SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

https://apnews.com/article/spacex-starship-launch-elon-musk-d9989401e2e07cdfc9753f352e44f6e2

by fnordpiglet • 3 years ago

955 1180 3 years ago

This was a test flight so it lasted long enough to do its job. They seemed quite pleased.

simondotau3• 3 years ago

Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad. Suggesting that this test “failed” is at best a mischaracterisation.

fnordpiglet5• 3 years ago

Failure doesn’t have to have a negative connotation, we just match it as so in our culture. The full mission plan wasn’t achieved and the rocket did in fact fail. That said, it achieved precisely what they hoped it would achieve as failure was an expected and acceptable outcome.

simondotau3• 3 years ago

The usage of “failure” as a way to describe not achieving the maximally ideal outcome makes no sense to me. I’ve never read or heard it used to mean that.

It would have been a failure if the data logging failed to transmit, or if it had immediately exploded and destroyed the launch tower.

corobo• 3 years ago

Absolutely! Applies to everything too, including the project you bought a domain for and didn't do anything with!

You there, reading this comment, go and fail or go and turn autorenew off :P

Failure > inaction. You can learn from failure.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m3• 3 years ago

Sure, but, nevertheless, I’d like to know why it exploded before declaring this a success!

Aaargh20318• 3 years ago

It likely exploded because they blew it up (flight termination system). It looks like the stages failed to separate and it started to spin. In this case they don’t let an uncontrollable rocket just fly off and see where it comes down, they blow it up. The FTS is basically an explosive mounted to the rocket that can be remotely detonated exactly for situations like this.

badcppdev2• 3 years ago

This story/thread gets my upvote because it is by far the least click-bait headline I saw in a quick scan of /new.

I will disagree with you though and say that the rocket stage separation failed to work. And this occurred a few minutes after launching.

What would your headline be?

Q6T46nT668w6i3m3• 3 years ago

The Times summary is solid:

SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Explodes After Launch
The most powerful rocket ever built got off the launchpad in South Texas, but did not achieve its most ambitious goals on Thursday.

sheepybloke• 3 years ago

Starship achieves liftoff, but fails to stick the landing.

baja_blast2• 3 years ago

If the separation did not fail it probably would have made it to orbit.

soco• 3 years ago

The irony is that we're all "fail fast" until something actually fails fast.

onion2k• 3 years ago

SpaceX has taken 21 years to get to this point. They have not failed fast. They have seen a long series of huge successes from doing some incredible engineering. Today's test is a small part of that journey.

version_five2• 3 years ago

The people who say that are usually talking about designing a landing page that doesn't get enough signups or something.

You can really tell if a company has a culture of embracing failure if they're cool with you blowing up a spaceship.

zitterbewegung• 3 years ago

Actually its more like your project is ahead of schedule and is meeting budget targets.

ravenstine6• 3 years ago

Even if this is true, it's going to get more and more difficult to explain away rocket explosions as succeeding the more decades we put between us and the dawn of the Space Age. If SpaceX is still blowing up rockets in 2033, it's going to become a PR problem, especially as the MSM further turns its back on Musk.

shadowgovt7• 3 years ago

That doesn't make any sense for prototypes. It's been slightly fewer decades since we've been doing consumer software. Does anybody expect version 1 to be bug free?

risyachka• 3 years ago

No, it won't.

It is obvious that every new rocket that was built from ground up will fail a few times before it is released.

This is not a "production build". And you don't need to explain anything when your "test build" fails, it is obvious some will.

ClarityJones• 3 years ago

It would be absolutely reckless for SpaceX to not blow up rockets. How could they credibly claim to know the limits and abilities of their spacecrafts if they did not test those limits to the breaking point?

csbingel• 3 years ago

Couldn't disagree more. The biggest innovation that SpaceX has brought to the table is the reusable nature of their platform, both reducing operation cost AND in reducing R&D costs. I believe one of the biggest contributors to the lack of space exploration and exploitation was the astronomical (pun totally intended) cost of both developing and operating the platforms to get us there. If this helps fix that, blow some stuff up!

okdood64• 3 years ago

Cause space billionaire man: bad.

But seriously what a terrible title. This was a huge accomplishment in engineering, getting it this far up.

op00to• 3 years ago

No, because normal people see a huge explosion and think "well, that didn't go to plan." It has nothing to do with space billionaire man: bad.

Someone• 3 years ago

That’s the message they choose to use externally. I would guess they had somewhat higher hopes internally, and would have been at least somewhat disappointed if it had exploded just after clearing the launch pad.

Whether they’re truly happy with this result probably will depend on their analysis of what went wrong.

If they can find the cause and it’s easy to fix, they’ll be a lot happier than when they can’t figure out what went wrong, or when they can figure it out, but preventing it requires a huge redesign.

But yes, this is the nature of rocket building. Things do get boom fairly easily.

93po13• 3 years ago

Everyone who works at SpaceX would tell you they're happy. Could they be happier? Sure. But they aren't unhappy with this.

mcculley7• 3 years ago

"Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad."

I am confused. Everything I read before the launch said that it was intended to reach orbital altitude and make it around the Earth.

swarnie2• 3 years ago

The Chief Twit said "anything other than blowing up the launch pad is a success."

nagisa• 3 years ago

That might have been the flight plan. When drawing these up you don’t typically mark down "experiences an unexpected rapid disassembly a few minutes after launch.”

theK• 3 years ago

Well, even if your success factors are waaaay early, you have to account for the fringe event that everything keeps working out. So yeah, they filed a flight plan because theoretically the ship could get there.

fabian2k• 3 years ago

This is a bit of spin by SpaceX. Blowing up the pad would be a serious failure and would be a large and costly setback. But they obviously didn't achieve the goal of the test flight here. It is a test flight, so it's not a complete failure and not entirely unexpected. But it's not a full success either, significant parts that were planned to be tested could not be tested because the rocket failed early.

AviationAtom5• 3 years ago

Musk was saying it was a 50% chance the rocket blew up on the launchpad. Their sole hope was that it made it in the air, leaving the launchpad unscathed and quickly usable for future launches.

makomk• 3 years ago

This test launch was never planned to actually make orbit. It was an "orbital test flight" only in the sense that it was intended to demonstrate system performance that would basically have been enough to reach orbit; the original plan was that they'd reach velocities and aerodynamic stresses similar to an actual orbital flight, test stage seperation, both stages, and part of the re-entry, then crash into the ocean, all on a sub-orbital trajectory. Something apparently went wrong at stage seperation.

HarHarVeryFunny3• 3 years ago

That was the goal, but failures are to be expected at this stage of testing. Clearing the tower was a primary goal since a ground level explosion would cause a lot of expensive damage. Clearly there were multiple failures.

mlindner• 3 years ago

That was the stretch goal. They made it clear several times on the webcast and in tweets that clearing the launch pad was the primary goal and further than that to gather lots of data. The farther they got, the more data they gathered and the more successful it was. You can have varying degrees of success and still be successful.

bitL3• 3 years ago

It almost blew up on the launchpad (see the debris flying after a few seconds), then at around 30 seconds you can see some explosion at the bottom, throwing away some surface parts. Multiple failed engines. Then it went into an unsurvivable "tailspin" if there was any crew around. Cheering for failure was the topping.

baq13• 3 years ago

Go play some KSP, you’ll learn to appreciate not blowing up on the pad.

93po13• 3 years ago

It almost blew up on the launchpad (see the debris flying after a few seconds)

you have literally no idea what you're talking about

destitude2• 3 years ago

What evidence do you have it almost blew up at launchpad? That most likely was concrete chunks flying off away from the rocket and nothing with the rocket itself. You really don't seem to have a grasp what was trying to be done or how any of the previous SpaceX rocket programs functioned.

notfish• 3 years ago

Maybe they were cheering for failure because they know more about their goals than you do

AviationAtom5• 3 years ago

I hate when major outlets sink to using clickbait headlines that mischaracterize an account of events

s1k3s• 3 years ago

Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad.

That's not what they said in their mission presentation though. It was supposed to launch, separate, return the booster back, then the rocket was supposed to orbit once around the Earth and then fall into the ocean.

I understand people have their feelings invested into this (for whatever reason), but objectively speaking that was not what "success was defined as".

93po13• 3 years ago

They defined success up front as being able to gather information. They did that.

greedo2• 3 years ago

There was no plan to return the booster back.

mgfist6• 3 years ago

Well they need a plan in case the thing takes off. If you look at the objective:

"SpaceX intends to collect as much data as possible during flight to quantify entry dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally. This data will anchor any changes in vehicle design or CONOPs after the first flight and build better models for us to use in our internal simulations."

From https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481

It doesn't say the objective is "fly across earth".

gpm3• 3 years ago

It literally is what they said in their presentation. Repeatedly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1wcilQ58hI

@ 9:38 "We will consider any data inform and improve future builds of starship as a success. From a milestone our main goal is to clear the pad. Every milestone beyond that is a bonus."

@ 15:57 "We're focusing on the fundamental systems and operations, so that's the liftoff portion, but we are going to try and get some data on how the fins work..."

