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Commercialization

Starship SN11 Lifted Off But Didn't Land In One Piece

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
March 30, 2021
Filed under ,

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

18 responses to “Starship SN11 Lifted Off But Didn't Land In One Piece”

  1. rb1957 says:
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    sure, it landed in one piece …
    just didn’t stay in one piece for long !
    what were they thinking ? (launching in such weather)

  2. Johnhouboltsmyspiritanimal says:
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    In about four months they have flown four full sized starships. The naysayers will say and crashed all four of them but that myopic view failed to see what was learned from four prelaunch and launches. Four nomina! Uphill shutdown of engines, four apogee maneuvers to the belly flop position, four attempts to restart the engines for flip to vertical and landing. And one high speed landing. This was the last of this iteration of starship so while the weather was really for all the bloggers and YouTube pundits failure or success it was on to SN15 and it’s improvements either way. They will get there sooner we think and they are doing it all very out in the open for the fans and detractors to watch.

    • Jonna31 says:
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      SpaceX is gaining very valuable data from every test. Their iterative design-build-test approach clearly works. The naysayers have no point. SpaceX and Starship will succeed. They have the resources, time and talent to do it.

      Where I disagree though is the timeline offered by some about when Starship will be ready. As I see it, Starship+Superheavy will do “beta tests” to orbit starting late 2022. Landing, refinement and additional iteration to make it reliable will stretch into 2023 and 2024. So we’re really talking a late 2024-2025 timeframe before we get a bonafied “Starship 1.0” ready to perform commercial missions. And that’s actually crazy fast. Concept to launch for the largest space vehicle ever in about 6 years? That’s a speed to be proud of.

      I think based on what we’ve seen, and what we know they need to do, that expectations that Starship+Super Heavy will be ready to go as a commercial launcher anytime 2022 or 2023 is baseless. It forgets how the roll out of the Falcon 9 was – it took a while to get going, but when it did it did. It forgets how Falcon Heavy was years behind schedule. Both eventually fulfilled their promise (and them some), but the predicted schedules were way off. And that’s fine. It’s better to get it right.

      As an unmanned payload launcher, I think Starship will be a mid-decade development, and spend the second half of the 2020s basically retracing the steps of Falcon 9’s capability progression until the manned version arrives around 2028 or so.

      Why mention that at all?

      The odious SLS program is probably going to launch Artemis I before Starship+Super Heavy fly together for the first time (much less fly something useful). And Artemis II, which is already being built, will certainly beast the manned Starship to the pad. Pronouncements in some quarters that Starship will beat both seem very off. The schedule doesn’t make sense, even at the SLS’s glacial launch rate.

      But moreoever I think that conversation almost makes the amazing things that Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon can do seem like second rate compared to the promise of what Starship *could* do. We shouldn’t be so enamored of Starship to not fully take advantage of what Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon can do today.

      As I see it, Falcon 9 will be SpaceX’s bread and butter and bill payer for most of the decade with Starship and Starship derived vehicles being a late 2020s / 2030s replacement for the Falcon line. And Crew Dragon, not Starship, will be their principle manned space vehicle in that time. And that’s great! It gets their (and taxpayers) month worth. I don’t think there will be a lot of direct competition between SLS and Starship until later in the decade. Starship, while increasingly capable, will be developmental while SLS is launching lunar missions. SLS will be politically protected until that point, but a fully matured, manned Starship, makes further SLS indefensible. Block II will never happen.

      Starship is making great progress. But it still has a lot of work to do. And that’s fine! No rush. Better to get it right. In the mean time, Crew Dragon can open up the potential of the ISS.

      • fcrary says:
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        It certainly isn’t clear how long it will take before astronauts fly on a SpaceX Starship. And agree some people are highly optimistic to think it will happen within a year or two.

        But a more interesting question is what those orbital “beta tests” (as you put it) will be like. They may be carrying Starlink satellites, since a failure launching would only affect SpaceX and not a paying customer. And the FCC license to operate Starlink requires that they get half of the full constellation up by 2024.

        It’s also possible that they will get orbital launch figured out and working reliably much sooner than they get reentry and landing figured out. In that case, they might flying payloads for customers as soon very soon after the first successful orbital flight. If the vehicle doesn’t get back intact, that doesn’t affect the customer. That’s what SpaceX did while developing first stage landing for Falcon 9. Let the customer pay for the flight, get the customer’s payload to orbit, and then do whatever tests or experiments SpaceX needs to do to develop reuse.

