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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.
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I really wish they'd stop putting Musk's name on things like this. He didn't design the engines, he didn't plan the flight path, he did nothing but throw a bunch of money at a company because he's obsessed with Mars.
He does force them to cut corners for the sake of more headlines though
Which is why I'm nervous for when they decide to start doing manned flights.
Falcon 9 is the most reliable rocket in the world and it used to explode like this too. It’ll be 5-10 years of successful unmanned flights before anyone rides on this rocket.
Was NASA exploding rockets this frequently when they pioneered all of this decades ago? It only took NASA 8 years to go from first entering space to landing on the moon. SpaceX is nowhere close to that and they've been launching rockets for 17 years.
Damn you clearly know nothing about space flight history. Tell me, what agency has the most spaceflight deaths? I’ll give you a hint: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents
Damn you clearly know nothing about technological development. Elon stands on the shoulders of all those who gave their lives in the past. He benefits from all the safety regulations.
And still with all of that. The tens of billions of dollars the government hands out to him. And more than twice the time of the Space Race he had accomplished so little. How many successful rockets did NASA develop in that time? A lot more than SpaceX.
Different design processes and NASA has to appease Congress who likes to cut funding if a rocket blows up.
But the Design-build-test-break-redesign-etc process that SpaceX uses is cheaper, quicker, and gives more data.
And blows up real good
Look how long it took to develop SLS and how much money was spent, and then how much each launch costs. And the moment Starship is complete SLS will be obsolete.
It took 8 Years AND $25 billions ($248 billions adjusted to today's dollar value).
For comparison NASA awarded a contract for spacex to develop the Human Landing System, the value of the contract is $2.89 billions.
Exploding rockets is totally common in rocket science. In fact, their mission objective wasn’t even for the rocket to succeed at making it to space. When you put millions of pounds of fuel into a tube and heat it up, there is a lot to take into account. No one has ever launched anything this big, so they are going to have to iterate quite a few times. Even the computer models can’t catch everything. Sometimes it is as stupid as a bad part manufacturer.
No, but the resources given and the requirements set are different. The Saturn V did not have to be reusable and was awarded two orders of magnitude more funding. Which is ultimately why it stopped being made.
The US government has a pretty good track record on making sure astronauts don't die.
Sadly, Thats how capitalism work hence they keep using Musk's name. Anyone with money is valuable in our economy.
… throw a bunch of money at a company because he
’s obsessed with Mars.wanted to justify sending money to some arm dealer Russian friends.what? didn't he start SpaceX because Russia WOULDN'T take his money?
IIRC, they wouldn’t take his money because he misunderstood the price they wanted, tried to bargain it down and lowball them, and ended up pissing them off so much they doubled the price.
He tried to buy Russian decommissioned ICBMs but the DoJ wouldn't let him.
This just false. Sure, he did not do everything alone but he has a huge hand in engineering concepts and design decisions. Lots of hate and complete misunderstanding how spaceship, spaceX and Musk work in this thread.
When Elon still wrote code it was so bad they had to scrap most of it.
And the one they did use ended up into a fridge's firmware.
The dude prefers reviewing source code on paper.
Anyone who writes code knows that is not a practical way to review.
Maybe in his time he got book smart about some physics/rocket concepts. That's the least I would expect anyway. But that doesn't mean he really has any expertise to offer to the product.
I agree it makes no sense. A fair number of my clients are morons and about 2 or 3 times a year they want a printout of the code.
You're wrong. Watch some videos on starship development and the history on spacex in general.
Videos like what?
Several on Everyday Astronaut's channel for instance.
I do not know that channel, can you link one of those? I would like to see what he has to say.
Not OP, but it’s really not hard to find.
Look for the three tours that Tim did with Elon
https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=everyday+astronaut+elon+musk
So, actually kinda successful.
Actually kinda really successful 👍 All 33 engines were firing, the hot staging was successful. On both the first and second stages, it looks like the automatic FTS (flight termination system) was triggered. That would happen if it veered too far off of it's approved flight path (don't need it coming down over a populated region.) The only thing that didn't happen that I was hopeful for was atmospheric re-entry - we really need to see how that heat shield works in practice.
If the stage exploded due to the hot staging change, perhaps it won't count as a success. But it's too early to tell either way
Looked to me like the hot staging plus flip maneuver sent the 1st stage into a slow spin it couldn’t recover from using the ullage gas thrusters.
A user in another thread pointed out that during relight, not all engines lit, and the ones that did started going back out.
Scott Manley suggested the hot-stage combined with the fast flip maneuver may have caused fuel to slosh away from the intakes in the tank, leading to ingestion of gas bubbles in the fuel lines. Those would have damaged or destroyed engines as they worked their way into the turbo pumps, leading to the progressive engine-outs seen on the stream before the eventual catastrophic failure of the booster.
I'm guessing they wanted to show the FTS works really good now and terminates at the first sign of something wrong. Last time it was doing those flips for quite a while.
Maybe. I would think the best FTS is the one not used ¯_(ツ)_/¯
If i had a nickel for every time this happened to me in KBS…
lol: “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly”. That’s one way to describe it!
What a shitty title. The lunch was an absolute success.
There's no shame in highlighting what went right and still acknowledging what went terribly wrong.
Censoring the latter prevents improvements. No need for fanboyism.
On test flights, having something go terribly wrong is expected. This is the second test flight of a brand new vehicle system which also happens to be the largest and most complicated vehicle ever made. They also have half a dozen more vehicles already made and waiting to fly, each with improvements learned in manufacturing the previous one. They are behind their original schedule, for sure, but this mission was a huge success for SpaceX considering all of the things that did work.
I wonder what the simulation showed was going to happen compared to the actual flight. Would give you a real metric of progress.
If the simulation showed a problem, they could have fixed it before launch. I'm guessing they don't have a enough data to make a super high fidelity integrated model for all phases of fight, so they'd break down the sections individually. But integration always brings extra challenges.
So they don't have a physicist on staff? Or several? We have known the math for rocket science for some time. What data is it they need? When even NASA in the sixties has simulators.
I'm sure they have tons. But we don't know the full thermo areo dynamics at hypersonic speeds and complex geometries, especially their effect on unconventional control surfaces across huge temperature and speed ranges. Some military companies have even bought flights on electron to get high altitude hypersonic velocity data on how the air behaves in that regime.
So rocket science…the thing the world has been doing since the end of WWII. Weird how other rockets don't have this problem…
You know of any other companies doing a belly flop maneuver? Or a reusable first stage with hot staging?
How reusable? NASA had recoverable boosters How does math and physics change based on goals?
NASA has never used hot staging.
Yeah it's super easy that rocket science. Just plug some numbers into a simulation and off you go. It's not exactly brain surgery.
Tell that to Robert Goddard
Here's the everyday astronaut livestream of the launch: https://www.youtube.com/live/6na40SqzYnU?t=27150
He certainly didn't have to be all anti-Semitic to deflect attention from this failure. It's telling.
It weirds me out how many people want to get a brain implant done by a company of this guy
eh… it looks like hot-staging still has some bugs to work out, but the 2nd stage worked just fine (and since that's the part that matters, the end fate of the first stage is irrelevant)
good test all in all
Look, I really want to like SpaceX and enjoy all their successes and so on.
But it's just not. going. to. happen. And they know why. This isn't complicated.
Thx for the ocean pollution!
Back to the drawing board. Yeah, I know they are with the sliderules.
I bet some of them own slide rules in homage to the people that went before them.
That is a nice thought. I have a few and have given a few away. Problem is when you have to teach others how to use them.
