alt Hacker NewsI don't think Starship has gotten to orbit yet. It's gotten to altitude but not speed. That's a very big deal, because slowing down from that speed is a massive challenge unto itself.
Orbit is scheduled for the test after next, if all goes well.
They don't really need Starship just for orbit. They've already got ships that get to the ISS and back. They really do need to get Starship to orbit or their plans really will be hosed.
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LorenDB • today at 4:01 PM
AFAIK they are just cutting the engines off some seconds before they would achieve full orbit, and they have already demonstrated deorbut burns. So I don't think a proper orbit will be a big hurdle for SpaceX.
>I don't think Starship has gotten to orbit yet. It's gotten to altitude but not speed.
I'm honestly kinda curious how you came to this thinking after watching the launches, like the last Flight 11 [0]? They have the velocity listed at all times right there in the bottom corner. It's peaking over 7.4 km/s, seems pretty clear they were stopping just barely short and maintaining a ballistic path on purpose exactly as they said they would in the flight plan they filed ahead of time with the FAA for deorbit safety purposes, not because they couldn't have technically squeezed out another few hundred m/s and different trajectory if that was the goal. It's a hardware rich program, and their testing sequence has been reasonably careful about controlling the space of out of bounds scenarios (on the scale of rocketry). What has lead you to believe that they can do 7.4+ km/s with Raptor 2 and Block 2 but v3 won't be able to do ~7.8 (or that they couldn't have done it with v2 for that matter)?
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0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tvK7flZ72c