5/23/2026 at 12:39:54 AM
Summary from my watch:- Launch roughly on time, after a scrub yesterday. (Sounds like the scrub was due to ground equipment, most notably the water system.)
- Initial ascent was good, but then one engine on the booster went out.
- Relight of the booster's engines after stage separation for the boost back burn failed. Engines did light again for a landing burn, but seems to have hit the water harder than expected and was very off target.
- Starship lost one engine shortly after stage sep. Turned into an unintentional test of engine out capability. It made it to space.
- Some weird motion and lots of off-gassing after engine cut-off, with uncertainty about if it actually got a good orbital(ish) insertion. Seems to have been benign, with the motion being a weird slow flip to the orientation for payload deployment.
- Test deployment of dummy payloads was successful, including a couple with cameras to look back at Starship.
- An in space engine relight test was skipped, presumably due to the issues during launch.
- Re-entry to over the Indian Ocean seemed to go really well. Nothing obviously burning or falling off. The amazing views of the plasma during re-entry, something never seen live before starship, are now routine.
- Starship did a maneuver to simulate how they'll have to go out over the gulf and back to the landing site.
- Nailed the target, evidenced by views from drones and buoys. Soft landing before falling over and giving us a big (expected) boom.
As far as overall progress from previous test flights goes, they're at least treading water while making many large changes. I think they were hoping to try for a tower catch and actually going orbital for next flight, but I highly doubt that now. The boostback burn failing was the largest failure, with the engine failure on Starship being a close second. Good performance despite engine out seems to be an unintentional success.
by Laremere
5/23/2026 at 5:34:34 AM
Nice work by SpaceX engineering.Good summary. The booster appeared to hit the water at 1400 km/h (a bit under 900 mph) so not really survivable :-). Engine out on ship seems to left them with just enough fuel to land but not enough to do the hover thing (simulates being caught by chopsticks). They notched it down to two engines (vs planned 3) on the landing it seems?
Basically if they can figure out the engine issues, it looks like they should be able to do a full end to end flight. That's reasonable progress. Given the IPO this was a pretty important flight and I don't think they hurt it (like blowing up on the launch pad would have). So their one step closer it seems.
by ChuckMcM
5/23/2026 at 8:25:23 PM
Landing on two engines was the plan.V3 Raptors are too powerful, they no longer need three engines to land. They are only going with two from here on out.
So I think it’s unlikely that they altered any aspect of the landing test due to lighting only two engines… as they was the plan anyway.
by Gagarin1917
5/23/2026 at 8:34:42 PM
Hmm, I've seen data that landing the booster on 2 engines was the plan, but hadn't seem similar things about Starship. The difference is the chamber pressure you need in the individual engines. Lower chamber pressure has, in the past, been easier to modulate for precise control. Do you know if they've done any white papers or patents on V3's flow aeronautics?by ChuckMcM
5/23/2026 at 11:45:14 PM
Rocket engines can’t throttle down very much. Raptor can go down to 40% of its rated thrust, which for V3 would be 100 tons. The ship’s mass is maybe 150 tons with remaining propellant at the start of the landing burn, and probably around 100 tons at the end of the burn. Even at the lowest throttle, three engines would give it a thrust to weight ratio of 2, making hovering impossible and a suicide burn tricky. Two engines gives them redundancy, roll control, and a lower thrust to weight ratio to help with landing precision.I’m surprised they went down to one engine at the end, because that means they lose most of their roll control. The only way to roll with one engine is to use the cold gas thrusters, which aren’t nearly as powerful.
by ggreer
5/24/2026 at 6:35:17 AM
They have a new RCS system on V3 which appeared to be hot gas thrusters. The landing was 3 engines lit to 2 to 1, using the lesson learned in very early flights to have an extra engine in case one fails unexpectedly.by NetMageSCW
5/23/2026 at 6:31:08 AM
Is there videos of booster crash?by dzhiurgis
5/23/2026 at 8:12:05 PM
Not that I have been able to find, the 1400 km/h number comes from the telemetry on the video just before it contacted the water. Presumably one could estimate the return point if you had access to the telemetry and perhaps a platform in the Gulf might have eyes on it. Depends on how far east it got.by ChuckMcM
5/23/2026 at 9:01:54 AM
I doubt it since many of the booster engines didn't seem to relight, the location of touchdown wasn't near any pre-positioned cameras (if there were any).by mrandish
5/23/2026 at 3:49:23 AM
Good summary. I was pleasantly surprised that they nailed the re-entry target even after the ascent engine problems.The re-entry itself looks amazingly smooth compared to V2. TBD whether it's good enough for re-usability (much less rapid re-usability).
