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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

#561

Post by bdcravens »

AviationAtom wrote: post #265
mcculley wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad." I am confused. Everything I read before the launch said that it was intended to reach orbital altitude and make it around the Earth.

Musk was saying it was a 50% chance the rocket blew up on the launchpad. Their sole hope was that it made it in the air, leaving the launchpad unscathed and quickly usable for future launches.

He actually said 50% chance of reaching orbit.

> “I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won't be boring,” Musk promised at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. “I think it's got, I don't know, hopefully about a 50% chance of reaching orbit.”

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#562

Post by samwillis »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #551
samwillis wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, the two untested things were stage zero (all the new ground infrastructure) and stage one (booster). I think it's clear one of their biggest lessons is that the construction of the launch mount is wrong, and it REALY needs a flame diverter. Take a look at this photo: https://mobile.twitter.com/LabPadre/status/16490627841670307... That massive hole in the ground should not have happed, and I suspect that was…

I agree with this assessment and probably the biggest problem in the test. After that, they still have a fair way to go on Raptor reliability; I was a bit disappointed with the number of engine outs: clearly the engines have not arrived. I think the big win of the day was the overall resilience of the vehicle. It seemed to handle (what looked to be) possibly explosive engine failures and kept going and stayed intact.…

> After that, they still have a fair way to go on Raptor reliability

I suspect the debris from blowing a whole in the ground was the biggest contributing factor for the engines out. It looked like at lease 4 we're gone before it left the pad.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#563

Post by bdcravens »

swarnie wrote: post #118
mcculley wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad." I am confused. Everything I read before the launch said that it was intended to reach orbital altitude and make it around the Earth.

The Chief Twit said "anything other than blowing up the launch pad is a success."

> “I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won't be boring,” Musk promised at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. “I think it's got, I don't know, hopefully about a 50% chance of reaching orbit.”

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#564

Post by jungturk »

smiley1437 wrote: post #395
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…

Parable of the Pots - Quantity leads to quality https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality... [A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he…

This parable elegantly explains how McDonald's came to offer the world's best hamburger.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#565

Post by kortex »

samwillis wrote: post #483
kortex wrote: post #365

Initially posted this as a reply, but going top-level, cause the hot takes are too spicy for my liking. So the plan was to test x, y, and z. Launch sequence and takeoff, stage separation and Starship engine light, and the post-launch stuff like booster wet landing, reentry, and heat tiles. The booster by itself is not aerodynamic, so the only way to test x is with a starship on top. And if you have starship, you migh…

Exactly, the two untested things were stage zero (all the new ground infrastructure) and stage one (booster). I think it's clear one of their biggest lessons is that the construction of the launch mount is wrong, and it REALY needs a flame diverter. Take a look at this photo: https://mobile.twitter.com/LabPadre/status/16490627841670307... That massive hole in the ground should not have happed, and I suspect that was…

Woof, that's a hole! Yeah I completely forgot "w", all the stage 0 stuff. There's only so much you can test with wet dress rehearsals, at some point you need to just launch a fully loaded rocket from it and see how it behaves.

> On top of that there was significantly more debris making its way to South Padre

Tim Dodd got coated in dust and sand (probably pulverized concrete) kicked up from the launch well outside the exclusion zone (iirc his studio is just over 5km). That's not just a bad sign from the engineering and politics/perception point of view, but I'm sure EPA has some feelings on that amount of rapid unscheduled geology.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#566

Post by dotnet00 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #180
LeonM wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not known, as SpaceX is a private company, and the rocket is still being developed. But I'd say a whole lot less than $2B per launch ;-)

You touch upon an interesting advantage that private space engineering has that, depending on one's attitude on the topic, may or may not be fair. NASA has to do everything in the public eye and their process reflects this. Private enterprise is allowed to hide information, which implies they are allowed to massage information. (... this probably says unfortunate things about the nature of governance by public sentim…

It's important to remember that SLS is only funded by NASA, everything else is still pretty opaque behind Boeing's curtains.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#567

Post by dabluecaboose »

pmontra wrote: post #310
the_third_wave wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect SpaceX will have to add something resembling an escape system before the thing gets "man-rated". That system could also be used to protect the passengers in case of a failed landing. It will add weight and thus lower the carrying capacity but they seem to have enough margin to allow for such an addition. They already have the header tanks in the top of Starship, adding a number of escape engines and some ex…

They want to carry 100 people. An escape system for those many people is the same scale of a commercial airliner escape system, which is designed to be operated on a stationary plane, on land or water. Astronauts will be well trained to use it but I think that there must be a lot of openings to let 100 people get out quickly in mid air. Maybe they'll agree that Starship is its own escape system. There is a section ab…

Fun, little known fact: The Shuttle program's only successful post-launch abort was performed by Challenger in STS-51-F (not to be confused with Challenger's STS-51-L, which ended... suboptimally)

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#568

Post by rootusrootus »

sschueller wrote: post #244
nomilk wrote: post #157

Anyone reading the headline could easily be misled: this was a massive success. Some context: - This was the first "integrated test" of the Starship space craft with its booster - The whole thing together was 120 meters tall - It will be one order of magnitude larger than the current largest rocket in terms of carrying capacity (~150 tonnes if it needs to return the booster, 250 if it doesn't) - There's 5 more of the…

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

As impressive as Starship is or will be, Saturn V has definitely earned a place in the history books that cannot be undone. The first airplane flew in 1903. Just 64 years later, Saturn V was launched for the first time. The fact that it has taken us 56 more years since then to outdo it says a lot.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#569

Post by mschuster91 »

samwillis wrote: post #543
dsfyu404ed wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Need to see the numbers before passing judgement. Dirt is cheap compared to concrete. Depending on how many cycles the concrete is expected to last it may be cheaper both short and long term to just have "ablative dirt" and bulldoze around afterwards "reloading" the launcher. There's also other variables like how long it takes for the engines to stabilize and the launcher to release the rocket, weight of rocket, etc…

The issue is that that dirt and rocks flying around damages all the other expensive equipment at the launch site. There is going to be some very dead kit down there. They can't do that every time. But big dust clouds also upset people, and SpaceX can't afford to fall out with the locals.

Locals? Don't they own 99% of Boca Chica by now?

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#570

Post by jackmott42 »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #551
samwillis wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, the two untested things were stage zero (all the new ground infrastructure) and stage one (booster). I think it's clear one of their biggest lessons is that the construction of the launch mount is wrong, and it REALY needs a flame diverter. Take a look at this photo: https://mobile.twitter.com/LabPadre/status/16490627841670307... That massive hole in the ground should not have happed, and I suspect that was…

I agree with this assessment and probably the biggest problem in the test. After that, they still have a fair way to go on Raptor reliability; I was a bit disappointed with the number of engine outs: clearly the engines have not arrived. I think the big win of the day was the overall resilience of the vehicle. It seemed to handle (what looked to be) possibly explosive engine failures and kept going and stayed intact.…

> but having that gut feeling that maybe there's more to a situation than the numbers would have you believe is still something that humans can do better

In my life experience so far, humans having gut feelings it 99% of the time complete nonsense. But people forget the 99 times and that one time their gut was right they tell that story forever about how smart they were.

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