For those of you who love rockets and/or space, there’s a test flight of the fledgling Starship rocket in Boca Chica, Texas today. Assuming they can iron out last minute wrinkles in time, they’ll be launching what looks like a large grain silo with fins to about 40,000 feet. They’ll then let gravity take over, pitch the rocket on its side to increase drag and help slow the descent, and then attempt to do a “flip maneuver”, using thrusters and the 3 vectored-thrust Raptor rocket engines to bring it upright and cancel any lateral momentum. This is designed to allow them to land this behemoth on its tail back at the point of origin.
This is the first attempt at the flip maneuver, so SpaceX is gathering as much data as they can. Even Elon Musk gives them only about a 1 in 3 chance of a successful landing. Most likely, they will either destroy the rocket in mid-air or allow it to crash into the ocean just offshore. No matter what the outcome, it will be a hell of a show, and really is making history. There are lots of live feeds for the launch, but the official SpaceX feed can be seen here.
Another interesting fact about Starship. It seems obvious that they expect to lose a few in testing. They’ve got Starship serial numbers 9-16 already in various stages of completion on site. Blow one up? No problem, clean up the debris and roll out the next one.
“Get a shot off fast. This upsets him long enough to let you make your second shot perfect.” In “From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long”, Time Enough for Love: The Lives of Lazarus Long (1973), 257.
Yeah, there’s a NASA plane scheduled to fly out of Houston to monitor the hop attempt. The flight plan was filed for 12:30 CST, but was recently updated to 2:30 CST, so I wouldn’t expect them to actually make the hop attempt until maybe 3 or later. It isn’t far from Houston, and the NASA flight is a Martin WB-57 twin jet, so they can be positioned to monitor the hop in less than 30 minutes from their takeoff time. You can follow the NASA flight at https://flightaware.com/live/flight/NASA927.
NASA’s jet is apparently grounded with mechanical difficulty, so don’t rely on that any more. Starship is venting/fueling, so it shouldn’t be long, actually.
It looks like the countdown halt at 2:06 might have been due to a range violation. A boat was supposedly infringing on the exclusion zone. If that is true, then at least they still have a healthy rocket and can re-fuel and go again today.
