Was Starship’s Stage Zero a Bad Pad?
practical.engineering
practical.engineering
> That’s the nature of SpaceX and why many find them so exciting. Unlike NASA that spends years in planning and engineering, SpaceX uses rapid development cycles and full-scale tests to work toward their eventual goals. They push their hardware to the limit to learn as much as possible, and we get to follow along. They’re betting it will pay off to develop fast instead of carefully.
> But this wasn’t just a test of the hardware. It was also a test of federal regulations and the good graces of the people who live, work, play, and care about the Boca Chica area. And, SpaceX definitely pushed those limits as well with their first orbital test.
Rush replied four days later, saying that he had “grown
tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument
to stop innovation and new entrants from entering their
small existing market.” He understood that his approach
“flies in the face of the submersible orthodoxy, but that is
the nature of innovation,” he wrote. “We have heard the
baseless cries of ‘you are going to kill someone’ way too
often. I take this as a serious personal insult.”
My ignorance permits the possibility that exclusion zone wasn't big enough, for example.
But it did have an exclusion zone, and Musk gave it, what, 50% odds of making it past the launch tower? Or was 50% a different test launch?
(But this is what I get as an untrained watcher of Scott Manley videos, I'm not a rocket scientist nor a pilot so I assume I only half-understand what he says, and what he says is necessarily a summary or the videos would be x10 longer).
Oceangate also started with unmanned test dives before they declared their submersible to be safe for humans.
It's not directly comparable. Oceangate didn't do that many test dives and never tested their sub to destruction, and SpaceX is working with several government agencies on certifying Starship (both Nasa and FAA). But there are parallels in attitudes that should be drawn and compensated for.
They were reusing a material that is not safe to reuse that way. If they were only testing the design, it's unlikely anyone would be dead.
Either "reusable carbon fiber" is the design, and you need to test what it takes to break that.
Or "single use carbon fiber" is the design, and you need a new hull each trip.
They did neither.
They didn't stress test the reusability before putting people on board, and that's both one of their biggest mistakes and one of their biggest differences from SpaceX.
SpaceX's development program is explosive, but I see no evidence that they are "techbro idiots" who risk actual human lives. The stuff that explodes is remotely controlled hardware, and I am personally fine with that. You can't have rapid technological development with at least some negative externalities.
No-one mentioned Elon Musk, yet you're pre-emptively getting defensive on his behalf.
We make tradeoffs between protection of nature and technological civilization all the time. Boca Chica has some qualities that are relevant to the cosmic industry and hard to replicate elsewhere: a mostly empty sea to the east of the site, low population, closer to the Equator than most of the US.
I like nature, but I also like technological progress and it isn't obvious to me that the relatively low-level damage to the environment there (it is not as if the place was devastated Hiroshima-style) should automatically trump everything else.
Maybe we won't need to colonize some other planet if we don't trash our current planet to save shareholders some dollars in the name of "technological progress" .
But humanity in its current size definitely needs some industry, and industry is actually becoming less polluting with technological progress. I am 45 and I grew up in an industrial city; both the air and the water there have become a lot cleaner during my lifetime, because a richer and more developed society can afford better protections. When I was a kid, neither a butterfly nor a fish could survive in Ostrava, today there is plenty of both.
Also, judging someone's else's interests as "delusions" is pretty rude. Who are you to distribute such labels to others?
The place you grew up at was degraded by industrialization. It would have been cleaner today if it wasn't for that. Irreparable changes have been made. I'm about half your age and I'm disgusted by the state the planet is in right now. I understand, old people do not care about a future they won't live in. But I'm going to suffer from micro-plastics more than you. You had access to more natural landscapes than I ever will. I have every right to be angry at old people for screwing up our homes and bodies.
> because a richer
Ah, the 1% is richer, that makes it more okay! But me, little 99% guy, I got screwed by inflation. The U.S. economy is stronger than ever my little Ethiopian fisherman, what are you crying about? Go raise funds making an unprofitable startup or work for a defence contractor to build machines to kill little brown kids remotely, you'll make good money to buy a McMansion, a Tesla, and play golf on artificial grass with friends you secretly hate.
