Hot Staging Troubles: What Really Happened To Booster 9?

Keep exploring at Get started for free, the first 200 people get 20% off an annual premium subscription. In this episode we will examine the critical design considerations that had to be addressed to allow Starship to execute its hot stage maneuver without destroying both vehicles in the process! At the end you will hopefully gain an appreciation for the amount of work that went into being able to pull this off in a ridiculously short timeline. After covering the upgrades that needed to be made for this to be successful, we will get deeper into the physics of hot staging. This isn’t a unique mode of stage separation but the way it is executed is unlike any other rocket that has done this. Lastly, we will address all of the speculative explanations about what caused Booster 9 to explode shortly after stage separation. The goal is not to come to a definite conclusion, but get a visual understanding of each theory, and then determine which ones