So what was that? Was Starship’s launch a failure or a success?
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I've been more than a little disappointed with all the "they tried but it blew up" headlines that came in the days following the test flight.
The whole point is that this is bigger and more ambitious than any prior attempt - the failure is the most important part, it means you learn something.
Anything more than a failure to ignite should be considered a success in my book.
They purposefully chose not to have a flame diverter, instead they were hoping to get away with simply blowing up the launchpad beneath them. I respect that they're trying to push boundaries, but this just seems foolish.
For a company so focused on reducing cost through reusability, why did they choose to blow up the launch pad upon launch? I understand building a flame diverter for a rocket this massive is an incredible amount of work, but if it makes subsequent launches cheaper then wouldn't that amortize the costs?
At the same time, if it would have taken several more months to install a flame diverter / metal plating below the launch pad, would that be worth it, or negate the progress made by gathering flight data? I'm not sure we can know that for sure.
I would hazard a guess that in the long term, it will have been the right decision.
they used something they knew to work so there is one less variable that should prevent liftoff
at this point there is no reducing the cost phase yet, they try to test assumptions and learn what and how things can go wrong. It's much better that things go wrong at test flight than at mission flight.
if they would get lucky and none of the issues would manifest, they could assume that design is perfect and do not try to improve it. so it's good if whatever can go wrong goes wrong at test flight
I agree that the success should be measured in lessons learned from the launch. However we learned next to nothing about the second stage because the first stage failed for reasons that weren't unexpected.
So from that perspective the launch could be considered a failure, because they traded getting data on the second stage for learning a lesson that was already known.
and remember, as you already mentioned, that stage 2 won't even start until stage 1 succeeds, so they need to perfect that first.
but I see your point, if they would manage to separate before stage 1 failure they could gather more data
Unless on the Moon, but then it would have to LEO or lunar orbit abort if it does not burn up on the spot and require a recovery mission.
Lunar Starship is the second stage, this was the first that did the damage. Even that is different from the one launched in the recent test; it’s a variant that will do the final landing on different engines high up on the rocket. Per Wikipedia:
> Within 100 meters of the lunar surface, the variant will utilize high‑thrust RCS thrusters located mid‑body to avoid plume impingement problems with the lunar regolith.
Landing is also very different than takeoff; the F9 takes off with nine, lands with one. Likewise, Super Heavy launches with 33, but Starship lands with 3-6, and three of those are the vacuum variant, with much less focused plumes.
First stage will likely use more than 3-6, none will be the vacuum variant.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEnz8V97Qck&t=2100
> for the terminal descent of Starship, a few tens of meters before we touch down on the lunar surface, we actually use a high-thrust RCS system, so that we don't impinge on the surface of the Moon with the high-thrust Raptor engines. ... uses the same methane and oxygen propellants as Raptor.
(We'll see if that winds up being the actual final solution, but they've clearly at least thought about this aspect.)
Starship != Super Heavy
Lunar Starship != Starship
Earth != Moon
All of these differences combined make the test not the slightest bit indicative of how things would work for a lunar Starship landing.
Lunar Starship is going to use the same engines for takeoff, assuming they don't get smashed by flying debris.
> 3 months ago, we started building a massive water-cooled, steel plate to go under the launch mount.
> Wasn’t ready in time & we wrongly thought, based on static fire data, that Fondag would make it through 1 launch.
To me, it sounds like people that would have been considered experts (and probably still are) made assessments than turned out to be incorrect.
Videos of the debris storm were pretty mind boggling to watch - it's difficult to comprehend the sheer amount of energy expended.
I am truly looking forward to the learnings published from this.
"Aspiring to have no flame diverter in Boca, but this could turn out to be a mistake" -Musk https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1313952039869788173
I wouldn't worry about it. The news papers always view it in a sorta pessimistic way. I used to joke about this with spacex's booster landings. When they couldn't stick a landing even though the mission itself was successful, the news sites always made headlines that sounded like "welp, spacex screwed up again" lol :D
The news sites will always pick the headline that raises the most eyebrows.
