POST-Post-Mortem on SpaceX Starship Rocket Launch
No new information here …. Just a better telescopic camera. The Twitter message by Everyday Astronaut shows the rocket flying responsibly along …. even with a few engines out.
You can click through this gallery of screengrabs from the Twitter post.
I have heard that the occasional flare of bright yellow exhaust from fuel from the hydraulic pump seems to have burned and exploded early in the flight. That pump provides the hydraulic pressure needed to articulate the steering engines. Good news, SpaceX had already replaced all hydraulics on future boosters with electrical actuators. So this won’t be a failure mode next time.
There are also descriptions of peculiar exhaust as “Engine-Rich” — i.e. an engine’s components burning up and about to fail. Copper components burn bright green. That is a SpaceX play on words from my own rocket launch days when we diagnosed peculiar exhaust as “Oxygen-Rich” or “Fuel-Rich” due to improper balancing of fuel/oxygen ratio.
The second part of the video shows the vehicle flying very badly (but still in one piece). It is plummeting down, out of control, through the upper atmosphere, (but still in one piece).
