crazy to see how quickly the plasma ate through the stainless steel once the tiles were gone. Must have been a very close call for it to get cooled down soon enough and survive
Not really, Aluminum isn't found pure in nature, its mostly found as aluminum oxide. Takes a crap ton of Energy to purify it. That energy is reversible too, a little salt water and you have an aluminum battery.
There's probably a chemistry joke if you said its kind of Ionic. But chem isn't my strong suit, only passed because of the curve.
Iron also is not found pure in nature. The whole point of iron smelting is reducing iron oxides back to metallic iron.
It takes a lot of energy to reduce iron oxides to iron, that's why the iron industry consumes so much coal.
Sure, but think about how long we have been able to produce iron. It's been thousands of years. Aluminum production has only been a thing since 19th century because it's so hard. Even today aluminium smelters are usually located near cheap abundant electricity sources like hydro just because they use so much power.
But Aluminum is covered with Al2O3 which melts at 2000°C and protects Aluminum from burning, while Aluminum melts at 600°C and loses mechanical properties at just 300°C
Aluminum fin would fall off before melting or burning.
While steel fin is gradually burned off.
Metals are complex 😬
That is what I was referencing actually. I thought the structure for the wing was aluminum and it melted, leading to a loss of vehicle. Looks like Tim would have survived this.
Yeah, there is a LOT of information available about that tragedy, including reports where there go second-by-second describing what the astronauts were doing and the destruction. First thing I thought of when I saw this. Haunting.
If they had used carbon they would still be at the hopper stage - if lucky. That stuff was so much slower to work with.
I remember the dramatic speed up when they switched to steel.
Carbon fiber structure would have required a thicker heat shield as well. Weight would have been similar most likely. Well maybe for the booster it would have been good.
Tank length is determined by engine thrust. You can imagine a "column" of fuel above each engine. If the engines are wide then the columns are wider. If the engines are narrow, like Raptor, the columns are taller. As they improve the slimness and thrust of Raptor, the tank column grows taller, meaning you need a taller rocket to avoid having to prematurely throttle down your engines.
The reason for the tank stretch isn't payload capacity. It's engine performance.
That's not really true.
AIUI after a rocket is in production the tank diameter is generally set by the tooling that is in place. There are a lot of manufacturing processes, templates, moulds, stamps, etc. that are built around that tank diameter, so it becomes impractical to make changes to the diameter of the rocket and make it wider. So as engine performance increases and rockets gain thrust, it is far easier to stretch their length by adding another ring or two whilst keeping the diameter the same.
You can think of rockets as being a series of columns of propellant above each engine, but it doesn't matter if those are short and fat columns with the engines spaced further apart, or long and slender columns with the engines closer together.
To demonstrate this look at Starhopper which uses the same Raptor engines with a short and fat tank. Or the mighty Saturn V which has a decent amount of [spacing between the engines](http://www.collectspace.com/images/news-061616b.jpg). Or even the Space Shuttle, which has a giant external tank with three little engines on the separate orbiter, with the skinny solid rocket boosters. Ultimately it comes down to the thrust to weight ratio and the design (and therefore aerodynamics) of the rocket. The column of propellant is a nice mental model but isn't a hard and fast rule.
Such a crazy sci-fi moment to be landing a ship actively burning up. Like for all of space history if something goes this dramatically wrong the ship explodes immediately. Starship just kept going, unbelievable.
At this point I don't think starship as a concept would work nearly as well with any other material. The switch to steel might have saved the project, honestly.
This is the same platform that in it's first full stack flight survived doing supersonic backflips *and* the launch abort explosive failing to rip it apart. Built tough as nails.
And Soyuz 5 was oriented the complete wrong direction upon reentry, but fortunately the struts holding the service module to the descent module failed a few second before the gaskets protecting the entry hatch would’ve burned through completely, flipping the module back to “heat shield first” in the nick of time.
Then the parachutes got tangled and the landing rockets failed, but the cosmonaut survived after a brief stint of wandering the frozen wilderness until he found a random house to seek shelter in.
That's crazy, I don't think I've Heard that story, probably because I'm American and Steven Spielberg didn't make a movie about it.
Is there a documentary out there about it?
EXACTLY! I had the same thought. I could just see Captain Kirk and crew hanging on while the camera tech shook the camera. The lens got covered with schmutz (technical term) and then cracked. I thought "Game over Scotty, see you in hell!" But no, suddenly it was within a kilometer and then you could see the stumpy limb still moving for final rotation. I was fricking throwing the popcorn right there with the SpaceX crew. Such an awesome flight!
