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[Merged] SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Explodes After Launch/Starship hop

Gord_in_Toronto said:
I was really just hoping that, after some decades of designing and building liquid fuel rockets, someone could get it right the first time. :(
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The first SLS flight sent a capsule around the Moon.

Thirteen Saturn V flights all made it at least to Earth orbit.

Talking of decades, the programme that designed and built the Saturn V started, put twelve men on the Moon and was cancelled in about the same time as it took SpaceX to design, build and blow up a Starship after four minutes.
 
Ziggurat said:
The US government is paying SpaceX about $3 billion to develop a lunar lander. That's dirt cheap. Most of Starship's development costs are being paid for by SpaceX, which plans to earn back those costs primarily through non-moon missions. If you want to complain about excessive costs, look to the Space Launch System (SLS), not Starship.

And we don't have the technology to travel to the moon anymore, at least not in the economic sense. All the tooling for the Saturn V production is long gone, it's an outdated design that we have no reason to return to, and it wasn't particularly safe to begin with. It's a matter of luck that the Apollo 1 launch pad fire was the only fatal accident.

The reusability of both Starship and the Super Heavy Booster is not a red herring at all, it's a really big deal if SpaceX can achieve it. Both are useful for a **** ton of other missions, not just the moon mission. Compare that with the SLS, which will probably never be used for any other missions.
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It’s not SpaceX’s own money. They have raised external funding every year since they were founded and they’ve been given a lot more than $3 billion.
 
Marcus said:
This launch was a proof of concept of a radical new design. 33 methane rocket motors in a single giant rocket. They performed beautifully, generating the required thrust even a few motors short, and successfully transitioning MECO. "Rocket explodes" makes great headlines but is only a minor part of the story.
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They had at least five, possibly six engine failures. That’s not performing beautifully.

The rocket exploded because first stage separation failed. This is basic stuff.
 
arthwollipot said:
Wow.
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Name the new technology.

It was a rocket.

The plan was to launch, have separation, crash the booster in the gulf and crash the second stage in the Pacific. They weren’t going to even try to land either part. This is simple stuff.

So what happened? The second stage failed to separate and they also lost a number of engines and apparently it destroyed the launch pad. This is simple stuff.

This was not the triumphant success that you Musk fanbois seem to think. It shows that SpaceX have got some serious rework to do on a rocket that is already years late.
 
jeremyp said:
They had at least five, possibly six engine failures. That’s not performing beautifully.
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Consensus is that that they failed due to damage cause by a lack of a water deluge system in the launch pad, which resulted in shockwave damage to the engines.

The deluge system has not been built yet, but SpaceX bosses made a conscious decision to proceed without it.
 
jeremyp said:
Name the new technology.
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The Raptor engine - a reusable methane-oxygen Full-flow staged combustion engine.

jeremyp said:
The plan was to launch, have separation, crash the booster in the gulf and crash the second stage in the Pacific. They weren’t going to even try to land either part. This is simple stuff.
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Funny-men-laughing-cartoon-you-want-it-when.png


So simple that rockets NEVER fail, they always succeed, and no-one ever dies testing them, or flying them to or from space.

Oops, Soyuz 1: One killed
Oops, Soyuz 11: Three killed
Oops, Apollo 1 fire: Three killed
Oops, Challenger STS-51L; Seven Killed
Oops Columbia STS-107: Seven killed
Oops, N1 Rocket Test Flight explosion: over 90 killed

Designing and building a 400 metre long, 5000 metric tonne rocket, that lauched using a new type of engine, 33 of them, delivering 17 million lbf of thrust is ******* hard

Do you know what is easy? Neville Nobodies showing their complete ignorance of the subject material on obscure message boards
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smartcooky said:
The Raptor engine - a reusable methane-oxygen Full-flow staged combustion engine.



[qimg]https://www.dropbox.com/s/m9keaq5069rb4qo/Funny-men-laughing-cartoon-you-want-it-when.png?raw=1[/qimg]

So simple that rockets NEVER fail, they always succeed, and no-one ever dies testing them, or flying them to or from space.

Oops, Soyuz 1: One killed
Oops, Soyuz 11: Three killed
Oops, Apollo 1 fire: Three killed
Oops, Challenger STS-51L; Seven Killed
Oops Columbia STS-107: Seven killed
Oops, N1 Rocket Test Flight explosion: over 90 killed

Designing and building a 400 metre long, 5000 metric tonne rocket, that lauched using a new type of engine, 33 of them, delivering 17 million lbf of thrust is ******* hard

Do you know what is easy? Neville Nobodies showing their complete ignorance of the subject material on obscure message boards
.
.
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You’re mocking me but I’m not the one pretending a one hour flight that ended after four minutes was a success.

