- Starship's Fourth Integrated Flight Test
or simply Flight Four is almost here. Riding off the
successes and learning from the failures
of the third flight test.
The fourth flight test doesn't have a lot
of big notable hardware changes,
but there are a few noticeable tweaks and improvements.
I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut,
and today we're going to do a quick overview of what's new
and different between Starship's Flight Three
and Flight Four, including hardware tweaks, changes
to the launchpad, as well as some changes
to software in the flight profile.
Then we'll go over some expectations
and what we will hopefully see next in this
exciting Starship program. Let's get started.
- This video is sponsored by Ground News.
Now, before we start here, we gotta give a huge shout out
to the Ringwatchers community
who has been diligently tracking
and documenting everything we talk about in this video.
If you want an even more in depth rundown on some
of the specific hardware, be sure
and check out their article.
There's a link in the description. Okay.
Let's start off with the launchpad.
Since Starship's third flight,
we've seen SpaceX continually upgrading
and maturing the launchpad.
Most notably, the biggest horizontal tanks in the tank farms
are now online
and supplement the old vertical tanks that are being retired
and continually torn down.
Now, these tanks likely won't decrease prop load times,
which is already ridiculously quick as of flight three,
but they will help continue the expansion of storage,
which will help with recycling times
and reduce times between launches.
The last of those two old suborbital launch pads has been
decommissioned with the ship test operations now happening
at the other test site Massey's.
This is to help make room
for the second orbital launch tower,
which is super exciting.
Another upgrade to the launchpad is
with the quick disconnect for the ship
that likely features some upgrades
to help increase reliability
and decrease refurbishment time.
And lastly, there's a fresh coat
of paint all over the launchpad
and it frankly looks really good,
but that's really the main things
that have changed at the pad since the last launch.
Which brings us to some of the changes to Starship.
By far, the biggest change between S28 from flight three
and S29 with flight four is the attention
to detail going into the heat shield.
Now that SpaceX knows they can get Starship to reentry,
it's important to really spend the extra time
to make sure the heat shield can do its job.
Prior to flight three, there really was almost no point in
putting hundreds or thousands
of work hours into the heat shield if they didn't even think
they'd make it to reentry.
Now that they know that they can get to reentry,
it's important to really tidy it up
and make sure the ship has the best chance
of actually surviving reentry from orbital velocity.
For the first time. On S29, they've been working
to remove the horizontal seams in the heat shield
and they managed to remove one from the mid LOx barrel.
SpaceX also removed tiles on the cone
and scuffed up the metal underneath the heat shield likely
to have a better surface to adhere the heat shield tiles to.
As you likely know, S28 was unable
to maintain orientation once it got into space
during its coast phase.
SpaceX determined the cause was clogging of some
of the valves responsible for roll control.
They've addressed this by upgrading hardware
to be more resilient to blockages such as this,
and they've also added another set
of roll control thrusters for redundancy.
Some of these changes were a once hotly debated topic,
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Okay, now onto what's new with the booster. Booster 11 seems
to have gone through more major upgrades from Booster 10
mostly in what appears to be some major reinforcements.
The methane tank went from 24 internal stringers
to about 74, so a threefold increase.
There are also stringer doublers added at the top at the aft
end of the locks tank.
Then there are additional supports
and stringers added below the grid fins basically
doubling the thickness.
All this is likely to help improve the rigidity
of the booster when it's unpressurized
and perhaps help it flex less on reentry,
which we'll talk a little bit more about here in a second.
When I talk about expectations,
the cowbell deflectors on the four LOx tank vents have
been massively reinforced.
Why We're not sure,
but perhaps they were damaged
during reentry on flight three.
There was also a new vent doubler plate opening on the
methane tank on flight three six of the 13 engines used
during the boost back in landing burn shut down prematurely
during the boost back burn due to some kind
of filter blockage in the oxygen feed lines.
