two hugely important things came from the Starship landing/splashdown. 1) scientists got to see first hand what went wrong with the heatshield instead of having to deduce it from data. 2) The recovery software was sufficiently robust to adjust for a wildly different aeronautical environment to what was expected during descent and landing. Brilliant engineering!!!!!!!!
For Starship IFT launches the payload is the data/telemetry, that they got a lot of (possibly the most they can get in an hour) which makes IFT-4 wildly successful.
It would have been better to have been able to recover both vehicles and then been able to visually inspect the effects of reentry and boost back in thorough and minute detail.
It's actually shocking how terrrible Google as a search engine is getting. You used to be able to search anything, now, if you sesech something, it wiill just repeat the same 5 mainstream media outlets over and over again, reaching a third party website that isnt part of a massive conglomerate is almost impossible.
Google's search engine is working as intended. Its purpose for you the consumer isn't to provide the correct answers or find you the correct website, it hasn't been that for a long time, its purpose is to keep you distracted and occupied within the approved boundaries of approved thought.
@@RoySATX yeah, that implication has gotten really obvious now, I'd you ask Google for certain data sets, it will bombard you with 20 articles telling you why those data sets are wrong, what your opinion on the data sets should be, and how you're a bad person for trying to find those data sets. It Google q few years ago at least pretended to be a search engine.
As always, thank you for your excellent science reporting! I also get your newsletter and highly recommend other viewers support you and get the newsletter too! There's so much clickbait and fluff here on UA-cam and creators like you, Anton Petrov - whom you've mentioned before - and a few others are rare gems! If you gave a shout out to some other creators for us to check out I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
But the real question is why it was wrong. It may have been wrong because your solution only solved the 90% easy case, but left the 10% hard case unsolved. It routinely turns out Murphy was correct.
5:45 Not sure the tiles were the problem as such. I think the plasma was getting around the hinge gap area, heating the steel, causing expansion, which in turn detached the first tiles and that led to the failure.
The problem was actually a known quantity since like three years ago when SpaceX tweeted about it. They noted that they would need to reposition the fins "leeward" i.e. away from the belly. Design plans have been drawn up illustrating this change. Anyone's guess as to why they held off on it for so long. They recently tweeted that they intend for the problem to be solved in the next launch, which means they'll either be moving on to Block 2 immediately, or they plan to thoroughly retrofit Ship 30 even though that ship has long since been built and tested.
@@Asterra2 How soon they move onto the newer design really is an interesting question. I have a feeling that the public has only part of the story but an impressive result. Musk posted after the test flight that the favorable outcome "speaks to the incredible resilience of stainless steel at temperature."
@@Mentaculus42 Personally, I think they will do the right thing and just send up Ship 30 as-is, using it to test the things they wanted to test on IFT3. They need to do this anyway before they can orbit. The reason I believe this is what will happen is that the FAA will most likely issue the new license quickly. If things go well, we could see the next launch inside a month. If SpaceX elects to solve the fins first, then no matter how they do it, it's going to take multiple months. Flight data is just more important than that. It's _the_ most important thing.
According to comments from starship, they deliberately removed tiles to assess how much damage would be done to non critical parts of the craft if tiles were lost in real time
I appreciate how you are able to explain the way we barely see through the camera lens and protective covers during reentry. Not many fully explain that properly and I think some may not have the ability to properly imagine what's going on behind the soot deposit.
So beautiful. Great work I love the fact that you talked while showing the footage. And that little chill music in the back round Making Art brother.!. Get some
Fraser, thank you for your insightful videos. Love them ! Google searches have become an advertising feed, and no longer give your alternate paths to search and follow down. In the past you could broaden your search through the results, now you seem to be guided towards a more narrow focus. It has become a case of accepting the result rather than using the result to think more deeply about the search subject. Stuart from Melbourne AU.
Great video update. The enthusiasm about the 4th Starship test is unwarranted IMHO. After a year of explosions, this vehicle has only been able to fly a suborbital trajectory and then mostly burn up on reentry with a poorly designed heat shield. Where is the HLS prototype? How many years before they can manage 15 launches, 15 orbital refuelings (for one trip to the moon!) and landing a 30 foot tall vehicle on the moon? Certainly not by 2026.
Extremely low bandwidth on shuttle.. just some telemetry.. SpaceX were broadcasting HD camera feeds live. Think morse code verses an Ethernet connection.
Kudos to the flaps, but this is overall a serious failure. SpaceX has had years to get tiles to stay on and they're still falling off, despite extensive gluing. Also, SpaceX has the best CFD software on the planet, yet it misjudged the plasma flow. Why?
@@saumyacow4435 It could well be the U.S. government attempting to make geopolitical rivals waste time and money building their own version of Starship. The Soviets could not understand why America spent so many billions on something as useless as the shuttle so they assumed it had to have a secret military purpose.
If this was a movie, they couldn't have it directed better. I was at the edge of my seat the whole time. The broken camera in combination with reactions of the SpaceX crowd made it even more exciting.
It will be amazing to see, but I'm doubtful that we will actually see that anytime soon. This last launch is considered a success, but in all honesty that success hung by a thread. The fin on the Starship melted on the way in, and the booster had an engine destruct on the way down. It was an amazing show, but I suspect there will be many more problems to be solved before a successful chopstick landing.
Fraser, did you notice the camera views of the non tiled sides of the flaps. Sheet metal flexing as the structure is loaded and flapping due to high differential pressures and turbulence. This is what I've predicted all along.