All of those other examples of rockets blowing up before they should have one thing in common: nobody called those launches a success just because they cleared the launch pad.

In fact, we can argue that Starship failed to do that because it destroyed the launch pad and, according to some, that damaged a number of its engines.

It’s supposed to be reusable. They can’t even reuse the launch pad.

It’s not automatically a success just because nobody was killed.
 
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jeremyp said:
It’s a rocket engine. It was designed eleven years ago and they had a 15% failure rate. It’s not that new. And liquid fuels rocket engines have been around since the Second World War.
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You sound like you're arguing that there's been no new motor vehicle technology because the Model T rolled off its assembly line in 1908. It's an internal combustion engine, right? Nothing new there.
 
It did not destroy the launch pad. The launch pad will be cleared and re-used. The booster and the Starship module itself were not intended to be recovered or re-used. You can't call it a failure because it didn't do something it was never going to do.
 
arthwollipot said:
You sound like you're arguing that there's been no new motor vehicle technology because the Model T rolled off its assembly line in 1908. It's an internal combustion engine, right? Nothing new there.
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Indeed, and when they design and build a new engine, they don't expect it to break down when they run it in a new car for the first time.

The Raptor has been in development since 2012 at least. Don't you think it should be a bit more reliable by now?
 
arthwollipot said:
It did not destroy the launch pad. The launch pad will be cleared and re-used. The booster and the Starship module itself were not intended to be recovered or re-used. You can't call it a failure because it didn't do something it was never going to do.
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Apparently, lumps of concrete were seen flying around the rocket. On this thread, somebody has claimed that the five engine failures were caused by pieces of launch pad. If it has to be rebuilt, it's not called reuse.

I know what the flight plan was. They were going to crash the booster into the Gulf and they were going to crash the second stage into the Pacific. I completely understand why they decided to do that and, if it had done that, I'd be calling this a success.

Unfortunately, their plans were wrecked because the rocket failed to achieve first stage separation. They will hopefully learn how to prevent that failure in future launches, which is positive. But there will be things they were hoping to learn that they have missed out on, like how does Starship cope with re-entry.

Now they have to rebuild the launch pad, fix whatever went wrong in the next booster and then run another test. Starship is already about three years late. This is going to delay it further.

Edit:

SpaceX themselves were saying that clearing the launch tower would be considered a success. This is ********. They were setting the lowest of possible bars purely for public consumption. Internally, I'm sure they are pretty disappointed by this test.
 
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jeremyp said:
Name the new technology.

...snip....
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How they are using materials and construction techniques. You have to build something differently if you want to keep re-using it rather than one-use. Then there is all the computing stuff.

Lots of new stuff.

Never mind of course that rockets have always been on the edge of our technological abilities, there hasn't been a stable design to be re-iteratively updated over a hundred years.
 
jeremyp said:
Indeed, and when they design and build a new engine, they don't expect it to break down when they run it in a new car for the first time. The Raptor has been in development since 2012 at least. Don't you think it should be a bit more reliable by now?
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Because they'll have had many protypes beforehand. Also, computer modelling of materials and forces is a well-developed technology in the world of car engines. And even then test rig engines do fail during development. And one substantial difference is that you can test a car engine in a secure testbed in a way you can't with a rocket, at one point no matter how much modelling and pre-take-off tests you have to put your current model together and light the blue fuse paper.

And I've no way to assess whether we should have expected them to have made more progress, in fact no one can until long after all the development has been done and you can do an investigation of the entire process. Estimations about new technology always gets the time spans wrong.
 
jeremyp said:
Indeed, and when they design and build a new engine, they don't expect it to break down when they run it in a new car for the first time.
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And yet it does happen

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/lawsuit-alert-honda-cr-v-struggles-with-engine-failure/

jeremyp said:
The Raptor has been in development since 2012 at least. Don't you think it should be a bit more reliable by now?
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Have you been following the Raptor development, I mean at all?


I'll bet you were one of those people who declared SpaceX would be doomed to failure in their goal to land booster from space!
 
