Starship's Third Flight Test [video]

They might do one to test deployment, but it'd be a throwaway. Their relight test was skipped (not said why), so they still don't have confirmation they can control where Starship re-eneters. Until that happens, it's very unlikely they'll target actual orbital velocity. The Starlink satellites do have thrusters, but they're ion engines, so not nearly enough thrust to get that last bit into orbit before they'd re-enter.

Exactly, they’ve reached feature parity with large expendable launch systems so they can piggyback paying customers with a high risk threshold (starlink) on flights they’d be doing anyways. Given their cadence this phase won’t last long, they’ll likely achieve at least one successful landing next flight.

My understanding is that Starship is financially comparable to Falcon 9 on a per-payload basis even if fully expended.

but for near-term needs like deploying bigger Starlink satellites and their moon lander contract they could probably power through without reentry survival

Starlink sat deployment, probably. I’m not convinced on the moon lander contract though. Each mission requires the moon lander itself, plus a number of tanker launches to refuel the moon lander. I think it’s something like 8-15 tanker launches.

If each of those tanker launches is an expendable vehicle that’s… probably economically survivable, but definitely not sustainable.

The point they were trying to make is that getting up is MVP, getting back down can be figured out later

OP's point is that the tests become a bit cheaper and a bit easier to get licenses for since they can get to orbit and can deploy Starlinks. The reentry problems of course have to be fixed, but the FAA mishap investigation will involve fewer delays, just like how Falcon 9 was able to keep flying, attempting landings without having to wait for a mishap investigation to finish every time a landing failed.

it's the expected outcome of an imperfect (literally not precisely perfect) reentry. something went wrong. it could be a very minor thing like a stuck valve somewhere. we'll know in the next test if they figured it out.

Yeah, breaking up in-air during re-entry (at 65 km going by last telemetry) seems like a potential big issue to fix.

That's what pretty much every non-SpaceX rocket does today with very few exceptions.

No quite; even if 1st and 2nd stages deliver cargo to orbit cheaper than competition, you still has to make sure there is enough demand to pay back the cost of Starship creation. That demand may require not just being cheaper, but to being substantially cheaper than competition, to enable additional uses.

What SpaceX is doing with Starlink reminds of the situation with early versions of Windows, when, as Bill Gates described, the industry wasn't keen to produce applications for it. So Microsoft started writing Word and Excel in house. Similarly, SpaceX created Starlink which needs lots of launches, and which couldn't exist with previous level of launch prices, but is able to make profits if the prices are as low as SpaceX can provide.

Parent's (correct) point is that it isn't a matter of the ascent trajectory. They can't leave the Starship up in orbit, and where it reenters needs to be controlled.

No, that's inefficient and real spacecraft don't do that for typical low earth orbits. Works in Kerbal Space Program, though.

Normal orbital insertion is a single burn to orbit (with staging). With the correct initial roll and pitch, the spacecraft follows a perfect gravity turn and ends up in a near circular orbit at main engine cut off.

You need a second burn just to enter orbit

Not necessarily - it is completely dependent on the ascent profile. For example, during the Apollo program, the Saturn V would fly directly into a parking orbit and only relight the S-IVB for the Trans-Lunar Injection burn.

Transfer internally between tanks in the bottom and top of the ship. This was one of the planned tests, I have not heard whether it was accomplished though.

They performed an in-ship fuel transfer, from one chamber to another. My understanding is that this is a very important pre-requisite for an actual transfer from one ship to another, because of the need to keep the fuel at cryogenic temperatures during the transfer, which is apparently not easy. Last time it was done was decades ago, but in kilograms. SpaceX just demoed a transfer of tons of fuel.

They used tanks inside the ship to transfer from 1 to another to prove the process, was discussed and called out as success, and talked about many times before the flight

They transferred something like 10 tonnes of fuel from one end of the ship to the other.

Jesus Christ, that really puts it into perspective what a game changer starship is

Yes, the official stream is only on Twitter now.

Musk decided that Twitter is now a video platform and he's decided to dogfeed with SpaceX.

They did that for IFT-2 and the first channel I went to was one of those crypto bullshit things too. Very dumb decision on SpaceX's (well probably Musk himself) part.

You weren't the only one, I clicked on it too, as did thousands of others, before finding a real stream

when you search spacex on x, you are presented the official account first.

when i searched spacex on multiple youtube apps this morning, i couldn't even find the official spacex account after going through pages of menus.