I'm cautious about getting into "new" Space Content YT channels. I have limited time, and I want to make sure the content I enjoy is the best I can get and packed. I'm starting to watch your channel now. I blame Scott Manley and Marcus House. I'm glad for the work you are doing and support of #TeamSpace.
Thanks a bunch for all the news, Fraser! 😊 My bet is that dark matter is more than just one thing... But we shall see. Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
When you say this I’m really glad I patreoned! Might upgrade as well since I believe this is an important channel for all of us. I hope many people will become patreons!! PATREON FOR FRASER!
Oly for LEO, though. Starship actually have really bad payload capacity for anything higher. I mean even the Falcon Heavy can beat it when it comes to GTO or higher .
@@Jackalhit we can and should use asteroids for that. I would even say the best way to get smth to the moon would be to use the water from the asteroids to produce fuel for the landin
On a day like today I'm more thankful than usual to have Universe Today out there! Especially since normal news is exclusively political. Thanks Frasier and team!
OMG "Safely Land" see like a 2-3 years too soon statement to me! That Starship and booster would have definitely made some serious destruction on the ground had it not been for a "lets just get 70-80% of the vehicle somehow intact on the ocean" I just get very concerned when we start lower the "success" bar from the optimal standard just based on what A PRIVATE COMPANY SAYS! Artimis 1 had all kinds of delays and was build from spare parts but the success standard was not dropped. If theoretically q person had been put there by accident they would have made it back, as well as any of the Apollo missions back in th 1960s... that horrible accident that killed 3 astronauts wasnt a "RUD" it was a WE WILL NEVER LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN AND THE BAR JUST GOT SET WAY HIGHER! The why have we lost this, reminds me of how many time humanity has literally gone back to the stone ages (fall of Roman Empire), we dropped the bar do to our inability to recognize a good achievement and total fanaticism for whoever had the shinier thing!
This starship achievement is a HUGE relief. I was genuinely concerned that SpaceX wasn't going to be able to perform to schedule and that they would be responsible for delaying Artemis. It's starting to look like they might actually be able to meet their expectations...
My heart used to sink every time I saw "exterior footage" from NASA. I literally FEEL that there's some kind of conspiracy in the camera industry to keep cctv quality cameras a thing. I've seen what basic cameras can do, have been able to do for a very long time. You'd think that they'd at least have something worth showing the best they ever got was some pimple on the ass close-up from a tower. Great effect... The first time
the starship flap erosion was half expected, as elon explained in a preflight interview, but i don't think there was much damage elsewhere on the vessel. i think the camera was positioned there for that reason (most vulnerable area). there is a seal there that is supposed to prevent plasma from flowing through the flap gap, which didn't work long. flexibility and high heating is a difficult ask for engineering usage.
The control fins and its pivot seemed to sequester compressed air but it kept control. I think collecting the ship getting the data is important. It works, but I venture to say some sacrificial ablatives could be useful in those sensitive areas by pivot to bleed off heat, and control grid fins as a replaceable item will be the fix.
Even if they did dispose of the hot staging ring on every launch (which they've specifically said they aren't going to) they'd still be reusing the two most expensive parts of the rocket. The cost savings to orbit would still be insane vs any other rocket. They've already said the only reason its being disposed of is it was added late in the design phase of the current boosters and the next version will have it integrated.
Re - Universe Today I don't care for a LOT of the journalists that cover scientific reporting, however, that's not the case here. Fraser is one of the few journalists who genuinely loves the field on which he's reporting, well enough, to have learned a lot about it. He understands space/ astronomy/ astrophysics well enough to (A) be able to report on it accurately and competently as well as (B) to be able to relate it to others in an easy-to-understand way. This is in stark contrast to 'journalists' who misunderstand the fields they're reporting on, so badly that they end up publishing misinformation more often than not! Fraser's penchant for getting it right, when reporting on space-related news and for making it interesting, as well as easy-to-understand, makes him worthy- in my esteem- of a Nobel prize! Perhaps he'd be eligible for the Nobel prize in literature? Or perhaps, given the state of the world, they could eliminate the "literature" category and replace it with "Science Communication." But then again, if they were to do that, they might find it impossibly difficult each year, to pick a winner...
At the very end, you're missing another important detail, this Starship launch didn't bring the entire rocket back. The interstage was ejected because the first stage doesn't have enough fuel and there were problems with clamping the interstage down during reentry of the first stage on the previous launch. Full reusability isn't achieved just by fixing the problems with Starship's reentry, there's more going wrong sadly.
The problem right now is that the hot-stage ring is a jerry-rigged addition. It wasn't on the first flight, and the next couple of boosters were originally built without it. So not only is it much heavier than it needs to be, but it also messes with the aerodynamics and centre of mass because again, the boosters weren't built with it in mind. Future boosters (Booster 15+?) will feature a redesigned and directly integrated hot-stage section.
The privatization of space exploration has been a disappointment as far as both technological development and mission selection. Human advancement goes beyond profit for a minority.
All the launches were successful, by test standards, but they didn’t feel like complete successes. Launch 4 was a successful test by test standards and it felt like a success even for those who are less technical.
FYI.... Booster 11 is a hollow tube. Unleas the FTS is activated to blow up the vessels. It is likely bobbing on the surface on thw Caribbean Sea somewhere around Puerto Rico or thw Yucatan Peninsula.... depending on the ocean currents. The Starship Orbiter could also be floating on the surface of the Indian Ocean.
