SpaceX Orbit Largest Spacecraft In History also SpaceX Destroy Largest Spacecraft In History.

Hi, I'm Scott Manley, as you've probably heard by now. SpaceX conducted the third test flight of Starship and super heavy on Pi Day, March 14, why do people love Pi? I don't know, it's irrational, it's

also

momentous and it's

also

Spacex's 22nd birthday, the launch. The window was supposed to open at 7:00 am. m., but this was delayed, as many of us were afraid, including myself, due to the weather. There were some serious concerns with the winds, as speeds were forecast to reach 37 knots at 3,000 feet. Spacex's goal was going to be more successful than flight number two, where, however, they successfully performed a hot stage, but the booster exploded and the Starship failed to reach

orbit

after an oxygen spill caused a fire in the engine compartment and eventually a vehicle failure, so the first thing we did.

What we were looking out for was the hot staging to make sure the booster motors re-ignited successfully after they failed to do so in if2 and then we would be watching the return boost and descent through the atmosphere, with Good luck, until a soft landing in the meantime. The

spacecraft

was to continue descending on a slightly different trajectory toward a lower-inclination

orbit

that would take it over Africa and then land in the Indian Ocean. During this partial orbit it would perform a series of other tests and open the Pez dispenser. cargo door would perform a cryogenic propellant transfer test between the tanks inside and try to restart the engine and that would actually mean that the place where it landed in the Indian Ocean would not be safe because they would have to perform this maneuver and eventually we all hoped to get to the re-entry phase where we could finally see the heat shield, the belly drop maneuver on Mark 25, so I can tell you now that SpaceX achieved absolutely more successes than on its previous flight was definitely a step forward, although They didn't get all the successes they wanted immediately after takeoff.

The first thing we did was look at the engine diagram and we saw all the engines on and we watched this Drone video again showing this flight. beautifully through these clouds and unfortunately that meant that a lot of the fans that are on Bach chica couldn't see this, it was foggy until the launch and yes that was a problem but we got a lot of images on board. The images on board this flight were absolutely perfect for the chef. We got so many great views and a big part of this was simply having a redundant Starlink antenna for multiple sets on the side of both the Starship and the booster.

I particularly love this moment where he ascends. a layer of clouds it's just cool to see these stratified clouds passing by you on a rocket. I wish my plane would climb that fast, but again I'm glad I wasn't carrying this fuel Bill at that time because of the way it would have been passing. via the maximum aerodynamic pressure Max Q from the

spacecraft

point of view, we see that some tiles are missing, but again it seemed like an improvement on previous flights. By the way, I think this is my favorite camera because it sticks out of one of the fins, so it's a reasonable distance from the edge of the rocket, you can actually see the surface, so anyway at this point it's raising, we're going to play this at four times normal speed, we're not worried about any structure. failures at this point it's just ascending faster and faster, what we're really worried about is when stage separation happens, so yes the plan is here, you have to shut down several engines, but not all, and then once you are stable. you have to start the engines on the second stage and have them separate and once they are far enough apart you start the engines again on the first stage while returning home, this time they started all those engines on the first stage yes Remember that During the previous flight the engines were failing, we saw all kinds of puffs of smoke as the engines started to shut down and finally the booster exploded.

This was now officially attributed to something clogging the propellant filters. We don't know what that was. It could well be pieces of the inside of the tank due to reduced fuel but until SpaceX tells us otherwise we don't know in this case, however it is propelling backwards slowing down as it increases altitude and will eventually recoil towards home . not all the way home, enough so that they can prove that this boost works now, so what you have to take into account is the shutdown of the engines and it seems quite asymmetrical to me. I'm not sure if that's bad.

Telemetry, but yes, wouldn't the asymmetrical shutdown seem to imply that there was some problem? It's not clear which one it is, anyway Starship continues downward, but for the booster its trajectory is very similar to what we see for the Falcon 9 booster, so we would largely consider it a Problem solved, one big difference is that the thruster uh doesn't use an intake burn, it's going to hit the atmosphere at full speed and take all that Force because it's designed to do this from day one, the primary control mechanism during this phase will be the big four. grill fins and you can see one of them on the left screen which is the thruster and you can see the grill fin, so let's go back to normal speed now below 50 km, descending at 1 km/second and still gaining speed here.

You can see the grille fins start to try to control, but very quickly it seems to me as if the control starts to become unstable and honestly, I think what they are probably doing is exploring the performance of these fins or these. grid fins because this is a regime they have never tested, so they will activate it and record the details and its control laws, the logic may not be correct, but anyway look, we are at 30,000 feet and we are still descending at several times the speed of sound, just watch those cloud layers pass by, but very quickly the thruster seems to pick up some kind of rolling oscillation.

