Starship's Third Flight: A Successful Failure!

Starship launched for the third time last week made it to space but then burned up on re-entry NASA's SpaceX creu 7 successfully returned to Earth a brand new Japanese rocket exploded seconds into its Maiden flight electron launched the last of three dedicated launches for the stricks constellation a March 2C suffered a partial failure when attempting to deliver two satellites to Luna orbit and space axis starlink constellation grew by another 23 satellites all of this and so much more to cover in today's episode of space this week let us begin yeah so there's really not any point skirting around the biggest event of the past week right that's right we saw the orbital launch attempt of a long march to see which carried two payloads okay okay I I joke obviously it was of course Starship flight 3 the third ever launch of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket as the clock counted down I was a bit worried we might have another sn11 on our hands again as the launch area was completely shrouded in fog but as we got close to T minus 0 things had thankfully started to clear up and then it finally happened we had engine ignition and then liftoff and I think for many people our eyes immediately jumped to the Raptor engine diagram on the stream UI to check that yes all 33 Raptors were lit and they were and then we got something a little unexpected on flight views something that was absent from the flight 2 stream I love seeing how quickly this thing screamed through the cloud layer watching them vanish below and then we got an uninterrupted onboard view of the hot stage event wherein the six Raptors of the upper stage lit while still attached to super heavy booster 10 before the two separated now at this point we were wondering if booster 10 would terminate in a similar Mana to boost a nine but no it seemed to successfully steer itself down towards the Gulf of Mexico with those huge grid fins though towards the end it did start rolling back and forth quite aggressively and the Raptor engines ultimately failed to reignite resulting in the booster slamming into the ocean at about 1 km/ second so uh probably not going to buff out that to be honest anyway onto the Starship it then made it to space on a suborbital trajectory the plan was never to actually make it to full orbit for safety reasons but SpaceX were planning on relighting a Raptor engine while in space in order to enter a trans atmospheric trajectory but unfortunately the planned W to restart was cancelled that wasn't the only test that SpaceX wanted to run in space though the other two tests were reportedly a success a propellent transfer test was started and run completion and the payload bay door was opened and closed too although the latter looks like it might need some more work it really looked like the door struggled to open fully and I'm not too sure if it ever managed to successfully close at the end of the test though admitted ly the camera angle makes it a little bit hard to tell then it was time for re-entry I don't think any of us expected the views here to be so spectacular seeing those plumes of plasma erupting around the heat shield was insane speaking of the heat shield it looks like ship 28 retained a lot more of its tiles than ship 24 and 25 though some still did fall off as you can see that wasn't really the biggest problem that the ship was facing at this stage though it was in a massive role during re-entry it is a bit hard to tell from the raw video but Twitter user o fell uploaded a stabilized video that does a really really good job at showing just how extreme the role was I'm going to put a link to the Post in the video description so you can watch the full thing yourself I also have to say the same about a video from pocken CG showing a 3D representation of the ship's orientation during re-entry giving an idea of how and why the ship was eventually lost yep I mean you guys already knew this by now but the ship did not survive re-entry Communications was lost at around 65 km altitude the Hypersonic re-entry environment is a brutal one Mac 25 so to be honest I would have been more surprised if this worked the first time I think Starship re-entry is definitely going to be one of if not the biggest hurdles that SpaceX will need to overcome now where was I during the launch well I was here yeah sadly I missed the beginning of the launch because I'd finished my shift at work and was frantically cycling home through the wind and rain as fast as possible but sadly I missed it by literally only about a minute thankfully you can rewind live streams don't know why I'm mentioning this to be honest but just thought it might be a you know fun anecdote about my life and also the reason I wasn't streaming the launch which you know some people asked why I didn't slash wasn't and that's why hopefully I'll be able to do it for flight four but we'll have to wait and see flight four though is hopefully not too far away certainly hopefully a lot closer to us than the amount of time we had to wait between Flight 2 and 3 Because by all accounts flight 3 was much more successful than Flight 2 we of course got much closer to Safe splash down of the booster it didn't just explode like it did in Flight 2 and we of course saw that amazing re-entry footage of ship 28 the next launch date is of course very dependent on whether or not SpaceX can address the problems faced by flight 3 namely that outof control spinning of the ship on re-entry as well as a few other things like you know maybe adding some more grease to that door mechanism ship 29 has already completed a six engine spin Prime test so just needs to complete a static fire before it's good to go and super heavy booster 11 is on engine installation stand 2 in mega Bay 1 awaiting its roll out to the Launchpad for spin Prime and static fire testing before it's ready too in fact booster 12 and ship 30 are also coming along really quickly too with the booster receiving