Hi Fraser, great channel and fantastic episode, as always. Say hi to Niles for me... Question: is this the first time we have ever been able to see reentry as it happened? I think we all knew that re-entry was a rough process, but I'm not sure we understood how rough until starship flight 4. I don't know about all y'all, but I was rooting for that little flap the entire time... Seriously, it's #TheLittleFlapThatCould
3:10 If the camera _lens_ had cracked, we would not have continued to see perfectly in-focus sparks through the gaps. Camera sensors aren't designed to resolve things in focus like that without a lens.
I believe there was some Starship rich gas streaming over the camera which some of the material condensed out of the camera. Then the film of material must have cracked as it cooled.
@smeeself I'm done being surprised. For example, I haven't seen a single streamer/reaction correctly identify the vehicles' post-splashdown "acceleration" as being the accelerometers situated in the top of the vehicles delivering data while they tipped over into the ocean. Take a poll on this camera without listing options and over 90% are going to say it was the lens.
Of all the things that didn't go nominally during IFT4, the failure of the raptor right from the takeoff is more concerning. These motors have been tested for a long time and they should be rock solid and reliable by now. Having the heat shield tiles fly away is normal because this was the first time they were being tested in real-world conditions.
@Fraser Cain For me... "The fully reusable rocket architecture begins the day they successfully catch a rocket out of the air and place it back on the launch pad". So NOT this week, but hopefully in a few months or maybe a year.
The steel melted and plastered itself over the camera lens. Had the vehicle soft landed on solid ground it would have been written off. Starship is overweight and will have a payload well below 100 tonnes. And the Raptors are over-stressed and 2 of them failed. All a consequence of heavy steel.
@saumyacow4435 Would a thin structure have done better? I don't think so. The steel holds a lot of heat without failure. It's also cheap and let's them iterate very quickly. That's the main advantage
@@sulljoh1 The steel failed. It melted. So its not a lot of use unless you can fix the gas flow. The problem with steel is that its weight causes other compromises. The vehicle gets larger, thus more expensive to operate and refurbish between flights. it also means you end up pushing the engines harder.
@@saumyacow4435 it failed because the heat shield failed, same thing would happen if a space shuttle heat shield failed and the body of the space shuttle got cooked with super heated plasma, the steel isnt meant to survive reentry so no it didnt fail it's job is to keep the structure and ofcourse make up the space ship
Fraser I hope you get this in time to put into the Q&A show. The other day I was listening to a show about meteor showers but also had been listening about Kessler Syndrome and space junk cleanup with you and Pamela - and I thought, wait a minute, how much damage occurs during meteor showers and how close are we to getting a Kessler syndrome just due to passing through the debris fields that are the source of the meteors we see several Times a year? If you could help clarify beyond space is big. I mean really really big... 😂
While the talk about JWST being a replacement to Hubble in reality they have different purposes. As there isn't a direct replacement for Hubble it seems worthwhile having another mission to repair and refuel. Perhaps they can do that when the last reaction wheel is near the end of its life so the risk of a mission failure isn't as great as Hubble is about to fail anyway
If I had to guess, I'd guess that the next Starship launch will attempt booster recovery, but not Starship. Maybe an "achieve full orbit, then deorbit", maybe just the originally planned "slightly under one orbit, land near Hawaii". But I think they'll do more one more test of Starship orbit and reentry systems before attempting to recover. Have a fully successful (no disintegrating fins!) ocean splashdown before risking their land infrastructure. *MAYBE* attempt a barge landing, but I'd think they'd have to already have the barge kitted out for that by now, which they don't.
One of the engines disintegrated during Booster's relight. I feel like since they still have a Block 1 ship to expend anyway, they'll probably hustle to get the next launch out the door, and use that opportunity to try a repeat of IFT4, this time seeking to have a Booster landing free of anomalies that would definitely jeopardize the launch tower. Other things they could test: Raptor relight during the coasting phase; a new pez door design; Booster / Starship hovering for double-digit seconds since that would be very useful to have. Ship 30, of course, uses the same design, so we would have to expect the fins to disintegrate once more.
@@saumyacow4435 Pretty simple - if an engine failure happens that would risk the landing - it crashes off the coast. The exact same process used by Falcon 9. It actually aims offshore/near-but-not-at-the-barge, and only corrects to properly land if everything is going perfectly AFTER relight for landing burn.
I’d would contend that this wasn’t a burn through at all but a burn around. There has never been a ship as big as this one before. Therefore, we honestly do not know the real world activity of plasma and its interactions with spacecraft. Look at the close up again. What do you see? The framework of the wing. Meaning the upper wing has been melted away while the bottom and heavily tiled surface remained in tact. This wasn’t a burn through so much as a plasma wrap around! That’s how it was able to stop perform the manner at the very end. Had it burned through, there wouldn’t have been enough surface resistance to spite the manner to complete.
Re- Dear Moon Maybe in a few weeks, he'll announce a new partnership with Boeing Starliner, or -Slave- Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic? I mean, this sudden cancellation might just be an *angry,* knee-jerk reaction to SpaceX being unable to meet his expectations. If so, he'll probably try finding a new carrier and launching as soon as possible (presuming he's monetising this trip).
Given the issues with the moving flaps, might an alternative with combined fixed flaps and mini-thrusters be tried instead? As for the heat tiles, depending on the temperature needed for production, couldn’t they be ‘cooked’ onto the rings in entirety - one segment at a time. Unfortunately, it seems the numerous gaps between the tiles seems to be causing problems, and allowing plasma to reach the steelwork below.
The gaps are necessary, because the entire vehicle shrinks when it's filled with cryogenic propellants, and the TPS material thermally expands under reentry heat.