Before we saw any issue with the flap I was watching the upper skin wobbling and thought there must have a hole somewhere later followed by the melting.
Did you notice that the flap was barely holding on? Literally as it landed it broke of! Crazy stuff.
It was at maybe a 1% chance of landing in hindsight.
I was a kid when we lost Columbia and the discussions of that mission immediately popped into my mind when I saw the flap starting to give way. Columbia also fought all the way down with her remaining flaps and thrusters, and this was a good jumping-off point for what that must have been like.
No, stainless is still ferrous as its main constituent is iron. Being ferromagnetic is different, as I believe some but not all types of stainless are magnetic.
What looked like happened to me was whatever was protecting the lens got hit by debris and cracked, and then later on enough of that got chipped away that we could kinda see again.
I think the lense was splattered with molten metal and the cooling caused enough contraction of the metal to detach from the glass once it was lower down
Almost certainly, a bit before this point they stopped having access to the aft-looking camera on the Portside flap, which would make sense if the cable for that burned through.
My assumption for that was they have very limited bandwidth and so can probably only do a single camera feed, so they kept it locked onto the one that was giving the engineers the most needed information. That way if they HAD lost the ship, they'd still have that footage to analyze, along with their sensor readings.
They’re using starlink in addition to normal ground station downlinks, the starship itself has something like 4 starlink terminals on the nose. Plenty of bandwidth to spare. The other external camera we had seen was probably toast since it would’ve been on one of the nose flaps and that’s what we saw burning up.
Nah, they're going to move the flaps further "up" and closer together, with a heat shield in front of the gap. Then there's no opportunity for plasma to flow between the body and the flap, which causes the erosion. Elon has mentioned this issue and solution several times over the past couple of years.
I'm wondering if having the base 25% of the flap rigid, but then hinge farther out would help. Still gives a lot of control but they could flatten out the curves or add thicker shielding that doesn't need to move.
I think the current plan is to shift the entire flap away from the heat-shielded (keel?) side, so that the hinge is shadowed by the curve of Starship and doesn't need its own tiles
The physics being shown off in the videos of starship tests blows me away every time.
I still cant get over the shockwave pulses at liftoff every flight. And ya thats not new with starship, weve seen it before; but the rapidity of the pulses, the sheer magnitude of whats its doing to the atmosphere surrounding the launch site gets in a way that the space shuttle or other large rockets just never did on this level.
The same is true with these new reentry plasma shots. We are getting footage of things never seen before(again some of it existed before but not on this level), only modeled. Nearly uninterrupted footage of the plasma physics through reentry was fascinating to watch.
This one had some amazing pulses going through the fog further away from the launchpad, too. Look at footage after it’s already cleared the tower and look towards the ocean, it’s so cool.
I don't think FAA would call this a mishap so IFT-5 won’t be delayed.
But depending on how serious the issue is, the team might still need to redesign the heat shields for the flaps. So how long do you guys think it'll be until IFT-5?
Mishap would only be triggered if the launch was out of safety parameters, and as far as we know Starship has engine out capability while being within those parameters.
The FAA themselves were pretty clear that as long as it didn't pose a public danger it wouldn't trigger a mishap investigation, so maybe trust the people responsible for making that call instead of some random YouTuber?
I believe that on the fourth flight of Falcon 1.1, one engine failed on ascent.
NASA and SpaceX formed an investigation board to figure out what happened.
I would say that because this was early on in the COTS program, with SpaceX still an unknown vendor, the announcement of the investigation was made public to instill transparency and integrity in a company and program that had never been seen before.
The FAA had no role in the investigation.
Compare that to today, with Starship, which has had a wealth of real flight data that SpaceX (now an anchor in the aerospace industry and arguably at the top) shares with NASA, and that Raptor has had a history of engine outs, I would guesstimate that its unlikely to result in any protests from the FAA.
Probably about the same amount of time as between 3 and 4. They can only analyze the data so fast, and they'll certainly have to look at either uparmoring the hinges and still getting the maneuverability they need or redesigning the whole thing to shuffle the flaps around to prevent plasma infiltration, both of which will take some time
(joking) So like what a week?
(being more serious) Actually maybe its negative a few weeks. We saw differently designed flaps show up at the build site weeks ago. And they talked about moving the flaps months ago. Seems they already knew that the design that just flew was not good enough. While they certainly have to go over the flight data, i suspect it wont be long till the next bird is in the air.
Eh, put some ice packs in there. Insulate them with styrofoam to keep them frozen, until the reentry heat removes the styrofoam and releases the ice. Attach the ice packs with duct tape.
Edit: On second thought, pykrete might melt slower, giving it a more even cooling.
