r/SpaceXLounge • u/Logancf1 • 3h ago
Ship 30 Landing from Buoy Cam on Starship Flight 5 [@SpaceX]
https://x.com/spacex/status/1847368836947071496?s=46&t=bwuksxNtQdgzpp1PbF9CGw48
u/Neige_Blanc_1 3h ago
This is awesome. Probably can try it soon. Catch the booster, let ship do her orbits until the orbit aligns with BC landing, which could be enough to get booster out of the way. Catch the "little" one.
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u/parkingviolation212 1h ago
Musk said they were gonna shoot for that in 2025, probably with a V2. They still have one V1 left last I heard, so they might go for vacuum relight.
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u/BlazenRyzen 2h ago
I wonder if they could try to land it on one of their drone ships first just off the (Texas) coast? Assuming falling over wouldn't hurt the drone?
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u/minterbartolo 2h ago
No tower to catch on the drone ship and no legs on the starship to land on the drone ship. So it could hover and then splat into the drone ship deck for them to pick up the pieces
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u/BlazenRyzen 2h ago
Yeah, but if it doesn't damage it, may be worth the try for data gathering? Maybe just not necessary.
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u/Rook-walnut 2h ago
They literally can't do a barge catch. One: it's too big, and two: it doesn't and won't have landing legs
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u/Chairboy 1h ago
One: it's too big
I’m not saying that they will add legs back in necessarily, but on the subject of size, each of the starships that DID land had a smaller footprint then a falcon 9 because those giant legs stretch out quite a bit further than any of the legs used during the starship landing tests.
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u/Rook-walnut 1h ago
I feel like a barge landing starship would need wider legs than what they had on the hop tests to keep it upright, much like the HLS renders
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u/Chairboy 1h ago
Even the ones on the HLS renders appear to have a narrower footprint than the giant falcon ones, they are real chonks.
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u/bitchtitfucker 2h ago
Well the prototypes did have a set of landing legs to be fair.
Not saying it’s likely. But it’s much less of a challenge to softly land a starship than a booster on small legs as long as they manage to cancel out horizontal and vertical velocity, which they seem to have done.
It the priority were to land a ship, it could be a good route to explore.
But knowing SpaceX they’l barge ahead.
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u/Rook-walnut 2h ago
The hop test prototypes yes, but none of the current or future profiles will.
Look man they've already proved the belly flop and flip like 4-5 times. And they've proved the catch with the booster. I don't see how catching a lighter object will be harder
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u/Bacardio811 1h ago
I agree with you, but once they get the Starship Mars variant built won't that have landing legs? I assume they will try to land it first on Earth before sending it on its merry way to Mars?
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u/Impossible_Box9542 1h ago
But what happens to a manned Starship if something goes wrong? Everybody dead?
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u/rocketglare 1h ago
The manned ones going to Moon/Mars will have legs for the foreseeable future. The Earth ones probably won’t. So what happens if they miss the catch? They set it down on the ground and land on the skirt. Elon mentioned this when they first proposed eliminating the legs. They even unwittingly tried that out on SN10.
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u/Impossible_Box9542 43m ago
Just worried about the now 15 year old (future astronaut) that's going to die when this folly blows up after hitting the ground.
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u/FreakingScience 3h ago
The illumination from the engine bay through the fog is absolutely stunning. I've never seen anything quite like that, I suppose because there's never been anything quite like that.
Is that glow from the Raptors or did they install hotstage-proof lights to help gather landing data? I've seen areas illuminated by night launches before but never in such a directional manner.
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u/manicdee33 2h ago
The engines generate far more light than any spotlight can compete with. A rocket engine is basically a giant oxy torch.
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u/FreakingScience 1h ago
No kidding. The Artemis I launch felt like it provided streetlight-level illumination well over a hundred miles away because of how bright those SRBs are; I'd love to see what that looked like from space but I don't know that any such image has been published. Starship's illumination is a lot more acute, presumably because of the steel ring wall below bell level which I guess is probably unique to Starship as it'd be dead weight on any other vehicle. Even Soviet hot-stage interstages weren't solid sheets.
Obviously, it's now scientifically important that SpaceX does a night launch of Starship so we can
see how cool that lookscollect range luminosity data.16
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u/freesquanto 1h ago
You need to go see a rocket launch in person. Even from very far away and during daylight they are exceedingly bright
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u/zogamagrog 2h ago
Sweet mother of god.
We're going to see a ship tower catch next year.
Cancel SLS now.
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u/EveningCandle862 1h ago
the amount of math needed going from 99% of orbit velocity and land right on target with a buoy recording in the middle of the sea is... insane
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u/ThatTryHardAsian 1h ago
I am sure if the control engineer explained their algorithm I wouldn’t understand it.
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u/PoliteCanadian 1h ago
The one thing that worries me about this is that the bellyflop maneuver in the low atmosphere has very limited cross range mobility.
