So, silly question. It's obvious that the starship probably could have landed with 2 engines if maybe that flame-out wouldn't have happened so late in the landing. Redundancy and such probably dictates one engine can fail without too severe consequence. However, is there any chance that things lands with one engine if the fault happens early enough in the procedure that the telemetry can recognize and compensate for it?
That's a good question and it would be nice to have redundancy somewhere in the chain, but I don't think a failure like that could have been recognized early enough. The dynamics of the fast flip is likely what caused the issues and by that time it's already too late to compensate with a longer single engine burn. Maybe if the flip happened earlier it could possible, but I don't know what limitations avionics are playing with. For instance, as @mpusch mentioned earlier, the reason for a two engine landing is because Raptor can't throttle the engines low enough to land with three, so if the two engine landing started earlier we'd likely be thrust positive well before the vehicle landed. No good. Fun fact, F9 goes thrust positive the moment before it lands and the engines shut down. It's a move called a hover slam. Maybe they could figure out a scheme where the flip happens early and all three engines light to scrub the majority of the speed then kill two and do a single engine landing a la F9. I'm not sure how much aero is depended on to slow the vehicle, so they might not be banking on having that kind of fuel margin to do a three engine burn. I think the best solution is to develop the engine enough so ensure reliability. The whole point of Starship is to fly to Mars and back and rebuilding engines on the Martian surface is probably a non-starter for a while. Of course this is all a guess. I'm a structural guy, so propulsion and especially avionics are like magic to me.
Well they would have had to flip down first. Hopefully he wasn’t in charge of that part Hopefully you didn’t work on the SN9 support structure. That is sort of a colossal F up
Road closures scheduled starting tomorrow, but last I looked a specific reason wasn't provided. Might get canceled, or who knows, maybe it'll still be used. Next step should be atmospheric and cryo pressure testing. Supposedly they're going right to a 3 engine static fire, then a launch if everything checks out. Raptors already installed, so... Maybe 2-3 weeks before a launch if everything went smoothly? Who knows.
Maybe There's an active TFR and road closures that fit the bill for tomorrow. Wouldn't be surprising for additional prep after doing two static fires today though.
Make that *three* static fires in one day. Cool! Though I'm sure you've seen already, big hop is not going to happen today. Likely will in the next week though.
Did it go last night? I was flying into FLL but the TFR was not active until 30 min after landing. I was guessing they would scrub it due to weather. Still waiting to see one of these from the air....
There should be great Starlink train visibility for the next several days. I have my alarm set for Wed morning 6:20 AM.