Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad. Suggesting that this test “failed” is at best a mischaracterisation.
I am confused. Everything I read before the launch said that it was intended to reach orbital altitude and make it around the Earth.
I think he said the exact same thing about the first Falcon Heavy launch.
I interpreted literally the words they used about the plan for today's launch.
I might go to the grocery store with a list of five things, but I only really need two things. Coming home with 3 things would be a success.
On one end of the spectrum, Starship detonates on the pad and they have learned very little and have a year of work to do rebuilding the pad.
On the other end of the spectrum, everything works flawlessly and Starship survives re-entry and smacks into the ocean off of Hawaii.
They achieved a result in the middle. Neither total failure nor total success, and well within their stated expectations for this attempt.
there is something about this launcher and the launch that looks exeedingly wrong to me cf a saturn v (i realise spacex is trying to launch larger masses)
Thanks for the laugh.
Furthermore, we don't know there was a failure to separate. If I had to guess, once the vehicle was in an unstable attitude outside of the nominal flight path, they triggered the self-destruct and purposefully didn't try to separate.
This is progress, and admirable, but not a success according to their previous statements.
It's pretty amazing that the rocket went past the launch pad, yet alone survived past max-Q to begin with!
SpaceX has no test facility capable of withstanding a full thrust booster test on the ground.
Also SpaceX has more boosters and ships complete and in various stages of assembly. A complete loss of the pad would have been much more damaging to the program.
I wouldn't have been surprised if the whole thing shook itself apart on the lift pad and blew up.
I don't know about you, but when I rapidly build and assemble large complex structures like a cowboy, I certainly expect a ton of failures on my first trials. When stuff goes much further than I expected, I'm in awe and disbelief.
“We consider any data received that helps inform an improved future build of starship a success. From a milestone standpoint, our main goal is to clear the pad. Every milestone beyond that is a bonus. The further we fly, the more data we can collect.”
I'm no fan of the SpaceX model but if it works for them and the safety of those on the ground is prioritized, it seems to work better than any other model tried here.
I don't think "planned" is the right word - the right word is "hoped".
> “I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won't be boring,” Musk promised at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. “I think it's got, I don't know, hopefully about a 50% chance of reaching orbit.”
I do recall he did express some level of concern about the launch pad being damaged if the rocket failed to launch though (it still looks like it was damaged to some degree from the launch.)
Very, very technically true, but not really. Their target trajectory was only a few tens of m/s short of orbit.
> aerodynamic stresses similar
Right, within one percent.
I will disagree with you though and say that the rocket stage separation failed to work. And this occurred a few minutes after launching.
What would your headline be?
> SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Explodes After Launch
> The most powerful rocket ever built got off the launchpad in South Texas, but did not achieve its most ambitious goals on Thursday.
(?)
But seriously what a terrible title. This was a huge accomplishment in engineering, getting it this far up.
It's absolutely correct.
SpaceX is a great demonstration of an "ideal mix" of new and old. It has a lot of "classic" "measure twice; cut once" planning, but also an absolutely essential "YOLO" mindset for live testing, which can cause big failures, but also give the most valuable data.
Their manned flights have been great (except for that toilet thing...).
You can really tell if a company has a culture of embracing failure if they're cool with you blowing up a spaceship.
Whether they’re truly happy with this result probably will depend on their analysis of what went wrong.
If they can find the cause and it’s easy to fix, they’ll be a lot happier than when they can’t figure out what went wrong, or when they can figure it out, but preventing it requires a huge redesign.
But yes, this is the nature of rocket building. Things do get boom fairly easily.
It would have been a failure if the data logging failed to transmit, or if it had immediately exploded and destroyed the launch tower.
You there, reading this comment, go and fail or go and turn autorenew off :P
Failure > inaction. You can learn from failure.
But things just are what they are. They aren’t good or bad. Good or bad is your interpretation of the way things are. If you consider doing nothing good, then you succeed by not trying. If you consider trying good, then you succeed by simply trying.
The altitude and velocity when things went sideways were in MRBM territory, not ICBM territory so the only thing they would have hit would have been the Atlantic ocean.
Most complicated part of building any rocket by far and Starship's is a lot more complex than any previous one by far. It was always the most failure prone part but everything else looks great.