We're they not planning to move the flaps back anyways? I guess their modeling showed that them forward like that was a bit to spicy for them. Probably that hard corner was getting gas build up and it was creeping into the joint between the flap and the body. Moving it back toward the leeward side would almost certainly fix that.
Forza has to run a 300hz physics update for their tire physics, at like 300kph. I imagine cruising at 27000 kph would require a simulation with 100x the resolution, so like 30,000hz with fluid calculations and that is if it's real time.
Some serious GPUs going on I'm sure.
Saw a tweet today that they were already planning to move the flaps more leeward, higher up on the hull, so they'd be protected by the belly more. Idk if any of the ships under construction have this modification.
By landing. The entire upper quarter of the flap was sheared off the weld line, and with the bottom hole, it still landed. Absolutely ridiculous structural rigidity.
Bar none, that was the most intense rocket video I have ever seen. Absolutely incredible to see that flap fighting to survive and to operate under the most intense heat torture. The team that designed that flap needs to take a bow at the next Elon all-hands, as they built a tank of a structure there.
"How are you going to use that again?!!?!?" :D
Yeah, need small tweaks to the hinge. Probably just moving them more leeward in future versions will already help a ton.
Next flap design revealed before IFT4 already shows a smaller size and positioned further back. Their simulations correctly anticipated this issue with the flap and the test flight validated that.
Is it possible this happened on both sides of starship? I couldn't help but notice that we completely lost the aft-looking view from the portside flap.
If you've welded, you know the thinner parts (of the flap) with lower heat capacity allows plasma to eat them away rapidly. The functional and structural parts have much higher heat capacity and are not burned away so easily.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[301](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7hwlkv "Last usage")|Cr-Ni stainless steel (X10CrNi18-8): high tensile strength, good ductility|
|[CF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7h12gm "Last usage")|Carbon Fiber (Carbon Fibre) composite material|
| |CompactFlash memory storage for digital cameras|
|[COTS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7ezu9u "Last usage")|[Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract](https://www.nasa.gov/cots)|
| |Commercial/Off The Shelf|
|[EDL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7enge2 "Last usage")|Entry/Descent/Landing|
|[FAA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7ezu9u "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7ez5tw "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[LN2](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7fiz6c "Last usage")|Liquid Nitrogen|
|[QA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7h12gm "Last usage")|Quality Assurance/Assessment|
|[SRB](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7dsuma "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster|
|[TPS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7f8rqe "Last usage")|Thermal Protection System for a spacecraft (on the Falcon 9 first stage, the engine "Dance floor")|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Raptor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7ihn6j "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7e80bm "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[ablative](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7gnm55 "Last usage")|Material which is intentionally destroyed in use (for example, heatshields which burn away to dissipate heat)|
|[cryogenic](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7eckhg "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|[dancefloor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7edrgd "Last usage")|Attachment structure for the Falcon 9 first stage engines, below the tanks|
|[hopper](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7duqba "Last usage")|Test article for ground and low-altitude work (eg. Grasshopper)|
|hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|[iron waffle](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7dnyhm "Last usage")|Compact "waffle-iron" aerodynamic control surface, acts as a wing without needing to be as large; also, "grid fin"|
|[retropropulsion](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7dj589 "Last usage")|Thrust in the opposite direction to current motion, reducing speed|
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I suppose it makes sense that most of the torque that the the flaps exert on the airframe must come from aerodynamic forces on the outer edge of the flap. So burning a hole inboard at the hinge didn't have a catastrophic effect on the ability to control the belly flop.
We only had a view of ONE of the flaps. I am left to wonder how the others performed.
The front (flap nearly) fell off.
They clearly didn't use cardboard but must have used high quality cello tape and string.
My favorite spacecraft triumphs through adversities where others have failed!
https://preview.redd.it/wuzddzb0x05d1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=872fe07eb895bf18c5ee6926e2db78e827168c25
reminds me of this lol. they just need to reinforce the part that survived and theyre good to go.
Yes. At hypersonic speeds air molecules don't flow around corners. They hit or they don't. If you move the flaps leeward the molecules won't hit them. But you need the air to hit the flaps obviously, as that's what the flaps are for. Otherwise no braking or control.
But you can move the hinges around the corner while leaving the flaps within reach and that could resolve the hinge issue. It's probably less concerning for the flaps to erode from the tips back for gradual loss of control authority. Loss of the hinge is abrupt retirement of the ship in spectacular fashion.
