SpaceX launches

alfadriver said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Sorry, forgot that X is not to be faulted. Even when mistakes happen. 

It may be just me, but it sounds like you have a bit of a "dog in this fight"....  maybe you are not being entirely objective on this?

Keith Tanner said:

Had there been crew on Apollo 6, they would have had a bad time of it.

My understanding is that if Apollo 6 had been crewed, they would have aborted during the second stage burn.  So most likely a "we're not going to space today" time of it, but not *bad*.

aircooled said:

I suspect they could be a lot more careful about changes if they wanted to save some money, but the way they are doing it, though expensive, seems to allow for very rapid iterations.

Keep in mind that SpaceX is a commercial enterprise, not a government project.  There are definite business cases to make for spending more up front if it gets you to a working product sooner.

alfadriver said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Sorry, forgot that X is not to be faulted. Even when mistakes happen. 

I am saying that this IS a mistake and that it's a problem. It's different from the earlier tests where failure was an option. This failure was one that should not have happened, and that's why it's not the same. If you take that as "X is not to be faulted", I'm not communicating well.

If the fix is one that can be applied fairly easily, it may not slow them down much in terms of time to the next launch. But it did set back the testing program as now we don't have data on how the new flap placement works.

codrus (Forum Supporter) said:

aircooled said:

I suspect they could be a lot more careful about changes if they wanted to save some money, but the way they are doing it, though expensive, seems to allow for very rapid iterations.

Keep in mind that SpaceX is a commercial enterprise, not a government project.  There are definite business cases to make for spending more up front if it gets you to a working product sooner.

Yeah, time has a cost. Sometimes it's worth breaking things if it gets you to production more quickly.  SpaceX is also working on improving their production line, and you've gotta do something with all those rockets and engines you keep building :)

It will be interesting to see how the FAA reacts to this, I think they'll be the ones to hold up the next test flight and for good reason. There are videos of all the ATC chatter as they closed the airspace, lots of flights in holds, diverting and not a lot of info on how long the airspace would remain closed. I'm sure there are a decent amount passengers pissed that they didn't land at their destinations and airlines that had to burn a bunch of extra fuel and put extra time on their crews and equipment.

adam525i said:

It will be interesting to see how the FAA reacts to this, I think they'll be the ones to hold up the next test flight and for good reason. There are videos of all the ATC chatter as they closed the airspace, lots of flights in holds, diverting and not a lot of info on how long the airspace would remain closed. I'm sure there are a decent amount passengers pissed that they didn't land at their destinations and airlines that had to burn a bunch of extra fuel and put extra time on their crews and equipment.

Ironically, there's a case to be made that the debris field is partially the FAA's fault.  Apparently it was several minutes between loss of telemetry and the explosion, which suggests that it was probably the onboard flight termination system that blew it up when it diverged sufficiently far from the expected trajectory.  In this case that was probably less safe than letting the single, large Starship hit the ocean on a known, trackable trajectory.  Blowing it up just produced a visually spectacular shower of debris, which was much less predictable.

If the problem was a buildup of fuel leading to a fire as has been stated, that could have easily led to an explosion. But the center engines dropped off first in the telemetry, and they're the gimballing ones. Which means they were left with off-axis thrust from the big vacuum engines and it could have easily departed the safety corridor. In that case, it may have been a race between the FTS and the fire in the engine bay.

alfadriver said:

In reply to Keith Tanner :

Sorry, forgot that X is not to be faulted. Even when mistakes happen. 

Keith led off by literally saying, "Personally, I think this is a bad failure."

Grind axes much?

Keith Tanner said:

If the problem was a buildup of fuel leading to a fire as has been stated, that could have easily led to an explosion. But the center engines dropped off first in the telemetry, and they're the gimballing ones. Which means they were left with off-axis thrust from the big vacuum engines and it could have easily departed the safety corridor. In that case, it may have been a race between the FTS and the fire in the engine bay.

Yeah, I think that is what it came down to. There's also the chance that you lose the ability to trigger the FTS at some point and wish you had. I think an uncontrolled starship with fuel still onboard likely isn't making it through the atmosphere at those speeds in one piece anyways.

Just a heads up that another Starship test launch is scheduled for Friday the 28th (3:30 - 5:00 PST).

The analysis of the previous launch apparently showed that harmonic vibrations caused a fuel leak into the open area above the engines which eventually exploded.  Obviously, those issue have been addressed in the current Starship.

Explains why they did a full duration burn on the stand for this one. 

Unfortunately I'll miss this one live. Fingers crossed it's a good one!

Space X launched a NASA probe to the moon this evening.  Seems like the launch went well.  

We had a doubleheader yesterday. Saw both go up. Pretty clear night so you could track the rockets for quite a while. 

Starship launch delayed til March 3rd

Reminder:  15 min, from time of posting.  (they are doing some holding, so may not launch, but looks like it's good to go)

Update:  It's scrubbed for today.  Could be a re-launch as soon as tomorrow.

Here is a cool pick showing the propellant tanks and lots of venting:

Looks to be rescheduled for tomorrow (Wed March 5th), same time.

Well... Good launch, hot stage, booster catch.... Starship went out of control right before it got to orbit.  It was probably going fast enough to mostly burn up on re-entry(?). Some pics:

Booster return (which had two engines go out), the fire is not the engines, it's the re-entry heat:

Booster recovered (note Starship still showing good):

Starship out of control (not altitude, speed and 4 engines out)

I definitely think Starship is ready for Elon to go for a ride.

aircooled said:

Starship out of control (not altitude, speed and 4 engines out)

Yeah, the vacuum engine stops first, then the sea level ones wink out one by one.  There's an explosion visible just before the last one goes, and then it goes into a spin.  IIRC the vacuum engines are not gimballed (fixed nozzle) so they need at least one sea level engine to compensate for off-axis thrust.

Would have liked to see the view from the camera in the engine skirt. Would imagine they could at least see the beginning of the trouble

Im pretty sure i saw the rogue starship. I saw the usual odd white cloud that is seen after a spacex launch, only instead of being southeast of me towards cape canaveral, it was south of me. Seemed to be stationary for a sec then took off east FAST. I tried to get a pic but my phones camera is screwed up. 

Someday, Starship, someday.

But at least one if your customers managed to get to the moon.

TJL (Forum Supporter) said:

Im pretty sure i saw the rogue starship. I saw the usual odd white cloud that is seen after a spacex launch, only instead of being southeast of me towards cape canaveral, it was south of me. Seemed to be stationary for a sec then took off east FAST. I tried to get a pic but my phones camera is screwed up. 

I wonder if that was the booster doing it's boost back burn?