Not sure if the booster and Starship sank after touching down. If undamaged, their tanks are just fill with gas at that point and they should have more than enough buoyancy to stay on the surface right?
It seems that after the next starship flights may actually have at least one section land successfully. I think that long atmosphere exposure was a big difference vs the previous flight. It saved lots of fuel probably but really took a beating!!! ..seems they probably will take a different approach vs flight 3 & 4….& improve the flap heating flaws.
The long reentry profile was always the intent of this design. A shorter reentry would result in much higher peak heating (beyond the current estimated maximum of 1400°C) and much higher aerodynamic stress on the airframe, heat shield, and control surfaces.
@@Spherical_Cow unless you did a de-orbit burn to slow down before re-entry, if you did a steeper glide path to come down faster from orbital velocity you would indeed get the higher peak heating as you would be coming in faster, but if you did a burn to de-orbit that would slow your velocity and you would get less peak heating and then could use a steeper angle to get down faster potentially without higher peak heating if you balance things properly.
@@DanielRichards644 don't confuse deorbit burns with reentry burns. Deorbit burns merely put the perigee inside the atmosphere, to enable reentry. Starship will of course perform deorbit burns, once it starts flying full orbital missions. Reentry burns, on the other hand, are something only the Falcon 9 does - and Starship will never, ever do. Starship's design philosophy aims to maximize cargo mass to orbit; carrying enough propellant to significantly slow down a huge and heavy spacecraft like Starship, would mean it couldn't carry any cargo to orbit, at all. The whole point of the long, slow reentry is to use air resistance to bleed off Starship's kinetic energy. Of course, energy is conserved - so you trade off kinetic (and to a much smaller extent, gravitational potential) energy, for heat. Ergo - the heat shield.
In a perfect world, I think it means we can actually start to build orbital infrastructure, colonize the moon, and gather resources all over the place.
24:20 Dark Matter is the effect of Time on matter. If Time is a variable in the equation of the relative speed of light, then it can effect/have mass when interacting with matter.
two hugely important things came from the Starship landing/splashdown. 1) scientists got to see first hand what went wrong with the heatshield instead of having to deduce it from data. 2) The recovery software was sufficiently robust to adjust for a wildly different aeronautical environment to what was expected during descent and landing. Brilliant engineering!!!!!!!!
For Starship IFT launches the payload is the data/telemetry, that they got a lot of (possibly the most they can get in an hour) which makes IFT-4 wildly successful.
It would have been better to have been able to recover both vehicles and then been able to visually inspect the effects of reentry and boost back in thorough and minute detail.
@@music100vidhopefully that will be one of the goals for IFT-5. Getting the actual hardware back will be a “data payload” of immeasurable value.
They should rename the software as Anakin Skywalker. That thing can safely land half starship!
So there's only ONE camera on Spaceship , but any phone has at least two , makes sense !
It's actually shocking how terrrible Google as a search engine is getting.
You used to be able to search anything, now, if you sesech something, it wiill just repeat the same 5 mainstream media outlets over and over again, reaching a third party website that isnt part of a massive conglomerate is almost impossible.
Google's search engine is working as intended. Its purpose for you the consumer isn't to provide the correct answers or find you the correct website, it hasn't been that for a long time, its purpose is to keep you distracted and occupied within the approved boundaries of approved thought.
@@RoySATX yeah, that implication has gotten really obvious now, I'd you ask Google for certain data sets, it will bombard you with 20 articles telling you why those data sets are wrong, what your opinion on the data sets should be, and how you're a bad person for trying to find those data sets. It Google q few years ago at least pretended to be a search engine.
Google needs an alternative to as Google was in the past.
@@RoySATX Google is 100% WEF AGENDA2030 & INSANE WOKISM
@@stevannikolovski DuckDuckGo is a privacy centric engine that I have been having really good results with
The footage of the Starship launch was fantastic.
imagine believing litterally anything anybody says , the camera malfunctions always at the most convenient moment for SpaceX !
Did the feed cut off when it sank to the bottom of the sea?
@@DOPEDOGTOPDOG I'd rather believe camera malfunctions than some windows xp renders that boeing shows lol
OMG 👱🏿♀️really?
@@lukasralys6096 lol my wife was a tard. She's a pilot now.
Idiocracy.
As always, thank you for your excellent science reporting! I also get your newsletter and highly recommend other viewers support you and get the newsletter too! There's so much clickbait and fluff here on UA-cam and creators like you, Anton Petrov - whom you've mentioned before - and a few others are rare gems! If you gave a shout out to some other creators for us to check out I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
26:24 "For every complex problem, there's a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
H. L. Mencke
Like huge thermal tiles on a bunch of flapping sheet metal? :)
But the real question is why it was wrong. It may have been wrong because your solution only solved the 90% easy case, but left the 10% hard case unsolved. It routinely turns out Murphy was correct.
5:45 Not sure the tiles were the problem as such. I think the plasma was getting around the hinge gap area, heating the steel, causing expansion, which in turn detached the first tiles and that led to the failure.
I think you may be correct because that's what I started looking to me after looking at it a few times
Well then something like ablative coatings on all exposed surfaces?
The problem was actually a known quantity since like three years ago when SpaceX tweeted about it. They noted that they would need to reposition the fins "leeward" i.e. away from the belly. Design plans have been drawn up illustrating this change. Anyone's guess as to why they held off on it for so long. They recently tweeted that they intend for the problem to be solved in the next launch, which means they'll either be moving on to Block 2 immediately, or they plan to thoroughly retrofit Ship 30 even though that ship has long since been built and tested.