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arthwollipot said:
No, I've seen the contingency plans for if the craft happened to survive the launch. You have to make those plans. Just lighting the booster and standing back isn't sufficient. It was a big rocket, and they needed to plan for what it was going to do should the primary mission objective be fulfilled.
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I am...nothing short of truly amazed that you expect me to believe the separation and entire subsequent 1.5-hour flight plan was just a contingency in case the rocket DIDN'T explode immediately after launch. That is preposterous beyond accurate description.

arthwollipot said:
The point is that those were not criteria for success.
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Yes I know that already; my point is that that is such a ludicrously low bar for "success" that it's unintentionally hilarious. What are we supposed to extrapolate about the soundness of the design, or the engineers' own confidence in their own work, when the only reason they bothered to even create a full flight plan was because the FAA needed one before they would approve the launch?

arthwollipot said:
Every rocket has failure mode contingencies built in.
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Why is a completed flight plan a failure mode though? That seems to be backwards.

arthwollipot said:
Anyway, this as I said was the first test of the most gargantuan rocket system ever built. If it had succeeded on all of the "cake" contingencies, it would have been extremely surprising.
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I wouldn't have been upset by a few failures or glitches. Even rockets that are well-established and proven systems have them, and of course a brand new rocket is going to have bugs. But I would expect some things to work right at least. Like, more than a single thing. And the builders of a rocket that is hyped the way this one has been should set their sights a little higher than "well as long as it clears the launchpad". I could JUMP from the top of the damn launch tower and say that I "cleared it". A rocket is supposed to do more things than that. This thing had systems on board that were supposed to do more than that, and every one of them failed or was destroyed before it had a chance to fail, and the excuse is that the people who built it absolutely expected nothing better from the thing they've just spent years and years working on, so really it's fine.

The only thing that worked were that the engines lit - that's great, we knew they would from the static test. The only data this launch created was that the rocket definitely goes upwards if you let it go while the engines are lit. I guess that's great for someone who isn't sure they believe in physics.

It was embarrassing. Everyone is trying to save face by being Super Positive about the rocket blowing up at launch and I understand that from a human standpoint - but, objectively, this was a failure, the rocket didn't work. And the idea that a rocket exploding halfway up is "really the best anyone was hoping for" and "we only even made a flight plan just in case God played a joke on us by making it actually work right" is a weird, sad, fatalistic attitude, it's the kind of thing you expect from a team that has simply lost morale.
 
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jeremyp said:
You’re mocking me but I’m not the one pretending a one hour flight that ended after four minutes was a success.

All of those other examples of rockets blowing up before they should have one thing in common: nobody called those launches a success just because they cleared the launch pad.

In fact, we can argue that Starship failed to do that because it destroyed the launch pad and, according to some, that damaged a number of its engines.

It’s supposed to be reusable. They can’t even reuse the launch pad.

It’s not automatically a success just because nobody was killed.
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Or because Musk changed the paramaters for success after the event either.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
If just clearing the tower was the goal, then SpaceX shouldn't have been allowed to launch.
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I'm going to amend my previous statement, given all the shennanigans SpaceX pulled around this event if their only goal was to launch the rocket so it cleared the ground, the company should be permanently barred from flying anything.

You do not risk so much for so little gain, and for knowledge already in the public domain.
 
Checkmite said:
I am...nothing short of truly amazed that you expect me to believe the separation and entire subsequent 1.5-hour flight plan was just a contingency in case the rocket DIDN'T explode immediately after launch. That is preposterous beyond accurate description.



Yes I know that already; my point is that that is such a ludicrously low bar for "success" that it's unintentionally hilarious. What are we supposed to extrapolate about the soundness of the design, or the engineers' own confidence in their own work, when the only reason they bothered to even create a full flight plan was because the FAA needed one before they would approve the launch?



Why is a completed flight plan a failure mode though? That seems to be backwards.



I wouldn't have been upset by a few failures or glitches. Even rockets that are well-established and proven systems have them, and of course a brand new rocket is going to have bugs. But I would expect some things to work right at least. Like, more than a single thing. And the builders of a rocket that is hyped the way this one has been should set their sights a little higher than "well as long as it clears the launchpad". I could JUMP from the top of the damn launch tower and say that I "cleared it". A rocket is supposed to do more things than that. This thing had systems on board that were supposed to do more than that, and every one of them failed or was destroyed before it had a chance to fail, and the excuse is that the people who built it absolutely expected nothing better from the thing they've just spent years and years working on, so really it's fine.

The only thing that worked were that the engines lit - that's great, we knew they would from the static test. The only data this launch created was that the rocket definitely goes upwards if you let it go while the engines are lit. I guess that's great for someone who isn't sure they believe in physics.

It was embarrassing. Everyone is trying to save face by being Super Positive about the rocket blowing up at launch and I understand that from a human standpoint - but, objectively, this was a failure, the rocket didn't work. And the idea that a rocket exploding halfway up is "really the best anyone was hoping for" and "we only even made a flight plan just in case God played a joke on us by making it actually work right" is a weird, sad, fatalistic attitude, it's the kind of thing you expect from a team that has simply lost morale.
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Plenty of other rocket system tests have stage separation problems. It's the most powerful rocket ever.

