7heCulture

@vixen1511 @SawyerMerritt Booster was already caught 3 times so they already know how to do that. To the extent that they stopped trying to catch to focus on stressing the vehicle further. It’s a minor setback. V3 just introduced new parameters they probably couldn’t/did not want to simulate.

@SawyerMerritt the booster's partial boostback burn and hard splashdown tell me reusability is still the hardest part of this architecture.

SpaceX has released a statement after today's 12th Starship test flight: "The flight test began with Super Heavy igniting all 33 Raptor 3 engines and ascending over the Gulf of America. A single Raptor engine shut down during ascent. The successful first-stage ascent was followed by a hot-staging maneuver, with Starship’s upper stage igniting its six Raptor engines to continue its flight to space. Following stage separation, the Super Heavy booster performed a directional flip maneuver and attempted its boostback burn. It was unable to light all planned engines and performed a partial boostback burn that ended early. Super Heavy attempted to reignite its engines for the landing burn before experiencing a hard splashdown in the Gulf of America. Following stage separation, the Super Heavy booster performed a directional flip maneuver and attempted its boostback burn. It was unable to light all planned engines and performed a partial boostback burn that ended early. Super Heavy attempted to reignite its engines for the landing burn before experiencing a hard splashdown in the Gulf of America. During its ascent burn to space, Starship lost one of the Raptor 3 vacuum engines but demonstrated its engine-out capability and achieved its planned trajectory. During coast, Starship successfully deployed all 20 Starlink simulators and two modified Starlink satellites that imaged Starship in space. These simulators and modified Starlink satellites were on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship. Starship re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and was able to gather critical data on the performance of its heatshield and structural strength. In the final minutes of flight, Starship performed a maneuver to intentionally stress the structural limits of the vehicle’s rear flaps and a dynamic banking move to mimic the trajectory that future missions returning to Starbase will fly. Starship then guided itself using its four flaps to the pre-planned splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean, and executed a landing flip, landing burn, and splashdown on two Raptor engines."

@Avi8Navg8Comnc8 @mcrs987 Yes, but we never got the “nominal orbital insertion” call out, so something was off in the final orbit. It was within bounds though.

@mcrs987 Didn’t they burn Ship longer than planned for engine out?

Can clearly see S39 generating lift during reentry to make up for the lost range from the engine-out on ascent.

@rndnmber @Hrosik7114281 @r3a9an_k_ You make it sound like it was a fast job. It was a meticulous process that spanned months. While they were reusable, they had to be meticulously inspected, replaced (glued) if needed and waterproofed. With each tile being unique it was a painstaking job. So no rapidly reusable.

@Hrosik7114281 @r3a9an_k_ No, they didn’t replace all TPS after every flight. The tiles were designed to be reusable, with many lasting for dozens of missions. Instead, they underwent inspection, repair, and selective replacement between flights rather than being replaced entirely….

People are saying the heatshield is a solved problem. While there was no burn through into the Ship's steel, there were still places where (it appears to me at least) the plasma made it in between the tiles and burned ablative leaving these trails.

@Phantom2Phlyer @justinackermann @AI_EmeraldApple Test like you flight it. It’s probably a matter of slightly modifying throttle levels from whatever the simulations had shown. They could spend more time simulating or just fly the thing. And we know SpaceX would rather fly.

My point is, why didn't they anticipate that? In the postmortem, they said something like "Gee, that darned V3 Raptor engine was a lot more powerful than we thought, and darn! It kicked that booster into the Twilight Zone. Who coulda thunk it?" When you have huge forces causing actions that could be catastrophic, then someone has to say, "Hey, what could go wrong here, and how can we mitigate against it?" It looked like to me the Starship engineers said, "Hey, it worked OK with V2, so no need to reevaluate it for V3." Again IMHO, there doesn't seem to be anyone overseeing the build whose purpose is to point out obvious flaws in logic. Maybe what SpaceX needs is a logician to keep this kind of obvious failure from happening.

