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SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

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Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#411

Post by szoszon »

baq wrote: post #343
szoszon wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there are 5 more of these being built, how they will incorporate anything they learned during this failed attempt? Isn't that just a waste of money?

Some parts are interchangeable. The countdown process needs optimization. There are things missing and things which shouldn’t be there. We’re talking about speed of loading propellant, density of it, etc. Then there’s software. So much software. And a million other things. Rockets are complex, launching them doubly so.

Yeah, that's why you engineer, and test before trying to launch something like that. There won't be any other attempt this year - I can bet my lunch money on this.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#412

Post by CydeWeys »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #190
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The test was a massive success. So happy to see starship clear the towers. The largest rocket ever built, larger than the Saturn V. Are you kidding me?

If I'm tasked with recording test data for x, y, and z and I only record x, is that a success? Now I need to launch another to try for the y, and z. Edit: What would an unsuccessful test look like then?

Look at all the Martian rovers. That is a notoriously hard environment to operate in, so success has often been defined as "the rover functions for at least 30 days". And then some rovers ended up working for over a decade. That doesn't mean that every rover that didn't last an entire decade was a failure though! It just means that, regardless of whether you hit your main goal, if you still have something working left over at that point, of course you keep using it.

The main goal here was to clear the pad and get some atmospheric experience with the entire stack. Goal met. But of course they had contingency plans to get as much more experience with it as possible, if things continued to function nominally (as they have with some rovers, or indeed some previous first SpaceX test flights, like the Falcon Heavy).

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#413

Post by ohitsdom »

alexobenauer wrote: post #215
intrasight wrote: post #170

When it started doing cartwheels and the announcer said "beginning the flip for stage separation" I was like "WTF does that mean? That can't be nominal!"

More info on why that's necessary here: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/17878/why-does-the... Edit: "that" = one flip; not the many we saw today.

This isn't what the commentators are referring to when they talk about "the flip".

Rockets traditionally have some type of separation mechanism to separate stage 1 and stage 2. This is usually some type of pyro charge or an actual pneumatic pusher. SpaceX wants to avoid this complexity with Starship and instead "throw" off stage 2 (Starship) by doing a flip with the booster. I don't believe it's been done before for stage separation, but this is also how they deploy Starlink satellites. [0]

Obviously, something went wrong in stage separation today so Booster+Starship just continually flipped. We don't know exactly what the true flip will look like.

[0]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1630394434847227909?lang...

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#414

Post by [deleted] »

sandworm101 wrote: post #309
mabbo wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not proposing something, I'm describing it. This is what SpaceX is doing , and it's quite successful. And you can look all the way back to their little hopper version of the Falcon 9 and see that this strategy has been the key to them undercutting the launch market significantly. My prediction: SpaceX will have a 5th 100% successful launch of Starship before the SLS has a 5th successful launch. They'll just have…

My point would be that while SpaceX does save lots of money, it doesn't do so by producing cheap or less reliable rockets. It would never accept a failure rate any different than anyone else because, in aerospace, that isn't really a thing. SpaceX can certainly blast forwards with different business practices and different tolerance for developmental risks, but the final product will not be fundamentally different th…

[deleted]

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#415

Post by samstave »

dingosity wrote: post #399
samstave wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved the fact that in the video, the staff clapped when the thing exploded... Where in the past, people would be like "OH NO!!" -- but the crew knew how much data they got out of that launch. I wonder how stripped down the starship was though in an effort to save costs in the event such as this RUD. I would love a piece of the shrapnel from the exploded device though... Hopefully they get those pieces and auction…

I suspect they were told "if we get off the ground, it's a success." Elon's been saying similar things over the last week.

Which is rightly, awesome... They just launched an 11 million pound firecracker....

It would be AWESOME if elon included actual fireworks which would go off in the event of a RUD to add some fabulousness to such events.

In fact, all the devices that are stripped out for these test launches should be replaced with their equivalent weights in fireworks. Detonate them when possible during a RUD to allow for more spectacle!

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#416

Post by ftxbro »

mabbo wrote: post #61

People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. Compare the SLS to Starship. SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time. Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve…

[flagged]

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#417

Post by RC_ITR »

sandworm101 wrote: post #198
mabbo wrote: post #61

People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. Compare the SLS to Starship. SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time. Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve…

>> People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. That sounds logical, but isn't really a thing in aerospace/space. Complicated high-energy systems have thousands of failure points. So to have any chance of success each failure point needs to be engineered below, by way of example, a 0.0001% chance of failure. That costs lots of money. But say one decides to accept more risk for less c…

Tbf, even before launch, no-one expected a full trip. The 'baseline' was lift-off and the rest was upside [0]

Sometimes in aerospace you need to collect data, and sometimes that means explosions.

[0] https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-first-space-launch#:~:....

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#418

Post by nunuvit »

mabbo wrote: post #231
sandworm101 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. That sounds logical, but isn't really a thing in aerospace/space. Complicated high-energy systems have thousands of failure points. So to have any chance of success each failure point needs to be engineered below, by way of example, a 0.0001% chance of failure. That costs lots of money. But say one decides to accept more risk for less c…

I'm not proposing something, I'm describing it. This is what SpaceX is doing , and it's quite successful. And you can look all the way back to their little hopper version of the Falcon 9 and see that this strategy has been the key to them undercutting the launch market significantly. My prediction: SpaceX will have a 5th 100% successful launch of Starship before the SLS has a 5th successful launch. They'll just have…

Completely agree. I've worked in "old space" and the fundamental problem is that they can't afford to experiment. SpaceX has the option to physically test an idea that's holding them up before investing in fully bringing it up to production quality, only to have to redo all that work next iteration. That's why they can make new things and do it cheaper and faster.

Re: SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

#420

Post by hindsightbias »

gvb wrote: post #235
hindsightbias wrote: post #200

FAA will be wanting to talk to that Range Safety Officer. Waiting for it to break up on it’s own can’t be a best practice.

As long as the trajectory of the vehicle stays within the "safe trajectory box", the range safety officer has no reason to blow the rocket up. SpaceX acquired a huge amount of data that would have otherwise been lost if the RSO was "quick on the trigger." Example of a different rocket failure where the range safety officer let the rocket survive until it exceeded the safe trajectory box: "Astra Rocket 3 LV0006 drifti…

You can’t assume you can trigger a system after it has undergone extreme structural loads or failure. So waiting until that happens while rocket is, charitably, careening does not ensure staying in any box.

I doubt they had any uplink or downlink during that mode so there’s no data to be had.

Prediction: the FAA will come down hard on them.

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