@ 35:26 "I want to remind everyone that success today is anything <interrupted by cheering> for today success is anything that helps improve the future builds of starship. If we lift off and clear the pad we're calling that a win."

mempko7• 3 years ago

The Soviet N1 moon rocket, which SpaceX shares a bit of design (30+ engines for example) failed 4 times before being scrapped.

The Soviets had the 'launch often, fail fast, learn faster' view that SpaceX employs today.

However, nobody viewed the N1 launches outside the Soviet Union as successes. I'm glad to see that 'fail fast, learn faster' is finally part of American aerospace engineering.

orbital-decay• 3 years ago

Very different situations. N1 was a technical blunder on many levels (and it wasn't a moon rocket - it was a hastily repurposed LEO launcher intended for in-orbit assembly, not optimal for the TLI).

Instead of adopting the proven R-7 stacking scheme which was much easier to test piece by piece, Korolyov opted to a novel design which was too wide (17m!!), and static fires required a humongous and prohibitively expensive testing facility. The lack of static fires made the development too slow and expensive, as the only way to test it was in the actual flight. Combine this with other technical mistakes (the shape led to the extra weight while the modularity wasn't required, too much drag, etc) and Mishin's poor leadership after Korolyov's death, and you have a recipe for a failed project.

Starship is much narrower (9m), today's tech is much better, so the static fires are much cheaper; and unlike N-1, it's actually designed for fast iterations from the ground up.

lttlrck2• 3 years ago

Finally

This comment is 20 Years too late, SpaceX was founded in 2002.

Kapura• 3 years ago

So you're suggesting intent was to detonate the rocket in the air, despite that not having been stated anywhere?

"I may have crashed the car into the neighbour's house and broken my arm, but I did get the milk from the store!"

physicles4• 3 years ago

List of things that were crystal clear before launch:

- SpaceX will be sad if the rocket blows up on the pad.

- They’ll be very happy if the rocket clears the tower.

- They’ll be ecstatic if the rocket makes it around the world.

- They’ll use the flight termination system, which all rockets carry, if it veers off course.

Did you see the employees cheering during the webcast?

TheLoafOfBread3• 3 years ago

Very reminiscent of Soviet N1 rocket. Same concept. Similar problems.

bhouston• 3 years ago

Can you share? I figure this is mostly just new system problems. When I write lots of new code my unit tests find a lot of bugs in the first pass, but you don't have that in complex dynamic mechanical systems. Simulation can only take you so far.

mlajtos• 3 years ago

I don't think there is real historical footage, so this might do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZ5Ep06TTk

pinewurst• 3 years ago

I had the same thought while watching! You could see the asymmetry in the lit engines as it climbed and I was wondering how long the control system could take it before losing it.

matzab• 3 years ago

Well, the launch pad survived this one.

meepmorp2• 3 years ago

Yeah, starship has a ways to go to beat the N1's body count.

tekla4• 3 years ago

Going to guess you don't actually know what the details are in the comparison betwen the N1 and Starship, because this is a incredibly uniformed comment without any arguments/evidence.

TheLoafOfBread3• 3 years ago

N1: 30 engines working next to each other instead of big engines. Starship: 33 engines working next to each other. There might be some details, but concept and idea are same.

panick21_23• 3 years ago

The issue was stage separation, N1 never got that far.

Also, N1 had many issues, non were really shown in this flight. So I don't know what you are referring to.

Maybe you are referring to the N1 failure where to many engine shut off, N1 used pure thrust vectoring for guidance and the board computer had a overly simple guidance computer where 1 engine getting shut down was automatically leading to a engine on the other side shutting down. This lead to a cascade where all engine shut down.

N1 also suffered from pipe failures because of vibration. Again not something experienced in this flight as far as we can see.

Can you be more concrete of what you are referring to?

haunter• 3 years ago

Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1wcilQ58hI&t=2920s

(the cheering is actually really funny cause the launch was already a success)

kgwxd• 3 years ago

The cheering was annoying, it felt like it was being forced by some cringey hype man.

vvillena• 3 years ago

Part of SpaceX company culture. All their launches are cheer-heavy. Even mission control gets rowdy at times.

elil172• 3 years ago

I get that it is a successful test based on the goals they set out, but the cheering seemed staged to me. If that was my rocket, I'd be very upset that it came so close to total success but didn't make it. Maybe everyone at SpaceX is just super emotionally mature

AYBABTME3• 3 years ago

They probably just know what they're doing so they expected far less than they achieved.

bushbaba• 3 years ago

It’s smart PR. Most the public audience won’t realize how each of these steps is a huge success in of itself.

pfannkuchen4• 3 years ago

If I worked on that project I would have been in tears of pride and happiness at the launch and how far it flew on the very first attempt. Assuming it is SpaceX staff being shown, I do not think the cheering is in any way staged. Lack of cheering would be strange if anything.

throwaway4aday3• 3 years ago

The thing you saw blow up was a prototype, a test vehicle and the first ever flight to boot. Do you have any idea how many prototypes get thrown in the trash when you're trying to figure out a physical product and how to manufacture it? If you loved every one of them you'd give up after a week. You have to be merciless and willing to scrap everything and start over if you want to get to production.

aziaziazi2• 3 years ago

clearing the tower was all we hoped

All, really ? What about the flight plan ?

I like the American philosophy to see the good part of experiences even when thinks don’t go as planned, but IMHO I feel like it's drifting more and more from « there’s good in failure » to « let’s call everything a success ». May be wrong, just my European point of view through the transatlantic optic fiber.

geoffeg• 3 years ago

The flight plan was the best case scenario.

dbrueck2• 3 years ago

They're required to file a flight plan with the FAA or they can't launch.

If the plan says they'll go all the way into orbit and they abort early, that's ok.

If the plan says they'll get 100m off the ground and go no further, and they instead manage to make it all the way into orbit, they'd be in a huge amount of trouble.

Given the above, what sort of flight plan would you recommend they file?

Symmetry3• 3 years ago

For myself, I'd feel like a test flight was a full success if it was able to test all the important bits. From that perspective not testing stage separation, second stage ignition, and reentry makes this a partial success but a partial failure as well.

EDIT: Perhaps a better way to think about it is, if it had crashed back to the stand and damaged things there that would be a setback. If it made it all the way that would be as much progress as you could get. Failing before MECO was less progress than I expected but still progress.

rootusrootus7• 3 years ago

You're not totally wrong, there is a lot of cheerleading going on, putting a positive spin on every little bit. There are a lot of uncritical fans here. I hope that internally at SpaceX the engineers are a lot more serious. Based on the results they've achieved with other rockets, my guess is they are.

pclmulqdq• 3 years ago

Some Tesla events have been shown to have artificially-inserted cheers to show more enthusiasm than the crowd actually had. I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing that for SpaceX, too, but I also wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX launches had a lot of enthusiastic people in whatever crowd watched them. It was pretty telling that we didn't hear the roar of the engines on the "cheering" track, which would have happened for pretty much every recording of people actually watching the launch.

tetris112• 3 years ago

Hell, listening to the commentator describe the rocket's ascent like a giddy sports commentator really reminded me that this is just another corporate event with people paid to shape narratives of what you see. I really miss NASA launches in this respect. Less hyped, but you had the solemn sense that something special was happening without anyone yammering in your ear with nonsense patter.

fnordpiglet5• 3 years ago

I have over 600 hours logged on KSP and 200 hours on KSP2. This is pretty normal in my experience.

geocrasher4• 3 years ago

As somebody who's never become good at KSP, I've debated whether or not to get KSP2. Does it have better training so that you have clues how to get some of the initial things done so you can build up in career mode better?

fnordpiglet5• 3 years ago

I think you should look into it in two years. Right now it’s early access, and in this case early seems to mean “first successful merge to main that builds”

moffkalast9• 3 years ago

Forget KSP 2 for now, watch Scott Manley instead and you'll be good at KSP 1 in no time.

panki27• 3 years ago

It looked just like a regular launch in Kerbal Space Program at the end.

geocrasher4• 3 years ago

I thought the same thing, as did many other rocket geeks including Scott Manley. I've lost track of the number of Kerbins I've uh... lost...

agloe_dreams• 3 years ago

Pretty much, I'm sure most of us have at least once had a tumble at or above max-Q.

I'm intrigued as per cause. Lots of Engine failures and spewed parts. It had a real slide on liftoff. An engine violently flashed and went pop about +25s.

I do have to say, the thing requiring FTS after a violent flip well above supersonic speaks orders about structural work.

mwint6• 3 years ago

I wonder if, after seeing that performance, they'll decide to weaken (or more accurately, remove extra weight from) structure they don't need.

remarkEon• 3 years ago

Is there a technical name for the "tumbling" phenomenon? When your first stage is almost out of fuel mass, so the CoG is not where it was when you launched and it's like you're pushing a bowling ball with a fishing pole instead of a giant steel beam, so you tip over.

daveslash• 3 years ago

(Low Quality Comment Here) I, for one, have never had a tumble in KSP. Nope, every single launch, exactly as planned, all the way to orbit, and even the Mun. I have never once strapped a bazzilion first-stage engines in a row just to see what happens. Never once stacked them as high as I can. Nope - totally responsible game player over here.

Note: Trying to fly Jeb directly into the Sun was a real lesson in Angular Momentum.