That's not what they said in their mission presentation though. It was supposed to launch, separate, return the booster back, then the rocket was supposed to orbit once around the Earth and then fall into the ocean.
I understand people have their feelings invested into this (for whatever reason), but objectively speaking that was not what "success was defined as".
To me, more interesting than how the company itself defines success would be how domain experts outside the company perceive it.
"SpaceX intends to collect as much data as possible during flight to quantify entry dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally. This data will anchor any changes in vehicle design or CONOPs after the first flight and build better models for us to use in our internal simulations."
From https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481
It doesn't say the objective is "fly across earth".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1wcilQ58hI
@ 9:38 "We will consider any data inform and improve future builds of starship as a success. From a milestone our main goal is to clear the pad. Every milestone beyond that is a bonus."
@ 15:57 "We're focusing on the fundamental systems and operations, so that's the liftoff portion, but we are going to try and get some data on how the fins work..."
@ 35:26 "I want to remind everyone that success today is anything <interrupted by cheering> for today success is anything that helps improve the future builds of starship. If we lift off and clear the pad we're calling that a win."
It even spun like a KSP rocket.
you have literally no idea what you're talking about
Looks like the propellant line issues from earlier flight tests - that sort of stuff is really not at all supposed to happen.
The Soviets had the 'launch often, fail fast, learn faster' view that SpaceX employs today.
However, nobody viewed the N1 launches outside the Soviet Union as successes. I'm glad to see that 'fail fast, learn faster' is finally part of American aerospace engineering.
Instead of adopting the proven R-7 stacking scheme which was much easier to test piece by piece, Korolyov opted to a novel design which was too wide (17m!!), and static fires required a humongous and prohibitively expensive testing facility. The lack of static fires made the development too slow and expensive, as the only way to test it was in the actual flight. Combine this with other technical mistakes (the shape led to the extra weight while the modularity wasn't required, too much drag, etc) and Mishin's poor leadership after Korolyov's death, and you have a recipe for a failed project.
Starship is much narrower (9m), today's tech is much better, so the static fires are much cheaper; and unlike N-1, it's actually designed for fast iterations from the ground up.
Why? It had pretty advanced engines, conservative fuel choices, architecture optimized for low requirements at manufacturing. And it was originally planned for Mars missions, not LEO missions.
> Korolyov opted to a novel design which was too wide (17m!!)
Why too wide? Technical decisions were made with all degrees of justifications available at the time. That it's wider than anything else till today, including Starship, doesn't make it "too wide".
> Combine this with other technical mistakes (the shape led to the extra weight while the modularity wasn't required, too much drag, etc)
Extra weight in weight-carrying construction is compensated, at least to a degree, by lesser weight of spherical tanks. Modularity was present so even N-11 was considered - two upper stages of N-1. Too much drag - comparing to what?
N-1 was quite state of the art technically when it was created. I don't see how calling it a technical blunder can be justified.
Whatever technical issues N1 had, could have been resolved with enough iterations. We have no idea if Starship will work and if it does have design problems, we won't know until years from now if it fails or succeeds.
This comment is 20 Years too late, SpaceX was founded in 2002.
"I may have crashed the car into the neighbour's house and broken my arm, but I did get the milk from the store!"
- SpaceX will be sad if the rocket blows up on the pad.
- They’ll be very happy if the rocket clears the tower.
- They’ll be ecstatic if the rocket makes it around the world.
- They’ll use the flight termination system, which all rockets carry, if it veers off course.
Did you see the employees cheering during the webcast?
Even now, it's not hard to ask the somewhat specious question of how we can be 70+ years into aerospace tech and we still need our rockets to blow up.
That combination is inherently explosive in any sort of failure.
Historically we can see that there are two modes of rocket development when it comes to failure tolerance. 1. Iterate fast and blow stuff up (e.g. mercury/redstone, spacex) or 2. Iterate slowly, at massive cost, with fewer catastrophic failures (space shuttle, Apollo, SLS).
When it comes to safety, the slow and expensive route has a dubious track record. Of course, slow and expensive is producing much more complex vehicles, until today, at least.
It is obvious that every new rocket that was built from ground up will fail a few times before it is released.
This is not a "production build". And you don't need to explain anything when your "test build" fails, it is obvious some will.