Starship shows it can deploy satellites, but Moon mission clock still ticks

Summary

Science Starship shows it can deploy satellites, but Moon mission clock still ticks What's a tumbling Super Heavy and a skipped Raptor relight between friends? SpaceX has successfully demonstrated that Starship will be just great at deploying Starlink satellites. But a return to the Moon still looks some distance off. Starship's twelfth flight test started swimmingly on Friday, May 22, at 1730 CT as all 33 Raptor 3 engines on the Super Heavy Booster were ignited, and the vehicle leaped off its Texas launch pad.The flight test was scrubbed in the final seconds of a launch attempt on the previous day, but the countdown proceeded without significant hitches this time around. All went well for the first few minutes of flight. One of the Raptor engines shut down, but the remaining 32 continued burning. Things began to go awry at the hot-staging maneuver. The maneuver avoids a loss of acceleration by igniting the second-stage engines before the first-stage engines are completely cut off. Things deviated from nominal rapidly after this point. First, the Super Heavy Booster flipped to perform its boostback burn, but after a flash was visible at the rear of the vehicle, the engines shut down, and the booster tumbled back into the Gulf of Mexico. It attempted to reignite its engines for the landing burn, but broke up. Still, SpaceX hadn't planned to recover the booster, so its loss was not a disaster. It will mean, however, that the company will need to give serious thought to what happened to those engines before it attempts another crowd-pleasing catch maneuver.That left Starship to continue its suborbital trajectory on its six Raptor engines. Except that one of the big Raptor 3 vacuum engines failed, meaning that the remaining engines had to burn longer to keep the vehicle on its trajectory. SpaceX put a brave face on things and stated that the vehicle had "demonstrated its engine-out capability and achieved its planned trajectory." Indeed, it had, but the company also opt...