Symmetry3• 3 years ago

My guess is that losing too many engines meant that they were too low, in too thick atmosphere for the speed they were reaching and with the reduced control authority form a missing gimbaling engine they couldn't maintain stability with those fins in the front. But we'll learn more later.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m3• 3 years ago

Truly! RIP brave Kerbins.

shadowgovt7• 3 years ago

Jeb will be back.

TT-392• 3 years ago

Yup, if they hadn't terminated it, surely they'd have just waited until they entered a less dense part of the atmosphere, stabilized, and continued the flight. Just with some delta-v lost. And if that wouldn't have worked, they could have just throttled the engine up when pointy end up, and down when pointy end down, waited until exiting the atmosphere, and then time warp to stabilize.

shadowgovt7• 3 years ago

Complete with "Why the hell are you tiling over I'm holding down the turn key as hard as I can", yeah. :)

cwillu2• 3 years ago

Some day I want a keyboard with pressure sensitive keys :)

MaxikCZ2• 3 years ago

I was so surprised it held for so long! Every time something similar happened in KSP I got a little angry at the game for obviously wrong simulation: no way the rocket would hold together under such stresses. And then I see real-life rocket of biggest proportions do just that. I owe KSP an apology I guess

Aperocky3• 3 years ago

KSP is so realistic unless you run into the kraken.

I made rockets that would do the same thing (flipping) when the fins where on the top due to aerodynamics... going to be interesting to see how SpaceX is going to solve that.

diamondfist25• 3 years ago

It looked like a small pipe Bomb in the sky.

Only 120 meters tall

cryptoz• 3 years ago

People always joke that a success like this will be blasted by the media as a failure, but it's the most predictable thing ever. Massive success today for SpaceX but the story is massive failure. So silly.

I'm as anti-Musk as the next, but it's also weird to see so many people gleeful that Musk must be so embarrassed at this 'massive failure'. Like, how uninformed do you have to be to think that Elon would be humiliated by such a resounding success? Oy.

silveraxe93• 3 years ago

Not just misinformed. How petty and I dunno, plain _evil_ do you have to be? This is a step into making humanity reaching the stars. Is seeing a guy you hate fail really all that matters?

foobar_______• 3 years ago

Thanks for saying this. Can people chill the fuck out and appreciate the world around them anymore? This was the largest rocket launch _ever_ from an American _private_ company using a novel launch configuration in the first fully integrated test _ever_ and people are complaining !?!?!?

This makes me proud to be American, proud to be an engineer, and just stoked to be human. Let's show some humility and graciousness, people!

dmix2• 3 years ago

but it's also weird to see so many people gleeful that Musk must be so embarrassed

These people are pretty easy to ignore if you don't venture into certain parts of Twitter and Reddit. Who cares what they're social media-brained minds think. It's just another hot take.

valine6• 3 years ago

Also notable is that unlike most heavy lift rockets in history they have a functional assembly line that can rapidly churn these things out. We should only have to wait a couple months for the next test flight.

smrtinsert2• 3 years ago

Musk is humiliated when his tweets don't show up in everyones feeds, so its easy to see why that expectation exists.

ChrisBland2• 3 years ago

Test failed successfully

tjpnz2• 3 years ago

Parts falling off, engines going out, something getting inside the interstage. That ship was an absolute fighter.

eisvogel2• 3 years ago

I was thinking this as well... It spiraled seemingly forever without failing, while they hoovered telemetry off of it, until pressing the big red button. Massive fault tolerance at play. SpaceX is awesome in so many ways. Thanks Elon.

a4isms• 3 years ago

Perhaps you mean, "Thanks Gwynne Shotwell."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell

I think HN understands the difference between a charismatic leader who is good at laying out a vision and generating a tremendous amount of hype around it (like Steve Jobs) and someone who is an expert at actually realizing a vision (Steve Wozniak, Tim Cook).

They may both be necessary for success, but if you are praising the rocket's engineering, you're praising the person who works tirelessly to manifest the vision.

lm284692• 3 years ago

Thanks Elon.

And the many many many other people actually conceiving the engines/rockets/&c.

dmix2• 3 years ago

something getting inside the interstage

What does this mean?

tjpnz2• 3 years ago

Based on the feed there was either some gas or debris flying around in the section between the two stages. At that altitude I don't think it could've been air.

moffkalast9• 3 years ago

One or two engines looked like they actually exploded in flight, it just kept going like nothing happened. Absolutely amazing.

danpalmer3• 3 years ago

It was great to see that they seemed unconcerned about 3 engines not lighting on launch. That's the sort of redundancy Starship is going to need to succeed in the way SpaceX are aiming for.

cryptoegorophy2• 3 years ago

It appeared not all engines light up. Was it normal?

jfoster• 3 years ago

No, it was a sub-nominal flight, but a successful test. (assuming they got the data they needed in order to learn from it, which is a pretty safe assumption)

badcppdev2• 3 years ago

Happens in 100% of Starship launches

falsenapkin2• 3 years ago

Sort of, the rocket has "engine out" capability. I don't think the number/configuration is known, but it is intended to perform as desired with more than one engine disabled.

LeonM2• 3 years ago

It was planned to leave the tower with 3 engines turned off. During flight two more engines appear to have flamed out (shut down).

Starship is unique in that it has so many engines, which add redundancy. They can (re)start engines mid-flight.

With the loss of 5 engines, this demo flight would have been fine. Though they will have some work to do on reliability.

gnarbarian• 3 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/live/-1wcilQ58hI?feature=share#t=45m

video with timestamp

justin663• 3 years ago

Did the range officer destroy the rocket because it wasn't going to separate, or did the tumble destroy the rocket?

kortex12• 3 years ago

I strongly suspect the range safety officer pulled the trigger. It did a bunch of unexpected tumbles, so I think if it were flight termination system, that would have popped it earlier. I don't think it came apart of its own account, the RUD was quite rapid.

jaywalk3• 3 years ago

The Flight Termination System is controlled by the Range Safety Officer. And yes, it was pretty clear from the way the two stages exploded that it was the RSO activating the FTS.

cubefox15• 3 years ago

I don't think a manual flight termination is considered a "RUD".

AviationAtom5• 3 years ago

A Wikipedia entry claims it was a commanded explosion. I hadn't yet been able to corroborate that elsewhere.

panick21_23• 3 years ago

I think SpaceX rockets don't have a traditional range safety officer anymore. That function was replaced by software. I suspect the software has certain conditions that will cause destruction.

But it might also have been manual intervention.

justin663• 3 years ago

They might or might not be permitted by the FAA to do some unconventional manning of that role when they fly out of BFE, Texas. (but to what end?) I'm sure they do things traditionally when their rockets fly from NASA or Space Force facilities.

bromuk• 3 years ago

Fail?

So much success, the fact that it got off the ground and is providing tonnes of data to ground control.

Agile rocket building ftw.

perihelions4• 3 years ago

- "Agile rocket building"

Waterfall of propellant-falling

mempko7• 3 years ago

It's good to see U.S. aerospace finally adopting Soviet style rocket building.

koliber2• 3 years ago

Congrats on hitting the test goal.

The double speak is funny though:

SpaceX call this a rapid unscheduled disassembly

What would a regularly-paced scheduled disassembly look like?

Tade0• 3 years ago

The type you do to examine wear after a successful landing.

TheJoeMan• 3 years ago

RUD is an "industry term" :) https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10022/who-coined-t...

koliber2• 3 years ago

I did not know! Thank you.

mauvehaus• 3 years ago

There'd probably be more wrenches and less fire involved for one thing. In the near-term it would also likely be done on the ground.

weberer• 3 years ago

RUD is more of a joke term than doublespeak. Like FUBAR and SNAFU.

plasticchris• 3 years ago

Hard ocean landing was the scheduled disassembly

tekla4• 3 years ago

Not double speak. Just terms you are not familiar with.

tzs• 3 years ago

Was it an unscheduled disassembly?

From the video it looks like the stages failed to separate and the rocket started tumbling. I'd expect the range safety officer to trigger the self-destruct at that point which would make the explosion newly scheduled rather than unscheduled.

mabbo2• 3 years ago

People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. Compare the SLS to Starship.

SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time.

Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve success, but they will have a bigger, better launch system that's fully reusable and costs orders of magnitude less per launch.

"Fail fast" applies to more than just software.

cryptoegorophy2• 3 years ago

How much did starship cost?

LeonM2• 3 years ago

Not known, as SpaceX is a private company, and the rocket is still being developed. But I'd say a whole lot less than $2B per launch ;-)

emilecantin• 3 years ago

They're still designing it, and learning to build it (building the "machine that builds the machine"). They've already scrapped booster 4 / ship 20 without even a test flight.

Today's rocket was a byproduct of what they're actually working on, so it's hard to pin a price on it. I'd guess a few million dollars in engines, and a few hundred thousand in steel? This is all stuff they would've needed to find a way to dispose of anyway; the next booster in line (B9) already has hundreds of improvements. Among these are improvements to thrust vector control and engine shielding, both of which were involved in the issues with today's flight.

dingosity17• 3 years ago

Well... the US tax-payer spent $2.9B for a starship or two. Or to be more accurate, there's a contract between NASA and SpaceX to deliver a Lunar Lander Starship variant (NextSTEP-2, Appendix H, Option A.) Last year it was upgraded to Option B which (I think) calls for a beefed-up Starship that can perform multiple lunar missions.

