sevenperforce

Liftoff. Sporty!

And it's live!

It would still work.

Successful solar array deploy...and that's a wrap, folks!

You can see the airlock inside Dragon's trunk as it separates.

Successful SECO.

Welcome back booster!!

Interesting that S1 didn't have enough dV for an RTLS but it still did a partial boostback.

More thrust, lower isp.

The atmosphere has to go somewhere. As long as the superheated atmosphere is expanding faster than the airspeed of the spacecraft, a very significant amount of the superheated expanding atmosphere is going to impact the pusher plate. That will provide impulse.

Atmosphere which flows between the pusher plate and the tungsten jet is superheated in the explosion and increases the reaction mass.

Orion is more efficient in atmo.

Yes, that was quite amazing. They were able to use differential thrust to produce some degree of control. Fortunately the control surfaces were trimmed for roughly level flight. That's kind of like if all four of Starship's control surfaces became locked in a stable config and they had to use hot-gas thrusters for roll and pitch. Of course, it may have propellant reserve problems. It can land with extra reserves when carrying humans. Starship will have completely, truly independent drive systems for each of the four control surfaces, so there is no such single failure mode. Helicopters are much closer to Starship for this particular analogy. For a jetliner, the engines are independent of the glide mode; for a helicopter, the engine is the glide mode. If a helicopter lost hydraulic control of its main rotor it would be unable to autorotate.

Yeah, the Convert-O-Tron element is pure hokey. That pretty nearly violates conservation of energy. Antimatter is an energy storage mechanism, not an energy generation mechanism.

High 4-digit at worst. You can use regenerative cooling to keep the throat and nozzle solid. Hell, with antimatter-level energy density, you can afford to use film cooling and still hit high four-digit Isp. That's where radiators come into play.