Also check for condensation clouds around the bottom, you are trying to restart the engines, not all of them come up. and we just lost contact with it at zero altitude, so look clearly, the engines didn't start, there are a couple of possibilities, one is that when they shut them down there was a problem and that's what we saw during the telemetry which shows something strange. asymmetrical landing it's also possible that the vehicle's movements again caused the SLO fuel to cause something to become a problem and they just couldn't restart those engines because the booster was in the wrong place, but you know what was in the In the right place was Starship, which about 8 minutes later successfully reached orbit and became, I believe, the

largest

spacecraft ever launched into orbit.

Now technically it's fine, it's not exactly in orbit, it was slightly suborbital, but it was as close to orbital in energy as anyone who tries. To split those hairs it's just, you know, a strange enemy of SpaceX that SpaceX deliberately chose for this flight not to go into orbit for safety reasons and, uh, you could have easily gotten there and yeah, yeah, then we had, you know, good 40 minutes of beautiful images. From this it came and went over time, but yes, some of the images from this were absolutely stunning, the images came and went, as you know, live links were established and removed, there was probably a lot of complicated things going on, but yes, initially the spacecraft seemed to maintain this attitude and we saw a lot of outgassing and that would be consistent with shedding excess propellant.

Remember they had done this on a previous flight and it had caused a failure, so they dumped it after they reached orbit. It would make some sense, but one of the most interesting images came from orbit. It was just a very early clip before they tried the door. It was our first camera view inside Starship's nose cone and what I see here are clouds. like there was still an atmosphere in there, it's not like it was in a vacuum and I think that while this is not designed to be airtight, it had enough pressure that there was still some pressure in here when they were ready to open. the door and remember this is like a mailbox opening and you see when they open, you see what I'm seeing here right when that thing slid up a little bit, we had the atmosphere just exploding.

What's also interesting is that it's a very thin sliver through which you get one of those laser light smoke machine effects and it looked a little bit like water when I first saw it or a liquid and I thought this I should have been inside the propellant tanks, but no, it's an optical illusion. What I'm also seeing is that the door doesn't appear to be fully open. I mean, it's really hard to tell because of the camera angle, but we saw this happen later on. flight like they were supposed to close it, I think the door failed and it could be that there was just too much atmosphere inside the vehicle when they tried to open it and that caused some problems, you know, the first space shuttle flights they actually had.

There were also issues with the payload bay doors, so it's unprecedented, so anyway, moving forward, the next test that was supposed to happen was the Crowen propellant transfer and well, we heard the announcement, we heard them mention it, we saw confirmation, but there was honestly no clue as to how successful this was, whether it worked or not and whether the spaceship spin was part of this process. This is something that happened, it started to rotate around its axis and that could be absolutely intentional, we don't know what the attitude they planned was. but obviously the Apollo program used that for thermal control of the space shuttle, it didn't do that, on the other hand, the final test in orbit was supposed to be restarting the engine and that was going to be done autonomously if the conditions were right. correct and when the time passed we didn't have any video we didn't have any uh Telemetry to suggest that it happened and SpaceX said yes, it didn't happen, they're not telling us why the engines didn't fire, but they say that attitude that the The rotation , the spin was somehow anomalous that could have interfered with the engine restart, so now we fast forward a couple of minutes and they're getting ready to go in and the thing is still spinning, it hasn't actually gotten rid of the spin around its primary axis and I think, whether that roll was part of the flight plan or not, I'm pretty sure he shouldn't be taxiing in this part of the flight plan because he's supposed to be getting into his you know, attitude of belly to enter the atmosphere and if it's spinning around its axis like this, you're not controlling it, but it's cool that it's giving us these incredible images.

I think they would prefer to have the vehicle in the correct attitude. We were really looking forward to the heat. The shield would work especially since we saw a couple of tiles were missing, but most of the tiles were still there; however, I don't think we could see a proper heat shield test because I believe the vehicle did not maintain attitude control properly. We get to a point where we start to see debris flying out of the top of the vehicle and I wonder if, coming out from under the heat shield, it has become trapped. Maybe there's something being ejected by the attitude control jets.

My question is why this didn't come out during the initial Ascension, because we're starting to see pretty substantial chunks of stuff coming off. If you remember, this camera sticks out of the end of a fin. It's actually quite far from the vehicle so that you don't have that effect of really small debris looking bigger than it really should be at this altitude of about 100 km, we should start to see the effects of the atmosphere pushing away light things like , for example, broken tiles, for example, you. I will also notice that the fin is working, left fin just like the left shark.