I'm sure they're not just dumping 2.9B in Elon's bank account (I mean... if they did he would just buy back all the Tesla stock) but there are a series of milestones that need to be met for the government to release the next chunk of funds. I don't know if NASA published the exact milestones, but maybe "not exploding on the launch-pad" was enough to release the next block of funds.

dingosity17• 3 years ago

Elon says Starship launches will get down to $10M per launch within 2-3 years. But he also said we would have our CyberTrucks by now, so... ymmv.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-starship-ro...

By comparison, Falcon Heavy costs about $62M per launch, but Gwynne Shotwell predicted they can shave 40% off that price tag when they start re-using heavies.

https://spacedotbiz.substack.com/p/is-starship-really-going-...

But Elon has supposedly said the TDC (total development cost) of the Starship is projected to be 2-10 billion. [I found this at the Daily Mail website, so take it with as large a grain of salt as you wish.]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11994755/Wha...

If it costs $10B to build one and $10M per launch and you get 10 launches per vehicle, that's $1.1B per launch if you amortize the development costs. But if it takes $2B to build one and $2M per launch and you get 10 launches, then it's only $220M per launch. But if you build five operational starships that each have 10 launches each, things start to get downright affordable.

So if the question is how much has SpaceX spent on the Starship to date? I don't know that's public info. If the question is how much will they spend on development, the answer is $2B-$10B (though that's from the Daily Mail.) If the question is how much will each launch cost (including amortizing development costs)? It could be as cheap as $42M. Or depending on how much of the $2.9B from NASA they're able to apply to previous development costs... who knows!? They could make $1.6M per launch as long as the GSA doesn't audit them too closely.

There's a myth in US government purchasing that competition drives costs down, and that's probably true for commodities. But Starship class super-heavy-launch vehicles aren't commodities. There's a TREMENDOUS amount of cost (both opportunity cost and dollars) associated with fiscal oversight of large projects. The hope has always been that when Blue Origin built something to compete, it would bring total costs down. I am skeptical.

brookst4• 3 years ago

There is no answer to this.

If you hang the entire R&D plus materials cost for Starship on this one launch, it's a huge amount.

If you consider this as R&D that will be amortized over decades of launches, not that much.

It's the same math that gets you the military buying $5000 hammers: it all depends how you allocate fixed costs across units.

sidibe5• 3 years ago

The way I'm hearing it was not a failure but an unbelievable smashing success. No one expected the rocket to get to the launchpad, much less off of it. The second stage was not expected to be reached at all, it's cool that they even tried. Greatest test launch of all time. From what I've read this morning if the test flight had worked all the way it would be like man on moon levels of good.

brookst4• 3 years ago

Eh, if SpaceX had genuinely not expected the rocket to get off the launch pad, they would not have launched it.

I expect their math was something like:

95% chance of enough engines lighting to launch 90% chance of clearing launch pad 60% chance of making 60 seconds of flight 30% chance of 2nd stage separation 15% chance of re-entry

pohl• 3 years ago

Well said. On the other hand, the SLS — having a launch escape system and not requiring sophisticated acrobatics in order to reach land safely — is totally the ship I'd rather be on.

the_third_wave4• 3 years ago

I suspect SpaceX will have to add something resembling an escape system before the thing gets "man-rated". That system could also be used to protect the passengers in case of a failed landing. It will add weight and thus lower the carrying capacity but they seem to have enough margin to allow for such an addition. They already have the header tanks in the top of Starship, adding a number of escape engines and some explosive bolts to separate the nose cone from the rest of the ship should be doable. Add some parachutes to make the thing land at a survivable speed and you're done - beer coaster calculation style that is.

throwntoday4• 3 years ago

SLS will never reach land, you'll be splashing down in the middle of the ocean, stuck inside a tin can getting battered by waves until NASA can scramble their limited resources to get you.

The booster presumably like you will have been thrown into the ocean. Very wasteful system.

CydeWeys11• 3 years ago

I disagree. SLS is hard-limited to a small total number of launches. Starship is going to get into the hundreds soon enough. By that point Starship will legitimately be safer and more reliable than SLS will ever be able to accomplish, so I'd pick it.

GuB-42• 3 years ago

SpaceX approach when it comes to safety is to make sure everything that can go wrong goes wrong during testing and lesser value launches, so that when it is time to put people onboard, the issues will have been fixed.

NASA is about making doing right the first time though careful design.

For SpaceX approach to work, they need to test a lot, with a lot of explosions, so they need to make a lot of rockets, they also need repeatability. That's why they are using assembly lines and mass production techniques.

Which approach is the best, I don't know. The traditionally designed Delta IV never failed, but on the other hand, we lost two Space Shuttles and their crews. As for the Falcon 9, it had a couple of failed missions, but it has proven very reliable over time.

dotancohen5• 3 years ago

  > On the other hand, the SLS — having a launch escape system and not requiring sophisticated acrobatics
  > in order to reach land safely — is totally the ship I'd rather be on.

Have you ever flown on a Boeing 747, without a launch escape system?

That said, I do agree about the flip maneuver. I am very interested to see how that evolves.

JKCalhoun4• 3 years ago

Maybe someone can explain to me why SpaceX lands their boosters?

I would think weight of fuel required to land booster + legs + steering fins would be much greater than a parachute or two and a water landing. That weight savings would be a cost savings as well as more payload that could be lifted (also a cost savings).

Would the booster be destroyed landing in the ocean by parachute?

ilrwbwrkhv• 3 years ago

The test was a massive success. So happy to see starship clear the towers. The largest rocket ever built, larger than the Saturn V. Are you kidding me?

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

If I'm tasked with recording test data for x, y, and z and I only record x, is that a success? Now I need to launch another to try for the y, and z.

Edit: What would an unsuccessful test look like then?

dingosity17• 3 years ago

Elon was setting expectations a couple days ago when he said "Let's just not explode on the launch pad" or somesuch. In that sense, mission definitely accomplished. "Massive" success? Not sure I would go that far, but success of a massive project? Absolutely. It would have been nice to see the mission hit all it's objectives, but I'm sure they got quite a bit of data and operational experience.

What would be a failure is if the next one has the same problem.

tootie• 3 years ago

Serious question, but why is bigger better? Is there a pending need to launch something huge in one go?

baja_blast2• 3 years ago

The technological developments in the 60s/70s in aerospace never cease to amaze me. The SR-71, X-15, Saturn 5 rocket all developed when computers were less powerful than the NES yet they achieved things that no one else has been able to accomplish since (although I am sure there these have been surpassed via classified Skunk Works).

dingosity17• 3 years ago

They also had a lot more money (adjusted for inflation) and didn't have to worry about updating their code to the latest version of python.

ChrisBland2• 3 years ago

NASA's budget peaked in 1964–66 when it consumed roughly 4% of all federal spending. I wish we were spending this much on science now

giantrobot2• 3 years ago

they achieved things that no one else has been able to accomplish since

These sorts of statements are infuriating. You're dropping all of the context of past achievements (budget, political will, design goals, need, etc) and then castigating modern engineers.

The SR-71, X-15, and Saturn V achieved their design goals. There's no modern need to go back and re-achieve those goals.

The SR-71 is an amazing plane. When it was originally built there was a need for a reconnaissance plane that could fly high enough and fast enough to evade Soviet high altitude air defense systems. In the intervening years reconnaissance satellites have obviated that need. Outside of a few other tasks there's not much need for a Mach 3+ manned aircraft. Even for the tasks where one is useful the SR-71 still exists. That's not to say a replacement couldn't be built today. In fact many believe one exists in the form of the rumored Aurora.

It's just ridiculous to make assertions about "no one" being able to accomplish those projects today. If NASA or the DOD put out an RFP and had a budget for a modern X-15 it could definitely be built.

perihelions4• 3 years ago

Interesting thought: Starship just expended more engines on a *test* (39?) than I believe the entire SLS program has budgeted through the end of the 2020's (16 from shuttle + 18 new = 34?).

edit: Never mind, it's slightly less – see the comment below correcting me. The SLS program has 40, not 34, RS-25's.

kortex12• 3 years ago

Yep. And they are trying to get Raptor 2 to less than $2M a pop (iirc). The "cattle not pets" of rocket science.

nordsieck4• 3 years ago

It's 16 + 6 (part of the restart contract) + 18 = 40.

And that doesn't count the 2nd stage which, for 10 flights, should be 3 * 1 + 7 * 4 = 31 RL-10s.

But yeah - a very different architecture.

HarHarVeryFunny3• 3 years ago

They're building Raptor engines at a pace of one per day though !

chasd0011• 3 years ago

i'm a big fan of spacex and poked fun at SLS with all their delays and stuck valves etc. Well now it's the SLS fans turn to do a little ribbing. I still think starship will win out in the end but I'll tip my hat to SLS.. occasionally.

sandworm1018• 3 years ago

> People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical.

