51 thoughts on “The Final Version 2 Test”

          2. Yes. Low cost of manufacture is also a tech spec. The financial envelope is as important as the aerodynamic one.

        2. The analogy is with the “X” series of vehicles for the military. You make a few with the X designation and basically test them to destruction.

          Maybe there’s one left over so you can put it in a museum.

          You learn a lot more that way, by pushing the envelope until it tears.

          I was a little surprised that Flight 11 worked so well. I guess for this one they couldn’t think up enough new tests.

          Or perhaps they looked at all the negative comments “Oh they always blow up” and decided not to be quite as aggressive to calm prospective customers.

          2. If you had expended the 2001 Ranger when it needed tires, you would have nothing to upgrade. Assuming the Ranger is still functional, it has trade in value or sale vale towards the 2025.

            Seriously, thinking that vehicles must be destroyed to be replaced is nuts. It is the opposite end of freezing design at the start, as in Shuttle. A thoughtful test program gets all the information possible out of each investment. That the vehicles are cheap by industry standards has no bearing on it.

          3. Tires, batteries, etc. aren’t upgrades, just replacement parts (like replacing a blown engine on a Super Heavy for example). An upgrade would be adding a second engine, axle, and drive wheels to my Ranger, converting it to a 6×6. Also, V1 and V2 were test sets, not upgradable in-service vehicles. There ain’t no more. Maybe they should’ve caught them as museum pieces, but who would pay for the haulage? Now maybe useful to the fish?

        3. John, you’re wrong about this/ The components being tossed in the sea sre completely obsolete at this point. The boosters that were caught were reused as a test, then discarded after flight 2. The ship stage discard is mandated by the FAA. What else would they do with them?

          Modification and upgrade would be much more expensive (if not impossible). Look at the design change for v3. They’d have to remanufacture the whole thing. The early versions aren’t even worth scrap value. It’s just stainless steel. And the engines are at best museum pieces (and there are hundreds of spares!).

          3. There are scads of roadside firework stands throughout the country that would love to have a booster or a Starship that everybody could see three miles from the highway exit. ^_^

          4. The question has always been, “Are you better off spending the money on a 2026 F350?” or “should you spend a bunch on maintenance to keep your 2001 Ranger going and just make a lot more trips.”

          5. In a way, that was meant as a joke, but my Ranger can haul maybe a 500lb boulder, whereas an F350 can haul, let’s say, a 3,000lb boulder. So, I break up the 3,000lb boulder and make 6 trips, then what? Cement it back together?

            In fact, the 2001 Ranger was/is near the pinnacle of the old technology and has required very little maintenance.

        4. Don’t discount that SpaceX has been learning how to mass-produce giant rockets. Better to actually fly them instead of just scrapping the test articles.

        5. Recovery has a cost , too. These are now-obsolete test articles. They have the data they were looking for.

      2. Btw, I saw a video of the landing that purported to be a stabilized closeup showing “massive damage.” Much of what I saw there was preplanned “sabotage.” More info needed.

        1. Yeah it looked to me like there were a lot of tile or surface parts of tiles missing. But I couldn’t get a clean look at it.

  2. Most shocking part of the flight was Felix Schlang of “What About It” getting his Youtube channel deleted minutes prior to the flight. Somebody said he had offensive material on his site, which is a complete lie. Youtube is evil.

  4. Boring is good.

    When things aren’t boring, they’re going to crap rapidly. That is not good

  5. Launch rate will soon be approaching manufacturing rate and hopefully the other challenges will be knocked off at a good clip

  6. The S-turns on re-entry and J-shaped approach were new and interesting to watch.

    They really did stress the damage tolerance to the limits with removed heatshield tiles, though.
    The landing view shows vapour escaping from both LOX and methane tanks through the heatshield, suggesting both tanks were penetrated by hot gas – but it survived and landed on-target.

    1. The header tanks have independent pressurization, so even if the main tanks suffer a breach and venting during reentry, it can still do the landing burn. A hole in the methane tank that vents all pressure and admits air during descent could form an explosive mixture- and that might have occurred on this flight, come to think of it. It certainly launched COPVs and other debris far enough…

      1. This demonstrates that Starship is a much tougher vehicle than Shuttle. Shuttle lost tiles many times but they were all backed by a thick pad of mineral felt. The only time Shuttle actually suffered TPS damage that exposed metal structure, it disintegrated on re-entry.

        Starship 38 looks to have had at least three burn-thrus in tankage but the tough structure limited the damage in each case to pretty much the area of the missing tiles or less. It was still able to maneuver to a precision landing even with such damage – a commendable demonstration of ability to “play hurt.”

        Starship belongs in the same category of hard-to-kill air vehicles as the B-17, P-47 and A-10. If there had been a crew aboard and the destination was Starbase and not the oceanic middle of nowhere, Ship 38 could have been caught and the crew would likely have survived.

  7. Keeping the Block 2 equipment to upgrade to Block 3 requires making Block 2 to be upgradable to Block 3. That would require doing the engineering upfront as to what Block 3 might be so that you leave capacity in Block 2 to upgrade. That would be foolishly expensive.

    Also noted previously; you learn more about the flight envelope when you test to failure or near failure. Otherwise, you are guessing where the envelope might be. It may look ugly, but SpaceX has shown the durability of Starship to survive entry forces yet control landing even with what might appear significant structural damage from an imperfect heatshield. That should provide a lot of confidence to those that may one day fly inside.

