SpaceX’s Starship V3—still a work in progress—mostly successful on first flight

SpaceX has more to prove before flying Starship all the way to low-Earth orbit.

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[ChrisPhoenix]

When that one asteroid struck the Earth and killed all the dinosaurs it turns out the earth did just fine without them; probably didn't even notice they were gone.
The dinosaurs were screwed of course, but the Earth kept on going.

Randall Munroe notes: "Birds aren't descended from dinosaurs, they are dinosaurs. Which means the fastest animal alive today is a small carnivorous dinosaur, Falco peregrinus."

 

[NeoQuasar]

It'd be nice if Ars would step up moderation of completely useless comments on the SpaceX articles, the people who have nothing better to do than make comments which contribute nothing because Elon Bad are really tiresome.

 

[Latchkey_Wizzard]

The engine issues may be concerning. The engine out on starship seemed to be leaking heavily into the engine area through the whole flight, not just an engine not starting.

And, the flip maneuver definitely caused all.ost every engine on the booster to get completely knocked offline,so they may be back to the drawing board on some of that fluid showing again.

Good progress, given the immense number of changes, but worrisome. Hopefully they have another test unit ready to adjust and try again quickly.

I think the flip manoeuvre was the issue. It seemed to flip sideways instead of up (relative to camera view) like the previous starship flights. The booster then falls away with engines partially relighting and subsequently shutting down. I’d say they must have been sucking gas at this point.

 

[odikweos]

The hard things to do are climate mitigation and adaptation, not go and fuck other planets when we can’t even properly manage the one we have.

This is deranged as fuck.

We have to do all of the above.

 

[odikweos]

Okay, but that's totally ignoring the "why" part. Why does this matter? What problems does moving some humans to Mars solve, and why does it have to be now instead of in a thousand years or five thousand or fifty thousand? And why is it worth indulging someone who is currently actively hostile to living things? What's the higher cause here?

You're too short-sighted. Over the long term, getting offplanet in quantity guards us against catastrophe on earth killing us all at once. That could be anything from runaway nanotech, to nuclear war, biologicals, or even just a damned unlucky asteroid we can't deflect. And more importantly, it keeps us on the road toward leaving the solar system, which is the final word in species survival.

The problem with the people who talk about how we have big problems here at home is they will always say that. That view will keep us at home, until something unexpected just snuffs us out like the dinosaurs. Anyone who says, as they did above, that "on some multimillion year timescale momentum doesn't matter" is nuts, because human beings get stuck in ruts. Civilizations do. We probably don't have a window of hundreds of years to get off Earth, much less more. But getting off Earth will improve some of the building tensions and make coopetition between the powers less of a zero sum game, which will help our overall survivability in several dimensions.

This is not to say we should ignore the climate catastrophe. But even there, getting space based industry finally up and running will eventually help. And don't kid yourself, the climate problem is going to take a thousand years, if we're lucky, to sort out. We'll need the help of the materials in the Belt at least.

As a final note, for decades people said landing rockets was too hard. Everything's too hard to a particular mindset. Not invented here. Not in my back yard. Etc. Step back and see that for the bullshit it is.

 

[eyesoars]

It's kind of silly to use the threat of climate change as an argument for settling other planets. No matter how bad climate change gets, the easiest planet to survive on is going to be this one. Antarctica is easier to settle than Mars. It has significantly more sunlight than Mars, and provides easy access to water and oxygen. And it's relatively warm, compared to Mars. If we can't survive on a climate-changed Earth, Mars is much harder.

And your point is?

Mankind didn't go to the Moon because it was easy.

 

[SpikeTheHobbitMage]

Because there too many of us. We are ruining the planet because of that. We need to move some activities off world to reduce our negative impact.

"Too many of us" is Malthusian anti-humanism. Earth's carrying capacity is estimated between 12 and 14 billion. That should be sustainable. Our problem is waste. Our society is incredibly, needlessly, destructively wasteful, and every effort to clean it up is hindered by entrenched interests and blatant corruption. Whether it succeeds or fails that's probably the single biggest contribution that colonizing another world will give us: A colony on another world cannot afford waste and it can't cheat as is widely done here on Earth. Everything we learn from a serious effort on that front will benefit us here at home.