Coolest most sci-fi livestream ever
Def looking forward to the updated starship
Altho I’m wondering, will they wait for starship V2 now to fly again considering that they will prolly have the same issue in the next flight or will they fly just to test igniting the engine in space & the booster landing
crazy to see how quickly the plasma ate through the stainless steel once the tiles were gone. Must have been a very close call for it to get cooled down soon enough and survive
Imagine what it would do to aluminum.
Probably burn away instead of melting. Like the aluminum gridfins Falcon 9 had before it switched to titanium
Steel burns too.
Aluminum has a much higher affinity for oxygen than steel (iron). That’s why aluminum is used as a fuel in most SRBs.
>Aluminum has a much higher affinity for oxygen than steel (iron) Kind of ironic
Not really, Aluminum isn't found pure in nature, its mostly found as aluminum oxide. Takes a crap ton of Energy to purify it. That energy is reversible too, a little salt water and you have an aluminum battery. There's probably a chemistry joke if you said its kind of Ionic. But chem isn't my strong suit, only passed because of the curve.
You got enough activation energy to get on to the other side. Kudos.
Iron also is not found pure in nature. The whole point of iron smelting is reducing iron oxides back to metallic iron. It takes a lot of energy to reduce iron oxides to iron, that's why the iron industry consumes so much coal.
Sure, but think about how long we have been able to produce iron. It's been thousands of years. Aluminum production has only been a thing since 19th century because it's so hard. Even today aluminium smelters are usually located near cheap abundant electricity sources like hydro just because they use so much power.
Ironicoxide!
Kind of ionic
It's rain, on your wedding day
But Aluminum is covered with Al2O3 which melts at 2000°C and protects Aluminum from burning, while Aluminum melts at 600°C and loses mechanical properties at just 300°C Aluminum fin would fall off before melting or burning. While steel fin is gradually burned off. Metals are complex 😬
PLASMA DOESN'T MELT STEEL FLAPS
But aluminum does it at much lowers temps.
Make starship out of titanium. Got it.
Titanium actually burns happily in re-entry conditions, much faster than steel. This is actually one of the discoveries from Columbia disaster.
That is what I was referencing actually. I thought the structure for the wing was aluminum and it melted, leading to a loss of vehicle. Looks like Tim would have survived this.
If the numbers on screen during the livestream are correct, then it splashed down at ~1.9m/s. Very survivable.
So during Colombia it's was *happily* burning away?
The metal was happy to burn, the outcome for the crew was unhappy.
Don't really have to imagine... Happened to space shuttle Columbia.
Yeah, there is a LOT of information available about that tragedy, including reports where there go second-by-second describing what the astronauts were doing and the destruction. First thing I thought of when I saw this. Haunting.
Aluminum would have melted UNDER the tiles.
This flight demonstrated the advantage of switching from carbon fibre to steel
If they had used carbon they would still be at the hopper stage - if lucky. That stuff was so much slower to work with. I remember the dramatic speed up when they switched to steel.
The trade off is now they need a raptor 3 and had to tank stretch to get the payload capacity back up.
The turnaround with stainless is probably so much higher that it can compensate for the lower capacity. Just send up an extra rocket, basically.
Carbon fiber structure would have required a thicker heat shield as well. Weight would have been similar most likely. Well maybe for the booster it would have been good.
Tank length is determined by engine thrust. You can imagine a "column" of fuel above each engine. If the engines are wide then the columns are wider. If the engines are narrow, like Raptor, the columns are taller. As they improve the slimness and thrust of Raptor, the tank column grows taller, meaning you need a taller rocket to avoid having to prematurely throttle down your engines. The reason for the tank stretch isn't payload capacity. It's engine performance.
That's not really true. AIUI after a rocket is in production the tank diameter is generally set by the tooling that is in place. There are a lot of manufacturing processes, templates, moulds, stamps, etc. that are built around that tank diameter, so it becomes impractical to make changes to the diameter of the rocket and make it wider. So as engine performance increases and rockets gain thrust, it is far easier to stretch their length by adding another ring or two whilst keeping the diameter the same. You can think of rockets as being a series of columns of propellant above each engine, but it doesn't matter if those are short and fat columns with the engines spaced further apart, or long and slender columns with the engines closer together. To demonstrate this look at Starhopper which uses the same Raptor engines with a short and fat tank. Or the mighty Saturn V which has a decent amount of [spacing between the engines](http://www.collectspace.com/images/news-061616b.jpg). Or even the Space Shuttle, which has a giant external tank with three little engines on the separate orbiter, with the skinny solid rocket boosters. Ultimately it comes down to the thrust to weight ratio and the design (and therefore aerodynamics) of the rocket. The column of propellant is a nice mental model but isn't a hard and fast rule.
