Starship SN8, perfect jump and landing with a bang – AstronautiNEWS

After a spasmodic wait and a long series of preliminary tests, the test “jump” of Starship’s SN8 prototype, the new SpaceX launch system, literally ended with a bang. As a result of the hard work of Musk’s engineers, the Starship took off at 11:45 p.m. Italian time from the experimental center in Boca Chica, Texas. The prototype flew for about six minutes and forty seconds.

While the “jump” ended with a very hard landing leading to its destruction, SN8 undoubtedly achieved many of the goals likely expected by its manufacturers (though never clearly announced in advance), including collecting valuable data during all the various phases. of your flight.

Before continuing with our story, the video of the SpaceX livestream is worth enjoying, until the last fateful moment.

From several tweets published by Elon Musk in recent days we can say that the general objectives for the SN8 flight were:

Of these points, probably only the last one was overlooked (also considering the greenish color of the flame) due to a problem with the propellant supply. Musk confirmed this hypothesis, revealing via Twitter a low pressure problem in the propellant tank (the one in the “nose” of the prototype).

With shots from other angles, which will almost certainly be broadcast in the next few hours also by the troupe of fans and youtubers present on the site, in all probability it will be possible to better analyze how the apical moment of the flight was managed, when it seemed that the closure of two of the three Raptors had been programmed to manage a hover phase, probably useful to better prepare the maneuver backflip.

SN8 landed too hard and exploded, but the point is, it did exactly on the runway. This demonstrates SpaceX’s already advanced ability to control the flight of a completely new rocket, which has in fact inherited the experience gained with the control software from the veteran Falcon 9, but has a completely new and innovative horizontal phase of flight.

It is also unclear whether all three Raptors performed as planned in the final stages of the descent, which took place with only one Raptor running and ended with a RUD (Unscheduled quick disassembly, “Disassembly” not programmed fast 🙂).

In any case, despite the pyrotechnic conclusion, the one reached today by SpaceX remains a first historical success. Few would have expected so many milestones to be achieved in the first flight of a prototype. In fact, it should be immediately clarified that what we have been able to witness is a landing technique never before experienced by a carrier rocket, which has also seen in operation a series of subsystems so far tested only individually or statically.

The SN8 is now destroyed, but in Boca Chica work on the prototypes continues uninterrupted and they have already reached the production stages of the SN15. The prototype SN9 is now practically ready, and we are sure that in a few weeks we will be able to witness a new “jump” attempt, which we hope will be crowned with full success.

As we explained above, the reason SpaceX is assembling all of these prototypes is precisely because they hope to break many, in an iterative process where technical improvements and refinements will be made to the spacecraft as experimentation continues.