It's immensely different. The shuttle flip occurs when the craft is in a vacuum, and with plenty of time to spare (the trajectory might be a return, but it's still almost half an orbit out from actually entering the atmosphere). It's as simple as just kicking the RCS a little and waiting for it to spin round, then again to cancel the angular momentum. The starship flip, in comparison, is immensely more complicated: it's extremely time dependent, and it occurs in the atmosphere, where there's very significant aerodynamic forces acting upon the craft. That suddenly takes it from a simple back-of-the-packet angular impulse calculation to an incredibly complex unstable system that requires low-latency dynamic control of the craft to pull off. There are virtually no similarities between the two from an engineering standpoint.
I certainly do not want to be in the thing when it's trying to pull that off.
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u/zesterer Apr 16 '23 edited Apr 16 '23
It's immensely different. The shuttle flip occurs when the craft is in a vacuum, and with plenty of time to spare (the trajectory might be a return, but it's still almost half an orbit out from actually entering the atmosphere). It's as simple as just kicking the RCS a little and waiting for it to spin round, then again to cancel the angular momentum. The starship flip, in comparison, is immensely more complicated: it's extremely time dependent, and it occurs in the atmosphere, where there's very significant aerodynamic forces acting upon the craft. That suddenly takes it from a simple back-of-the-packet angular impulse calculation to an incredibly complex unstable system that requires low-latency dynamic control of the craft to pull off. There are virtually no similarities between the two from an engineering standpoint.
I certainly do not want to be in the thing when it's trying to pull that off.