But Flight 12 was definitely forward progress.
by GMoromisato
5/24/2026 at 3:14:44 AM
It looks like the ships software did a phenomenal job compensating by adding that much longer Second stage burn time. It was also very cool to see the sea levels vector to compensate for the thrust asymmetry. All and all that ship is look really realllllly good. Seems like they just need to add some mass to Raptor to reduce the tendency to tear itself apart..by erkt
5/24/2026 at 6:39:20 AM
1 out of 33 failing hardly seems like a tendency - probably some minor issue. Relight was likely an issue with new downcomer that was supposed to improve boost back engine feeds for its flip maneuver - that seems to need work.by NetMageSCW
5/23/2026 at 2:22:20 AM
The videos were incredible. My favorite part was watching the booster flip in such clarity. Normally we don't get full view of it, let alone 4k.by irjustin
5/23/2026 at 8:32:17 PM
Scott Manley pointed out that it seemed to flip in the wrong direction, with one of the grid fins passing through the plume and inducing a roll. Will be interesting to hear more about that.by oconnor663
5/23/2026 at 4:09:37 AM
The videos are great!, but the rest of it is never going to work lol, just never. Even without a rethink about how to get heavy payloads to another planet this is still good entertainment.by globalnode
5/23/2026 at 4:30:09 AM
why won't it ever work?by itsthecourier
5/23/2026 at 7:10:38 PM
The hardest problem in the entire design had yet to be solved. Having a robust human rated tile system that can be rapidly turned around is a huge engineering challenge that kind of breaks the whole point of the design if it doesn't work. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually give up and go back to a cheaper throw away second stage, or throw out the tile design completely and try for some evaporative cooling approach, again.by fooblaster
5/24/2026 at 6:40:24 AM
They’ve already shown they can replace all the tiles in a couple of days with removal and new install. No reason they couldn’t do even faster turn around with just re-install if that was needed.And human rating is a NASA requirement they won’t have to worry about for a few years.
by NetMageSCW
5/24/2026 at 3:18:18 AM
I really hope to see the evaporative cooling make a comeback but it seems unnecessary when it’s returning to earth right now.It would also be interesting to see them do shallower dips into the atmosphere then pull back out and repeat. Like a skipping stone. Lots of expansion contraction, but might work better without tiles.
by erkt
5/24/2026 at 6:41:36 AM
They did that during the return of Ship on this test flight.by NetMageSCW
5/23/2026 at 8:35:34 PM
Bear in mind that a lot of what's happening to the tiles now is deliberate experiments to see how much weight they can shave off and how many failed tiles they can survive. Given that the vehicle is routinely surviving reentry at this point, it doesn't seem "hard" to make the tiles more robust by paying for it with added weight. The question is whether they'll have enough weight budget to pay for it? But at this point...probably? Not my area ofc.by oconnor663
5/23/2026 at 8:39:28 PM
"surviving reentry" and being reusable are two very different things, particularly if this is to become human rated.by fooblaster
5/24/2026 at 6:42:55 AM
Human rating is irrelevant to what they want to do, it is only a NASA rating - if NASA wants to ride they will have to come up with a rationale but private astronauts can fly on it.by NetMageSCW
5/24/2026 at 7:53:56 AM
From day one they said their vision was to replace airlines for international air travel.by globalnode
5/24/2026 at 6:58:49 PM
This vision is impractical, bordering on ridiculous, but there it is in the S-1.by Zigurd
5/24/2026 at 3:18:25 AM
Well at least for one part of that, 90-something percent of the launches don't need to be human rated.by Dylan16807
5/23/2026 at 4:37:09 AM
Even if it landed perfectly how is it going to be rapidly reusable with all those tiles breaking and needing repair? Then if that problem was magically engineered-away through some sort of materials science breakthrough, it still makes more sense to me to keep your big ships in a space staging area and your smaller ones as atmospheric gophers.by globalnode
5/23/2026 at 11:57:51 AM
All what tiles breaking and needing repair? There was remarkably little visible damage this time around compared with previous flights.There's no materials science breakthrough needed -- the shuttle used ceramic tiles successfully its entire service life. What's needed is engineering work, and that's what SpaceX has been doing.
by laughing_man
5/23/2026 at 7:13:40 PM
You know a whole the size of a quarter can wreck the entire spacecraft and make it effectively throw away? Also, you'd want to use this many times. Making a system robust while not requiring months of refurbishment is really really hard.by fooblaster
5/23/2026 at 7:34:37 PM
The Space Shuttle had that problem because it was aluminum with a much lower melting point. It’s one of the reasons they’re using steel.We’ve seen much larger holes than that in previous tests. Some of the control fins burned completely through.
by ceejayoz
5/24/2026 at 3:20:23 AM
They already demonstrated that entire tiles can be removed without wrecking the spacecraft.The quarter thing may have been true for the space shuttle, that doesn't make it true in general.
by aeternum
5/23/2026 at 8:14:03 PM
For some of the tests, they removed a few tiles before launch, presumably to test that. Starship did fine.by GuB-42
5/23/2026 at 8:41:18 PM
coming back in one piece, and being good enough to use for 5 more missions are two very different things. For example, all existing reentry vehicles come back "fine" but they need to be completely remade to go up again.by fooblaster
5/23/2026 at 9:38:33 PM
I remember this being the same argument used against the Falcon 9 when it first stuck its landings."Oh, they'll need to do it 10x to be profitable!"
