SpaceX's Starship Prototype Takes To The Skies And Returns Safely

[Music] [Music] hello it's scott manley here what a marvelous intro that was yeah i put that together as a joke because there was a good chance that starship serial number 15 was going to fly on may the 4th but you know what it still works because we can call that revenge of the fifth like regardless yes spacex yesterday they successfully flew a starship for a high altitude test they performed their belly flop they performed their transition to landing and they landed and they didn't explode 10 minutes later marking the first fully successful flight of a starship prototype showing the whole descent system now this is a pretty big deal because you know we've seen four failures so far because of the way you know spacex is very happy to throw hardware out there and test it by flying it um but sn15 had a number of changes that were expected to solve problems that had previously been seen so the first set of prototypes i had flown this high altitude flight were serial number 8 9 10 and 11 and they had failed because of design problems with the starship hardware and also with design problems or fabrication problems with the raptor engines and both of those had received revisions for sn15 and by the way 12 through 14 were never completed and were never intended to fly so 15 had new plumbing and changes i think it's inside the thrust puck but we're not too clear on exactly what changes happened or at least we if we have a few clues as to what might have changed but by no means an exhaustive list of things uh or why the raptors were also redesigned and upgraded and boy it looks like those combination of upgrades may have actually made it work although it was 100 perfect we did have problems here and there and we'll talk about that now the flight should have been absolutely spectacular but we didn't see all of it because there was a cloud layer at about 1 000 feet so all those wonderful people who bring their cameras out to watch the spectacle they got to see this amazing launch you got to see the vehicle lift slowly off the pad and then disappear into the cloud layer for several minutes and then you know then appeared back out from the clouds rockets firing and landed safely and that was pretty good so anything above the clouds we pretty much had to rely on spacex's cat on board cameras and it looked like they had made some effort to upgrade the quality their live stream was in 4k i noticed and the camera that we were seeing from inside the skirt actually showed a lot more detail on the edges and on the raptors things looked a lot better but there were all sorts of problems with the signal and we kept on the video kept on freezing for several minutes at a time we would sometimes get snippets of video and then it would go away or we might get just motion vectors and you know the mush flying around and this meant that we did miss most of the flight we did get to see that the engine shut off but i think my favorite moment from the flight was they had now fitted a camera to one of the fins that are on this vehicle at the front of the vehicle and these fins they move up and down to adjust the aerodynamic drag and therefore adjust the horizontal orientation so you got to see the horizon tilting as these fans these fins moved but also during one sequence they were falling with their plume right the cloud plume that they had made on the way up it was behind them so you actually got to see this you know falling down past it and it looked amazing it had this old depth and quality to it that i'd never quite seen but yeah it seemed that the video quality might have been related to the fact that they were maybe testing delivering video over their starlink network so a few weeks ago spacex i had applied to fly a starlink antenna on the side of a starship and well i mean they were approved you can actually see it on the side i guess it didn't target so well or there's problems still to be worked out during the flight we also see ip addresses like you see udp colon 234 dot whatever port 9000 that's like udp you know video streaming that they were pulling data from and new 234 address range i believe that's actually a public multicast address that might have been visible on the internet but i doubt it like just because it's a publicly rootable address doesn't mean that it would actually be visible to the public let's say so i i don't know the the by the way we knew it was vlc which is a public uh open source media player because the font pretty much matched what vlc uses i thought that was kind of cute you know spacex just using what works right now one important bit that we sort of glitched out a little was when the engine's lit uh because in previous flights and according to john inspector the plan this time was to fire three engines and then down select two engines for orientation to the vertical and then switch to a single engine for the landing but in this case the it looks like they only lit two engines it looks to me and most other people that the third engine immediately swung out of the way so it's not clear whether that one engine was voted out before it was even lit whether it was ruled out due to something prior to ignition but i think that one would have been one of the first ones to ignite because it's one of the engines towards the belly of the vehicle and therefore actually provides slightly more a lever arm because of the orientation of the fins whereas uh the two that did light or one one of the ones that did light didn't do that quite as well so we had two engines that were working which wouldn't be the first choice of a pair of engines to land it also came in and down a lot faster if you do look at pixel counts compared to sn10 which was their successful landing it was coming down faster and higher and breaking faster as well although it managed to throttle down and safely land based on my pixel counts it was moving at less than three meters per second less than 10 feet per second as opposed to um sn10 which we know was about 10 meters per second or 33 feet per second depending upon what your um what your unit preference is the landing wasn't totally you know clean by any means we can now see on the pad that there were you know black marks where the feet had hit and then they slid sideways you know a couple of feet also it seems pretty close to the edge of the pad you can actually see by the way from the uh skirt camera as it comes down and performs this transition you get to see the the tank farm from high up and then you get to see sections of the landing pad you can see in the background just the little fire hose there that was going to be needed for um the post flight fire yeah they landed and there was immediately lots of methane burning out the side wasn't clear how much of this was actually a leak