SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first suborbital flight

Re:SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first su... by conroy on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @07:17PM (#25367597)

Does anyone know if the engines cutting out one by one was planned? Or was something going wrong with the engines?

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Re:SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first su... by tortarga on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @07:29PM (#25367750)

Seems to be planned. Elon tweeted in response to Tim Dodd that the engines were "working great" on ascent.

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Re:SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first su... by chiph on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @08:04PM (#25368102)

(not a rocket scientist) They didn't need the thrust once they lightened the rocket by burning most of the fuel.

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Re:SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first su... by arentyouspecial on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @08:08PM (#25368147)

Planned. They wanted to test restarting the engines as if it was reentering the atmosphere.

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Re:SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first su... by ansible on Thursday December 10, 2020 @03:47AM (#25371359)

Definitely planned. If you look closely at the SpaceX stream, the first two engines that were shut down were the ones restarted during the landing flip maneuver.

Too bad about the loss of fuel pressure from the header tank. SN8 wasn't quite on the landing pad, but it was close.

We also didn't see the landing legs deploy, not sure why that didn't happen.

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Re:SpaceX launches and nearly lands starship on its first su... by virgilp on Thursday December 10, 2020 @06:30AM (#25372526)

My understanding is that the speed didn't get low enough for landing legs to deploy.

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