 

[stevenkan]

I think the flip manoeuvre was the issue. It seemed to flip sideways instead of up (relative to camera view) like the previous starship flights. The booster then falls away with engines partially relighting and subsequently shutting down. I’d say they must have been sucking gas at this point.

And by "gas" I assume you mean "gaseous propellant instead of the intended liquid-phase propellant."

Yeah, that sounds entirely plausible. The propellant feed systems were probably not designed to deal with that amount of rotation, nor along that axis.

But, knowing SpaceX, we'll probably get their word on this in a matter of days.

 

[A_Very_Tired_Geek]

FWIW, and probably it isn't worth much anyway, but this is why you shouldn't directly link to X/Twitter when trying to make some point:

At least it's accurate: X is having issues. They can get over themselves though cuz I'm not going to disable the only thing that makes the current widely dysfunctional web tolerable nor use some other browser.

 

[SubWoofer2]

I've honestly never understood this desperation mindset that a lot of people seem to have.

See, cuz, the only reason it's desperate is if you actually care about saving the human race. It has absolutely nothing to do with saving the Earth.
Because despite all of our technological advances we do not have anywhere near the technological capacity to actually destroy the earth.

Your point about the Earth having negotiated its way through major traumas is well made, and that it will continue in some form irregardless of whether human beings are around or not.

Your point also is a nicety bordering on irrelevance. From a human beings point of view, the goal is that human beings are still around and are thriving, on a planet that is also thriving.

There are about thirteen major cycles which combine and interact to collectively ensure this planet thrives and, as a home, allows us to thrive.

We have bent or broken eight or nine of them, through use of our technology. The carbon cycle is the greatest of these emergencies. We've even affected the tectonic cycle, for goodness sake.

All this without discussing nuclear winter and the number times over the Earth can be destroyed if all nuclear weapons were launched.

Your confidence in the Earth's powers of recovery is noted. Your claim that we don't have the technological capacity to destroy the Earth is bullshit. It's happening around you, right now.

 

[randomuser42]

You're too short-sighted. Over the long term, getting offplanet in quantity guards us against catastrophe on earth killing us all at once.

There is almost nothing that could conceivably happen on or to earth that would make it LESS habitable than a planet like Mars. If we reached the point technologically that a colony on Mars could not only exist independently but could also thrive and expand, then we'd have reached the point to weather those events on earth and come out the other side. The days and years after a bigass asteroid struck the Yucatan and kicked off a mass extinction event were still incomparably better than living on Mars.

I'm not against doing it, but attributing it as meaningfully contributing to the longer term survival of the species is just lying to yourself. We'll need to leave to deal with the sun expanding but even then that time scale is so gigantic our descendants wouldn't even be recognizable modern humans, and since we're just doing sci fi wish fulfillment here we'd probably have figured out stellar engineering at that point and we'd just stop it.

Edit: what you're looking for is our ability to go to another habitable planet, none of which will be reached without as of yet unknowable breakthroughs in propulsion or some other unknown physics to actually let us get there. It may happen, but it's impossible to say if or when. If we wanted to singularly focus on human long term survival in the way you're describing we'd be focusing full bore on things like theoretical astrophysics.

 

[randomuser42]

Your claim that we don't have the technological capacity to destroy the Earth is bullshit. It's happening around you, right now

Full on nuclear winter....still more habitable than Mars.

Edit: if we boiled the oceans, blew the atmosphere off of earth, destroyed its magnetic field, killed all life on earth and made the outside uninhabitable....closer but still better than Mars.

Edit 2: if the greenhouse effect ran away until Earth's surface was choked under dense gas....still better than Venus.

 

[AdrianS]

Because we won't survive over any reasonable time as a species unless we get off the planet in quantity, and we cannot afford to lose momentum (as we already did once in the 20th). Of course it's fun too. But the important thing is not to die off as a species because we were too lazy, distracted or stupid to do hard things.

Rush rush burn the planet this is important! We only have 100,000,000 years left before we have to leave.

