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.
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.
And what of worker safety at Space X?
It’s not the rocket or the engineering I’m concerned about, it’s the push to meet deadlines at the expense of safety.
You literally said you were concerned for manned flight in your last comment. So originally it was the rocket and engineering you were concerned about.
You literally said you were concerned for manned flight in your last comment
You’re oh so slightly twisting the dude’s words. What he said was:
Which is why I’m nervous for when they decide to start doing manned flights.
This could be expressing concern about the flights themselves, or about something that happens around the time the decision to start doing manned flights is taken - like cutting corners that leads to employees getting injured.
Dude even clarified what he meant, and you’re like “nope, I won’t accept that”?
I said I was concerned because of the corner cutting, which isn’t an engineering problem
That might’ve been what you intended but it is not what you said. You didn’t bring that up until your 2nd comment.
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.
Rocket go up Rocket blow up Stonk go up
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.
Blame the poster. The CNN article itself doesn’t have Musk in the headline and barely mentions him at all (there is one quote near the end).
EDIT
Or maybe don’t blame the poster. From the URL and web archives, it appears CNN may have changed the title.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/18/world/elon-musk-spacex-starship-launch-scn/index.html
Perhaps it’s time for titles that match the article headlines as a matter of policy here?
Actually, I just realized the poster may have used the original CNN title.
That is precisely what happened. I use the title that gets pulled when you paste in a URL.
That is already the rule. CNN changed the headline after I posted it.
… throw a bunch of money at a company because he
’s obsessed with Mars.wanted to justify sending money to some Russian arm dealers friends.what? didn’t he start SpaceX because Russia WOULDN’T take his money?
He tried to buy Russian decommissioned ICBMs but the DoJ wouldn’t let him.
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.
Sadly, Thats how capitalism work hence they keep using Musk’s name. Anyone with money is valuable in our economy.
He did insist they slap an X on it tho. Thats gotta be worth something, right.
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.
You’re wrong. Watch some videos on starship development and the history on spacex in general.
He doesn’t do shit. All of that is just him saying buzzwords he learnt from the actual engineers so he’d look smart.
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.
Look for the three tours that Tim did with Elon
https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=everyday+astronaut+elon+musk
Not OP, but it’s really not hard to find.
Alright, let me clear something up.
This is literally rocket science. The process to put humans into space is literally done this way, for this exact reason. They had two key primary objectives for this launch:
- Successful ignition and control of 33 raptor engines in first stage.
- Successful hot separation into second stage.
The first stage separated entirely and gained plenty of distance before it did explode.
The second stage flew for several minutes before the automated emergency flight termination kicked in and destroyed it.
All of the data that they were recording will pinpoint the failures in the return of the first stage, and the destruction in the second stage. They would not have that data if they did not do this test and nothing went wrong.
All of the data that they were recording will pinpoint the failures
Do they need data like last time with the launch pad? Where it was clear that it will desintegrate? Did that give them additional insights into how the engines react to debris doing back into them? Was that the goal all along?
Seriously, they are iterating, sure. But we already know they ignore known problems. So it is not like every explosion is necessary or helps in any way.
I’m not a rocket scientist, but I research complex systems. Failure is the best way to improve something, even if you know it’s going to fail, you want to see how and what are the repercussions. I’ve done so many experiments that I knew were doomed, but I still have to do them just because I wanted to see how the system is would react.
Not a fan boy of Elon by the way, not trying to defend him or anything.
That was really non of that. It was predictable that and how it would fail. NASA etc. solved that issue decades ago. It also created new issues, like the (protected) water table being affected. All because he wanted a certain date and cheap out.
Primary objective was things not to explode, which they did. Everything else you just said was repeated PR. Yes, it was a success, they wanted to throw hundreds of millions for no reason. More to the point, second stage blew up in low earth orbit, which is within reach of satellites. So your so called success is yet to be proven. It’s going to be weeks and months before we see the real effect of explosion propelled debris around the planet.
Primary objective was to get further than last time, which they absolutely did. Not only were all the engines reliable for their first burn, they tested a successful hot separation, in flight ignition, and effective flight termination system. All of this was on top of the achievements they made last time and allowed Starship to reach space for the first time, making it reach past the N1 in only two attempts.
It was a great success.
PS. No it did not explode in orbit. The actual rocket scientists did think about this you know. The flight plan featured a suborbital track, and it splashed down safely in the ocean somewhere along it’s predicted path at most about an hour after launch.
Great success would be landing it. Exploding and ramming the rest of the wreckage in ocean is not a success, but I guess Musk fans will repeat everything verbatim. If someone drives a car through your house but jumps out just before it smashes. Them claiming it was a great success, initial goal was to get the car moving… hardly constitutes a success to you, does it?
You’re either a malicious troll or completely uninformed. A landing sequence was never planned for this test nor the one before it. Even if they met all their stretch goals, both stages would have crashed into the ocean, just in a different location from what ended up happening. The goals haven’t changed, you just assumed that they were something they were not.
People here are conflating progress with space flight with Elon musk. Like yeah Elon musk sucks, but frankly, progress in space flight is cool. It is a good thing that space x exists because it is on one of the frontiers of science.
As for this flight, like yeah of course it would be cool if they could just know that their designs would work on the first flight up, but that’s not how science works. This was a test. They learned from the test. Next time they will improve and make more progress.
One day that progress will take us to Mars. That is cool not because musk wants to go to Mars - it is cool because humans going to Mars is freakin amazing and an incredible achievement.
Oooh, so those are called stretch goals now. Good to know. So anything you don’t manage to do you just call stretch goals. Noted.
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…
We’ll see how many satellites gets damaged by huge explosion in LEO.
It blew up about 3000 km/hr short of orbit, so thankfully all of it has burned up in Earth’s atmosphere already :)
What a shitty title. The launch was an absolute success.
The launch achieved most of its objectives, but it was supposed to fly farther and splash down near Hawaii. It was a success in that the 32 engines fired together, and the ship achieved separation, and there will be plenty of data about what went wrong.
But some things did go wrong, so you can’t say it was an “absolute” success. Both the superheavy and the starship were lost. Rocket science is slow and expensive progress. It’s only a failure if we abandon the project. But it is disingenuous to say that everything worked out as intended.
…but it exploded before dinner.
Taco Bell strikes again.
No it wasn’t. Absolute success would mean no explosion.
Did he blame the Jews for it blowing up?
Well that tweet is being composed with the aid of kilos of ketamine as we speak
The space lasers took it out probably
lol: “experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly”. That’s one way to describe it!
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.
It weirds me out how many people want to get a brain implant done by a company of this guy
It would be very weird, if we could verify they weren’t shills or bots. Insane and desperate people. It was only “interesting” years ago, before he exposed himself as a fraud (and tortured animals during failed testing).
so how many?
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
What bugs? At this point we don’t have an explanation for the first-stage RUD, looking at the overlay it seems there were issues re-lighting the Raptors which could be for any reason.
From what I saw, the hot-staging went perfectly with the RUD happening when the ship was already in space.
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
To late for Indipendence Day, to early for New Year - But what a splendid fireworks!
Explosion at T+03:20
Wow. Was not expecting that from the rocket.
how nice for mexico
