I would love to see the dashboard that the team that made the decision was looking at.
I'd be interested to hear speculation by people who know about this as to what they think went wrong. Was it off course? Did the engines not relight in time? Did it not have enough fuel?
Indeed. It had just finished the boostback burn and jettisoned the hot staging ring when the divert was announced. I wonder if after the boostback burn they determined that there was insufficient fuel for a good safely margin when trying a tower catch.
The catch attempt is actually a divert - IIRC both Super Heavy and regular Falcon 9 first stage target empty space by default and only divert for landing once all checks out. :-)
That is what happened. It performs the maneuvers at a primary target site with no catcher, or terrain, or ground-based feedback; the Gulf; switching to an alternate site; the launch tower; if and only if all factors allow for a real catch.
It's not so much a retarget in this case. The water landing is the default path, they have to manually tell it to target the landing pad if it is a go for the catch.
The way it gently splashed down in the ocean without hiccup - I think this is promising and that they will get to the chopsticks catching a booster is boring and mundane phase soon. Specialists would say why they aborted.
Well, it made a big fireball. It's only that the official stream cut away before that. You could still hear the SpaceX crowd cheering as they (apparently) got to see it. The fireball was in any case visible in the NSF stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/6yd_cpPP4fE&t=3h31m35s
Though the upper stage actually didn't explode this time, it only broke apart.
Water splashdown did look very smooth. I seemed like they cut the video before it exploded (I assume), but hopefully there's some third-party footage or SpaceX will release it later.
Oh, you're right: this did also happen back in 2018, with a Falcon booster (GovSat-1 launch). I don't think the part about the missiles was accurate though.
no barge for super heavy- the point of the catch is to save weight on the massive legs that would be required. It “soft landed” in the Gulf a few miles off shore, meaning they did a burn and it entered the water not in freefall (though it still looked faster than I expected).
I'm a project management nerd, so let's take a look at the dependency chain to get to usefulness: to be anything other than an oversized orbital launcher, starship has to be refueled. Refueling depends on meeting payload specs, otherwise you need a too many starships to refuel one upper stage in orbit. Refueling also depends on rapid turnaround, which depends on near-zero damage to launch towers, engines, shields, and tanks. All of these dependencies depend on repeatability, which is why not catching the booster is a significant regression not a huge one, but marginal negative progress.
Strange how it is leaning to one side but otherwise looks just fine. I'd have thought that anything with enough force to push it over like that would have caused other more visible damage. Pretty grainy video though.
Whatever it was, it seems more likely that it was a booster issue than anything relating to the tower given that they were initially go for the catch. It was only during the boostback burn that they scrapped it.
