Comment on The inside story of Elon Musk’s mass firings of Tesla Supercharger staff
ebc@lemmy.ca 7 months agoHaven’t watched the video, but what do you think circularization is? If you’re “just a circulization away from orbit”, you are indeed going a bit slower than orbital velocity. There’s no point to going orbital velocity if your trajectory still brings you back inside the atmosphere. To get to orbit you want to raise your periapsis outside the atmosphere, and you do that by doing a burn at the apoapsis, which is what we commonly call “circularization”.
anachronist@midwest.social 7 months ago
The planned goal of the mission was to achieve orbital velocity but not orbital trajectory. This was because they had not yet demonstrated the ability of their vac engines to relight in space. If they go into a stable orbit but can’t relight they can not deorbit and they become space junk.
They initially claimed that this was a success (they achieved target velocity) but subsequent analysis was they were quite a bit off. Also because their engine relight test was failed/cancelled they will also not be allowed to attempt a stable orbit in IFT4. They have to demonstrate relight/deorbit capability before they will be allowed to attempt stable orbit.