roystgnr
9hr ago
Israel/Palestine conflict was an American lefty thing to worry about too. In the MetaFilter heyday around 2010 it was (along with declawing cats and male circumcision) recognized as one of the "third rail" topics that could be expected to start heated fights on that (American-centric, though leftist enough to feel ashamed of that) forum.
roystgnr
10hr ago
This one was a real nail-biter
As a bet, maybe. As a live-stream, not by their standards.
They set the nail-biter bar way too high in the last 10 minutes of their first controlled reentry, Flight 4, starting at around T+57:11, when you can see the back side of a forward flap start to glow. The live-stream stops swapping between 3 other cameras and now focuses solely on The Flap as it's torn completely through by the plasma intrusion.
Fifteen seconds later I'm seeing whole thermal protection tiles ripped off into the slipstream ... but it's still going. At T+58 I'm warning my kids that that plasma temperature is thousands of degrees and the video is probably about to stop abruptly when the whole ship explodes, but so far it's still going. At T+59 I'm squinting because the lens cover is partially obscured by spatters of what must have been molten steel, but it's still going. Just before T+1:00 the video does stop abruptly, and I'm sure the thing is dead ... and 5 seconds later it's back, still going. 2 minutes later we lose video again, for 40 seconds this time, but just as I'm wondering if we're merely seeing telemetry from a falling black box amidst wreckage, ship video comes back; it's still going. Soon it looks like it's nose down, surely too far to be a maneuver, probably out of aerodynamic control ... until, though the cracked and splattered camera cover, you see a near-skeleton of a flap actuate again, and the ship levels off, 15km up, still going. At T+1:04:07 the host literally says "This is a nail-biter!" Ship's slowing to subsonic, but still plummeting into the Indian Ocean night, video pure black, telemetry hitting 1km altitude and surely about to end with a dead belly-flop into the water ... but then the black is lit up by engine light, the flap is clearly visible (minus what looks like half its heat shield and a quarter of its structure), the ship flips sharply and stabilizes at vertical, and water spray fills the view for a moment as the ship comes to a stop.
At T+1:06:06, the ship tips into the water post-splashdown, and the decimated-but-still-working flap appears to tear loose, job complete and permission to die finally granted.
roystgnr
11hr ago
In every rational market the reaction of prices to news doesn't hinge on "is this news good" versus "is this news bad", but rather on "is this news better than expected" versus "is this news worse than expected". This was their best v3 launch so far, even aside from it being their first operational launch, but I'm not surprised if it's not the best by as far as the market was expecting. Flight 12 had 2 engine shutdowns on ascent, but massive (dozens of) relight failures on the boostback and landing burns, Flight 13 had an aborted ascent but then had a fine ascent on their second try and had slightly-less-massive (boostback shutdown when only 80% done, fewer but still too many landing burn engine failures) failures on the relights. Flight 14 had only recoverable failures (2 engines shutdown on ascent, 4 relights aborted on boostback and landing), but it still had enough failures that they didn't risk completing the full planned testing phase of the mission, and I wouldn't be surprised if investors had been hoping for a little better than that. There's now a good chance that SpaceX won't even try for another catch on Flight 15, of ship or of booster much less both.
Getting satellites into orbit is huge, though. They're still not getting the payload margins they want (they launched 26 Starlink v3s from a ship that's supposed to be able to do 60 eventually), but what they did get to orbit is roughly 3 times the mass and 10 times the additional bandwidth capacity of a Falcon 9 Starlink launch, which is a pretty nice start.
IMHO the biggest question right now is cadence. They've been doing v3 Starship launches every 2 months since Flight 12, but before this flight they were talking about NET October 19 for Flight 15 and (in a "super provisional" schedule) October 30 for Flight 16, the first Starship launch from Florida. I'm sure those will be delayed, but I'm hoping it'll be delays of weeks rather than months.
roystgnr
13hr ago
You beat me to it; thanks! I'm trying to actually get work done and not just get nerd-sniped by the livestream, so I missed the deorbit burn too. Looks like it went fine, thankfully; they're nearly down to 100km now and probably 5 or 10 minutes away from hitting atmosphere.
roystgnr
14hr ago
Aaaand ... they're going to bring it down early. Aiming at the Northern Pacific contingency zone for splashdown, after a deorbit burn, about an hour from now, for a total time in orbit of only 3 hours instead of 8.5. Not sure whether this means they actually are seeing sensor readings that suggest the relight will be riskier than they'd expected, or whether they're just having the same "if this goes wrong it'll be literally the biggest failure of its kind ever" thoughts I outlined above and decided not to push their luck after an imperfect launch.
roystgnr
15hr ago
Starship Flight 14 is in orbit; it's just finished deploying satellites as I type. Looks like @TheDag won his bet with @ArjinFerman, with about 3 months to go. Recent discussion of this and other bets.
IMHO I'm still on track to lose my bet with Arjin, though there's three years left for things to get more interesting there. Things got a little more interesting in the wrong direction this morning, with SpaceX making a last-minute call to do the final (only 19 seconds long! Their suborbital trajectories really are really close to orbital!) orbital insertion burn after an ascent in which one of the six upper stage engines shut down early.
An early engine shutdown or two (they had one on the booster too) isn't the end of the world for the ascent - they carry extra fuel reserves for that contingency, and just keep the other engines lit a little longer if it happens - but it does mean a higher chance that the most exciting potential failure here is still to come. Starship did go to orbit, but we have yet to learn for certain whether Starship should have gone to orbit. They're hoping to do about 8 more hours of orbital coasting, then relight an upper stage engine for a deorbit burn. They also get to a "checkpoint" every hour or two where they can do an early deorbit burn and an early controlled reentry over ocean if they anticipate any issues with the full-length mission. But, if there's anything wrong with the upper stage that prevents the relight, then instead of another nice reentry and splashdown, we'll have the largest individual vehicle to make orbit (at least 25% heavier than the Shuttle orbiter, and something like a quarter the mass of the entire International Space Station after all its individual parts were assembled) stuck in orbit, eventually reentering out-of-control. This would be the largest event ever of that nature (Skylab was maybe 75% the mass of the Starship orbiter) and would be by far the largest recent event (the series of irresponsibly-littered Long March 5B upper stages were something like 20% the mass of Starship).
Depends on why. If they'd just decided to be extra paranoid and stay suborbital, they'd have gone to orbit in October instead. If some wild disaster had blown things up on the pad, Starship would be shut down for investigations for at least the rest of the year for sure.
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