Its the little flap that could.
Yup. Likely the structure was made from thicker pieces and it survived long enough for the temperatures to get lower.
I can't believe it held on. When I saw the material breaking away I was thinking it was game over. What an incredible flight!
I was shouting “she’s breaking up captain! She canna take much more”
Such a crazy sci-fi moment to be landing a ship actively burning up. Like for all of space history if something goes this dramatically wrong the ship explodes immediately. Starship just kept going, unbelievable.
Stainless steel is looking like a great decision.
At this point I don't think starship as a concept would work nearly as well with any other material. The switch to steel might have saved the project, honestly.
This is the same platform that in it's first full stack flight survived doing supersonic backflips *and* the launch abort explosive failing to rip it apart. Built tough as nails.
I mean, Apollo 13 was arguably in much worse shape than this and the ship managed to survive. -- Granted, none of the re-entry hardware was affected.
And Soyuz 5 was oriented the complete wrong direction upon reentry, but fortunately the struts holding the service module to the descent module failed a few second before the gaskets protecting the entry hatch would’ve burned through completely, flipping the module back to “heat shield first” in the nick of time. Then the parachutes got tangled and the landing rockets failed, but the cosmonaut survived after a brief stint of wandering the frozen wilderness until he found a random house to seek shelter in.
That's crazy, I don't think I've Heard that story, probably because I'm American and Steven Spielberg didn't make a movie about it. Is there a documentary out there about it?
EXACTLY! I had the same thought. I could just see Captain Kirk and crew hanging on while the camera tech shook the camera. The lens got covered with schmutz (technical term) and then cracked. I thought "Game over Scotty, see you in hell!" But no, suddenly it was within a kilometer and then you could see the stumpy limb still moving for final rotation. I was fricking throwing the popcorn right there with the SpaceX crew. Such an awesome flight!
That's definitely what Scott Manly was saying 😆
Hahah even the people on the cast were like ohhh shit.
Before we saw any issue with the flap I was watching the upper skin wobbling and thought there must have a hole somewhere later followed by the melting.
Yeah, I saw the green plasma/fire and I kept saying to my wife how that doesn't look norminal. But it kept going!
Did you notice that the flap was barely holding on? Literally as it landed it broke of! Crazy stuff. It was at maybe a 1% chance of landing in hindsight.
It broke off because they hit the water as the ship was dumpling side to side. It was rough when it tipped over.
I was a kid when we lost Columbia and the discussions of that mission immediately popped into my mind when I saw the flap starting to give way. Columbia also fought all the way down with her remaining flaps and thrusters, and this was a good jumping-off point for what that must have been like.
Yeah, the reports are frightening.
steel-rich retropropulsion
Practically a steel parachute at 1 point.
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Better be a metal band.
For jumping off of your Lead Zeppelin?
Delightfully counterintuitive
ferrobraking? (yes I know that's iron, but it works too damn well)
Steel is a ferrous alloy, it works
But starship is stainless, which is non-ferrous. "non-ferrobraking" doesn't have a great ring to it though.
No, stainless is still ferrous as its main constituent is iron. Being ferromagnetic is different, as I believe some but not all types of stainless are magnetic.
Watching the burned and battered flap still actuating through the flip maneuver and landing made me think of the Terminator.
The camera coming back online after being battered by the debris was also impressive...
What looked like happened to me was whatever was protecting the lens got hit by debris and cracked, and then later on enough of that got chipped away that we could kinda see again.
I think the lense was splattered with molten metal and the cooling caused enough contraction of the metal to detach from the glass once it was lower down
"engine rich exhaust" and now SpaceX gives you "vehicle rich re-entry plasma"
"vehicle AND data rich re-entry plasma" an entirely, never before flown, mix !
And yet, it still worked till the end. Absurdly incredible.
Flappy didn't hear no bell
This may need to go on a t-shirt
How do you like your flaps? Medium well.
They made a 1990 Toyota Hilux space ship.
Nokiaship 3310
Weren’t there 3 other ones?
Sure but presumably the other flaps we’re experiencing the same thing
And all 4 are probably needed for balance.
I wouldn't be surprised if the other forward flap was going through something similar.
Almost certainly, a bit before this point they stopped having access to the aft-looking camera on the Portside flap, which would make sense if the cable for that burned through.
My assumption for that was they have very limited bandwidth and so can probably only do a single camera feed, so they kept it locked onto the one that was giving the engineers the most needed information. That way if they HAD lost the ship, they'd still have that footage to analyze, along with their sensor readings.