As for my liking of spacex but my great distaste for the jackass known as Elon, well, that's nothing new. I was saying that 10 years ago lol. You can still cheer on the accomplishments all of the engineers are spacex are making. That's fine.
As for the failure, the Raptor 2 failures have caused a RUD on multiple Starship launches so far. They should be back to static firing the Super Heavy or something, but this is not sexy enough for the billionaire.
Until the engine and launchpad works reliably, there is literally no point in launching the boosters when you have high probability of mission failure right at the launch. (Even if it clears the tower.)
Musk/SpaceX redefining failure as success is terribly annoying too. If done repeatedly enough it has the potential to tank the whole space program. They obviously wanted to test separation the most (since it was issued despite the control failure) and that failed too.
> Thursday's launch was hailed as "a real accomplishment" and "so successful" by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and retired International Space Station Commander Chris Hadfield, respectively. SpaceX agreed.
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/21/1171202753/spacex-starship-la...
"Computers understand English now, but they occasionally make mistakes, so who cares?"
Something I've noticed is that GPT 4 seems to make mistakes less often than humans. That is, if you asked a random person to stand up in a lecture hall and answer questions thrown at them like the type people have been trying on ChatGPT, they would fail at least 50% of the time, like more.
For example, from what I can tell, GPT 4 has nearly perfect spelling and grammar. Better than mine, certainly, and up there with professional copy editors.
My observation is that it is an online sentiment. But due to the way Technology news cycle works most of these online sentiment do have their source from America. So I think it is an American Sentiment being exported. But most places outside America, especially those without the usage of English being main language tends to be less affected.
Professionals in the industry whose life work is the study of rocket plumes (e.g. @ DrPhiltill on Twitter) warned about what would happen if they proceeded with this plan. They were right. The FAA license application, as it turns out, was wildly off base and the projected environmental impact was off by as much as an order of magnitude, being based on an earlier design with much, much lower thrust.
This does not help the cause. It makes SpaceX come off as reckless, irresponsible, and untrustworthy. It makes it less likely that the FAA is going to sign off on a launch from Boca Chica again, and certainly not in the next year or so.
Somewhere in there is an innovation that might do a public good, but most people are realising that corporations don't do public good. They do what they want.
If it was a government entity that tried and failed to reach for the stars, I think there'd be jeering too ("there go my tax dollars") but a large portion of the scientific community would be happy with the result.
Like, that low-key way where when you pretend to be in complete denial about all the reasons why people might delight in the failures (perceived or otherwise) of a Nazi billionaire's ridiculous vanity projects and then come to the highly self-serving (well, cult-leader serving) conclusion that "they must just be impatient with the saviour of mankind for not being the saviour of mankind enough"
It is interesting that you would immediately default to a cult-of-personality retort when I never mentioned Elon in my original post. SpaceX is not just one man.
The problem is in modern mainstream media anything Elon does should be painted with a heavy dose of negative brush. All while adding more Social Media hatred to fuel the cycle.
You then see a lot of people are actually very supportive of SpaceX and Starship. They dont get the MSM media or Social media boost of their voice.
So now MSM and Social Media are changing their tone to question their previous reporting of "they tried but it blew up" and offer some insight to label it more like success.
I'm not sure I agree with you either, though. I'm a big believer in failing as often as possible and recovering in such a way that no customer or outside observer notices.
And the fact that rockets have a history of audacious risks and fantastic explosions is no excuse for that ongoing pattern. It's not just about fatalities or the raw cost of equipment lost. It's also about confidence and, where applicable, stock prices.
Any decent manager should understand that, so maybe it's another example of Musk's companies being mismanaged.
But hey, a well built rocket with a ton of hubris will still fly.
If the excuse is "that's too hard" or "I'm not paid to add information after publishing" then that's just dumb.
The video showing a car being smashed by pad ejecta was posted ten minutes after launch: https://twitter.com/SemrauDylan/status/1649050806577164293
The whole thing was a test. The ship and rocket themselves would always have been scrapped afterwards, and the goal of the whole endeavor was to get back as much data as possible.
They succeeded in launching the rocket, having it take off and reach max-Q and got valuable data on all that. That's the successful part. They also learnt some hard lessons on launch pad construction.
