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SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident

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Re: SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident

#121

Post by kev009 »

lopmotr wrote: post #116
kev009 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yours is far weirder. How does mortality in daily life have anything to do with a billionaire’s fantasy.

That response doesn't make sense (normal people can risk lives but billionaires can't?). What does make sense is the fact that daily driving produces lots of economic value in the short term which manned space travel doesn't. So it's worth killing some drivers but not worth killing some astronauts. But that's still not obviously the right conclusion. Space travel has the potential for much greater value further in th…

It's completely orthogonal. By all means fix the externalities of internal combustion engines.

Intelligent people in NASA realized unmanned vehicles can conduct almost all important space research and business in the near future. There is no reason to jump the gun and do it with the lack of quality the software industry champions and is known for. If the mission of manned space flight is simply to inspire people, then it must be done without compromise. Engineering ethics 101.

Re: SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident

#122

Post by boznz »

"You will learn more from your failures than your successes - so embrace those mistakes, as difficult as that sounds, and grow from them. When a project is successful, you're never really sure why, because so many elements come into play. However, when you fail, you always know why. That is how you learn and grow."

Lynda Resnick

Re: SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident

#123

Post by Diederich »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #106
senectus1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When their entire business depends on very carefully managing their PR You really think this? My perception is that their PR is fairly blunt and upfront. while they may not tell you everything they dont seem to be trying to "spin" anything

>they dont seem to be trying to "spin" anything Compare their statements about the cause of the CRS-7 explosion to NASA's.

I dug around and didn't find an official SpaceX statement. The cause was a poorly constructed struct they bought from a 3rd party company.

> Compare their statements about the cause of the CRS-7 explosion to NASA's.

Did NASA's and SpaceX's statements differ in content?

Re: SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident

#124

Post by baking »

walrus01 wrote: post #70
DennisP wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think SpaceX has proven they know how to design rockets. But they are newcomers to building rockets from welded steel.

It is my understanding that the pressure vessels are carbon fiber composites. The skin is steel.

https://everydayastronaut.com/stainless-steel-starship/

Edit: "So in summary. SpaceX chose stainless steel over carbon composites because it’s about as light, it can handle higher temperatures which means less heat shield is need, which then makes it lighter, it reflects heat which means even less heat shield which again makes it even lighter, it’ll be cheaper and quicker to build AND it’ll look FREAKING AWESOME."

Re: SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident

#125

Post by soapboxrocket »

taneq wrote: post #80
NamTaf wrote: post #71

Oh dear! It looks like someone accidentally divided by 2 for the cylindrical hoop stresses, forgetting that they're not the same equation as for spherical stresses. :) Less facetiously, a thin-walled cylinder's stress is a function of pressure, radius and thickness with the equation: sigma = P*r/t whereas for a sphere (including the spherical end caps on a cylindrical pressure vessel), it follows the equation: sigma…

That's why you take your maximum design stress and double it, right? /s

It's been a while since I did pressure vessels but it's usually 2.5 times for proof and 3.5 for burst. Then with added safety you usually need about 4x to actually see a "planned" failure. This is most likely a construction fault.

Re: SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident

#127

Post by double0jimb0 »

I read this was a manufacturing pathfinder.

Manufacturing and assembly of high strength hardened steel is near black art.

Pathfinders do exactly what they say, they lead you through unknown territory to the outcome of the manufacturing journey you embarked on. Often things go boom, you find out why, add it to your corpus of black art knowledge, and keep pathfinding until you run out of budget / succeed / change mission.

So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like.

Re: SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident

#128

Post by elteto »

killion wrote: post #126

I haven’t seen an mention if anyone was injured. Was there someone on the cherry picker?

You would never have people around when doing high pressure ops. This might even have been a proof test, where the tank is pressurized to test for leaks so something like this failure is a plausible scenario.

Re: SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident

#130

Post by jcims »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #120
taneq wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it strong enough to take a full tank of water? Liquid methane weighs less than half what water weighs.

Maybe they can use liquid nitrogen?

This is almost certainly the answer. Cheap, inert and cryogenic.
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