Good summary. The booster appeared to hit the water at 1400 km/h (a bit under 900 mph) so not really survivable :-). Engine out on ship seems to left them with just enough fuel to land but not enough to do the hover thing (simulates being caught by chopsticks). They notched it down to two engines (vs planned 3) on the landing it seems?
Basically if they can figure out the engine issues, it looks like they should be able to do a full end to end flight. That's reasonable progress. Given the IPO this was a pretty important flight and I don't think they hurt it (like blowing up on the launch pad would have). So their one step closer it seems.
V3 Raptors are too powerful, they no longer need three engines to land. They are only going with two from here on out.
So I think it’s unlikely that they altered any aspect of the landing test due to lighting only two engines… as they was the plan anyway.
There's 2 options if you don't want to drop stages back on earth. You don't launch, you land the stage.
SpaceX is the company that pioneered propulsive landing of a booster. You can say a lot about them but not that they pollute with dropping stages in the ocean. Even in absolute sense that doesn't happen often and that's ignoring that they put over 90% of all the weight in orbit nowadays
There's no materials science breakthrough needed -- the shuttle used ceramic tiles successfully its entire service life. What's needed is engineering work, and that's what SpaceX has been doing.
We’ve seen much larger holes than that in previous tests. Some of the control fins burned completely through.
Here is a decent summary.
The re-entry itself looks amazingly smooth compared to V2. TBD whether it's good enough for re-usability (much less rapid re-usability).
But Flight 12 was definitely forward progress.
Not just space-potatoes… but missed the separation shot on the live feed. How in the hell!?
The problem was never solved and turned what was supposed to be a few days into weeks or months. Every mission the shuttle had to go back into the assembly building and have all tiles inspected and potentially replaced.
Obviously doesn’t guarantee they’ll find solution, but fast iteration will definitely help.
Its turn around time is ridiculous, it has to be maintained with specialized equipment/hangers, along with external contractor assistance.
Compared to the Gripen, as an example, which can land on a freeway and be up in the air again in a few minutes.
One was designed to be used in war, in desperate scenarios, with no ability to coddle it. The other, the F-35? Is designed around milking the taxpayer as much as possible, and employing people in as many politician's states as possible.
The shuttle was like that, I think. Which is really sad.
The gripen is a much less capable non expeditonary platform designed to maximize asymmetric losses if sweden is invaded. As a small country sweden has to follow a porcupine strategy to deter invasion.
Presently the actual comparable to the F-35 is attritable drones, which is why every mid-size and major power is developing them.
The maintenance is the real difference - US specifically USAF gear is designed for nice air conditioned hangars to do regular maintenance, Gripen, MiG-29, and to way lower effect F-18 (when compared with F-16) - the first two assume forward bases without ability to do major maintenance, and even the latter (and other carrier adapted ones) promote things like quick swap engines because that's no space for hangar queen to have deep engine maintenance just so engine vendor can claim long time between overhauls
The engines did have lower overall hours, yes, but the suggestion they need whole overhaul after very few hours is because it looks so when looking at it from USAF doctrine where "removing engine and sending it to special facility" is only for rare complete overhauls, and local mechanics are supposed to do regular minor work all the time.
MiG-29 instead was done under doctrine that the airbase does not have mechanics capable of doing such overhaul, nor the facilities to do so, and instead you swap the engine and send the used one to maintenance facilities further away from the front, same with other aggregates.
It’s an extremely different design goal, the US doesn’t mind exotic weapons that require exquisite (and expensive) methods of servicing, they have the budget and the assumption that a well equipped air field will be immaculately maintained.
Meanwhile the Mig-29 designers assumed it’d operate from damaged/poorly maintained fields, so on the ground you can shut the primary air intakes and it uses ones on top of the plane to get air, drastically reducing the FOD risk on taxi/takeoff.
I do wonder how well the F-35 would fare in an actual shooting war against near peers when all the peacetime assumptions breakdown.
The F-35 was just in a war, in Iran. It performed as expected and was able to roll back Iran's air defense network in days.
"Rolling back" Iran's air defense seems like very fuzzy phrasing. Certainly, Iran was not able to close its own airspace, nor prevent ongoing airstrikes on many American and Israeli targets. At the same time, my armchair observation is that a great many US and Israeli airstrikes were accomplished using stand-off weapons [1], which would not have been needed if the United States and Israel had achieved 'air supremacy'[2] as has been the case in America's conflicts in recent history.
The observed trend in USAF readiness has been downward for some time [3][4]. Air war is more than single sorties. If you have anything resembling an accurate summary of sorties flown, targets successfully hit, and number of combat-ready aircraft throughout the (currently on hold) war, and so on, please share. Absent such detailed information, all we have are various degrees of speculation.
1. https://news.meaww.com/us-used-tomahawks-himars-standoff-wea...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_supremacy
3. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-mission-capable-...
4. https://havokjournal.com/culture/military/the-hidden-erosion...
They've made great progress but have a bit left. It's always the last mile, isn't it?
It's so cool seeing progress in this space (sorry).
SpaceX’s people were saying it was on target, and it seems to have landed in about the same position relative to the camera buoy as previous flights. I don’t think there’s any evidence to call it off target. The landing and toppling looked the same as previous flights too.
Also I think Ship now has methane thrusters on it. They were operating with a clean blue flame in short purposeful bursts.
A good cold gas thruster produces a lower density, more expanded flow, which looks blue for the same the reason the sky looks blue.
One can compare this to the exhaust from various Falcon-9 engines and thrusters when it is illuminated by the sun on the backdrop of the night sky: https://youtu.be/JRzZl_nq6fk?t=193
This was as good, if not better, than the livestream itself!
EDIT: I cannot reply further in this thread, but my understanding is that the non vacuum engines are not intended to stay lit throughout the orbital flight in a typical mission. If they are, they can gimbal and compensate.
I said some raptor engines are on a gimbal, not vacuum engines.
To be precise, the three central engines can gimbal up to 15 degrees. That can control the thrust vectoring when an engine fails, and that’s what happens in the last flight.
Since the flight already happened and we know it didn’t spin out of control (unless you imply their diagnostic and telemetry was completely off and the engine was actually on) something must have compensated for the failure. It wasn’t magic, it was in fact the central 3 engines that did that.
You may be confused because those are called sea level engines, but that doesn’t mean they can’t work in vacuum.
The upper stage has six engines. The outer three engines are “vacuum engines” (optimized for operation in space). The inner three engines are “non vacuum engines” (optimized for operation in the atmosphere, at sea level).
The outer three vacuum engines are not gimbaled, but the inner three sea level engines are. Thus, it is completely accurate to say that they gimbaled some of the engines to compensate for the engine failure.
The word "live" is doing a lot of work here. Astronauts used to film the plasma going past the windows of Shuttle.
I remember as a kid my science textbook had a still of it to illustrate plasma.
A latency of a few seconds for streaming video compared to several months for a still photo from the Shuttle seems an entirely valid use of 'live'.