SpaceX Starship Grounded Indefinitely by FAA
flyingmag.com
flyingmag.com
The only thing cited (in this article) is:
> An anomaly occurred during the ascent and prior to stage separation resulting in a loss of the vehicle. No injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA will oversee the mishap investigation of the Starship / Super Heavy test mission.”
Which is normal - I'd expect nothing less. You'd be crazy to allow further flights (of anything) until you have a full understanding of what happened.
But of course, that doesn't have the same nice sting as "grounded indefinitely".
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/20/spacex-starship-exp...
The FAA have grounded all flights “indefinitely” in the US as recently as this year.
The launch license was for only 1 launch. They need to get another one to launch again, which will take an indeterminate amount of time, and isn't technically guaranteed to ever be granted.
The Artemis program could also be cancelled by politicians and budgets
There seems to be a lot of things that went wrong in this launch, and the FAA will want to see those issues investigated, from engine failures at launch, to the disintegrating launchpad, all the way to a possible malfunction of the flight termination system, because it seems the rocket disassembled itself before the FTS could do its job in a controlled way.
Starship is grounded regardless, and most definitely not 'indefinitely' in the same sense that your mother tells you 'no more candy until I say so.'
Which highlights this:
'Users dug up an October 2020 tweet from Musk in which he posted that SpaceX wouldn’t build a flame diverter on the launchpad, but acknowledged that “it could turn out to be a mistake.”'
How much it would have cost to build a flame diverter?
[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-faa-grounds-starship-after...
I think they should have considered an above ground flame diverter - which would have been far cheaper. It would consist of a simple pyramid below the rocket.
If they add both a trench and a deflector that gives them some degree of control of where the exhaust goes once it leaves the underside of the rocket, so you could lead it away from critical pad infrastructure and direct it out to some empty area to disperse. Obviously all that requires quite a bit of space, which they might not have available.
https://youtu.be/LNkmwrTjKuo (NASA) https://youtu.be/dU9TTRfM_9Q (Interesting Engineering) - at Kennedy Space center.
The system at Boca Chica is shown at https://youtu.be/OsbnYp0FYKU which looks like a garden sprinkler compared to what is at Kennedy.
However, this wasn't the case - the joints were vertical (as would be normal for laying a parking lot), and the end result was exhaust gasses went through the joints and lifted the slabs up, causing many of them to get blown away.
Not having a trench and sound suppression was, unsurprisingly, a mistake, and the lack of those may have caused the crash in the first place.
And I doubt the water-cooled steel base would be much better at anything but preventing chunks of concrete from hitting the engines and their support systems.
> Spokespeople for the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity noted that the particulate emissions may be unsafe to touch or breathe in, and samples will need to be collected and examined to dispel any concerns.
I assume there are attorneys salivating at this. (If the concerns are legit, then good.)
"[no proof] ... but environmental groups are holding judgment until a full investigation can be completed."
And the parked cars were all rocket watchers trying to park inside the evacuation zone... It's not like they were unsuspecting victims...
A spacecraft isn't an aircraft.
Anything that flies through the air, not under a roof, using active control is an "aircraft".