That sounds logical, but isn't really a thing in aerospace/space. Complicated high-energy systems have thousands of failure points. So to have any chance of success each failure point needs to be engineered below, by way of example, a 0.0001% chance of failure. That costs lots of money. But say one decides to accept more risk for less cost. Ok. So you switch from 0.0001 to 0.001 failure rates. You risk is now 10-fold higher at each failure point, but with thousands of failure points adding up you are now essentially doomed. And you haven't saved anything. The cost of 0.001 components isn't fundamentally different than the 0.0001 components were. SpaceX can save money though different business practices, by trimming people/money/contracts/compliance and such, but if you look at their rockets they are not fundamentally any less-perfect than anyone else's. They cannot afford to be. This is why rocket failures, like aircraft failures, are taken so seriously. There is an extremely fine line between "works ever time" and "never worked twice" with very little money to be saved between the two.

Across many areas, risk-v-cost math never really happens. It is either go or no go. Take CPU production. Intel spends billions at each of hundreds of fabrication step to push down miniscule error rates because any of a million errors can destroy a chip. There is no money to be saved by allowing any one process to become less than as perfect as it can possibly be. A detected slip from 0.0001 to 0.001 at any step would result in an entire fab being shut down in order to diagnose the problem. The marginal savings of a less-than-perfect process isn't worth the exponential increase in the risk of total system failure.

mabbo2• 3 years ago

I'm not proposing something, I'm describing it. This is what SpaceX is doing, and it's quite successful.

And you can look all the way back to their little hopper version of the Falcon 9 and see that this strategy has been the key to them undercutting the launch market significantly.

My prediction: SpaceX will have a 5th 100% successful launch of Starship before the SLS has a 5th successful launch. They'll just have ten not-100%-success launches before then.

pas• 3 years ago

SpaceX is doing the classic statistic thing[0], making spacecraft stronger where they explode until they don't. It's more like a hyperparameter search and less like QA for individual parts.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Survivor... :)

cpleppert2• 3 years ago

That doesn't really apply here. The dynamics of stage separation on Starship are orders of magnitude more complex than anything used on any previous rocket. If you want to look at what failure looks like for a super large rocket compare it to the failed Soviet N1. This flight demonstrated better performance in a single test flight than every N1 test flight over years. The N1 suffered catastrophic failure after catastrophic failure. Starship was pushed way past its design tolerance and showed its design is technically sound. Failure is unavoidable, the Saturn V almost failed its first test flight way earlier than Starship did here.

CydeWeys11• 3 years ago

You're talking about failure rates per rocket, but we're talking about the overall development program. Falcon 9 certainly has very low failure rates on its individual components now (below your suggested 0.0001 number). But the way they got there was via a higher risk iterative development process, same as what we're seeing with Starship. The Falcon is the most reliable rocket on the planet at this point, so clearly it's working!

deelowe2• 3 years ago

Your intel example doesn't fully hold water. Chip design has taken a binning approach for decades at this point. The silicon is designed for failure in such a way that yield is maximized assuming there will be a variance in quality. Launch and iterate happens for silicon just like anything else. During the initial product launch, there is a lot of waste, but as processes are improved, microcode updated, rework procedures defined, and value engineering efforts completed, yields go up and costs go down.

valine6• 3 years ago

Evaluating the reliability of every component is extremely expensive. If you had perfect knowledge of the reliability of every component, then sure. It would be cheaper to build a perfect rocket first, then launch it. The cost saving comes because it’s cheaper to launch the rocket and see where it fails than it is to exhaustively evaluate the reliability of every component.

RC_ITR• 3 years ago

Tbf, even before launch, no-one expected a full trip. The 'baseline' was lift-off and the rest was upside [0]

Sometimes in aerospace you need to collect data, and sometimes that means explosions.

[0] https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-first-space-launch#:~:....

intrepidhero• 3 years ago

Maybe you're trying to make the point that for very complicated systems with many failure points, the reliability of a single component is less impactful than redundancy and there is some truth to that but I must point out that risk vs cost calculations are definitely happening in both industries you mention.

Triple redundancy is not a thing in general aviation while, for some systems, it is in commercial. That's a risk vs cost calculation.

Semiconductor manufacturers do risk vs cost calculations through the entire development and manufacturing process. Source: I've worked in semiconductor, doing those calculations.

RetpolineDrama3• 3 years ago

That sounds logical, but isn't really a thing in aerospace/space.

Your authoritative tone doesn't make any sense when Falcon 9 exists and has been actively dominating the entire industry for half a decade.

scythe2• 3 years ago

So to have any chance of success each failure point needs to be engineered below, by way of example, a 0.0001% chance of failure. That costs lots of money. But say one decides to accept more risk for less cost. Ok. So you switch from 0.0001 to 0.001 failure rates. You risk is now 10-fold higher at each failure point,

It seems like a strawman to suggest that you would let failure probability increase by a factor of ten as the first step.

but with thousands of failure points adding up you are now essentially doomed.

And it was an easy one to tear down.

And you haven't saved anything. The cost of 0.001 components isn't fundamentally different than the 0.0001 components were.

There is no reason to believe that at all. Invert the question: if a system is 99.999% reliable, does that mean it should be free to make it more reliable? And why?

It is either go or no go. Take CPU production. Intel spends billions at each of hundreds of fabrication step to push down miniscule error rates because any of a million errors can destroy a chip. There is no money to be saved by allowing any one process to become less than as perfect as it can possibly be.

This is completely wrong. Chip factories do produce chips with defects; those chips are sold for cheaper, since they still work, but not as fast. IIRC most of TSMC's modern processes are designed to sell the good chips at a high price and the bad ones cheaper.

nostrademons• 3 years ago

Only if the failure points are arranged in series - A AND B AND C must happen to have a successful outcome.

If the failure points are arranged in parallel - X OR Y OR Z must happen to have a successful outcome, with multiple redundant paths to success, your total failure rate is the chance that ALL of X, Y, and Z fail. This is a much lower number than when they are in series.

To use concrete math - say that Starship has 33 raptor engines with a failure rate of 0.01%, 3 grid fins with a failure rate of 0.05%, and a fuel tank with a failure rate of 0.001%. If it's engineered so that all 33 raptor engines, all 3 grid fins, and the fuel tank all need to work for a successful launch, the success rate of the whole system = 0.9999^33 * 0.9995^3 * 0.99999 = 0.9952 = ~0.5% chance of failure. If it's engineered so that it can get to orbit on 28 out of the 33 raptor engines, 2 out of the 3 grid fins, and there is a double-hull to the fuel tank with a failure rate of 0.005%, then the chance of failure for each subsystem is 0.0001^5 = 10^-20, 0.0005^2 = 2.5 * 10^-7, and 0.00001 * 0.00005 = 5 * 10^-10, and when you multiply out those subsystem failure rates you get 1 - (1 - 10^-20) * (1 - 2.510^-7) * (1 - 510^-10) = 0.9999997495 = ~0.000025% chance of failure.

Moreover, lets look what happens if you take the multiply-redundant design above and then increase the chance of failure of each component 100x. Raptor engines are now 99% reliable, grid fins are now 95% reliable, and fuel tanks are now 99.9% reliable. The overall failure rate for each subsystem becomes 0.01^5 = 10^-10, 0.05^2 = 2.5 * 10^-3 and 0.001 * 0.005 = 0.000005. When you multiply out those subsystem failure rates you get 1 - (1 - 10^-10) * (1 - 2.510^-3) * (1 - 510^-6) = 0.00250498759 = ~0.2% chance of failure. The multiply-redundant system, even with component failure rates 100x higher, still has better reliability than the perfectly-engineered system where every component must perform exactly to spec.

This principle is used all the time in practical engineering. It's why Google builds server farms out of thousands of commodity PCs, hooked up in primary/replica clusters with replication and transparent failover. It's why ships have watertight compartments and double-hulls. It's why passenger jets have multiple engines, multiple hydraulic control systems, and multiple flight computers. Any engineer worth their salt is going to avoid SPOFs and assume that components will fail, then build redundancies into the design so that a partial failure does not endanger overall mission success.

hackernewds2• 3 years ago

risk is now 10-fold higher at each failure point, but with thousands of failure points adding up you are now essentially doomed. And you haven't saved anything. The cost of 0.001 components isn't fundamentally different than the 0.0001 components were.

exactly. optimizing for an acceptable risk for space launches, esp space travel, seems still to be leading to $2B launches. at which point, what's the difference?

JumpCrisscross14• 3 years ago

you switch from 0.0001 to 0.001 failure rates. You risk is now 10-fold higher at each failure point, but with thousands of failure points adding up you are now essentially doomed

Our ex ante ability to estimate these probabilities is lacking. Especially when they’re coupled. And redundancy, instead of tighter tolerances, is often cheaper than the classic approach. These are proven lessons from SpaceX.

DuckFeathers• 3 years ago

Before the anti-Musk cats get too wet, Elon Musk has said, and I quote, "If we get far enough away from launch pad before something goes wrong, then I think I would consider that to be a success. Just don't blow up the pad.": https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/16/world/starship-spacex-lau...

sterlind2• 3 years ago

but like, SpaceX's whole thing has been blowing up test rockets over and over as they experiment, iterating quickly. once they've nailed the design down, the result is pretty reliable, but look at how many booster recovery fails they had before they got successful. your logic works more for defect rates on parts than on the design itself.

gridspy14• 3 years ago

What you've missed here is that failure points can only be guessed or simulated prior to testing. That analysis is often more expensive than the cost of a test and test article.