The main failure of flight test 12 is actually a sign of how insanely powerful the Raptor 3 engine is. During "most engine cutoff," that extra power from the booster and the upperstage engines during the hotstage separation pushed the booster to flip sideways at 44 degrees per second, or 0.77 rads/s. Nominally, it should flip up instead of sideways more slowly. That rotation was WAY too fast in the wrong direction with added axial rotation, causing an estimated 2.2 g outward force at the nose of the booster, causing massive sloshing for the propellant. That caused gas ingestion, engine explosion, and cascading failure for the boostback. This led the booster to an uncontrolled fall at terminal velocity. I think for the next flight, they are going to have to change the gimbal profile for the MECO to reduce rotation and counteract the upperstage engine push, increase the coast time to allow propellant to settle, and stagger the relight more slowly with 2 engines per 3-4 seconds or so. This won't need many hardware changes, mostly software changes, so the next launch will probably be sooner than expected... classic too much of a good thing problem.

@JValentine1972 @LomaxFalconer @CSI_Starbase Starship’s engines are supposed to start up in such a way that the differential Raptor exhaust causes the flip. It might be just a matter of correcting throttle level and timing the sequence correctly. Real world data they got will solve that issue.

@LomaxFalconer @CSI_Starbase Absolutely, they've reintroduced the problem they solved by filling in a section of the old hot stage ring

🤯My goodness! I've always wanted to see Superheavy jump off the pad like that! Although I don't think this was as fast as they originally planned. But, now that the pad isn't holding the vehicle back anymore we can see the true monster thats been hiding this entire time.

@SpunkyEnigma @Vex_0fficial @mcrs987 Not going orbital is more SpaceX ‘s decision than the FAA’s. Lots of new rockets fly immediately orbital on first test flights.

@Vex_0fficial @mcrs987 Almost has to. Can’t see the FAA approving reentry otherwise

I think we got to see the consequences of the lack of full blast shielding. Boostback probably would have gone fine minus one engine had this single engine, either E5 or E6, not had an energetic event and took out 16 of its neighboring engines.

@otherside_X42 Attachment testing for HLS and/or tanker tiles: they’ll need special tiles all over the vehicle for cryo management.

genuinely what are they cooking at this point

@spgvxb @MarcusHouse @RGVaerialphotos Flight termination charges only need to “terminate” flight, not really completely destroy the booster. Trajectory becomes ballistic and predictable.

@MarcusHouse @RGVaerialphotos Does it make anyone else wonder if the flight termination charges would actually destroy that thing with that massive transfer tube?

Incredible @RGVaerialphotos! Managed to look right inside there. 🫡

@jarrichvdv @Rafi27R @AnthonyFGomez First stage survived just fine for 9 flights already. Again, engineering.

@Rafi27R @AnthonyFGomez My bigger question is how does that dome survive sitting right up against engines that are being lit

The future king emerges

@Rafi27R @AnthonyFGomez This is widely used in Russian rockets: check Soyuz and N1. It’s a matter of proper engineering. It’s like asking how come a suspended bridge does not fall compared to a more traditional one pillars along it’s length.

@AnthonyFGomez Can someone explain how those braces are supposed to hold the upper half? I feel like the rocket will just snap in half.. I mean I’m sure they are way bigger in person but still looks kinda iffy

@noah_vandal @XavierExteberri @QuaintTransfer @chris_j_paxton ?!? That’s not an argument. It’s apples and Cheerios. And before you start blaring “experts” we having these discussion using technology built by the experts.

@7heCulture @XavierExteberri @QuaintTransfer @chris_j_paxton yes. this is from the same "experts" who said we would have a population crisis by 2000 and that the sea levels would have risen by 1 meter by 2025

So interestingly enough this is basically false. Even if you had the millions of spare years, now fungi have evolved to decompose lignin in plants. We will never again see the massive coal beds forming. Which also means that industrial civilization could likely never arise again on this planet. This is our one shot, basically.

@noah_vandal @XavierExteberri @QuaintTransfer @chris_j_paxton We are sufficiently advanced today to be able to plot potential avenues for easy access to energy if civilization collapses. The current analysis shows there are none. It’s not a blind exercise.

@XavierExteberri @QuaintTransfer @chris_j_paxton we are consistently finding new sources though. and i bet a world wide catastrophe would present itself with new opportunities

@CroAglo @ArunTG12 @DiscussingFilm You are the average moviegoer that actually makes or breaks a movie. The fans’ money is deep in the pocket of WB. It’s the casuals that count when it comes to the box office.

