An 'orbit' here is defined as a trajectory on which if no re-entry burn is fired Starship would remain in space for a period of over 24 hours (I don't want to get 'burned' by some sort of wacky sub-orbital flight that still lands at Starbase or in the Atlantic after one circumnavigation.
I will add an IFT 7 if Other is larger than any other option for a non-trivial period of time (and so on, by induction)
If SpaceX changes the naming convention, for example to OFT, this question will still apply.
If SpaceX announces before IFT 5 that IFT 6 will orbit, IFT 6 would be the one to resolve YES. If they did this I would still wait until before the (eg) #6 flight to check they didn't change it based on what happened in #5
1,000https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1896239972195438598
This is a real video of a past @SpaceX Starship water landing. Trying again tomorrow.
We need to perfect ship reentry at extreme temperatures before attempting to catch the ship with the tower arms, like the booster.
Certainly not attempting catch or orbit on flight 8 but does this sound like there could be more flights before attempting a catch. If they haven't perfected reentry perhaps they also won't attempt orbit? Or am I trying to read to much into this and it really only means catch not going to be attempted on flight 8?
@ChristopherRandles At minimum, they won't attempt orbit until they're confident they can deorbit (controlledly). Beyond that, orbit is mostly a pretty meaningless milestone by itself, but will allow them to test other functionality (payload deployments into orbit, longer-duration coast phases, solar power generation, etc.)
My theory is that they already have the locational accuracy to land on the tower, but they're not confident enough in the heat shield yet. The worst case is trying to deorbit over the launch site and splattering the entire area with hot chunks of Starship because you broke up during reentry.
So that's one of the main reasons why they're flying with all those missing tiles; if it survives that, then they can safely start deorbiting with a trajectory near the launch site with a full heatshield.
Oh and yeah they're just going to the Indian Ocean for flight 8, same as the plan for flight 7. You can tell from the NOTMARs but also from the flight plan lasting only an hour, rather than 90 minutes.
@CommanderZander I believe this is a linked market and therefore only one can resolve YES, hence I assume this is intended to resolve to the first such test flight for which this is the case