Spacex team’s Starship partially melts during renterty of test flight 4, makes soft splash down anyway.
youtu.be
Evidently the joints on the flaps still need a little work into not letting gases through, but it seemed to still have enough actuation to keep the spacecraft stable until the engines took over for the landing burn.
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This really was awesome to watch live. Specifically I remember the part where the camera was almost completely covered, and the fin was barely visible. But juuuuuust barely, you could see that the fin was actuating, and it was alive! And then the crowd gets hype. That was the moment where I was like, wait, this could still happen!
The live was such a rollercoaster of emotions.
The moment the fin started to melt I thought this was the end of it, but it still hold on, and hold on. Then the image disappeared do I though that was it, but no it continued after that, we get the image back.
I start to think that it might be able to crash on water, maybe not in one piece but it would be a big improvement comparef to the last launch, especially since they already soft landed the booster.
And then it get a few km away from water level and at the last minute it DOES THE BELLY FLOP AND SOFT LAND ON WATER !
I had absolutely zero hope of that happening !
I thought for sure the camera was toast when it went all purple, it looks like the lense was essentially gone and we are just seeing the raw output of the CCD but then the flap moved and there was a few frames where you could actually see the flap and the damage but it's still actuating!
Amazing engineering.
There is essentially no better data that this regarding what the error tolerance is on the flaps. Should help create lots if reliability in future versions
Honestly, I started laughing my head off when I saw that ragged flap still moving and the Starship still maintaining attitude control with it. That's the sort of battle damage I expect to see in a science fiction show, I wasn't expecting SpaceX to bring that sort of thing into the real world too.