Starship Flight 9
Keith’s 28 May Update: I just did an interview with Al Jazeera about the SpaceX Starship 9 flight Audio. Keith’s 27 May note: I just did live coverage of the SpaceX Starship Flight 9 mission on Bloomberg Radio. After two last minute holds the rocket lifted off re-using a first stage that had already flown – 29 engines were being re-flown – and one of them was being flown for its third flight. After staging the first stage was brought back – but under heightened stress loads to test the vehicle. Just as the landing burn was going to happen telemetry stopped and SpaceX confirmed that “Heavy just demised” in SpaceX lingo. The Ship (second stage) made its way into space and tested some engines. The plan was to deploy 8 Starlink demonstrators but the payload door would not open properly so that task was aborted. Upon re-entry the vehicle lost control and spun and was eventually lost.
3 responses to “Starship Flight 9”
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It would sure be better if Space X could get a mostly successful flight. After the last three mostly failures, I am beginning to lose hope. The future of the US space program is at stake.
I don’t think it’ll matter even if they could get it “mostly” working. they still have to be able to refuel in orbit with another starship 15-20 times. It’s so unbelievable far-fetched when you consider turnaround times, success rates, system design. This drive to privatize everything is killing us. The rockets are the “easy” part compared to the science and pretty soon we won’t be able to do either let alone beat china anywhere. The hard truth is there aren’t enough customers for a private industry launch vehicle. its 99% the government and if you want the space program to do the goals they are setting youre gonna have to pay for it which both parties seem completely unwilling to do.
SpaceX is in a bad place at a very bad time. It’s never been run in a sustainable manner and its been a resume padding stopover for the aerospace industry for its entire existence. But since around 2018 and even harder since 2022 the company has been losing institutional knowledge faster than it can be preserved. The people who built Falcon 9 are long gone with very few exceptions, but worse most of the people who built Starship are nearly all gone and they very prominently weren’t done building it.