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Laremeretoday at 12:39 AM1 replyview on HN

Summary from my watch:

- Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.)

- Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out.

- Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and was very off target.

- Starship lost one engine shortly after stage sep. Turned into an unintentional test of engine out capability. It made it to space.

- Some weird motion and lots of off-gassing after engine cut-off, with uncertainty about if it actually got a good orbital(ish) insertion. Seems to have been benign, with the motion being a weird slow flip to the orientation for payload deployment.

- Test deployment of dummy payloads was successful, including a couple with cameras to look back at Starship.

- An in space engine relight test was skipped, presumably due to the issues during launch.

- Re-entry to over the Indian Ocean seemed to go really well. Nothing obviously burning or falling off. The amazing views of the plasma during re-entry, something never seen live before starship, are now routine.

- Starship did a maneuver to simulate how they'll have to go out over the gulf and back to the landing site.

- Nailed the target, evidenced by views from drones and buoys. Soft landing before falling over and giving us a big (expected) boom.

As far as overall progress from previous test flights goes, they're at least treading water while making many large changes. I think they were hoping to try for a tower catch and actually going orbital for next flight, but I highly doubt that now. The boostback burn failing was the largest failure, with the engine failure on Starship being a close second. Good performance despite engine out seems to be an unintentional success.


Replies

TechPlasmatoday at 12:59 AM

I think the ship really punted the booster during stage separation. And caused the boost back failure from sloshing.

Also I think Ship now has methane thrusters on it. They were operating with a clean blue flame in short purposeful bursts.

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