Business, Space, Technology and Society

IFT-3

29 Comments

Launch time has slipped, now in a little over half an hour.

https://x.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1768254684504936574?s=20

[Post-flight update]

My immediate thoughts: Booster didn’t survive, but it did seem to make it to the ocean intact, so that’s a step forward. They’ll probably figure out why they didn’t get a proper relight of the center Raptors, but that’s not important to a customer, any more than whether a Falcon booster comes home does.

As for Starship, they can clearly get into orbit, and open the payload bay doors, which is necessary to deploy a payload. But they didn’t demonstrate on-orbit engine relight, and until they do that, the ship can’t be considered operational, because it has to be able to deorbit, even if it can’t survive entry, so it doesn’t become a navigation hazard. They also seem to have an issue with attitude control, unless they planned that continual roll during coast (and that may have contributed to the failed entry as well), and absent that, they can’t deploy satellites. Until they solve those two issues, they can’t consider it operational. But I think that this was a huge step forward, and after another test in which they do relight the engines on orbit, and can demonstrate attitude control, they can start deploying satellites (likely Starlink initially).

[Update late morning]

Here‘s Marina Koren’s take.

[Update a while later]

OK, technically, they didn’t make orbit, but they certainly achieved orbital speed (as planned). They didn’t circularize because they didn’t intend to.

[Friday-morning update]

Here‘s Eric Berger’s take. He says that the roll was not planned, and it was why they didn’t attempt the relight.

[Bumped]

29 thoughts on “IFT-3”

  1. What happened to the SpaceX YouTube feed? They stopped the live feed after the first long hold and never returned.

    1. I didn’t know they even had a YouTube feed. They moved their other launch feeds to Xitter a while ago, but finally removed the need to log in to Xitter to watch.

      I had the X feed on one computer and the NSF YouTube feed on another, with one earbud from each computer in my head at work.

    2. What you saw was probably a cryptocurrency scammer claiming to be SpaceX. The video was probably stopped after the scammer was reported to YouTube.

      1. Exactly, at first I was mad at SpaceX but not their fault. The proper direction is YouTube. I hope they get sued for airing this scam.
        It was very hard to distinguish a scam site when you are using a cable box to watch it on a big screen TV like I do. This one was rather well done, but after careful reflection, spottable. I hope nobody with Bitcoin to spare got swept into it. If they did, I hope get their money back plus damages from YouTube.

      2. Yep. It was the launch video until the hour delay then they started a rerun of a Musk speech and the crypto junk.

  2. There is a chance that the continued roll during coasting was a barbeque roll for thermal reasons. It sounds like the cargo door and propellant transfer tests were successful.

    1. I wonder if a continuous spin may be necessary to eject the satellites from the Pez Dispenser with fewer moving parts, similar to the flip maneuver that they initially intended to use for staging,

  3. Some comments I made at Instapundit

    Towards the end of what we saw there seemed to be a whole lot of plasma concentrated at the bottom of the ship, as if it may have ended up base-end first, or at least with the base way too far down. Plasma blasting inside the skirt would do all kinds of horrible damage, and that area has all kinds of propellant lines.

    And hadn’t long thin COPV lines under steel cover plates been added to the side of the ship? If it was having trouble controlling roll, those could’ve suffered catastrophic heating and blown up.

    ***

    Shortly prior to the re-entry, the video showed all kinds of debris traveling along with Starship. Did anyone ever comment about what that might be? It looked almost like a cloud of tiles or something. It could be the ship was doomed before it ever touched the atmosphere.

    ****

    Nothing would’ve been from stage separation, obviously. Whatever it was had once been part of Starship. For a while I wondered if maybe their PEZ dispenser test had involved dispensing something, but that didn’t make much sense because they’d have ejected something more akin to a Starlink mockup..

    What if something rather catastrophic knocked out one of the flaps on the side we weren’t seeing? That might explain what might’ve been tiles (and oddly shaped ones), along with the roll problems we saw early in re-entry.

