SpaceX Starship Launch is Good but No Deployment of Starlink Dummy Satellites and Booster was Lost

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There was a good launch, good separation, and a good insertion.

All 6 engines were reignited on Starship. They got through the second stage burn.

They could not deploy the Dummy starlink satellites. They could not open the doors of the bay.

They reflew a super heavy booster for the first time.

They canceled the Raptor relight of the Starship engines. They have lost orientation (attitude) control but will still try to reenter and go to the Indian Ocean. However, loss of orientation control means they have to get super lucky to actually reach the Indian Ocean intact. They vented the fuel and are making an uncontrolled re-entry.

Going from block 1 to block 2 and new Raptor engines caused a lot of problems.

14 thoughts on “SpaceX Starship Launch is Good but No Deployment of Starlink Dummy Satellites and Booster was Lost”

  1. Door not opening makes me wonder about how much structural twisting or buckling the ship is experiencing.

    Like having your camper off-level can twist the frame, jamming the door and windows.

    Tall and thin-skinned…

    Maybe his rocket isn’t stiff enough.

  2. Bromance has ended. Musk stepped down from role as special gov employee, like I anticipated. It is common with trump, rare can work with him for more than few months.

    – 25 % cut to NASA, science.
    – increased spending for military on the other hand
    – Big corrupt bill that increases budget deficit by a lot
    – Trump damaging business with lying and bad tariff practices.

    Naive people got disillusioned by trump. Now Musk will focus on things like his companies, what is good.

    • Special government employee – A Special Government Employee (SGE) is limited to serving no more than 130 days during any period of 365 consecutive days—regardless of whether the service is on a full-time, part-time, or intermittent basis.

  3. Gee, guys don’t get your panties in a wad. It took falcon a few dozen or more test flights to settle down. This big guy may take a few more than that to get stable.

  4. situation seems to have gotten worse since Elon start paying more attention to DOGE and playing Diablo like games than SpaceX.

    Actually, it started going downhill since he acquired Twitter.

    He IS the chief engineer of SpaceX after all isn´t he? Also, all that POLEMIC he is always involved can´t be good for the company.

    FOCUS ELON, FOCUS!

  5. I understand “Rockets are hard”, but the DOORS did not open.
    WTF! Seriously, my faith in in Elon’s minimalist engineering ideology is fading.
    REDUNDANCY, space craft need redundancy in key components.
    Doors HAVE to open 100% of the time, without exception.
    An entire mission of satellite deployment would have failed because of a DOOR!
    One engine can fail and the mission will still be successful, one door fails and the mission is a failure.

    • Typically rockets can only afford redundancy on extremely lightweight components like avionics. Chemical rocketry is a marginal enough thing to begin with that redundancy on mechanical components is just too heavy. So they substitute extreme quality control, try to reliably have just barely enough strength to get by.

      SpaceX is pushing the envelope here, seeing what breaks, fixing that, rinse and repeat. It seems frustrating, sure, but they they can afford to do it, if in the end the result is a very reliable craft.

      The challenge at this point is that diagnosing what broke is difficult when it burns up on reentry; They really need to land it intact for the best data.

      • Nailed it, “challenge … is diagnosing … when burns up … [in stead of landing intact]”

        Every time MuskCo announces a lower mass engine having higher internal pressure, higher thrust-to-weight ratio, I think “well, there’s going to be more failures soon”. As you posted, the ‘problem’ of rocketry is that it is surprisingly close to a non-starter, lifting the rocket itself along with all its oxidizer and fuel-propellant.

        Eyebrow raising pressures, stresses, physics compromises, time-money tradeoffs.

        For missions which are designated as do-able well, well in advance. Yep.

        There’s going to be a few crack ups.

  7. This is frustrating for me to watch. SpaceX is up to flight 9 and not one completely successful test mission. All 39 engines worked nominally this time and that’s good but the Star Ship rolled uncontrollably in sub-orbit and was destroyed. What’s with SpaceX not being able to handle Pitch, Roll, and Yaw? That is basic rocketry. It seems to me they need to switch to HOT gas Thrusters.

    • “not one completely successful test mission”

      This is how they learn. Build -> Test -> Fail -> Learn -> Repeat. The learning curve has proven steeper than we’d all like, but each “failed” test brings in new valuable data for the engineers.

    • Have you ever played Mastermind? SpaceX’s approach to rocket testing is similar.

      They’re not trying to get it right on the first flight. They’re trying to learn as much as possible from each flight. And as long as you get data back, failures teach you more than successes.

      It’s like you take a rope, and hang a weight on it, and the rope doesn’t break. Great, you know it will hold that weight, but you don’t know if it was one ounce from breaking, or a thousand pounds. OTOH, if you keep adding weight until it breaks, you know exactly at what tension it breaks, and if you make another rope the same way, you know how much you can safely hang on it.

      They’re repeatedly breaking the rocket, figuring out how it broke, and fixing that failure mode, instead of playing it safe. If they wanted to play it safe, they could have been launching payloads with Starship last year, just not as big of payloads as they want.

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