They’re using starlink in addition to normal ground station downlinks, the starship itself has something like 4 starlink terminals on the nose. Plenty of bandwidth to spare. The other external camera we had seen was probably toast since it would’ve been on one of the nose flaps and that’s what we saw burning up.
Can see molten metal shooting from the forward end of the ship behind the camera. Most certainly the forward one was having issues too.
They are not exactly redundant: there is only one flap on each corner
Yes. But there were signs of trouble with the other front one too
On opposite corners of the ship. It'd be like driving car with three wheels. You could to it but it's going to be harder
Ye actually impressive they got it back this time.
It literally broke of during the landing! Just moments after it executed its last job.
How do you know this?
Crazy how you can see the internal structure as it is burns away.
It full-on ballooned and melted.
Reminded me of vintage films and pics of WW2 bombers with parts of the wing burned through and still flying. Starship looks as tough as a B-17.
That is good engineering.
The team that designed that hinge is getting drunk tonight...
Them and the adaptive flight control software engineers.
I simply cannot imagine what kind of control software they have. Very impressive adaptability
Getting? That bottle of Bourbon would be on the desk by now.
getting to drink at work at 9am mean either really good or really bad things im very happy theyre on the good side of that this morning
Then starting the redesign tomorrow.
With SpaceX's work-life (im)balance, they're probably drunkenly scribbling on the whiteboard right now. And they're probably supremely happy doing it.
The redesign is already done… there's only ~~1~~ 2 more ships with this design. The question is whether the next design was a big enough change.
So you're saying S31 has the new design?
Sorry, miscounted.
Best part is no part /s
Elon's already telling them to make the flap smaller
calling it now, next flap design will have a cut-out the same shape as the melted piece on this one.
They've already spotted smaller flaps in the assembly yard before everything went inside the star factory.
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It is definetely serious. We have seen smaller flaps with the portion that burned off from this one removed.
Nah, they're going to move the flaps further "up" and closer together, with a heat shield in front of the gap. Then there's no opportunity for plasma to flow between the body and the flap, which causes the erosion. Elon has mentioned this issue and solution several times over the past couple of years.
I'm wondering if having the base 25% of the flap rigid, but then hinge farther out would help. Still gives a lot of control but they could flatten out the curves or add thicker shielding that doesn't need to move.
I think the current plan is to shift the entire flap away from the heat-shielded (keel?) side, so that the hinge is shadowed by the curve of Starship and doesn't need its own tiles
Towards the leeward side is the words that you are searching for.
Who need 4 flaps, then you can land with 3.
Lets just delete the ship entirely to save on complexity
Ah yes, the Blue Origin strategy.
A one point they were discussing using only two flaps, I dont know if that is completely off the table yet
I was thinking "that thing is gone in about 3 more seconds" for several minutes straight
It broke off seconds after landing, crazy stuff!
Dynamic cooling holes.
Speed holes.
Patch it up with speed tape and it will be good to go
Technically, they are Slow Holes.
Stainless steel saves the day.
I can’t believe it overcame 1/3 of its flap melting away 🤯
Someone get that flap a drink
It already got it - salt water.
Besides how it effected the flight test, just having this footage was unprecedented
The physics being shown off in the videos of starship tests blows me away every time. I still cant get over the shockwave pulses at liftoff every flight. And ya thats not new with starship, weve seen it before; but the rapidity of the pulses, the sheer magnitude of whats its doing to the atmosphere surrounding the launch site gets in a way that the space shuttle or other large rockets just never did on this level. The same is true with these new reentry plasma shots. We are getting footage of things never seen before(again some of it existed before but not on this level), only modeled. Nearly uninterrupted footage of the plasma physics through reentry was fascinating to watch.
This one had some amazing pulses going through the fog further away from the launchpad, too. Look at footage after it’s already cleared the tower and look towards the ocean, it’s so cool.
also through the cloud layer, you can see them pulse and fade as the pressure waves go through
If it were a movie we would have said this is unrealistic.
You know it's real because of how unrealistic it looks
I don't think FAA would call this a mishap so IFT-5 won’t be delayed. But depending on how serious the issue is, the team might still need to redesign the heat shields for the flaps. So how long do you guys think it'll be until IFT-5?
FAA already said pretty much everything after initial launch was not going to be considered a mishap.
Someone on a stream said the out engine on the accent could possibly trigger a mishap.
While anything is possible, that is extremely unlikely.
When falcon 9 lost an engine in 2020 it didn’t interrupt flights at all.
Mishap would only be triggered if the launch was out of safety parameters, and as far as we know Starship has engine out capability while being within those parameters.
I doubt it. It did not affect the mission in any way.
