A Rocket Nerd Reacts to SpaceX Starships Third Orbital Flight Test! 

IFT1: "explodes during flight" IFT2: "reaches space but is lost" IFT3: "reaches orbit but burns up on reentry" I bet by the time Starship achieves a completely nominal flight the media will ignore it.

@@BukuiZhaoactin like they don’t need to test the rocket to work on what went wrong for the future

They are used to the space industry spending decades working things out on paper and launching first time because they spent billions building it by hand and have no concept of the iterative approach spacex use.

every launch was a failure apart from IFT-4.

@@bigdogben Nope, they sucessfully got every flight off the pad.

Yep!

They will probably need another mishap investigation because of burn up. IFT-4 sometime in May?

Nice

He's a fan in spaceflight and transport

SpaceX won't be ready in a few weeks, that would just be a repeat of this one without more time. They'll be performing an RCA to develop whatever changes are needed for the next flight to get new data. The last investigation didn't slow SpaceX down, they were doing things up to the last week. The mishap report comes from the investigation SpaceX already would be doing so their next test isn't a repeat of the last one, the mishap report doesn't even have the minor stuff that didn't cause a failure but was suboptimal and SpaceX would work to optimize. I suspect there will be some software changes for controls now that they have significantly more data for the control model. I also expect some minor hardware changes like last time. You can see with the booster once it got through the clouds movements of the grid fins made increasingly bigger vehicle movements, until it started oscillating and over correcting each time. So with that data they'll probably be able to fix the issue, and I'm guessing the grid fins were way more effective in the lower atmosphere than they expected. Maybe they even alter the size or dimensions of the fins or change the servo motors to something stronger.

@@Jaker788 > that would just be a repeat of this one without more time. This is effectively what will happen. Booster still needs to repeat, again, its attempt to soft splashdown; Starship's heatshield still needs to be legitimately tested; the door needs to complete its test; the engine relight needs to be given an attempt. Realistically, the only new thing SpaceX is likely to try is a soft splashdown for Starship. Unless they think of something new to try, that's all IFT4 can be. > The last investigation didn't slow SpaceX down, they were doing things up to the last week. This is always a bizarrely shortsighted statement. Every time the FAA takes longer than SpaceX would like, SpaceX doesn't simply get certain things done and then wait. They will have already learned, internally, what kind of pace the FAA is adopting for their investigation in any given instance, and so they shape their ground tasks around that timeframe. The most conspicuous instances of this unavoidable adjustment are those times when SpaceX scraps usable vehicles in favor of newer models. Without a single bit of controversy, they would get more use out of flight data, even on outdated ships. SpaceX recently tweeted that they would like 6 more launches this year. That was a message to the FAA. The flight data is everything, and they would be more than happy to spend more time launching than tinkering on the ground.

@@Asterra2 By repeat of the test, I mean the results would be the same because nothing was fixed or changed. They need to find the causes of the failures and fix them before doing another test or it's a waste, that takes more than 6 weeks here. The FAA gets blamed a lot, but the investigation they want from SpaceX is less in scope than SpaceXs own post test root cause analysis. It takes time to look at everything, find the root causes, formulate a solution and prove that it will work (team consensus), and then actually implement those solutions. SpaceX was working on the next test and hardware all the way up to when they submitted the finished mishap report to the FAA. Then they spent time getting everything ready for a launch, and they were ready later than when the FAA had said they were finished reviewing the mishap report. They do not pace themselves on work and the only time they scrapped a vehicle slated for an IFT was the first one due to the environmental review. So how exactly is the FAA the one getting in the way here? We know for a fact that SpaceX spent the entire time working on stuff specifically for the next test and they were not ready to launch, if the mishap report wasn't required we wouldn't have had this test any sooner. SpaceX does the investigation, not the FAA and the FAA just reviews as oversight. The launch licence could have been made pretty much at any point after the FAA closed the investigation, but as we know SpaceX prefers getting it the day before their planned flight date. So that last week is actually when they were about ready, and that tracks given the WDR the week prior, and the finishing of vehicle mods before that. The goal of 6 flights was not a message to the FAA, it's just a goal. They hope they can make this more routine without failures that require in depth analysis before attempting another test. If the booster didn't fail to relight and lose control, and if the Starship didn't fail to maintain attitude control, then SpaceX could indeed move on and process the data in parallel to running another test with new data gathering goal. But because of those issues, there is no point in doing another test until that's fixed, which will take 3 months and definitely not 6 weeks. It'll take 6 weeks alone to deep dive on the data and talk about causes and fixes.

@@Jaker788 > They do not pace themselves on work Last time for this topic. Yes they do. This was a question asked to NSF quite a while back. The FAA indicates to SpaceX that they'll have the paperwork finished by such-and-such, and SpaceX works around that schedule. _Full stop._ If you feel the desire to repeat unsubstantiated guesswork, my recommendation would be to superchat NSF.

Because they spent their time on perfecting Saturn 5 plus the mission was going to go sub orbital speed

These so called "succesful" tests are also an extreme waste of resources and emissions.

First of all, do you know how many times it took to get people on the moon? There's a reason why it was called "Apollo 11". Secondly, it costed 3 lives and tons more money than starship to put people on the moon. Not to mention it almost took another 3 lives with Apollo 13. So, no. What SpaceX is doing is far more cost effective and safer than NASA in the 60's.

Money

@@thereasonableconsumer Spacex have a space ship factory, they are not building these one at a time. At present they have 4 full stacks almost ready and 2 are just waiting for engine testing.