Main Engine Cut Off - T+286: Starship Flight 5

Episode Date: October 17, 2024

SpaceX is entering a new era for Starship after the epic Flight 5, with its pinpoint ship reentry and staggeringly beautiful booster catch.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 31 executive producers—Matt, Will and Lars from Agile, Steve, Harrison, Warren, Frank, Russell, Josh from Impulse, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Stealth Julian, Fred, Lee, David, Theo and Violet, Joonas, Better Every Day Studios, Jan, Ryan, Pat, Pat from KC, Joel, Kris, Donald, The Astrogators at SEE, Bob, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsSpaceX on X: “Watch Starship's fifth flight test”SpaceX on X: “Starship on its fifth flight test. Views powered by @Starlink”Starship’s Fifth Flight Test - SpaceX - LaunchesSpaceX Catches a Super Heavy Booster During a Milestone Flight 5 - NASASpaceFlight.comThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by SpaceXWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff, I'm Anthony Colangelo. On a very, very exciting week here, the absolutely amazing Starship Flight Test 5 occurred, I'm sure. If you're listening to this and you have not seen that, I don't know what happened to you this week. But if you have not partaken in every video out there of the booster catch, please go and do so before you listen to this. I think this is, there's a couple of parts to this, right?

There's the actual moment, which is very reminiscent to me of the first booster landing that spacex did with falcon 9 had a very similar vibe in terms of the um staggering technical nature of it the fact that it did break out into non-space spheres as something that is amazing and worth celebrating i think this one more than than falcon 9 was incredible because of the fact that you have the precision needed to catch this thing on the tower with the the just everything's amazing about this particular moment because of the videos that we have. Of course, the first Falcon 9 landing was at night. It was landing on a landing pad. Does not look as cool as a beautiful Texas coast at sunrise with a booster that gets

caught by a tower. So that has that moment to it that just feels so grand. And we haven't had that for a little while in terms of SpaceX moments, right? I think the last one to me was not even a successful landing, actually. I think Starship SN8, if you remember the first high altitude flight test of Starship, the moment that it did the flip maneuver, I think was the last time we all had this feeling of oh wow that's what this thing looks like i can't believe they've even gotten to this point um that had a and the videos of that were amazing we had the one shot from like underneath the vehicle as it did the flip i think that was the last time that we had a a spectacle that that rose to that level. But this certainly, I think,

was probably the greatest of SpaceX achievements, considering the fact that the catch was just one part of a very successful mission. You know, we had great Raptor reliability all the way through the flight. Hot staging went well again. The ship's flight was spectacular. That came down exactly where they wanted,

where they were targeting, because they had a buoy cam set up, so we know that they hit exactly where they were targeting with this flight, whereas the last one, they were a couple of kilometers off on reentry and splashdown. success that they've had with Starship so far. But that's the thing I want to talk about is the fact that I think this is entering us into a different era of Boca Chica, of Starbase, of Starship testing. And there's been many eras. And it's been interesting if you now, where we are, you know, with a booster caught, and it's late 2024, if we look back to the past five years at Starbase, there's very clear eras that happened. There was the initial era where there wasn't a lot of infrastructure built out, if any, and they were doing Starhopper testing.

They were testing Raptors in flight. They were testing, you know, can we even make this out of stainless steel? There was low-level, in terms of altitude, but also in terms of components, low-level testing happening for the mid to late 2019, right? April 3rd, 2019 was the first Starhopper flight that went a foot in the air. So it wasn't really much of a flight. And then the 150 meter flight, the fourth flight of Starhopper was August 27th, 2019. And that was that first era where they were really just getting their wits about them down in Starbase. They were testing out Raptors in flight.