This is actually a valid point. I admit I'm not a comic book reader. I'm more of a nostalgia, Reeves Superman fan. I'm very much a generic and cross-sectional, I would argue, type fan. My whole point was the movie is extremely far from being successful, as it likely won't break even. That's it, but the internet.....🤣🤣🤣🤣🤷‍♂️

James Gunn’s ‘SUPERMAN’ opens with $217M worldwide. Budget was $225M Read our review: bit.ly/SupesDF

@CroAglo @DiscussingFilm The trunks… the moment I saw the trunks a year ago my inner self said “I can’t watch this in a cinema”. Will wait to stream. Maybe a live-action Incredible would be a better superman-ish adaptation.

I haven't even seen it... not sure I ever will. I heard sufficient reviews. I'm a huge cinema fan. Bad movies are becoming extremely common. Any movie with a several-hundred-million-dollar budget has NO excuse to be junk on the basics. Unfortunately, that's exactly how this fails according to the negative reviews. They have common threads. Weak plot, disjointed, incoherent. I saw Megalopolis with great enthusiasm, because it was FFC, and it was horrendous. I walked out. Movie creators must get back to the basics of telling a compelling story before they're handed $250,000,000++ budget. Go watch Kim Fu Hustle if you need to learn the basics of quality filmmaking. It's low budget and very silly, but it demonstrates the fundamentals very well. I would like to see the DCU rebooted by Guillermo del Toro. That guy really knows how to tell a story and he could bring unbelievable enjoyment to comics... The studio would need to back off though and let his freak flag fly... if they took a risk like this, I predict multi-billion dollar successes for the DCU. Bottom line. They need to get back to the basics, but no one is doing that.

@PebMet1 @Josh143574359 When did NASA ever have to conduct so much testing with a single spacecraft? When you are launching once every 3 months the economics of being closer don’t matter. When you do multiple proploads and recycling per day, now you understand why every inch matters.

@Josh143574359 Being NASA has to keep Hydrogen as cold as they can, they didn't seem to have an issue keeping the tank a distance away.

I still don't get it. Why would you put tanks that close to the test stand?

@DrChrisCombs This aged like as well as milk left outside in summer

Continues to be one of the best tweets

@SpaceJunkie64 @booster_10 @FelixSchlang Immense amount of time? They don’t have to redesign this: just reinstall everything. 3 months tops with their deep pockets.

@booster_10 @FelixSchlang Yes, it is certainly sub optimal. That is going to take an immense amount of time & effort to return to operational.

Aerial view of Masseys test site after Ship 36 exploded during testing. 📷:What About It

@rudyastro06 @spacesudoer When there are people on board you have different procedures, duh!

@spacesudoer Interesting. If that’s true then firing is probably justified, it’s all very well when it’s a test flight but what if people were onboard?

From what I'm hearing, some engineers and QA technicians intentionally skipped checks on Ship 33 to meet the schedule. Many were fired this week.

@CMAimage @Tbtemplex @norminalnerd Anything is sensitive to those wind gusts if held by two tiny pins. It’s a simple physics problem, you can calculate that. 30kph is also the or close to the upper limit for the launch. Anything higher and it’s a scrub.

@Tbtemplex @norminalnerd I doubt a 200+ tons Booster is that sensitive to 20-30kmph wind gusts. Booster 14 was slowly swaying on the landing pins from the momentum of a more aggressive landing if I had to guess

The capture of Flight 7 was actually more brutal and efficient! Here's a comparison to flight 5 catch!

@greenetoo @deltaIV9250 Ehhrrr… makes no sense. If it was hardware related during thr flip maneuver (not entry burn, Superheavy does not do that) the flight controller would simply right the engine off even for the landing burn. The engine was probably starved of propellant due to g-forces.

@deltaIV9250 My absolutely uneducated in SpaceX hardware guess: failure to light on entry burn, reason unknown. Relight after the entire engine bay was heated by reentry was probably due to something melting or pressures rising in the fuel and O2 tanks due to that heating. Just a guess.

Still don’t understand how a raptor aborted and then turned on again