The explosion was intentional since it was out of control. That is standard procedure for all rockets.
 
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starship-new-simplicity-extremes/

Sidestepping decades of precedent, Musk says that Starship will have no separation mechanism at all. Instead, at some point during the design or testing process, Musk decided that a separation mechanism was entirely superfluous and that the same effect could be more or less replicated by using existing systems on Super Heavy. By using the booster’s gimballing Raptor engines to impart a small but significant rotation on the rocket moments before separation, Super Heavy could effectively flick Starship away from it – a bit like how SpaceX currently deploys Starlink satellites from Falcon by spinning the upper stage end over end and letting the spacecraft just float away thanks to centripetal forces.
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a_unique_person said:
Musk is an idiot. I bet there is a separation mechanism already designed and ready to go.
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You'd think that being that rich he could hire a real engineer.

Destination Moon (1950) has just shown up on YouTube.

Pay particular attention to the rocket launch at around 2 min 40 sec and see if it reminds you of anything.

Maybe the answer is here?

Character 1: What happened Charles? What went wrong.

Character 2: I don't know. I don't know.

Character 2: There could not have been anything wrong with the design astronautically.

Character 1: No. It was the motor.

Character 2: But why? Why, after four years of development and tests?

Character 1: It seems impossible but I can only think of one thing. Somebody tampered with it.
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:w2:
 
I'd call that a successful test: it lost six engines on one side yet kept going. From jimbob's link it sounds like the separation problem was that the remaining engines could gimbal enough to fly straight or flick the second stage off, just not both.
 
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jeremyp said:
The first SLS flight sent a capsule around the Moon.

Thirteen Saturn V flights all made it at least to Earth orbit.

Talking of decades, the programme that designed and built the Saturn V started, put twelve men on the Moon and was cancelled in about the same time as it took SpaceX to design, build and blow up a Starship after four minutes.
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Apollo also used on the order of a million man-years of effort.

Look, I used to work for the guys who designed the Mercury capsule. I worked on the command and data integration of SLS and Orion, and on the KSC ground segment. I also know that SpaceX has succeeded due to American taxpayer (like me) dollars, and I think Musk is a technologist and salesman, not an engineer, and that he’s a piss-poor excuse for a man in general and an American in particular.

Now that I have made it clear that I am not some sort of naive Musk fanboy, I wanted to note that (as Jay and others have already pointed out) you can’t evaluate the Starship development program the same way, or yet judge it by the same criteria, as Apollo or SLS. It’s a different engineering/economics model.

And I know that Starship is nowhere near ready to do any of the missions it’s touted for, even if the test flight had gone as planned, and I remain doubtful about the eleventy-dozen-engined booster ever being reliable enough. And I predicted two? years ago that SLS would send Orion around the Moon before Starship ever made it to orbit. But, again, this isn’t the same kind of approach, and it’s innovative in both an engineering sense and an economic sense.
 
jeremyp said:
It’s not SpaceX’s own money. They have raised external funding every year since they were founded and they’ve been given a lot more than $3 billion.
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Not from taxpayers. If investors invest in a company and it goes under, that's the investor's problem, not mine. If taxpayer money disappears into the void, that's my problem, because I'm a taxpayer.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
I'm going to amend my previous statement, given all the shennanigans SpaceX pulled around this event if their only goal was to launch the rocket so it cleared the ground, the company should be permanently barred from flying anything.
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That wasn't their only goal. Their goal was the full planned flight path.

They would be satisfied with far less, but their goal was a lot more than just clearing the tower. But even supposing that was their only goal, why should that bar them from flying anything?

You do not risk so much
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What exactly do you think was risked?

for so little gain, and for knowledge already in the public domain.
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Knowledge of how a completely new design would perform isn't in the public domain. And I don't think you're in any position to evaluate how much gain the test data provides.
 
Ziggurat said:
Not from taxpayers. If investors invest in a company and it goes under, that's the investor's problem, not mine. If taxpayer money disappears into the void, that's my problem, because I'm a taxpayer.
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SpaceX is here today because of NASA contracts for Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew: taxpayer dollars. That’s how they were able to survive and build to where they are today.

I’m fine with that. I think CRS and CC are good programs, and there’s nothing wrong with the business model - Orbital (now part of Nothrop Grumman) and Boeing are other participants. I’m just pointing out that investors and commercial customers are standing on the shoulders of taxpayers.
 
jeremyp said:
The first SLS flight sent a capsule around the Moon.

Thirteen Saturn V flights all made it at least to Earth orbit.

