Starship finally makes orbit but engine trouble cuts the victory lap short

SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time yesterday and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, although engine trouble cut short a planned six-orbit flight. Super Heavy had problems of its own. All 33 Raptor 3 engines ignited at 07:48 CT, but one shut down during ascent. The booster later reignited 26 of the 28 engines …

[Fruit and Nutcase]

EM Phone Home

Another step closer to the day Musk goes home

[Uncle Slacky]

Re: EM Phone Home

"Note: Musk died on the way back to his home planet":

https://frinkiac.com/img/S08E14/1226392.jpg

[Annihilator]

Re: EM Phone Home

Absolutely zero chance he's getting on one of those rockets imo

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: EM Phone Home

> Absolutely zero chance he's getting on one of those rockets imo

As he hasn't yet climbed into the cage to slug it out with Zuckerberg, I suspect you are right. Our Karen is great on the mouth side but for walking the walk… not so much.

[Oneman2Many]

Re: EM Phone Home

I can't recall him ever saying that he wants to travel off plant. He says that humanity should be a multi-planetary species.

Anyway, expect usual downvotes from uninformed.

[DS999]

Re: EM Phone Home

Oh really? In 2018 he said there was a "70% chance he'll move to Mars" - he specifically says "move" not just "visit".

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-mars-axios

[Winkypop]

Re: EM Phone Home

“Off Plant”

Maybe he prefers a stairway to heaven…

[MachDiamond]

Re: EM Phone Home

"Absolutely zero chance he's getting on one of those rockets imo"

Sir Richard and Jeff took rides in theirs.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: EM Phone Home

We've not seen him in the driver's seat of a Tesla with Autopilot engaged, travelling on a highway and coming up to a group of stationary emergency response vehicles

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: EM Phone Home

The trillionaire who fell to earth?

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: EM Phone Home

> The trillionaire who fell to earth?

This Little Prince clearly landed on his head, so no harm done. Still I wish he would toddle off home to his asteroid and tend his rose bush.

[LogicGate]

Rocket engines are almost as difficult as...

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2096292014824247360

Regarding Raptor 3 Engines:

“While deleting parts sounds easy in theory, it is actually very difficult to figure out how to do so in practice and requires many iterations,”

This comes from the man who DOGEd the whole US government in a matter of weeks.

[Flocke Kroes]

Thanks for the nightmares

DOGE had a PR web page listing all the money saved. Most of it was fiction and the rest was cancelled out when staff got re-hired at a higher rate because the work still needed to be done. Musk was unhappy because he got blamed for the consequences of his actions (diddums) but was pleased by the secondary effects.

"... requires many iterations." I am not looking forward to DOGE2+.

[Sproggit]

Re: Thanks for the nightmares

I don't think it was *those* secondary effects that were his main (hidden) objective, but to absolutely *gut* any and all federal agency that had investigations running against his various businesses.

We know that there were investigations in the NTSB, the FAA, the Federal Payment Registration Agency [the one tasked with reviewing the application from X to allow payments on the platform] and so on.

A few weeks of the "DOGE Bro" community running through those agencies and ... in a puff of sparklemagic, all those investigations just disappear...

I'm sure it was just a coincidence, but he spent $250MM and saved his companies *billions* in fines and commercial setbacks.

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: Thanks for the nightmares

I will add the SEC and the environmental assessment for Starbase Louisiana to your list. I am sure there are plenty more we missed. I did not feel comfortable putting those in the same sentence as 500,000 dead black children. Many years ago I was disappointed by Musk. My expectations repeatedly dropped until I thought nothing he did could make me think less of him. Then I thought about what you wrote: the main focus was avoiding the fines and delays. You are quite correct. The children were just a bonus of opportunity to him.

[Charlie Clark]

Congratulations but…

… does El Reg get paid only to cover SpaceX launches? I thought the successful IsarSpace launch the other week was at least worth a mention…

[werdsmith]

Re: Congratulations but…

Indeed that was a historic event.

[John Robson]

So a 19 second burn from one sea level engine

Was the difference between suborbital and orbital - an absolute pittance

Good data, and some extra bandwidth, as well of course as the ability to potentially learn and tweak the sat design.

[MachDiamond]

Re: So a 19 second burn from one sea level engine

"Was the difference between suborbital and orbital - an absolute pittance"

Not really. There's a difference between orbiting Earth and being in Earth orbit. The burn just extended the distance the rocket would go before intersecting the planet again. To achieve "orbit" would have meant another 1,500-2,000kph. The line is a bit fuzzy since most things said to be in orbit will eventually come back down even if that's not for ages.

I'm surprised the heat shield held up as well as it looked from the space video. I haven't seen if there are any images from right before it went boom. The added velocity means more energy to turn into heat on the way back down. Even if it can do it once, can it do it again with minimal refurbishing as promised?

