Starship's Tenth Flight Test

I think Scott Manley's position on the "still hasn't gotten to orbit" take is probably still the best and most accurate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8htMpR7mnaM&t=420s

What Scott is missing is that the only reason "it did not get to orbit" is of interest at all is that SpaceX keeps claiming they got to orbit with starship. I believe that the trajectories have all been suborbital by design, but it still pisses me off that they keep claiming they got to orbit.

The reason this matters is that if they get into an orbit in a short test, they need to exit that orbit with some sort of active system. So the statement "we got to orbit" implies a lot more technology development than the current flights actually show. I agree with Scott that Starship can easily enter LEO, but I am not so sure it can exit gracefully.

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.

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.

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?