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Starship Flight 7

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#651

Post by wat10000 »

Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #629
dpifke wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity. Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130

This sounds like one of those "and also" things. I'd say you add fire suppression AND ALSO try more to reduce leaks. It's got to be really difficult to build huge massive tanks that hold oxygen and other gases under pressure (liquid methane too will have some vapor of course). Are leaks inherently going to happen? This is meant to be a human rated ship of course, how will you reduce this danger? I know this stuff is…

This might be one of those components where it just needs to be built without problems, and improved safety means fixing individual design and manufacturing flaws as you find them, until you’ve hopefully got them all.

This can work. Fundamental structural components of airliners just can’t fail without killing everyone, and high reliability is achieved with careful design, manufacturing, testing, and inspection. I’m not sure if a gigantic non-leaky tank is harder to pull off that way, but they might have to regardless.

We’re going to have to accept that space travel is going to be inherently dangerous for the foreseeable future. Starship is in a good position to improve this, because it should fly frequently (more opportunities to discover and fix problems) and the non-manned variant is very similar to the manned variant (you can discover many problems without killing people). But there are inherent limitations. There’s just not as much capacity for redundancy. The engines have to be clustered so fratricide or common failure modes are going to me more likely. Losing all the engines is guaranteed death on Starship, versus a good chance to survive in an airliner.

All other practical considerations aside, I think this alone sinks any possibility of using Starship for Earth-to-Earth travel as has been proposed by SpaceX.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#653

Post by wat10000 »

mavhc wrote: post #646
Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #629

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like one of those "and also" things. I'd say you add fire suppression AND ALSO try more to reduce leaks. It's got to be really difficult to build huge massive tanks that hold oxygen and other gases under pressure (liquid methane too will have some vapor of course). Are leaks inherently going to happen? This is meant to be a human rated ship of course, how will you reduce this danger? I know this stuff is…

Given that a) most human rated rockets have had 0 flights before use, and b) I'd expect each starship to have at least 10 flights, and at least 100 in total without mishap before launching, the statistics should be good

I don’t think (a) is true. The Shuttle flew with people on its maiden voyage, but that’s the only one I can think of.

(b) is true and should make it substantially safer than other launch systems. But given how narrow the margins are for something going wrong (zero ability to land safely with all engines dead, for example) it’s still going to be pretty dangerous compared to more mundane forms of travel.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#654

Post by m4rtink »

logifail wrote: post #407
mrandish wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the incredible speeds Starship was moving (>13,000 mph) by the time it was over the Caribbean, debris from a Starship is expected to burn up by the time it reaches the surface. But you said "depending on the size", so let's imagine it's a different spacecraft carrying something that won't entirely burn up, like the Mir space station from several years back. In that scenario, debris from 100km will survive to pass…

> so by the time it slows enough to get that low (10km) it's hundreds or thousands of miles East from where the explosion was seen Appreciate that, the question would be, do we know that there won't be any aircraft at the right (wrong) altitude in that area(?!) With aircraft regularly travelling thousands of miles, would be interesting to know whether route choices are made to avoid being "under"* the track of a rock…

There were quite large areas of airspace closed just for this reason via NOTAMS - with airlines grumbling about that even before launch.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#655

Post by throw5959 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #544
perihelions wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- "And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight," That doesn't resonate as true to me. The first Ariane 5 flight blew up [0]. That Europe's current heavy-lift workhorse with 112 successful launches (including JWST), but the first one blew up. The first PSLV blew up [1]. That's India's current workhorse with 58 su…

You're right that I exaggerated, sorry about that. Still, many of these are more successful than Starship: The first GSLV was still able to deploy a satellite, just in a lower orbit than intended. The first Delta IV had the same problem, satellite deployed, but in a lower orbit than planned. The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one di…

Compare how much money each company spent before the first/second/etc flight. The ENTIRE program has so far cost less than one set of SLS engines - that they took from older rockets without changes.

They have explicitly and publicly chosen to rapidly iterate without spending billions to make sure the first try goes well - it's simply different culture. The first Starship wasn't even something you could actually call a rocket, it was a water tower with a bunch of rocket engines.

They wanted data about the engines and got them - mission 100% accomplished, that's not a failure in any way except for media shock value because "wow such boom". Come on, you call yourself an engineer? Do you not try your software or hardware before 100% completion? You don't have CI with integration and e2e tests? There's no other way to do this cheaply and quickly, you have to try.

Call me when any other company achieves what Falcon9 did, then we can discuss issues of SpaceX engineering culture and how others are better. But they are not, few test flights are not interesting, what's interesting is that they are 10 years ahead of everybody else and offer by far the cheapest and by orders of magnitude most reliable orbital lift service.

Others should stop waiting 10 years before the first flight and accept some risk, the world would be much better by now.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#656

Post by wat10000 »

prerok wrote: post #640
ChrisClark wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly hope that if you ever design a rocket yourself, that you will test it. I have no idea why you'd think testing is a terrible thing to do if it has to do with rockets.

I think we all agree that you need to test eventually. I do think most of us would already be double checking for leaks. It just seems one of the obvious things that may go wrong when putting it all together.

They likely did test it, and it passed. The leak was probably caused by the somewhat violent environment of the launch, and that can’t be entirely replicated on the ground.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#657

Post by burnerthrow008 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #493
saberience wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a fairly disingenuous comment. SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before, and done it faster and at a lower budget than anyone has done before. Every other national space agency and private company had both infinitely more money, time, and engineers than SpaceX did (when founded) yet they were making zero…

The achievements you quote are highly overblown. SpaceX sells capacity to orbit somewhat cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best. They also don't have any fully reusable rockets today, and Starship is still probably a year or more from being production-ready. It remains to be seen how reusable Starship will actually be, how long it will take to refurbish and…

Half the cost is not "some huge margin"?!?

So, like, if you found a 50%-off sale on a car, you're telling me you wouldn't test drive it because it's not a very good deal?

What color is the sky in your world?

Re: Starship Flight 7

#658

Post by me_me_me »

ceejayoz wrote: post #586
me_me_me wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this doesn't even scratch the surface. Slow motion cameras and real time sensors for debugging hardware issues, computer simulations, 3d printing. Apollo program directors would advocate to start a nuclear war with ussr if they could get hands on that kind of tech. But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX…

> But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things?? NASA lost a good number of probes in the process of getting the expertise to do that. And likely quite a few test devices in building out the skycrane.

citation needed

You cant be making shit up and equating a test to blowing up 7 rockets

Re: Starship Flight 7

#659

Post by Mistletoe »

hooli_gan wrote: post #459
bboygravity wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?

A Mars cargo mission, according to the timeline spacex set for themselves. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F2HFqsVkiZc/YT9bPpXSKDI/AAAAAAAAG...

Ah Elon time strikes again.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#660

Post by me_me_me »

Albatross9237 wrote: post #625
me_me_me wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that's an 'achievement'?

What would you consider an achievement then? The point of a rocket is to deliver mass to space.

Nobody credits boeing with a achievement of caring most people in planes. We credit Wright brother with creating first airplane.

Cargo rockets is to elo is an old tech, a participation award for you and your convincing arguments (you and you ilk - producing numerous 'achievements' called 'etc. etc.').

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