@@Asterra2
How soon they move onto the newer design really is an interesting question. I have a feeling that the public has only part of the story but an impressive result.
Musk posted after the test flight that the favorable outcome "speaks to the incredible resilience of stainless steel at temperature."
@@Mentaculus42 Personally, I think they will do the right thing and just send up Ship 30 as-is, using it to test the things they wanted to test on IFT3. They need to do this anyway before they can orbit. The reason I believe this is what will happen is that the FAA will most likely issue the new license quickly. If things go well, we could see the next launch inside a month. If SpaceX elects to solve the fins first, then no matter how they do it, it's going to take multiple months. Flight data is just more important than that. It's _the_ most important thing.
Your video quality is insanely good, whatever recording setup you got figured out is great!
According to comments from starship, they deliberately removed tiles to assess how much damage would be done to non critical parts of the craft if tiles were lost in real time
I appreciate how you are able to explain the way we barely see through the camera lens and protective covers during reentry. Not many fully explain that properly and I think some may not have the ability to properly imagine what's going on behind the soot deposit.
Loved that drone shot of the launch.
So beautiful.
Great work
I love the fact that you talked while showing the footage. And that little chill music in the back round
Making Art brother.!.
Get some
Fraser, thank you for your insightful videos. Love them !
Google searches have become an advertising feed, and no longer give your alternate paths to search and follow down. In the past you could broaden your search through the results, now you seem to be guided towards a more narrow focus. It has become a case of accepting the result rather than using the result to think more deeply about the search subject.
Stuart from Melbourne AU.
Said it before and will say it again. What an amazing content creator
Great video update. The enthusiasm about the 4th Starship test is unwarranted IMHO. After a year of explosions, this vehicle has only been able to fly a suborbital trajectory and then mostly burn up on reentry with a poorly designed heat shield. Where is the HLS prototype? How many years before they can manage 15 launches, 15 orbital refuelings (for one trip to the moon!) and landing a 30 foot tall vehicle on the moon? Certainly not by 2026.
It's delusional.
3:30 space shuttle did get telemetry out during reentry from a transmitter mounted at the rear. This was introduced from 1983 from what I can remember
Extremely low bandwidth on shuttle.. just some telemetry..
SpaceX were broadcasting HD camera feeds live.
Think morse code verses an Ethernet connection.
Starship was amazing! That incredible plasma and that little fin that could hold attitude despite melting. Mindblowing.
Kudos to the flaps, but this is overall a serious failure. SpaceX has had years to get tiles to stay on and they're still falling off, despite extensive gluing. Also, SpaceX has the best CFD software on the planet, yet it misjudged the plasma flow. Why?
@@saumyacow4435 It could well be the U.S. government attempting to make geopolitical rivals waste time and money building their own version of Starship. The Soviets could not understand why America spent so many billions on something as useless as the shuttle so they assumed it had to have a secret military purpose.
Don’t worry flap is going to be moved on next versions (they saw this coming) still we will remember the little fin that could 😁
@@oldtimer2662 I just hope the new location is not "top-heavy" and causes the ship to roll.
If this was a movie, they couldn't have it directed better. I was at the edge of my seat the whole time. The broken camera in combination with reactions of the SpaceX crowd made it even more exciting.
Congrats to the Boca Chica SpaceX Team. Bravo!!
Just wait until we're able to see that giant starship actually come back down and land on that Tower...
My favorite description of what this will be like for the booster… a 20 story building falling from the sky being caught by a giant robot arm.
It will be amazing to see, but I'm doubtful that we will actually see that anytime soon. This last launch is considered a success, but in all honesty that success hung by a thread. The fin on the Starship melted on the way in, and the booster had an engine destruct on the way down. It was an amazing show, but I suspect there will be many more problems to be solved before a successful chopstick landing.
Dream on
@@LemonsAndSalt69I'm assuming 5 years from now
@@duckgoesquack4514 I certainly hope it doesn't take that long, but I also don't see it happening next launch.
Fraser, did you notice the camera views of the non tiled sides of the flaps. Sheet metal flexing as the structure is loaded and flapping due to high differential pressures and turbulence. This is what I've predicted all along.
Just how SpaceX was able to keep live shots on that ship during re entry was a just a thrill as a space watcher since the 60’s that was the best.
I'm cautious about getting into "new" Space Content YT channels. I have limited time, and I want to make sure the content I enjoy is the best I can get and packed. I'm starting to watch your channel now. I blame Scott Manley and Marcus House. I'm glad for the work you are doing and support of #TeamSpace.
Thanks a bunch for all the news, Fraser! 😊
My bet is that dark matter is more than just one thing... But we shall see.
Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Starliner: Look what I did!!!!
Starship: Hold my beer......
What a week it was for space flight !!! Poor Hubble though 😢
When you say this I’m really glad I patreoned! Might upgrade as well since I believe this is an important channel for all of us. I hope many people will become patreons!!
PATREON FOR FRASER!
Don't be sad, with Starship, it's much easier to build a better station.
Oly for LEO, though. Starship actually have really bad payload capacity for anything higher. I mean even the Falcon Heavy can beat it when it comes to GTO or higher .
@@remliqa That is no issue as LEO is where every previous and all future stations(except for moon station) are planned for.
@@bluesteel8376 but what would you use moon station for?
@@MusikCassetteGateway Station (moon station) will be highly useful for refueling vehicles headed to other parts of the solar system.
