Posted on 12/09/2020 3:19:25 PM PST by Moonman62
Epic, hugely successful first high-altitude test of Starship. The belly flop maneuver test of Starship's aerodynamics was especially impressive. So very much to build on here for the Starship program.
Starship.
They built this city on Rock ‘n Roll!
THe Flaps are Freaking amazing. The Power they must have is astronomical.
Its like folding & unfolding an airliner wing in flight.
There’s a long shot showing the landing. The thing was darn near floating belly down. When it went vertical, it was coming down as stable as a F9, but when the engines went rich, it plummeted. Still, this was a massively successful test, and SN9 is in the hangar waiting for testing.
You are not alone.
No. The prototypes have landing legs that deploy from within the ship. They have worked fine in the past. Couldn’t see that detail in this test due to the hard landing and subsequent explosion.
Yes. The aspect that was the primary point of interest was the flaps controlling the ship as it guided the ship during descent and then oriented for the ship for a landing on the pad. That portion performed extremely well. The only failure was two early s/n engines.
Back to the drawing board.
Didn’t quite stick the landing, though. LOL
I understand that Musk tweeted that the two engines shut down in sequence early, due to the FAA asking for a lower altitude flight. 12.5K vice 15K. Musk also said that they lacked pressure in the header tanks for landing.
95% successful won’t get us to Mars and back. Everyone is cheering this like it was some kind of major space flight breakthrough, but it exploded after fuel issues.
Not the greatest example of success.
Very cool. Will be something to see the full stack on the super heavy booster.
...
I think we’ll see it before next Summer. The first booster is under construction.
I haven’t seen that tweet. However, that doesn’t change the fact that engine s/n 32 did not reignite for the landing and s/n 36 sputtered during reignition for landing. Only s/n 42 performed well.
Prototype 9 will use engines with more development time so it should stick the landing without exploding due to a hard landing.
I can’t believe how many arrogant, Dunning Kruger suffering, armchair assholes there are here. Truly embarrassed for Free Republic.
The shutdown and reignition of individual engines is used to control thrust. They’re not all supposed to turn on and off at the same time.
There was a problem with propellent supply from the header tanks during the landing burn — as per Elon Musk Tweet.
And the maneuver is called? that’s right a crazy Elon!
Another Tweet from Musk:
SN8 did great! Even reaching apogee would’ve been great, so controlling all way to putting the crater in the right spot was epic!!
It was an amazing achievement, probably reached with less money and in less time than Boeing's capsule, which will take 9 months more just to disassemble to fix the problem they identified. Musk already has another Starship almost ready to go, and they know exactly what was wrong with this flight.
LOL! “[A] little hard.” Accurate, but loses a little something in the telling.
(Epic, fireball explosion for those who didn’t see... but yes, the flight WAS a success.)
Rapid Unplanned Disassembly Emergency. That’s just plain RUDE! Seriously, I love your jargon, RUD.
“Putting the crater in the right spot.”
Now, THAT is a salesman with a sense of humor!
Dunning Kruger... amazing this has no etymological relation to finishing the last of the coffee.
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