Live stream of the 7th test orbital flight of Starship/Superheavy
I have embedded below the live stream of today’s attempt by SpaceX to complete the 7th orbital flight of its giant rocket Starship/Superheavy. The stream goes live at around 3:15 pm (Central), 45 minutes before the start of the one hour launch window beginning at 4 pm (Central).
For embed purposes I am using the youtube version provided by Space Affairs. Once SpaceX’s feed goes live on X you can then switch to it, found here.
The flight’s goals:
Superheavy: Complete the second catch of the booster at the launch tower using the chopsticks. The booster will also be reusing an engine from the fifth test flight to confirm its viability for reuse.
Starship: Test new avionics, a new fuel feed system, and new heat shield tiles as well as the ablative material used underneath the tiles. Test a different placement and configuration of the flaps. The ship will also test engineering that will eventually lead to it being captured by the chopstick tower on return.
There will be an engine restart during Starship’s orbital cruise phase to further confirm the Raptor-2 engines can work reliably when needed during a full orbit de-orbit burn.
Finally, the ship will test its Starlink deployment system, releasing 10 dummy Starlink satellites.
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 or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
I have embedded below the live stream of today’s attempt by SpaceX to complete the 7th orbital flight of its giant rocket Starship/Superheavy. The stream goes live at around 3:15 pm (Central), 45 minutes before the start of the one hour launch window beginning at 4 pm (Central).
For embed purposes I am using the youtube version provided by Space Affairs. Once SpaceX’s feed goes live on X you can then switch to it, found here.
The flight’s goals:
Superheavy: Complete the second catch of the booster at the launch tower using the chopsticks. The booster will also be reusing an engine from the fifth test flight to confirm its viability for reuse.
Starship: Test new avionics, a new fuel feed system, and new heat shield tiles as well as the ablative material used underneath the tiles. Test a different placement and configuration of the flaps. The ship will also test engineering that will eventually lead to it being captured by the chopstick tower on return.
There will be an engine restart during Starship’s orbital cruise phase to further confirm the Raptor-2 engines can work reliably when needed during a full orbit de-orbit burn.
Finally, the ship will test its Starlink deployment system, releasing 10 dummy Starlink satellites.
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 or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
How can a flight that is just going to orbit and not really _doing_ anything, have a mere hour-long launch window?
I can see wanting to catch the booster in daylight, which means it must go up in daylight. I can see wanting the ship to come down during daylight, which means it must be after dawn in the Indian ocean when it comes down.
There is really only an hour overlap between those two timeframes? That seems too short.
0800 sunrise to 1730 sunset; rounded to cover all of Texas. Boca Chica is UTC-6, so 1400 to 2330 UTC.
0630 sunrise to 1830 sunset; rounded to cover all of Indonesia. The eastern side of Indonesia is UTC+9, so 2030 to 0930 UTC.
Crossing days in a time interval confuses me, so let’s go with darkness: 0930 to 2030, which makes the window look like 2030 to 2330 UTC. 1600 CST is not in that window.
What is being “window”ed?
I am curious on the direction they eject the Starlink mass simulators. Directly in their path feels like flying into your own bullets… Probably want them to reenter fast and predictably.
Too bad Starship was lost. That’s a big loss of experimental data after so many new items aboard. The catch of the Superheavy was great.
@geoffc I heard NASA had a chase plane over the splash down zone to film reentry. I wonder if that factored in. Sadly, I don’t think we will know now.
How far east would the ship be when it was lost? Would it have cleared all of the Caribbean Islands?
Satchel Paige: “It ain’t showin off if you can do it…”
Mark Sizer asked: “How can a flight that is just going to orbit and not really _doing_ anything, have a mere hour-long launch window?”
For one, SpaceX supercools its propellants in order to take advantage of their contraction properties. Cooler propellants means that they can fit more on board for the size of the propellant tanks. As they sit on the launch pad, the propellants warm up and expand, so less is in the tanks, until there is not enough left to reach space, even though the tanks may be full. Since they want some extra amount for contingencies, they end the window before there is not enough to reach space.
There are other possibilities for the length of the launch window, and we don’t always hear what these are.
It will be interesting to learn what went wrong with the second stage, Starship. Since engines seemed to shut down on one side before others shut down, it seems like it is not an engine problem but may have to do with propellant delivery to the engines. Since only the three inner engines, the vacuum engines, swivel, once the last of those shut down, then there was probably no hope of control for the Ship. My first guess (speculation leads to embarrassment, since it will turn out to be related to space alien interference) is that the Ship began spinning out of control once the last swiveling engine was extinguished. That would likely have led to an internal trigger of the flight termination system.
Mark Sizer,
The reason for a launch window is because of the aviation and marine restrictions.
The the restricted zones are for when things may come down in the wrong place.
SpaceX runs all kind of data streams from the vehicle, I bet they figure out what happened.
But this was the first iteration of this version of the Starship.
I will wait patiently.
It is an interesting irony that the Starship (stage 2) failed, but the Booster (stage 1) landed.
And New Glenn had the opposite. Stage 2 did great. Stage 1 was lost.
geoffc asked: “I am curious on the direction they eject the Starlink mass simulators. Directly in their path feels like flying into your own bullets… Probably want them to reenter fast and predictably.”
That is an excellent question. I do not know the answer. However, if they were ejected to the side (north or south) then they probably would be a few miles away when they began to decelerate, and they likely would have been too far to be a danger to Starship. Since Starship seems to travel over the Earth with its nose forward and heat shield toward the Earth, then the mass simulators could have been ejected upward, and they would travel farther than Starship before they began to decelerate. Their flat shape likely would cause them to reenter edge-on so that they probably would not decelerate as fast as Starship does. This would also leave Starship safe from them.
Steve Richter asked: “How far east would the ship be when it was lost? Would it have cleared all of the Caribbean Islands?”
This is the advantage of a graphic, which they have not been providing for these Starship launches. However, a little calculation can give us a little insight:
Ship was traveling at about 20,000 km/hr when the telemetry graphic froze. Assuming constant acceleration (which it isn’t), that means that the average speed was around 10,000 km/hr. The frozen graphic happened around 10 minutes into the flight, or 1/6th of an hour, so it traveled 1/6th of 10,000 km, or around 1,000 miles. An earlier graphic showing the intended flight path showed that it would fly over the gap between Florida and Cuba, which is perhaps somewhat more than 1,000 miles from Boca Chica.
The debris from Starship would travel much farther before reentering. 20,000 km/hr is short of orbital speed, so reentry was guaranteed. My guess is that it would not reach the African coast, but it probably went beyond the keep-away zone for falling debris from a failed launch. So, another question is:
How much debris from Starship would survive reentry, given that its speed was 20,000 km/hr and altitude was around 140 km or so? An earlier flight (Flight 3?) showed that during an uncontrolled reentry Starship breaks up at 64 km (or was it 84 km?).
Hearing some scuttlebutt about oxygen leaks around SS engine compartments.
Again–parallel staging can help eliminate this–that’s why ALS/NLS had that design.