 

[DDopson]

Your point about the Earth having negotiated its way through major traumas is well made, and that it will continue in some form irregardless of whether human beings are around or not.

Your point also is a nicety bordering on irrelevance. From a human beings point of view, the goal is that human beings are still around and are thriving, on a planet that is also thriving.

There are about thirteen major cycles which combine and interact to collectively ensure this planet thrives and, as a home, allows us to thrive.

We have bent or broken eight or nine of them, through use of our technology. The carbon cycle is the greatest of these emergencies. We've even affected the tectonic cycle, for goodness sake.

All this without discussing nuclear winter and the number times over the Earth can be destroyed if all nuclear weapons were launched.

Your confidence in the Earth's powers of recovery is noted. Your claim that we don't have the technological capacity to destroy the Earth is bullshit. It's happening around you, right now.

In the aftermath of a major nuclear war, the vast majority of Earth's surface would be less radioactive than Mars. It would also be warmer, with readily accessible oxygen and water, and despite the stratospheric dust devastating terrestrial crop yields, post-apocalyptic Earth would still have more sunlight for growing crops. And the damaged ozone layer would provide better protection than the total lack of ozone and magnetic shielding on Mars. And unlike Mars, you wouldn't need a vacuum rated space-suit to prevent the water in your eyes from boiling.

Let's not kid ourselves that we can screw up this planet and have a get-out-of-jail-free card by colonizing an airless rock in space. By all means colonize Mars for the technological challenge, or explore it for the scientific value; just don't delude yourself into thinking that a "Martian backup plan" absolves us of our responsibilities to this planet and the billions of people the depend upon it for survival. Sustaining life on Mars is far harder than cleaning up the worst conceivable terrestrial disaster, and it will be a very, very long time before any Martian settlement can survive without constant support from Earth.

 

[himi]

The satellite view was very cool, but one thing I was a little confused about: they said on the broadcast that they were doing that to be able to inspect the heat shield. But the satellites are released from the top of the ship (the side without heat tiles). Was it supposed to do a flip maneuver after they released, or did they mean they wanted to inspect the few tiles they stuck on the top of the flaps?

I believe the idea is that they deploy the satellites and then use RCS to rotate the ship while in view, in order to confirm the state of the heat shield before attempting re-entry. If a ship suffered damage during launch or in orbit, that could be used to determine whether to attempt a recovery or go for a splashdown.

I don't think this deployment was intended to do that (particularly given the engine issues during the launch - they probably dropped a bunch of potentially risky on-orbit tests so they could make sure they got the ship re-entry results), it was mostly just a tech demo to prove the core idea, as well as put some starlink v3 components in space to do basic functionality tests.

 

[SubWoofer2]

It'd be nice if Ars would step up moderation of completely useless comments on the SpaceX articles, the people who have nothing better to do than make comments which contribute nothing because Elon Bad are really tiresome.

Tips: downvote the posts when you see them. Don't click on the "posts not visible" when you don't see them. You have an option to exclude the usual suspects from your feed.

Tiresome is a small price to pay when the alternative is claims of censorship.

 

[AdrianS]

And your point is?

Mankind didn't go to the Moon because it was easy.

"Mankind" went to the moon as part of a dick-measuring contest between two major powers.

 

[YetAnotherBoris]

Does anyone know why their warm gas RCS thrusters had a blue tinge? They had a fairly continuous vent of white out of the side, presumably boil off from the forward part of the methane tank. When the RCS thrusters would fire they were consistently a very different color. But shouldn't they be the same gas coming from the same tank? Is it just a difference in pressure causing this?

One example is visible in the timestamped video here.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRi55GyADv8&t=2903s

I believe those are actually hot gas thrusters (and the blue is just literally a typical methane flame). Cold/warm gas thrusters work well for the Booster, but they're not a good solution for Ship. Even a baseline Starlink Pez v3 Ship is spec'ed to endure at least 48 hours in orbit, according to SpaceX. Tankers, Depots, and certainly HLS will need to both endure much longer, and carry out significant maneuvers with far more mass onboard. It would make sense that SpaceX is already laying the groundwork on all the prerequisite tech for those more-ambitious applications.

