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 launch pad 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 1 hour and 17 minutes. These are ridiculous fill rates considering it's about 10 times more propellant and fills it in a 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 Starship'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 IFT2. There's 10 upgrades and changes for the ship and 7 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 Starlink 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 used 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, IFT2, 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 on board S-25. The oxygen vents inside the aft skirt have changed and it's 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 3 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 with Starship. They plan to try and relight a Raptor engine in space. Now at the moment we don't know if they're going to 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 I guess we'll have to wait and see. This time instead of making it 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 reentry 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 little 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 while 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 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 livestream 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 would be a great time to consider becoming a Patreon supporter, a YouTube member, or an ex-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 going to do it for me. I'm Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut, bringing space down to Earth for everyday people.