Then there was another era about a year later, August and September of 2020, where we had the first full Starship prototypes do their 150-meter hop tests. That was a short little connector segment to what the next real phase was at Starbase, which was that ship testing phase. And this was the really rapid phase of testing where they went from December 2020, they had Starship SN8, they had nine in February,

10 in March, 11 in late March, and then 15 in May 2021. So between December 2020 and May 2021, they had those five flights in rapid succession, all up to 10 or 12 and a half kilometers testing the belly flop and the flip maneuver um and uh i think the the speed that that was all occurring set the the stage for what we were expecting out of starbase um so when you look now and you see

this two-year gap between starship sn15 and the first first fully integrated flight with a booster that happened in April of 2023. So almost exactly two years later, that gap is very interesting. We all, I think in the community, expected there to be more than just that one Starship SN15 landing. We thought they might do a couple of more high altitude tests to really characterize the flip maneuver. But SpaceX thought they had enough of that they needed to get on to the next phase, which was fully integrated testing. But what occurred in the middle there was the fact that they needed a massive amount of infrastructure to even get to that next phase, you know, so all these Starhopper flights, the smaller subscale flights of starship of low

altitude starship that didn't have a nose cone, all that subscale flights of Starship, of low altitude Starship that didn't have a nose cone, all that stuff. It needed some infrastructure, but only just enough. They didn't need that much propellant to do those tests. They didn't need much more than a small launch mount and a landing pad. They were still building out the factories for sure, but that could all be done with less infrastructure. Then there was this phase of two years of heavy infrastructure build-out, where they had to build an entire tower capable of holding and tanking a starship and its booster, the entire tank farm.

There was drama off and on with the tank farm and how it was built. They were fully outfitting this facility. The amount of Raptor engines they needed for this next phase of testing was increased massively. Now they've got damn near 40 per flight that they need to integrate. testing was increased massively. Now they've got, you know, damn near 40 per flight that they need to integrate. And not only that, but they had a significant, as we've heard in recent weeks, a significant regulatory challenge to get all of these flights licensed and actually flown. So in all those cases, from the ship, the booster, the infrastructure at Boca Chica, and the regulatory side, all of that was like a magnitude harder than what they had done before.

So there was a two-year phase there of just building up a base level infrastructure that they needed to even get to this point. And now that we know, you know, we're five flights in here of the fully integrated stack. And even within that, there's been some drama. The first one blew apart the launchpad, and they had to figure out, all right, we got to resort to go exactly what we're thinking here on the launchpad. So we don't do that again. So four month gap between the first or four or five month gap, right? Between the almost six now that I'm looking at a calendar and counting correctly, long gap between that first and second flight. And it's been increasing since. So we went April, November, the following March, June, and now October. So it is getting a bit quicker. But a lot of what they had to do there is now

solved at this point. We know that the booster can come back and hit a very specific spot, get caught by the tower, and be ready to go again. Obviously, there's issues to sort out the booster, there was things, catch on fire and stuff. But in terms of the problems they've solved already, figuring out why a COPV blew up or something like that internally, figuring out what they need to do with heat shielding around the engines. Those are significantly smaller technical challenges than what they have achieved to get to this point with the tower catch. So if you look at these first five flights as an era of their own, where they've tested their infrastructure that they had to build

out for two years, and they've iterated on smaller bits and smaller integration pieces there through the course of those five flights to end up with a test where they hit exactly where they needed with the ship exactly where they needed with the booster and uh do not have to go through a another round of investigation figure out what went wrong convince the faa that they have it classified correctly and um then get cleared for launch with their fight flight five certification they already have certification for Flight 6, which is using a similar trajectory, they said, which we'll get to that in a second.

But they have now fully tested this infrastructure, proven that they can reuse it quicker than needing to rebuild something entirely in the case of a failure, and hit pinpoint targets with both of the portions here. That truly is entering into the next era of Starship testing at Starbase. That has to be the most exciting one, because this now can lead to a rapid increase in the flight rate. And that's the thing that's been limiting so far with the

Starship program, which sounds crazy to say compared to every other program in the world, obviously. But compared to some of the targets that SpaceX had for Starship overall, the fact that we're now at this rapid flight test cadence or chance for that cadence, I think is really important. We had that at other eras, like I mentioned, there was Starship flight testing happened in rapid succession. There were, you know, five and just about as many months. We were expecting to keep a similar pace there, but we had that big downtime. And I guess my point is we have now reached that part where I think the rapid uptick in how many Starship flights can happen a year is technically possible. Now they do have regulatory stuff to get through. They are

already trying to raise their yearly flight limit from five up to 25. And, you know, they're at three in 2024. They presumably want to get another flight off by the end of the year. So they'll have four out of their five for 2024 spent, and they need to get that cap raised for 2025 to be able to go beyond that. But on a technical level, they are now able to, and they're ready to. And I think that's a really important thing, because something that's happened with Starship all along is that they've had a really rapid production iteration speed. You know, they are on, I mean, hell, the thing that we just saw was booster 12 and ship 30,

