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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

#191

Post by fsloth »

conjectures wrote: post #185
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to misquote GP to confirm your preexisting bias. I think the quote you're looking for is: "So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like. " If blowing up a prototype enables changes to the manufacturing process that prevent the same thing happening later with a live crew on board, then it's considered a success. It doesn't matter who the CEO of the company happens to be.

On the other hand, perfection looks like nothing ever blowing up while job always getting done.

Does this ever happen?

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

#192

Post by rusticpenn »

conjectures wrote: post #185
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to misquote GP to confirm your preexisting bias. I think the quote you're looking for is: "So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like. " If blowing up a prototype enables changes to the manufacturing process that prevent the same thing happening later with a live crew on board, then it's considered a success. It doesn't matter who the CEO of the company happens to be.

On the other hand, perfection looks like nothing ever blowing up while job always getting done.

That creates a very conservative mindset, unsuitable for innovation.

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

#193

Post by dsfyu404ed »

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…

I know that SpaceX is trying to make space flight cheap so they have to figure out how to do things like use cheap pressure vessels but this mode of failure is exactly why aerospace pressure vessels have long been made from a hot rolled body (as opposed to cold worked and welded).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvADC43EHmE

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

#194

Post by garmaine »

sfifs wrote: post #188
garmaine wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter. If you take the conservative assumptions that go into manufacturing, say, a car and apply those to a rocket, you'll get something that won't even lift off the ground, much less make orbit. Any rocket HAS to be very close to the limits of what materials used allow, and not the +50% margin of error you routinely seen in other fields. What you say about SpaceX is true, but only relative to the rocket ind…

The video is hilarious! Thanks for sharing!

My favorite part is the look on the engineer's faces when they're asked to turn a Robin Reliant into a Space Shuttle.

"Have you got a spare billion dollars?"

"No. That's why we came to you."

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

#195

Post by kolinko »

michaelscott wrote: post #190
dvdbloc wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW the “boat” is not moving. This is in contrast to Blue Origin’s reusable booster which will literally be landing on a moving boat.

What do you mean by "not moving"? The platform sat on the surface of an ocean. It's always moving.

What he means is that the boat is moving up and down but keeps a stationary latitude/longitude.

The rocket has static landing coordinates, and if the boat were to move a few meters to either side it would miss it.

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

#196

Post by madaxe_again »

conjectures wrote: post #185
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to misquote GP to confirm your preexisting bias. I think the quote you're looking for is: "So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like. " If blowing up a prototype enables changes to the manufacturing process that prevent the same thing happening later with a live crew on board, then it's considered a success. It doesn't matter who the CEO of the company happens to be.

On the other hand, perfection looks like nothing ever blowing up while job always getting done.

You never get the job done without blowing things up, in any field where you’re treading untrodden ground.

See also: Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Challenger, Columbia, Apollo 1 - and that’s purely spacecraft which have killed people, never mind the vast list of experimental aviation deaths.

Much better to blow up some prototypes than some humans.

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

#197

Post by phkahler »

conjectures wrote: post #185
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to misquote GP to confirm your preexisting bias. I think the quote you're looking for is: "So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like. " If blowing up a prototype enables changes to the manufacturing process that prevent the same thing happening later with a live crew on board, then it's considered a success. It doesn't matter who the CEO of the company happens to be.

On the other hand, perfection looks like nothing ever blowing up while job always getting done.

There is no such perfection in space. Never has been.

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

#198

Post by lowbloodsugar »

conjectures wrote: post #185
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way to misquote GP to confirm your preexisting bias. I think the quote you're looking for is: "So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like. " If blowing up a prototype enables changes to the manufacturing process that prevent the same thing happening later with a live crew on board, then it's considered a success. It doesn't matter who the CEO of the company happens to be.

On the other hand, perfection looks like nothing ever blowing up while job always getting done.

Can't have perfection without ever blowing up. If you can launch 1000kg with a design, could it launch 1100kg by reducing the mass of the rocket? How about 1200kg? But reducing the mass of the rocket leads to explosions. If you never exploded, then you never found out how light it could be. It could be lighter. If it could be lighter, it's not perfect.

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

#199

Post by madaxe_again »

combnoinipo wrote: post #170
double0jimb0 wrote: post #127

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 missi…

What does pathfinder mean in the context of manufacturing?

A fuzzball of patches and “good ideas at the time”. It’s like the first iteration of an app that never sees the light of day, as you finish, sit back, go “ah, an abomination”, and rewrite the thing properly with what you learned from the prototype.

I do this pretty much any time I’m doing something new - I have three revisions of a solar panel stand sat out on the lawn right now, each better than the last, as I needed to build the thing to see how it actually held up to forces as it’s easier and more accurate (ah, how do I fit a screwdriver in this gap to fasten this?) than doing an engineering simulation.

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

#200

Post by ehnto »

CPLX wrote: post #172
double0jimb0 wrote: post #127

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 missi…

I must admit that Elon has done some fairly impressive things, and I respect his hustle and innovation. With that said, the cult that surrounds his projects where people say things like "this is what success looks like" when a big metal thing blows up unexpectedly or robot car goes flying off an exit ramp is a never ending source of amusement.

I guess the parent comment was pointing out that this actually wasn't unexpected, it was one of the expected failure modes for the test and it happened.

I don't see any constructive reason to look at it negatively, failure is part of testing. We don't test to find success, we test to find failures so that we can get them out of our systems.

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