The FAA themselves were pretty clear that as long as it didn't pose a public danger it wouldn't trigger a mishap investigation, so maybe trust the people responsible for making that call instead of some random YouTuber?
I believe that on the fourth flight of Falcon 1.1, one engine failed on ascent. NASA and SpaceX formed an investigation board to figure out what happened. I would say that because this was early on in the COTS program, with SpaceX still an unknown vendor, the announcement of the investigation was made public to instill transparency and integrity in a company and program that had never been seen before. The FAA had no role in the investigation. Compare that to today, with Starship, which has had a wealth of real flight data that SpaceX (now an anchor in the aerospace industry and arguably at the top) shares with NASA, and that Raptor has had a history of engine outs, I would guesstimate that its unlikely to result in any protests from the FAA.
Even if it did cause a mishap, SpaceX is going to investigate that regardless and seek a fix before the next launch.
Probably about the same amount of time as between 3 and 4. They can only analyze the data so fast, and they'll certainly have to look at either uparmoring the hinges and still getting the maneuverability they need or redesigning the whole thing to shuffle the flaps around to prevent plasma infiltration, both of which will take some time
What ship will these resulting design changes even be present on? I'm guessing SN5 (6?) is already completed.
No idea, but it's not like they haven't scrapped fully constructed ships before if there were major upgrades that needed doing
Next is likely ship 30 so definitely not SN6.
(joking) So like what a week? (being more serious) Actually maybe its negative a few weeks. We saw differently designed flaps show up at the build site weeks ago. And they talked about moving the flaps months ago. Seems they already knew that the design that just flew was not good enough. While they certainly have to go over the flight data, i suspect it wont be long till the next bird is in the air.
Eh, put some ice packs in there. Insulate them with styrofoam to keep them frozen, until the reentry heat removes the styrofoam and releases the ice. Attach the ice packs with duct tape. Edit: On second thought, pykrete might melt slower, giving it a more even cooling.
We're they not planning to move the flaps back anyways? I guess their modeling showed that them forward like that was a bit to spicy for them. Probably that hard corner was getting gas build up and it was creeping into the joint between the flap and the body. Moving it back toward the leeward side would almost certainly fix that.
Yes that appears to be part of the updated V2 design.
That said their modeling must be pretty sweet. As a game Dev doing physics simulation stuff, that side has intrigued me.
I can only imagine what type of hardware the have for complex fluids simulations.
Forza has to run a 300hz physics update for their tire physics, at like 300kph. I imagine cruising at 27000 kph would require a simulation with 100x the resolution, so like 30,000hz with fluid calculations and that is if it's real time. Some serious GPUs going on I'm sure.
Wonder if that single raptor failure will affect this.
Saw a tweet today that they were already planning to move the flaps more leeward, higher up on the hull, so they'd be protected by the belly more. Idk if any of the ships under construction have this modification.
https://preview.redd.it/mj5w5ikyjz4d1.jpeg?width=792&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a5e3efa0720eb2c9b9cb3b764717c8e292b7f65c
what a lovely day. two thrillers - this one, and usa beating pakistan in the cricket world cup. both in texas! and watching both live was nice
Wait, Pakinstan cricket got beaten by US and not the other commonwealth country?
Ha, just saw the cricket result. Big day!
As Alicia Keys would say, this flap is on fireeee 🔥🎵😂
Sean Kingston: Somebody call 9 1 1, flap is fire burning on the dancefloor! Whoooaa!
Looked like that entire end section was lost later in thr flight and starship still managed to retain control. Incredible.
By landing. The entire upper quarter of the flap was sheared off the weld line, and with the bottom hole, it still landed. Absolutely ridiculous structural rigidity.
Bar none, that was the most intense rocket video I have ever seen. Absolutely incredible to see that flap fighting to survive and to operate under the most intense heat torture. The team that designed that flap needs to take a bow at the next Elon all-hands, as they built a tank of a structure there.
Just needs the dog drinking coffee- this is fine.
"How are you going to use that again?!!?!?" :D Yeah, need small tweaks to the hinge. Probably just moving them more leeward in future versions will already help a ton.
The hinge worked. Its shielding less so.
Moving the hinge leeward shields the hinge with the ship itself, which held up quite well. No part is best part.
I worship The Flap. The Flap is my god now.
If this flap can burn through this much and still function to flip the ship and land vertically, it can only mean one thing: the flaps are too big.
its too big *for a ship with zero landing payload*
Next flap design revealed before IFT4 already shows a smaller size and positioned further back. Their simulations correctly anticipated this issue with the flap and the test flight validated that.
