Cool! Hopefully they get to use them this time. I’m really curious as to how the hot staging will turn out.
Does anyone know if this is common for US rockets or not? I didn’t see too much info on it after a cursory Google search.
Hot staging? As far as I could find, the only US rockets that use it were the Titan launch vehicles.
Great footage. It does look very destructive. As it is now, stage 0 gets destroyed by stage 1 and stage 1 will get destroyed by stage 2. It’ll be great to see how they make this all work.
Didn’t see a rain of tiles fall off so that’s good progress!
Seems like perhaps a dozen fell off.
IS there better video to count tiles? But judging by integrated test failing tiles is not a big problem now.
The leaked photos of the flight test ship before breakup didn’t show many tiles missing, so it’s still possible that the static fire environment is harsher, at least for vibrations, than the actual flight.
For missing tiles, there was a before and after picture posted in the Starship dev thread: