I’m old enough to remember the Apollo program. Not one Saturn V blew up on launch. I guess we had a different notion of “success” back then.
Apollo 1
SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
131–140 of 193 posts
Re: SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
#132In spite of this, it was still a great success.
> SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight It's really a glass half empty headline, isn't it? It's like if someone got bronze at the Olympics and the headline were, "Athlete loses to multiple opponents, fails to get gold or silver medal."
SpaceX has made launches so routine only the explosions get headlines.
Re: SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
The details of how they stream all the data down in real-time reliably must be really interesting
Yes, this is what I've been hoping the HN crowd will elicidate.
Telemetry isn’t too hard to send down during launch, at least for the booster stage. It’s really only when you have hot plasma buildup in front of the vehicle that’s a problem for RF, which is mainly on reentry.
Re: SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
#134Altogether, it was a terrific flight and a big step forward for the Starship program. The biggest success was the survival of stage zero, which bodes well for a quick turnaround for the next flight. Hot staging was the second big success, and Starship got to space. The flight termination was disappointing, but the actual functioning of the FTS system seems to be fixed. That was a problem with the first flight and sho…
I don't understand why people are celebrating failed rocket launches.
Apollo 4, the first time the full Apollo Saturn V rocket stack was assembled, did not blow up on the first attempt to space. That is something to celebrate. Now wasting millions of government dollars from subsidies, which in the end comes from citizens.
We should not be celebrating failure.
Re: SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
#135Altogether, it was a terrific flight and a big step forward for the Starship program. The biggest success was the survival of stage zero, which bodes well for a quick turnaround for the next flight. Hot staging was the second big success, and Starship got to space. The flight termination was disappointing, but the actual functioning of the FTS system seems to be fixed. That was a problem with the first flight and sho…
I don't understand why people are celebrating failed rocket launches. Apollo 4, the first time the full Apollo Saturn V rocket stack was assembled, did not blow up on the first attempt to space. That is something to celebrate. Now wasting millions of government dollars from subsidies, which in the end comes from citizens. We should not be celebrating failure.
Because, even in failure, there's progress. "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" is often attributed to Edison, without whom, we wouldn't have the lightbulb. In order to make progress, you need to try. And if you never fail, you're not trying hard enough. Would it be better if it hadn't failed? Absolutely. But better to try and fail than never try.
Re: SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
#136Re: SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at that full set of 33 engines burning almost brought a tear to my eye (and the controlled cutoff). That more than anything else tells me they've made it.
I don't understand what makes the functioning of all the engines so difficult (I know nothing about rockets). How is it that you build something so expensive with so many development resources and expect parts to fail?
Say you want to build something new, something that is beyond the bounds of what anyone has ever built before. In this case, a rocket that has more thrust than any built before. The basic mechanics say that it is feasible, so you start to work the details. You find the limit of knowledge in all kinds of directions, and determine which limits you can definitely build the rocket within, and which ones you will need to exceed. As the world's most powerful rocket, perhaps it will exceed current bounds of knowledge about things like material performance and turbulence under extreme temperatures and pressures.
Anything built outside of currently-known parameters might fail, so you design as much of the rocket as possible to operate within the limits of current knowledge.
Some of those limits turn out to be feasible to push in a laboratory. So you build and conduct experiments on those parameters, record the results, and design your rocket accordingly.
But for some parameters, the lab experiments required to test them are incredibly costly. Especially for parameters that vary strongly with scale (like turbulence), a system with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket can only be predicted by an experiment with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket.
Say it costs a billion dollars to build and launch your new rocket, but it will operate with ten unknown parameters, each of which will cost 200 million dollars to individually test on the ground. You could spend two billion dollars on experiments, then one billion dollars on a rocket you're confident will work. This is more-or-less the model that NASA used for developing the Space Launch System: do as much science as necessary, ask Congress for as much extra time and money as the contractors say they need, so they can be extremely confident that their new biggest rocket will work perfectly the first time. NASA doesn't like launching rockets that they don't know will work, because Congress doesn't like when rockets they paid for blow up, and NASA depends on Congress for all of their funding.
However, for the same money, you could build your rocket best-guess within the known unknowns and fly it. It's likely to blow up, because you guessed on ten unknowns. However, if the results of the flight allows you determine some of the parameters with greater confidence than one billion dollars in ground experiments, then it was worth the while, and you re-design your rocket according to the newly-understood parameters. You can do this three times for the cost of building the experiments and flying once. That's a decent chance at learning the parameters, and as a bonus, you get to practice building and flying the rocket, productively employing all of your staff and facilities.
That's more-or-less the model that SpaceX is developing Starship on, and previously Falcon 9. Blowing up prototype rockets only costs SpaceX time and money, and as long as it costs less time and money than running ground experiments (and keeping their production and launch crews on retainer, and maintaining their facilities between rockets), they're saving money by launching rockets they expect to blow up.
Re: SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s literal rocket science. Liquid fueled rockets have to work in basically the most extreme environments we’ve ever made machines work. Extreme cold temperatures through extreme hot and from extreme high pressures through vacuum. You have to have the best metallurgy and amazing machining tolerances. And then on starship they got it to work more than thirty times simultaneously.
Sure, but if one works, why wouldn't the rest? It's like saying "we built a car engine, but every 33rd car we make the engine doesn't" work. That's not a very good engine. Also, not sure why I am getting downvoted for saying I don't understand something and asking other people how it works.
Yes but the reliability of modern car engines is a minor miracle, achieved through over a century of incredible engineering effort. Also remember that production lines always have yield, which means that not everything that rolls off it will actually work and the non-functional components are discarded. For example new chip production fabs very often have low yields, sometimes even the majority of chips don't work.
Re: SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why people are celebrating failed rocket launches. Apollo 4, the first time the full Apollo Saturn V rocket stack was assembled, did not blow up on the first attempt to space. That is something to celebrate. Now wasting millions of government dollars from subsidies, which in the end comes from citizens. We should not be celebrating failure.
Because, even in failure, there's progress. "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" is often attributed to Edison, without whom, we wouldn't have the lightbulb. In order to make progress, you need to try. And if you never fail, you're not trying hard enough. Would it be better if it hadn't failed? Absolutely. But better to try and fail than never try.
What bothers me is that they don't even try to succeed. They only want liftoff - they don't seem to care about the ever important orbital aspect
Re: SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
#140I’m old enough to remember the Apollo program. Not one Saturn V blew up on launch. I guess we had a different notion of “success” back then.
I have personally seen a video of a Saturn (unmanned), launching, that rose maybe half its height off the ground, stopped, descended back down, hit the launchpad, and blew up. That's pretty much "on launch". But that doesn't seem to have been a Saturn V. What was it? I'm pretty sure it was on Youtube, but a quck search failed to turn it up. So, maybe "not one Saturn V blew up on launch", but one of the Saturns did.
Are you thinking of Juno II AM-16? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIJF26ukQgw