Check out this view.
Remember that the booster is 232 feet tall. So it's not all that close to the tower.
Plus everything I've read says those flames are just flare-off from excess fuel fumes.
Posted on 10/13/2024 5:44:13 AM PDT by 6ppc
Can't believe no one has a thread going on the Starship launch. They just caught the booster in the chopsticks! Awesome!
Starship is in orbit and will be doing a soft landing in the Indian Ocean in about 15 minutes.
Diners in chinese restaurants should be ashamed to ask for silverware.
Looks like Elon mastered the technique.
Don't understand the 'BARELY' part.
I'm in my 60s now but I remember when I was a child in the early 1970s watching the NASA moon shots and imagining space travel for myself as an adult and seeing Mars and other planets in person.
Alas, that never happened because our government turned into a socialist state using our wealth to give it out as welfare to the most unproductive people in our society as opposed to investing in technologies that would result in the betterment of society overall.
Now thanks to people like Elon Musk, private enterprise has picked up the slack and we will belatedly realize our dreams of interplanetary (and eventually interstellar) travel.
It's too late for people like me but hopefully our younger generations will get to see humanity realize its fullest potential.
bttt
“Don’t understand the ‘BARELY’ part.”
Well, it almost hit the tower and it was on fire. I assume that at least one engine wasn’t working properly.
This in no way detracts from the achievement, if anything this ADDS to it, with a success under less than optimal conditions! Great engineering and firmware!
“And why are you still going to Sludge? It’s become an anti conservative screed. Are you a masochist?”
Know your enemy.
Wracking my brain as to how they get that elegant a performance from the rocket engine and maneuvering mechanism that guides the booster back into the cradle so smooth and precisely, and then almost as a sly wink to the viewer, it shuts down the engine without any apparent effort by anyone. It’s the code. The people who wrote the code, and the engineered fluid smoothness of the hardware in performing the instructions in the code. By what means does the booster sense the location of the launch “cradle” and flawlessly guide itself back there to it, and upon coming silkily to rest, shut down the engine, wordlessly declaring, “Mission accomplished”?
I guess you missed the point I was trying to make....
NASA is loaded with dei type misfits that cannot even reproduce what was manufactured in the ‘60’s..
Same as all government organizations..
They are incompetent
Sorry.
Our opinions about this planet populating another are far apart.
“Know your enemy.”
Don’t you already know your enemy?
The fire part was venting methane, you could see where the vent holes were and the vapor got ignited by the three got running engines. You cannot just turn off ten raptor engines in a dime those turbo pumps are running at a couple of hundred thousand rpm you must keep flowing methane and lox through them until they spin down you vent the turbine exhaust as it is both coolant and lubricant to those pumps. Then you see the same effect as the three other engines pumps spin down. At altitude right at after staging and MECO look at all the vapor shooting out the sides of super heavy in the video that’s the same vent holes doing their job after main engines plural.shutdown. They probably.need to vent higher up the stack to keep it from igniting but the while stack is stainless steel and some burning methane vapor is not going to phase it at all. It just did a mach 5 reentry at much hotter temps. They melted some of the outer engine bells that was almost assuredly due to reentry heating you could see them all glowing red hot on reentry from space. The booster got close to the Kalman line which is officially space.
Check out this view.
Remember that the booster is 232 feet tall. So it's not all that close to the tower.
Plus everything I've read says those flames are just flare-off from excess fuel fumes.
SpaceX engineers confirmed that were at max venting of methane as they ended the 13 raptor burn so the booster was lighter on landing and also so the tanks would be at low pressure when it came to a standstill. The three raptor were running off header tanks they were venting the main tanks you can see the main vent at the umbilical connector port it’s venting pure methane and it goes up as a flare. Some good posts by spacex on X.
You can clearly see LOX also being vented fast and heavy for the same reasons.
The precision of this landing cannot be understated. They didn’t catch on the grid fins they caught on small landing legs and the rails are not much wider than the pads Elon said they were looking for 10 centimeter accuracy I think they came close.
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1845966756579627167
Check out this view you can see the main methane vent from the umbilical connector port area it’s white and flares further up the plume. You also can see closer to the top the LOX vents blowing full stream out.
https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1845958325948895425
Impressive , and the media was like yawn we have Marxism to push nothing to see here.
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