News Changes to the SpaceX BFR rocket.

70kms and I haven't seen any stuff falling off...
 
I think we could see the sats burning up behind the ship... yes!
 
Some small burning/debris on the aft left flap...
 
Past peak heating, and sunrise coming up....
 
60kms and more small stuff flying away, both on the aft and forward ends, but nothing like previous flights...
 
Just catching up with the replay. The video is just amazing, start to finish.

I didn't see anything about them attempting to soft land the booster stage in the water - did they actually get a reentry burn or did the booster just freefall like a bomb from engine shutdown after staging? And Starship losing one of the vacuum engines right after staging isn't good.

Aren't they planning to fly these things through space and need the engines working to actually safely land at their destination? The booster can absorb a certain number of engine failures because it has 33 of them. Starship (where the people and payload are) has only six, and I'd imagine that they need at least two of the main and two of the vacuum engines working to boost and land. What would be the minimum engine out criterion to commit to a trans lunar or trans Mars injection burn? If they were to lose any one of the main or vacuum engines, they could be down to a single additional failure causing loss of mission and crew, which might make for a tense couple of days or months during the coast phase. If they lost any engines going to orbit, would that essentially end the mission?

I'm not convinced that they have enough 9s of engine reliability for the number of engines that must work on Starship to complete a mission safely. I'll throw that on the pile of the other things that concern me about human rating this mess.

But the video is still amazing.
 
So, starship planned boom, booster unplanned boom, I gather. Any word about how much damage starship received from re-entry? Because that still seems like a main concern to me when it comes to reusability...
 
So, starship planned boom, booster unplanned boom, I gather. Any word about how much damage starship received from re-entry? Because that still seems like a main concern to me when it comes to reusability...
It won't really matter until they actually recover it one way or the other. Until then, they can keep on doing their suborbital hops, it doesn't seem to matter much. If it starts getting RUDs again, move on to V4, V5 etc, all plagued by similar issues but hey, it's a new version, so "it's to be expected"
 
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So the booster flipped sideways instead of upwards, and engines did fail...
 
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