    ****

    I commented earlier that it looked towards the end of what we saw as if there was way too much plasma concentrated around the base and skirt. If the starboard flaperon was dead, and in an up position, it might explain the re-entry problems. To fix the roll, they’d have to also raise the starboard aft flap (the one with the camera we were seeing things with). But that would mean both rear flaps were up, which would pitch the vehicle nose up and cause the base-first re-entry problem.

    In a perfect world matching diagonally opposite flaps would cure roll and pitch problems, but that introduces a yaw problem. The flight control software and ground teams may have been trying to muddle their way through an unsolvable problem.

    And of course:

    They shouldn’t be pre-mature about declaring that the ship broke up during re-entry. It could just be lost. It’s the Pacific, and people are still looking for Amelia Earhart. Someone needs to check Howard Island.

    2. Speculation on the Everyday Astronaut stream was that the RCS thrusters were icing over, which explains both the debris and apparent control issues.

  5. I think the attitude issues and the lack of re-light, which I suspect was related to the attitude control issue, will ensure the next flight is suborbital too.

    1. I was wondering why they wanted to do a Gagarin style suborbital loop these first few tests. Not having to deal with needing to reignite and control reentry makes sense, especially, as the first few tests showed, you probably won’t get that far. I do hope they can do the orbital test before the end of the year.

      Then again, when they changed to Indian Ocean, I was wondering if they weren’t secretly using Australia as their target. It and northern Canada seem to attract space debris.

  6. Lost many heat shield tiles as well. May have been attributable to the loss of attitude control in vacuum because of RCS issues, causing bad or excessive accelerations on the vehicle. We’ll know soon enough.

    All in all a good day for SpaceX. With plenty left to do. I’m not buying into the Artemis schedule. But OTOH I wouldn’t be surprised if they sacrifice a Starlink satellite or two on the next flight just to prove out the Pez dispenser. That’s a high priority also.

    1. As Tim Dodd pointed out after the launch in his podcast, with a little extra burn time on Starship’s engines, we’d have had a demonstrable 200 ton to orbit expendable rocket [on a repeatable and sustainable cadence – my opine].

      There was a time, not that long ago, that this would have seemed like a total dream somewhere in La La Land….

  7. When Starship does finally become operational it will probably be the most thoroughly tested spacecraft in history, and will therefore soon acquire a reputation for rock-solid reliability. Big bangs now, big bucks later.

        1. Are you sure? Wasn’t that possibility mentioned in the Pilots Technical Reference Manual right after mention of MCAS playing Russian Roulette with the trim wheel?

          1. My remark was prompted by the breaking news that the camera in the Boeing factory that would have had a record of the door being installed “just happened” to have its memory erased.

            I’ll be here all week, and tip your waiter.

      2. I am wondering about the working-stiff whose Corolla in the employee lot at SFO got smashed by the tire that fell off a Triple-Seven on takeoff.

        Will the aviation insurance carrier (private pilots have such insurance — does United self-insure?) declare this poor guy’s car “a total loss” and offer him a low-ball cash value less what a salvage yard would pay for the car, wishing him luck “car shopping”?

        Too bad the wheel and tire rolled and bounced into the neighboring rental car return lot. If the tire was wedged into his smashed car he could have announced, “I’m keeping it!” and maybe got a lot of money for it as a collector’s item?

  9. I appreciated the irony of them playing elevator music while they did tests on opening/closing the payload door.

    I am guessing the high level of venting that Starship sustained over the entire flight was for executing the propellant transfer objective, then simply for keeping prop settled for re-entry. Controlling the ship with sloshing propellant would be a nightmare for any control system.

  11. IIRC they built a couple of Starships with no Elonerons or heatshield.
    If they can get a couple of well controlled landings into the ocean offshore they could start recovering boosters and having an expendable upper stage for launching Starlinks.

  12. It took 4 tries before Falcon 1 put a payload in orbit. 7 tries before Falcon 9 stuck a landing. As things stand now, Starship could deliver Artemis II to lunar orbit, using the DIVUS for lunar orbit insertion. Or, you could get Skylab II out of the Smithsonian, and launch it.

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