Wait, double it? Would you please link me?

They're in the ads business - watched hours = money.

Why remove spam and clickbait when it means less money? Youtube is the stereotype of post-hype company that is just milking its users to increase their bottom line, driving the entire product to a slow death.

They get paid to serve that spam. Why would they reduce the avenues to serve the spam?

Orbit is a speed, not a distance. You could do a suborbital hop that has its highest point beyond the orbit of the moon. (if you aim very, very well)

It's in space (above the Kármán line), but not in orbit. Orbit implies it has the velocity for staying in space, which isn't the intention here. If anything goes wrong they want to be able to not leave junk in orbit

Orbit is when you drop an apple off a dining room table - it’s just a very crappy orbit.

“On orbit” typically means in a stable orbit around a body - but in the case of starship, it could have been on orbit, the delta v is more than sufficient, but that’s an unsafe configuration if you don’t know your engines will relight.

Space is generally defined to be 100km above earth's surface, an arbitrary point called the Karman Line [1].

Orbit is when an object is traveling so fast that it reaches the horizon of a body before the body's gravity can pull it down to the surface, but perpetually. It's basically perpetually falling around the body. Imagine one of those guys in a wingsuit skimming along the surface of a mountain, never actually touching the surface. It's similar to that, but at a much higher scale.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line

Orbit is mostly about speed, not about height. Going straight up and down doesn't count, even if you pass the height that some orbital vehicles attain.

This vehicle is actually going orbital speed, but not quite orbital height (or rather, it's in an "orbit" that has a very eccentric elliptical shape that would cause it to hit the atmosphere on its way back around; it'd be well above a typical orbital height at apogee, though).

Orbit is when you turn the engines off and stay up there.

I did the math. So, the minimal orbit at 180 km, the one that grazes the earth's surface at its perigee, is about 7.75 km/s or 27,900 kph. The other commenters are right: it was never technically orbital.

edit:

    (let* ((μ 398600.0)     ;; km^3/s^2
           (r 6371.0)       ;; km
           (peri (+ r 0.0))
           (apo (+ r 180.0))
           (a (* 0.5 (+ peri apo))))
      (sqrt (* μ
               (- (/ 2.0 apo)
                  (/ 1.0 a)))))
    ;; 7.745844595118488

I don't believe that's the case—see the math in my sibling comment.

What’s grifty about nasa space flight? They’re a private news org that does incredible coverage of SpaceX and spends funds doing as such. They’re mostly donation driven but they don’t solicit them really. They just thank folks that do on their livestream. Their forums are an absolute goldmine of knowledge if you take a look and it is an incredibly friendly community.

i get the same message, but if you log into twitter then it says the stream will begin at 5:52am PDT

It's SpaceX's problem that they're not where the public expect them to be.

I've been listening to SFN for about 20 minutes now and haven't heard a single reference to donations. Like parent, they're my preferred feed.

If you can get SpaceX's twitter to work, you can use them for audio. If so, EverydayAstronaut will likely have the best video.

Whatever the infrastructure spacex is using for the stream, the twitter front end doesn't load for me. That's what I meant.

edit: now it loads but it has 10s delay so I'm sticking to VLC

It is, how to reproduce:

Twitter stream page, F12, network tab, look for m3u8 file, right click, copy url, open in VLC

On shores of Africa, in Gulf of Mexico... yes, in 2024 ships can travel far

They are on vacation.

Some species are rare. You need to look in the right places if you want to catch some fine raptors.

Illegal fishing by Chinese fleets is now commonplace in Africa, in Argentina, etc [0], so given how much they've expanded operations over the years it's only a matter of time before you see them there too, if it hasn't happened already.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/26/world/asia/ch...

As of today, it's the new normal!

Just like the first belly flop video.

The thirty seconds from 1:00 are unreal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA6ppby3JC8

Ahh, beautiful, thanks! :D

Sounds like the perfect music to calm down in the evening or while cooking.

the instability was due to partial engine relight

FWIW, this seems to be the m3u8 link of that stream: https://prod-ec-us-west-2.video.pscp.tv/Transcoding/v1/hls/g...

Placing the heat tiles is (currently) entirely manual, and is very time-consuming. Starship is big.

The key demonstration is “relight in a vacuum”, which was the test that was skipped late in the stream. If you can do this then deorbiting is possible. Relight of the booster doesn’t demonstrate this, unfortunately.