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Video
https://x.com/VickiCocks15/status/20...375357603?s=20 Looks like the @SpaceX team worked hard over night and have fixed the SQD arm retention pin issue. Fingers crossed they're good to go, after all, Starships are meant to fly! |
Thanks for that image Orac, I'm doing a STEM talk on space flight next week and will cover the flight. I'll steal that image for a giggle.
(Another candidate here for the snooze award given that I turned in at 01:00 and was up at 06:00 to take care of the livestock. I will do my best to stay up this evening however it will probably be a case of catching up on YouTube tomorrow.) |
A qualified success.
First, they lost the booster. One engine shut down after lift off, then - after separation and the flip only a couple of engines relit and they shut down early so it couldn’t make it back to the coast, then it didn’t make it’s slow down burn and came in hot, finally only a couple relit for the landing burn and it came in hard. Might be a fuel pogo thing again causing engines to cavitation and explode, but we will have to wait and see. Second, they lost one of the 3 vacuum raptors on the ship and had to boost longer using the remaining engines to make their required sub-orbital profile. Video showed damage in the engine bay so it seems to have blown. Whatever, they’ve cancelled the planned raptor relight test. Good news, PES dispenser worked fine as have the photo Starlink satellites ejected last to video the heat shield on the ship. Now we wait and see if it survives re-entry. Shows how wise they were not to plan a RTLS for either vehicle. So many changes they were just as much prototypes as for launch 2. |
They're probably classing that as a success. Right on the money and no visible burn thru of the flaps this time.
Very impressed at how manoeuvrable the ship is in the latter stages of freefall. :ok: |
So excellent re-entry and landing. Seemed to survive totally intact and a pinpoint landing. Video before it toppled also seemed to show all the heat shield tiles intact.
Time for bed - oo41 in the morning here in the UK. Catch up on the hot debriefs tomorrow on what happened to the raptors. |
I didn't see any engine damage and NSF seemed to think it was an automatic shutdown.
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The question being why it blew - cavitation, over-energetic flip, something else?
Commenst as to whether they need to replace the shielding - but that's a lot of weight. Better question is why it blew. Video clip https://x.com/mcrs987/status/2057998419335995628?s=20 I think we got to see the consequences of the lack of full blast shielding. Boostback probably would have gone fine minus one engine had this single engine, either E5 or E6, not had an energetic event and took out 16 of its neighboring engines. |
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https://x.com/niccruzpatane/status/2...592203211?s=20 Starship Heat Shield Comparison Between Flights 10, 11, and 12 |
A few observations - rants LOL!
It gets creepy when you see how little fuel is left as these behemoths get back to the landing sites. How many more raptors are going to end up in the sea. Is SpaceX purely funding these engines or does NASA cough a bit up? Didn't Peter Beck (Rocket Labs), say that they won't push engines to the max? I mean it looks like SpaceX is pushing the engines to the blueprint limit. Like a car at full revs all the time. Less stress on the pumps etc, But less weight. 80t instead of 100t, but the engines and ship get back. Just doesn't seem like any redundancy's. One assumes they recover the Booster/Starship from the oceans - well, no Starship on this flight ;) Be nice to see some recovery doco's. Check the engines out and donate them to museums etc. Or do they repurpose the bells etc. How many Starlink sats is the Pez supposed to launch. Falcon's doing, what 20+ at a time - and look how reliable F9 has become. I guess with all this testing and continual blow ups, it's the data that's important. But with all the changes and Ver's, there doesn't seem be that much time in polishing the running Ver's. Always 'new'. Falcon Nine has proved itself time and time again. Going to be a long time before the dream of 1 launch a day to Sydney etc. I hope I'm alive to see a Human on Mars. |
I'd have thought it pretty obvious that a big turbopump or combustion chamber failure is going to have an explosive and shrapnel effect likely to take out surrounding engines, similar to the damage we all know a burst turbine wheel can do to an aircraft structure, but there no LOX or methane under monstrous pressure is present to exacerbate the damage.
