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Starship Flight 7

spacex.com

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#571

Post by ls612 »

askl wrote: post #500
pmontra wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Test flights. My tests keep failing until I fix all of my code, then we deploy to production. If code fails in production than that's a problem. We could say that rockets are not code. A test run of a Spaceship surely cost much more than a test run of any software on my laptop but tests are still tests. They are very likely to fail and there are things to learn from their failures.

Thank god you're not building rockets.

This has been SpaceX’s methodology for a long time now and has gotten them to the point where they have the most reliable western launch vehicles ever launching record amounts of mass to orbit each year at record low prices.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#572

Post by BurningFrog »

onion2k wrote: post #486
api wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be unpleasant if there was crew. Of course this thing is pretty far from human eating.

Would be unpleasant if there was crew. 19 people have died in the 391 crewed space missions humans have done so far. The risk of dying is very high. Starship is unlikely to change that, although the commoditization of space flight could have reduce the risk simply by making problems easier to spot because there's more flights.

Modern space ships are very likely to change that, as designs mature and improve.

Early aviation was extremely dangerous. Now a plane is among the safest places to be.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#573

Post by londons_explore »

pixl97 wrote: post #135
londons_explore wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fire around the rear flap hinges I believe it's pretty hard to have a fire at that altitude. You need a leak of both methane and oxygen, and an ignition source. I wonder if perhaps one of the engines split open and the exhaust wasn't going into the engine bell?

I mean blowing liquid oxygen on something with a hot heat source beside it typically turns things to fuel you wouldn't expect. Like metal.

At atmospheric pressure, yes.

But up at 140km altitude, the pressure is so low that I don't think even pure oxygen would lead to combustion.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#574

Post by Workaccount2 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #546
ericd wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're blowing up their own money, unless you still count it as being the taxpayer's after the government pays them for launch services.

R&D for starship has a several-billion-dollar NASA grant. Something like 30-50% of the money being blown up on this program is taxpayer money.

The savings Spacex has promise of delivering to NASA make every dollar given to them probably an easy 2x-3x ROI.

Without Spacex, the typical cohort of gov contractors would have been happy bleeding NASA dry with one time use rockets that have 10x the launch cost and carry 1/4 the cargo.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#575

Post by Kye »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #567
Kye wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does SpaceX bother with NOTAM for its launches? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM It seems like the flights should have been planned around it so no diversion would be needed.

Actually, this video is a good indication for exactly what transpired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE It's ATC audio captured during the event.

This video, the map elsewhere in this subthread, and the stream recording give a nicely detailed view into what went down. It seems like everything went like it was supposed to in terms of pre-warning, but based on the video the information didn't make it to pilots with coinciding flight plans until after the fact.

As far as I understand airline pilots have a high level of authority and diverting probably was the right call depending on the lag between seeing it and knowing what it was or if there was a risk of debris reaching them. They wouldn't necessarily know how high it got or what that means for debris.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#576

Post by blendergeek »

computerex wrote: post #549
fernandotakai wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land. i guess you didn't follow the falcon 9 failures right? here's two minutes of failures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone. NASA (with the shuttle an…

SpaceX’s track record is too fetishized by the Musk fanboys. Falcon 9 has some weird Demi god status even though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz.

Part of why it has "weird Demi god status" is that it is not only so reliable but also so cheap. Soyuz is not reusable. Falcon 9 is. That is why Falcon 9 is so celebrated. No other rocket company or state-sponsored space agency comes close to its track record of cheap, reliable, reusable rockets.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#577

Post by drillsteps5 »

sneak wrote: post #42
simonswords82 wrote: post #3

This NASASpaceflight stream is up now: https://www.youtube.com/live/3nM3vGdanpw

...which has nothing to do with NASA the US government organization, or the NSF (FYI). It's just some independent streamers who apparently know you can't get trademark claims against you by the federal government.

NSF was started by Chris Bergen, a meteorologist by trade and a space exploration enthusiast, in early 2000s as a hobby forum (good old phBB) for people to chat about space and rocketry. I'm sure he couldn't even dream about becoming so popular so he didn't spend too much time coming up with a name (ie to protect himself against copyright infringement lawsuits). In fact I'm sure he would love to change the name now as they try to cover space programs all over the world (it's too late as people know them as NSF).

Re: Starship Flight 7

#578

Post by ceejayoz »

tsimionescu wrote: post #527
ceejayoz wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they successfully sent two to the Moon on Weds. https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/science/nasa-launch-firefly-i...

The point was about Starship - it has never successfully flown with any amount of cargo. The 3 billion number from the poster before makes it clear they were only referring to Starship, not all of SpaceX. SpaceX is an extremely successful space launch company, and Falcon 9 is the best we've ever had. It's just Starship that seems to be going much worse.

Falcon 9 was once in the same spot; simulator payloads (a wheel of cheese), years of delays, a bunch of smashed-up first stages and drone ships, etc. Even more so if you count the Falcon 1 failures.

Starship has already demonstrated several key things work - the new engines, catching the booster, and on-target intact reentry of the second stage, all for about as much money as a single SLS launch is projected to cost. (Thus far, they've only had one for $26B.)

Re: Starship Flight 7

#579

Post by londons_explore »

gr3ml1n wrote: post #568
onion2k wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be unpleasant if there was crew. 19 people have died in the 391 crewed space missions humans have done so far. The risk of dying is very high. Starship is unlikely to change that, although the commoditization of space flight could have reduce the risk simply by making problems easier to spot because there's more flights.

The higher frequency of launches seems likely to have a big impact on reliability. It's no different than deploying once per day vs once per month. The more you do it, the more edge cases you hit and the more reliable you can make it. SpaceX also has a simplification streak: the Raptor engines being the canonical example. Lower complexity generally means less unexpected failure modes.

> SpaceX also has a simplification streak: the Raptor engines being the canonical example.

Not necessarily. Your engine which used to have 200 sensors perhaps now only has 8. But you now don't know when temperatures were close to melting point in a specific part of the engine. When something goes wrong, you are less likely to identify the precise cause because you have less data.

Many of those sensors are not to enable the rocket to fly at all, but merely for later data analysis to know if anything was close to failure.

In yesterdays launch, if the engines had more sensors musk probably wouldn't have said "an oxygen/fuel leak", but would have been able to say "Engine #7 had an oxygen leak at the inlet pipe, as shown by the loud whistling noise detected by engine #7's microphone array"

Re: Starship Flight 7

#580

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

computerex wrote: post #549
fernandotakai wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land. i guess you didn't follow the falcon 9 failures right? here's two minutes of failures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone. NASA (with the shuttle an…

SpaceX’s track record is too fetishized by the Musk fanboys. Falcon 9 has some weird Demi god status even though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz.

Soyuz? an expendable rocket with 40% less payload capacity? How is that a competitor to falcon 9? More like a competitor to rocketlab's current generation.
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