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Massive explosion rocks SpaceX Texas facility, Starship engine in flames
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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IFT3 was technically suborbital, but only barely. Like a couple hundred km/h short. Literally a couple of seconds longer second stage burn would have put it into a stable orbit. Or the same velocity just with a lower apogee. They intentionally left the perigee just inside the atmosphere so a deorbit burn was not required. This is also the plan for IFT4, iirc. I think they are talking about the bellyflop/suicide burn. It was not planned on IFT3, but is for IFT4.
Both the booster and the ship have attitude control thrusters that you could see firing during the live stream of IFT3. Early prototypes used nitrogen cold-gas thrusters, but were planned to be upgraded to methane/oxygen hot-gas thrusters at some point. I don't recall if/when they were.
Just to further clarify this...
They did the suborbital thing because they wanted to ensure it came in over the ocean.
If they went orbital, and anything went wrong, they'd have lost control of where it would deorbit and land, potentially putting people at risk.
So sure the rocket did not reach orbit.
No one with even a pinch of knowledge on the topic would ever try to dispute they could have if they wanted.
It was for our saftey that they didn't.