Now they do, as a matter of course.
by ceejayoz
5/23/2026 at 11:15:49 PM
Just because you defeat popular consensus of what is possible in one place doesn't mean you can continue to do it again and again. This stuff is hard.by fooblaster
5/24/2026 at 7:15:20 AM
Yes reusing falcon 9 was hard too.Being a cynical naysay isn’t hard.
by hdgvhicv
5/24/2026 at 12:26:50 AM
Deliberately testing its survivability with that failure mode over different parts of the vehicle has been one of the major foci throughout the entire test campaign, and it has proven remarkably resilient. That generalisation pretty much does not hold for starship.by peebee67
5/23/2026 at 9:59:06 PM
I doubt that. It's made of stainless steel. If it gets home safely they can patch it.by laughing_man
5/23/2026 at 7:14:06 PM
Weren't the tiles one of the worst obstacles to quick turnaround times for the shuttle? It was something like 18 months before one could be launched again, and that's if they were in a hurry.by NoMoreNicksLeft
5/23/2026 at 8:20:08 PM
SpaceX has been specifically engineering both the tiles themselves (e.g. manufacturing) and the way that are used on the ship to be much more rapidly repairable than the Shuttle.by fastball
5/23/2026 at 7:21:33 PM
By the end they could turn a shuttle around in ten weeks.by laughing_man
5/24/2026 at 6:44:17 AM
They’ve already demonstrated they can replace all the tiles in a couple of days - even if they continue to have some fall off it won’t be an issue.by NetMageSCW
5/23/2026 at 5:57:40 AM
Small ships are less efficient, especially leaving the gravity well. Thats the whole pointby s1artibartfast
5/23/2026 at 9:03:45 AM
Could you tell me more? I suppose a heavy two-stage rocket is not optimized from the point of view of the rocket equation, but I know nothing about this field.by JPLeRouzic
5/23/2026 at 5:57:26 PM
In short, the more stages the better to discard mass once it isnt necessary, and the larger to the better to improve the ratio of (ship+payload) to fuel.Here is a decent summary.
by s1artibartfast
5/23/2026 at 7:18:24 PM
This is only true to an extent. Yes, a larger rocket means a better mass:payload ratio, but a larger rocket also means more mass in absolute terms, and more mass means more fuel, and more fuel means more mass, and more mass means more fuel, and more fuel means more mass, and so on. This is "the tyranny of the rocket equation", and it places an upper bound on the size of rockets that need to carry their own fuel for a given gravity well. And because the larger absolute mass of a larger rocket means more fuel, which means more cost, it relies on actually being able to find enough paying customers to fill out that payload capacity every single time. This is why, for example, despite the existence of jumbo jets (which have a better mass:payload ration than smaller planes), most passenger flights are not on jumbo jets, because there's just not enough demand on most routes.by kibwen
5/23/2026 at 10:18:28 PM
> This is why, for example, despite the existence of jumbo jets (which have a better mass:payload ration than smaller planes), most passenger flights are not on jumbo jets, because there's just not enough demand on most routes.Airlines used to use a hub and spoke model where it would make sense to have larger planes between hubs and smaller ones to get to and from the hubs, but consumers strongly preferred direct routing, so it didn't work out. For orbital payloads, most payloads probably do not mind too much if it takes a month or more to boost/deboost themselves to their intended orbits.
by murderfs
5/24/2026 at 6:47:11 AM
No it doesn’t matter if the payload is full or not. If they succeed in full reuse, flying on a mostly empty Starship will be ten times cheaper than flying on an F9 and that means everything will switch eventually.If a jumbo jet was ten times more efficient than a smaller plane, they would go everywhere. If a giant pickup truck got a 100MPG, why would you take a 30MPG economy sedan anywhere?
