What Did SpaceX Change & Upgrade For Starship's 3rd Flight Test?

- Starship's third full stack flight test is just

around the corner and with the first two tests,

achieving some merits of success and progress.

The third flight with Booster 10

and Ship 28 has made some pretty substantial upgrades

and changes to not only the hardware,

but also the flight profile and the mission itself.

I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut,

and today I just wanted to do a really quick overview

of these changes and upgrades as we prepare

for what's always guaranteed to be an exciting launch

of the world's biggest

and most powerful rocket ever flown. Let's get started.

- Let's start off with the launchpad

and the stage zero infrastructure

because there have been some huge

upgrades since the last flight.

SpaceX can now load LOX on the booster in less than 40

minutes, and methane in 41 minutes, both took about an hour

and 37 minutes before,

and now they can load LOX on the ship in 53 minutes

instead of an hour and 13 minutes

and methane in 51 minutes instead of one hour

and 17 minutes.

These are ridiculous fill rates,

considering it's about 10 times more propellant

and fills it into similar time to a Falcon 9.

Thanks to additional coolers

and pumps, there are some new tanks

that will be used on future flights to help

with additional storage needs.

The pad also received a few upgrades

and additional heat reinforcement on the launch mount

and tower, and a few small tweaks here

and there to hopefully reduce refurbishment

time between flights.

Okay, onto the rocket itself,

the FAA has signed off on SpaceX's mishap report on

Starhip's second flight, which ended in both the ship

and the booster being terminated.

SpaceX listed 17 upgrades to the ship

and booster that would address the issues

that cropped up during IFT-2.

There's ten upgrades and changes for the ship

and seven for the super heavy booster.

So here's a quick overview of some

of those changes on the booster.

There's a few noticeable changes on the outside.

First off, you may notice the grid fins on Booster 10 look

different than Booster 9,

but SpaceX actually walked back a small design change

and returned to the grid Fin design from prior vehicles

removing a small strip along the outer edge,

there have been upgrades to the Starling terminals

that will hopefully help improve data

connections to the vehicle.

There's a slightly different common dome design

that's debuting on Booster 10 that's more rounded

and less rampy.

There's a small tweak to the stability mount that they use

during lifting, and there's likely some changes

to filtration and potentially slosh baffles in the booster

as some kind of blockage in the oxygen line of a raptor.

was the demise of Booster 9

but the booster will mostly see changes in software

and engine control algorithms that should help.

It better cope with the flip maneuver after hot staging.

While the booster doesn't seem to have a ton

of notable hardware changes,

S 28 is quite a bit upgraded over its predecessor S 25.

In fact, IFT-2 which flew Booster 9

and Ship 25 was a bit of a mismatch

as S 25 was already a fairly outdated vehicle

design when it flew.

In fact, Ship 28 started life completely differently when it

was stacked in reverse order from top down,

which allowed the vehicle to always be attached

to the crane, reducing rigging time during construction.

It also finally caught up to its booster friend by upgrading

to Raptors that have electric actuators

for its thrust vector control system.

Instead of the older hydraulic ones.

This greatly tidied up the engine compartment

and helps reduce the risk of fire,

which fire reduction risks is generally another upgrade.

S 28 has many tweaks

and changes to help prevent fire on the vehicle, which is

what took down S 25.

There's also just the simple change

to not dump oxygen in the same manner, which is

what helped feed the fire onboard S 25.

The oxygen vents inside the aft skirt have changed

and it speculated their angle could help

with attitude control as well.

More obvious changes on the outside include some changes

to the heat shield placement

and pattern similar to the booster.

It also gets a mighty upgrade

with Starlink dishes now featuring four dishes instead

of one, which again will help provide better data

and hopefully get us some beautiful

views while it's in space.

The flaps added some small static wicks

to help discharge static electricity.

Side note, the front flaps are actually older than S 25.

They were taken off of S 22, which never flew.

S 28's aft flaps have beefier mounting points compared

to S 25 and the body has been strengthened

with 24 new reinforcement stringers inside the oxygen tank.

Another fairly obvious change between S 25

and S 28 is the vents on the propellant tanks.

