Starship IFT-6 Livestream (liftoff at 4pm CT)

unfortunately they had to scrap the booster Catch, due to undisclosed factors.

The explosion when it landed in the ocean was pretty epic though!

Any word why they scrapped the booster catch?

did they land it on the barge instead?

Cost cutting in effect at SpaceX: Falcon Heavy used a Tesla Roadster as their test payload, Starship only has a banana.

No, it was a water splashdown. Looked silky smooth though, they likely could have caught it again had they tried.

Water splashdown.

No landing legs on Starship or its booster! Tower catch or bust.

The way it gently splashed down in the ocean without hiccup - I think this is promising and that they will get to the chopsticks catching a booster is boring and mundane phase soon. Specialists would say why they aborted.

It did a controlled landing on the Gulf of Mexico, exploded, and now it's floating!

Hasn't sunk yet; haven't seen any official comments yet about this novel situation.

oh duh, thanks

no barge for super heavy- the point of the catch is to save weight on the massive legs that would be required. It “soft landed” in the Gulf a few miles off shore, meaning they did a burn and it entered the water not in freefall (though it still looked faster than I expected).

Water splashdown did look very smooth. I seemed like they cut the video before it exploded (I assume), but hopefully there's some third-party footage or SpaceX will release it later.

Update: Looks like Spaceflight Now has the explosion at https://www.youtube.com/live/dtmvbQDou4I at about 90 minutes in

I would love to see the dashboard that the team that made the decision was looking at.

I'd be interested to hear speculation by people who know about this as to what they think went wrong. Was it off course? Did the engines not relight in time? Did it not have enough fuel?

No shots of the banana yet post launch. Did it rip away from the strings?

(Up until I typed this I hadn’t considered they might use an artificial banana.)

Banana is on screen at T+00:24

They announced a no-go while it was still boosting towards space, so it won’t be a relight issue.

There's a better camera here which shows the aftermath,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjDFirLcQDM (Everyday Astronaut)

Landing is at about T+06:42.

No official word, but the communication antenna on the tower appears to be damaged [1]. Seems likely that played a role.

[1] https://x.com/CSI_Starbase/status/1858998330401190375

Whatever it was, it seems more likely that it was a booster issue than anything relating to the tower given that they were initially go for the catch. It was only during the boostback burn that they scrapped it.

I think it's an homage to previous chimp astronauts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjCX5F74zIM

Knight E6.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_(chimpanzee)

I wonder whether doing a catch without the catcher (rapid scheduled crash landing) would be feasible. Data is data.

If I remember correctly last time this happened they shot missiles at a booster from a jet

NSF Stream commentary is fun too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yd_cpPP4fE

Oh, you're right: this did also happen back in 2018, with a Falcon booster (GovSat-1 launch). I don't think the part about the missiles was accurate though.

https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/7w4pag/americaspace... ("Air Force Didn’t Take Out SpaceX’s GovSat Booster, Private Company Did (UPDATED WITH CORRECTION)")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16332582 (ibid.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16279316 ("SpaceX Rocket Survives Experimental High-Thrust Landing at Sea")

> Data is data.

This is one of those cases where technically correct is not the best kind of correct.

Not all data is useful.

A billion rows of sensor output is data but without a timestamp it’s useless. Maybe you need more or less resolution, or additional dimensions.

That is what happened. It performs the maneuvers at a primary target site with no catcher, or terrain, or ground-based feedback; the Gulf; switching to an alternate site; the launch tower; if and only if all factors allow for a real catch.

With 5.2 million people watching. This flight probably broke the world record for most people watching a single specific banana, ever.

Honestly showing that you can re-target it in flight is extremely impressive too. Like, it still soft-landed in water, it didn't blow up.

Hah. I mean it did blow up (the booster), but not due to impact from a failed soft landing. The soft landing succeeded, then it blew up.

Boom is here:

https://www.youtube.com/live/DjDFirLcQDM?feature=shared&t=11...

This is a bit before that:

https://www.youtube.com/live/DjDFirLcQDM?feature=shared&t=11...

> They announced a no-go while it was still boosting towards space,

False. The booster was already coming back when the landing abort came through.

The upper stage was also on fire!

Well, it made a big fireball. It's only that the official stream cut away before that. You could still hear the SpaceX crowd cheering as they (apparently) got to see it. The fireball was in any case visible in the NSF stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/6yd_cpPP4fE&t=3h31m35s

Though the upper stage actually didn't explode this time, it only broke apart.

Strange how it is leaning to one side but otherwise looks just fine. I'd have thought that anything with enough force to push it over like that would have caused other more visible damage. Pretty grainy video though.

The booster still looked a bit flamey on the landing burn, I wonder if this is expected

There was a picture showing a antenna bent at a roughly 30 degree angle, ontop of the launch tower. Not sure if that was the cause though.

Indeed. It had just finished the boostback burn and jettisoned the hot staging ring when the divert was announced. I wonder if after the boostback burn they determined that there was insufficient fuel for a good safely margin when trying a tower catch.

Elon:

"Successful ocean landing of Starship!

We will do one more ocean landing of the ship. If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower."

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1859036912348262787

It's not so much a retarget in this case. The water landing is the default path, they have to manually tell it to target the landing pad if it is a go for the catch.

Does this mean flying over populated land to attempt the catch?

I believe so, yes. Obviously it will be a different permit, and who knows how long that will take to be granted.

Engine relight and controlled precise landings are obviously per-requisites, which is why they've been doing them.

If the duty cycle is stable enough, you can reconstruct the timestamps in many cases based on the data. ;-)

The catch attempt is actually a divert - IIRC both Super Heavy and regular Falcon 9 first stage target empty space by default and only divert for landing once all checks out. :-)

Shoot, I re-watched and you're right. Memory's a fickle thing.

https://www.youtube.com/live/l7cM90N-CDc?feature=shared&t=23...

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-... does say this now, though:

> During this phase, automated health checks of critical hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered an abort of the catch attempt.

How does that change anything

“If” is doing a lot of work there.

I'm a project management nerd, so let's take a look at the dependency chain to get to usefulness: to be anything other than an oversized orbital launcher, starship has to be refueled. Refueling depends on meeting payload specs, otherwise you need a too many starships to refuel one upper stage in orbit. Refueling also depends on rapid turnaround, which depends on near-zero damage to launch towers, engines, shields, and tanks. All of these dependencies depend on repeatability, which is why not catching the booster is a significant regression not a huge one, but marginal negative progress.

The spacex website indicates that it was indeed an automated check of the tower that caused the catch to be scrapped.

  > target empty space by default

Well, water.

I see that you're a glass-half-empty guy ))