by NetMageSCW
5/24/2026 at 1:57:11 PM
You fundamentally misunderstand the implications of the rocket equation. It does not put and upper limit on rocket size for a given gravity. Smaller rockets would not be successful where larger fail.Due to strucrually efficiency, larger ones suceede where smaller fail due to higher m0/mf ratio
by s1artibartfast
5/23/2026 at 6:51:54 AM
While we're downing this I'd like to add I think the "I've written X in Rust" posts are also cringe :Dby globalnode
5/23/2026 at 3:36:57 AM
SpaceX does an excellent job at videography. Sad that Nasa flew its Artemis mission with potato cameras.by clippy99
5/23/2026 at 8:40:19 PM
SpaceX probably spends a lot of money on marketing/public relations creating great media. I'm guessing NASA's on a shoestring budget for that kind of thing.by djeastm
5/23/2026 at 9:35:14 PM
SLS was far from a shoestring budget and both NASA and Boeing/Northrop/etc have equally strong incentive to provide solid coverage for the public to keep the jobs program going.SpaceX has much better infrastructure for video with their satellites and are just generally more competent at production
by dmix
5/24/2026 at 6:48:29 AM
One of SpaceX’s founding reasons was to promote STEM and they continue to do that with their video productions.by NetMageSCW
5/23/2026 at 3:49:40 AM
Hey, we have everyone watching, our funding might in part depend on interest and awe…Not just space-potatoes… but missed the separation shot on the live feed. How in the hell!?
by SV_BubbleTime
5/23/2026 at 12:59:20 AM
I think the ship really punted the booster during stage separation. And caused the boost back failure from sloshing.Also I think Ship now has methane thrusters on it. They were operating with a clean blue flame in short purposeful bursts.
by TechPlasma
5/23/2026 at 1:28:32 AM
If we look at the venting from the propellant tank (around T+16:15) it looks thick white closer to the vent, becoming more transparent and blue as it expands. That's just sunlight scattering on the particles and density fluctuations in the flow.A good cold gas thruster produces a lower density, more expanded flow, which looks blue for the same the reason the sky looks blue.
One can compare this to the exhaust from various Falcon-9 engines and thrusters when it is illuminated by the sun on the backdrop of the night sky: https://youtu.be/JRzZl_nq6fk?t=193
by generuso
5/23/2026 at 12:05:26 PM
From what I've read there was "unintentional mixing of fuel and oxidizer" which caused a fire in the engine section, so the engines automatically shut down. I don't thing we have official word yet, though.by laughing_man
5/23/2026 at 1:53:57 AM
I'm concerned about the cracking clearly visible on the heat shield tiles. It doesn't bode well for rapid reusability.by SJMG
5/23/2026 at 2:49:03 AM
I thought the tiles were designed for easy replacement, so not a big concern with replacing cracked ones.by WalterBright
5/23/2026 at 3:05:51 AM
The tiles ablate. The shuttle returned from every mission with missing tiles.by EA
5/23/2026 at 3:14:22 AM
Shuttle's tiles not being durable as hoped is what killed it's turnaround time.The problem was never solved and turned what was supposed to be a few days into weeks or months. Every mission the shuttle had to go back into the assembly building and have all tiles inspected and potentially replaced.
by jordanb
5/23/2026 at 3:20:26 AM
Shuttle tiles were also unique per position and starship tiles have a few base forms that are interchangeableby dnautics
5/23/2026 at 3:56:08 AM
I would also believe that a robot could inspect and replace tiles a lot faster than humans.by amluto
5/23/2026 at 12:00:10 PM
Shuttle tiles were also bonded to the body, which I don't believe is the case with most of the Starship tiles.by laughing_man
5/23/2026 at 6:35:24 AM
Total 6 shuttles built over 35 years. SpaceX already crashed 12 over 5 or so years.Obviously doesn’t guarantee they’ll find solution, but fast iteration will definitely help.
by dzhiurgis
5/23/2026 at 8:04:50 PM
The tiles are not supposed to ablate - they're supposed to be ~fully reusable. That said I think it's plausible that the much higher iteration speed and lack of a need for human-rating (at least during reentry, for now) will allow for more success than the space shuttle saw with its similar approach.by daemonologist
5/24/2026 at 6:49:10 AM
Starship’s tiles are not designed to ablate. They are intended to last multiple flights.by NetMageSCW
5/23/2026 at 3:10:10 AM
The shuttle required long expensive refurbishment after each flight.by throwaway85825
5/23/2026 at 5:16:19 AM
Just made me realise, this is just like the F-35.Its turn around time is ridiculous, it has to be maintained with specialized equipment/hangers, along with external contractor assistance.
Compared to the Gripen, as an example, which can land on a freeway and be up in the air again in a few minutes.
One was designed to be used in war, in desperate scenarios, with no ability to coddle it. The other, the F-35? Is designed around milking the taxpayer as much as possible, and employing people in as many politician's states as possible.
The shuttle was like that, I think. Which is really sad.
by b112
5/23/2026 at 2:29:15 PM
The F-35 is designed to be able to break into and defeat modern air defense networks.The gripen is a much less capable non expeditonary platform designed to maximize asymmetric losses if sweden is invaded. As a small country sweden has to follow a porcupine strategy to deter invasion.