its engines on engine installation stand one and the ship awaiting its engine install at the production site now crucially did stage zero survive well for the most part yes NASA space flight was soon at the scene and captured some great views of the flight 3 Aftermath as well as this amazing video of the launch seriously I'm going to link the full video in the description because this is definitely something you'll want to watch in full with the sound on the overal launch mount looks intact though but it will need another coat of paint to get it back to how it was pre-launch but otherwise everything looks good though it's a bit early to be conclusive but you know there's no sign of you manifestly obvious damage aside from few cosmetic imperfections here and there while Starship may have burned up upon re-entry luckily the same can't be said for crew Dragon endurance which safely returned the four members of NASA's SpaceX crew 7 Mission from the International Space Station last week on Monday NASA astronaut Jasmine mbil Esa astronaut Andreas marginson Jax astronaut satosi far aawa Andros Cosmos Cosmonaut Constantin borisov all made their way on board the spacecraft before the hatch was closed behind them about two and a bit hours later the crew dragon autonomously undocked from the Space Station's Harmony module departing the station after being docked there for 197 days 2 hours and 4 minutes not too long after this a deorbit burn was made and the spacecraft made a successful atmospheric re-entry followed by Parachute deployment and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida bringing a successful close to spacex's seventh operational mission for NASA's commercial crew program recovery ships were soon at the scene and the crew successfully disembarked the capsule roughly 20 hours after boarding in addition to another masterful commercial crew mission SpaceX also completed another Falcon 9 launch on Saturday the rocket blasted off from launch complex 39a at Cape canaval carrying 203 starlink V2 minis to Shell 6 as always stage separation was quickly followed by the first stage performing a boost back and Landing burn coming down to rest on the a shortfall of gravitar drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean it's nearly the big 20 for this first stage b162 as this was its 19th Mission overall crazy numbers really rocket lab had a successful 45th electron launch last week on Tuesday they launched their owl night long Mission from Mahia New Zealand on board the electron was the stricks 3 Earth observation satellite and this was rocket lab's third and final of three dedicated launches for inspective stricks constellation the striis constellation was developed through Japan's IMPACT program and is a pioneering effort in synthetic aperture radar technology providing high res Earth imagery at a fraction of the cost of conventional satellites and inspective ultimately want the constellation to consist of 30 satellites by the late 2020s for this particular electron launch no first stage recovery attempt was made Starship was kind of a success kind of a failure as was China Aerospace science technology corporation's Long March 2 sea launch last week the vehicle lifted off on Wednesday from The Z Chang launch complex carrying the distant retrograde orbit A and B technology demonstration satellites to Luna orbit however the rocket suffered an anomaly with its YZ 1s upper stage which meant that it didn't reach Luna orbit instead only be to place the satellit into low earth orbit in view of the partial failure I found it really hard to find footage of this launch so apologies for the vertical video I have to use and if it got copyright claimed that's why the screen is all blurry now but hey let's let's plan for success partial launch failures aside we also had a total launch failure last week as well the same day as long march 2C we saw the maiden Flight of the chyos rocket a Japanese solid fuel rocket designed to be able to place small SATs weighing up to a quar metric ton to low earth orbit built by the private Japanese company space one for its first flight it carried the rapid launch small satellite payload but unfortunately the rocket exploded pretty much immediately after liftoff with automatic flight termination system activating it t plus 5 Seconds this uh energetic end to the mission did result in fires and damage to the launch area hopefully space one can figure out what went wrong here and we can see another launch attempt of this vehicle in the not too distant future I guess this is another good reminder that space can sometimes be hard unless you're allowing an aerospace yes last week I launched the seventh episode of my beginner playthrough of KSP 2's exploration mode heading to Duna for the very first time I go through each step nice and carefully to hopefully help you perform your very first junor landing and return if you've not managed it before but other than that that's everything I had to cover this week I hope you enjoyed the episode and if you want to support me further then I do have a patreon you can join just like these great people on the left did and you know there are two videos on screen that hopefully look like they're interesting for you to watch next and uh and that's it thank you for watching once again uh bye byebye bye bye bye bye bye everyone bye oh leave a like on the video as well that I did forgot to say that

Channel: Matt Lowne

Views: 47,777

Keywords: starship launch 3, explained, starship explained, starship launch 3 explained, long march 2C loss, failure, lunar orbit, boca chica, booster, elon musk, flight test, matt lowne space news, matt lowne space this week, mechazilla, nasa, rocket launch, space this week, spacenews, spacex, spacex starship, starbase, starbase boca chica, starship, starship flight test, starship orbital flight test, static fire, united launch alliance, for dummies

Id: L7p5t3kRV7Y

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 18 2024