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Starship Flight 7

(www.spacex.com)
649 points chinathrow | 5 comments | 16 Jan 25 21:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.626s | source
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numba888 ◴[16 Jan 25 22:54 UTC] No.42731956[source]▶
4M viewers. comparable to top politics events.

ship looks to be lost. this was the main part, so it's almost complete failure.

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1. egglemonsoup ◴[16 Jan 25 22:59 UTC] No.42732000[source]▶
these tests are designed to fail — the data collected now will ensure they don't blow up with actual people on them. test seems like a success to me
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2. numba888 ◴[16 Jan 25 23:12 UTC] No.42732124[source]▶
they didn't get the telemetry after, what it was, 16 min(?) hope they'll find the reason which will be hard without black boxes like on airplanes. as every engineer knows it works flawlessly only at the end. if ever.

the booster was the same, great, but not surprising.

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3. ◴[16 Jan 25 23:32 UTC] No.42732299[source]▶
4. m4rtink ◴[17 Jan 25 00:47 UTC] No.42732819[source]▶
IIRC they had 30 cameras on board & who knows how many sensors (probably hudreds ?).

So even if an engine bay fire burned the electronics and interrupted all coms (or FTS blew it up) they should already have a lot of data by that point showing how it went wrong.

5. GuB-42 ◴[17 Jan 25 01:06 UTC] No.42732933[source]▶
Still a failure in my book, it blew up before it could deliver its payload so they couldn't do many the tests they intended to do.

It is possible they will have to add one more test launch to their schedule, delaying commercial operations because of that.

It is not a complete failure, but to me, it is more failure than success, even by SpaceX test flight standards.

Compared to the previous flight, that I consider a success, the booster catch was nice, but it is not the first, and they have plenty of tries left to perfect it, so it is not in the critical path.