SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
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Hot staging was the second big success, and Starship got to space.
The flight termination was disappointing, but the actual functioning of the FTS system seems to be fixed. That was a problem with the first flight and should make the FAA very happy.
How is it that you build something so expensive with so many development resources and expect parts to fail?
Most rockets (almost all) use just a few engines. The Saturn V had five engines, and the Space Shuttle had a total of five engines (including the Solid Rocket Boosters). The Atlas V uses one engine, New Glenn seven engines, etc.
Historically, there has only been one rocket that attempted the 'many engine' approach before now: the N1 by the Soviets, which they never managed to get working successfully.
SpaceX is thus attempting something unprecedented. They are not only trying to create a rocket with 33 engines, but they are also building the most powerful rocket ever made. Furthermore, it is the only rocket ever designed with fully reusable first and second stages. In this single machine, SpaceX is innovating in multiple ways that neither the US, the Soviets, nor any other country has managed to achieve.
Additionally, the Raptor engine used by SpaceX is the only full-flow staged combustion rocket engine that has ever flown. This design makes it more efficient and high-performing and has been considered the 'holy grail' of rocket engine design. Until now, no one has managed to build a successful rocket engine using full-flow staged combustion due to its complexity. The Raptor is also, pound for pound, the most powerful and efficient rocket engine ever made.
SpaceX is innovating throughout their space 'stack.' The entirety of the Starship project is immensely innovative in almost every way possible. Many others have tried and failed to achieve even a single aspect of what this project encompasses. The fact that SpaceX managed to have 33 Raptors firing perfectly today is already absolutely phenomenal.
So yes, I expect things to fail because much of what they are doing is literally the first attempt of its kind. It's entirely predictable that some aspects might fail. What you're asking is akin to questioning the pioneers of quantum computing: 'Hey, are you telling me the first quantum chip you built failed? That’s crazy! How can you build something so expensive and expect it to fail?'
You received a response with many words but I don't think it contains a real answer, other than "the Soviets couldn't do it".
There is a very interesting book about it, called Combustion Instabilities in Liquid Rocket Engines: Testing and Development Practices in Russia.
Very minor nitpick, but the Space Shuttle had seven engines: Two SRBs, three SSMEs, and two OMS engines.
The SRBs and SSMEs were used for launch, and the two OMS engines were used in orbit.
When you put together a bunch of equipment with a small error rate, the time between errors climbs very fast. Build a RAID array with 33 disks and you’d better have a vendor picked out for replacements because you’ll be doing replacements fairly often, instead of every four to ten years with a single disk.
And they don’t understand dependent statistics either. Every failing rocket engine can potentially damage its neighbors. Every failing hard drive requires a stressful operation on the remaining disks (resilvering) that may push the next drive to failure.
Yes, naturally 33 > 1, so you might expect 33 times as many failures of individual components.
But your analogy between arrays of rocket engines and disks is apt, because both have redundancy to survive the failure of individual components.
For example, in the high-altitude flight test of the Starship prototype in May 2021, three of the 33 Raptor engines powering the first stage failed shortly after liftoff. The vehicle still managed to continue flying, reaching an altitude of 40 kilometers before failing due to a variety of causes.
> People genuinely don’t understand how statistics work
Indeed.
If an individual disk has MTBF of 2 million hours, the probability of it failing in the first year is 0.437%.
But put 33 of those disks in a RAID 6 array, which can tolerate 1 or 2 failures without replacement, and the probability of the entire array failing in the first year drops by a factor of ten to 0.0413%.
The statistics say the array is even more reliable than a single component by itself.
> Every failing hard drive requires a stressful operation on the remaining disks (resilvering) that may push the next drive to failure.
I saw something similar: RAID array with 5 disks and 3 spare disks. One night controller detected failure, ejected one drive and replaced with spare. After rebuild of RAID it ejected another disk and then another. In an hour all spare disks were used and on fourth failure it stopped work
What was probability of such series of failures?
It's like saying "we built a car engine, but every 33rd car we make the engine doesn't" work. That's not a very good engine.
Also, not sure why I am getting downvoted for saying I don't understand something and asking other people how it works.
Rocket science is hard hence "It's not rocket science", except it is.
