SpaceX’s Starship Kicked Up a Dust Cloud, Leaving Texans With a Mess | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX’s Starship Kicked Up a Dust Cloud, Leaving Texans With a Mess

nytimes.com

26 pointsperihelions40 comments

This is exactly what I was concerned about in my comment yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35641876

They may well be able to justify the lack of diverter/deluge from an engineering prototype perspective, I'm all for moving quickly. But the lack of foresight of what a massive dust cloud does politically is going to cause so many issues going forward.

It's quite clear that the lack of diverter/deluge was a misstep, and the effect was unanticipated. So many things were damaged - launch cameras, that car, a pad-side oxygen tank, likely several of the rocket motors. You can see enormous chunks of concrete flung into the air on the recording - it's a miracle the damage was not worse. The rocket could easily have been destroyed on the pad, along with the entire launch complex. Given the obvious problems at the business end of the rocket it very possibly even cost the mission.

It was just a bad decision.

>It's quite clear that the lack of diverter/deluge was a misstep

I don't agree. None of this, pad included, is production hardware. This test article was obsolete and on the verge of being scrapped (like the several before it) to make room for newer models. The pad itself (except the ring structure, which is fine) is temporary. The tank farm is temporary. The only infrastructure that really needed to be protected was the tower frame itself, which is fine.

The overwhelming majority of commenters in here and that flagged article from the other day seemingly refuse to understand that almost everything involved in the test was temporary/planned to be scrapped. The "damage" wasn't mitigated *because it doesn't matter*.

The debris very likely compromised the test because it damaged the engines. That is not intentional and is something SpaceX needs to fix.

Dust Egress is pretty tame in terms of environmental impact. Guess they need to mske these pads more remote.

“There were bowling ball-sized pieces of concrete that came flying out of the launchpad area,” Mr. Balderas said. The blast, he added, had created a crater that he estimated was around 25 feet deep.

"But without a chemical analysis of the dust and debris, he added, it was difficult to say whether or not they were harmful to human health."

From the article...

It's nyt, though. How objective has their past reporting on Musk-related enterprises been? I know it's a weak spot with some, just as the inverse is also a weak spot with some others.

Come on, man. There's plenty of footage of this.

Yeah, footage of a throwaway car left inside the exclusion zone as a glorified camera tripod getting destroyed, yet they used that as an example to muddy the waters

You are totally overstating everything yourself, as that wasn't my takeaway from the article at all. If anything, the article makes it seem like not a big deal at all (there's a video of the town where all you see is... a cloud??). Nevertheless, contrary to what you are stating, I see tons of posts here cogently explaining why the SpaceX decisions about the launchpad were probably dumb.

Ah - I wasn't clear. I'm not saying that didn't happen; it's just the "we don't know if it's dangerous" line isn't great.

Reporting potential news is not much different to insinuation, and I wish it would stop in newspapers of record.

This article is misleading. The way it's written makes you think people's cars were destroyed, or that these massive bowling ball objects flew into town.

In reality the damage was limited to the exclusion zone around the rocket. A destroyed vehicle was intentionally left there as a camera tripod.

The only thing that "left" the exclusion zone was sound and a dust cloud, so I'll give them that, but the article is trying to mislead the reader (and succeeding, based on comments in this post).

Just because it is more remote doesn't make the environmental impact smaller. It could actually make it worse.

Humans are not the only living things on the planet, and it does matter when we fork it up for the other living things (even if you are entirely selfish, you'd be a fool to ignore the fact that we are biological beings dependent on the rest of the ecosystem for our own lives).

>In Port Isabel, a city about six miles northwest where at least one window shattered, residents were alarmed.

>"There were bowling ball-sized pieces of concrete that came flying out of the launchpad area"

>In June, an environmental assessment by the Federal Aviation Administration concluded that SpaceX’s plans for orbital launches would have “no significant impact” on the region along the Gulf Coast.

There was a thread here [0] a few days ago of a blog post that raised some valid criticism to the way Starbase its conducting its ops and how the EPA is playing dumb around it.

Funny thing, it got flagged and hidden almost immediately, even though it was quite active and getting several comments per minute ...

What I've found particularly disturbing is how some commenters were dismissing the blog post as ignorant, misinformed, a "breathless doom mongering", etc. I wonder if they're on Musk's payroll or if they just shill for free. I'd like to hear what they say about this but they're, conveniently, no longer around now. A classic.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590279

It’s a big rocket. What do you expect?

You could expect them to build adequate measures to limit damage like flame trenches and water deluge systems. And to build new rocket launch facilities in suitable areas with sufficient distance to cities.

See my above comment, you and a bunch of other commenters are making wildly incorrect assumptions about a huge list of things.

It might surprise you that the Engineers running the current leader in space flight (tonnage to orbit, reliability, reusability, cost, pick your metric) aren't complete idiots.