      • ed2291 says:
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        SLS and Space X are not equal and should not be regarded as such. Space X has a record of achieving what nobody else has done and legacy space has said was impossible at any price.

        Starship is building on the success and experience of Falcon 9.

        SLS has a record of being very late, vastly over budget, and based on poor outdated ideas. Even the Space Shuttle was more reusable. It survives only because it has lobbied congress by doing work in their districts.

      • ed2291 says:
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        You said, “And that’s fine! No rush.”

        We landed on the moon the summer after I graduated from 10th grade. I am now 68 years old. Humans have not been out of low earth orbit since 1973. Real progress has always been promised 10 years down the road but has not happened. There should in fact be more of a rush.

      • p4e1 says:
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        SpaceX has said that they plan on orbital testing this Summer. Given that, it seems pretty reasonable to think that they could make orbit this year.

        Their focus on rapid manufacturing, the switch to steel instead of carbon fiber, ample experience, and plentiful funding is going to greatly accelerate their rate of progress far beyond anything they achieved with Falcon 9.

    • Todd Austin says:
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      I would add to that, built multiple flyable vehicles. Gaining skills in manufacturing these vehicles is key to their plans – building and flying lots of these, the antithesis of putting all your eggs into one rocket basket. *cough*SLS*cough*

  3. ed2291 says:
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    The big picture is Space X is building right now what is needed for expansion from earth to our solar system instead of small incremental improvements on inadequate designs which will take generations. Of course there will be failures when there are so many radically new designs and prototypes, but that is the way to make the fastest progress.

    As Elon Musk said, “A high production rate solves many ills.”

  4. Andrew Sexton says:
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    As a friend of mine noted to me, he thinks that SpaceX’s simulation capabilities are quite extensive and capable. Couple this with a robust test program and all the data it provides. These guys will sort this out.

  5. David_McEwen says:
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    As far as I’m concerned, the most challenging thing about starship is that it needs to land and *relaunch* without refurbishment (or very, very little), since it will be landing on another body and relaunching. The level of reliability in design is going to have to be substantially over what the current falcon 9 has. Basically, it will need to be at aircraft level reliability for solar system exploration.

  6. ProfSWhiplash says:
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    I’m still curious why, even with a decent sized test window (7:00 am to 3:00 pm CDT — EIGHT hours), and that it looked like the sun was going to start burning through the fog, did they decide to launch in that pea-soup anyway (only an hour in)? And this is NOT about seeing it being important only for bloggers and YouTube pundits. This was a Flight Test! And despite all the onboard sensors that might get transmitted to the ground stations, a visible observation is still necessary, for new aircraft including rockets; especially in cases where what data was transmitted might not give the full picture.
    Even with an LOS occurrence, a visual record would have provided additional insights, like observing any stray flames or structural loss of integrity (including where and how). It was very right that they had established that keep-out zone on the ground. I’m sure SpaceX will eventually determine the cause, but only now having to do a lot of detective work with the pieces that they’d dug out of the ground. It should be not unlike FAA & NTSB investigations of aircraft crash sites where no one witnessed the event.
    I dunno, but I’ve a feeling that either Elon or whoever was the launch director might have had a bit of launch fever impatience. (Wonder if he had anything to do with the fog-or-no decision to launch?)

    • fcrary says:
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      I’m not sure if I see it that way. SpaceX is actually building Starship prototypes faster than they can fly them. (Largely because they want to have a production facility to crank out Starships, and developing the production line is as important to them as the test flights.) That means the SN11 prototype which exploded this week was already under construction during the earlier flight tests, and didn’t incorporate a bunch of changes based on experience from those flights. They had already decided to scrap the partially built SN12 to SN 14 prototypes and move one to SN15 (which does incorporate many of those changes.) SN11 was far enough along that they decided to just finish it and get whatever additional data they could from flying it. But that was just because the incremental improvement in the data justified the incremental cost of _not_ scrapping it like SN12 to SN14.

      It isn’t clear why they didn’t wait a couple hours for the fog to burn off, but the visual data would have an incremental improvement to already incremental extra data they were expecting. I suspect that just wasn’t considered to be of especially high value. And they do have other things to worry about, like ongoing construction of new facilities at Boca Chica (which has to be paused for a Starship flight test.) So I wouldn’t call the decision to launch in fog to be “go fever”. Perhaps more like, “Let’s get this over with so we can clear the pad and move on to flying SN15.” Or, for all we know, they may have wanted to see if they could launch in fog. That would be a valid part of a flight test; the flight rates SpaceX wants to eventually achieve just won’t be possible if every launch has to be done under ideal weather conditions.