Having money and smart people doesn't ensure success. Bezos started his company before Musk did Space X and they still haven't gotten to space.
The limits of simulation (From Henry Spencer) The 27May91 Aviation Week, reporting on the April 1 test-stand failure of an upgraded SRB (Solid Rocket Booster) for the Titan 4: Investigators determined that extensive three-dimensional computer simulations of the [motor's] firing dynamics did not reveal subtle factors that they now believe contributed to motor failure. [Program director] Stifling said the full-scale test was essential precisely because computer analyses cannot accurately predict all nuances of solid rocket motor dynamics. "That's why we test", he said. For those who don't follow the space news, a few seconds into the test the motor pressure rose rapidly and exceeded the limits of the casing, the result being a large, spectacular explosion that destroyed the motor and much of the Edwards AFB test stand.
-ACM SIGSOFT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING NOTES vol 16 no 4 Oct 1991 Page 15
The more reasons to leave AI out of nuclear launch mechanism.
Anything built outside of currently-known parameters might fail, so you design as much of the rocket as possible to operate within the limits of current knowledge.
Some of those limits turn out to be feasible to push in a laboratory. So you build and conduct experiments on those parameters, record the results, and design your rocket accordingly.
But for some parameters, the lab experiments required to test them are incredibly costly. Especially for parameters that vary strongly with scale (like turbulence), a system with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket can only be predicted by an experiment with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket.
Say it costs a billion dollars to build and launch your new rocket, but it will operate with ten unknown parameters, each of which will cost 200 million dollars to individually test on the ground. You could spend two billion dollars on experiments, then one billion dollars on a rocket you're confident will work. This is more-or-less the model that NASA used for developing the Space Launch System: do as much science as necessary, ask Congress for as much extra time and money as the contractors say they need, so they can be extremely confident that their new biggest rocket will work perfectly the first time. NASA doesn't like launching rockets that they don't know will work, because Congress doesn't like when rockets they paid for blow up, and NASA depends on Congress for all of their funding.
However, for the same money, you could build your rocket best-guess within the known unknowns and fly it. It's likely to blow up, because you guessed on ten unknowns. However, if the results of the flight allows you determine some of the parameters with greater confidence than one billion dollars in ground experiments, then it was worth the while, and you re-design your rocket according to the newly-understood parameters. You can do this three times for the cost of building the experiments and flying once. That's a decent chance at learning the parameters, and as a bonus, you get to practice building and flying the rocket, productively employing all of your staff and facilities.
That's more-or-less the model that SpaceX is developing Starship on, and previously Falcon 9. Blowing up prototype rockets only costs SpaceX time and money, and as long as it costs less time and money than running ground experiments (and keeping their production and launch crews on retainer, and maintaining their facilities between rockets), they're saving money by launching rockets they expect to blow up.
Who are you talking to where many people are saying that? I work in the space industry and no one I've ever spoken to says that.
Even the first launch had some. https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/12claay/the_k.... I recall the during the SpaceX audio commentary of this morning's launch (but perhaps EverydayAstronaut's) it was mentioned that onboard cameras on Starship and Super Heavy would be attempting to communicate via Starlink for the first time.
They have a production line to build these things. They’ll roll out the next one and try again. It’s not like SLS where everything is expected to work perfectly.
Yep. to be more specific, they have 6 more ships built and 5 under construction. Engines are being produced one per day. The scale of manufacturing is stupefying.
I have to imagine 350 engines/yr is more than enough for now, even if the FAA has permitted up to 20 launches per year.
Like I said, the whole scale is staggering.
Now that we have the person who knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive in charge I’m sure these glitches will get sorted out.
Sarcasm aside, NASA has blown up plenty of rockets. It's not a problem to blow up a rocket if it doesn't pose any substantial risk. NASA doesn't much like to blow up rockets anymore because it's contrary to how their operational model works: Congress gives NASA a task, a deadline, and a budget, and NASA is expected to deliver on the task, and can ask for more time or money down the road. Any kind of high-profile public failure is risky to NASA because it looks bad to Congress, who might cancel the project. Asking Congress for more time or money is normal, so the safe strategy with NASA's undertakings (especially high-profile ones like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Space Launch System) is to deliver flawless performance, usually late and over-budget. Congress doesn't need to be paid back, and history mostly remembers program success rather than schedule and budget overruns.
