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anyway here, their opsec at boca chica is so bad that this picture of the vehicle breakup from an onboard camera has leaked like five different times
i suppose we should start with figuring out what things here were successful and what were not. a lot of spaceflight fanatics will say "they gathered data, and that's all that matter" and like. sure. maybe. but in a general sense, let's think about this. what did they prove here?
if you're seeing this without anythin' below it, i just spent like two hours writing out a longwinded historical explanation of why things panned out this way for starship as a reply to this. Do check it out, it's far more interesting if far less compact.
Things that were a success:
- it flew. it turns out when you put enough rocket engines and fuel behind something, it will move. who knew.
- it got most of the way through first stage flight. that's kinda nifty considering that stage design had never flown before.
Things that were not a success: (i was trying to get the read more thing to work but couldn't)
- within moments of lifting off, several engines had been knocked out by the shockwave of the rocket's exhaust reverberating off the flat ground below. more would fail for assorted and less obvious reasons throughout the flight, but the ones that failed before tower clear have a fairly apparent cause.
- it started tumbling at the end of first stage flight
- the two stages did not separate
- the rocket excavated a crater beneath the launch mount due to a lack of any flame trench/flame diverter/sound suppression system (this is why several engines were knocked out)
- as it excavated said crater, it sent chunks of concrete flying half a mile and one completely totaled a minivan that was being used to host a news outlet's cameras remotely. (Nobody was harmed, this vehicle was in the keep out zone and just being used to stage remote cameras, but still)
- dust kicked up from the rocket excavating said crater rained down all over the protected wetlands upon which the SpaceX launch site sits, the dust falling at least as far as nearby Port Isabel and South Padre Island.
- they may not have blown up their facilities, but they sure did manage to wreck them plenty serious nonetheless
- as you can see from the onboard camera view in the previous post, not all of the thermal tiles that are meant to keep the thing from melting during reentry stayed on. this is generally bad
- it blew up. this one was kinda expected at some point i don't think anyone sane expected any measure of success from the bastard battleship but even still it manages to find ways to defy our expectations and fail in strange ways.
It's worth noting that at the moment, this vehicle is the recipient of a sole-source contract to be our lunar lander. This is the basket we chose to put our eggs in, despite being fully aware of spacex's history of underbidding to get government contracts.
I hope the other contenders have been working on their bids still, because we were going to offer the option to bid on future landings to them.
i have a lot of opinions about starship and the space program as a whole that i've developed over years of following it, like... I moved to florida to be closer to it, i share my launch photography here regularly on @aWildLupi, but there's a lot I could say and I don't even know where to start here. If you ever want me to chime in on something with all I know at this point, don't be afraid to ask, i like sharing.
