For those of you who didn't see it this morning, Starship launched this morning and things were looking good for a while. All of the booster engines functioned at launch and until the ship separated. The booster engines restarted to turn the booster around to head to the planned soft landing in the ocean. Video from the booster as it was headed back to earth showed a grid fin moving. Just before the engines were supposed to restart for the slowdown, the one visible grid fin started moving around more and picture of the ground was moving as the booster wobbled. From the data shown, only one engine restarted and no more of the picture was seen. I assume they lost control and maybe used the destruct command.
The ship carried on around the Earth with a camera on the ship showing a tail fin and the side of the ship. The ship reached altitude and shut down the engines. After the engines were shut off, there appeared to be something coming out of the bottom. After a time the ship got into an area where they expected a loss of signal which was expected to last for about 30 minutes. They did regain contact with it in time for it to start re-entry. Some black pieces started to go by which many assumed were parts of the heat tiles. The fin could be seen glowing red as it moved to change the attitude of the ship. Then contact was lost and apparently the ship broke up over the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX likes to claim success even when missions don't go as planned because they collect data. If they lost all contact, there won't be much data to retrieve. I don't know when, if ever we will find out what happened.
[long detailed vaguely techy answer below...]
Data is transmitted in real-time back to SpaceX via several different redundant Starlink terminals on the exterior of both the booster and ship so they *should* have got the data they need. Someone said "the payload is data" and that's probably about right. So....at the point that the booster impacted the ocean at 1100kmh and the ship broke up over the Indian ocean, they'd have lost data then but every second of the flight's data should have been transmitted basically instantly.
It's definite progress for them, but....my view is that RAptor re-lighting reliability is still poor and highly variable. That's what caused the loss of the Booster -- damn engines did not relight for the landing burn. I saw 3 of them light briefly then when it finally hit, it was down to 1 engine. Raptor has been in development design since approx 2010.... so it's not new and for them STILL to be having engine reliability issues is, to me, highly concerning. The Merlins on Falcon9 and FalconHeavy seem almost bulletproof. It might be more the fuel pressure than the engines themselves. CH4 and LOX just floats around weightless in orbit like everything else. You have to spin a ship or have a resultant net acceleration (or deceleration) to move the CH4/LOX liquids to the right place in the tanks, where the pumps can transfer them to the engines RELIABLY.
Raptor is a much more complex engine than Merlin but....they HAVE to be reliable otherwise they'll just keep losing boosters and ships. Right now that just costs money but on a manned mission, everyone winds up dead if the engines fail on re-entry. Ascent is much more forgiving as they have excess engine-count.
RCS (Reaction Control System) also looked dodgy on Starship. Failed to keep attitude control of the Ship on re-entry. Speculation is the nozzles blocked up with propellant ice. That's a relatively simple fix though, change the RCS design, use nitrogen or similar.
Really the next test, IFT4, needs both the Booster and Ship to execute soft water-landings, as intended. Starship IS a critical part of the Artemis program and if it does not work then Artemis III cannot happen as it requires use of Starship.
Artemis (unlike Apollo) CANNOT land men on the moon on it's own. Nope. It needs astronauts to transfer in lunar orbit between their Orion capsule to a lunar Starship variant. If Starship's engines fail to light on descent to the lunar surface, everyone on board dies. Simple as that.
So NASA's timeline for Artemis III (lunar manned landing) is BS. Gonna be YEARS more before they trust Starship enough to put men on it, whatever variant they use. As for the 'Dear Moon' mission, don't hold your breath on that. 8 to 12years from now, if it ever happens at all. Again, woefully optimistic timing. The 'Dear Moon' mission was I think originally scheduled for 2023 lol!
As for Mars
manned landing, Elon is WAY off in his time estimates. I think it'll be 12 to 20years before that happens, or MORE. Getting anyone BACK from Mars is ...almost un-doable for fuelling reasons. Really it is. So if people sign up for a 1-way trip, then ....ok folks.
Mars unmanned landing -- sure that might happen earlier, but again, if Starship engines don't light reliably, every landing attempt fails and ends in a high-speed crash. Plus.... you can only (realistically!) attempt to travel from Earth to Mars every 22 or 26months (I forget which it is) when the planets are in the necessary alignment. Even then it takes 6 to 8months to get to Mars. It's a very long way.
I admire the vision and tenacity of Elon and him doing this program. He is resolute.
I just think that they should concentrate hard on a manned lunar base first, and get all the kinks ironed out there.
A manned Mars landing might well happen one day, and that's tremendous, but I think a Mars COLONY is ....unrealistic.
20 or 30people at once, yup sure, but that's not a colony really.