Of SpaceX's current programs, Falcon 9 is operated most similarly to NASA. It's expected to be mature and reliable; it is trusted to fly billion-dollar spy satellites and human crew. Any kind of failure will be heavily scrutinized, so SpaceX is only pushing the envelope of reuse and flight performance with their in-house payload program, Starlink. All of their customer flights get to operate well within the established safe performance envelope of the rocket. With over 200 successful consecutive flights now, SpaceX's Falcon 9 obviously can be depended on.
Starship, on the other hand, is not being depended on by anybody at the moment. No project gets delayed or cancelled when it explodes; no missile complex goes unwatched, no humans get stranded in space, smacked into the ocean, or burned alive. Nobody, least of all SpaceX, needs it to be perfect now. What they need is for it to become good enough to sell, to sell lots once they're selling it, and to not cost too much once they're selling it, all of this ideally sooner rather than later. They have access to lots of money now to make this happen, but investors' money has to be paid back someday.
So the bar for Starship isn't set at "succeed". It's set at "maximize future return on investment".
SpaceX is counting on present failures to save them money in the future by proving exactly what is necessary to succeed, at a time when failure is relatively cheap for them. They've clearly improved from the previous launch. Key milestones were passed. Telemetry was collected, and the flight safety systems executed an authoritative conclusion to the flight. With the investment of only 212 days of time and money since their previous high-profile Starship explosion, SpaceX has gotten demonstrable progress towards future flight success.
Did you forget the Artemis 2 mission?
Starship appears to be a source of delays, not SLS.
But yeah, landings would have been much bigger successes.
Apollo 4, the first time the full Apollo Saturn V rocket stack was assembled, did not blow up on the first attempt to space. That is something to celebrate. Now wasting millions of government dollars from subsidies, which in the end comes from citizens.
We should not be celebrating failure.
Apollo 1 is highly analogous to the current testing of Starship. New spacecraft, highly ambitious, coming together for the first time.
Its conflagration was predictable, and a total waste of the life of the astronauts onboard. Only their deaths forced the whole spacecraft to be redesigned the way it should have been before any astronauts were onboard. Even afterwards, a second electrical fire nearly killed three more astronauts, far from any safety though their shiny new door.
The Space Shuttle ran much the same way. Carrying astronauts on its very first flight, people though it was safe, right up until it spectacularly killed seven astronauts. After that, it was flown much less ambitiously, and then it killed seven more people, and then we still kept flying it because it was all we had, and our bureaucracy was stuck with it.
Starship blowing up today poses no risk to human life, or to any organizational ambition. Rather, its present failures represent progress towards future success. Somebody is trying to do better than has been done in the past. If they learn all the things to not do to their rocket before valuable payloads and people fly on it, all the better.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/the-launch-of-japans...
The Soviet N1 rocket never even got past first stage separation, in 4 launches. They got closer every time, but after the 4th stage blew up during main engine cut-off, they canceled the program, and never flew a cosmonaut beyond low-earth orbit.
It's valid (and explained well and often) but counterintuitive.
(And with mundane tasks, it's less applicable, as with them, it's reasonable to expect that when competent people attempt them, they generally get done correctly.)
As predictable the news media - most of which seem to have an antipathy against anything related to Musk, most likely due to ideological differences between their staff and Musk himself - present the launch as "a failure", "a flop", "a disaster", "a fiasco" and more of the like. This goes for nearly all of the ones I sampled ranging from the likes of CNN to places like Sweden's "Dagens Nyheter". As to whether this misrepresentation is due to them not understanding the expectations of test launches like these or in an(other) attempt to tar-and feather another Musk enterprise is unclear but I find it hard to believe that these institutions do not have the facts at hand to honestly report on such tests.
[ apparently click that down-arrow again... ]
NYT: “The journeys of Starship’s two parts ended in separate explosions. But the engineers at Elon Musk’s spaceflight company overcame problems that marred the rocket’s first flight in April.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/science/spacex-starship-l...
Successful test of Starship’s two stages ended in explosions, making progress over the initial test flight in April.
(A fusion bomb generates more power for a minuscule period of time, but that sort of competes in a different class.)
