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Freedom wins again: SpaceX completes the 6th orbital test flight of Starship/Superheavy

Starship/Superheavy at T+6 seconds

SpaceX today successfully completed the sixth orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy heavy lift rocket, only forty days after its previous test flight, the shortest turn-around so far, mainly because the FAA imposed no red tape to hold SpaceX back.

Before describing details of the flight, it is essential to note that this giant rocket, bigger than the Saturn-5 that sent Apollo astronauts to the Moon and intended to be completely reusable and being designed to be able to relaunch in mere hours, has been conceived, designed, built, and tested entirely by a private company and free American citizens, funded almost entirely by private investment capital hoping to make a profit from the rocket. The government and NASA has played almost no part, except possibly using its regulatory power improperly to slow development down by a year or two.

Even more important its development has cost a tiny amount compared to similar government programs, and has been accomplished in less than a third of the time.

Thus this rocket is a perfect example of freedom in action. Get the government out of the way and allow humans the freedom to follow their dreams, and they will do astonishing things.

As for the flight, Superheavy worked perfectly in getting Starship off the launchpad and on its way into orbit. However, engineers canceled a second tower catch attempt and instead diverted Superheavy to complete a soft splashdown just off the coast in the Gulf of Mexico. The booster touched down on the water quite softly, and then fell over into the water. Expect SpaceX to quickly do salvage operations to recover it.

Starship reached its orbit as planned, carrying for the first time a payload, a single plastic banana suspended by cords in the center of the Pez deployment payload bay where SpaceX hopes to soon begin deploying Starlink satellites. Though somewhat silly, the banana is being used by SpaceX and the FAA to certify future payload operations.

About 38 minutes into the flight engineers did the first re-light of one Raptor-2 engine while in orbit, the burn lasting about three-four seconds. This burn demonstrated that Starship is capable of doing a de-orbit burn so that in a future flight it can be launched into a full orbit and use the engines to bring it back to a precise location on Earth, including possibly a return to the launch tower for its own chopstick catch.

Starship splashing down vertically
Starship splashing down vertically

During re-entry the flight plan called for pushing Starship beyond its technical margins in order to learn exactly what those limits were. Even so, it appeared that — unlike the previous flights — there was very little evidence of damage to the flaps from the heat of re-entry. One flap appeared to have damage at one pointed end, and even that burn-through appeared far less than the previous flights.

During final descent and moving slower than the speed of sound they pointed the ship nose down in order to stress the flaps the most. Even so, the ship performed as planned, and splashed down softly and vertically in the Indian Ocean.

Though the flight plan for this Starship flight as well as the previous flights was purposely designed to bring it back to Earth before it completes an orbit, this was still essentially a successful orbital launch, and thus I am including it in my launch totals. The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

118 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 136 to 79, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 118 to 97.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

23 comments

  • F

    I’m looking forward to more information regarding the decision to scrub the launch tower catch. While I can only speculate, I imagine there was a minor glitch or issue that will be relatively easy to solve prior to the next test launch.

  • Yeah Go SpaceX!!!

    I remember as a boy when the first orbital launches were made. Times were exciting then. Then things fizzled in the late 20th Century. Now times are exciting again. Oh to be young enough to work for SpaceX but alas I am well into retirement. Space flight is now a spectator sport for me. I hope to live long enough to see the first humans on Mars.

    I have the same question as F above. I look forward to the IFT-7. I think it will be a similar flight profile to test Version 2 Starship’s new configuration for reentry. Hopefully IFT-8 will involve full orbital flight.

  • Jeff Wright

    I think there was some damage to the lightning protection system… Jonathan McDowell said Starship was a tad low this go-around, but that may have been by design.

    I watched the Spaceflight Now feed…where I heard that 2100 tiles were removed…which might be good or bad.

    Starship didn’t seem to explode quite like last time–but it did seem to break up…perhaps from annealing of the metal.