So SLS does a LOT of analysis and manages to find and rectify failure points prior to flight. They pay a lot in analysis and inflexible design to do this.

SpaceX does some analysis, but then flies to confirm the analysis early. That way they identify actual failure points and can use sensors to see how close they got to failure.

For instance today I'm sure they learnt a lot from each failed engine, parts on the booster that stopped working, detailed telemetry on ship behavior on flight and sensors for the non-separation of booster from ship.

SpaceX builds to the same high tolerances as other rocket manufacturers, but they don't try to avoid testing through overly rigorous analysis. They also don't gold-plate their manufacturing, instead making tradeoffs to allow cheaper volume production with recovery instead.

bumby34• 3 years ago

"Fail fast" applies to more than just software.

Yes, but let's not take the analogy too far. For people who work in safety-critical design (including software), it takes a different mindset than what is often prevalent in silicon valley. When the stakes are high, you don't really want to "move fast and break things".

You can actually see this in SpaceX. In development when stakes are relatively low (e.g., no payload or passengers), the risk threshold is high. But they start taking a more measured approach when that risk starts to ratchet up. The danger being, advocates of one approach don't always know when/how to transition to the other.

shinryuu• 3 years ago

I think it's a matter of failing in a safe environment. Clearly that's what space x is doing. They fail spectularly, but they do so within the confines of a safe environment.

For the real launch they've already mapped out the failure modes and are able to prevent them when it really matters.

version_five2• 3 years ago

I agree with everything in your comment. One thing I've wondered about re space exploration though is how we reconcile what I think is pretty much universal acknowledgement that we have to do everything possible to avoid loss of life with the inherent danger of space travel, and the "drag" that a zero-tolerance safety focus can have on culture.

Put another way, what would global exploration have looked like if sailors refused to accept the risks of early ocean crossings?

mgfist6• 3 years ago

You can actually see this in SpaceX. In development when stakes are relatively low (e.g., no payload or passengers), the risk threshold is high. But they start taking a more measured approach when that risk starts to ratchet up. The danger being, advocates of one approach don't always know when/how to transition to the other.

This corroborates "fail fast". They achieve reliability and safety by launching far more than traditional space companies and seeing failure in those launches. They prove it out before adding the risk of human lives or expensive cargo. Meanwhile traditional companies will develop their rocket for 15 years till it's "perfect". SpaceX figured out that achieving perfection is best done through actual attempts, not laboratory experiments.

phkahler2• 3 years ago

Let's look back at Star Hopper. SpaceX literally hired a company that builds water towers to build a prototype tank for Starship - and flew it! They were primarily trying to figure out how to build it, move it, etc. Obviously the risk tolerance was high. That's really the difference between them and say Boeing. SpaceX starts with higher risk tolerance just to figure out the lay of the land, but they start reducing that tolerance as development progresses. Boeing aims for perfection out of the gate (apparently).

bick_nyers• 3 years ago

I previously worked in medical image processing/transcoding and you are correct, but most people probably don't know precisely how or why.

The knee jerk mindset that most people have in safety-critical design, is being ultra conservative.

In the fields of medical and space (and likely others), you have an asymmetrical risk-reward profile. Think about it this way, if an engineer takes a risk on refactoring some software logic, and it speeds the system up 3%, what is their reward? A raise? A promotion? Fat chance. If that refactor instead breaks 3% of the time; engines blow up, people die, customers yell at them, they get fired, perhaps in some situations they even get sued.

The engineers then converge to a local maxima by the means of: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", and various other ultra conservative leanings. This mindset also will often get selected for in hiring, and rewarded.

Now take the limit of this as time goes to infinity, you have bloated, legacy software that is full of spaghetti code and can't take new features easily (if at all). In the case of NASA's space shuttle program, it was extremely expensive, and the cost wasn't falling significantly over time either.

One might view ultra conservatism as the problem, but the real issue is the asymmetrical risk-reward profile. Solving that takes a head-on approach with great leadership, deploying capital, state of the art testing/QA, great deployment pipelines, and more. Shield people from the risk, and intentionally reward people when they push the envelope.

Imagine if you had a software testing process and product specification that was 99.9999% effective (and no, yours is not even close to that), you could then move at a silicon valley "fail fast" pace and advance the technology and architecture rapidly.

rhacker2• 3 years ago

Yikes, what's the chance just enough rockets will cause the next one to crash and blow up in Miami?

Denvercoder92• 3 years ago

Zero, given that the launch corridor doesn't pass over land, and all rockets are equipped with a Flight Termination System that blows up the rocket if it deviates from that corridor.

smrtinsert2• 3 years ago

Move fast and break things said my doctor. jackiechan.png

localplume• 3 years ago

100% success matters when you need to hit a launch window for interplanetary transit. or when you have spacecraft that are integrating sensors from dozens of commercial and academic partners. 100% success matters when rockets are actually launching payloads. what is the evidence that this fail fast method is superior to the already tried and tested method? everyone just assumes that. the differences between spx starship and SLS go far beyond just that method anyway so you cannot possibly compare

burnished• 3 years ago

Your comment was dead when I got to it - I disagree with your words but vouched because I think being skeptical is valuable (terms and conditions may apply, etc).

I can't personally attest to this but another commenter mentioned that this was what the soviets did as part of a space race with a smaller budget.

You should note that success rate is crucial once you are in production and ready to go - judging overall success against that bar while developing and testing is nonsense.

Finally - I think everyone learns faster by trying more things and making more mistakes? I wouldnt blame you for wanting to see that studied - kind of a neat question after all - but it seems like you are assuming one method or another was picked because it was superior as opposed to a reality of material constraints.

I feel like if NASA had budget for blowing up more rockets to prove/disprove points that they would be doing so. Actually now that I say it out loud I can't imagine anyone choosing 'not rocket'.

samstave10• 3 years ago

I loved the fact that in the video, the staff clapped when the thing exploded...

Where in the past, people would be like "OH NO!!" -- but the crew knew how much data they got out of that launch.

I wonder how stripped down the starship was though in an effort to save costs in the event such as this RUD.

I would love a piece of the shrapnel from the exploded device though...

Hopefully they get those pieces and auction them off.

dingosity17• 3 years ago

I suspect they were told "if we get off the ground, it's a success." Elon's been saying similar things over the last week.

running101• 3 years ago

SLS to Starship is not a good comparison. If all starship had to do was fly into space it would have succeeded.

smiley1437• 3 years ago

Parable of the Pots - Quantity leads to quality

https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality...

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

jungturk2• 3 years ago

This parable elegantly explains how McDonald's came to offer the world's best hamburger.

aaronharnly• 3 years ago

I like this parable!

The counterpoint to it is the probably apocryphal Soviet nail factory (but with more verifiable examples nearby):

Once upon a time, there was a factory in the Soviet Union that made nails. Unfortunately, Moscow set quotas on their nail production, and they began working to meet the quotas as described, rather than doing anything useful. When they set quotas by quantity, they churned out hundreds of thousands of tiny, useless nails. When Moscow realized this was not useful and set a quota by weight instead, they started building big, heavy railroad spike-type nails that weighed a pound each.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a-sov...

de6u99er• 3 years ago

I wonder how quickly they can iterate?

s1artibartfast26• 3 years ago

They have two more ships built and two under construction. I think the iteration time could be driven by the (1) condition of the launch pad (2) the cause of S24 destruction.

chasd0011• 3 years ago

they have a booster and starship outside the hangers waiting to go but the pad is going to need a lot of work.

shmatt• 3 years ago

Daily Mail (UK) and NY Post (US) are quoting the cost of this launch as $3B

recursive2• 3 years ago

This isn't really credible. The Daily Mail also quotes Musk:

Musk has said the entire program will cost anywhere from $3 billion to $10 billion.

These can't both be true.

ChancyChance• 3 years ago

Same thing with NASA. There are countless mashups of NASA foibles. SpaceX is the same, just for profit.

panick21_23• 3 years ago

But it costs $2B per launch

The initial launches are gone be more like 5 billion. Its pure fantasy that it will go to $2 billion anytime soon.

fivestarman2• 3 years ago

starship will always be a failure built on lies. just youtube 'starship debunked'.

recursive2• 3 years ago

I searched the phrase on youtube. It's mostly stuff about this launch. You'll need to be more specific.

sixothree2• 3 years ago

I'm not sure why people need to be reminded of this. This isn't a reply to anyone making complaining about the lack of success. It comes off as fanboyism.

kahrl• 3 years ago

Who are "people?"

NovaDudely• 3 years ago

> Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time.

That is not always a bad thing. I mean you typed this on a computer running an ISA that started in the 70's or 80's. Maybe 90's if you are on PowerPC ;)

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

NASA did so many studies where they tried to put together Space Shuttle parts to make ‘low cost’ rockets (saving development expenses) but whatever they came up with was terribly expensive since those parts were expensive and that didn’t matter if it was a rocket with a cluster of 4 SSMEs or a rocket that strapped on 3 of the solid rocker booster.

