon. That only allows SpaceX to make big profits. It seems to me
that the booster showed today that it can put the ship were it needs
to be to reach orbit. The ship did not reach orbit simply because it
wasn't trying to reach orbit. The ship didn't succeed in its reentry,
but there is no reentry involved in the moon mission.
If the tanker ships, for refuelling the Lunar Starship in Earth orbit,
can't reenter and be reused, it will be /quite/ expensive, right?
There have been various statements about the number of tanker launches
needed for one lunar mission, but there seems to be agreement that the
number is about 10 or more.
Yes it would be quite expensive. But I think they will view that as
development cost until the do achieve intact return.
You may well be right. If they can get the boosters to return and be
reused, the cost of single-use tankers may be bearable for a while.
However, while SpaceX said that this flight tested the opening and closing
of the payload door, and the in-orbit propellant transfer, they have not
yet said whether those tests were successful.
For the payload door, after the SpaceX commentators said the door was
closing, some of the video from inside the payload bay seemed to show the
door swinging loose and bending back and forth at the same time as a
disting "clunk" sound was heard; that did not seem successful to me.
SpaceX admitted that the ship roll rate prevented the re-ignition test of a
Raptor engine; apparently the roll rate was uncontrolled and too high. This
may have messed up the propellant transfer test, and certainly the ship's
uncontrolled attitude seemed to be one factor that doomed the re-entry. At
some points in the re-entry the ship had the lee side towards Earth,
certainly not planned.
If the payload door was not well closed for re-entry, that may have
contributed to the ship's re-entry failure.
Actually, I think I prefer attitude control problems. If the destruction of
the ship was due to insufficient thermal protection or something like that,
it could signal a hard to solve problem. But I think that we will all agree
that SpaceX will be able to solve attitude control. Not that it is
necessarily very easy to solve, just that they did it for their Falcon
rocket, so there is no reason to believe they can't do it for Starship.
Same goes for the booster. It hit the water hard. But we know that SpaceX can
get a booster to land smoothly.
Of course, it is possible that once they will have solved the ships attitude
control problem, we will learn that it can't actually survive reentry heat.
Alain Fournier
I think the tiles looked good during the plasma portion of the video.
Attitude was indeed an issue.
Scott Manley has made his first review of the SpaceX footage, and the
cargo door coverage is at
and the rolling return at about t=706.
I had 3 laptops and a phone tuned in. The phone, following Ellie In
Space's stream, stayed pretty close to realtime. The old laptop,
following the NSF member's multiview, was a bit mor than 5 minutes
lagged at launch, and 10 minutes by the end. The newer laptops were
following NSF's main stream and Everday Astronaut's stream. They were
lagged by at least 40 minutes by launch time.
Ellie had Joe Tegtmeyer on her stream, and he's always great. (He's
done GigaFactory drone shots with Ellie before, and on his own
channgel. And he now has a CyberTruck.).
/dps
--
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