Business, Space, Technology and Society

New IFT-7 Schedule

18 Comments

From SpaceX: “SpaceX is targeting Thursday, January 16 for the seventh flight test of Starship from Starbase in Cameron County, Texas. The 60-minute test window opens at 4:00 p.m. CT. “

[Thursday-afternoon update]

[Friday-morning update]

[Bumped]

18 thoughts on “New IFT-7 Schedule”

  2. The last piece of data from stage 1 was 4285 mph at 84,226 feet, which is about Mach 6.4. The entry burn started at roughly 4900 mph at 173,000 feet, which is about Mach 6.8, but it was over long before the loss of signal.

    I was rather irritated with Blue Origin’s launch coverage. It brought Soviet or Chinese coverage to mind where you wouldn’t know that the Americans had done X, Y, and Z before. SpaceX simply didn’t exist in their universe. They were the first to do everything.

    That is not a sign of a healthy culture.

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    1. Oh I would cut them some slack here. They made it to orbit on try 1. Quite the achievement. Today is shaping up to be the most exciting day in aerospace since July 20, 1969.

      We now have our New Space versions of General Electric and Westinghouse. Let’s see where it takes us.

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  3. Looks like Starship had engine failure before SECO. At this moment, I suspect it is tumbling, and they cannot communicate with it and likely won’t regain signal until atmosphere maybe stabilizes it. It certainly won’t land where and how they wanted it too, but hopefully they do regain some comms so they can get some data on what went wrong.

    Great job catching the booster, but that part of the test was less important than Starship itself. And a major anomaly at orbital speeds and altitudes will likely cause government regulators to have major heartburn until the anomaly is resolved.

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    1. It’ll be interesting to know if Starship came back down effectively in one piece or in many fragments. It’s possible its FTS was activated at engine failure. My guess is there was a problem with the new fuel lines that led to engine lean and turbine failure…

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          2. That is one hell of a video watching it blow. Excitement guaranteed.

            Not sure about Musk’s statement that an improved Starship is ready to fly. I’m sure it is, but I suspect FAA will want them to explain what went wrong this time and how the improved vehicle won’t have it happen again. If they got the data for it, that’s awesome. If not, I don’t think even DOGE will have them flying so quickly.

          3. I got a like from Lori Garver for asking Scott Manley, who was splicing together various shots of the explosion and breakup into a time-consistent view, whether his task of analyzing the breakup would be easier if flight 7 had included an onboard banana for scale.

  5. Well looks like Blue Origin is technically winning the heavy lift space race with New Glenn having achieved orbit before Starship.

    Other than I suspect both will be grounded with FAA Mishap investigation though haven’t seen the announcement yet. Though Blue Origin should be able to continue rather quickly.

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  6. Falcon 9 achieved orbit first try 14 and a half years ago and has been routinely successfully landing since 2015.
    Starship has achieved orbital energy several times and apart from safety concerns for those on the ground could have been in orbit those times.
    I think Blue Origin was running the BE-4s throttled significantly which might mean they aren’t all that confident about seven at once.
    The low thrust to weight wouldn’t have done much for payload capacity and the booster was lost at high Mach.
    BO’s achievement isn’t all that impressive in light of that. Potemkin rocket.
    BTW what is happening to BO’s upper stage? Might take a while to re-enter from MEO unless it is arranged to re-enter or is orbital junk we don’t need.

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  9. I was in Scott Manley’s comments and did a very rough and quick bit of math on the risk to airliners.

    ****
    A bit of math. The Space Shuttle Columbia’s debris field was 2000 square miles. Starship was going 33% faster than Columbia, so I’d expect the debris to be scattered across 3500 square miles, which is about 100 billion square feet.

    Starship has 18,000 tiles, so I’ll double that for an estimate of how many pieces of debris there are. That would be a debris density of one piece per every 2.78 million square feet.

    A later model Boeing 737 has about 2600 square feet of top area, so it would have about a 1 in 1000 chance of being hit by any piece of debris if flying through the debris field, and the vast majority of any impacts would be minor. It would have about a 1 in 67,000 chance of a piece of debris hitting one of the two fans and possibly creating an engine out.

    And if there were 100 big hunks, such as batteries, TVC servos and linkages, and the six Raptors, and assuming the were also evenly spread over the 3500 square miles, there would be one hunk per billion square feet, with a 1 in 380,000 chance of the airliner being hit by one.

    So I’d say slight impact damage would occur once for every 1000 airliners in the debris field, a loss of engine once for every 67,000 airliners, and a catastrophic loss once for every 380,000 airliners.

    *****

    That’s of course a 5 minute shotgun estimate, but the FAA should already be sitting on top of detailed risk estimates for the Space Shuttle, especially in light of the Columbia breakup.

    Shuttle flights resumed, and it re-entered over the continental US, so obviously the risk was acceptable.

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