    Then too–Starship seemed very responsive in terms of handling…it didn’t seem to wallow as much. Perhaps that is also a result of a lower tile count. The increased mobility may be the big takeaway in all this.

    The crew on ISS got some video–and I hope NASA’s big wing Canberra did too.

  • John

    The video on the way down and buoy cam was absolutely awesome. Forget all the rest!

    Came here looking for info on what F posted. Elon hasn’t said anything about why they diverted, usually he posts info quickly to X.

    Thermally protecting a moving flight control surface seemed like it was going to be a problem, but it looks like they’re getting that down to. I seem to recall them saying the reentry parameters were adjusted this time around, subjectively it looked like less severe heating to me.

  • John

    Bill Nelson on X , “Congrats to @SpaceX on Starship’s sixth test flight. Exciting to see the Raptor engine restart in space—major progress towards orbital flight.

    Starship’s success is #Artemis’ success. Together, we will return humanity to the Moon & set our sights on Mars.”

    Way to go Artemis!

  • Jeff Wright observed: “Starship seemed very responsive in terms of handling . . ”

    Not words normally associated with rockets, but neither are “return to launch site”.

  • Gary

    Plan is one more ocean landing then chopstick catch for Starship.

    https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1859036912348262787?s=46

  • Edward

    Jeff Wright wrote: “Starship didn’t seem to explode quite like last time–but it did seem to break up…perhaps from annealing of the metal.

    It may have broken up because the structure is not really built to lay down on its side. The stresses from that gravitational direction may have been too much for the structure.

    The areas where the tiles had been removed showed signs of extreme heat, and that most likely didn’t help it while it was on its side.

    Finally, I’m not sure whether the steel was annealed. It turns out that the metal has to be cooled very slowly for annealing to occur, and reentry happens fairly shortly before the ship tipped onto its side. The temper of the steel may be changed, and if so, that new strength is what SpaceX will have to work with after every ship’s first use. SpaceX will have to use steel that is tempered to the same strength as it will have after the first and every subsequent reentry.

    We seem to be seeing progress in the development testing. I have noted that for these tests, the ones that attract a large audience, SpaceX provides quite a bit of test plan information. Years ago, when they had more obscure testing, they gave us little information about the plan, so we didn’t know whether they were testing to destruction or if the test unit burst due to design problems.

  • Richard M

    Looks like the tower was the problem, not the booster. They don’t say exactly what the problem was, though.

    The Super Heavy booster successfully lifted off at the start of the launch window, with all 33 Raptor engines powering it and Starship off the pad from Starbase. Following a nominal ascent and stage separation, the booster successfully transitioned to its boostback burn to begin the return to launch site. During this phase, automated health checks of critical hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered an abort of the catch attempt. The booster then executed a pre-planned divert maneuver, performing a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.

    https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-6

  • Mac

    “the banana is being used by SpaceX and the FAA to certify future payload operations”

    Elon has a flair for highlighting the stupidity of government regulation…

  • Ray Van Dune

    SpaceX in writing refers to “…flight through subsonic speeds at a more aggressive angle of attack,” while the commenters on multiple webcasts referred to a “higher” angle of attack (AOA).

    In fact the former “aggressive” is the correct terminology. During the belly-flop maneuver, the hull and fins are essentially horizontal, and perpendicular to the airflow which is vertical. Thus the AOA is as “high” as it can meaningfully get – 90 degrees.

    In the Starship belly-flop context, lowering the nose and achieving an AOA of < 90 degrees is aggressive in the sense that it results in more horizontal airflow over the fins, more directional control, and different stresses than experienced before.

    The Starship fins however always operate at a much higher AOA than an aircraft wing, in the stall region, and thus in this case move briefly to a slightly "lower" AOA.

  • Tower error is an interesting theory. There was a call right around the time of staging that Tower was a go for catch. Call shortly after that that they were going to divert into the Gulf.