> and more developed society can afford better protections.
What protections? Against the various cancers that are more and more common? Against the mental decay I see in my young peers, caused by social media? Against the huge floating pile of trash in the sea? Against the coral reef that's mostly lost by now? Against the constant threat of the atom bomb, great technological innovation brought to you by the same friendly agencies financing SpaceX nowadays? The protection I want is protection of the environment. I don't care about your money and your materialism, it'll never buy love and community.
> Also, judging someone's else's interests as "delusions" is pretty rude. Who are you to distribute such labels to others?
I believe the idea that we can colonize Mars is delusional. How are we supposed to terraform a planet when we can't even fix our own? Who do I have to be to be allowed to have this opinion? What is rude about that? Would you find it rude to call flat earthers delusional? At least flat earthers are not causing irreparable damages to our round planet.
I doubt that the world is objectively worse off in 2023 than it was in 2000, I would even say that it has grown a bit better. (For example, a lot more people in the developing world are food-secure.) But the perception of the world has gone from "bearable" to "irredeemable shithole" among way too many people. IMHO this is even worse than objective trouble such as climate change; widespread depression results in unwillingness to even try to improve things.
"How are we supposed to terraform a planet when we can't even fix our own? Who do I have to be to be allowed to have this opinion?"
We cannot terraform Mars in 2023. But we couldn't even fly to space in 1923, and we might be able to terraform Mars in 2123. Every passing year brings some new development, and these developments compound our abilities.
Also, here you are mixing two different sorts of questions. Fixing Earth's climate is mostly a political question, not a question of technology. It might be harder than future terraforming of Mars because you need to bring many important nations on board, and humans are notoriously bad at large scale cooperation. On Mars, there are no nuclear superpowers opposing your plans.
That's a personal attack and that's against the spirit of this website. Please do not do that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> We cannot terraform Mars in 2023. But we couldn't even fly to space in 1923, and we might be able to terraform Mars in 2123. Every passing year brings some new development, and these developments compound our abilities.
This does sound reasonable to me. What does not sound reasonable is cutting corners today in the name of "technological innovation" for something that we might be able to do in the future we are currently destroying.
The young naive person that I am thinks that in reality, this is mostly for defence purposes, to put military bases and equipment in space.
If colonization there will be, it will be only for rich people, which will pay a lot of money to get irreparable DNA damage while reading Icarus in space. Kind of funny when you think about it.
> Also, here you are mixing two different sorts of questions. Fixing Earth's climate is mostly a political question, not a question of technology.
I guess what made me angry here. This attitude is exactly why the planet is in the state it is right now. I'm not even talking about fixing, I'm talking about not destroying. You kids - if any - will have to fix the damages caused by SpaceX, but you can prevent it now.
> It might be harder than future terraforming of Mars because you need to bring many important nations on board, and humans are notoriously bad at large scale cooperation. On Mars, there are no nuclear superpowers opposing your plans.
I believe the complete opposite of your statement: it's easier to take care of our planet than terraforming another one, and on Mars there will definitely be nuclear superpowers opposing your plans. But I guess we will never agree on that.
Of course you do, or does someone evacuate all the fish from the impact zone whenever an empty rocket stage slams into the ocean?
This is only a question of the degree of the damage we are willing to tolerate. Of course the precise boundary shifts over time.
And yes, easily, compared to other rockets. Excavation is hard for their location because of the water table. And an artificial hill takes time to settle. But they probably don't need either because they don't roll (or roll and erect) the rocket to the launchpad, they lift and place it. They just need the diverter itself. Meaning it should be easier than for any other large rocket.
For the Kennedy Space Center launchpad the plan apparently already was to use a water cooled diverter (3) (4). But for Boca Chica they just didn't bother, even after the static fire tests already created problems. It is implausible that they didn't know it would be a bad idea to launch the way they did. But who cares if we damage stuff, right?
They were just not moving fast enough and breaking enough things.
Stop worshiping techbros.
(1) https://physics.byu.edu/docs/publication/4678
(2) https://youtu.be/P_tGKxL6CLI?t=31
(3) https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/44625/starship-fla...
