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Starship Flight 7

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Re: Starship Flight 7

#701

Post by WalterBright »

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…

Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis had the main fuel tank directly in front of him. This was in spite of his primal fear of being burned alive. In some airplanes you sit on the fuel tank.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#702

Post by gusgus01 »

mrandish wrote: post #689
zardo wrote: post #621

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. Don't the heat tiles at least make it through? And possibly large hunks of metal like the thrust frame and engines.

As I said, I'm only familiar with the high level concepts of vehicle launch safety and not qualified to assess detailed scenarios. I'm just a guy interested enough to read some technical articles and skim a few linked papers several years ago when there was a lot of heat about launch safety from Boca and not much light. When there's a lot of heated rhetoric in the mass media, I find it's better to check directly in s…

I know this is just another reddit post so could be fake, but supposedly debris is already washing ashore in Turks and Caicos. Specifically in this post a heat shield tile, but the poster mentions other stuff on the beach. So at least some debris probably dropped nearby.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1i3na4a/...

Re: Starship Flight 7

#703

Post by WalterBright »

wat10000 wrote: post #651
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…

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…

High reliability of airliners is achieved by having redundancy of all critical parts. The idea is no single failure can cause a crash.

For example, if system A has a failure probability of 10%, if A is redundant with another A', the combined failure probability is 1%.

That of course presumes that A and A' are not connected.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#704

Post by WalterBright »

api wrote: post #582
gr3ml1n wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My #1 rule for all engineering: simplicity is harder than complexity. I truly wish more software engineers thought this way. I see a lot of mentality in software where people are even impressed by complexity, like "wow what a complex system!" like it's a good thing. It's not. It's a sign that no effort has been put into understanding the problem domain conceptually, or that no discipline has been followed around redu…

I've written something good when others look at it and say: "pshaw, anyone could have written that!"

Re: Starship Flight 7

#705

Post by jiggawatts »

nomel wrote: post #697
hooli_gan wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The taxpayer is paying for these lies

I don't think that's a useful framing. If not SpaceX, it would be all NASA. NASA lies about their budget all the time, with massive overruns. For example, the Artemis overrun exceeds the entire cost of Starship development so far [1]. [1] https://www.space.com/nasa-sls-megarocket-cost-delays-report

Not to mention that each Artemis launch is of the same order of magnitude cost as the entire Starship program. Each engine is about the same cost as Falcon 9 launch!

Re: Starship Flight 7

#706

Post by jiggawatts »

hooli_gan wrote: post #644
schiffern wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think delays in aerospace constitute "lies," you're not going to have a good time following any aerospace company. Unexpected delays are par for the course.

If you think these are mere delays, then I have a bridge to sell to you

In about two years, when these things will be launching hundreds of starlink satellites like clockwork, you’ll just move the goalposts and find something else to criticise.

I’m saying this with confidence because it’s the established history of SpaceX critics. Everything from reusable rockets, space internet, full-flow staged combustion, etc.. has had its naysayers that all shut up and found something new to critique once SpaceX showed it was possible and even profitable.

At this stage you may as well just come out and say “I don’t like Elon”.

Re: Starship Flight 7

#707

Post by jiggawatts »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #652

Coders who require at least 7 iterations to properly implement a data entry form here grousing over a spaceship failure on the 7th iteration.

Failure of an entirely new, previously thought to be impossible combination of technologies.

This is like complaining that your first attempt at new programming language paradigm resulted in a compiler that is slow and sometimes has internal errors!

Re: Starship Flight 7

#708

Post by thombat »

mrandish wrote: post #420
logifail wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 are people on HN far better qualified than I to discuss both orbital mechanics and spacecraft safety assessments but I'll give it a layman's stab based purely on the high-level concepts (which is all I know). They know there's little to no risk to aircraft or people hundreds or thousands of miles to the East of a Starship RUD in orbit because they know exactly what's inside Starship and how it's built. They mod…

That description of heavy lead shielding of a power plant on Mir surprises me since photos show it as having solar arrays. Wikipedia also gives the power source as solar with no mention of lead components. Can you add further details of this?

Re: Starship Flight 7

#709

Post by me_me_me »

ceejayoz wrote: post #663
me_me_me wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Observer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Polar_Lander

wtf does that have to do with Curiosity program? All of these are 2+ decades old.

Besides, you make it as if SpaceX couldn't learn from nasa mistakes, not to mention core team of SpaceX are ex-nasa already.

what kind of elon musk logic is that?

Re: Starship Flight 7

#710

Post by ben_w »

littlestymaar wrote: post #694
ben_w wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you cooled the mixture at low enough temperature, you'd stop it from burning (like when you pour water on top of a camp fire), but it's not clear how you're supposed to do that in a spaceship where you can't carry a few tons of water for your sprinklers. Also water would make it hotter, given this is liquid oxygen .

It's not liquid at the point of ignition, that's the thing: if you mixed liquid oxygen and fuel nothing would happen expect the fuel would freeze. For a fire to take place the temperature must reach the fire point temperature, and if you manage to get your fire below this temperature then the fire stops. I don't know how low this temperature can be when the oxidizer is pure oxygen and maybe it's so low water wouldn't…

I believe LOX is injected into the engine as a liquid, it gets atomised rather than boiled?

And you can have fires where both fuel and oxidiser are solid: thermite reactions.

"Fire point" seems to be more of a factor for conventional fire concerns, albeit I'm judging a phrase I've not heard before by a stub-sized Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_point

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