    Wondering if this was intentional, part of the test plan. SpaceX made some comments before launch that the flight profile was more aggressive and they might not be able to recover both stages. Going to be interesting to put together what happened and why. Cheers –

  • Taylor

    Poor booster. Just wanted a hug and was told to go jump in the Gulf. 😢

  • Lee S

    Not wanting to pick fleas ( and great work SpaceX) but Bob…. How can you class this as “essentially a successful orbital launch” , yet you refuse to class Beagle 2 as a successful soft landing on Mars, when the thing arrived intact, opened 4? 5? of it’s solar panels, and failed to deploy the last one, for whatever reasons… But no fault of the decent and landing system. Perhaps for the same reason you never report on Mars Express images? #Just saying… I know the politics here are very USAcentric, and I understand why… ( It’s a USA based website..) , but surely I am not wrong in detecting a little bias here?

  • Lee S: 1. The reason I have mentioned Beagle 2 almost not at all over the years, including not putting it on my Mars maps, is for the same reason I don’t include the Soviet Mars landers. None produced any usable data on the surface. That’s it.

    2. I have been saying for years that I would love to include more Mars Express images, but can’t because the ESA doesn’t make them available. All it does is release one image every few months as part of a press release. The fault thus lies with ESA, not me.

    3. My work might be American-focused, but then, I am an American. At the same time, if other nations do something great I gladly report it, such as China’s space program or Europe/India’s incredible shift to capitalism in space. That you conveniently make believe I don’t do this only indicates your own biases.

    4. You are getting crankier these days, looking to find fault with others continuously rather than look at things as they are. Very unfortunate and sad, but that’s your problem, not mine.

  • pzatchok

    I will qualify this flight as a very successful failure.
    Only because neither stage could be recovered in a usable state.
    The launches, flights and re-entries went perfect.

    As for the gulf diversion I was watching the fuel meter the whole time and it looked quite low at the time of the diversion call. Maybe, and this is all guess, they did not think they had enough fuel for a safe catch.

    As for the break up of the second stage when it hit the water.
    It could be that the fuel tank or piping cracks when it hits warmer water.

  • Ray Van Dune

    One more word on AOA. It reminds me of the old joke about the rules of flying:
    1. Push the stick forward, and the houses get bigger.
    2. Pull the stick back, and the houses get smaller.
    3. But pull the stick too far back, and the houses start getting bigger again!

  • Lee S

    @ Bob…. I still consider Beagle 2 to be a successful soft landing, and I can understand your frustrations with ESA… I share them!

    And yes… I am getting grumpier as I get older… As one ages one realizes that the world is heading to hell in a handcart… I think we are facing several existential threats all at the same time .. and I worry about the world we are leaving for our kids… War, climate change,. Idiocracy… Your fears and my fears are not so different. ( And regarding the “woke” far left… I predicted the pendulum swinging back on here a decade ago)… Non of us know how the world we live in is going to pan out, we can only hope that level heads, and science play a significant role in the hard decisions that are ahead of us.

  • “we can only hope that level heads, and science play a significant role in the hard decisions that are ahead of us.”

    What happened to strong leadership?

    Level heads and science will get you nowhere without true strong leadership. If everyone is standing around thinking that they are correct and “I did my job” “I followed the science” “I am an expert” with their thumbs up their nether regions and everyone pointing their free finger at others for their failure of projected desired results and leadership. That is a recipe for chaos and confusion which is exactly what we have had in America and by extension the world have experienced over the last 4 years because of it.

    A minister in a government bureaucracy is NOT leadership.

    (I was going to stay out of this one, but sometimes I just can’t :)

    TRUE LEADERSHIP

    “And that statement is an example of exactly what leadership in government is not in America and must never be. There is leadership, there is diplomacy and then there are “experts” in their fields that leadership might consult with before they make a decision and interpretation about the direction that the country will be going. Three very different things.”

    https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/the-refounding-and-true-leadership

  • Richard M

    I will qualify this flight as a very successful failure.

