Josiah 🚀 Profile picture
i like rockets | 🏳️‍⚧️ they/them 🏳️‍🌈 | yeah that's about it
Nov 21, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read
Starship graph thread #4! Probably my last one, but let's get right into it.

I took the fuel data from Starship's second stage of flight and graphed it as a percentage, and then overlayed that graph on my previously made graph of Starship's speed. Here's my analysis:
(1/8) A graph of the fuel remaining in Starship from stage separation through the activation of the flight termination system, with various lines and circles to indicate parts that I found interesting. See thread for more details. The first 4 minutes of the Ship's burn appeared to be nominal, with all 6 Raptors running. There is a small dip in the graph around the 5:45 mark, but I think that was a data error, as the fuel quantities get right back on track afterwards.
(2/8)
Nov 20, 2023 9 tweets 3 min read
It's time for Starship graph 3! This time, at @normanr's suggestion, I've graphed the methane (CH4)/liquid oxygen (LOx) percentages based on pixel-counting the fuel bars in the data overlay. Here is the graph on top of my previous graph of SS's velocity during the ascent.
(1/7) A graph of the fuel remaining in Super Heavy from Starship's initial liftoff through the stage separation, with vertical lines to indicate parts that I found interesting. See thread for more details. To start, I will say that this is probably my most interesting graph by far, as we can see both tanks start at less than 100%, which is most likely due to boil-off during the last minutes of the count. Then, both tanks start dropping at the same rate up until about T+1:00,
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Nov 20, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
Following on from my graph of Super Heavy's ascent yesterday, I have a graph of Starship's ascent, from staging to FTS explosion:
(1/7) A graph of the speed from Starship's stage separation through the explosion of the second stage, segmented into parts that I found interesting. See thread for more details. First, we can see that for most of the ship's burn, there is a long period of consistent increase in acceleration. This means that the Ship is firing all 6 engines at a constant throttle level, and is not trying to control for g-forces.
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Nov 19, 2023 10 tweets 3 min read
I made and annotated a graph of Starship's ascent today, capturing the speed at every 1-second interval from the livestream telemetry, and it revealed some interesting things:
(1/10) A graph of the speed from Starship's initial liftoff through the explosion of the booster, segmented into parts that I found interesting. See thread for more details. First, we see a constant acceleration of ~6m/s^2. The best reason for this that I can see would be limiting aerodynamic loads on the early ascent, which is necessary because the flaps move the CoP much higher than it is on other rockets, which do not do this on ascent.
(2/10) Image