I thought the flip manoeuvre to be pretty dynamic and wonder at the (immense) additional gyroscopic forces on turbopump components rotating at humongous RPMs. Who knows? But I bet SpaceX does, or soon will and a fix will be forthcoming. It's a completely, radically new engine so of course it'll have teething troubles. I can't imagine how anyone imagine's they recover booster's and starships from the ocean as they always explode upon arrival; as for "doco's" (sic) I don't think SpaceX is in the business of being very open about operational details, indeed I feel we are only fed highly controlled, trivialised and sanitised info, a distinct contrast to previous generations' coverage on Apollo, Gemini and Mercury missions. An engine bell that's hit the water is most unlikely to be in a state to be re-used for owt but a planter or conversation piece. Not at all sure what Ver's refers to? |
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https://x.com/AI_EmeraldApple/status...209201509?s=20 The main failure of flight test 12 is actually a sign of how insanely powerful the Raptor 3 engine is. During "most engine cutoff," that extra power from the booster and the upperstage engines during the hotstage separation pushed the booster to flip sideways at 44 degrees per second, or 0.77 rads/s. Nominally, it should flip up instead of sideways more slowly. That rotation was WAY too fast in the wrong direction with added axial rotation, causing an estimated 2.2 g outward force at the nose of the booster, causing massive sloshing for the propellant. That caused gas ingestion, engine explosion, and cascading failure for the boostback. This led the booster to an uncontrolled fall at terminal velocity. I think for the next flight, they are going to have to change the gimbal profile for the MECO to reduce rotation and counteract the upperstage engine push, increase the coast time to allow propellant to settle, and stagger the relight more slowly with 2 engines per 3-4 seconds or so. This won't need many hardware changes, mostly software changes, so the next launch will probably be sooner than expected... classic too much of a good thing problem. |
The difference of the power between Raptor 2 and Raptor 3.......
Video: https://x.com/ENNEPS/status/2058198634219348156?s=20 STARSHIP FLIGHT 12 A side by side look at the the launch of Starship flight 11, the final launch on Pad 1 and Starship flight 12 the first launch of the new and improved pad, engines, and vehicles. |
With the 'rotation'.
Misalignment of the fore, aft, pitch, roll with the yaw sensors, overcorrecting flaps... Over powered Raptor engines... One would have thought that the fluid dynamics of the propellent and ALL of the pitch/yaw etc and the work done on the Raptor, the latest and greatest techs and AI's would have modeled/simulated this? Maybe should have used OpenAI instead of Grok :} Read somewhere that 44tons was carried in those dummy starlinks.44 tons? I think the broadcast said that Flight 12 was V3 starlink dummy's. Falcon 9 has gone up with approx 17 tons and 24qty V2 starlinks. Looks like they got the landing pad sorted out. Great stuff there. Looks like the heat shield of the Star Ship faired pretty well as well. In the broadcast showed some missing - but then - I think they purposely left some off in non critical areas. Engines cutting down/off. I wonder if they cut down on their own, or commanded to by control once they see abnormal readings. But by the time a human gets the info, makes a call and presses the button, it might be all too late. One assumes that the failures (considering the work done of the Raptor), are minor, but are shut off to stop a RUD :E Reminds me of an SLS launch whereby a female 'flight director' not sure on the title. Saw an engine giving up on launch and she had the auth to abort, but she let it go. Launch/mission was successful. - No pressure! :} But they are going to have to do a lot more work on whatever engines giving up, particularly the landing phase.... I haven't seen any info on the percentage of engines outages are for power/gimbling. As Meleagertoo says 'fed highly controlled, trivialised and sanitised'. |
Originally Posted by Bfah
(Post 12091108)
Engines cutting down/off. I wonder if they cut down on their own, or commanded to by control once they see abnormal readings. But by the time a human gets the info, makes a call and presses the button, it might be all too late.
Starship and Super Heavy V3 will debut advanced avionics capabilities designed for high flight-rate, full reusability, and enhanced reliability. At the heart of the two vehicle systems, approximately 60 custom avionics units integrate batteries, inverters, and high-voltage electrical distribution into single assemblies, capable of delivering ~9MW of peak power across the vehicles with distributed fault isolation. The upgraded multi-sensor navigation is designed for precision autonomous flight with high redundancy across all phases of upcoming missions and environmental conditions. |
9Mw?? What the digamma does a rocket do with 9Mw?? That's a stupendous amount of electrical power.
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flaps. for one
Originally Posted by meleagertoo
(Post 12091604)
9Mw?? What the digamma does a rocket do with 9Mw?? That's a stupendous amount of electrical power.
TVC is also electrically powered on current hardware. Surely there is a lot of electronics as well, but maybe not 9 MW. |
Video
https://x.com/JoeTegtmeyer/status/20...928533291?s=20 I thought I'd try to illustrate how Starship 39 made up for a less than optimal sub-orbital insertion and lower-than-planned perigee by using aerodynamics during re-entry to extend its downrange flight profile and make an on-target landing in the Indian Ocean. The ship used a combination of Angle-of Attack (AOA) changes, the flaps and body of the ship as lifting surfaces to manage the total drag forces to "fly" a longer distance, all while managing plasma heating & velocity decreases to prepare for the landing burn. @SpaceX had to do this because of the loss of the one RVAC at about the 3:03 mark just after hot staging, resulting in the remaining 5 engines to compensate and burn longer. Impressive example of the Avionics, Navigation & Control used with Starship! Check out this short video clip with illustrations & information along the way! I hope you find this informative! |
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