or whether this was just stuff left open in the pipes whether there was a valve that failed to close and they had to figure that out but it burned for well yeah it burned well past the end of the official spacex stream and there was a lot of people anxiously wondering whether it was going to go the same way as sn10 there was this little you know fire suppression thing there just trying to spray water on it but boy there was only so much it could do but eventually yeah they shut the fire down it's not and uh then actually they got out to look at the thing with the vehicle on the pad they had people out there working on it a few hours later which was way faster than previous flights if you remember hopper or sn5 or 6 they had to wait like a day before the propellant had evaporated so that they could safely send people out to this i'm not sure if they come up with a new way to you know safely depressurize it or something else i know that they had you know robotic dog spots that could walk around with sensors to verify that the environment was good yeah um they've already got their tankzilla headed out to the pad to pick that up i'm presuming that they might just they might either stick on a truck and bring it back or they might stick on a test stand i think most likely they'll take it back to the um hanger to the tall bay so they can maybe dissect it verify what's working what's damaged take a look at the state of the legs they might even take those raptors out of there and send them off to mcgregor for inspection and more test firings that would seem like a fair thing to do and so the next one that is going to fly is probably serial number 16 which is nearing completion as we speak we are told to expect that within a couple of weeks by sources who are not public now um this does come at an interesting time because yes a few weeks ago nasa selected spacex's starship to provide human landing system for the surface of the moon right for the artemis program and this was a big deal first of all spacex had got in there despite being very different and they somehow i don't know i didn't expect them to be a winner right i didn't think that they were exactly the thing that nasa wanted i thought they might make an excellent second choice i never expected them to be the first choice but nasa went with them and the biggest part of why they would go with them was because they were half the price of blue origin and we know now that they were half the price of blue origin because blue origin submitted a protest saying you didn't give us fair consideration you didn't have give us a chance to renegotiate her price i'm saying blue origin that's not fair it's the national team which is blue origin lockheed northrop grumman and draper so it's a fairly you know some old space people and one new space person and similarly dianetics published another protest and we know that they were more expensive as well than the national team and of course nasa because it had these protests in hand they were legally required to stop their collaboration with spacex advancing on that project and spacex reacted by saying okay we're doing this anyway like spacex has its own agenda they're gonna let the human landing system contract do whatever it needs to do maybe like if they come back and they do get it that'll be great i don't think at this point that there will be a change to spacex getting a human landing system award i do think that a big part of this protest and uh discussion that it's going to engender or drive will basically result in politicians saying hmm maybe we need some more funding for this artemis program thing i i i think that might be what happens it i mean it's also entirely possible that what that both the the other two or one or the other two accept some short-term funding from some pot of money that nasa can find with the hopes that the congress will approve a much more serious amount of money for the the actual human landing system for artemis because right now they basically don't have they don't get what they need so yeah what else is is worth talking about well the tiles interestingly enough the tiles are on the side they had a fairly large section and a smaller section they actually lost a couple of tiles during test fires but it looks like if they lost any they weren't particularly obvious during the actual flight test fires might actually be a slightly more dangerous environment because it's spending more time on the pad as opposed to in flight and of course you get reflection of sound waves from the ground that can be can really make for a very hostile sonic vibration environment by the way a lot of people have been asking why there are tiles being tested on the back of the fins because the plan is to have the front of the vehicle that will go through re-entry to have the tiles and for the leeward side to have nothing just to have the silver shiny finish of the stainless steel to reflect the incident thermal radiation back into space and so people will assume that that might be true of the fins however the fins are in a slightly different situation first of all they're actuating into different angles and they might actually end up getting heat reflected from the body but also just because you've got this sort of high pressure air being pushed around it's entirely possible you might have more heating on the back of the fins and finally the fins are relatively thin compared to the body so there's a lot less thermal mass there therefore they might actually need to have thermal protection on the back of all the fins to get them through re-entry i don't know somebody's probably modeled this in a lot more detail but since they're putting the tiles there i expect they're considering this as a possibility the raptor engine plumes looked much more consistent than previous flights should usually we'd have one that was slightly orange and we'd be thinking oh that's maybe a bit fuel rich but there were much much closer although there were definitely moments where they were running with off nominal mixtures probably for thrust reasons so congratulations to spacex and everyone involved in starship this has been great to watch not just the development the failures the successes and this you know first big steps showing that it actually can work and i hope that when sn16 flies that it similarly continues this tradition and we can actually demonstrate that the level of reliability needed to make starship work is achievable but yes that will be in the future we'll see sn16 fly in a couple of weeks and of course i'll be watching i'm scott manley fly safe [Music] you

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 746,269

Rating: 4.9555702 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 7IDMM63InLY

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Syngeon4]

Scott Manley is great.