Starship is like a top drag racer where it’s quickly damaging itself in normal operation, but it’s the most powerful local machine that can last for over a minute.
However, there’s a lot of pulsed devices that briefly get to much higher energy levels like artillery or experiments that charge capacitor banks for massive discharges like Z machine which briefly hits 300TW.
Edit: misread your comment, we’re in agreement. But I’ll leave the arithmetic.
Also, calculating power output like that is misleading. A solar powered ion engine on a probe has constant solar power and constant acceleration but would have increasing calculated power output over time as it keeps accelerating. What’s going on is rather than the engine being more powerful the propellant starts with more kinetic energy.
Nothing else comes close, even planned ones that aren't operational yet.
They're testing and developing and learning. They're taking risks and making improvements as needed.
As the most successful rocket company of all time by a VERY large margin, I'm pretty sure they know a heck of a lot more about rockets than you and I do, I'm willing to let them make the expert decisions.
The failure of the pad was entirely, 100% predictable. It's (literally) not rocket science. How concrete responds under pressure is a super well understood thing.
Then they put the deluge system on a priority list with 10,000 other things that had to get done before the first flight and did what needed to be done, but likely skipped over the nice to haves, knowing they could always come back to them.
For all you know building the deluge system for flight one may have delayed them x months, and they simply decided to take the risk because they needed the political capital of a visible launch attempt to even keep the program alive.
I’m a bit shocked people on hn don’t understand rapid prototyping and iterative development.
You genuinely seem upset or angry that a private company did something other than what you think it should have. That’s not healthy.
The most advanced rocket company of all time that is literally putting the industry to shame very clearly knew the risk and took it anyway.
You're so excited to point out their MaSsIvE fAiLuRE You forgot to ask why they consciously took that risk.
Here is more recent and complete version: https://archive.ph/aN2dV
Happens on my phone every time.
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-is-failing-...
Keep in mind that the goal of this launch wasn't to carry any payload. It was to get data and further iterative development. People here, especially, should understand how iterative development works.
I'm sorry about the booster tho. But overall it's hard to consider this anything other than a great success.
Scott Manley has a good short up on the booster at hot staging.
There is no footage for that.
Even here, the detractors are coming out of the woodwork to complain about success. At least we get to mine salt from their tears, I guess?
It's really a glass half empty headline, isn't it? It's like if someone got bronze at the Olympics and the headline were, "Athlete loses to multiple opponents, fails to get gold or silver medal."
If you teach people life is harsh, then typically they won't try new things. If you tell people life is easy and risk free, they may do something that gets them killed...
If you balance out both you get people that try new things with appropriate safety and risk tolerance.
Coke and Pepsi both are winning, though your comments sound like you think one is a loser for not being top sales in beverage.
I'm not really sure your point. Just because the 2nd placed entity is earning lots of cash means that they are winning? They may be successfully operating their business, but if someone is earning more then they are not winning. I'm really not sure of your definition of winning. Maybe you're using the Charlie Sheen version of winning?
If winning and losing were a spectrum, all those things you listed are very clearly much closer to winning than they are to losing.
I'm no fan of Musk by any means, but you only have to look at the Falcon program to see how successful Spacex has been. I have no doubt that Starship will work out.
There’s a reason words like “unsustainable” are so often associated with the Apollo program. It was amazing, but it couldn’t be a model for continued progress.
Do you consider that a failure of the Saturn-V program? Or do you understand the value of testing prototype hardware to destruction?
In SpaceX's case, they've done this exact process before with the Falcon to great success. In a few years, Starship launches will likely be a routine thing, as Falcon launches are now.
You have to understand this is a private business doing it on a budget and fast. Yes, NASA is involved...
But that doesn't seem to have been a Saturn V. What was it? I'm pretty sure it was on Youtube, but a quck search failed to turn it up.
So, maybe "not one Saturn V blew up on launch", but one of the Saturns did.
The one I'm thinking of came straight down, still vertical, nose up.
The third Redstone launch was also a lot like what you describe, but I can't find video.
There was another of the Vanguard ones where it rose a couple of inches and then shut down and fell... and survived and was launched awhile later.
Applies perfectly and seems to be working for SpaceX