A bunch of them have moved in location

and the cowbell style thruster ish vents have completely

been removed from the middle of the ship

and now the nose vents do feature

that cowbell style thruster-ish vent.

But maybe the coolest change we see on S 28 is something

that I've been waiting to see

for a long time on one of these tests.

S 28 finally has its payload door operable instead

of being welded shut, which brings us

to the changes in the mission

that we will hopefully see occur on IFT 3.

And there's actually some fairly large changes

that are completely different from IFT 2 with

that payload bay not welded shut.

It means we're hopefully going to see it open a little more

than three minutes after ship engine shutdown at 11 minutes

and 56 seconds, there is a Starlink dispenser installed,

but since this is a suborbital mission,

there will be no payload actually deployed

Then we'll hopefully see another first first with Starship.

They plan to try and relight a raptor engine in space.

Now at the moment we don't know if they will do this

prograde or retrograde

so either slightly extending its reentry location

or slightly shortening it

but I'd speculate they'd want to practice a retrograde

deorbit burn, but we'll have to wait and see.

This time, instead of making about three quarters through

an orbit and then landing in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii,

Starship is now targeting a good bit shorter trajectory

and it will land in the Indian Ocean near Australia.

The reenter corridor is fairly large

and I'm guessing it's that big,

so they can accommodate whether

or not Starship completes that Raptor relight test as

to why exactly they're aiming shorter than before.

We don't really know the difference

between the two points is marginal in terms

of total velocity, so perhaps just reentering in a bit more

of a remote location is preferred

and it just adds a touch more margin to the profile.

The ship will still just do a belly flop landing

as there appears to be no attempt at a propulsive flip

maneuver likely

because they're just not even sure if it's going

to survive reentry.

So they might as well wait to try

and program all those maneuvers

until they know the ship can make it back in one piece.

Lastly, one more exciting change is

that SpaceX will be attempting to transfer propellant

between a header tank and a main tank wall in space.

This is part of the "Tipping Point" contract for NASA

to demonstrate this technology for a milestone

for the Artemis Program's Starship Human Landing System.

While propellant transfer isn't new,

it's usually done in a relatively small amount

between two vehicles like the ISS

and a resupply vessel like ROSCOSMOS' Progress vehicle,

which is a hypergolic propellant

and not cryogenic propellant like on Starship,

successfully completing this test is worth $53 million.

So we really hope they nail this one,

but that's pretty much everything.

Okay, so now for my thoughts

and expectations at this point,

you can tell SpaceX has higher expectations than before

and they should because it's really to the point now

where this vehicle needs

to start honing in on achieving some of its lofty goals.

But of course, do keep in mind

that this is still just a test vehicle and a test flight.

So it's not detrimental if this would fail spectacularly

again, because of course there's no shortage

of rockets in production waiting for their chance to fly.

However the clock is ticking,

and of course, NASA needs this rocket in order

to land humans on the moon for the Artemis program.

So yeah, it's it's time to start, you know, seeing progress

and getting closer and closer to some

of those big milestones.

So personally, I hope we see the booster safely come back

and do a landing burn for a soft water landing.

I think that'd be great.

I also hope the ship gets through its main burn

and completes its three demonstrations

of relight door operations and propellant transfer.

If it does survive reentry, that'd be awesome,

but for that one, I'm a little more 50 / 50.

But what do you think?

Do you think it's going to do better than last time?

About the same? What are your expectations?

Let me know your thoughts or your

questions in the comments below.

And don't forget to join us live

whenever this thing launches.

We already have our 4K live stream up,

which I think we're the only true end-to-end 4K Stream

available since SpaceX no longer streams on YouTube.

Our last stream was amazing, honestly,

and we've made even more upgrades

and spent hundreds of hours literally working

to make this next stream incredible.

So I hope we see you there.

And now it'd be a great time to consider becoming a Patreon

supporter, a YouTube member,

or an X subscriber, so you can get access

to our 4K multi-view clean feed,

and you can have your very own mission control in your own

house on launch day.

That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd,

the Everyday Astronaut bringing space down to earth

for everyday people.