Cost cutting in effect at SpaceX: Falcon Heavy used a Tesla Roadster as their test payload, Starship only has a banana.
I think it's an homage to previous chimp astronauts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjCX5F74zIM
Knight E6.
No shots of the banana yet post launch. Did it rip away from the strings?
(Up until I typed this I hadn’t considered they might use an artificial banana.)
Banana is on screen at T+00:24
With 5.2 million people watching. This flight probably broke the world record for most people watching a single specific banana, ever.
unfortunately they had to scrap the booster Catch, due to undisclosed factors.
I would love to see the dashboard that the team that made the decision was looking at.
I'd be interested to hear speculation by people who know about this as to what they think went wrong. Was it off course? Did the engines not relight in time? Did it not have enough fuel?
Honestly showing that you can re-target it in flight is extremely impressive too. Like, it still soft-landed in water, it didn't blow up.
Hah. I mean it did blow up (the booster), but not due to impact from a failed soft landing. The soft landing succeeded, then it blew up.
The upper stage was also on fire!
They announced a no-go while it was still boosting towards space, so it won’t be a relight issue.
> They announced a no-go while it was still boosting towards space,
False. The booster was already coming back when the landing abort came through.
I wonder whether doing a catch without the catcher (rapid scheduled crash landing) would be feasible. Data is data.
That is what happened. It performs the maneuvers at a primary target site with no catcher, or terrain, or ground-based feedback; the Gulf; switching to an alternate site; the launch tower; if and only if all factors allow for a real catch.
> Data is data.
This is one of those cases where technically correct is not the best kind of correct.
Not all data is useful.
A billion rows of sensor output is data but without a timestamp it’s useless. Maybe you need more or less resolution, or additional dimensions.
The explosion when it landed in the ocean was pretty epic though!
did they land it on the barge instead?
No landing legs on Starship or its booster! Tower catch or bust.
oh duh, thanks
No, it was a water splashdown. Looked silky smooth though, they likely could have caught it again had they tried.
Water splashdown did look very smooth. I seemed like they cut the video before it exploded (I assume), but hopefully there's some third-party footage or SpaceX will release it later.
Update: Looks like Spaceflight Now has the explosion at https://www.youtube.com/live/dtmvbQDou4I at about 90 minutes in
There's a better camera here which shows the aftermath,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjDFirLcQDM (Everyday Astronaut)
Landing is at about T+06:42.
Boom is here:
https://www.youtube.com/live/DjDFirLcQDM?feature=shared&t=11...
This is a bit before that:
https://www.youtube.com/live/DjDFirLcQDM?feature=shared&t=11...
It did a controlled landing on the Gulf of Mexico, exploded, and now it's floating!
Hasn't sunk yet; haven't seen any official comments yet about this novel situation.
If I remember correctly last time this happened they shot missiles at a booster from a jet
Oh, you're right: this did also happen back in 2018, with a Falcon booster (GovSat-1 launch). I don't think the part about the missiles was accurate though.
https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/7w4pag/americaspace... ("Air Force Didn’t Take Out SpaceX’s GovSat Booster, Private Company Did (UPDATED WITH CORRECTION)")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16332582 (ibid.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279316 ("SpaceX Rocket Survives Experimental High-Thrust Landing at Sea")
no barge for super heavy- the point of the catch is to save weight on the massive legs that would be required. It “soft landed” in the Gulf a few miles off shore, meaning they did a burn and it entered the water not in freefall (though it still looked faster than I expected).
Water splashdown.
The way it gently splashed down in the ocean without hiccup - I think this is promising and that they will get to the chopsticks catching a booster is boring and mundane phase soon. Specialists would say why they aborted.
Well, it made a big fireball. It's only that the official stream cut away before that. You could still hear the SpaceX crowd cheering as they (apparently) got to see it. The fireball was in any case visible in the NSF stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/6yd_cpPP4fE&t=3h31m35s
Though the upper stage actually didn't explode this time, it only broke apart.
NSF Stream commentary is fun too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yd_cpPP4fE
Any word why they scrapped the booster catch?
No official word, but the communication antenna on the tower appears to be damaged [1]. Seems likely that played a role.
Strange how it is leaning to one side but otherwise looks just fine. I'd have thought that anything with enough force to push it over like that would have caused other more visible damage. Pretty grainy video though.
Whatever it was, it seems more likely that it was a booster issue than anything relating to the tower given that they were initially go for the catch. It was only during the boostback burn that they scrapped it.