right? Some of them have been scrapped or tested or whatever. But the fact that they are that far ahead in terms of production compared to flight numbers is something that we haven't seen for other SpaceX programs. There was always test articles and there always are with other rocket programs, but you're never, you know, 25 flights ahead of what you've got in terms of orbital flights before you kind of sync up with a pace that is as rapid on flights as it is on production. So they have iterated themselves to a very strong production line, but the flight rate was lagging. And I think now we can start

seeing that even out where, you know, Elon Musk has said that they want to go for a starship catch in early 2025. We'll see how that date holds up to reality. But even if they aren't able to catch these ships, they have enough of them. And they are now in that full mindset of waste, steal, not time, once again, where they can just maybe get to booster reuse long before they get to Starship reuse. And that's just fine with them. They are able to maintain a production cadence. They need to in some instances because they are still working out changes to the vehicle, design changes. They're going to learn a lot of that through the flight testing, which is the other important part here.

When they start getting hardware back, they can make a lot of changes as they learn from the engines, as they learn from the vehicles, they are able to start optimizing the flight trajectory. You know, if you look at the way Falcon 9 lands now, it is vastly different than it was back in 2015, 2016, 2017. Every time they do one of these flights, they're able to figure out what margins they can trim in, how they can tweak different burn timing or trajectories to be more efficient, to get more out of the booster, to be more efficient in the landing. When you look at this tower catch, it was significantly more hovery than most of their landings are. I'm sure that will get trimmed in so they can use more and more of that performance on the actual flight rather than on the recovery. That's the kind of stuff

that you can only get to by flying it. And the fact that they're now getting hardware back enables that part of the program to continue as well. Now, in terms of the next flight that we might see, they've said that it's going to be a similar trajectory to Flight 5 here in Flight 6. And one of the things they have not done yet, and that we haven't gotten a lot of info on yet, is that they've been a little bit hesitant to light the Raptor engines up of the ship in space and, you know, boost to a full orbit rather than a suborbital trajectory that they've been in thus far. I don't know if that's a, again, not a lot of insight here. Is that a technical limitation that they are having some sort of issue with the ability to restart those in space

because of foliage or propellant settling, or they haven't finished some subsystem that they are having some sort of issue with the ability to restart those in space because of foliage or propellant settling or they haven't finished some subsystem that they need to do that clearly they don't have a problem restarting the engines they've been doing that in the atmosphere but is there something about uh you know being in microgravity and having that restart sequence put together that they haven't gotten to yet or just merely they are hedging and uh they want to really prove out the re-entry portion before they even go orbital so that they haven't gotten to yet, or just merely they are hedging and they want to really prove out the re-entry portion before they even go orbital, so that they can prove that when they start going orbital and de-orbiting, that they can de-orbit in maybe more specific spaces than just

the empty expanse of the Indian Ocean. That could certainly be the case. So maybe for Flight 6, what we see is some sort of in-space relight of raptor um but maybe in in a way of of changing the de-orbit location rather than going fully to orbit maybe they uh fire them up for a second so that they pull their point of impact you know in a little bit from where they were going to land in the indian ocean they pull it a couple hundred miles short or something like that uh just to prove that that burn whatever they would need to uh i think it was somebody calculated it was like another 20 seconds of a burn um get to orbit from where they were. You know, maybe they have a burn of that magnitude in space, but not going orbital. Maybe that's the case. And it's still the same

flight profile, but it's proving out the technical capabilities that they need to reach orbit, and then do the full reentry sequence as well. Now, the thing that Elon Musk said about trying to catch the ship in early 2025 is pretty staggering, right? Because there's a lot of questions in terms of what's going to be allowed in terms of re-entry over land. If you look at their trajectory and where they would be coming back over land and overpopulated areas, that seems like it's going to be a tall order. I haven't seen them starting to build a tower out in Hawaii or anything like that. So that's definitely not what they're thinking in this case. But, you know, they are, again, proving that they can hit pinpoint locations with these reentries. They're going to need a lot more data before they get allowances to fly over

