SpaceX targets February for third Starship test flight - SpaceNews
SpaceX targets February for third Starship test flight - SpaceNews
SpaceX expects to conduct the third integrated test flight of its Starship vehicle in February as it works to demonstrate landing humans on the moon.
"Jensen described an iterative process of flight and ground tests. “That will wind up determining how many missions we need,” she said.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson then stepped in. “The question was, how many fuel transfers?”
“I will say it will roughly be ten-ish,” Jensen responded. “It could be lower, depending on how well the first flight tests go, or it could be a little bit higher.”"
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DoD US Department of Defense EUS Exploration Upper Stage HLS Human Landing System (Artemis) SLS Space Launch System heavy-lift Jargon Definition Starlink SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation
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Can't wait to see another flight! Iterative progress needs to keep marching.
So the Ship that apparently was supposed to have a condensed testing schedule is actually getting an extended testing schedule, and the speculated launch time of late Dec to mid Jan is now sometime in Feb, pending testing results.
And they now also do not expect the flight license in Jan, also now that is expected sometime in Feb.
SpaceX has not yet publicly said anything detailed about what went wrong with StarShip2 (despite their PR indicating that they would learn so much from the test data of StarShip 2), but much can be discerned from the video evidence:
Lower Stage:
- Unreliable Rocket Engines
And/Or
- Fuel Flow Plumbing / Pump Problems
In addition to
- Lower Stage Superstructure Not Structurally Integrous Enough To Execute Belly Flop Maneuver Without Serious Damage
And also likely
-
Lower Stage Fuel Tank Construction Not Structurally Integrous Enough To Withstand Belly Flop Maneuver Without Serious Damage
-
Flight Termination System Appears To Not Function Properly
Upper Stage:
Not sure what went wrong exactly, but apparently:
- SpaceX is not capable of determining their craft disintegrated until 3 minutes after it disintegrated, while also calling out that the craft had entered inertial guidance phase /after the craft had visibly exploded/.
So basically their Mission Control protocols and/or their Communications systems have serious flaws.
...
I am sure they will be able to complete their 3 Billion dollar contract from NASA and land StarShip on the Moon by the end of March this year, and I am sure they will be able to continue receiving massive funding grants from NASA after they definitely do not miss this deadline.
Its not like Artemis recently managed to successfully return from a TransLunar orbit or anything.
Artemis 2 is delayed for Orion heat shield reasons, so that alone would prevent Ar-3 from being this spring, according to that one crazy timeline.
Starship HLS is definitely behind schedule, but at least it's fixed price and milestone based.
Cool, is that going to put the entire Artemis program so laughably behind their contracted schedule that theyre at risk of having the entire program unfunded?
Let me know when StarShip manages to even successfully orbit the Earth a few times and have both the booster and orbiter section land and be reusable I dunno 10 or 20 times with 0 or 1 failures (standard rocket launch failure rate is approximately 5% across the board) both within budget and within the timeframe promised in funding proposals.
Spoiler: This will never occur because SpaceX will at best have to dramatically scale back its operational scope, or at worst, entirely go bankrupt sooner than you think after NASA and other investors stop giving them money and place their bets on far, far more advanced and reliable options.
Truly exciting!