Then the ship failed and the test was aborted - and they never got to test stage separation, which they had planned to do as well. That's the unsuccessful part.
So, did they get the data they wanted? Not all they wanted - but an important chunk of it.
Since they're not saying anything about the data that was gathered or was going to be gathered we're all going by SpaceX marketing. They might have been aiming for structural load data on the coupling, or might not. Engine relighting maybe, or maybe not. They might have been going after trust vectoring, or not...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9793555
I think sometimes it's good to look back and learn from posterity
It went so flawlessly that most people online were pissed Elon didn't use it to launch some useful payload and considered his Roadster launch a vanity project, not realizing it could have gone Kaboom just like the Starship launch, and all Elon would have to show for it would have been the shreds of his roadster.
When things go successfully, it's all Gwynne Shotwell and her team of Engineers to praise; when it goes south it's Elon and big mouth to blame for the all the issues.
Maybe we need to realize it's all a test, that has Elon wanted, there would be NO press coverage and we wouldn't even have known a Test had happened, or that vehicle like Starship even existed.
let's just enjoy the show, failures and all.
Anyone on the beach could have made a video of the rocket launch itself, but we wouldn't have been able to get the destroyed launch pad pictures etc. We definitely wouldn't have had any video of the insides of the Merlin rocket factory
(i am not sure that without access to the spacex video feed and launch countdown, nerds would have been able to timely setup cameras to record something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mX5H_Gaicg )
We have shockingly good access to information that no one else gives, imho.
But this leads to a bigger problem. SpaceX's attitude of experiment vs. drawn-out design is working (perhaps not too dissimilar to agile vs. waterfall design). Even with all that careful planning, the Space Race did kill people, we almost lost Apollo 13, and there were two distinct shuttle disasters that killed everyone on board. Even with very careful progress, we still had disasters. But, as I think this launch shows, SpaceX is going to experience similar events unless there's a incentives and structures to actually empower people with safety concerns (meaning the engineers and technicians on the ground).
Both post-mortems on the shuttle disasters are filled with something like "a higher-up decided it wasn't that big of a deal and dismissed concerns because previous red flags turned out to be nothing." Single humans can be singularly stupid. Single humans that are busy running a company, incentivized by profit margins, isolated from on-the-ground operations, equipped with a golden parachute, and wealthier than god, are even more prone to detachment from reality.
I also feel a bit bad for the astronauts that have to gamble whether these rockets are safe. Did this actually pass safety checks or is my life a sacrifice Elon Musk is willing to make? I suppose this has been part of the calculus of all astronauts since the post-Space Race era started to defund NASA, but it still sucks even if it's de rigueur at this point.
isn't that an unfair assertion? Elon does not have the ability to rate his rockets "human safe", NASA did it. They make the final call, imho.
The Soviets abandoned that project because they couldn't get their 30 engines to synchronize.
Maybe this time AI (c) will help solve the problem. We will watch and see.
Worth mentioning that N-1 was severely limited by the state of electronics technology in late 60s Soviet Union. The first 3 launches of the N-1 rocket didn't even have a digital flight computer, they relied on an [analogue system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)#Engine_control_sys...).
The Space Falcon Heavy uses 27 engines and it has a perfect reliability record over five launches. Having many engines on a rocket is a solved problem and it even brings some advantages - you can still reach orbit if you lose one or two of them.
You can abort the mission more safely perhaps (if separation works), but not proceed with it really.
The answer to the clickbait headline is obviously no :)
It was a tremendous success, and getting the rocket off the ground at all is totally remarkable.
For SpaceX, data might be the most valuable asset.
Sorry you missed the actual launch! I was on the edge of my seat while at the computer.. Hard to imagine what in-person felt like.
It was right from the word go, meant to be a destructive test flight. It flew, it was destroyed and in the process they learned a lot about stage 0 and about the performance of the engines and the structural strength of the whole thing.
very very successful.
There was also so much to be impressed by, the integrity of the vehicle at those speeds and spins was really cool to see, and that it got off the ground for the first fully integrated was awesome.
Lots went really well. It doesn't take much going wrong to blow a rocket up, so I am impressed with SpaceX in this instance.