Exploded SpaceX rocket devastated a town and a wildlife reserve
salon.com
salon.com
The "damage" is almost exclusively to and from the concrete pad being blown apart by the rocket plume into fast moving chunks and dust. The chunks did not devastate any of the town. The wildlife reserve was similarly not devastated. The worst "damage" to non-SpaceX property was the spread of concrete bits and sand.
I have plenty of complaints about him but the non stop articles have just become comical at this point.
From someone who knows nothing about this stuff, these seem like very simple things to solve given the vast complexity of the rest of the system.
And they also don't seem like massively expensive investments.
> In a tweet from October 2020, Musk wrote "Aspiring to have no flame diverter in Boca, but this could turn out to be a mistake."
Why? What is the aspiration for?
a) Pick a cheap quick but possibly insufficient solution, or
b) Pick a reliable solution that costs so much more time that stuff downstream of your project (Artemis 3 in this case) can't use the results of your project anymore
If the quicker fix doesn't, then you are really screwed. You didn't start the slow expensive fix, you have less money, and you may be out of time.
And Elon wants it fast. That means anything that would require tearing down and replacing the launch mount is off the table. So, next up is the water cooled steel wedge. You are right that relative to space explorations budgets, a flame trench and a deluge system are small potatoes. But it feels like they are tangled up in sunk costs and a desire to find the fastest solutions.
So, like F5 tornado or cat5 eyewall landing? Or a richter 9 earthquake? Or a nuke exploding?
Aside: by chance I happened to be in the area so headed down and saw the launch. That was a trip.
A guy I chatted with told me we were 5 miles from the launch. He said that 10 miles is the typical viewing distance for the Florida launches. NASA apparently, he said, has an observing facility that is 3.5 miles from the Florida tower but you pay dearly for a seat.
With that as context, I confess that I was expecting something a little more chest-pounding from the launch. Perhaps 3.5 miles packs that extra punch.
The slowness with which it climbed also surprised me. Watching it rise, kind of hanging in the air it seemed to struggle. It seemed suddenly to me that large rockets were "not meant to be", were an affront to gravity or something.
We saw several of these flashes in the thrust that apparently were engines going out (blowing up?). At the time I thought maybe the fuel was being pumped unevenly — some kind of pogo-ing. When nothing blew up though I assumed that perhaps at various angles the flame from the motors might just look brighter — perhaps momentarily unobstructed by exhaust.
As it disappeared into the sky above the final thing that struck me was how long you could continue to hear the thing — like a Harley or something still thundering long after you've lost sight of it.
If it blew up while we were there, I didn't know it. Odd flashes and booms had suddenly become something I just came to expect from a large rocket launch. We were frankly more interested in getting off South Padre before the whole crowd slowed traffic to a crawl.
Tyranny of the rocket equation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enB2QL9Ulus