Talking of decades, the programme that designed and built the Saturn V started, put twelve men on the Moon and was cancelled in about the same time as it took SpaceX to design, build and blow up a Starship after four minutes.
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And yet, which Apollo missions do you think NASA learned the most from?

Answer: Apollo 13, and before that, Apollo 1

Apollo 13 was a failure that nearly resulted in the deaths of three astronauts, but the learnings from it were huge. As a result of this incident, NASA made several changes to the design of the lithium hydride cartridges. They increased the size of the canisters to allow for more absorbent material, and they added a third canister for better redundancy.

Apollo1 was a failure that did result in the deaths of three astronauts, but it led directly to a comprehensive, almost complete redesign of the interior of the Command Module. The changes included

a. Covering the interior walls of the Command Module with a more fire-resistant material called Beta cloth
b. Coating the wiring and other components with fire-resistant materials.
c. Installing fans and blowers to circulate the air inside the spacecraft to prevent buildup of flammable gases
d. Adding filters to remove hazardous particles.
e. Adding an emergency escape hatch that could be opened quickly in the event of an emergency. It could be opened in just five seconds and could be explosively jettisoned.
f. Adding a system to regulate the pressure inside the Command Module, ensuring that the pressure remained stable, thus preventing explosive decompression.
g. Redesigned the communications system inside the spacecraft to improve the reliability and readability of transmissions between the astronauts and mission control.

The lesson here is that successes teach you very little - more is learned from failures.
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sts60 said:
SpaceX is here today because of NASA contracts for Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew: taxpayer dollars. That’s how they were able to survive and build to where they are today.
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We were talking specifically about Starship funding, and the cost that's gone into that. The costs for Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew are a separate issue. Assuming you agree with the ISS mission, then NASA got good value for that (and if you don't, SpaceX is a small fraction of those costs).

I’m just pointing out that investors and commercial customers are standing on the shoulders of taxpayers.
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Falcon 9 is a pretty good return on that investment, I would say.
 
smartcooky said:
And yet, which Apollo missions do you think NASA learned the most from?

Answer: Apollo 13, and before that, Apollo 1

Apollo 13 was a failure that nearly resulted in the deaths of three astronauts, but the learnings from it were huge. As a result of this incident, NASA made several changes to the design of the lithium hydride cartridges. They increased the size of the canisters to allow for more absorbent material, and they added a third canister for better redundancy.

Apollo1 was a failure that did result in the deaths of three astronauts, but it led directly to a comprehensive, almost complete redesign of the interior of the Command Module. The changes included

a. Covering the interior walls of the Command Module with a more fire-resistant material called Beta cloth
b. Coating the wiring and other components with fire-resistant materials.
c. Installing fans and blowers to circulate the air inside the spacecraft to prevent buildup of flammable gases
d. Adding filters to remove hazardous particles.
e. Adding an emergency escape hatch that could be opened quickly in the event of an emergency. It could be opened in just five seconds and could be explosively jettisoned.
f. Adding a system to regulate the pressure inside the Command Module, ensuring that the pressure remained stable, thus preventing explosive decompression.
g. Redesigned the communications system inside the spacecraft to improve the reliability and readability of transmissions between the astronauts and mission control.

The lesson here is that successes teach you very little - more is learned from failures.
.
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From a technological point of view you are right, of course, but from a business point of view this is bad for Space X. Apprently Musk has lost a few billion since the explosion.
It certainly is not doing his battered image any good.
And I see the "Tony Stark FOr Real" image dies very hard.
 
sts60 said:
Apollo also used on the order of a million man-years of effort.

Look, I used to work for the guys who designed the Mercury capsule. I worked on the command and data integration of SLS and Orion, and on the KSC ground segment. I also know that SpaceX has succeeded due to American taxpayer (like me) dollars, and I think Musk is a technologist and salesman, not an engineer, and that he’s a piss-poor excuse for a man in general and an American in particular.

Now that I have made it clear that I am not some sort of naive Musk fanboy, I wanted to note that (as Jay and others have already pointed out) you can’t evaluate the Starship development program the same way, or yet judge it by the same criteria, as Apollo or SLS. It’s a different engineering/economics model.

And I know that Starship is nowhere near ready to do any of the missions it’s touted for, even if the test flight had gone as planned, and I remain doubtful about the eleventy-dozen-engined booster ever being reliable enough. And I predicted two? years ago that SLS would send Orion around the Moon before Starship ever made it to orbit. But, again, this isn’t the same kind of approach, and it’s innovative in both an engineering sense and an economic sense.
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I agree, but problem is Musk needs investors to keep Space X going, the explosion is not helping much there.
 
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