Gotta love engineer-speak. Another way to put it:
Ping!.....................
I’m starting to think ‘SABOTAGE’.................
I watched the launch for a while on youtube. After 10 or 15 minutes the indicated velocity started dropping which seemed unusual at the time, but I quit watching.
Geez! They act as if this was rocket science.
Ouch!
That's quite a stylistic way to say it blew-up.
Gotta love engineer-speak. Another way to put it:
it is amazing to me even 50 years+ after space travel was started how hard it still is to do right.
I imagine Russia would probably crash more nukes on its own land than us if there ever was a war.
The actual story is that the booster was intended NOT to land the way it normally did but to come down at a higher angle of attack to see if the empirical results matched what they were seeing in silico and in the wind tunnel.
Amazing technology. Thanks for posting.
When they get the kinks worked out, this is going to be a heck of an asset.
I hope they are getting good data out of these test flights, because the time between launches is expanding and the results do not seem to be hitting a decent percentage of the published mission goals.
Booster... First time a reused Starship booster. Including 22 of the motors being “used” including the somehow famous PIE motor number 314. They did multiple re-lights during descent and it was not a “chopstick” landing from the mission profile because of the high probability of hardware failure.
The Ship. Still a V2 with strategic heat tile placement to test new thermal coatings. This was the first of the V2’s to hit SECO... but that was about the only mission objective I am aware of that actually happened.
PEZ door didn’t open. They had valves stick open causing massive fuel loss. Because of that, they lost attitude control and then the RUD at about 50 some miles up and at 17k MPH... They never even made it to the re-light to see if the vacuum engines would blow up...
So... a couple of positive events... and I hope they got a lot of data... But the optics of this look VERY bad IMO. Yes, I’m aware of the iterative engineering approach... but this seems excessive for the hype they are putting in to each launch.
That kind of failure seems rather strange at this stage of his rocket endeavors. Purposely sabotaged?
I understand. Had an earlier than planned deceleration into a vehicle in front of me 30 minutes after takeoff.
Keep at it. One day, success.
It could be that they are deliberately pushing the envelope just to see where it is, but without a firm baseline of multiple successes, I'm not sure that will produce really useful results. They may just be introducing so many changes that working out all the permutations of failure becomes too difficult to test.
Article is very poorly written! “Orbit” was not achieved nor was it ever an objective for this flight.
“third consecutive failure”
“a notable improvement compared to its last two flights”
I love how this is described.
To rephrase; this 3rd flight TEST gained significant successes after the lessons learned from the prior 2 test flights.
try, try again.
“Booster” aka “Shake Stand”