You’d think NASA would have read their own studies and given up rather than proceed on the predictable Artemis boondoggle.

s1artibartfast26• 3 years ago

If you watch the this launch video, It looks like there are projectiles coming up from the pad around 18s. I wonder if the launch pad or engines were damaged by explosion.

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1649043715686793218

falsenapkin2• 3 years ago

There was another view at the pad that had sizable bits of what looked like rock or concrete flying past it, camera went off line when the vehicle had barely left the ground. See the bottom right panel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg

s1artibartfast26• 3 years ago

Interesting!

baggachipz• 3 years ago

I'm nothing resembling a rocket scientist, but the lack of flame diverters like you see for every other rocket launch has been a mystery to me. Every starship launch or static fire ends in concrete flying everywhere. That can't be good.

s1artibartfast26• 3 years ago

Indeed, it is not ideal. What you see as a result from a decision to solve that problem in parallel instead of before launches. SpaceX is actively working on their launch stand, just not delaying lunches until they have it worked out. There will be many iterations of it before it is final, just as there will be many iterations of the Starship with increasing capability

2OEH8eoCRo02• 3 years ago

It got further than I expected but I wish these streams had less cheering or at least muted them.

travisgriggs• 3 years ago

One of the new graphics that showed up on the dashboard was that of the engines lit. There were at least 2 on the outer ring that were fed from TO, and a few more winked out during the flight.

I’m curious how many off engines the system tolerates. How many do they anticipate regularly? I’ve never noticed if Falcon 9s periodically run as a Falcon 8 or 7?

All and all, ‘‘twas an awesome sight. Kudos to all those cheering excited people.

sidewndr46• 3 years ago

I think the regular Falcon 9 was designed to lose an engine every single launch.

seydor3• 3 years ago

At least 6 seemed to be off

Diederich4• 3 years ago

I think I saw at least one in flight engine relight. If true that's a capability I haven't heard about before.

mwint6• 3 years ago

My guess was for this flight it was "once off the pad, we will fly as long as it doesn't leave the envelope" since it's all about data collection.

seydor3• 3 years ago

Isn't that a safety risk with such a huge rocket?

panick21_23• 3 years ago

How many engines can be of depends heavily on when the go off. Even 10s of flight can make a huge difference.

Generally Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 are incredibly reliable. In over 200 flights there were only a couple of engine failures. Some worked nominally on accent but had some failure during landing.

How many do they anticipate regularly?

The vast majority flights should never have an engine out. This is something that should generally never happen. I think SpaceX would hope that far less then 1% of flights have an engine out issue. Anything else I don't think they would consider acceptable.

SpaceX will redesign the Raptor engine as often as they have to to get the reliability to Merlin levels.

positr0n• 3 years ago

I recall a few Falcon 9 launches that ended up with 8 engines. It is definitely designed to handle that (although maybe not for the extreme performance cases? Not sure)

At least once they lost the booster when they were planning on recovering it because they had to run the ascent phase on only 8 engines and burned enough extra fuel the booster didn't have enough fuel to complete the boost back and landing.

cubic_earth• 3 years ago

Looking at the aerial footage before the launch, I was wondering why there is so much infrastructure so close to the pad. Clearly much of needs to be nearby, but perhaps those tanks should be 800 - 1000 feet from the pad and not ~200. After seeing the damage to some of that infrastructure caused by the launch, I am still wondering.

s1artibartfast26• 3 years ago

They are very limited in space due to environmental regulations so it is difficult to expand.

It is also worth noting that liquid methane is not explosive by itself.

CydeWeys11• 3 years ago

They would much rather not have all that infrastructure close to the pad. This is a sub-optimal situation that they, more than anyone else, are acutely aware of. Sadly this is what they could get.

seydor3• 3 years ago

Pity that the rocket did not separate.

I wonder if spaceX has considered a scaled down, like half the capacity, which would still be huge

moffkalast9• 3 years ago

I doubt it, the size is what makes it economical in the long run. For anything smaller there's F9 or Heavy.

danpalmer3• 3 years ago

They actually did scale it down from the original plans in ~2015.

I'm not sure if it's worth scaling down substantially from where it is. There is a certain scale that's necessary for the economics (payload vs dry-weight vs fuel) to work out, and ultimately they want to be able to put very significant amounts in orbit. They're currently targeting 150 tons, would it be worth targeting 50 tons? Probably not.

brucethemoose22• 3 years ago

Like single stage? I don't think the booster can reach orbit by itself (much less carry something and come back).

somenameforme4• 3 years ago

One interesting observation here is how long it took the ship to get off the pad from the T-0 mark. This is undoubtedly because some of the raptors on it apparently failed to ignite. I thought they were about to make a mess on the launch pad!

I'm also curious about what technically finally got it off the ground - was there a sufficient, but low, level of acceleration, was it a matter of reducing the rocket's mass (by burning through fuel), was it a matter of some of the engines reaching some peak level of performance. Or, probably most likely, maybe just a combination of everything.

mwint6• 3 years ago

More likely, holddowns on the pad until everything was stabilized. Probably takes a few seconds to vector/throttle the other engines to compensate for the lost ones.

E: convery's reply below makes much more sense.

convery• 3 years ago

Clamps were released at T-10min. IIRC compensating for engines are pretty fast. But they hold the engines at just below lift/weight to run some more checks before fully powering up.

s1artibartfast26• 3 years ago

It is extremely heavy and the engines do not all light at once, they sequentially start over 6-8 seconds.

dzader3• 3 years ago

they said it would take ~6 seconds from engine ignition to takeoff in one of the streams. everything was working as planned at that point afaik

malfist2• 3 years ago

Ditto, this hover then takeoff was planned.

That's why on the live stream you see T0 and then T+0:06 you see "liftoff". The hover was planned.

CydeWeys11• 3 years ago

I was amazed at how resilient Starship was despite how many engines had failed, right up until the point they needed to yaw for stage separation and lost control. They've gotta improve the reliability of those engines (which I'm sure they will), but it's a testament to the quality of their control software how far they got despite having those malfunctioning engines.

Aperocky3• 3 years ago

Commodity parts are going to run the future. Soon we'll have commodity rocket engines and it's going to be plug and play with software accomodating X% failure per launch.

The Soviets only dreamed of such when they came up with the disaster that is the N1.

nonethewiser6• 3 years ago

Does SpaceX build the actual engines? Are they as complicated as airplane engines which are famously hard to produce?

echoer_lyrist• 3 years ago

I believe this is intentional. They engines start with less thrust than is needed to launch the rocket and only throttle up fully after the system checks pass.

physicles4• 3 years ago

The startup sequence is indeed longer than with most other rockets, but I don’t think that’s the reason.

5-6 engines were gone since very early in the flight, and for most of those I suspect that’s because they were damaged by debris from the pad. Everyday Astronaut’s live stream had a different camera angle on the rocket, and you could see it actually slide sideways away from the tower a bit in the first few seconds. Uneven thrust would explain that.

Elon said in the past that the rocket will leap off the pad (thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.5 or 1.6 iirc). But if you’re missing 20% of your engines, that ratio is ~1.2, or less than half the expected acceleration. A slow start indeed.

the_third_wave4• 3 years ago

I suspect they'll install a larger water inundation system before the next launch of Superheavy seeing how as debris seems to have damaged a number of the first stage engines. Maybe a flame tunnel as well but at least something to keep the sound pressure and heat from breaking up the concrete under the launch platform which sets free debris which in its turn causes damage to the rocket and the launch facilities.

gglon• 3 years ago

According to https://www.metaculus.com/questions/14270/spacex-starship-or... its chances to reach orbit in 2023 have just risen from 85% to 90%. Therefore generally I would call the launch a relative success.

danpalmer3• 3 years ago

It looks like it has dropped 4% over the last week, so while the monthly trend is upwards, I'm not sure this launch, or the scrub a few days ago, have improved things.

cubefox15• 3 years ago

Worth also noting that Elon "chronically overoptimistic" Musk said 80% himself, suggesting that Metaculus is too optimistic here.

brodouevencode• 3 years ago

I loved the excitement and the cheering of the crew more than anything. Those folks did a good job.

colesantiago• 3 years ago

space, launching and building rockets is hard. very hard.

outside12342• 3 years ago

especially if the CEO is smoking weed

shagie• 3 years ago

The 4/20 launch date was purely coincidence.

roflyear3• 3 years ago

It isn't like he's contributing to the company anyway

LorenDB• 3 years ago

My mind is so blown. Definitely disappointing, but let's be honest: this is a win for SpaceX, given that this was the first fully integrated flight test of a very complex, very unproven vehicle. (Yes, the ship has flown before, but this was the booster's first flight.)

Did anybody else notice the Apollo-style maneuver to avoid the launch tower?

ahoka• 3 years ago

How could this be a success? It was a catastrophic failure. Sorry but bullshitting releases only works in software.

georgeg232• 3 years ago

Tons of data, including achieving max-Q

Coffeewine• 3 years ago

It didn't blow up on the pad. They'll be happy to blow up dozens of these, hopefully incrementally perfecting the design each time.

valine6• 3 years ago

The goal of this flight was always to prove they could get off the launch pad. They got past max-q, ergo it’s a success.

The launch pad is intact, so the next starship rolling off the assembly line should launch in a couple months.

tekla4• 3 years ago

Sorry but engineering doesn't give a shit about your feelings.

