Starship maybe about to go up

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Will SpaceX’s Starship Finally Not Explode Next Week?

A bit early for bottle rockets.

Latest launch seems to have gone smoothly - looks like it made orbit. Next hour to confirm other systems but all engines fired correctly.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-68546912

Lost communication earlier than expected, but that's not from Musk's mouth.

It went up, really nicely. No problems on ascent at all. The boost-back burn for the booster succeeded, but the landing burn failed (looked like 1 of 3 engines that was supposed to relight did, and so did 1 that wasn’t supposed to). A soft splashdown turned into a hard one. For Starship, the prop transfer demo and payload bay door tests were successful, but what looked like ice buildup on the thrusters meant that it couldn’t achieve the right attitude for the engine relight test. For the same reason, it was tumbling into the atmosphere well outside of its flight envelope, beyond the ability of the flaps to fully recover from, and it broke up on reentry probably about 67 km up. The footage of the plasma was cool as hell, especially from the front flap camera. I saw a few missing and damaged tiles, but a lot fewer than previous launches.

It sounds to me like SpaceX is using the same model as Toyota: constant improvement. When Japanese first came to the U.S. they were cheap, cheaply made rice burners. One thing I've heard Toyota did was run cars until they crapped out. They would fix whatever the proximate cause was then run them to the point of breakdown again....repeat over and over. Car buffs may scoff at Toyota's as "boring", but their reliability is superb. SpaceX is getting closer to their goal every time out. What they're doing makes sense, but testing to destruction is jarringly different than the "zero defects" mentality that we've grown used to from the traditional NASA approach.

Wait.

You're saying the ship built by the guy who Iron Man 2 sucked the cock of, broke up on re-entry due to the problem that killed the villain from Iron Man?

Not quite “constant improvement” though their approach leads to it mostly (not every starship test hop was an improvement in results over the last, for instance), but “most actionable data most cheaply”. If they can figure out what went wrong on the engine relight this time, they might try to land Superheavy 10 recoverably (though they’re not likely to go for a chopstick catch). It’s really too bad about the relight not being a go. They probably would have gone to orbit on the next one. That seems considerably less likely now.

Not quite. The thrusters were able to burn through the ice. But it didn’t all break off. Some of the ice plugs might have been tunneled through unevenly, or otherwise vectored the thrust in not-quite the right direction. There may have been more to the bad attitude and breakup, but that definitely looked like it contributed. Easy enough solve with a little resistive heater.

So, you solved the icing problem, but the genius billionaire didn't?

"We burned through the ice, but not in the right way" is still "we didn't solve the icing problem".

The genius billionaire doesn’t design every facet of every system. Not even most. And hindsight is 20/20.

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Can't wait to have Jet parts and burning space trash falling from the sky and killing us all.

It is pretty much going to be cowboy bebop in earth orbit in the future. Just waiting to see which Elon project takes out half of the moon and turns the earth into a constantly changing map of craters.

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