Apr 20, 10:58am: On the next full stack launch of starship (after 4/20), conditional on passing max q, will stage separation be nominal? → On the next full stack launch of starship (after 4/20) which passes max q, will stage separation be nominal?
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@traders See my comment in the below-linked market, with updates from SpaceX on the root cause of the booster explosion (a filter blockage), and comments from the FAA describing the separation as "successful", and listing corrective actions, together I think this information points to a YES resolution:
@Mqrius it seems to me that whilst Scott Manley could be correct that the deceleration caused sloshing that was a problem, that it might be the case that booster was supposed to be able to deal with such sloshing, and therefore the problem was with the booster rather than the stage separation itself. Here's a discussion on reddit from a long time ago talking about how the cold-gas thrusters are used to settle propellant before the boost-back burn:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/tbv0tv/superheavy_header_tanks/
This was before hot-staging was proposed, but seems like the same thing should apply.
Since the question is whether stage separation was nominal or not, we're wanting to know "did they expect stage sep to impart that amount of deceleration on the booster" - if they did and the deceleration caused more sloshing than they expected, or the booster wasn't as able to deal with the sloshing as they expected, I think this market would still resolve YES. But if there was more deceleration than expected, it would resolve NO.
Kind of find it hard to imagine they didn't model the deceleration roughly correctly, so I'm leaning toward YES.
@chrisjbillington imo it's, if the sloshing was caused by the flip, then it's unrelated to the staging and this market could resolve Yes. If it's caused by the exhaust from the ship, then it's the staging that messed with the booster and this market would resolve No.
@Mqrius Well, some sloshing might still be nominal - it depends if there was more sloshing caused by the exhaust than was expected. A nominal amount of sloshing but the booster having a below-nominal tolerance to sloshing I think would be a YES still. But more sloshing caused by the exhaust than was budgeted for would be a NO.
@chrisjbillington Yeah alright. Not sure we'll get that much detail from SpaceX though, might have to wait for the incident investigation.
@Mqrius @chrisjbillington Feels like we have a consensus in this market to generally treat it as a duplicate of what /YaakovSaxon/will-starships-hotstaging-work-on-t has reduced to, and specifically to apply Chris' test. Does anyone in this market disagree? Does anyone think that we ought to just say that the stages separated cleanly and that's that? I'm pausing trading to give anyone interested a chance to opine. See also my comment in https://manifold.markets/YaakovSaxon/on-the-next-full-stack-launch-of-st-a003f51d2735