    I don’t see this as a failure of any sort, and I do not think the Starship team does either. They got three of Elon’s four stated objectives, and a ton of useful data.

    I think their original expectations for this campaign were to try to get a catch by Flight 6. They ended up getting it one flight early. That being the case – and given that the reason for the wave-off yesterday appears to have been an issue on the tower, not on the booster – I think the greater urgency at this point was to get the Starship engine relight. That is what will enable full orbital flights, as well as a Starship catch (and, yes, orbital re-fueling). And they got that.

    The other thing to think about with regard to the catch wave-off is that in the future, they will surely have ways to still recover the booster. SpaceX will soon have multiple Starship launch towers at both Boca Chica and the Cape, and this will open up backup options if the primary tower has an issue. They just divert the booster over to another tower. That’s an easy software upgrade.

  • Mike Borgelt

    They were probably going to need a demonstration of a catch wave off at some time so ditching the last V1 was as good a time as any. Note it still did a soft landing.
    I did some something that said the lightning tower on top of the launch tower got bent during launch. I’d bet it also has the antenna for the GNSS RTK differential system on it, so deflecting to top of the tower would put the booster in the wrong spot. Providing no physical contact between booster and lightning tower is likely, this can be fixed in software

  • Edward

    pzatchok wrote: “I will qualify this flight as a very successful failure. Only because neither stage could be recovered in a usable state.

    Except neither stage was supposed to be reused. They are test articles in a development program. They have been obsolete for months, but they have been used in order to learn what can be learned as fast as it can be learned. The purpose of the flight is to see what new methods and some new hardware and configurations work and what do not, and it looks like they got almost all the testing that they wanted to do, and even tested the diversion-to-gulf method. In that way, the flight was not a failure.

    The tower, however, seems to have a problem, or SpaceX has set the “go” criteria too strictly. Either way, development lessons were learned on this flight, which is the purpose of this flight. During development, failures are (counterintuitively) successes, as lessons are learned. Lessons during development reduce the number of failures and the consequences of failures during operations.

    As has been noted by SpaceX, they were using an aggressive angle of attack. If they lost the ship (Starship), then what looks like a failure is actually a success. They would have a better handle on how far is too far. As it is, they don’t know where too far is, but they may have an estimate.

    The launches, flights and re-entries went perfect.

    So, there was no failure at all. Right? They maximized their education, and maybe learned something about the tower that they may not have learned if things went right and there had been a catch.

    Once SpaceX starts to move into operational flights with reusable flight hardware, then we can see whether they have failures in the operational modes. During those operational flights, they may still be doing quite a bit of testing (as they did with Falcon boosters for a year or so), but a failure would be when a deliverable payload fails to be delivered properly.
    ____________
    Mike Borgelt wrote: “I did some [see?] something that said the lightning tower on top of the launch tower got bent during launch. I’d bet it also has the antenna for the GNSS RTK differential system on it, so deflecting to top of the tower would put the booster in the wrong spot.

    They may not be so eager to put anything near where a lightning strike is intended to be. I think they would put their antennae in more protected locations. However, it could be that the same thing that caused the lightning tower to be bent (unexpectedly large thrust vectoring or attitude at launch?) could have caused plenty of other damage to the tower. These may be additional lessons learned for the positioning and the protecting of hardware on the tower.

  • Jeff Wright

    To Lee

    A better example of “essentially orbital launch:”

    https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/nasa-space-launch-system-sls.13729/page-23#post-583211

    Starship got about 125 miles up—a burn could help that.

    SLS apogee 1,800km
    https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/ywmd57/the_sls_vehicle_has_lifted_off/

    SLS still has flight-records that have yet to be matched—but don’t expect libertarians to admit to those—or how their zealotry would hurt workers as badly as Green attempts would hurt coal miners.

    Fretting bean-counters and carbon-footprint tally’s are both enemies of progress.

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