SpaceX Confirms: How Starship Just Changed Everything!

Video from the channel What about it!? about Starship, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 24:27. Language: English. Video type: News.

The channel What About It!? analyzes Starship's flight 14, the first in which a vehicle of the program reached orbit. Ship 41 lifted off from pad 2 at Starbase atop Booster 21, made nearly two orbits of Earth, deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, relit an engine after more than two hours in space, and splashed down in the Pacific north of Hawaii instead of off Chile. The flight lasted 3 hours, 8 minutes and 35 seconds, the longest for Starship.

The stack was stacked on the pad almost a week earlier: there was a full-propellant-load wet dress rehearsal on 24 September, and the FAA licence arrived on the 26th, which the host attributes the delays to. That licence also removes lightning as an abort criterion, which is relevant for future launches from Florida and Louisiana.

In flight, an engine on the booster's central ring failed around minute 1:06, and the boostback burn was performed with 31 of the 33 engines; even so, Booster 21 was the first version 3 booster to make a soft splashdown in the Gulf. The ship lost one of its three vacuum Raptors at 7 minutes 16 seconds. After an initial suborbital trajectory, orbital insertion came around minute 25, at an altitude of about 275 km. Satellite deployment began around minute 34, and three of the satellites photographed the ship's heat shield. The deorbit burn came at 2 hours 12 minutes, at the first planned opportunity. The ship carried two tiles recovered from Ship 40, the program's first tile reuse.

Musk aims to catch a ship with the tower by late October and to refly it by the end of the year or early next. FAA planning slides provisionally set flight 15 for 19 October and a Starlink mission from Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center for 30 October, the first public mention of a Starship launch from the East Coast, whose pad has just tested its deluge system. Reducing the booster's grid fins to two is also being considered.