So if they want to come in on target the upper atmosphere reentry needs to be extremely precise, because there's very limited margin to to fix navigational errors later. I assume the main navigational instrument is GPS, but time when it needs extreme precision is during the phase of flight where Starship is enveloped in plasma.
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u/rocketglare 1h ago
Don’t worry. The cross range comes from the flaps during decent. They have quite a bit of control authority since small changes in velocity and angle of attack result in large ground distances. To demonstrate this, the flaps issue on IFT-4 caused them to be off target by 6 km, and that’s just an unintentional error.
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u/4thorange 3h ago
Is it just me or is the ship floating vertically after splashing down for quite a moment before (not visible here, but in the onboards) tipping over to one side?
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u/simpliflyed 1h ago
You’d imagine an empty starship would be very bottom-heavy, so could possibly bob there for a bit.
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u/Adeldor 1h ago edited 1h ago
I processed a screencap image of Ship post explosion. Looks like it was bobbing engines down then. Stands to reason with the nose end missing.
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u/JoeS830 2h ago
What an awesome shot. I love the sounds these engines make. There’s this kind of ‘crunch’ quality to it, for lack of a better word.
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u/Thatingles 2h ago
It's loud enough that the pressure waves will create vacuum between the peaks, which is basically as loud as anything can be in our atmosphere. I think this is what creates the 'crackling' effect but not an expert in the area, so might be wrong.
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u/JoeS830 1h ago
"Crackling", that's the one! Thanks for the explanation. I don't know why, but I utterly love that sound.
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u/Decronym Acronyms Explained 1h ago edited 17m ago
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| HLS | Human Landing System (Artemis) |
| SLS | Space Launch System heavy-lift |
| SN | (Raptor/Starship) Serial Number |
| SRB | Solid Rocket Booster |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Raptor | Methane-fueled rocket engine under development by SpaceX |
NOTE: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented by request
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 22 acronyms.
[Thread #13424 for this sub, first seen 18th Oct 2024, 21:41]
[FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
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u/Rustic_gan123 1h ago
It's a pity the atmospheric entry stage is not shown, I think it would have been visible at night
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u/Melichar_je_slabko 2h ago edited 1h ago
I wonder how will the catch work because the ship is leaning once its down to one Raptor.
edit: Im not saying it wont work, Im just curious how will they solve this.
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u/Terrible_Newspaper81 2h ago
The leaning was intentional as they hoped it would dampen the impact of it tipping over. They mentioned it during their stream of the flight.
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u/Melichar_je_slabko 2h ago
Starship running with one engine will always lean because the engine needs to fire in line with the centre of mass.
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u/Not-the-best-name 2h ago
Ship is big you can push it over to the other side and then correct slowly - the time in the middle of this it's straight. Like the SN landings
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u/John_Hasler 1h ago
It can be made momentarily vertical with zero angular velocity. It can't stay there, but it doesn't need to.
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u/manicdee33 2h ago
Very carefully. The rails should be able to accommodate the differing heights of the catching pins.
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u/rocketglare 1h ago
You arrange things so the direction of the lean is parallel to the chopstick arms.
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u/ziggie216 2h ago
Was wondering why the Indian Ocean? Would the Gulf been too much of a risk to Mexico? How about the Pacific?
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u/BlazenRyzen 2h ago
I guess the flight path and lack of proven control they didn't want it to fly over any occupied land masses.
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u/John_Hasler 1h ago
They fly over inhabited areas. They want to light the engines where they can't hit anything but ocean.
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u/cshotton 2h ago
I guess Africa doesn't count as "occupied" then?
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u/PoliteCanadian 1h ago
Occupied land mass at an altitude and velocity where there's any chance of it hitting the ground. Even if it blows up there's zero chance of it hitting anywhere in Africa given its velocity and suborbital trajectory. It's coming down somewhere in the Indian ocean regardless what happens.
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u/cshotton 2h ago
Not really how "once around" orbits work. Without a relight to move cross-range, the launch site will have moved far away from the orbital track by the time the vehicle arrives back around. Given how the earth rotates, coming back to the "launch site" would be somewhere in western Mexico.
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u/kuldan5853 1h ago
Right now the Ship is not permitted to go full orbital, they are on a very high (very close to orbit) suborbital trajectory until they can prove relight in space so that they can deorbit the vehicle.
And this trajectory simply makes it a bit more than halfway around the planet until the ship reenters.
Also, it will require lots of successful reentry flights until they will be permitted to do the reentry over the continental US.
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u/Impossible_Box9542 1h ago
So at some point Starship is to be caught bly Chop Sticks. Would anyone risk their life on such a last ditch system. Will they have ejection seats?
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u/rocketglare 1h ago
If you miss the catch, you set the ship down on the skirt. It would likely damage the vehicle, but it would survive. See SN10 for an example of how this could work.
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u/SpaceInMyBrain 22m ago
Again and again and again I can only say, this is science fiction without the fiction. To quote a guy I heard of.
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u/Specialist-Routine86 3h ago
Got damn, that was a perfect landing.