Starship Flight 4 aces mission with double splashdown

flight four and we actually have proof of concept.  this means that We can anticipate lifting 200 tons of goods into low earth orbit and doing this daily.  Or 100 passengers.  All of this is more than enough to easily build out a proper bicyle wheel Space Station.

understand we build the hub first and that can be bolt together components to provide a hull shell able to internally dock our rocket and even provide an atmosphere.  Cable stays from the hub can hold the rim structure however large we like.  again this starts with bolt together components with pre built units.  once assembled, you slowly pressurize the rim and start spinning it up until you have the desired g force at the rim. 

Obviously this design is easily expandable and also extended along the Hub structure as well.  Thus

 we can imagine a space wheel with a diameter of a kilometer and a leght of one kilometer spinng sufficient to provide one g of acceleration on the outerh surface of the rim.

that supplies three square kilometers of interior surface easily exanded to ten additional stories toward the hub all relying on cable stays.  lots of secondary issues but with a platform like this we have thirty potential square kilometers of buildable space.  Several million folks could safely live in such a station.

just saying this to show how big we can build a space habitat supported in near earth orbit.  Once built it can then be nudged over into near moon orbit or over into a lagrange point if we like.  Thinking big, it is no trick to place dozens of these into space and allow for a population of 100,000,000.

Starship Flight 4 aces mission with double splashdown

By David Szondy

June 06, 2024

https://newatlas.com/space/starship-flight-4-double-splashdown/

SpaceX's Starship scored a double win on its fourth test mission today as both the Super Heavy first stage and the Starship second stage had successful flights, reaching space and ending in slow splashdowns in the Gulf of Mexico and the Indian Ocean.

Flight 4 lifted off on June 6, 2024 at 7:50 am CDT from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The largest and most powerful rocket ever built has made three previous attempts at successful orbital missions, though these ended in explosions, engine failures, and loss of attitude control on the latest previous attempt to land Starship.

According to SpaceX, these failures were anticipated and part of the company's policy of speeding development by testing its rockets to destruction. Unfortunately, the uncontrolled end of the previous three flights resulted in FAA investigations and official permission for Flight 4 being being withheld until the day before launch.

During Flight 4, as the 397-ft (121-m) rocket lifted off, 32 of the 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster fired successfully and completed the full ascent burn before all but three engines powered down as the Starship second stage fired its six Raptor engines during the hot fire separation maneuver. The first stage then executed a return to Earth and a landing burn for a soft splashdown at seven minutes, 24 seconds into the flight.

Meanwhile, Starship continued its engine burn as it ascended into a suborbital trajectory. During most of the flight, a constellation of onboard high-resolution cameras and SpaceX's Starlink satellite networks provided real-time video coverage as well as a steady stream of telemetry for the engineering teams.

This allowed for some very spectacular footage up to and through Starship's reentry phase. Normally, this reentry would have resulted in a communications blackout due to the build up of hot ionized plasma around the spacecraft. This time, Starship was able to continually send back video and telemetry that gave a remarkably clear picture until debris built up on the camera lens, which eventually cracked under the intense heat.

Flight 4 ended one hour and six minutes after launch when Starship fired its three center Raptor engines for a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Starship carried no payload on the test flight and the craft had some of its heat shield removed to learn how hot the hull got during reentry. In an X (formerly Twitter) post, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said that Starship lost some tiles and suffered from a damaged flap, but was able to complete its tasks.

Because the flight ended under full control, no FAA delay of Flight 5 is anticipated, which may take place in July and may see the Super Heavy booster being captured on returning to the launch site by SpaceX's Mechazilla tower.