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Off-Topic Space, the final frontier, these are the voyages of NASA

Calinative said:
Successful launch so far. Booster lost 1 engine looks like. It wasn't planning on attempting a landing at the catch tower today. Is going to simulate a launch with engine our though. So we will see. Think that was possibly the engine they were planning on landing without.... But ship has all engines lit still. Now they need to do a successful payload test deploy and engine relight in space (to simulate deorbit burn)....
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Looks like a full successfully demonstrated engine-out landing. Looked good and an important demonstration if they plan on making a lot of tower catch landings. Now all eyes on Ship which is where they have constantly had issues with the V2 ship. Really need to demonstrate payload deploy.
 
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Calinative said:
Looks like a full successfully demonstrated engine-out landing. Looked good and an important demonstration if they plan on making a lot of tower catch landings. Now all eyes on Ship which is where they have constantly had issues with the V2 ship. Really need to demonstrate payload deploy.
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Looks like successfull payload depoly so far (about 4/8 of them right now) which is critical. It's a little interesting rail system for deploy. Wonder if final sat test deploy will have a camera attached.

I wonder how soon they actually launch starlink V3s with Starship. this was a big milestone.
 
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90scane said:
I’d assume they want to catch both before going orbital and deploying v3s
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I disagree, the main reason being you need two operational towers to catch both. All they need to do is catch booster for the time being. With Booster and actual Starlink V3 payloads being deployed, it would pay for those individual test flights immediately. Actually with how much throughput the starlink v3s have it'd be a very big deal. They have already shown reuse with the booster. remember other than Falcon 9 no other rocket company even lands a booster for reuse, and the economics still work out for them. So imo its without question that as long as they are landing booster, it's a net positive...
the Ship wont get any reuse for a while judging by how crispy the flaps keep getting. Though they still were able to most fully maintain control to soft ocean landing. Plus they already know the V3 Booster+Ship is a major upgrade. And only Launch tower 2 is capable of launching the V3 starships. Launch Tower 1 may be used for the first Ship catch though, I'd assume, because ultimately at this point its more expendable. I don't think you want to risk Tower 2 on a ship catch until that's definitely good to go. And even then I wouldn't want to risk it until probably Florida has their launch towers ready to go tbh.
 
TallyCaneFan said:
This is really cool. I'm an old man and worked for NASA during the shuttle projects in the 80's. This ship has such clean lines. Love this.
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The sheer scale of size, thrust, and just pure production volume they are trying to achieve, is truly insane. Its going to generate over double the thrust of the Saturn V, and designed for full and rapid reuse and literally returns and is caught by a tower. Literally a decade ago people would have thought you were mental if you said they've already demonstrated a catch and reuse of the booster.

And they are legit trying to reach a scale of manufacturing where they are producing (if Elons crazy plans are to be believed!) up to 1k starships per year and even reach 100 Raptor 3 engines per day within the next year or so (will eventually use 42 engines total for Superheavy+Starship per launch - but be reusable obviously). Meanwhile Raptor 3 is Full Flow Staged Combustion and generates 1.47x as much thrust as the RS-25 (shuttles main engine for anyone unaware since you said you worked during Shuttle) and 3.27x as much as the Merlin engine on Falcon 9, with a 160-180:1 Thrust:Weight ratio vs RS25 was 73:1 and merlin is **** near 200:1. And the ISP at sea level is 350s vs 366s for RS-25 and 282s for merlin. It's probably not quite the master of any one specific metric (F1 a beast in terms of thrust, Merlins T:W, RS-25 Specific Impulse), but god **** is it close to the top at everything and just looks awesome. So vs Shuttles Main Engine it's about 150% the thrust, 45% the weight, and 95% the efficiency...Just insane. Oh and the booster has like 30+ of them lmao

For those that don't fully get it, think this pic is old and Starship is actually bigger than it was even a year ago with V3 being even biggeer, and a future V4 likely being EVEN BIGGER:

1756259937412.png

 
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Calinative said:
The sheer scale of size, thrust, and just pure production volume they are trying to achieve, is truly insane. Its going to generate over double the thrust of the Saturn V, and designed for full and rapid reuse and literally returns and is caught by a tower. Literally a decade ago people would have thought you were mental if you said they've already demonstrated a catch and reuse of the booster.

And they are legit trying to reach a scale of manufacturing where they are producing (if Elons crazy plans are to be believed!) up to 1k starships per year and even reach 100 Raptor 3 engines per day within the next year or so (will eventually use 42 engines total for Superheavy+Starship per launch - but be reusable obviously). Meanwhile Raptor 3 is Full Flow Staged Combustion and generates 1.47x as much thrust as the RS-25 (shuttles main engine for anyone unaware since you said you worked during Shuttle) and 3.27x as much as the Merlin engine on Falcon 9, with a 160-180:1 Thrust:Weight ratio vs RS25 was 73:1 and merlin is **** near 200:1. And the ISP at sea level is 350s vs 366s for RS-25 and 282s for merlin. Just insane. It's probably not quite the master of any one specific metric, but god **** is it close to the top at everything and just looks awesome.

For those that don't fully get it, think this pic is old and Starship is actually bigger than it was even a year ago with V3 being even biggeer, and a future V4 likely being EVEN BIGGER:

View attachment 333310
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Thank you!
 
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Calinative said:


Wont attempt ship catch till 2nd-5th V3 Ship launch. Makes sense to me.
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Agree. To do the StarLinks, they have to orbit. They may elect to fly the V3 rocket 1+ times before doing anything vastly different the flight 10. The catch very well could be on the same flight as V3 deployments. I believe the hold up on catching is a second catch tower thus it is anyones guess on when they deploy vs catch...
 
90scane said:
Agree. To do the StarLinks, they have to orbit. They may elect to fly the V3 rocket 1+ times before doing anything vastly different the flight 10. The catch very well could be on the same flight as V3 deployments. I believe the hold up on catching is a second catch tower thus it is anyones guess on when they deploy vs catch...
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I think they may try to go starlink V3 deployment with this final V2 starship launch tbh (their version naming system sucks btw). I mean not a full load, but maybe some actual ones with a full orbit. The only real thing stopping them until now to actually reach orbit has been the deorbit burn. So if they are confident with that that's really all thats stopping it, and they just showed that right now.

Theres just no way it isn't worth it to launch V3 starlinks pre-Ship catch... It will definitely be worth it.
 
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Calinative said:
I think they may try to go V3 deployment with this final V2 launch tbh. I mean not a full load, but maybe some actual ones with a full orbit. The only real thing stopping them until now to actually reach orbit has been the deorbit burn. So if they are confident with that that's really all thats stopping it, and they just showed that right now.

Theres just no way it isn't worth it to launch V3 starlinks pre-Ship catch... It will definitely be worth it.
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I’m all for it. Use Starlink. Brother uses Starlink. Hope to get the T-Mobile Starlink soon.

The outages are a little concerning.
 
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