Presently the actual comparable to the F-35 is attritable drones, which is why every mid-size and major power is developing them.
by throwaway85825
5/23/2026 at 7:49:00 PM
The Russians have been trying to use attritable drones for years to break down the Ukrainian IADS and have not yet succeeded. Meanwhile the Israeli F35 fleet with no direct American support was able to crack open Iran’s air defenses at the start of the Twelve Day War with relative ease.by ls612
5/23/2026 at 9:56:00 PM
Israel used long range air launched ballistic missiles (ROCKS) and cruise missiles, mostly from F15s, to degrade Iran's ancient radar network and S300s (which allegedly weren't moved around much). That was before the invasion, so Iran didn't have much long range radar coverage when the war started.by dmix
5/24/2026 at 3:04:42 AM
The shahed/geran is just a low cost cruise missile. The f35 comparable is a loyal wingman that does manned/unmanned teaming and carries A/A and A/G.by throwaway85825
5/24/2026 at 4:57:56 AM
Loyal wingman aircraft would have to be stealthy though to do it.The whole point of the F-35 is that it is a stealthy platform with a very advanced set of targeting and weapons capabilities: but the issue is a similar capability drone would basically have a similar price tag since the expense of the pilot is minor in that case.
Like plausibly the best autonomous F-35 platform would just be an F-35.
by XorNot
5/24/2026 at 5:30:57 AM
It's not the expense of the pilot but the fact that the human pilot is subject to human biological constraints. Ie they black out after 9 Gs or so. An autonomous platform you'd want to design to be able to routinely do outside that envelope in a way that a platform designed for a human occupant is not.by fragmede
5/24/2026 at 9:20:12 AM
Its a nontrivial exercise to design a plane which can regularly do more Gs then that though.There's no drones currently in development AFAIK with this goal either - the focus is on getting them to do useful mission without a pilot, rather then out dogfight or outmanoeuver missiles.
Basically the point stands: a hypothetical "better then F-35" drone is likely more, not less expensive then an F-35.
by XorNot
5/24/2026 at 3:47:55 AM
Such a platform does not exist today in active service in any military (so far as we know).by ls612
5/24/2026 at 6:45:45 AM
>Its turn around time is ridiculous, it has to be maintained with specialized equipment/hangers, along with external contractor assistance.>Compared to the Gripen, as an example, which can land on a freeway and be up in the air again in a few minutes.
I have no idea where people got the idea that the F-35 requires a major refit after each sortie or that it needs climate controlled hangars, but there's literally no truth to any of it.
The turnaround time for an F-35 after a mission in a wartime scenario isn't going to be much different from any other older fighter jet. Refuel, rearm, get back in the air.
One of the key requirements for the F-35 programs was to minimize extra care needed for the RAM (Radar Absorbent Material). Unlike older stealth aircraft the F-35's ram is "baked in" to the aircraft skin, rather than being a coating. The F-117 and B-2 require climate controlled hangars because their coatings are old and delicate, the F-22 doesn't, but needs regular touch-ups for its coating, the F-35 is just left sitting outside most of the time regardless of where it's operating, a desert, the arctic, a jungle, the deck of a ship, you just leave it out there. The only common maintenance done on the F-35's RAM is replacing a relatively small amount of special RAM tape which is usually used around the edges of the access panels which are opened for other types of maintenance.
by thunderbird120
5/23/2026 at 7:33:30 AM
I think there's also some exaggerations about the differing highway landing capabilities of various aircraft. [1] is a video showing Eurofighter, F/A-18 and F-35 all landing on a highway in an exercise. Capability with stores and fuel load is another thing but I've read material that doesn't find the contemporary aircraft drastically different in that regard. Now, maintenance hours per flight hour and general operability certainly are interesting topics and there could be large differences.by Gravityloss
5/23/2026 at 11:53:28 AM
Landing is the trivial part, though the USAF traditions of "FOD walk" do seem funny to air forces where donations you found out the aircraft spent whole day flying with maintenance toolkit left in intake.The maintenance is the real difference - US specifically USAF gear is designed for nice air conditioned hangars to do regular maintenance, Gripen, MiG-29, and to way lower effect F-18 (when compared with F-16) - the first two assume forward bases without ability to do major maintenance, and even the latter (and other carrier adapted ones) promote things like quick swap engines because that's no space for hangar queen to have deep engine maintenance just so engine vendor can claim long time between overhauls
by p_l
5/23/2026 at 2:37:06 PM
The main reason the Mig29s have a reputation for easy maintenance is because they don't replace parts, they just throw away the whole airframe. The structural and engine service life is like 1/10th that of western fighters.by throwaway85825
5/23/2026 at 3:43:06 PM
Not really. This "reputation" is based on misunderstanding of differences in doctrine.The engines did have lower overall hours, yes, but the suggestion they need whole overhaul after very few hours is because it looks so when looking at it from USAF doctrine where "removing engine and sending it to special facility" is only for rare complete overhauls, and local mechanics are supposed to do regular minor work all the time.
