That seems needlessly Kerbal
If the whole point of the first stage is to place the second stage on a safe trajectory to orbit, tumbling it into a spin seems like a very bad idea.
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wheresthefish Partly filled with wrong, Thu 20 Apr 2023, 23:04,
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Seems a bit like they're working around the KSP2 docking port bug!
I guess they're prioritising design simplicity and mass savings over losses to momentum and aerodynamics. Ideally Starship doesn't do any cartwheels, glides away and powers through with minimal loss of speed, while Superheavy does a 180 (or 540?) rotation to become aerodynamically stable while flying in reverse.
It does seem utterly insane, but reusable decouplers or spring powered docking ports are probably an even more complex problem to solve than flipping a rocket.
This test flight was mainly concerned with taking off, staging, and crashing the two stages in roughly the right places. No payload, no attempt to make orbit, so they were running light and massively overpowered. Assuming it truly exploded due to auto-destruct the structure did very well, performing numerous flips and rotations while firing its engines, shedding about 1000kmh in a matter of seconds and holding together. All this with no autostrut!
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brb Monkhouse Stampede, Fri 21 Apr 2023, 19:22,
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