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Skylon

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It's so strange to see those vehicles calmly drifting through space ... and then you look at the telemetry readouts, and realize the booster is falling at approximately one kilometer per second, and Starship is accelerating at about one G.

Landing burn, this could be interesting.

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Posted (edited)

Nominal orbit insertion, but there's still gas venting, seemingly erratically.  Is this bad news?

EDIT: rather large flakes are drifting away from Starship now, and it appears to be yawing quite a bit.  That doesn't seem good to me.

Edited by Codraroll
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That was incredible! 1 engine out on landing, maybe some debris. But safe splashdown. Unsure if that meets their criteria for actually doing the catch on flight 5. It was going so fast towards the end, I thought for a moment or two that it wouldn't make it! Seeing the hot stage ring fly by at the last minute was pretty cool as well.

Next up is attitude control, then entry.

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The continued venting on the ship is interesting. I wonder if the short-term fix to the frozen RCS from IFT-3 was to just keep a slow vent through all gas thrusters during coast (similar to Centaur’s constant settling thrust) and thus avoid ice formation.

Looks like Superheavy lost one perimeter engine on ascent and had one mid-ring engine relight failure during the landing burn. Notably that would have been the second relight for this engine; it turned off and restarted just fine during the boostback burn. Hard to speculate whether that might be physical damage from the overly aggressive re-entry (no entry burn makes it a lot hotter) or just general growing pains. Regardless, neither failure seemed to have any meaningful impact as both the ascent and the landing burn came off without a hitch.

There did seem to be some debris coming up from the bottom during the landing burn though. Hard to know if that was impact or spalling off the water surface or overstressing of the structure. None of the engines showed problems so the debris might have been the strakes peeling off from a combination of aero forces and sudden acceleration.

It looked like the booster actually executed a hover for a few moments there but it is hard to tell from that fisheye angle.

Cautiously optimistic about survival of re-entry for Starship! Superheavy’s entry was obviously much more controlled this time around so if it was a thruster issue for IFT-3 then that should be better.

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1 minute ago, Ultimate Steve said:

going so fast towards the end

Oh yeah - watching the booster telemetry go from over 4,000 km/h at 20 km altitude to less than a thousand at 1km before lighting the rocket and then the hoover was amazing.  The physicality of all that - wow!

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That still doesn't seem real, but they made the landing in one piece. I really hope they are able to release internal footage from the booster.

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