Starship flight N5 in 57minutes and they try to Catch the Booster

[iMo]

[iMo]

 

[Gyro]

That was surreal! 

[tom66]

Holy crap, they actually bloody did it.  They caught a booster.  First time attempt!  Incredible engineering.  Small fire but that can be resolved right? 

[DH7DN]

Amazing engineering feat! This was surreal, history has been made today!

Congrats SpaceX & Elon Musk 

[Psi]

It was awesome

Now observe all the news organizations. They will totally ignore the successful and awesome booster catch and instead focus on the negative. "SpaceX rocket explodes on landing", when it actually landed, and then exploded.

I'm not too sure if they terminated the ship on purpose after landing was over to sink it, or if the ship falling over ruptured a tank. Probably the former.

[iMo]

The Starship landed nicely perhaps 50m off the target buoy with camera, and the "explosions" were just the gases pushed upwards from the tanks when it failed over (and perhaps it raptured so the water pushed the propellants off)..

[coppice]

Lots of great stuff in this trip. All of it progress. However, they are really struggling with the Starship heat shield. NASA did. Everyone has. If they had recovered that Starship it would clearly have required a massive refurbishment of the heat shield, just like the Space Shuttle required after every flight. That isn't going to bring Space X to the kind of cheap, fast turnaround reuse they are aiming for. Could this be an insurmountable problem that will wreck the Starship program? I hope not.

[coppercone2]

given what i see about ceramics and particularly hot ceramics just working with them a little bit and imagining the incremental improvements that you can get in materials (comparing it to metal science) I think that is a distinct possibility.

A space elevator is insane unless your opinion of ceramic materials is as low as mine

Turn my kiln inside out and try to drop it 400 miles, thats just going to be problematic

crumbly bullshit materials that break for no reason

this is the technology I would eventually put my money on, active shield. I bet that will be developed before trustworthy ceramics.

https://www.universetoday.com/46474/the-next-generation-of-heat-shield-magnetic/

[wraper]

[Per Hansson]

The Starship landed nicely perhaps 50m off the target buoy with camera, and the "explosions" were just the gases pushed upwards from the tanks when it failed over (and perhaps it raptured so the water pushed the propellants off)..

The first explosion is pretty big, my guess would be that was the flight termination system: better to use it than to have unexploded ordnance on the seabed or possibly floating around...
Was truly amazing to watch the live feed by Tim Dodd (Everyday Astronaut).

[coppice]

https://www.universetoday.com/46474/the-next-generation-of-heat-shield-magnetic/

Electromagnetic fields act upon plasmas, so field based solutions for heat shields have been looked at since the earliest days of space flight. It never seems to get very far. The link is to something 15 years old. No signs of progress since then.

[coppercone2]

It's that or magic ceramic.

I think they should bring a stock of tiles on board a space station so they can put new tiles on things that need to go back to earth with robots instead of trying to reuse them.


Have you seen much progress in ceramics in the last 15 years? I think they have some wonder materials that are just way too hard to make at scale right now.

at least, a space based tile inspector drone to do a check before going back to earth

[Gyro]

In other news, Boeing spits feathers (and plans to shed 17k jobs, but that's another story).

[coppercone2]

And I really think it might be possible to make magnetic shields, at least we have maglev trains that are highly successful. now they need to fly

I think magnetic technologies have the most realistic chances of coming to life. It might be a realistic but very complicated design that does not have wishful thinking like 'robust insulators'. a FTL drive might be more realistic then expecting a tile not to crack lol

I am imagining what a ceramic computer motherboard might be like. Expecting 20k of them to stay intact on a plane is amusing

[coppice]

And I really think it might be possible to make magnetic shields, at least we have maglev trains that are highly successful. now they need to fly

I think magnetic technologies have the most realistic chances of coming to life. It might be a realistic but very complicated design that does not have wishful thinking like 'robust insulators'. a FTL drive might be more realistic then expecting a tile not to crack lol

I am imagining what a ceramic computer motherboard might be like. Expecting 20k of them to stay intact on a plane is amusing

Most magnetic solutions are very heavy. Not a big issue for a maglev train, but a very big issue for anything flying a little higher. Some of these high temperature ceramic tape superconductors don't seem very heavy in themselves, but involve some substantial cooling equipment. If someone could get past that.....

[BrianHG]

As insanely impressive that catch was, somehow I feel a rocket landing on the ground balanced like a pencil dropped on it's eraser staying standing vertical is just more difficult and impressive.

[Andy Chee]

And I really think it might be possible to make magnetic shields, at least we have maglev trains that are highly successful. now they need to fly

For heat shields, I don't think magnetic will ever be practical.  The power-to-weight requirements just don't compete with ablative ceramics for re-entry.

However, magnetic shields are the only practical method of radiation protection for manned Mars missions, so the technology is definitely being worked upon, just not for heat shielding.

[Andy Chee]

Now observe all the news organizations. They will totally ignore the successful and awesome booster catch and instead focus on the negative. "SpaceX rocket explodes on landing", when it actually landed, and then exploded.

Surprisingly, not yet. 

So far all the mainstream media seems to be focused on the "chopstick" catch, and have completely ignored the exploding Starship.

[CatalinaWOW]

Hard to say based on the video to date how far the heat shield was from working.

My takeaways from a quick watch.  There was much less burning/debris than on the last re-entry.  The camera views remained unobscured much longer.  Damage to the flaps is hard to evaluate.  The cameras turned down gain until I was only seeing the bright glowing spots.  Which may have been burn through or merely very hot stainless.  After things cooled down I didn't see any holes.  There were clearly some losses and failures based on the occasional showers of sparks.  When the camera gain went back up all I could see was intact.

Hopefully a full Starship landing is coming soon and a postflight will truly answer how much needs to be fixed and how hard it will be to repair and possibly prevent future damage.

All in all an incredible accomplishment.  When the chopstick system was first announced I thought it was batshit crazy.   It appears they were closer to right than I was.

[iMo]

..Hopefully a full Starship landing is coming soon and a postflight will truly answer how much needs to be fixed and how hard it will be to repair and possibly prevent future damage..

A couple minutes longer flight of the Starship and it would land in Australia. The continent is large enough and almost empty so they may try next time with the landing there.. And Dave may report directly from the landing site..

[Psi]

Now observe all the news organizations. They will totally ignore the successful and awesome booster catch and instead focus on the negative. "SpaceX rocket explodes on landing", when it actually landed, and then exploded.

Surprisingly, not yet. 

So far all the mainstream media seems to be focused on the "chopstick" catch, and have completely ignored the exploding Starship.

You are right, i'm happy to be wrong.

[wraper]

^Surprisingly even CNN reported this fairly. Unfortunately it was mostly positioned as some socondary news, which is undeserved as this is a major advancement of rocket technology and IMHO order of magnitude more important than some mundane news on top of the front page.

[Ice-Tea]

Was truly amazing to watch the live feed by Tim Dodd (Everyday Astronaut).

Their shot of the redhot engine bay was just insane.

[coppice]

Finally they have some raptor engines back, which have not been salt damaged, to be able to do a real assessment of how well they hold up to use. I find it one of the most satisfying moments, as an engineer, to be able to sift through the aftermath of using things I designed, looking at how well my decisions worked out.