(4) https://netspublic.grc.nasa.gov/main/20190801_Final_DRAFT_EA...
You know I read all this, and it’s good, but then I get to this last line and all I want to do is tell you to fuck off with your needless, baseless attack on my beliefs. I don’t give a shit about Elon but even if I did you have now contextualized this otherwise fine discussion you’ve written with hefty research into this invitation for a dumbass mudslinging. This is so stupid and undermines everything else you have written.
I would be curious to ask about the salience of the issue you’ve brought up. I’m not convinced fixing it would actually result in everything being fine.
Also, love the binary outcome set of Hiroshima/not-Hiroshima.
I never introduced any such binary concept. I only said that the environment damage sustained was relatively trivial, because some of the reactions seem a bit hysterical to me.
Hasn't SpaceX tried to buy the whole village to avoid any kind of lawsuit happening after those kind of incidents?
If Uber experiences a catastrophic failure, some people might end up earning less money, some people might be late or miss important events. If a rocket experiences a catastrophic failure, debris may destroy the environment around it (as it did) and people on board may die (as they would have if there were any).
With all due respect, it obviously does work; on account of the Falcon 9 rocket being the safest (and cheapest, given its capability) rocket ever.
> debris may destroy the environment around it
"Destroy the environment" invokes some rather grandiose associations for what is essentially pulverizing a steel tube in the middle of nowhere.
> and people on board may die
Perhaps you have missed the part where those tests are conducted with the explicit intention of figuring out failure modes.
SpaceX Crew Dragon is "one of two U.S. human-rated orbital transport spacecraft". This is a result of the same developmental process.
This cavalier attitude to what it means to affect the environment is exactly what brought us to a steady march into climate disaster. The middle of nowhere is still an environment for other species, not showing a little respect or consideration for that is exactly the kind of moral arrogance from humankind we need to look into and fix.
> the kind of moral arrogance from humankind we need to look into and fix
No we don't. What we need to fix is scope insensitivity and addiction to symbolics and gut feelings.
Posturing is all one can do when living under systems too big to be changed by the individual, it's through it that on can socially demonstrate insatisfaction with the status quo, posturing is just a social expression of values. I could call your posturing in the name of progress just as tedious and we wouldn't get anywhere.
> No we don't. What we need to fix is scope insensitivity and addiction to symbolics and gut feelings.
Neglect of scope in this case isn't lost, it's simply that for a facet of people the scope of a billionaire trying to reach Mars while destroying what they can get away with is what is seen as wrong with the establishment right now. It was known that the pad could be bad, they simply didn't care, probably because it'd be a little bit more expensive to do it properly, probably because people (like you did) wouldn't care, it's in "the middle of nowhere" for you anyway. That's the attitude that I'm against.
Good luck with fixing gut feelings, you'll discover that no human being is absolutely rational, and hence you'll never be able to act on pure rationality under a democracy.
Call it tedious as much as you want, I'm pretty jaded by this progress-at-any-cost posturing.
Some people, like me, are jaded by the suffocating safetyism that seems to have no upper limit in its appetite to introduce even more obstacles to everything in order to move the needle from 99,999 to 99,9999 per cent.
It is not just about industry; for example, the contemporary "helicopter parenting" standards are absolutely awful and I am glad that there is a "free range parenting" movement trying to counter them.
In my opinion, this pendulum needs to swing a little bit back if we want to solve the currently pressing issues. Life cannot be made riskless and Nothing Untoward Should Ever Happen isn't a viable innovation strategy.
Very well put. Life is all about tradeoffs. We should discuss them, both sides, instead of ignoring the downsides and pretending "you just want people to do!" You are right, it is not helpful and we can't solve problems like that.
NASA human fatalities: 15
It's almost as if there's benefit to running iterative tests to get real-world data. Who would've thought
Challenger and Columbia each had seven crew members. Apollo I had three. Then there were a number of astronaut candidates who were killed in the line of duty and probably should be counted in your death toll.
On the other hand, how many manned missions has NASA launched, and how many has SpaceX done to date? Gotta guess there’s an order of magnitude difference there.
