Charlie Foxtrot
Super Anarchist
SpaceX's High-Altitude test of the Starship was... errr... mostly successful.
The first high altitude test of SpaceX's Super Heavy Lift 2nd stage, the Starship, went pretty well. Control of the assent, the 3 Raptor engines, inflight shutdowns, and transition to the belly-flop reentry posture went very well. Looks like the horizontally falling Starship was well controlled by the four articulating fins. Restart of the Raptors enabled the very high risk "kick-flip" maneuver to succeed. And the vehicle hit the center of the touch down pad... just a little toooooo fast.
Like all of the best Elon tests, this one ended in a huge fireball.
I'm going to guess -- which absolutely ensures I'll be wrong -- SpaceX was right to worry about the fuel and oxidizer sloshing around after the "kick-flip" maneuver. To my highly untrained eye, it looks like at least one of the Raptors wasn't developing full thrust.
I'll bet this test was 80-90% successful. Well done, SpaceX!
The first high altitude test of SpaceX's Super Heavy Lift 2nd stage, the Starship, went pretty well. Control of the assent, the 3 Raptor engines, inflight shutdowns, and transition to the belly-flop reentry posture went very well. Looks like the horizontally falling Starship was well controlled by the four articulating fins. Restart of the Raptors enabled the very high risk "kick-flip" maneuver to succeed. And the vehicle hit the center of the touch down pad... just a little toooooo fast.
Like all of the best Elon tests, this one ended in a huge fireball.
I'm going to guess -- which absolutely ensures I'll be wrong -- SpaceX was right to worry about the fuel and oxidizer sloshing around after the "kick-flip" maneuver. To my highly untrained eye, it looks like at least one of the Raptors wasn't developing full thrust.
I'll bet this test was 80-90% successful. Well done, SpaceX!