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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

#251

Post by kev009 »

trixie_ wrote: post #162
kev009 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup let's see how the non critically thinking Musk fan thing works out for you in 10 years. People like Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman would be shaking their heads at these spectacles.

You were the guy who 10 years ago said electric cars and reusable rockets would never be practical. Meanwhile SpaceX is on their way to building a global internet constellation, have a working full flow combustion engine, and has multiple prototype Mars rockets in development. I'd love to take your 10 year bet. Easy money.

Except I wasn't. SpaceX has done well for cargo launches. The cargo work appears to be good enough with great economy and any losses can be modeled by the mature insurance industry.

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

#252

Post by JshWright »

Retric wrote: post #239
ncmncm wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which trips each cost much less because you don't have to build another rocket to do each with. Or, equivalently, in one trip with a bigger rocket you have left over from another launch, because you didn't ditch it.

That’s great if you’re transporting large numbers of the same thing like star link satellites. However, many payloads are worth sacrificing the first stage. Just look through the “No attempt“ missions in 2018 for some of the reasons why: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_... Which again demonstrates reusability is really expensive, though clearly not always as expensive as a new rocket.

Many of the "no attempt" 2018 missions were because they were reflights of older models of cores (pre-Block 5) that weren't worth keeping around. Expendable launches for Block 5 boosters are far less common.

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

#253

Post by bdamm »

conjectures wrote: post #245
rusticpenn wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That creates a very conservative mindset, unsuitable for innovation.

So if this prototype had not blown up you would now be complaining that SpaceX is not sufficiently innovative?

Personally, I feel no need to complain about SpaceX, whether they blow up rockets or not. They're powering a new golden age of rockets. There's no room in my worldview for complaining about SpaceX. You are free to waste your time asking people why they aren't complaining, of course.

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

#254

Post by bdamm »

kolinko wrote: post #195
michaelscott wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SpaceX is almost certainly using an ILS-type radio system for the final 100 meters, both on the boat and on land. GPS just isn't quite good enough, especially out on the ocean where there are no WAAS base stations to cover up GPS' flaws.

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

#255

Post by war1025 »

ncmncm wrote: post #250
mlyle wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't a glancing blow. It solidly struck a thrust mount and then bounced to pierce the tank. So while some energy was lost in the collision with the thrust mount (how elastic was it?) the blow that counted was dead-on.

Then the fuel just drained out for a long time. Long enough for the guy to dawdle before telling anybody, and then to get orders from higher-up, and for everybody to high-tail it out of the complex. Not far enough, though.

Except the guy they sent back in to turn on an exhaust fan that arced and blew everything up...

Poor bastard.

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

#256

Post by ncmncm »

JshWright wrote: post #252
Retric wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s great if you’re transporting large numbers of the same thing like star link satellites. However, many payloads are worth sacrificing the first stage. Just look through the “No attempt“ missions in 2018 for some of the reasons why: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_... Which again demonstrates reusability is really expensive, though clearly not always as expensive as a new rocket.

Many of the "no attempt" 2018 missions were because they were reflights of older models of cores (pre-Block 5) that weren't worth keeping around. Expendable launches for Block 5 boosters are far less common.

Right, if you can throw away an obsolete rocket stage as part of profitably launching a much bigger load than you would have done with a re-usable one, it's hard to justify not doing it, and just selling it for scrap instead.

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

#257

Post by NamTaf »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #219
jefftk wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those both sound like kinds of ways the real maximum load could be higher than what you've called your maximum load

Only as long as your "real maximum load" != "announced maximum load". For the type of stupidity mitigation I mentioned, you want the real maximum load to be greater than the max load you announce to the customer/users. For mitigating cascade failures, you want the real maximum load to be greater than the maximum load value meant to be used internally by people designing other components in the system (though here, a…

There's also some benefit in throwing a moderate safety factor on something if it doesn't actually compromise the intended form or function of the component, just as future insurance. For example, if you design a bit of equipment to take a certain load, but there's no size or mass constraints on it, and you can throw a 1.5x safety factor on, then it's not necessarily a bad thing. Even if your 'true' load as measured over several years of service only ends up being 1.2x, then the extra 0.3 or so can come in useful if a future engineer has to make modifications to the function of the device, or if they are asked to evaluate a life extension, etc.

In less words, I'm eternally thankful that I work in an era where much of the older equipment I used was designed in an era of slide rule. This means there's a bit of extra 'meat' in the designs which often means that when I do a more precise computational analysis, I can deal with 10% material loss through corrosion, or extend out the life by some period of time because it's not been designed precisely to the material limits.

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

#258

Post by TeMPOraL »

NamTaf wrote: post #257
TeMPOraL wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only as long as your "real maximum load" != "announced maximum load". For the type of stupidity mitigation I mentioned, you want the real maximum load to be greater than the max load you announce to the customer/users. For mitigating cascade failures, you want the real maximum load to be greater than the maximum load value meant to be used internally by people designing other components in the system (though here, a…

There's also some benefit in throwing a moderate safety factor on something if it doesn't actually compromise the intended form or function of the component, just as future insurance. For example, if you design a bit of equipment to take a certain load, but there's no size or mass constraints on it, and you can throw a 1.5x safety factor on, then it's not necessarily a bad thing. Even if your 'true' load as measured…

> I'm eternally thankful that I work in an era where much of the older equipment I used was designed in an era of slide rule.

Yes, I feel this way too. The knowledge and tooling of modern engineers is amazing, and can do miracles when applied to tasks that seemed impossible just a century ago. But more often than not, it's used to pinch pennies from old designs. This makes me wish for infrastructure projects to be forced to be designed with slide rules again - the less precise your determination of maximum load is, the less the beancounters can "optimize" it.

This is doubly sad in our era, where matter is cheap and labor is expensive - adding extra safety margin can be almost free, but it's an easy target for cost reduction.

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

#259

Post by ksec »

aedron wrote: post #206
ehnto wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fine, so don't call it "success!". It's a step on the way to (possible) success, but the hypersensitivity isn't helping anyone.

If my test were designed for failures, my test results expect it to fail, and it did, then I call it a success. Science is about testing what we think we know, measuring it and confirming it.

In a Chemistry Lab, I put two elements together to show off a little explosion to my students, if it did. It was a successful demonstration, if it didn't go according to plan, it was a failure. And we will be wondering why this didn't work.

The OP said it from his perspective of pathfinder. And I assume these results were expected. And if it didn't blew up and they did not understand why it didn't, it create more uncertainty and variables during real launch. And I am sure everyone would want to minimise of that happening.

I am not sure how hard this is to see thing from his perspective, I would agree if Elon calling it a success would be hyperbole, but the OP stated he is a pathfinder, and finding out failure is exactly his job.

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

#260

Post by conjectures »

bdamm wrote: post #253
conjectures wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if this prototype had not blown up you would now be complaining that SpaceX is not sufficiently innovative?

Personally, I feel no need to complain about SpaceX, whether they blow up rockets or not. They're powering a new golden age of rockets. There's no room in my worldview for complaining about SpaceX. You are free to waste your time asking people why they aren't complaining, of course.

Who is complaining about SpaceX? The point is challenging a particular confusion which seems prevalent round here.

Suppose SpaceX had used a very similar prototype, but some process or engineer had caught the fault. Few here would be taking the lack of an explosion as evidence that SpaceX are not innovative. Instead, if anything, they would be praising the superb processes in addition to the cool prototype.

So, there is always room to improve. The reaction to this essentially anodyne point here has been really interesting.

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