@@Jackalhit we can and should use asteroids for that. I would even say the best way to get smth to the moon would be to use the water from the asteroids to produce fuel for the landin
Congrats to Starliner Staff/Crew!!
Thanks for everything you've done for BAUT
It took balls to be the first on starliner
I loved Suni Williams dancing as she entered the station. She must have been relieved to complete the flight.
or a death wish
Man I would have been nervous as hell. Starliner does not have a good track record and then they had leaks on the way to ISS.
But now they have to get home!
@@frasercain Yeah 😅 happy to be on the station or happy to be off star-liner hehe
It's so refreshing to hear REAL science from someone and not some of those garbage fake exaggerated channels...
Starliner is important as a backup to Dragon, and as a demonstration. Dragon will always be the low cost more capable system.
We need something else for when Elon gets canceled
@@sulljoh1 🤣🤡
Great episode Frasier, enjoyed watching❤👍
Because of this test we can really see a Starship future. It was an amazing achievement.
I've got a bridge to sell you
On a day like today I'm more thankful than usual to have Universe Today out there! Especially since normal news is exclusively political. Thanks Frasier and team!
Well said, we don’t need to live on Mars but science here, near here, and over there will be amazing.
OMG "Safely Land" see like a 2-3 years too soon statement to me! That Starship and booster would have definitely made some serious destruction on the ground had it not been for a "lets just get 70-80% of the vehicle somehow intact on the ocean" I just get very concerned when we start lower the "success" bar from the optimal standard just based on what A PRIVATE COMPANY SAYS! Artimis 1 had all kinds of delays and was build from spare parts but the success standard was not dropped. If theoretically q person had been put there by accident they would have made it back, as well as any of the Apollo missions back in th 1960s... that horrible accident that killed 3 astronauts wasnt a "RUD" it was a WE WILL NEVER LET THIS HAPPEN AGAIN AND THE BAR JUST GOT SET WAY HIGHER!
The why have we lost this, reminds me of how many time humanity has literally gone back to the stone ages (fall of Roman Empire), we dropped the bar do to our inability to recognize a good achievement and total fanaticism for whoever had the shinier thing!
Good afternoon, that neat cool wow that differently 👌 👏 Good day.85 degrees California Sunday.
This starship achievement is a HUGE relief. I was genuinely concerned that SpaceX wasn't going to be able to perform to schedule and that they would be responsible for delaying Artemis. It's starting to look like they might actually be able to meet their expectations...
The booster and Starship will not sink as long as they are in one piece. They will float like a boat.
Spacex addressed this they said they will depress the tanks and open all vents with will flood the tanks thus sinking it
What if china salvages and steals technology
Boats are complex.
What a time to be alive!
Love your content Fraser. Keep it up! 🚀 👨🚀
My heart used to sink every time I saw "exterior footage" from NASA. I literally FEEL that there's some kind of conspiracy in the camera industry to keep cctv quality cameras a thing. I've seen what basic cameras can do, have been able to do for a very long time. You'd think that they'd at least have something worth showing the best they ever got was some pimple on the ass close-up from a tower. Great effect... The first time
the starship flap erosion was half expected, as elon explained in a preflight interview, but i don't think there was much damage elsewhere on the vessel. i think the camera was positioned there for that reason (most vulnerable area). there is a seal there that is supposed to prevent plasma from flowing through the flap gap, which didn't work long. flexibility and high heating is a difficult ask for engineering usage.
The control fins and its pivot seemed to sequester compressed air but it kept control. I think collecting the ship getting the data is important. It works, but I venture to say some sacrificial ablatives could be useful in those sensitive areas by pivot to bleed off heat, and control grid fins as a replaceable item will be the fix.
LOL, the soundtrack from 2001 A Space Odyssey was playing in my head as you mentioned it. The SpaceX video looks almost as good as the movie.
Producing one starship a day? That's pie in the sky.
Unbelievable that it worked so well
Landing safely is always relative.
If you still have your relatives it was a success.
I always look forward to your reports.
Even if they did dispose of the hot staging ring on every launch (which they've specifically said they aren't going to) they'd still be reusing the two most expensive parts of the rocket. The cost savings to orbit would still be insane vs any other rocket. They've already said the only reason its being disposed of is it was added late in the design phase of the current boosters and the next version will have it integrated.
outstanding update and love the pictures and video
Re - Universe Today
I don't care for a LOT of the journalists that cover scientific reporting, however, that's not the case here. Fraser is one of the few journalists who genuinely loves the field on which he's reporting, well enough, to have learned a lot about it. He understands space/ astronomy/ astrophysics well enough to (A) be able to report on it accurately and competently as well as (B) to be able to relate it to others in an easy-to-understand way. This is in stark contrast to 'journalists' who misunderstand the fields they're reporting on, so badly that they end up publishing misinformation more often than not!
Fraser's penchant for getting it right, when reporting on space-related news and for making it interesting, as well as easy-to-understand, makes him worthy- in my esteem- of a Nobel prize! Perhaps he'd be eligible for the Nobel prize in literature? Or perhaps, given the state of the world, they could eliminate the "literature" category and replace it with "Science Communication." But then again, if they were to do that, they might find it impossibly difficult each year, to pick a winner...
"accurately" regurgitating spaceX propaganda
You're awesome fraser always on point
At the very end, you're missing another important detail, this Starship launch didn't bring the entire rocket back. The interstage was ejected because the first stage doesn't have enough fuel and there were problems with clamping the interstage down during reentry of the first stage on the previous launch. Full reusability isn't achieved just by fixing the problems with Starship's reentry, there's more going wrong sadly.
