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.
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.
(Total speculation, of course)
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.
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.