On the next full stack launch of starship (after 4/20) where the booster reaches intended site, will landing be nominal?
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resolved Sep 17
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NO

Landing=landing or splashing down, whatever was intended for the test.

So the question is, on the next launch where the booster reaches the intended landing or splashdown zone in nominal condition to perform the landing, will the landing itself be nominal?

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@YaakovSaxon SpaceX has posted an update that may help with resolution:

https://www.spacex.com/updates/#flight-3-report

Following stage separation, Super Heavy initiated its boostback burn, which sends commands to 13 of the vehicle’s 33 Raptor engines to propel the rocket toward its intended landing location. All 13 engines ran successfully until six engines began shutting down, triggering a benign early boostback shutdown.

The booster then continued to descend until attempting its landing burn, which commands the same 13 engines used during boostback to perform the planned final slowing for the rocket before a soft touchdown in the water, but the six engines that shut down early in the boostback burn were disabled from attempting the landing burn startup, leaving seven engines commanded to start up with two successfully reaching mainstage ignition. The booster had lower than expected landing burn thrust when contact was lost at approximately 462 meters in altitude over the Gulf of Mexico and just under seven minutes into the mission.

bought Ṁ250 NO

@YaakovSaxon pretty sure this is a NO - the booster got as far as engine relight for a landing burn, and seems to have RUD'd approximately at that moment.

bought Ṁ250 NO

@chrisjbillington

From SpaceX:

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-3

  • Following separation, the Super Heavy booster successfully completed its flip maneuver and completed a full boostback burn to send it towards its splashdown point in the Gulf of Mexico.

  • Super Heavy successfully lit several engines for its first ever landing burn before the vehicle experienced a RUD (that’s SpaceX-speak for “rapid unscheduled disassembly”). The booster’s flight concluded at approximately 462 meters in altitude and just under seven minutes into the mission.

@chrisjbillington I think this is far from obvious; if "the booster reached the intended landing or splashdown zone in nominal condition to perform the landing" we would probably expect that the engines would relight as intended. It's at least plausible that the vehicle sustained some sort of damage that affected the ability to relight, or that it arrived at that 'gate' with non-optimal velocity or orientation such that they didn't.

@JoshuaWilkes I interpret the engines lighting to be part of the landing, and thus what this question is about - it would be very odd if the engines not lighting were strong evidence that the precondition wasn't met. The engines failing to light is one of the primary ways landing can go wrong.

I don't think "if everything upstream was nominal, the engines would have lit" is particularly true, except in the butterfly-effect sense where in some sense every failure is caused by things arbitrarily far in the past. Happy to wait and see if something dramatically went wrong earlier that caused the relights to fail, but I suspect that as with the boostback burn relights failing in IFT-2, SpaceX will keep the blame "local". I.e. even though the sloshing caused by hot staging plausibly made trouble for the relights, SpaceX did not eliminate the negative acceleration the booster experienced during stage separation instead modifying aspects of the booster so that it would work under those conditions anyway.

SpaceX said that the booster completed a full boostback burn, my previous hesitation to buy this down lower was due to not being sure this was the case. It's up to @YaakovSaxon, but I don't think it makes sense to blame earlier events unless there is something fairly dramatic.

@chrisjbillington I think my final sentence qualifying what I meant is broadly aligned with what you call 'fairly dramatic'. I'm happy to see what SpaceX say and what @YaakovSaxon thinks.

@JoshuaWilkes @chrisjbillington So it sounds like we have agreement to wait and see if any further evidence comes out (sometime between now and when they schedule IFT-4) suggesting that there was some particular damage to the booster that made it definitely not in condition to successfully perform the landing burn.

I will note that I think the implication from the statement Chris lined to is that they did not know at the time that the landing burn was doomed. So unless that statement is just misleading, I think the only remaining way for this to resolve YES is for them to realize after the fact that there was then some major damage that definitely doomed it.

Anyway I'm happy to leave this unresolved. I'm closing trading for now (but I could reopen if you prefer to keep trading on it, let me know), but will wait to resolve until IFT-4 is scheduled or we have consensus on the resolution, whichever comes first.

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