Also this rocket isn’t going to be human rated for a very long time, neither NASA or SpaceX are going to put people in it until it’s done a ton of cargo missions
I'm out of aerospace for about 15 years and only worked there as a junior engineer, so take this with a grain of salt:
There is always a payload. You could not just launch a rocket with an empty payload fairing. The payload dummies used are not only trimmed for appropriate mass and COG but also for the proper frequency response.
I know this, because as a young engineer I did the FE-models of the MaqSat (H2 and B2 IIRC) dummies for the Ariane 5 and spent days trimming their frequency responses.
Even if the money doesn't come from an external customer it's payed for. In addition to that, the fact that for the Ariane it is ultimately all tax money anyways makes the way it flows even less important.
(As someone who doesn't require absolute precision in all things) I find myself often wondering why. To feel smart? Argumentitiveness? A deep psychological need for precision?
That aside, I presume those frequency responses are not on the electromagnetic spectrum but about mechanical resonance? Was that a process to make the dummy better resemble whatever real payload it was supposed to represent or was that something that simply needs to be done for any load, dummy or not? An interesting little glimpse into what actual rocket science is like for us clueless software-heads.
Every payload has to be matched to the spectrum of the carrier. For the MAQSATs is was just easier than usual, because of their simplicity. The Ariane 5 Users's manual is actually public[1] and you can look up the actual requirements in Chapter 3, if you are curious.
[1] https://www.arianespace.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Arian...
Really, I do appreciate people like you who do not abstain from explain things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EsqMLT0Hzw&t=74s
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/04/spacex-s...
But the pad failing is indefensible. Any engineer on staff should have been able to see that as a problem, and if they were over ruled by executives then they have serious problems ahead.
It's not "without precedent" - they want to ignore the precedent and the entire concept of careful engineering for the sake of going fast (i.e. less money spent on step-by-step experiments). I think this is as irresponsible as the Titanic submarine. Hardware is not software.
No one was killed or even injured in the Starship test flight.
They are not comparable levels of "irresponsible".
The true issue with the launch was the flight termination system taking 15-30s to trigger, which they have had to requalify since that is what protects the public from harm.
SLS could have been done differently. Instead it was loaded with political favors demanding specific parts/suppliers.
Bloat = waste, that is just circular logic. You're defining what you want to call waste as a synonym of waste. Nasa gets a budget and spend it on space missions, propulsion technology and launch vehicles. That money employs engineers and scientists and generates demand for high specs engineering firms and supply chains. The bang for the buck is this impact on the economy, stimulating education, R&D etc. Not the rocket that fits your definition of efficiency. Having more then one actively used propulsion vehicle with different technological approaches is a national investment in resilience.
Calling it bloat and inefficient because it takes more money per launch then another 100% experimental and unproven platform is incredibly myopic.
If you want sources for government spending too much on things, those exist all over.
> Calling it bloat and inefficient because it takes more money per launch then another 100% experimental and unproven platform is incredibly myopic.
No, that's not what people are saying. The problem is that the main companies NASA contracts to are running in an extremely inefficient way and they get paid more when they waste money.
This is a problem that would exist even if SpaceX never became a company.
> That money employs engineers and scientists and generates demand for high specs engineering firms and supply chains. The bang for the buck is this impact on the economy, stimulating education, R&D etc.
The problem is the dollars that aren't going to engineering and R&D.
Dollars that just stimulate the economy are bloat when they're going to some big company out of a budget that's supposed to be doing things like exploring space. If you want to just send out dollars to stimulate the economy, send them out to people with low incomes and they'll have a much bigger impact.
Thank you for ignoring 95% of my post with that useless rejection.
- it destroyed its pad
- it went off course as soon as it left the pad
- 8 out of 33 engines failed - one of which immediately after firing (causing it to go off course)
We'll see what the future brings, but for now its clearly SLS 1 - Starhsip 0. Given the amount of failures in the Starship exepriment, my bet is that we'll see at least 1 more successful SLS launch before the first Starship launch to reach orbit and back.
