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To: Bayard
China has yet to design and build a rocket that does what Starship does...
What Starship is hoped to do. They're not there...yet.
53 posted on 03/31/2024 11:26:51 AM PDT by citizen (Put all LBQTwhatever programming on a new subscription service: PERV-TThose look good)
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To: citizen

Even what it does now they don’t have, not really. I doubt they will even have started working on their own big rocket by the time the shakedowns from Starship are finished.


54 posted on 03/31/2024 11:30:29 AM PDT by Bayard
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To: citizen

“China has yet to design and build a rocket that does what Starship does...
What Starship is hoped to do. They’re not there...yet.”

Got to love test to failure design cycle. SpaceX has done in a year what would have taken decade or more with NASA and never in the case of landing and reusing boosters.

Third flight and they got starship to orbit and most of the way to through reentry they lost RCS control before the flaps had aerodynamic control and starship rolled and flipped to its aerodynamic neutral position of base first the engines are the heaviest part of the empty vehicle. Without the heat shield on that end it broke up in the mach 15 plasma heating. They have four more gen 1 stat
Ships before gen 2 those four are already built or nearly finished. Starship four has already done its full duration test burn of all 6 raptors and a single engine restart for deorbital burn. It’s ready to fly.

It’s likley the dreaded stuck open valve fault that haunts spaceflight killed the RCS system before starships aerodynamic flaps could control it. They have to design it to be base first neutral that’s how it lands in the dense part of the atmosphere using its engines to hover then land softly not a suicide burn like falcon 9. Its also possible that the cold jet RCS system was just not strong enough for the beast of starship it is easily the largest object humans have every put in space. They probably will have to have hot gas spark ignition meth/lox feed from the header tanks those thrusters have already been designed and tested but add mass and are more expensive then simple cold gas pifft pifft jets.

I expect Starship flight 4 to make it down to spashdown all the way through reentry the videos live from starlink were a world first well into the plasma phase of reentry up and back through the plasma wake no one has ever done that and not with HD video to boot.


63 posted on 04/01/2024 2:16:10 PM PDT by GenXPolymath
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