Does not know. Dance movements. uh this spaceship is upside down, it doesn't feature the heat shield, it's the non-heat shield side that's currently facing the airflow, so I looked at this and it comes with the heat shield side down. I was hoping that he could stop that turn properly because now he's roughly in the right attitude to go in, if he can hold it he'll be able to get through, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. You see, yes we have a moment where those flaps appear to be working but the spin continues, it's high enough that you just don't get any control authority from those ailerons, you really need the reaction control thrusters to be doing something. , But we.

We're not seeing it, we saw so much gas being spewed earlier in the flight, but it's not happening now, it's over, you know they talked about usingIG gas? Do they need to improve reaction control thrust? Yes, again, this is now going up. down, we actually see like a whiff of something, there was that reaction control. The booster fires again now, yes, looking back along its trajectory, it's upside down and heading into the atmosphere and I think I can start to see a little hint of a glow here. Well, we're starting to hit the plasma, you know, part of this flight on Mark 25, the atmosphere hits this vehicle and it's compressing and the compression is heating the air to the point that it turns into plasma, the electrons are they dissociate from the cores and that will start to hinder communications and that's why we've never seen reentry footage like this live, think about it, this is something we've never seen live from a spacecraft that we hope at some point communications would drop. because that plasma is getting in the way of communications and Starship would somehow have to send a signal through it, now you'll notice by the way.

That spin appears to have reversed, but now it appears to be pitching with its butt pointing toward down and therefore instead of that hot plasma hitting the heat shield, it will start to enter the engine compartment towards various sensitive parts of the vehicle. that's why you have to maintain attitude control, we didn't know how long we would get live images of this, we were getting telemetry through the Tedris system and we were getting images through Starlink and by the way, you'll notice that the speed actually it's still not decreasing, it's actually still increasing even though you have all this violent heating, the density of the air is still very low, it's not enough to slow the vehicle down, so it just has to endure this kind of heating.

Obviously, doing a number on C space, there was a real hope that we could get live images all the way because Starship is big enough to punch a hole in the atmosphere wide enough to be able to send a radio signal . that hole, so it's possible we could get this maybe on a future flight, but not on this one. There are essentially two ways a communications blackout occurs due to plasma. The first is that yes, plasma makes hot electrons flow around. behavior: they interfere with the radio waves and the signal can't get out, the other is where your communications equipment gets hit by the atmosphere and turns into plasma and can no longer communicate and that is a more permanent type of plasma blackout in set and it's a type that Starship experienced on its first full reentry, the last signals we received suggested that it had lost uh 1,000 kmph of its 27,000 km hour that it needed to lose, so again an objectively successful flight set new records for space flight.

The US now has a launch vehicle that could easily put hundreds of tons into orbit if they don't mind expanding it. I mean, SpaceX apparently has quite a few boosters to spare, on the other hand, some basic things apparently didn't work, that door didn't look right, uh. attitude control failed and he didn't make reentry, so we never really knew how good that heat shield is. I'm looking forward to flight four, but I actually want to rewind to the stage separation because I predicted they would. Make changes in time and I want to see this in detail again, so I synchronized if 3 at the top and if2 at the bottom and you will see the sequence of the motors turning on and off.

Now the timing of this is slightly different. the new Telemetry doesn't show the big change in the speed of the spacecraft, so it's just something that was actually just an artifact or they have changed the preparation sequence because the time is the same, the only thing I think they could change is such time. the accelerator on the propeller instead of going to 50%, they could go higher. You'll also notice that in if3 the staging happened about 3 seconds later, so this time they get a little more thrust from that thruster and yeah, taking a look. On the final descent into the ocean, I'm pretty sure the three core engines are supposed to be used here and then somehow it decides to use some outer ring engines and that probably indicates that something went wrong, especially since one of them went out. turned off, so you know. the reinforcement at this point is just oh yeah, I'm going into the Gulf real quick.

I hope there are other photographs or images. There were a lot of planes, including Jared Isman. I think he was flying in a jet to get something. Cool pictures, I don't know if we'll be able to see them, but it would be great if we did, so now let's look forward to the fourth flight. We were told there could be up to six flights this year. that would mean we would want the next flight in a couple of months, the previous flight was 3 months, reducing it to two months would make sense and hopefully get us a little bit closer to a really successful flight, an unequivocally successful flight and then Of course, then I have to figure out how to catch the boosters, how to refuel in space, how to land it, there are still a lot of things that SpaceX has to learn about Starship through these incredible and spectacular test flights.

I'm Scott Manley, fly safe.