MiG-29 instead was done under doctrine that the airbase does not have mechanics capable of doing such overhaul, nor the facilities to do so, and instead you swap the engine and send the used one to maintenance facilities further away from the front, same with other aggregates.
by p_l
5/23/2026 at 9:08:18 PM
The Gripen is a light multirole aircraft like the F-16. The F-35 is a stealth strike fighter. It requires another level of special care to maintain its stealth performance. If you want mass-produced stealth aircraft, that's what's required. Stealth aircraft up to this point have been in extremely limited numbers at astronomical costs.by wildzzz
5/24/2026 at 3:06:32 AM
The f35 has been produced in sufficient numbers that its purchase price is lower than that of 4th Gen fighters. The maintenance cost is higher though.by throwaway85825
5/23/2026 at 8:54:26 PM
Gripen will not be able to fly higher than tree lines in zones with active anti-air. Russia can't really use any of it's air power in Ukraine war, for example.F35 can actually do something in such scenarios, as detecting them in the first place is hard.
by whatevaa
5/24/2026 at 3:10:13 AM
Russia can and did start the war with using airpower but stopped due to losses. Currently Russia is using its airpower to lob guided bombs which is effective due to the limited range of ukraines missiles. They have nothing comparable to the R33.by throwaway85825
5/23/2026 at 7:23:35 AM
Agreed and specifically in the case of the Gripen the “test condition” was “Needs to be serviceable by a few conscripts working under the direction of one person who knows what they are doing”.It’s an extremely different design goal, the US doesn’t mind exotic weapons that require exquisite (and expensive) methods of servicing, they have the budget and the assumption that a well equipped air field will be immaculately maintained.
Meanwhile the Mig-29 designers assumed it’d operate from damaged/poorly maintained fields, so on the ground you can shut the primary air intakes and it uses ones on top of the plane to get air, drastically reducing the FOD risk on taxi/takeoff.
I do wonder how well the F-35 would fare in an actual shooting war against near peers when all the peacetime assumptions breakdown.
by noir_lord
5/23/2026 at 2:32:34 PM
That's a reason the Mig-29 is no longer in production. Point defense fights are obsolete.The F-35 was just in a war, in Iran. It performed as expected and was able to roll back Iran's air defense network in days.
by throwaway85825
5/23/2026 at 7:37:45 PM
>It performed as expected and was able to roll back Iran's air defense network in days."Rolling back" Iran's air defense seems like very fuzzy phrasing. Certainly, Iran was not able to close its own airspace, nor prevent ongoing airstrikes on many American and Israeli targets. At the same time, my armchair observation is that a great many US and Israeli airstrikes were accomplished using stand-off weapons [1], which would not have been needed if the United States and Israel had achieved 'air supremacy'[2] as has been the case in America's conflicts in recent history.
The observed trend in USAF readiness has been downward for some time [3][4]. Air war is more than single sorties. If you have anything resembling an accurate summary of sorties flown, targets successfully hit, and number of combat-ready aircraft throughout the (currently on hold) war, and so on, please share. Absent such detailed information, all we have are various degrees of speculation.
1. https://news.meaww.com/us-used-tomahawks-himars-standoff-wea...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_supremacy
3. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/air-force-mission-capable-...
4. https://havokjournal.com/culture/military/the-hidden-erosion...
by GolfPopper
5/24/2026 at 3:15:09 AM
Iran innovated with the loitering optically guided missile. This was enough to dissuade a longer air campaign. Political support is low so any losses create a political problem.by throwaway85825
5/24/2026 at 2:00:47 AM
> an actual shooting war against near peers
by throwaway2037
5/23/2026 at 3:39:27 AM
Well, every mission that it returned from it had missing tiles. That is not the same thing as returning from every mission.by sidewndr46
5/24/2026 at 6:49:26 AM
That wasn’t cracking.by NetMageSCW
5/23/2026 at 2:20:15 AM
I mean ... step 1 is probably fixing the part where it lands in the ocean, falls over and explodes. Once they've done that and can get their hands on the tiles I'm guessing they can continue to iterate there until they get a more easily reusable design.by simmonmt
5/23/2026 at 2:57:09 AM
That part was intentionalby shigawire
5/23/2026 at 3:54:35 AM
Dang, a random HN user solving all the world's problems yet again, what would humanity do without you random HN guy?by idiotsecant
5/24/2026 at 4:46:09 PM
Thanks for the summary It was a good read and you nailed it!by tana_shahh
5/23/2026 at 3:13:46 AM
The final issue that led to the scrub was that a pin that held back the QD arm got bound and would not release.by russdill
5/24/2026 at 6:36:43 AM
First item is wrong - scrub was due to hydraulic pin on launch QD arm not releasing (apparently when released it caused an arm vibration that triggered a re-lock) and they had to improve arm stabilization when pin releases.Also Ship reached original intended orbit.