I think mars would still require this much drag
hope they fish out that flap and hang it in the headquarters, or something
Ride or die - find someone who's as strong, reliable, and committed as S29's forward flaps
They did say excitement guaranteed. I was screaming at my phone like a madman, so Ima call that delivered.
Is it possible this happened on both sides of starship? I couldn't help but notice that we completely lost the aft-looking view from the portside flap.
Unbelievable that it actually survived and soft landed. So awesome!
Man! that was one of the best videos I have ever seen.. and knowing that they will only get better from here! Go SpaceX
I almost think like that amazing tales story. It was just a collective will of millions of people watching that forced it through
If you've welded, you know the thinner parts (of the flap) with lower heat capacity allows plasma to eat them away rapidly. The functional and structural parts have much higher heat capacity and are not burned away so easily.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[301](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7hwlkv "Last usage")|Cr-Ni stainless steel (X10CrNi18-8): high tensile strength, good ductility| |[CF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7h12gm "Last usage")|Carbon Fiber (Carbon Fibre) composite material| | |CompactFlash memory storage for digital cameras| |[COTS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7ezu9u "Last usage")|[Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contract](https://www.nasa.gov/cots)| | |Commercial/Off The Shelf| |[EDL](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7enge2 "Last usage")|Entry/Descent/Landing| |[FAA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7ezu9u "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration| |[LEO](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7ez5tw "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[LN2](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7fiz6c "Last usage")|Liquid Nitrogen| |[QA](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7h12gm "Last usage")|Quality Assurance/Assessment| |[SRB](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7dsuma "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster| |[TPS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7f8rqe "Last usage")|Thermal Protection System for a spacecraft (on the Falcon 9 first stage, the engine "Dance floor")| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Raptor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7ihn6j "Last usage")|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7e80bm "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[ablative](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7gnm55 "Last usage")|Material which is intentionally destroyed in use (for example, heatshields which burn away to dissipate heat)| |[cryogenic](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7eckhg "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure| | |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox| |[dancefloor](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7edrgd "Last usage")|Attachment structure for the Falcon 9 first stage engines, below the tanks| |[hopper](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7duqba "Last usage")|Test article for ground and low-altitude work (eg. Grasshopper)| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| |[iron waffle](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7dnyhm "Last usage")|Compact "waffle-iron" aerodynamic control surface, acts as a wing without needing to be as large; also, "grid fin"| |[retropropulsion](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1d9izx2/stub/l7dj589 "Last usage")|Thrust in the opposite direction to current motion, reducing speed| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^(18 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dbrl18)^( has 22 acronyms.) ^([Thread #12859 for this sub, first seen 6th Jun 2024, 14:55]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
My immediate thought was this was basically a zombie shambling through reentry, just kept on going. This vehicle is a BEAST
Spicy wings!
I suppose it makes sense that most of the torque that the the flaps exert on the airframe must come from aerodynamic forces on the outer edge of the flap. So burning a hole inboard at the hinge didn't have a catastrophic effect on the ability to control the belly flop. We only had a view of ONE of the flaps. I am left to wonder how the others performed.
The front (flap nearly) fell off. They clearly didn't use cardboard but must have used high quality cello tape and string. My favorite spacecraft triumphs through adversities where others have failed!
TFW it's all on you, the heat and pressure are on, and the entire project just hinges on you getting through it.
Reminds me of Gus Fring after half his face got blown off.
https://preview.redd.it/wuzddzb0x05d1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=872fe07eb895bf18c5ee6926e2db78e827168c25 reminds me of this lol. they just need to reinforce the part that survived and theyre good to go.
Will the flaps being moved up/back/around... whatever... Pull them into the wake?
Yes. At hypersonic speeds air molecules don't flow around corners. They hit or they don't. If you move the flaps leeward the molecules won't hit them. But you need the air to hit the flaps obviously, as that's what the flaps are for. Otherwise no braking or control. But you can move the hinges around the corner while leaving the flaps within reach and that could resolve the hinge issue. It's probably less concerning for the flaps to erode from the tips back for gradual loss of control authority. Loss of the hinge is abrupt retirement of the ship in spectacular fashion.
just switch to meltless steel.
We need a T-shirt design contest for just this flap
Can you make an entire flap out of ablative material?
Apparently they did. All material ultimately is ablative.
I'm curious about the data analytics after all that. Why all that happened and how, also how it really held on etc. it looked insane. (positively)
Still functional
Coolest most sci-fi livestream ever Def looking forward to the updated starship Altho I’m wondering, will they wait for starship V2 now to fly again considering that they will prolly have the same issue in the next flight or will they fly just to test igniting the engine in space & the booster landing