SpaceX Rocket Struggled to Self-Destruct as It Spun Out of Control
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There have also been questions as to why it appears the FTS was only point charges rather than a cord down the side of the tanks.
There is a good stabilised video of this portion of the flight here (https://twitter.com/Erdayastronaut/status/165250639080235827...), you can see the plumes of propellant from the sides of the tanks where the FTS has made holes.
Elon also just did a Twitter Spaces where he answers a load of questions, summary here: https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/16524519714109358...
Key takeaways:
> From a "pad standpoint, we are probably ready to launch in 6 to 8 weeks.'
> "The longest item on that is probably requalification of the flight termination system ... it took way too long to rupture the tanks."
> Probably an 80% probability of reaching orbit with Starship this year, and "I think close to 100% change of reaching orbit within 12 months."
> "We're going to putting down a lot of steel" under the launch tower before the next Starship flight.
> The vehicle's structural margins appear to be better than we expected
> At T+27 seconds, SpaceX lost communications due to "some kind of energy event." And "some kind of explosion happened to knock out the heat shields of engines 17, 18, 19, or 20."
> Rocket kept going through T+62 seconds" with the engines continuing to run. Lost thrust vector control at T+85 seconds
Also I don't expect a FAA to give an ok until SpaceX has cleaned up the surrounding area.
If the piles under the launch mount aren't damaged (which would surprise me!), it's "just" filling in the hole, pour some concrete and cover with the new water cooled steel plate. Then replace any other stage zero kit that got damaged (the tall tanks particularly)
I think he's probably right the longest thing to solve though is flight qualification with the FAA.
I also love how Elonauts have decided that FAA qualification is a mere trivial formality as opposed to a necessary check on a founder deciding to go ahead with a premature launch because he wants to talk about it on 4/20 for example.
The fact that the FAA check will be the longest is no defense. It’s a reflection of the fact that the FAA gave him an easy way out and all the critics of the FAA’s decision (including flagged stories on HN) turned out to be absolutely right.
So what if it’s not 2x but more? Why are people like you so resentful of someone building something cool you literally can’t wait to point out any flaws. It’s sad tbh.
Maybe it sounds like aggressive and optimistic goals. Maybe it sounds like someone who doesn't understand that nine women can't give birth to a child in one month, and cracks the whip like they could if they tried hard enough.
If I was your neighbor and build a potato gun, but the potatoes kept ending up in your yard, would you be happy for me or ticked off?
You sound like the environmentalists you don’t want to build solar parks in the Sahara because it gets in the way of a few goats.
Take a step back. Perspective.
We are still waiting for all three many years after Musk promised they were coming soon.
Promising 10 awesome things and delivering 2 still gives you more awesome things than you started with.
At best you are a grumpy old man who isn’t happy with anything, at worst a resentful anti success advocate.
What have you created in the last 10 years?
Space shuttle challenger disaster discussed at 17:35.
Nobody is resenting anything cool, they are pointing out that when it comes to packing 4kt worth of explosives into a vehicle and flinging into the air you better take your time to get it right.
This is a private company which is not directly accountable to the government as NASA would be. There won't be a congressional committee holding them to account or removing the people in charge if they fuck up. Sure they might get a good scolding from congress if they make mistakes, but they'll get to pay their way through the courts to shirk accountability.
The fact that the FTS failed on top of all the other problems is cause enough for alarm and indicative that they are not being thorough enough. It was sloppy work, and when Elon opens his mouth about unrealistic timelines he is openly stating that he will continue to apply pressure on the team to rush things and cut corners for results. There is nothing cool about running an aerospace program like that.
Yet somehow they’re still the most successful rocket creating entity ever, and are close to creating a launch system that will reduce launch costs by 100x.
So what exactly is not working here, and why are YOU so upset about it?
There is an adage that people who love sausages shouldn't visit the meat plants where these are made. This is harder to do with the development process that SpaceX uses, given that it is all over the news and you can't easily escape the sight. But please do not confuse the development process with the end product.
As of now, Starship is in the not-even-beta phase. Its current problems have no relation to how the mature rocket will perform.
Note that, unlike other vendors, SpaceX didn't dare to launch human crew with their Falcon 9 until they were very sure that the rocket performs well and has a very good launch record. Compare this attitude to many other human-rated vehicles that actually killed astronauts. Nothing sloppy or rushed there.
