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SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

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Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#331

Post by valine »

sandworm101 wrote: post #198
mabbo wrote: post #61

People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. Compare the SLS to Starship. SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time. Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve…

>> People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. That sounds logical, but isn't really a thing in aerospace/space. Complicated high-energy systems have thousands of failure points. So to have any chance of success each failure point needs to be engineered below, by way of example, a 0.0001% chance of failure. That costs lots of money. But say one decides to accept more risk for less c…

Evaluating the reliability of every component is extremely expensive. If you had perfect knowledge of the reliability of every component, then sure. It would be cheaper to build a perfect rocket first, then launch it. The cost saving comes because it’s cheaper to launch the rocket and see where it fails than it is to exhaustively evaluate the reliability of every component.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#332

Post by mhandley »

I'm really interested to see the hole it dug under the launch mount. The NASA SpaceFlight van took a direct hit from a fast moving chunk of concrete.

https://twitter.com/JerryPikePhoto/status/164905272269878477...

https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/1649053476276797440

Edit: it really did dig a crater (this was flat concrete under the pad before):

https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/1649062784167030785

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#334

Post by LeifCarrotson »

6d6b73 wrote: post #185
Coffeewine wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't blow up on the pad. They'll be happy to blow up dozens of these, hopefully incrementally perfecting the design each time.

That's not engineering. What they did is identical to developers copying code from SO and running it to see if it works.

Only in old fields with a long history of failures to learn from are engineers expected to be failure-free. You're absolutely right that civil or structural engineers should not be expected to build a few bridges or houses and hope that eventually they come up with a design that doesn't fall down anymore.

Starship is far outside the realm of rote engineering codes that just need to be faithfully executed. They've simulated and tested and validated as much as was reasonable, now they're working with and learning from full-scale prototypes. If it just worked, they wouldn't know how much margin they had. Now that it's exploded, they know a large number of components that were good enough for the phases of flight that it went through, and also the exact stress at which a particular component/system failed: that's incredibly valuable and useful information, and not something you can find on Stack Overflow or an ISO standard.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#335

Post by kortex »

justin66 wrote: post #37

Did the range officer destroy the rocket because it wasn't going to separate, or did the tumble destroy the rocket?

I strongly suspect the range safety officer pulled the trigger. It did a bunch of unexpected tumbles, so I think if it were flight termination system, that would have popped it earlier. I don't think it came apart of its own account, the RUD was quite rapid.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#336

Post by localplume »

mabbo wrote: post #61

People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. Compare the SLS to Starship. SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time. Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve…

100% success matters when you need to hit a launch window for interplanetary transit. or when you have spacecraft that are integrating sensors from dozens of commercial and academic partners. 100% success matters when rockets are actually launching payloads. what is the evidence that this fail fast method is superior to the already tried and tested method? everyone just assumes that. the differences between spx starship and SLS go far beyond just that method anyway so you cannot possibly compare

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#337

Post by 93po »

nomilk wrote: post #256
sschueller wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saturn V was 110m tall and 140t in the 1960s.

The height difference is not huge, but Starship is twice the weight and 1/10th the cost ($50b vs $5bn in 2022 USD)!

And twice the thrust

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#340

Post by simonh »

bumby wrote: post #281
mabbo wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not proposing something, I'm describing it. This is what SpaceX is doing , and it's quite successful. And you can look all the way back to their little hopper version of the Falcon 9 and see that this strategy has been the key to them undercutting the launch market significantly. My prediction: SpaceX will have a 5th 100% successful launch of Starship before the SLS has a 5th successful launch. They'll just have…

> My prediction: SpaceX will have a 5th 100% successful launch of Starship before the SLS has a 5th successful launch. They'll just have ten not-100%-success launches before then. I'm not the best way to frame this is "first one to a single successful launch". Reliability matters when you're dealing with high-risk scenarios, so a better measure is "probability of a given launch being successful".

That only matters after you’ve gone operational though. The difference here isn’t risk appetite for operational launches, it’s risk appetite for test launches. SpaceX expects to do many, many more test launches than SLS, in fact counting Starship upper stage launches they’re already well ahead.
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