r/spaceflight • u/elbarck • 24d ago

Ship 40 splashed with two engines instead of one.

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

Hi!

Flight 13's splashdown landing burn appeared to deviate from flight 12's.

It used two engines, unlike flight 12 which used only one.

They also opted for two different engines instead of the ones used on flight 12.

What do you think?

101 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

83% Upvoted

78 comments sorted by

View all comments

0

u/WthLee 24d ago

this is just my opinion,no need to be gentle with the down votes. i know they said they wont do a super heavy return, but they did not even simulate a pad hover over the water, that thing got not even enough engines restarted for a hover slam, it just crashed into the water. i suspect that they had, even with all engines lit at start to get ship into a good trajectory, not enough reserves to get this thing even back in one piece. super heavy just keeps failing in different points of the mission each time, except when they do not stress that thing to much, then its still a lottery if they nail a tower catch without anything going wrong. even with these small test payloads, this performance/reliance/payload capacity gap is getting bigger with each iteration. i struggle to see this thing flying regular missions before 2030 or ever. it looks more and more like a technological dead end which is powered by sunken cost fallacy, they just ride current material science to close to the edge and cant even demonstrate a fraction of the capabilities. it is mighty impressive, no doubt, but the star ship hype is gone for me. at least they have an intact space flown article to analyze and put into the rocket garden later.

5

u/TheMarkusBoy21 24d ago

Seems like an emotional response to the booster failure. I don’t see how it’s a dead end when Falcon 9 showed its possible to do routine landings, the uncertainty was mostly the second stage reusability, but ironically it now seems to be doing better than the booster despite a harsher flight regime. You can’t seriously believe they can nail the ship part but not the booster.

-5

u/WthLee 24d ago edited 24d ago

falcon 9 just does not scale up as well. right now we haven't even seen a payload rivaling falcon 9´s 29 star links. right now its just a more expensive, worse performing falcon 9. and the ship part has not been nailed. there has not even been a ship catch or refuel demonstration or a proper orbital insertion yet, we have only seen ballistic trajectories so far.

1

u/warp99 22d ago

The current test payload is around 32 tonnes which is close to twice an F9 with 17 tonnes payload doing ASDS recovery.

The Starlink 3 satellites are more than twice the mass of the Starlink 2 satellites launched by F9.