The problem right now is that the hot-stage ring is a jerry-rigged addition. It wasn't on the first flight, and the next couple of boosters were originally built without it.
So not only is it much heavier than it needs to be, but it also messes with the aerodynamics and centre of mass because again, the boosters weren't built with it in mind.
Future boosters (Booster 15+?) will feature a redesigned and directly integrated hot-stage section.
The privatization of space exploration has been a disappointment as far as both technological development and mission selection. Human advancement goes beyond profit for a minority.
All the launches were successful, by test standards, but they didn’t feel like complete successes. Launch 4 was a successful test by test standards and it felt like a success even for those who are less technical.
FYI.... Booster 11 is a hollow tube. Unleas the FTS is activated to blow up the vessels. It is likely bobbing on the surface on thw Caribbean Sea somewhere around Puerto Rico or thw Yucatan Peninsula.... depending on the ocean currents.
The Starship Orbiter could also be floating on the surface of the Indian Ocean.
Hi Fraser, great channel and fantastic episode, as always. Say hi to Niles for me... Question: is this the first time we have ever been able to see reentry as it happened? I think we all knew that re-entry was a rough process, but I'm not sure we understood how rough until starship flight 4. I don't know about all y'all, but I was rooting for that little flap the entire time... Seriously, it's #TheLittleFlapThatCould
I don't know if any other live streams. There have been reentry videos recorded, but not live streamed.
He satisfied his desire for space travel on Soyuz to ISS. That’s all he wanted and knew he’d get notoriety.
SpaceX- one suggestion, windshield wipers for the camera viewports. Also, quartz or sapphire is much more heat resistant.
That sarcastic sentence was not too mean.. 😀Just sounds very much true. Thank you for great overview again!
3:10 If the camera _lens_ had cracked, we would not have continued to see perfectly in-focus sparks through the gaps. Camera sensors aren't designed to resolve things in focus like that without a lens.
I believe there was some Starship rich gas streaming over the camera which some of the material condensed out of the camera. Then the film of material must have cracked as it cooled.
@@solsystem1342 That's exactly what it looks like, yes. I'd be surprised if more than 1 in 100k viewers picked up on what was really going on.
@smeeself I'm done being surprised. For example, I haven't seen a single streamer/reaction correctly identify the vehicles' post-splashdown "acceleration" as being the accelerometers situated in the top of the vehicles delivering data while they tipped over into the ocean. Take a poll on this camera without listing options and over 90% are going to say it was the lens.
Thanks!
Of all the things that didn't go nominally during IFT4, the failure of the raptor right from the takeoff is more concerning. These motors have been tested for a long time and they should be rock solid and reliable by now. Having the heat shield tiles fly away is normal because this was the first time they were being tested in real-world conditions.
Still a new engine but also one motor is 3% of the power.
@Fraser Cain For me... "The fully reusable rocket architecture begins the day they successfully catch a rocket out of the air and place it back on the launch pad". So NOT this week, but hopefully in a few months or maybe a year.
What a week!
Every time I watch videos about starship this week - I tear up.. This is big. Really big.
Great graphics
pretty solid validation of the choice to use stainless steel.
The steel melted and plastered itself over the camera lens. Had the vehicle soft landed on solid ground it would have been written off. Starship is overweight and will have a payload well below 100 tonnes. And the Raptors are over-stressed and 2 of them failed. All a consequence of heavy steel.
@saumyacow4435 Would a thin structure have done better?
I don't think so. The steel holds a lot of heat without failure. It's also cheap and let's them iterate very quickly. That's the main advantage
MDS
@@sulljoh1 The steel failed. It melted. So its not a lot of use unless you can fix the gas flow. The problem with steel is that its weight causes other compromises. The vehicle gets larger, thus more expensive to operate and refurbish between flights. it also means you end up pushing the engines harder.
@@saumyacow4435 it failed because the heat shield failed, same thing would happen if a space shuttle heat shield failed and the body of the space shuttle got cooked with super heated plasma, the steel isnt meant to survive reentry so no it didnt fail it's job is to keep the structure and ofcourse make up the space ship
The Starship flight also demonstrated that the software can control the ship even when things are melting.
One of the most exciting test flights ever. Looked like controlled reentry all the way down.
I don't think this Starship flight was a complete success, but I'd rate this as a 90%, 95%, maybe 99% success. They're in the right place.
i was watching speechless 26 thousand miles a hour and still landed,
What a Week. Try to beat that now. 😊
Fraser I hope you get this in time to put into the Q&A show. The other day I was listening to a show about meteor showers but also had been listening about Kessler Syndrome and space junk cleanup with you and Pamela - and I thought, wait a minute, how much damage occurs during meteor showers and how close are we to getting a Kessler syndrome just due to passing through the debris fields that are the source of the meteors we see several
Times a year?
If you could help clarify beyond space is big. I mean really really big... 😂
Wonderful! ⭐️
The little fin that could
That fin got a plasma circumcision on the way down . . .
I'm currently reading Apollo 13/Lost Moon and I'm loving it. Are there any other books written by astronauts that you'd recommend?
While the talk about JWST being a replacement to Hubble in reality they have different purposes. As there isn't a direct replacement for Hubble it seems worthwhile having another mission to repair and refuel. Perhaps they can do that when the last reaction wheel is near the end of its life so the risk of a mission failure isn't as great as Hubble is about to fail anyway
If I had to guess, I'd guess that the next Starship launch will attempt booster recovery, but not Starship. Maybe an "achieve full orbit, then deorbit", maybe just the originally planned "slightly under one orbit, land near Hawaii". But I think they'll do more one more test of Starship orbit and reentry systems before attempting to recover. Have a fully successful (no disintegrating fins!) ocean splashdown before risking their land infrastructure.