heavily populated areas. But maybe there's a way to phase the orbit such that you come over a significant portion of unpopulated areas over Mexico into Texas and able to, you know, come in down there at Starbase. Or maybe it's something that we haven't even considered yet that they'll do first with those Starship re-entry tests and do orbit tests. But before they even get to that part, I think, you know, once they prove out that they can boost themselves to orbit, they're going to start actually carrying payloads with Starship as well. Starlink payloads for sure to start, but that'll put them much more on pace with what they've done in the past, which is fly operational missions, test with the part that wasn't part of the operational mission,

test the ship re-entry and the recovery and the reuse after they've deployed a bunch of Starlink vehicles up into orbit. Eventually, you know, third-party vehicles up into orbit as well. It's just huge that they've unlocked that portion now. We've been talking about it for so long. We've been talking about the fact that that's where they need to get. But I don't think until this flight were they really there. And having proved out this whole collection of things here, starting to get hardware back to iterate on,

that is the thing that unlocks the next phase of Starship, and this is kind of the real start of operational Starship from this point forward. It does kind of feel like there's going to be a branch here of Starship programs where there's a lot of things they need to test for their in-space and beyond architectures. So they need in-space refueling, depot management, all that kind of rendezvous

and docking that you need with two starships to do ship-to-ship transfers. And they've got all of that to sort out for Artemis human landing system and the Mars missions that they have in mind. But there's also still that whole portion of everything from the Earth atmosphere in that they need to sort out. So all the stuff that I mentioned about getting a booster back and figuring out how they can trim in the margins and increase performance, and there's iterations of ship design and booster design that they need to get through. They need to figure out what their actual architecture is for returning Starship and catching it with the tower. You know, there's people asking like, well, these tower arms face the direction that the ship is not coming from. So what is that trajectory going to look like in terms of is it going to be a little mini boost back to start heading back west,

instead of coming in and flying east? There's some small questions like that, that are, you know, probably bigger than some of us give credit for. But it's this is one of those cases where, you know, we've been here before with SpaceX, where they achieve something awesome on a technical level, and then we can list out a bunch of questions. But really, when you look at it, those questions are much easier than the ones that they've already answered. And so to sit here and be like, well, now I don't buy the Starship program because they need to figure out how to do a small boost back to get the ship back to the catch site. That's really like you're missing the point if that's what you're concerned about this point. The point is they are at the acceleration moment.

They clearly have had a issue with the FAA this year. They are fighting in public in a way, as I've talked about before, that they haven't before. But maybe that is clearing the path for them to be able to fly more frequently and to get licensed in a different approach. in a different approach. It sounds like there are other government agencies getting involved in this process to iterate on how they can actually be licensed to do these flights, and what kind of allowances they have to be able to fly more frequently, to be able to test what they need to test for a scale-up that is now another zero of flight rate to get to something like they need for the Artemis human landing system. NASA's deeply invested in that.

They've been tweeting pretty openly about the success that was down there in Starbase and about how it does lead into the Artemis program. So I think that will only get increased as they get more flights up, as they start doing ship-to-ship transfers. That becomes more and more important and more visible. We'll probably start to see some of the actual HLS,

the Human Land System hardware, not just mock-ups and prototypes, but we'll actually start to see some of the hardware come together because they're going to have to work on what the exact architecture is as they get through their ship-to-ship transfer testing. There's just all of the actual stuff that we're excited about about Starship is now in the realm of like, that's what we're testing because we're at this speed up point. And that's just the really exciting aspect here to consider is that we have gotten through the teething process of, you know, four different ones, really, right? Raptor teething, stainless steel teething, ship and booster teething, infrastructure teething. Now we are done that part. And we can now see what SpaceX can do with all that in place. So all in all, an awesome day. I think it leads in

even better areas. And just wanted to spend a couple minutes talking through where my brain is at on some of that. So hope you enjoy the rambling. And hopefully we get another Starship flight in, I don't know, a month or two. Seems reasonable based on what we've seen here. Seems like a month or two might make sense. So we'll see if we get one before Thanksgiving. Not before Canadian Thanksgiving, that already happened, but U.S. Thanksgiving, maybe before Christmas. We'll see what kind of holiday present we're getting this year. All right, before I get out of here, I want to say thank you to all of you who support Main Engine Cutoff over at mainenginecutoff.com slash support. There are 860 some of you. We're now split across Patreon and Substack, so my math is getting a little bit odd, except for when it

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