A tower catch was never in the plans for this flight.
by NetMageSCW
5/23/2026 at 4:40:36 AM
“seems to have hit the water harder than expected and was very off target.”SpaceX’s people were saying it was on target, and it seems to have landed in about the same position relative to the camera buoy as previous flights. I don’t think there’s any evidence to call it off target. The landing and toppling looked the same as previous flights too.
by rogerrogerr
5/23/2026 at 5:11:15 AM
You've mixed up the ship and booster.by zardo
5/23/2026 at 4:11:34 PM
Yep, I did. Thanks.by rogerrogerr
5/23/2026 at 6:58:50 PM
Fantastic summary. Thank you!They've made great progress but have a bit left. It's always the last mile, isn't it?
It's so cool seeing progress in this space (sorry).
by singingtoday
5/24/2026 at 3:10:13 AM
It was also noticeably wayyy faster off the launch mount. These V3 raptors are pretty fierce. It took off so fast it seems destined to be stretched imminently.by erkt
5/24/2026 at 4:55:16 PM
V2 they were bring them up in groups. V3 they start them all up at once.by ericcumbee
5/23/2026 at 3:01:32 AM
Did the landing burn light two engines as expected? It happened fast, but the graphic made it look like only one lit. If that’s true, that would be impressive as only lighting two was meant to be a test. At least according to the live stream hosts.by dylan604
5/23/2026 at 7:13:55 PM
Thank you for your service! You nailed every single detail.This was as good, if not better, than the livestream itself!
by moralestapia
5/23/2026 at 9:21:31 AM
Booster is a totaly new rocket. It did launch with acarity and by any other standard did well, but the failure to relight could be anything, but I am going for the giant fuel feeder tube bieng the failed part, based on nothing more than how tickled they were with it,and tank baffling bieng a dark art. The slosh of the fuel durring the flip is going to produce an internal tidal wave, lots of stuff gets "tested" there.by metalman
5/23/2026 at 2:17:39 AM
[dead]by aaron695
5/23/2026 at 2:54:32 AM
Lots of engine failures. Doesn't exactly bode well for a company looking to go public immediately. One of the engine failures was not on the booster but Starship as you noted, and that is a bit unexpected. I don't think they have spoken about it being equal in capability with one engine out, right? Those engines don't move around to compensate IIRC.by SilverElfin
5/23/2026 at 3:04:09 AM
Not sure how you come to that conclusion. The capabilities can overcome loss of engines. The fact it was successful with loss of engines shows it is working as designed.by dylan604
5/23/2026 at 3:25:03 AM
No, it just means the mission happened to be salvageable because of its parameters. The booster is designed to have engines out and can compensate because it has so many engines and many of them are on gimbals. On starship, the vacuum engines aren’t on a gimbal. I’m not sure how it could compensate for one of three engines being out.by SilverElfin
5/23/2026 at 3:52:29 AM
Some are on a gimbal and they specifically talked how others gimbaled out a bit to compensate. This is specifically something they designed in and not an accidental lucky save. In this flight they didn’t intend to test “one engine out” feature but it worked out that way.by rdtsc
5/23/2026 at 4:10:40 AM
See my other comment. The vacuum engines are NOT on a gimbal. None of them. The sea level engines on starship and several of the engines on the booster are on a gimbal. But not the vacuum engines for space.EDIT: I cannot reply further in this thread, but my understanding is that the non vacuum engines are not intended to stay lit throughout the orbital flight in a typical mission. If they are, they can gimbal and compensate.
by SilverElfin
5/23/2026 at 6:08:54 AM
> The vacuum engines are NOT on a gimbal. None of themI said some raptor engines are on a gimbal, not vacuum engines.
To be precise, the three central engines can gimbal up to 15 degrees. That can control the thrust vectoring when an engine fails, and that’s what happens in the last flight.
Since the flight already happened and we know it didn’t spin out of control (unless you imply their diagnostic and telemetry was completely off and the engine was actually on) something must have compensated for the failure. It wasn’t magic, it was in fact the central 3 engines that did that.
You may be confused because those are called sea level engines, but that doesn’t mean they can’t work in vacuum.
by rdtsc
5/23/2026 at 5:06:38 AM
I think previous comment means "on a gimbal" as in "angled at a non completely prograde direction" (presumably angled such that each engine points through center of mass so that none of the engines impart a torque)by adgjlsfhk1
5/23/2026 at 5:23:08 AM
The person you’re replying to is trying to play rhetorical word games.The upper stage has six engines. The outer three engines are “vacuum engines” (optimized for operation in space). The inner three engines are “non vacuum engines” (optimized for operation in the atmosphere, at sea level).
