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SpaceX SN15 Experimental Test Vehicle

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Yes they finally get to tear one apart. Lots to learn on those engines I'd think. I'd say that SpaceX is now getting serious about the starship as fewer details are coming out compared to past efforts. It is without a doubt the single most ambitious space effort since the moon missions and frankly, much more ambitious and well thought out than those. Perhaps the benefit of having something other than geo political cold war power struggle driving the effort. Anyway, well done all ye spacexers

Yeah, that’s my bet too. All the engineers can’t wait to crawl around every inch of SN15 and inspect everything.
 
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Starship SN15 10km flight test 050521 (SpaceX) launch 1.jpg

Starship SN15 10km flight test 050521 (SpaceX) launch 2.jpg

(C) SpaceX
 
Ugh. He doubles down on saying the only reason SpaceX won the HLS contract is that it was half the cost of Blue. I wish he would shut up about this. He’s both wrong and unhelpful.
Agreed. Price was only a small part of the many reasons that SpaceX was chosen. The reality is that NASA stated their reasons for choosing SpaceX in detail publicly and plenty of other Youtubers have gone through that document and gone over the details.

I would not have guessed they would re-fly SN15. Elon is eager to keep moving forward though.
 
Was this a high altitude launch? Just 10 KMs? High altitude for a plane maybe, but I thought for a rocket something like 50KMs should considered high altitude?

Also the descent speeds were minuscule in this test compared to what one would expect in a real re-entry from orbit. So the fact that all those tiles survived now means very little.
 
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Tiles were broken just ground handling and static fires. Now only few of the several hundreds ~thousand tiles were fractured. They are getting better making and bonding tiles. Are tiles TPS ready? Not yet, but SpX is going to test them anyway...
It will be interesting to see when they start testing them on the nose. The tiles will need to be shaped to account for the reduction in diameter.

Also wondering if the nose will be modified to reduce localised aero loads and heating. The forward flap mounting looks pretty 'brutal' but there again the whole aero flow regime is extreme. It is good that they are envisaging plenty of testing to get lots of data to be able to refine their modelling and then iterate the design. The guys on that team must be having a great time.
 
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Was this a high altitude launch? Just 10 KMs? High altitude for a plane maybe, but I thought for a rocket something like 50KMs should considered high altitude?

Also the descent speeds were minuscule in this test compared to what one would expect in a real re-entry from orbit. So the fact that all those tiles survived now means very little.
Compared to the water tower hops I guess...
 
Was this a high altitude launch? Just 10 KMs? High altitude for a plane maybe, but I thought for a rocket something like 50KMs should considered high altitude?

Also the descent speeds were minuscule in this test compared to what one would expect in a real re-entry from orbit. So the fact that all those tiles survived now means very little.

Compared to the water tower hops I guess...

As well as being about the test vehicle and what it's intended to be able to do. It's not pre-production, but they're at high enough altitude to execute the belly flop and landing maneuver.
 
So the fact that all those tiles survived now means very little.

In context of validating re-entry performance, yeah. But…history has proven that spacex won’t deliberately do something unless it’s moving the ball forward.

There’s a fair bit of mechanical environment during launch (I would speculate that in context of the tiles it’s mostly acoustic energy) such that these low altitude flights may be providing macro/directional information on basic things like tile material(s) and design (layering within the tile or whatever) and survivability of the attachment method.