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dmix

Video of the catch

> Mechazilla has caught the Super Heavy booster!

https://x.com/spacex/status/1845442658397049011

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10 minutes from 3h25m of this video shows launch and catch.

Historic viewing :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC87WmFN_As&t=3h25m14s

This angle is even more impressive IMO https://x.com/kimbal/status/1845451222750306344

It's very impressive to see the buildings next to it, the original video lacks any sense of scale

You can hear Elon Musk in the background.

Ha!

> Holy flying fuck, look at that thing!

Gold.

Naive question: I obviously expect there to be flames from the engines, but there were flames on the lower sides for quite a while after the catch – is that expected?

My guess is that it's venting out the system pressure, and it's safer to burn it.

who cares... they did it and it didn't burn up or destroy the platform. rest is just nitpicking

Outside of maybe Boeing "who cares..." isn't a valid answer in engineering.

[flagged]

It's an interesting engineering question, not a slight.

Obviously the primary mission was successful, in spite of anomalies (good system design!), but people are and should be curious about this aspect.

There’s a bunch of people crapping on you who clearly haven’t been through a flight test campaigns.

100% with you. The teams I’ve worked with would be celebrating and trying to figure out what’s burning at the same time. And especially trying to figure out if there’s anything that they need to do to collect evidence for that investigation (eg zooming the remote PTZ cameras in on specific areas or things like that)

Just to be clear, I never suggest that the teams actually working on this wouldn't look into it. I was talking about people who were watching and were happy.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a prototype.

That's why it's not a catastrophe that something was unexpectedly on fire, not a reason to dismiss the question.

So the whole purpose of it is to identify issues to be resolved.

> who cares...

I bet SpaceX does. They've solved the big problems, now it's time to solve the small problems and make reuse a reality.

Isn’t this a forum of hackers caring about the news? Everyone seems excited here and that excitement naturally leads into curiosity for many who identify as hackers.

You usually see some down near the engines after a Falcon 9 landing.

The vent out the side before touchdown didn’t look right, though. Something blew, but non-critically.

Probably not expected, but the nice thing is that they don't have to pull the vehicle off the bottom of the ocean to study what happened there.

Desirable? Probably not. Expected? Yeah. Especially given that is the was pretty unexpected to work on the first try.

It does look like venting, but on the Everyday Astronaut video feed it also looked like a COPV inside one of the strakes looked like it exploded as well.

If not an intended vent, probably some methane leak. Given that they have the first stage intact, they will know exactly what happened very soon. Yet another advantage of having the rocket returned instead of sinking it in the ocean.

It is common for Starship prototypes to have uncontrolled fires, but it is obviously not a good thing.

For example, prototype number 10 exploded 8 minutes after landing [1] because of a seemingly insignificant fire at the bottom.

After today's flight there was a long lasting fire in the engine section, with occasional flaming pieces of plumbing raining down from the rocket. Examining the aftermath should help SpaceX to understand what improvements need to be made to prevent this from happening.

[1] https://youtu.be/XOQkk3ojNfM?t=38346

This same issue was common on early Falcon 9 landings and took a while to fully eliminate.

This highlights another thing I love about watching SpaceX's unprecedented rate of progress. They're managing the complex balance of risk, learning, time and budget extremely well. I'm not an expert in the relevant domains but even I've noticed and appreciated that the typical SpaceX development test always manages to get big chunks of new data, while still having some notable things not quite working.

It's an object lesson in rapid engineering development. If everything goes perfectly in a development test, it's a sign you're not moving fast enough (meaning not taking enough risk per increment to maximize learning). As valuable as Falcon, Starlink and Starship are, the biggest near-term value of SpaceX may be providing such a clear demonstration of well-executed "fail fast, learn fast" engineering that even politicians and bureaucrats can understand it.

Scott Manley said it was a purposeful flare off of methane to prevent over pressureization.

Maybe the flare on the side started as purposeful. But there was also a fire inside, between the engines, with flaming pieces of some pipes or cables raining down from the rocket. You can see one example of this just after this timestamp: https://youtu.be/YC87WmFN_As?t=12928

Yeah i see what you are talking about now.

They have mission goals which were achieved (booster was caught). Goals that they didn't think they could do (Starship being within the buoys). While there was flames and those could be dangerous you judge the mission based on the planned outcomes but they will try to eliminate the anomalies to improve the next mission while still achieving the goals.

The thing is that no one is judging the mission based on this imperfection. It's just intellectual curiosity, which is a good thing. The comments that are getting down voted are all assuming some negative motive that just isn't present.

It looked to me like the fire was on the fuel intake valves and if you watch carefully that area was scoured by the nozzle output when it was first slowing down so it probably blew through the shutoff valves or something

I'd love to see followup analysis of what that fire was all about.

In some of the views of the landing it's clear that the flames are from a methane vent. I.e., it's really not a problem.

I wonder what will happen when they get to 99% reliability? They clean up and rebuild the Mechazilla every once a hundred catches, on that occasion that one fails?

I suspect there's already a whole "refurbishment" process for the crane even for non-reusable launches, and once it's working darn reliably, they can just have a bunch of them ready to go, and cycle once in a while.

The next one is already mostly built and very different from this one. They move fast.

The plan is to have many, many Mechazillas.

I also expect if something fails a test in the way down you crash in the water rather than splat your catcher

The booster aims towards the shore until the landing burn starts, only then does it swing towards the tower. So, for the most part, failures should mean that the booster safely crashes into the water.

That, and redundancy. The amount of cash you save allows you to do that.

They've landed over 300 Falcon boosters and haven't wrecked their barges yet I expect that this won't be a major issue.

A phone video[1] from Mexico, with nice plume refraction of the Sun.

[1] https://x.com/Cosmo_556/status/1845554958604657051

Erratum: Not Mexico. I echoed a repost without sanity checking the perspective - sorry about that.

Amazing achievement.

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