 

[DDopson]

I believe the idea is that they deploy the satellites and then use RCS to rotate the ship while in view, in order to confirm the state of the heat shield before attempting re-entry. If a ship suffered damage during launch or in orbit, that could be used to determine whether to attempt a recovery or go for a splashdown.

I don't think this deployment was intended to do that (particularly given the engine issues during the launch - they probably dropped a bunch of potentially risky on-orbit tests so they could make sure they got the ship re-entry results), it was mostly just a tech demo to prove the core idea, as well as put some starlink v3 components in space to do basic functionality tests.

I don't quite understand why this is important for flight decision making. As diagnostic data for confirming why a ship was lost, sure, yes, that's still quite useful. But if the Ship is going to be lost, it's not like there's some rescue plan that will save it for less than the cost of just manufacturing a new one, and the way that landings work, they aren't targeting the launch site until they've confirmed engine relight, so if it fails it will crash into the ... oh, hmm, I see. It's only the booster that reenters from the oceanic direction. The ship arrives at Boca Chica from the East, meaning that it fundamentally has to pass over a lot of populated land (even if it dodges major population centers).

So I guess if the inspection shows that Starship is missing enough heat tiles to have significant risk of failure during reentry, they are going to target open ocean to reduce the risk of it failing over land? It's not about reducing the risk of losing a Starship. It's about reducing the risk of a Starship failure scattering debris over land. I wonder what the decision threshold will be. Is a 1% chance of failure over land enough to dump a 99% survivable Starship in the ocean?

 

[YetAnotherBoris]

I hear from space fans all the time that what SpaceX or Musk or Trump do at a moral level don't matter as much as Becoming A Multi-Planetary Species. Presumably being "exiting[sic] and fun" isn't the basis for that, but if it is, that's even more pathetic than I realized the space cultists were.

Both extremes are dumb and pathetic.

On one hand, we have people unable to disentangle their rightful hate for Musk and Fascism as well as the tiresome conveyor belt of Silicon Valley horseshit for the benefit of stonks, from the objective facts and progress of rocket technology development at SpaceX.

On the other hand, we have people enamoured of Musk and Fascism (or at least, deeply ignorant and misinformed as to the latter, thanks to their personal information bubbles), and happily parroting the nauseating Silicon Valley horseshit for the benefit of stonks - which many of them apparently and unironically take as earnest gospel.

But the reality is that SpaceX continues to make solid progress in Starship development, and that Starship is indeed heralding a revolution in access to space that will eclipse even the accomplishments of the Falcon 9. And Starlink will continue to expand in capabilities, and enjoy a vast cost advantage over competing systems (except those eventually coming from China), thanks to its vertical integration with Starship under the same corporate umbrella. These are the baseline facts, and no amount of angry venting or proselytizing on the Internet by either extreme, will change those facts. Nor will complaining about news coverage for these obviously newsworthy developments.

 

[SubWoofer2]

don't delude yourself into thinking that a "Martian backup plan" absolves us of our responsibilities to this planet and the billions of people the depend upon it for survival.

Thanks for your reply, but I cannot see where I spoke to the point you make about Mars, let alone deluded myself about it.

 

[mcain6925]

The thing that impressed me, although I may be inferring what actually happened from bits and pieces, goes like this. They lost a vacuum Raptor on the way up, and the altitude and speed were both short of what was intended. On reentry, announcers were pointing out they were deeper in the atmosphere than expected, and slowing more rapidly. Then, after they passed maximum heating, Starship climbed and maintained its speed and returned to the originally planned trajectory. Then did all of the maneuvers it was supposed to and splashed down right in front of the cameras. They didn't land minutes and a thousand km short of the target; it flew right to where it was supposed to go despite the problems.

That's a big deal when your flight plans say overfly Mexico or the Southwest US, maneuver over the Gulf, and come back to the Texas coast.

 

[jthill]

Okay, but that's totally ignoring the "why" part. Why does this matter? What problems does moving some humans to Mars solve, and why does it have to be now instead of in a thousand years or five thousand or fifty thousand? And why is it worth indulging someone who is currently actively hostile to living things? What's the higher cause here?