Nasa over engineered pad 39A and now they have a pad that can probably launch anything. But SpaceX with stage 0 did absolutely nothing even though most rockets in history used a diverter of some kind. A simpler and cheaper solution is welcome, but ignoring physics and doing nothing is just baffling (especially for the largest rocket ever). Even RocketLab with their tiny Electron have a diverter. You can see it here: https://youtu.be/P_tGKxL6CLI?t=31
NASA built a launch pad with a flame diverter and water quenching system - and it worked! But now they have it, they're unlikely to test launches without it. Space X clearly think that there's a middle ground - something which is simpler, quicker and cheaper than the status quo, but which is good enough.
Clearly they failed - and arguably they were irresponsible not to do more tests. Given the environmental repercussions of failing, they probably should have started with something closer to precedent and worked iteratively to simplify it. But when you're talking about this sort of very low volume system (how many launch pads, total, are there in the world?), precedent is only worth so much. (It's also the reason so little progress was made in re-usable launchers until SpaceX came along).
Hardware is not software - I completely agree. But you can only make progress by testing hardware. Assumptions are rarely correct.
Engineering is all about finding the tolerances. It's a difficult line to walk.
Maintaining existing conservative approaches brings a huge amount of 'CYA' with little direct downside. Trying to even slightly roll back from a conservative position places all of the risk on the individual or individuals responsible, with a huge downside versus a small incremental upside that few will likely appreciate. It's mostly a thankless endeavour
I see this regularly in a different industry (with FDA, EMA) and it's what SpaceX are dealing with here. While I'm not arguing that their decision to launch with the existing stage 0 was correct, their decision to do something differently has introduced that much larger downside - further delays and potential censure from the FAA, and opprobrium from commentators and internet forums alike.
Also on Mars you need to dig anyway to create any kind of habitable environment due to radiation and you have no issues digging caused by the water table. So digging a diverter on Mars might even be easier then digging one at Boca Chica.
It's quite likely that the launch will mean they have to litigate for their right to even keep using the Boca Chica site, given that both locals and environmental protection organizations are now aiming for their guts.
Against that, trashing their own launch pad is nothing. The most they've got is the dust plume.
In fact, they were also not really supposed to launch a rocket they didn't have confidence they could detonate if it veered off course - which they did (remember, the FTS failed to detonate the rocket on demand, and we were lucky that it was far enough away from anything after the attempt that it didn't put anyone in danger before structural forces destroyed it). The FAA investigation will determine whether they did their due diligence and simply made a mistake, or whether they acted irresponsibly on that front as well.
If an area of a launch site is so valuable as to not be allowed to ever be at risk of mishap from the rocket launch, then the launch site should not be there.
However, the launch site is there and has already passed review for launch operations from that location. The occurrence of a launch failure or damage to the site does not suddenly mean re-evaluation on that basis: the default state of all rocket launches is that the rocket may explode upon ignition.
The environmental suit is motivated by people who have had an axe to grind with Elon Musk specifically (as opposed to SpaceX) unifying up with the regular environmentalist opposition, but neither has a valid claim here: a rocket failure resulting in destruction of the rocket and the facility is part and parcel of having any area performing launch operations.
Talking about "confidence" is irrelevant because that's not how you do a safety assessment: the assessment is "what happens when a failure happens, not if". You can only factor in "confidence" if your mitigations would depend strongly on an expected rate of failure being achieved.
So that’s a major case.
There is a reason flame diverters are diverters instead of blockers. It's much much easier to just throw the exaust to the side instead of trying to fight it head on. Don't try to use force to block it, put a 45 degree angle and use geometry and physics to your advantage.
If they really want to experiment with unconventional solutions they could make a small scale test with a spent F9 and see if the idea is feasible. For what it's worth, even the F9 uses a flame diverter trench.
I get why they don't want to. It probably means modifying the tower too, probably to make it taller. But I foresee this shower head plate going badly.
They don’t need to test with a spent F9. They already did with raptor engines blasting a steel plate in mcgregor.
I am not saying they have to build something equivalent to the SLS/SST/Satun/Soyuz/Proton concrete pad infrastructure. Just put a 45° angle. Wedge, cone, pyramid, whatever shape works. Make everything out of steel if it works and is cheaper. Even RocketLab with their tiny Electron have a diverter. You can see it here: https://youtu.be/P_tGKxL6CLI?t=31
Since the Super Heavy and the Starship are lifted into place by the tower instead of being rolled already assembled or rolled and erected from horizontal, it would be far easier for Super Heavy to have an above ground diverter compared to other rocket systems because it is no longer necessary to build the artificial hill and ramp on which to roll it. But the diverter is still needed.
