None of the past tests has reached orbit (IFT3 got to orbital altitude, but not orbital velocity), so I believe SpaceX is essentially a projection that they will reach orbit this time.
"SpaceX's Starship mega rocket launched from Texas on its third test flight, reaching an altitude of 160 kilometers and achieving orbital velocity [...]"
https://x.com/CBCNews/status/1768296197846884741
If you look at the readings on the screen and do some basic physics instead of relying on the press releases of a biased party, you will realize that they were short of orbital velocity. At that altitude, orbital velocity is 27000 km/h, and IFT3 got to 21000-22000 km/h.
CNBC parrots what SpaceX's press release says, and they have no other sources (see what they do with other corporations). And yes, they got closer than I thought, but still short for 170 km. 150 km has a higher orbital velocity.
There was an in-orbit relight in the IFT3 flight plan, which failed to happen. IFT4 is somewhat more conservative - just get to orbit (happened), pseudo-land the booster (happened), and get back out of orbit (remains to be seen).
The amount of disinformation that SpaceX and Musk create around failed tests is really annoying and honestly somewhat problematic. It would be nice if SpaceX could just honestly say "this worked and this didn't," but we have to pretend that everything is a miraculous success. After the engine failed on IFT3, the immediate line was "we planned it this way" and then days later "we reached orbital velocity." Launching rockets is impressive enough that you don't have to try to gaslight us all on the way there.
As far as I can tell, my scorecard has IFT1 and IFT3 as failures based on what the flight plans said going in, and IFT2 and (so far) IFT4 as successes.
Edit: I'm suspicious of the fact that they turned off the feed right after cutting the engines and some gas vented. Previous tests have had no problem showing a video feed at this phase.
The orbital relight test was not a factor in the fact that Starship was not intended to reach orbital velocity. You may have noticed that the flight plan indicated that Starship was to land somewhere in the Indian ocean and usually reaching orbital velocity vastly increases the difficulty of doing a planned reentry. The flight plans had them turning off the engines before they actually reached orbital velocity
They scrapped the relight test when they realized that they were losing control authority. The relight test was not meant for reaching orbit, it was to prove they COULD relight the engines on Starship while in space.
The original IFT-3 flight plan had them reaching orbit and then doing the in-orbit relight as a de-orbit burn. At that altitude, there's enough drag that you will de-orbit pretty quickly if you are in orbit and your de-orbit burn fails, so there was no risk of a big piece of space junk.
The disinformation I mentioned is why everyone keeps being "wrong" about SpaceX. It's incredibly difficult to be right.
All the info about IFT-3 pre launch always mentioned that they were deliberately not actually going to enter orbit, so as not to need an unproven de-orbit burn to avoid 100t of space junk.
100t of space junk that would then re-enter at some unpredictable time. Bad idea.
So they were on a trajectory that would automatically have the vehicle re-enter the atmosphere and splash down in some ocean, even if it were fully inert.
A 150 km orbit has enough drag to de-orbit you very quickly if you don't propulsively stay in it. The atmosphere doesn't just suddenly stop at 100 km, it gets exponentially thinner and thinner, and at 150 km there's still plenty of atmosphere to slow down a big chunk of stainless steel. Even 3x higher there's enough atmosphere that tiny satellites can essentially turn their solar panels into sails and deorbit with no propulsion within a few weeks. The ISS at ~400 km has to regularly burn their engines to stay in orbit.
Read the IFT-3 pre-flight materials, preferably from a source that comes from before the flight. They clearly intended to enter an orbital trajectory and then get out of it. SpaceX's historical revisionism muddies the waters. At the very least, they would not have announced (ie lied about) successful orbital insertion (which they didn't do) if they had no intention to get there.
1. At step 4 for Starship, they write "Once S28 has reached orbital velocity..." Not trajectory. Not orbit.
2. At step 8, we have the "relight demo". Note the last sentence, the one in parentheses: "for an actual deorbit burn, the ship would need to yaw 180º first".
So there is no deorbit burn in the flight plan. The relight demo was just supposed to show that they could relight, and thus hopefully could do a deorbit burn. Note also that the ship deorbited despite the fact that there was no relight demo (never mind no deorbit burn).
Orbital velocity = orbital speed + orbital trajectory. Velocity is a vector. Orbital velocity + orbital altitude means orbit. That is, unless you think that everyone at SpaceX misspoke and they were only aiming for orbital speed (which they did not achieve with IFT3), and just wanted that speed in any direction.
Sounds like the plan to de-orbit was then to just go belly forward and let drag take you out of orbit. That is pretty much how every object in LEO de-orbits.
The trajectory of the actual flight was suborbital, but the planned trajectory of the flight involved burning all the way to orbital insertion (hence the "orbital velocity" being on the flight plan). Once again, velocity is a vector, and "orbital velocity" means "a heading and speed suitable for orbit."
By the way, I agree that they never intended to complete an orbit, just that they intended to get into (and promptly out of) an orbit. IFT4 did that, for example.
After IFT3 failed to achieve orbital insertion (probably because a leak caused it to run out early), SpaceX announced that not only was the plan to not get to an orbit, but also that they had achieved orbital velocity. They claimed both things!
Both of those claims seem to be lies, and it is also logically inconsistent to claim that you never wanted to reach orbital velocity and also that you got there.
You are overlooking the easier explanation: they used "velocity" in the more colloquial sense meaning speed, not in the vector sense. Suddenly everything is logically consistent.
And everything matches what they said, what they filled with FAA prior to the fight, etc.
All I see is a video from after IFT-3 that parrots SpaceX's post-hoc rationalization about the fact that their craft could not reach orbital velocity. If you look at the GAO report on Artemis, one of the big issues they mentioned is that Starship has not proven that it can reach orbit, and SpaceX is very interested in making sure that the narrative is that it can and did. It was only after the fact that they said that the never intended to reach an orbital trajectory with IFT-3.
And actually, people rely on drag to deorbit huge objects in space in a controlled manner all the time. It's the preferred way to do it, and is basically the only way it's done - any satellite with fuel left will just stay in orbit. They have it down to a science. Usually they aim for the middle of an ocean. Sometimes they miss and chunks fall in a backyard.
> All I see is a video from after IFT-3 that parrots SpaceX's post-hoc rationalization about the fact that their craft could not reach orbital velocity.
Given that the video was posted 4 days prior to that test, it is downright prescient that they are parroting a post-hoc rationalization.
Just watched it, I had my dates mixed up. The trajectory this guy drew on the map does not involve starship reaching orbital velocity anywhere on it, which is inconsistent with SpaceX's publications. SpaceX's claim was that IFT3 would enter an orbit and then leave it, not that it would follow a ballistic trajectory to the indian ocean.
It's possible that SpaceX made the mistake of using the words "orbital velocity" and this YouTuber is right, though.
> SpaceX's claim was that IFT3 would enter an orbit
You are claiming that, SpaceX never claimed that, only "orbital velocity" meaning "orbital speed" in this context. They wanted to test if the Starship is capable of reaching orbit, but w/o entering orbit for safety reasons. For that they wanted to achieve "orbital velocity" but of course not in an "orbital trajectory".
The max q, or maximum dynamic pressure, condition is the point when an aerospace vehicle's atmospheric flight reaches the maximum difference between the fluid dynamics total pressure and the ambient static pressure.
Correct, but the time and velocity when you reach max Q (and the flight plan CSV) indicate something about your path to orbit. I was extrapolating from previous starship tests.
