Starship Flight Test Poll

What do you think is most probable case after the engines start and no abort?

  • Blows up on the launch pad.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Blows up within seconds after lift off.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Blows up well clear of the launch area.

    Votes: 1 16.7%
  • Successful booster phase but failure at staging.

    Votes: 2 33.3%
  • Successful booster phase and successful staging but failure of Starship to reach orbit.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Successful to planned orbit but failure of Starship during reentry.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Successful up through Starship reentry but engines fail during water landing.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Successful all the way to Starship water landing.

    Votes: 3 50.0%

  • Total voters
    6
  • Poll closed .

Jim Logajan

Administrator
Staff member
According to SpaceX, test flight is scheduled for Monday morning:
https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-test
Could easily get delayed or aborted, which should be considered a given, hence the question of what happens after the engines start. To keep the selections to a minimum I excluded the fate of the booster after staging. On the other hand, from what I heard the booster blowing up right after liftoff would be a worse scenario than blowing up on the launch pad, so I included that possibility.
 
Hmmm.
Looks like it was a ground control ordered rapid disassembly when stage separation didn't happen as planned. Even with five engines out their ground control chatter continued to report nominal operation on the remaining engines.

Speculating: perhaps because a loss of some engines means the boost phase has to then go longer to reach the target velocity it almost looks like the booster flip that should occur after stage separation was attempted by the booster while the upper stage was still attached. So perhaps staging failed.
 
It could be argued (afterall, this is the interweb) that all 6 votes were correct.

There was a water landing and the claim is that the launch was "successful" because it cleared the tower and they collected data.
 
Some damage from the launch, obviously the special surface wasn’t so special , probably led to these engine failures on liftoff
 

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