    1. There’s an addition advantage to testing to destruction that shouldn’t be overlooked. SpaceX has done extensive modeling of every aspect of Starship. The models predicted when things should fail. Testing to destruction helps validate the models or find out how far off they may be in certain aspects. That’s important information to have going forward.

      Looking back to when SpaceX first started recovering their Falcon 9 booster stages, they studied them in detail to learn what needed to be improved. No one ever had that ability before. Ultimately, they made a series of upgrades to create their Block V version of the Falcon 9. It has been their workhorse ever since. They likely have made other incremental improvements along the way. Their original goal was to get 10 flights per booster. Today, there are boosters with 30+ flights in their history. I hear they’re pushing to get 50 flights out of each booster when recovery is the plan.

      Similar lessons were learned from those three Super Heavy boosters they recovered. They’ll learn even more when they start recovering the Ships, hopefully fairly early next year. My guess is if Flight 12 is successful, they’ll go orbital on Flight 13. I predict they won’t attempt to catch that Ship but to return it near the launch point to prove a precision approach. If that works, I believe they’ll go for recovery on Flight 14.

    2. Yes. Especially that last point. If Ship 38 had had a crew and was caught instead of expended, the old girl would have gotten them home.

      If Starships are as tough as B-17s perhaps the next thing they need to have is nose art.

  8. I doubt that a winged aerodynamic vehicle would have survived the burn throughs of aero surfaces we’ve seen before.
    Starship not only works but is robust.

  9. Curious to know the rate of update to Pad 1 at BC. If they hold off a bit, even though they may not be able to launch V3, they can use the fully functional chopsticks to capture a returning Starship sooner rather than later. Assuming Pad 2 is used for launch and capture of V3 Starship/SuperHeavy.

    Maybe the changes would be staged to keep the Pad 1 chopsticks functional?

    1. My thinking here is that it would give them short orbit duration capture ability. Rather than have to rush to get SuperHeavy off of Tower 2 in order to free it for capture, i.e. <24 hour returns.

      2. Not sure where to look, but what is the current estimate for time for launch-recovery-relaunch of the booster once they start trying to meet a schedule?

        1. Given that faster will be better pretty much across the board of current known missions, increasing the cadence for missions of all types will be the order of the day for the next several years at least. As with the Falcons, cadence will increase based on increases in manufacturing and launch infrastructure and the minimization of booster and ship turnaround intervals. We are likely some years away from true airline-like gas-and-go flight ops, but there isn’t going to be a “typical” cadence for awhile, just one that continues to increase. Personally, I think SpaceX will be launching about as many Starships per year as Falcons by 2027 or 2028.

          Which types of missions will be most numerous will likely change over time. Starlink missions will likely dominate next year’s launch roster – both Falcon and Starship. But, once the constellation is fully built-out in terms of number of sats on orbit, the Falcon missions will cease and Starship Starlink missions will plateau at whatever rate is needed for steady-state replacement. The capabilities of individual sats will, of course, continue to increase.

          But SpaceX also wants to get depots and tankers proved out and operational ASAP, both for use anent Artemis 3 and subsequent Moon missions, but also to begin building a population of depots and filling them for use during the Mars expeditions that will be essayed at 26-month intervals. SpaceX can spend 26 months launching and filling an ever-growing population of depots, then cargo and crew Starships of the next Mars expedition will briefly dominate the launch schedule prior to mass departure from LEO.

      3. There is discussion online about having “capture only” towers at the Cape. I think that makes a lot of sense.

        1. So do I – if suitable space is found to build them. SpaceX has long since demonstrated it can get such a tower up in a matter of weeks.

          The launch towers will do for catching boosters, but having some dedicated ship catch towers would allow a higher launch cadence during the period when ships still require some degree of refurb between flights.

          1. Catch-only towers would also save a launch tower from damage should a catch fail. Launch cadence unaffected.

    2. Even before Flight 11, the hardware strictly related to V2 booster catches had been removed from the Pad 1 chopsticks. Given the different, and more robust, catchment hardware on both V3 boosters and ships, the Pad 1 chopsticks might already be capable of catching either. If not, they can certainly be made so in parallel with taking down and replacing the Pad 1 launch mount and waiting for Pad 2 to be ready to support V3 flight ops.

  10. Most interesting were the drone videos of the Starship splashdown. They had a lot of great coverage from several angles. The very first thing I noticed was the water surrounding the splash point: two telemetry buoys could be seen on either side of the splash point, approximately equidistant from that point. Over the years, ICBM shots from VAFB to KMR were scored by a variety of means. Barges equipped with cameras were parked at the aim point for water impacts for the Minuteman missiles, and for Peacekeeper there was a vast network of hydrophones which could measure impact points to dead nust accuracy. We didn’t do as many land impacts, but there are a number of films of land impacts, centered in the frame. When I think about how much data SpaceX gets per flight, I’m really jealous – but not as jealous as I am of the incredible accuracy I see in the landing of that humongous Starship, at way, way longer range than any ICBM.

    1. Are we feeling old yet? 😉 Don’t worry, I’m right there with you when it comes to AI farms…

    2. Ditto on all counts. If that puppy had come back to Starbase instead of the Indian Ocean, it would have been catchable.

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