Spacex reports that this is the second test of Starship where all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy Booster started up successfully and completed a full-duration burn during ascent.
• Starship has a second successful hot-stage separation. It powering down all but three of Super Heavy’s Raptor engines and successfully igniting the six second stage Raptor engines before separating the vehicles.
• Following separation, the Super Heavy booster successfully completed a flip maneuver and completed a full boostback burn to send the booster towards its splashdown point in the Gulf of Mexico.
• the Super Heavy boostersuccessfully lit several engines for its first ever landing burn before the vehicle experienced a RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly aka it exploded). The booster’s flight concluded at approximately 462 meters in altitude and just under seven minutes into the mission.
• Starship’s six second stage Raptor engines all started successfully and powered the vehicle to its expected orbit, becoming the first Starship to complete its full-duration ascent burn.
• While coasting, Starship accomplished several of the flight test’s additional objectives, including the opening and closing of its payload door (aka the pez dispenser,) and initiating a propellant transfer demonstration. Starship did not attempt its planned on-orbit relight of a single Raptor engine due to vehicle roll rates during coast. Results from these demonstrations will come after postflight data review is complete.
• Starship went on to experience its first ever entry from space, providing valuable data on heating and vehicle control during hypersonic reentry. Live views of entry were made possible by Starlink terminals operating on Starship.
• The flight test’s conclusion came during entry, with the last telemetry signals received via Starlink from Starship at approximately 49 minutes into the mission.
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It’s great to be able to see the progress made with each test-flight. Can’t wait for all that is to come, especially the first time the booster and Starship are successfully caught in mid-air by the megazilla arms ! That will be amazing when they pull it off .
It’s getting closer! But Starship isn’t quite ready yet, even as an expendable launcher. It rolled way too much in orbit, and entered the atmosphere at 90º, which is why it burned up. You also can’t deliver payloads while spinning, and the payload door didn’t seem to properly actuate. However, as an experiment they did make some advances in important areas. I can’t wait to watch IFT-4!
The best part of following the Starship development is that SpaceX is willing to play ball, given us lots of visibility into what’s going on and some beautiful live footage.
exactly.
Hopefully most of those issues will be resolved on the next flight, which I would guess will be May.
It basically proves it’s ready for use as an expendable payload launcher.
Let’s recall that on the old launcher industry standards, reusability is gravy.
Every aspect of the stack was tested apart from relignting in orbit and landing Starship. Every team has something to work on, this was a very successful test.
The whole test was quite exciting, but definitely the best part was seeing the images of the plasma glow during reentry.