And wait years for the soil to settle.
Note that even in the test you linked the plate was angled. This is not done just to redirect heat but in order too redirect the sound: https://physics.byu.edu/docs/publication/4678
Reflecting that towards the engines is probably suboptimal.
This issue was a measured known risk for the team/leadership
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/12tapz0/elon_...
It's not limited or login bound.
https://publish.twitter.com/?query=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com...
What a time to be alive.
But, some just love to trash Musk.
How is that a "newly uncovered “gas” pedal issue"?
Wow, ok. So there's no actual issue with the accelerator pedal, it's just that people are too stupid to not correctly operate a vehicle and the need to be guarded from making mistakes by adding a warning to the software.
There's a lot of stuff objectively wrong in Teslas (see phantom braking, for example), but this isn't one of those things.
The issue is with the inverter design. All Tesla cars on the roads use the 12V system as a voltage reference for the accelerator pedal position. If you turn the wheel while the car isn't not moving, it sources over 100 amps from the 12V system which causes a voltage drop to near 0V for hundreds of milliseconds. If the computer initiates a recalibration of the ADC during that time period, max throttle will be close to 0V until a later recalibration, which will immediately launch the car at very high speed. It also explains why Tesla says the pedal was pushed. It wasn't, but the software thought it was.
(Total speculation, of course)
I’m reminded of all the secondary and tertiary pump systems that go into traditional PWR/BWR nuclear reactor designs because at all costs you most keep water flowing over the core. And then when they did the newer SBWR/APWR designs someone said “uh, I got an idea, let’s just make the upper floors of these things massive water tanks and then, ya know, gravity”
More practically for Starship, I think one problem with the wharf idea is that you need to get a 5000t rocket there. Not unsolvable, but expensive.
In fact, the problem isn't that making a launch pad that is able to withstand the thrust of Starship is impossible, they could have simply copied the Saturn V launch pad design. But the Saturn V launch pad design is (intentionally, for historical reasons) way overbuilt and expensive, prompting SpaceX to attempt a more economical solution.
But yes the floor of the launch pad is really not something to worry about, I mean we know how to build safe launch pads since decades, we just have to do so.
Because the same people previously developed Falcon 9 Block V, the safest and most reliable launcher on record?
But even more the way this has been handled, or rather not handled. There is so much that can fail. All in all I doubt it will happen soon.
I remember a few years ago, SpaceX was selling seats for the mars mission. But maybe that’s just the Elon-way of doing things.
Even if climate change gets way worse and we contaminate our environment way more then we do now and additionally to all that have some additional nuclear escalations: It still would be WAY easier for humanity to continue to survive on earth then it is to do so on mars.
Putting up a few human on a mini base on Mars, that's the _easy_ part. Even keeping that base alive for a few years is very easy compared to making the mars a viable/relevant option for humans future survival, and AFIKT that is still years, maybe decades away.
The martian soil is toxic and currently we are unable to use it for agriculture.
Low solar panel output plus sandstorms mean a lot of upkeep is needed to keep power up - or more realistically you need to deliver a nuclear reactor there. But... rockets do explode, do you want to experience nuclear fuel payload explode in earths atmosphere?
People on mars will have to live in underground dwellings to shield them from space radiation.
Different gravity in long term might have some unexpected side effects, especially pregnancy.
But then whats the point of it all... we are unable to create stable colony (plan b) there. Mining? Moon is closer and easier for that purpose.
It all sounds like a penal colony, no sane person will sign up for it.
AFAIK a journey to Mars will be a one way ticket.
The chance we would see a person standing on surface of mars is 0%, unless there is some revolutionary scientific/engineering breakthrough or an actual threat to life on earth.
It's the ground under it that got annihilated.
Imagine saying "the house is fine, it's just its foundations that got annihilated."
Even the supports are intact. Just all the material around them is gone.