Is this going to mean SpaceX is going to start launching loads more Starlink sats? Or, will they work on the HLS system that NASA has mostly paid them to demonstrate?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: So a 19 second burn from one sea level engine

That's what lots of us have been saying to all the "it hasn't even reached orbit yet" brigade. The definition of orbit is a bit woolly, but would generally be at least 1 full circumnavigation unpowered. The energy difference between reliably coming down in less than that vs completing it is minimal compared to getting up anywhere close, but the difference in risk of leaving something of unknown reliability (or worse, the debris of it) in orbit vs coming down is massive.

[Oneman2Many]

Couple of points,

- It was always the plan to do a go/no go before final orbital burn, it wasn't related to the engine failure.

- The ship destruction was the plan, S40 surviving wasn't planned.

- Starlinks had already made contact with ground stations, terminals and laser links.

- This single launch was the equivalent to 10x F9 launches in terms of bandwidth.

Regarding early de-orbit, video showing unexpected venting after stage separation, possibly nitrogen from QD. Would have affected pressurisation of the main tanks which are used for RCS. Other items is maybe propellants were boiling off faster than expected.

[Bebu sa Ware]

33 Raptor Rocket Engines

Probably makes a lot of sense to the rocket engineers to have so many engines but I see a 33 little finicky little buggers all vying to go wrong in the most original and explosive ways (un)imaginably possible.

Seems the engines aren't identical but some are "tuned" for vacuum (space) operation; others for sea level operation; others again I guess for something else.

All points to Space X pushing the complexity of managing 33 engines into the management and control software. Only hope their software is considerably better than the Tesla's.

[Oneman2Many]

Re: 33 Raptor Rocket Engines

Rockets are a controlled explosion so yes they are trying to explode at any opportunity.

There are 3 different variants,

- 'Standard' which are used for the majority of the booster rings.

- Gimballed which have a different connector which allows them to change direction of thrust allowing change in direction the rocket is travelling. They are used for inner rings of the booster and 3 of the ship engines.

- Vacuum optimised. This have a bigger engine bell for better efficiency at higher altitudes. 3 of them are used for the ship.

And yes SpaceX are using software for controlling all this, they have more compute and sensor then any previous rocket. If you are interested they are always advertising for software developers.

[MachDiamond]

Re: 33 Raptor Rocket Engines

"Rockets are a controlled explosion"

That's a huge no. It's rapid combustion to produce thrust. An explosion is a very bad thing.

[MachDiamond]

Re: 33 Raptor Rocket Engines

"- Gimballed which have a different connector which allows them to change direction of thrust allowing change in direction the rocket is travelling."

That's not a different engine, but a different mounting.

[LogicGate]

Re: 33 Raptor Rocket Engines

33 Engines is great for redundancy, but it also substantially increases the statistical likelyhood that at least one engine will behave anomalous during launch.

However, if the engine can be designed in such a way that fault will not propagate to other engines, then this is still an over all plus for safety.

Having one out of 33 engines RUD is easier co contain than having one out of 3, if the total engine power output remains the same for the two solutions.

A similar situation and calculation can be found in modern drivetrain battery packs.

[Excused Boots]

Re: 33 Raptor Rocket Engines

In theory (at least) a few larger and more powerful engines would be more efficient, with less piping for one thing. But there are some advantages.

Redundancy - you can afford to lose one or two engines and still keep going, you may have to extend the burn slightly (see the premature shutdown of one of the booster’s engines, and one of the second stage vacuum engines).

Economy of scale - smaller engines are cheaper to construct, and in Space-X’s case it allows them to use the same engine on both stages.

Finer control - with more engines if you can gimbal (turn them so the thrust is to one side) or selectively throttle some of them, it gives better control over the flight’s direction.

This all supposes that modern control systems do give you this fine degree of control and are able to quickly shut an engine down if it detects any anomaly before it blows up and takes over engines with it.

When you fire a rocker engine, ideally you want all of the hot gas to go, well, straight downwards, because that is what gives you the ‘upward’ thrust. But in reality the gas starts to spread out once it leaves the nozzle, and the component of it which is going out sideways, doesn’t really contribute to forward thrust. However you can make use of atmospheric pressure, to hold this expansion back, but as the rocket rises and atmospheric pressure reduces it becomes less and less efficient.

Hence the ‘sea-level’ engines, which have fairly small ‘bells’ (that traditional rocket-engine, shaped structure), and rely on atmospheric pressure to keep the plume (mostly) on track; and vacuum engines which have vastly bigger bells and are optimised to be more efficient in a, err, vacuum.

[Sproggit]

Re: 33 Raptor Rocket Engines

Just to add to your excellent points...

I don't think it's *just* economies of scale that matter here...

Musk and SpaceX have talked about having a relatively large number of actively working Starship Super-Heavy vehicles. I did calculations in other discussion threads which show that just to maintain the planned number of Starlink satellites, SpaceX would need to be running AT LEAST 4 starship launches, per month, NON STOP. This is because the in-orbit lifespan of a Starlink satellite is 60 months / 5 years.

So to get back to my point... I can't help but think that part of what SpaceX is pushing for here is a much heavier scale of automation - literally going for a full-feature production line, with as much automated assembly as practical. They are learning a great deal from using robotic assembly with Tesla and that translates in to how to move away from "everything bespoke and assembled by hand" (which is slow, expensive and prone to error) to "everything is standardized and automated assembly is used wherever possible" (which is much faster, more expensive to set up but cheaper to operate, and which gives much greater consistency of outcome [good or bad]).

