Spacex flight termination (destruction of the booster) was at 3:20. This was after the stage separation.
The second stage (Starship) reached roughly 148km altitude before it was also destroyed.
Upper stage now at 148km altitude pic.twitter.com/3LdPSkLJrL
— JgaltTweets (@JgaltTweets) November 18, 2023
Based on the last altitude/velocity numbers on SpaceX's webcast, I estimate a Starship achieved trajectory of -1740 x 150 km with (if not entirely destroyed by the flight termination system) impact NE of the Turks and Caicos Is.
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) November 18, 2023
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Elon didn’t do it or it would have been at 4:20.
I wonder if hot separation was too much for the booster. Presumably they throttled down the Starship engines as much as possible, but maybe they’ll have to change to start only one or two engines?
Lots of heat shield tiles lost during ascent. That’s likely the hardest problem they have to solve, and perhaps not possible on several completed starships they have currently sitting in inventory.
39 Engines functioned generally well. Booster failure possibly due to inertial fuel slosh/engine starvation issues in flip over manoeuvre. Might be adressible just with more gentle flip-over or modified baffles. They’ll have good telemetry inside fuel feed system to help debug and remediate.
Starship sprung an oxygen leak (likely on an engine) as it approached orbital speed that ultimately blew up the ship a few seconds before it would have been in orbit. Possible it was damage from hot staging, but they will likely be able to quickly address and retrofit fixes to whatever went wrong.
Why was the booster teminated? Was it deliberate of because of a malfunction?
The current speculation is that the booster pulled negative gees during the hot staging (from the 6 Starship Raptor 2 engines pushing the stage backwards. That and possibly sloshing of propellant during the flip starved at least some of the Raptors.
Repeat this with me. Rocket turbopumps do not take ingesting gas instead of liquid gracefully.
In the frames of video before the FTS did its job there are some energetic events in the engine bay on the Superheavy booster.
The plan was for the booster, if it survived to stage sep and the boostback burn, to set down offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.
I predict success in the next two attempts (and every failure gives SpaceX data to go and fix weaknesses in the design and flight profile)
Turns out there really are Nazis in space after all.
Stage zero is apparently in pristine condition. Stage separation .
Awesome launch.
Good second step.