So you think they can get away with launching again without a flame trench and a real water deluge system? The debris very likely damaged the rocket engines, that is not something they can tolerate for more tests.

This kind of infrastructure isn't built quickly, so if it is needed they should have started building it somewhere 1-2 years ago instead of deciding to try it without it. Because if they need it now, this slows down development significantly as they have to built it starting from now.

No, it's the biggest rocket. Normal launch precautions for big rockets would have been a good place to start.

Not like we have done before - Saturn V launchpad had a water deluge system and a rather concrete bunker under the rocket.

I guess Space X will get there when it is more stable and not alpha version - the first few launches are always going to blow up in line with their build fast and break fast engineering philosophy.

Concrete is a major source of CO2, though.

So much trolling here recently it seems to me

Dude's account is 9 years old with >5k karma. I'm concerned he's having a stroke.

I got it by responding to content, not ad hominem nonsense, and occasionally making jokes. Some of the latter will not land, of course.

It's not trolling. I was just being light-hearted.

Well if you have A380, you are not going to try to land it on local sports airfield, aren't you?

All I'll say is Drop Pods. That should be enough of a hint.

The article was flagged because the article was trash. Just because it had a few correct points sprinkled in a misleading fashion among the rest doesn't mean the article was overall correct.

The damage was expected, no one was hurt. A throw-away obsolete test article that was literally going to be shot full of holes and sunk to the bottom of the ocean was instead blown up and a temporary pad that is being replaced anyways got damaged, oh well. The primary objective of the test was to demonstrate a 33 engine start up and operational run at 100% throttle. There's all kinds of compounding effects that are hard to simulate (constructive interference is a bitch) and at some point the only way to get the data is to test. Even hitting MaxQ was a bonus, although this test article lacked many of the structural enhancements already incorporated into the production articles so it's not as useful as some think.

Nothing that you see in Boca chica is in it's final form, almost everything there except the tower structure itself will be ripped out and replaced at some point.

The article was flagged because of fandom. It said there would be a larger radius affected than the environmental impact report and it was right.

Move fast and break things, as long as it's not your house being broken or your kids inhaling the toxic particulates.

Welcome to the Republic of Musk. He's smarter and wealthier than everyone else, so he doesn't need to ask for permission or forgiveness.

he also has great taste in letters.

why do you think he chose teXas?

do you think that was an accident?

When are people going to get past this pettiness, and just unite around the mission of making humanity a space spanning species.

Sorry, too busy gagging at the thought. Some of don't think there's any benefit to this or what he's doing, and that your whole argument is totally complete nonsense. It is, after all, just science fiction and a huge assumption that anything would come of it at all. It's cool that you like. I was into space when I was a kid too, went to space camp, launched rockets. But I don't need to buy into cults of personalities and their narratives. Like you are in some rush to become a belter. What a horrible reality to be in where this is your hope for the future.

There's orders of magnitude more resources outside of Earth than on it, and those resources can be harvested without disrupting any natural environments.

In fact, off-worlding all of human civilization's resource extraction and production would do more than any other project to protect Earth's natural habitats while ensuring every individual on Earth can enjoy the high, resource-intensive, quality of life that poeple in the developed world take for granted.

Starship will reduce the cost of sending material to space 10 fold and potentially much more, and this after SpaceX already reduced the per kg launch to orbit cost 10 fold and spurred a massive expansion of orbital launches:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/yearly-number-of-objects-...

So all of these aspirations are realizable and the progress toward them is real.

Perhaps you're addicted to being a cynic and tearing down any one who has hope, and that's why you're irrationally cynical.

I'm not being cynical at all. The notion that your position is anything but couched cynicism is my whole damn point. It's just fanciful mysticism on your part that actually reads more like science fiction.

I just gave a number of reasons why this is in no way "mysticism" and why it's highly worthy to pursue, so at this point I'll just dismiss your comment as it's clear you're making zero effort to justify your ultra-cynicism.

Those aren't reasons, they are conjectures. They are not facts. It is modern mysticism. You have the cynical take on society wherein we are so unable to live on this planet, that we have no choice but to take onto barren wastelands. I'm not cynical at all, you clearly haven't thought through your assertions the slightest bit. On top of that, even granting you a positive outlook on humanity, comes up with the reality where you are saying we need to get off planet now because of a future millions of years away? Give me a break, that's EXACTLY what mysticism is. You might as well be writing a bible.

I provided facts that make these projections credible. This bears no resemblance to mysticism.

>>You have the cynical take on society wherein we are so unable to live on this planet,

We can both live on this planet and harvest massive amounts of resources outside of the planet. It's a strict improvement over being limited to just Earth.

"In fact, off-worlding all of human civilization's resource extraction and production would do more than any other project to protect Earth's natural habitats while ensuring every individual on Earth can enjoy the high, resource-intensive, quality of life that poeple in the developed world take for granted."

Is not a fact

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