The outer three vacuum engines are not gimbaled, but the inner three sea level engines are. Thus, it is completely accurate to say that they gimbaled some of the engines to compensate for the engine failure.
by labcomputer
5/23/2026 at 3:31:30 AM
They explicitly said that they have engine out capability on the ship in the stream.by echoangle
5/23/2026 at 3:53:59 AM
That’s for the booster (the big lower part) not for starship (the upper part that continues to space). They were surprised to have a vacuum engine out. In space there’s no atmosphere so you can’t use fins or wings to change direction. And if the engines can’t move around, you only have thrust and gravity and the tiny attitude adjusters to direct your ship.by SilverElfin
5/23/2026 at 5:46:47 AM
You're simply wrong. The non-vacuum-optimized engines on the upper stage are still functioning in a vacuum, and their ability to gimbal to offset the loss of one of the vacuum-optimized engines was planned for.by cwillu
5/23/2026 at 8:16:51 AM
Watch the stream again starting with the ship burn. They explicitly said they have engine out capability on ship. The sea level engines on the ship are running and gimballing.by echoangle
5/23/2026 at 8:32:50 PM
And the “side effect” of polluting the ocean? SpaceX is more of a let’s only do things half way kind of company it seems.by isodev
5/23/2026 at 8:43:20 PM
Polluting with what? It's mostly stainless steel and other inert materials.by MetallicDragon
5/23/2026 at 8:43:11 PM
You do realize that every company so far has been doing that to every booster for every launch, right?There's 2 options if you don't want to drop stages back on earth. You don't launch, you land the stage.
SpaceX is the company that pioneered propulsive landing of a booster. You can say a lot about them but not that they pollute with dropping stages in the ocean. Even in absolute sense that doesn't happen often and that's ignoring that they put over 90% of all the weight in orbit nowadays
by hvb2
5/23/2026 at 1:47:28 AM
The takeoff looked almost normal but I noticed a slight drift from vertical, likely because one of the engines was dead or dying. Overall the V3 is supposed to be an upgrade but actual progress is more or less stalling compared V2.by stephc_int13
5/24/2026 at 5:15:14 PM
I have a hard time saying that its stalled. For one we don't really have the hard data to quantify the V3s vs V2s actual performance. On their first flight we lost one on the booster and one on the ship. I don't know that the boostback burn problems are related to the engine themselves given that they had multiple failures and a premature cutoff. That feels like thats a problem upstream of the Raptor.by ericcumbee
5/23/2026 at 2:03:10 AM
It is supposed to tilt away from the launch tower immediately, you can see this on previous flights. This keeps the engine plume away from the chopsticks and top of the launch tower.by Laremere
5/23/2026 at 2:38:03 AM
Also an additional goal is to get the booster as far away from the pad as immediately possible in the event it falls back down.by irjustin
5/23/2026 at 3:10:26 AM
The payload (100t) is at least double that of previous flights. It’s largest spacecraft ever flew. That’s some stallingby signatoremo
5/23/2026 at 2:53:26 AM
There is a slight tilt normally, but I agree it was more than usual.by SilverElfin
5/24/2026 at 6:52:21 AM
Flight 12 flew a different flight path than previous test flights.by NetMageSCW
5/23/2026 at 3:10:03 AM
> The amazing views of the plasma during re-entry, something never seen live before starship, are now routine.The word "live" is doing a lot of work here. Astronauts used to film the plasma going past the windows of Shuttle.
I remember as a kid my science textbook had a still of it to illustrate plasma.
by jordanb
5/23/2026 at 4:32:20 AM
> The word "live" is doing a lot of work hereA latency of a few seconds for streaming video compared to several months for a still photo from the Shuttle seems an entirely valid use of 'live'.
by dingaling
5/23/2026 at 4:20:58 PM
The difference here is a matter of AV technology improvements in the last 40 years.by jordanb
5/23/2026 at 8:30:28 PM
The difference is having high-bandwidth signal pointed up / away from the wall of plasma.by syncsynchalt
5/24/2026 at 6:53:13 AM
And having such a large craft that a hole in the plasma envelope exists above the craft that can reach Starlink.by NetMageSCW
5/24/2026 at 12:01:38 PM
>> As far as overall progress from previous test flights goes, they're at least treading water while making many large changes.What a kind take on what is again the continuous trend of: Every flight fails for a different reason. And they still cant make the most basic use case: https://www.instagram.com/p/DWzTFAEAhSe/
by tcp_handshaker