Why go? Because we can. Why now? Because we can. Why do we want to? You love what you love.

Image text on xkcd 893: The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

As I dare say everyone agrees, it's a dauntingly long road to the stars. You're demanding a justification for an early step? Trying to pose as arbiter? It's not-just-vaguely risible.

Not to put too fine a point on it: coward's logic and crab-pot logic, not a good look, dude.

 

[YetAnotherBoris]

but is he more enabling it with his money or more impeding it with his ego?

He's years behind schedule, having spent I don't know how many $billion on Starship, which is just now getting to TRL7. Maybe not quite there since they haven't managed to put it in LEO yet. As for TRL to take a rocket to the moon, they're at least a year from that.

Recent pre-IPO disclosures peg the total spent by SpaceX on Starship development so far, at approximately $15 Billion. While not nothing, it's still but a drop in the bucket, compared to NASA's total Artemis (and prior to that, Constellation) spending.

SLS is at TRL8 for taking a rocket to the moon or TRL9 for taking a human-rated rocket around it, with people on board.

Based on the number of things they've got to get operational to get boots on the moon, we're looking at 2029 at the earliest with Starship. SLS could get there with sooner with lower operational and program risk.

SLS is useless if your objective is to actually land people on the Moon, let alone construct, man, maintain, and resupply a permanent lunar base. You'd need an actual lander system for such things (and a way to deliver the lander to lunar orbit), and moreover a lander capable of hauling a hell of a lot more mass to the lunar surface, than the Apollo landers of yore.

SLS can get Orion into some high lunar orbit - but can't even take Orion to low lunar orbit. You'd need at least SLS Block 1B, with Exploration Upper Stage and Mobile Launcher 2, for that. Last I checked, EUS and ML2 were both running way over-budget and years behind schedule, and unlikely to go operational before ~2029 anyway; and now they're both getting canned.

But you're right: NASA's/Isaacman's new and improved timeline for Artemis is still as deeply unrealistic as it ever had been in its prior incarnations. There won't be a crewed landing on the Moon before 2029, and in all likelihood, not even this decade.

 

[himi]

I don't quite understand why this is important for flight decision making. As diagnostic data for confirming why a ship was lost, sure, yes, that's still quite useful. But if the Ship is going to be lost, it's not like there's some rescue plan that will save it for less than the cost of just manufacturing a new one, and the way that landings work, they aren't targeting the launch site until they've confirmed engine relight, so if it fails it will crash into the ... oh, hmm, I see. It's only the booster that reenters from the oceanic direction. The ship arrives at Boca Chica from the East, meaning that it fundamentally has to pass over a lot of populated land (even if it dodges major population centers).

So I guess if the inspection shows that Starship is missing enough heat tiles to have significant risk of failure during reentry, they are going to target open ocean to reduce the risk of it failing over land? It's not about reducing the risk of losing a Starship. It's about reducing the risk of a Starship failure scattering debris over land. I wonder what the decision threshold will be. Is a 1% chance of failure over land enough to dump a 99% survivable Starship in the ocean?

Exactly - and remember, this isn't just about the test program, this is something targeted at operational flights over the long term.

I expect they'll be pretty cautious about their decision making until they get a lot more experience, even though it's been made abundantly clear by the test program that a ship which can still control its re-entry is likely to make it all the way to the flip maneuver (I still shed a tear thinking of The Little Flap That Could . . .)

This thing is big, tough, and has lots of chunky hardware - debris hitting an urban area would not be pleasant. The only positive, really, is that the most toxic things on it are likely the batteries, there's no concerns about any of those crazy-arse-toxic hypergolics.

 

[LuvEngineering]

NASA sends humans to space.

SpaceX sends trash to the bottom of the ocean, over and over and every time it's "wait for the next one!"

I’m putting this short, yet poignant, text into a calendar event for Memorial Day weekend 2027. We can all gather in the comments next year. It will be interesting to see how this comment ages.

IFT-12 wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough. I predict the dam of Starship progress just burst and the next 12 months will be amazing.

We’ll see whose prediction is closer.