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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

#761

Post by s1artibartfast »

cratermoon wrote: post #753
vannevar wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That massive hole in the ground should not have happed, and I suspect that was not an expected possibility. Interestingly, this post predicting exactly this kind of damage was flagged on HN just days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590279 I think it's unlikely that SpaceX wasn't aware of the damage that would be caused. They have a pretty good engineering team, and that aspect didn't involve an anomaly,…

Seems like the author was closer to the truth that HN gave him credit for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thA8jlgcJ-8

I dont think it was close to the truth at all.

They predict shattered glass,damaged foundations of beachside homes, and people scarred for life by the launch.

This was hyperbolic fearmongering. The actual launch was very close to baseline expectations. The lack of launch pad flame channels was common knowlegle, and no great insight.

This entire blog is dedicated to environmental complants about SpaceX operations. If there had been flame channels, the author would instead be writing about how they are pointed at sensitive environmental habitat.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#762

Post by gumballindie »

5 kt lifting off into orbit is pretty darn impressive - well done to those that worked on it! In my view this was a total success, far from failure. Imagine laughing at this while the best you can do is deploy some lame JS to a server, while these people built this awesome machine.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#765

Post by labcomputer »

sandworm101 wrote: post #309
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 point would be that while SpaceX does save lots of money, it doesn't do so by producing cheap or less reliable rockets. It would never accept a failure rate any different than anyone else because, in aerospace, that isn't really a thing. SpaceX can certainly blast forwards with different business practices and different tolerance for developmental risks, but the final product will not be fundamentally different th…

> My point would be that while SpaceX does save lots of money, it doesn't do so by producing cheap or less reliable rockets

Indeed, if we assume that the each launch is an IID binomial coin flip (which isn’t really the right way to evaluate right-censored data), and observe (by reading Wikipedia) that SpaceX has had at least 450 successful Falcon 9 launches since the last in-flight failure, then they have at least five nines of reliability:

0.999995^450 ~= 449/450.

Which appears to be an industry-leading stat.

For context (excluding the Columbia re-entry failure), the space shuttle only had 4 nines:

0.99994^125 ~= 124/125

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#766

Post by lutorm »

bumby wrote: post #603
mgfist wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can actually see this in SpaceX. In development when stakes are relatively low (e.g., no payload or passengers), the risk threshold is high. But they start taking a more measured approach when that risk starts to ratchet up. The danger being, advocates of one approach don't always know when/how to transition to the other. This corroborates "fail fast". They achieve reliability and safety by launching far more t…

> This corroborates "fail fast". But it also shows "fail slow" later. My point is that "fail fast" is not some hard rule to abide by, but contextually dependent on the risk at stake.

I mean, the whole point if failing fast is to stop failing faster. If you just keep failing fast without end you're not going to be around long...

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#767

Post by nordsieck »

rmu09 wrote: post #589
samwillis wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Isn't it pretty unlikely that this debris, flying against the exhaust, can reach the engines with significant energy?

My understanding is that one of the Starship prototypes were damaged by flying debris during a static fire. I think the available evidence points towards it being possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM61ZkUoO4U

> About 2 secs after starting engines, martyte covering concrete below shattered, sending blades of hardened rock into engine bay. One rock blade severed avionics cable, causing bad shutdown of Raptor.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1328742122107904000

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#768

Post by ralfd »

nonethewiser wrote: post #669
AviationAtom wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many folks have looked at the other details of Starship. One I find most impressive? Weight of Starship when fueled: 11 million pounds

That’s so hard to comprehend. I used to operate a 25ton crane. That’s less than half of 1% of Starship. That made me think it’s in the magnitude of a skyscraper. Apparently the Empire State Building is “only” 7 million pounds. What the fuck.

Transposed digits? According to Wiki the ESB is 80 times heavier:

> According to official fact sheets, the Empire State Building weighs 365,000 short tons (331,122 t)

But Eiffeltower is only double the weight with 10100 tons.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#769

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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.

> dirt and rocks flying around damages all the other expensive equipment at the launch site

It’s a test pad. The equipment HN’s armchair aerospace engineers are proposing be installed would have been that expensive equipment.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#770

Post by lutorm »

DoughnutHole wrote: post #442
version_five wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything in your comment. One thing I've wondered about re space exploration though is how we reconcile what I think is pretty much universal acknowledgement that we have to do everything possible to avoid loss of life with the inherent danger of space travel, and the "drag" that a zero-tolerance safety focus can have on culture. Put another way, what would global exploration have looked like if sailor…

Early modern sailors were uneducated manual labourers with few economic prospects in a world where simply living as a lower class individual was more dangerous than nearly any job that exists in the developed world today. Sailing often paid better than jobs on land which made up for the risk, and it offered the potential of massive reward to the high class leadership of the vessel. There is no consummate economic inc…

If what you're saying is true, how come astronaut programs have many more applicants than they can take? People have other goals in life beyond economic incentives.

People volunteer for the military, and I don't think anyone's under any illusion this is risk free. The important thing is not lying to people about the risk involved.

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