The Starship took off successfully and 14 minutes after launch, it was in orbit at almost 200 km altitude, flying at 26 thousand km/h.
NASA & World Space Exploration...News, Views, Photos & videos
- Thread starter bd popeye
- Start date
Looks like it broke up upon re-entry, but it had some cool views of Starship before it broke apart! Really impressive stuff. Seems like they make it a bit further with each attempt.
Still broke orbital record for largest object ever launched.
Technically this was sub-orbital, so it's more like largest ICBM ever launched.
It would be neat to just put a massive nuclear bomb on one of those things in the gigaton range and use them against alien empires.
Absolutely amazing footage of the re-entry!
Someone mentioned this might be the first time we have seen an external shot of an object as it reenters the atmosphere. Impressive how StarLink was also able to maintain footage during most of this phase as well.
Someone mentioned this might be the first time we have seen an external shot of an object as it reenters the atmosphere. Impressive how StarLink was also able to maintain footage during most of this phase as well.
These are times soon after re-entry. They show that starship is not in its desired orientation for reentry, belly-down. Half of the fuselage (not covered by tiles) and the whole engine area are exposed to heat. That certainly lead to the breaking. As I understand from a paper and evidents from spaceshuttle and capsule, at this altitude the air is too thin for flaps or wings (as big as shuttle) to do much controlling work, but dense enough to heat up anything. So both space shuttle and capsules use thrusters to keep their heatshild or tiled belly to the direction of travel. Also, when they enter the initial orientation must be right, a later correction to flip them around is impossible with thrusters at that altitude.
So my question is, does starship have such thrusters?
So my question is, does starship have such thrusters?