*MAYBE* attempt a barge landing, but I'd think they'd have to already have the barge kitted out for that by now, which they don't.
One of the engines disintegrated during Booster's relight. I feel like since they still have a Block 1 ship to expend anyway, they'll probably hustle to get the next launch out the door, and use that opportunity to try a repeat of IFT4, this time seeking to have a Booster landing free of anomalies that would definitely jeopardize the launch tower. Other things they could test: Raptor relight during the coasting phase; a new pez door design; Booster / Starship hovering for double-digit seconds since that would be very useful to have. Ship 30, of course, uses the same design, so we would have to expect the fins to disintegrate once more.
Their was no relight in space, so orbit wont be allowed.
it would be reckless to attempt a booster landing on the "chopsticks" when they don't have reliable engines.
@@saumyacow4435 Pretty simple - if an engine failure happens that would risk the landing - it crashes off the coast. The exact same process used by Falcon 9. It actually aims offshore/near-but-not-at-the-barge, and only corrects to properly land if everything is going perfectly AFTER relight for landing burn.
@@AnonymousFreakYT And of it fails in the last few seconds? You still need a reliable engine.
Is the universal docking system monomorphic? As in could a possible rescue Dragon capsule dock with the Starliner?
I’d would contend that this wasn’t a burn through at all but a burn around. There has never been a ship as big as this one before. Therefore, we honestly do not know the real world activity of plasma and its interactions with spacecraft. Look at the close up again. What do you see? The framework of the wing. Meaning the upper wing has been melted away while the bottom and heavily tiled surface remained in tact. This wasn’t a burn through so much as a plasma wrap around! That’s how it was able to stop perform the manner at the very end. Had it burned through, there wouldn’t have been enough surface resistance to spite the manner to complete.
How much to buy a launch for personal use?
No loss of signal on re-entry. Is that not ground breaking news?
Greetings from the BIG SKY. Good news.
star liner and starship have a lot of defect and work to do
A wider opening at the back end of the hinge on the flaps to decrease the pressure heating????
Re- Dear Moon
Maybe in a few weeks, he'll announce a new partnership with Boeing Starliner, or -Slave- Blue Origin, or Virgin Galactic?
I mean, this sudden cancellation might just be an *angry,* knee-jerk reaction to SpaceX being unable to meet his expectations. If so, he'll probably try finding a new carrier and launching as soon as possible (presuming he's monetising this trip).
STARSHIP!
Given the issues with the moving flaps, might an alternative with combined fixed flaps and mini-thrusters be tried instead? As for the heat tiles, depending on the temperature needed for production, couldn’t they be ‘cooked’ onto the rings in entirety - one segment at a time. Unfortunately, it seems the numerous gaps between the tiles seems to be causing problems, and allowing plasma to reach the steelwork below.
The gaps are necessary, because the entire vehicle shrinks when it's filled with cryogenic propellants, and the TPS material thermally expands under reentry heat.
Fraser is effing great!
Not sure if the booster and Starship sank after touching down. If undamaged, their tanks are just fill with gas at that point and they should have more than enough buoyancy to stay on the surface right?
It seems that after the next starship flights may actually have at least one section land successfully.
I think that long atmosphere exposure was a big difference vs the previous flight. It saved lots of fuel probably but really took a beating!!!
..seems they probably will take a different approach vs flight 3 & 4….& improve the flap heating flaws.
The long reentry profile was always the intent of this design. A shorter reentry would result in much higher peak heating (beyond the current estimated maximum of 1400°C) and much higher aerodynamic stress on the airframe, heat shield, and control surfaces.
@@Spherical_Cow could be true…difficult to predict till actually tested to know for sure.
@@Spherical_Cow unless you did a de-orbit burn to slow down before re-entry, if you did a steeper glide path to come down faster from orbital velocity you would indeed get the higher peak heating as you would be coming in faster, but if you did a burn to de-orbit that would slow your velocity and you would get less peak heating and then could use a steeper angle to get down faster potentially without higher peak heating if you balance things properly.
@@DanielRichards644 don't confuse deorbit burns with reentry burns.
Deorbit burns merely put the perigee inside the atmosphere, to enable reentry. Starship will of course perform deorbit burns, once it starts flying full orbital missions.
Reentry burns, on the other hand, are something only the Falcon 9 does - and Starship will never, ever do. Starship's design philosophy aims to maximize cargo mass to orbit; carrying enough propellant to significantly slow down a huge and heavy spacecraft like Starship, would mean it couldn't carry any cargo to orbit, at all. The whole point of the long, slow reentry is to use air resistance to bleed off Starship's kinetic energy. Of course, energy is conserved - so you trade off kinetic (and to a much smaller extent, gravitational potential) energy, for heat. Ergo - the heat shield.
Freaking awesome
In a perfect world, I think it means we can actually start to build orbital infrastructure, colonize the moon, and gather resources all over the place.
I’d love to have photo of what shape starship was in after reentry. Don’t suppose we’ll ever know …
Plan to build 1 star ship a day, just like those cars and planes in yards where unused ones parked.
Genuinely so suprised starshiped launched 4 times before starliner finally launched crew
New sub here, fun video
24:20 Dark Matter is the effect of Time on matter. If Time is a variable in the equation of the relative speed of light, then it can effect/have mass when interacting with matter.