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Man, I'm usually the jerk that yells at your anti-SpaceX nonsense, and even I was expecting a giant fireball. I think Elon's estimate was still 50/50. A third of of the SpaceX formula is the "hardware-rich" design process where they start testing prototypes as soon as they expect useful data rather than as soon as they're sure everything will work.
And according to that leaked meeting audio the booster catch just barely worked this time. IIRC their software has a couple hundred metrics to pass to decide on "everything's working ok, so turn toward the tower to land now" vs "something's badly broken, so just continue to the shoreline and crash in a safe spot", one of those metrics was misconfigured, and it was literally 1 second away from deciding to crash instead. They'll fix that, and fix the design on the chine cover that ripped off, but this is still very much a test vehicle, even if they finally had a test hit every objective.
Half of the reason I post my nonsense is to get that exact kind of pushback so I can gauge if I missed anything, so I don't consider anyone a jerk, and I appreciate the yelling.
Funnily enough what kept me quiet was the thought "surely, they're not going to try to land this thing on a coin toss?", while you're saying the exact opposite. I guess they really do things differently there.
I wouldn't have held it against them if that's what happened. Better a false-positive-driven crash into the ocean, than a false-negative-driven crash into the spaceport.
Thanks for the feedback! "Be a jerk more"; check!
The only alternative I can see piles conspiracy theory on top of conspiracy theory: start with "The White House pushes to get FAA approval before the election so Elon can publicly embarrass himself" but then checkmate it with "Elon knows they would pull something like that if they saw the chance and so expresses grave doubts even though he knows they'll succeed".
Definitely. This is what they do with Return To Landing Site booster landings for Falcon 9 too, and those are just aimed at slabs of concrete, not expensive ground support equipment. They had one splash down back in 2018, when a grid fin actuator failed and it didn't/couldn't turn toward the landing pad. SuperHeavy is designed to be much easier to land than F9, but it'll also be a much bigger kaboom when a catch fails.
The big risk they're taking is with upper stage catches. With a booster return, it's flying over ocean all the way, and if it can't fly any more than it just goes in the water like any other rocket company's booster would. Landing the upper stage on an east-coast launch tower, on the other hand, requires it to reenter from the west over land. When that works it should work fine. IFT-5 managed to drop right on top of camera buoys pre-positioned to film the action. But IFT-4 just had one mostly-lost flap and ended up about 5 miles off target, and back in its day the shuttle Columbia scattered debris over a 250-mile-long swath of Texas. Starship is a hardier design than the Shuttle was, and any debris would probably include some scarily huge chunks. Just this year SpaceX started exclusively bringing Dragon capsules back to the Pacific rather than also to the Atlantic, because the discarded "trunk" rings that were supposed to be flimsy enough to burn up on reentry turned out to have too-big chunks of debris reaching the ground too frequently. SpaceX really can't afford to fail an upper stage RTLS Starship reentry, not until they've got a west-coast or island-based or ocean-going catch tower to practice with afterwards, and they have no near-term plans to build any of those.
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