To address this problem, SpaceX has added additional
hardware to improve filtration capabilities
and they've also changed the startup procedure
to light raptors for landing burns.
Now there's likely been hundreds
or even thousands of changes since flight three,
but many of them are likely more internal
or more to do with the flight software, which brings us to
what I'm hoping to see happen in flight four.
SpaceX made some really good progress,
but they're still needing to get both vehicles
to splash down successfully
before they can move on to the biggest hurdles of reuse
and eventually rapid reuse.
For booster splash down, they plan
to do a virtual tower catch,
so basically aim at a precise location in the Gulf
and then attempt to control the booster precisely enough
to validate the ambitious stage zero Mechazilla catch.
Now, this was a goal for Flight three as well.
However, the booster definitely didn't have
control during reentry.
Now, a few things to keep in mind
because the booster is made out of stainless steel.
SpaceX is trying to forego a reentry burn
and just hope the booster holds up
as it hits the atmosphere, kind of like what Rocket Lab does
with their Electron.
And as we saw on flight three, it made it through reentry.
It just didn't maintain control
once in the lower atmosphere.
This is one of the biggest reasons why I think we're seeing
such massive reinforcements on the booster.
It's quite obvious that SpaceX really wants to get
to catching the booster quickly.
If all goes well and they maintain control on flight four
and hit their virtual target,
a catch attempt could be made already on flight five,
but I wouldn't be surprised if they would want
to demonstrate a few successful targeted splash downs
before a catch attempt.
Speaking of successful targeted splash downs,
we are really expecting the ship to make it
through reentry this time, or at least a lot further along
'cause SpaceX is spending a lot
of time fixing up the heat shield tiles,
but the best heat shields in the world won't do anything if
the vehicle can't maintain orientation
leading up to reentry.
So the ship comes in at the correct attitude
where the flaps should actually have control,
and that's something that we didn't get to see last time.
I have some pretty big expectations for ship reentry.
Now, I'm assuming they can maintain control with their tweaks
that they've made, and I just really can't wait
to see those flaps do their job,
and hopefully we'll get absolutely incredible footage again.
But perhaps the most exciting change
for flight four is if Starship makes it through reentry,
we'll actually see an attempt to do the propulsive landing
and not just belly flop like what it was going
to be doing had it made it that far in one
of the first three flights.
Now, it's a bit confusing why they didn't just implement the
flip and landing burn in the previous attempts,
but it seems like SpaceX just wasn't even sure it was going
to get that far and figured adding the additional software
was just unnecessary work at the time,
and perhaps Starship's only currently capable
of one relight for now.
Anyway. Another thing that was talked about a while ago,
but we'll finally likely see is a jettison
of the hot staging ring
after the boost back burn
to reduce booster mass prior to the landing burn.
Not exactly sure why they're doing this other than again
to reduce mass, but it sure will be a fun thing to look for.
However, it does seem that on Flight Force,
SpaceX won't be attempting to do a simulated de-orbit burn
with Starship, meaning they won't demonstrate an on orbit
relight of a raptor likely
because they think demonstrating reentry is a more important
goal than a relight.
For now, this means that they'll still need
to demonstrate a relight
before they do a proper orbital mission as they'll need
to prove that they can control Starship's deorbit
so they don't leave a 100 plus ton metal hunk
of space debris in orbit.
That would end up reentering uncontrolled,
but hopefully they'll demonstrate
that relight later this year.
And if they do, it makes me feel really good about them,
hopefully deploying some payloads by the end of the year,
specifically Starlink satellites
by using Starship to launch Starlink.
It's again, the perfect opportunity to push the boundaries,
do some legit work while practicing recovery
and work on picking up the launch cadence.
But that's what I'm hoping to see on flight four.
What about you think flight four will go better
than flight three?
Think we'll see a landing burn on the booster
and a successful splash down think ship's going
to make it through reentry.
Let me know your thoughts and the comments below,
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That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd,
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