That consistent result appears to be what SpaceX are currently lacking with with Super-Heavy/Starship - it's been an age since the chopsticks capture, yet that's only been done once... we're seeing all sorts of different failures across each launch.

To be fair - they are iterating like crazy and every flight is a major test. The reason it is taking Super-Heavy/Starship so many more flights to get to stable reliability is down to complexity. And of course we don't know how much they are tweaking between flights - gut tells me it's a *lot*.

But it's worth reminding ourselves that one of the key milestones for F9 occurred once they got to reliable payload delivery to orbit... The moment they got that nailed [and that was largely successful after that initial milestone] then every launch was an experiment in reusable landings - and a customer-funded launch, no less. And we should note that they went from iterating RUDs to "Wow! It worked!" to "Yawn..." pretty darn quick.

Sure, we're still in "RUD Phase"... but the change, when it happens, could well be sudden.

[NetMage]

Re: 33 Raptor Rocket Engines

>This is because the in-orbit lifespan of a Starlink satellite is 60 months / 5 years.

I think it is important to remember this is a designed lifetime and they could decide to extend the lifetime of the larger more expensive V3 satellites if they feel comfortable with the technology.

[NetMage]

Re: 33 Raptor Rocket Engines

You forgot throttle down ability - having more engines means you can reduce thrust to a much lower level allowing hover or landing.

[MOH]

"The remaining five engines burned longer to compensate, leaving the spacecraft on its planned suborbital trajectory. This ensured it would return to Earth even if controllers lost control, but also meant a further burn was required to enter orbit."

That sounds like without the longer burn there was a risk it wouldn't return to earth, which I'm struggling to make sense of?

[Decay]

I think that wording makes it sound more confusing than it actually was.

The original plan was deliberately to finish the main ascent burn on a passively safe suborbital trajectory. In other words, if they did nothing else, or subsequently lost control of the vehicle, it would naturally re-enter over a predetermined uninhabited area rather than remain in orbit.

They would then check that everything required to get back out of orbit was healthy and, only if they were happy, perform the small additional insertion burn to enter a stable orbit.

When one of the Raptors shut down early, the remaining five burned longer to compensate. That wasn't to ensure Starship would return to Earth. It was to get it to the velocity and trajectory they had originally intended at engine cutoff. If anything, failing to make up the lost velocity would have caused it to come down sooner, not remain in space.

The interesting decision came after that. They now had an engine failure and had to decide whether it was an isolated engine problem or evidence of some wider propulsion, propellant or vehicle issue. Once they committed to orbit, passive re-entry was no longer the safety net. They had to retain the ability to perform the de-orbit burn later.

Apparently the flight team were satisfied that the failed Raptor was an isolated issue and that they had sufficient redundancy to continue, so they went ahead with orbital insertion. That also allowed them to tick off two pretty major milestones: Starship reaching orbit for the first time and deployment of the V3 Starlink satellites.

The original plan was then roughly six orbits over nearly ten hours, which would also have provided useful time in the actual orbital environment, including repeated thermal cycling between sunlight and shadow.

Instead, after deploying the satellites they brought Starship home much earlier, performing the de-orbit burn after a little over two hours rather than completing the planned six-orbit mission.

So the interesting unanswered question isn't really why they went into orbit after losing an engine. SpaceX had specifically designed a decision point for exactly that situation. It's why, having decided the vehicle was healthy enough to enter orbit and deploy the payload, they subsequently decided not to leave it there for the full planned mission.

Could simply have been an abundance of caution after the earlier engine issue, or they may have seen something else they didn't like. Until SpaceX publishes more detail, we are all in the dark.

[ChrisC]

"When one of the Raptors shut down early, the remaining five burned longer to compensate. That wasn't to ensure Starship would return to Earth. It was to get it to the velocity and trajectory they had originally intended at engine cutoff. If anything, failing to make up the lost velocity would have caused it to come down sooner, not remain in space."

Reading that part of the launch coverage reporting at the time immediately brought to mind Apollo 13 and its similar extended ascent burn times to compensate for a lost engine, and is a good reminder that at least some of the issues SpaceX are having with Starship are the sort of things that have happened before and will happen again (at least for any design using multiple engines), so they're less of a "hah, SpaceX don't know what they're doing" gotcha as some will be only too quick to pounce on, and more of a "this isn't easy, because this really IS rocket science..."

[Excused Boots]

Yes it is a bit vague. No, without the longer burn with the remaining engines, it would still have re-entered and come back, just not where they necessarily wanted it to.

[Mishak]

It would still have returned to a planned touchdown in the Indian Ocean - a failsafe return to the landing location of previous suborbital flights. They also had two other planned-for landing sites (all three were cleared for use), and chose to use the second backup location.

[Winkypop]

Send up all the Tech Bros next

And just keep it going…

[Alistair Dabbs]

The Gulf of... where?

Elon would disagree with your naming of the splashdown site.