It sounds like you are thinking about the water coolant being in or behind the steel plate.
But if you pump water on top of the steel plate there it can instantly vaporize without blowing up anything. If you have sufficient flow then that can keep the steel plate from melting.
> The IOP/SS peak flow rate is 1.1 million gallons per minute, high enough to empty roughly two Olympic-size swimming pools in one minute.
Must be some fair old pumps on that setup!
I admit I've never built a launchpad for the world's biggest rocket, but I'd wave my hands to say it might take a bit longer for that concrete, and it won't get poured immediately.
They need do proper failure analysis and engineer a solution so this damage won't happen next time, 6-8 weeks seems way too short. Elon is suggesting just slapping down a shitload of steal, but I really doubt that will meet standards.
I love it when people take one small issue and point out how stupid he’s being, yet ignore how by challenging every point of engineering on rockets he’s almost at the point of making a mars transportation system possible.
The launch pad at Cape Canaveral may not be exactly what Starship needs but it would be a good start. Like flame trenches and placing the fuel storage tanks far enough away from the launch pad.
SpaceX hasn't "started to realize" that, they always knew that some F9 launches would be fully expendable and they've been occasionally expending F9 boosters from the start. Not because there's something wrong with the economics of booster reuse generally, but because expending a booster is sometimes (not usually) worth it to get more mass into orbit (roughly double to GTO with Falcon Heavy if they expend the core stage.)
That extra performance was always known to be required for some payloads, but isn't required for most payloads.
Probably not a whole lot technically. By now we could have had several fuel tanks in Mars orbit and a few on the ground, rather than all those orbiters and ground vehicles.
Trade-offs.
I know they're planning it for Starship HLS to the Moon, maybe it will finally be done then (I'm not holding my breath, Starship HLS's role in Artemis still seems farcical to me.) But until then, it's never really been an idea worth developing.
I agree with you.
Why spend hundreds of millions or in the case of Saturn V billions on a governmentally overspecced launchpad when a launch mount and a concrete pad would do just fine?
Take the SLS crawler looking to cost $1 - $1.5B. What a waste of resources.
https://spacenews.com/nasa-audit-reveals-massive-overruns-in...
Trying to meet wildly divergent, even contradictory goals, is a good way to build a doomed project. Now add schedule pressure to remain the sole vendor for a lunar lander and you get bad project management decisions.
"...following the same formula" of rapid iteration is what they are doing. It worked well for learning how to fabricate a giant rocket out of stainless steel. That formula is bumping up against the cost of iteration. They're trying an Agile-ish approach to making the biggest ever rocket when Agile might be insufficient to, for example, make car software at VW Group.
1. Not giving up project goals or specs when they start to look dubious
2. Sticking with cheap (in time, money, or both) solutions when more-reliable solutions might be called for
3. Letting sunk costs drive bad decisions about the above and other project related decisions
In this case there are unpleasant downstream effects of making safer decisions: Starship might not be the Moon lander Artemis 3 should rely on. All changes made in Boca Chica will have to be retrofitted to Kennedy Space Center.
Lastly, Musk has made pronouncements about Starlink's viability resting on Starship. That could be hyperbole, but Starlink needs 30-100X more subscribers to become a first tier telecom provider, and it can't support that many without the planned constellation of tens of thousands of full-size second-generation satellites.
Otherwise, why prefix with it?
And the quotes don’t say that they will. In fact they imply that they won’t.
I understand that Starship needs the ability to operate in places where launch infrastructure can't exist. But that's a problem for another day. Put in a flame trench + water suppression system and get the thing to orbit.
Then maybe it would also require that much less thrust?
The main problem is the Super Heavy booster, tearing the ground apart with 33 engines at full thrust while struggling against 1 g downwards. This is a very Earth-specific phenomenon, because of our relatively high gravity. You can easily do a Single Stage to Orbit launch with just Starship on Moon, Mars, Europa etc. It is very likely that Super Heavy boosters will never leave the Earth.
Even if Musk was a Stalin-esque Maximum Leader, it couldn't happen. That's not even considering the other regulatory hurdles you might encounter when your planned building expels apartment-sized chunks of concrete at 83 m/s.
