Starship's Tenth Flight Test

What exactly do you think is the “more technology development than the current flights actually show“ needed to get into and out of orbit?

My impression is they just need to leave the engines on a little longer to get to orbit, then turn them on again with the ship pointed in another direction to get back to the suborbital trajectory they’ve already demonstrated deorbiting from.

The hard part is reentering through the atmosphere without burning up, flipping, and landing, which they’ve already demonstrated multiple times. There’s no additional atmosphere between where they’ve flown and “orbit”.

A little more longevity and one more engine restart, unless the suborbital is very suborbital, then it also means a lot more delta v. It doesn't seem that far away at all.

What's surprising is that people are still resorting to this silly complaint about not reaching orbit when there's a perfectly sensible complain they could be making instead: that SpaceX hasn't yet demonstrated that they can reach orbit and return safely. The safe return is important because I would expect a failure to return safely to be a big deal: it's not like this thing is going to completely burn up if they don't have control during a deorbit. The inadequate retry thermal protection is a large issue even if the Ship has managed to get to the landing areas on target and soft land in the right spot: the burn through on the control surfaces seems to mean that was as much luck as good engineering that the thing didn't crash somewhere less intended.

I appreciate none of that is as pithy as saying it simply didn't reach orbit, but it's a real concern versus something that is really irrelevant.

They tested that extra restart as part of today's flight. I think the only thing now missing is carrying the extra fuel.

Starship returned safely. Safe return of orbital generally means a splashdown within 1500 miles of Point Nemo. They just demonstrated that they can splash down within meters of their target buoy. Even if the flaps failed completely they still would have been far less than 1500 miles off target.

They've done so more than than this time, too. Granted, with a little less "Ship" than they left with on all occasions I know of.

No one (at least not me or anyone I take seriously) is arguing whether or not these suborbital profiles are designed to be safe even under adverse or full failure conditions; though the Caribbean air corridors might have been managed a bit more gracefully on some previous flights... still...

Nonetheless there is a valid criticism that in ten flights they still haven't mastered keeping the control surfaces of the space craft whole during the reentry phase of flight. 1500 miles isn't going to cut it as a safe return zone when they try bring this in for a catch. While I'm as impressed as anyone that they've hit the mark with compromised Ships as many times as they have, neither Port Isabel nor Titusville are 1500 miles from their nearest Ship catch towers and I wouldn't support any attempts for a catch until they can get the whole Ship back in good working order... reliably. While I'm a advocate for this program and SpaceX... I'm not such a fanboy that I can't see there are issues with this aspect of the program. This is ignoring the impact on rapid reusability and simply focusing on the basic safety of the program.

Point nemo is in the Pacific Ocean, it landed in the Indian Ocean.

What’s the point in the Indian Ocean they aimed for called?

"far enough from land not to risk hitting anyone"

Port Isabel is 6 miles away from Boca Chica. They demonstrated on a previous mission that they can land within meters of their target despite burnt out flaps. If SpaceX tries to catch Starship their launch tower might not be safe, but Port Isabel would be safe.

But they haven't tried to catch Starship yet and likely won't for a while, so you're arguing a silly hypothetical.

A zero-G engine restart is the big piece of technology.

near the northwestern coast of Australia