Of course, regulatory is . . not the primary problem, even if you're of the persuasion that things like safety and the environment don't matter. Some chunks rebounded and almost certainly hit that rocket. Even without "lotto ball concrete debris", Dougherty et al figured out in 1984 that high impulse continuous shock would reflect, resonate, and shake a rocket to bits. It's research related to the "water deluge" system; arguably, the Soviets came to the same conclusion with Energia, based on the N1 work from the decade prior. Minimum safety distance, that's to protect infrastructure that takes a long ass time to put back, and the V2 rocketmen started paying pretty close attention to that even for their suborbital shots.
I guess I'm not too sure what got learned here, aside from the fact that Raptor is a pretty great engine, still burning at all after that abuse.
Also, Saturn V's S-1C had 13 launches and 13 orbits . . fifty years ago. Why is that? Well, there's lots of reasons, and one of them is the cost of labor. Those big F-1 engines were essentially hand-fitted pieces of welding art, but, counterpoint, computing and other tech would MORE than make up for a surfeit of cheap master welders[1]. Leadership from capital is another. I'm not going to say anything negative about anybody, but let's take a look at one of the maximum leaders from the era: Thornton Wilson. Born on a Missouri dirt farm, ISU BS Aero Engineering, CIT MS in same, NAS award winner, as undergrad he worked on B-47 and B-52, and then kept on working aerospace UNTIL HE DIED. In 1969, the buck stopped with this guy. This is who capital put in charge of the big booster back in the day. How does capital do leadership now?
[1] You would think, right? Maybe these computer things aren't actually all that useful, but I don't believe that. More likely, computing has a whole bunch of secondary effects on organizational health that are really, really, really bad, which partly offset the amazing gains.
I have heard the project described as NASA skunkworks with fairly experienced engineers and scientists from the public sector available for consultation without barriers.
(In a somewhat similar situation, though not entirely comparable, STS Challenger was indeed torn apart by aerodynamic forces in a matter of seconds. The crew cabin, being reinforced, stayed intact, but the rest of the vehicle absolutely not.)
"...indicating that Smith made the switch changes, presumably in a futile attempt to restore electrical power to the cockpit after the crew cabin detached from the rest of the orbiter."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_dis...
Potentially up to 2 minutes and 45 seconds!
"Pressurization could have enabled consciousness for the entire fall until impact. The crew cabin hit the ocean surface at 207 mph (333 km/h) approximately two minutes and 45 seconds after breakup. The estimated deceleration was 200 g, far exceeding structural limits of the crew compartment or crew survivability levels. The mid-deck floor had not suffered buckling or tearing, as would result from a rapid decompression, but stowed equipment showed damage consistent with decompression, and debris was embedded between the two forward windows that may have caused a loss of pressure. Impact damage to the crew cabin was severe enough that it could not be determined whether the crew cabin had previously been damaged enough to lose pressurization."
At the time they said it was successful because the launch was successful. But as we now know, and Elon has admitted as quoted in the article, the launch wasn’t successful. Way more shit blew up than planned.
He redefines success as learning a lot. Which would have been the case in any launch, except, ironically, a launch that was actually successful.
Categorically false. Just watch the recording of the live stream. They told us what their definition of success is at multiple points before they lit a single engine.
> He redefines success as learning a lot.
Look, I find Elon distastefull in uncountable ways. But this particular mindset is an important one if you want to achieve hard things. More people should live by it.
It most definietly is if your goal is to learn as much as possible.
This is exactly my point. This is a different mindset so many people can benefit from. Many people want to build things, they try it, the end result fails short of their expectations and they give up. That is how you guarantee to not achieve anything. Instead anyone who wants to get better at doing things should do (carefully and with as much attention and deliberation as you can muster, but put tool to material don’t just think about doing), observe how things went (not just the end product, but every single step), figure out what are the low hanging fruits you can improve on, try again. This is how you can achieve great results (in creating hardware and software, but also in various other parts of life.)
Make sure you can sustain this process of iterative improvement and you will end up with things you couldn’t imagine any other way. In my case with my limited means that means don’t spend more on a single iteration than what my hobby budget can sustain, make sure nobody gets hurt and the workshop doesn’t burn down. SpaceX clearly has a lot more money to throw around but the principles are the same.
In a shocking turn of events, the grifter extraordinaire, Mr Musk, turned out to be grifting.
Do you have a citation for these two claims? One for the “Elon Musk was claiming the exact opposite” and one for the “were considered conspiracy theorists”. Thank you.