The primary objective was to leave the pad and not destroy the billion dollars of gear on it. Everything else after that was a win.

illegalsmile• 3 years ago

When SpaceX says their goals were to clear the launch tower, collect data and nothing more this seems like a huge success.

SaintGhurka• 3 years ago

If you watched the spacex youtube feed there's no denying it was a smashing success. The employees were clearly celebrating even after the Rapid Unplanned Disassembly.

aetherson• 3 years ago

Seems to me like it's a kinda medium result.

A failure would've been "oh shit we discovered another problem with the launch sequence, guess we're a few weeks behind where we wanted to be."

A catastrophic failure would've been "oh shit we didn't discover a problem with the launch sequence and it blew up on the pad and damaged our ground facilities."

A huge success would've been the planned mission.

This seems like, "Well, some thing went well, some went poorly."

sschueller2• 3 years ago

I agree with you. "clearing the launchpad" we did back in the 60' with 60+ year old tech. Sure starship is bigger but not that mutch.

entropicgravity• 3 years ago

Spectacular all the way around!

nomilk2• 3 years ago

Anyone reading the headline could easily be misled: this was a massive success. Some context:

- This was the first "integrated test" of the Starship space craft with its booster

- The whole thing together was 120 meters tall

- It will be one order of magnitude larger than the current largest rocket in terms of carrying capacity (~150 tonnes if it needs to return the booster, 250 if it doesn't)

- There's 5 more of these being built right now so the next tests can be done soon

sschueller2• 3 years ago

Saturn V was 110m tall and 140t in the 1960s.

nomilk2• 3 years ago

The height difference is not huge, but Starship is twice the weight and 1/10th the cost ($50b vs $5bn in 2022 USD)!

rootusrootus7• 3 years ago

As impressive as Starship is or will be, Saturn V has definitely earned a place in the history books that cannot be undone. The first airplane flew in 1903. Just 64 years later, Saturn V was launched for the first time. The fact that it has taken us 56 more years since then to outdo it says a lot.

szoszon9• 3 years ago

If there are 5 more of these being built, how they will incorporate anything they learned during this failed attempt? Isn't that just a waste of money?

baq13• 3 years ago

Some parts are interchangeable.

The countdown process needs optimization. There are things missing and things which shouldn’t be there. We’re talking about speed of loading propellant, density of it, etc.

Then there’s software. So much software.

And a million other things. Rockets are complex, launching them doubly so.

fastball5• 3 years ago

From watching the launch, my absolutely pulled from my butt guess is that something went wrong with the stage separation system, and that the explosion was deliberately triggered by the SpaceX team / triggered by automated guardrails when the mission didn't go according to parameters.

If that's true, then they can just fix whatever is wrong with the stage separation. And if it's something else, they can probably fix that too. Doesn't seem like it was anything unchangeably / structurally wrong with the entire craft.

shkkmo2• 3 years ago

No only are there more being built, but this launch used engines that are already obsolete. They are learning stuff by building the rocket, by testing the components and by using them to do a test launch. They are trying to wring as much learning out of each step as possible.

dotnet004• 3 years ago

Considering that the failures don't appear to point to fundamental design flaws of the structure of the vehicle (if anything it kind of overperformed structurally with how long it just tumbled despite being a 100m tall, mostly hollow tube), they'll do it the same way you would fix/upgrade a car, by swapping out the bad parts.

AviationAtom5• 3 years ago

I wonder how many folks have looked at the other details of Starship.

One I find most impressive?

Weight of Starship when fueled: 11 million pounds

nonethewiser6• 3 years ago

That’s so hard to comprehend. I used to operate a 25ton crane. That’s less than half of 1% of Starship. That made me think it’s in the magnitude of a skyscraper. Apparently the Empire State Building is “only” 7 million pounds. What the fuck.

Galxeagle• 3 years ago

As a SpaceX fan reading through the post-launch analysis, this was definitely more of a success than the headline applies, but 'massive' is a stretch. Most commentary I'm seeing put it at a C or B-. It's true that there was a number of areas where the risk is now retired, but three engines out at launch with three more dropping out along the way hints that their engine design still isn't as reliable as it needs to be, several years and several engine test campaigns later.

SpaceX doesn't have a test stand where they can static-fire the booster at full power or duration, which feels like an interesting gap in their usual 'hardware-rich, test-often' iterative approach. I'm betting we see something like that roll out soon.

marktangotango2• 3 years ago

In fact it was a really amazing "engine out" test. The thing appeared to been shedding engines all the way to RUD. I imagine these engines were all early generation, might as well fly them, units. It's easy to imagine a calculus of "we're pretty sure X% of engines will fail, but we only need Y% for this flight, go ahead and fly them". But yeah, Musk once said there's a gigawatt of power going through these Raptor engines, that's not nothing.

dang• 3 years ago

What would be a more neutral and accurate headline?

sidibe5• 3 years ago

SpaceX launches Starship Off Launchpad in Stunning Success, Giant Leap for Humanity

nonethewiser6• 3 years ago

Successful Starship Launch Tempered by Failed Seperation

rodoxcasta• 3 years ago

First orbital attempt of Startship got halfway there before exploding

adamsb6• 3 years ago

I guess "Largest rocket test in history successfully launched" doesn't generate enough traffic compared to the pessimistic "explodes minutes after launch."

hersko• 3 years ago

This was pretty much expected. This flight was to gather data and not much else.

jjoonathan6• 3 years ago

I hope it wasn't hydraulic steering that failed, because that's the part that was already obsolete = nothing to learn. Ah well.

It didn't destroy the launch tower, and that's what counts!

osigurdson• 3 years ago

It sounds like they achieved what they were officially hoping to achieve. Everyone was cheering but Musk didn't look super happy imo.

93po13• 3 years ago

Elon is on the record as saying that launches cause him massive anxiety so I'm sure it was difficult to be outwardly happy

RoyGBivCap3• 3 years ago

Also, Asperger's, which he's publicly admitted to having.

intrasight4• 3 years ago

When it started doing cartwheels and the announcer said "beginning the flip for stage separation" I was like "WTF does that mean? That can't be nominal!"

jjoonathan6• 3 years ago

Well it is supposed to flip, but only one flip, not a tumble.

moffkalast9• 3 years ago

Nah it's the nominal KSP launch trajectory. You forget to add first stage fins, launch up to the gravity turn, do the cartwheel, separate and continue to orbit. Seems like they forgot to check their staging though.

jjoonathan6• 3 years ago

Spacebar got stuck, couldn't stage.

marvin• 3 years ago

Imagine how magnificent it would have been if they managed stage separation after doing a 360 cartwheel, via some sick on-the-fly manual intervention. I was half hoping for it.

alexobenauer• 3 years ago

More info on why that's necessary here: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/17878/why-does-the...

Edit: "that" = one flip; not the many we saw today.

ohitsdom• 3 years ago

This isn't what the commentators are referring to when they talk about "the flip".

Rockets traditionally have some type of separation mechanism to separate stage 1 and stage 2. This is usually some type of pyro charge or an actual pneumatic pusher. SpaceX wants to avoid this complexity with Starship and instead "throw" off stage 2 (Starship) by doing a flip with the booster. I don't believe it's been done before for stage separation, but this is also how they deploy Starlink satellites. [0]

Obviously, something went wrong in stage separation today so Booster+Starship just continually flipped. We don't know exactly what the true flip will look like.

[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1630394434847227909?lang...

pbreit• 3 years ago

A "flip was part of the flight plan.

fwlr2• 3 years ago

The plan for Starship’s separation from the Super Heavy booster stage does include a 180 degree flip!

intrasight4• 3 years ago

But doesn't that result in Starship pointing in the wrong direction after separation? I get that it's the right direction for the booster. Also a flip seems much more risky than the well-understood current separation mechanisms.

cs702• 3 years ago

...more or less as expected.

firstlink• 3 years ago

Indeed I think anyone who's paying attention can expect Musk to fail every time

SkyMarshal• 3 years ago

Actual video here if you want to see it for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/live/-1wcilQ58hI?t=45m

Uptrenda• 3 years ago

It looked like a bunch of parts had fallen off during take-off. Not to bring up a tragedy so casually: but I'm reminded of when a piece of foam damaged an insulation tile on Challenger. It does speak to the robustness of their design that it was able to make it to separation without issues.

I do kind of agree with simondotau, too. Saying that the rocket just 'failed' doesn't take into account what they did get right. I think it's kind of disappointing that the media chose to take the opportunity to put down everyone involved in this activity for a cheap click. What they're doing is important and tremendously complex. This kind of thing just makes me hate the media even more.

jaywalk3• 3 years ago

Columbia was the shuttle that was doomed by a piece of foam. Challenger exploded due to a failed O-ring on one of the SRBs.

6d6b732• 3 years ago

That's not engineering. What they did is identical to developers copying code from SO and running it to see if it works.

ianai• 3 years ago

Let’s not move the goalposts. This company develops differently than historical aerospace. Success was defined as blowing up any point beyond the launch pad. It made it well past max-q which is the point of highest atmospheric stress on the rocket.

ShamelessC4• 3 years ago

What provoked this response? The headline makes no assertions about success or failure. It is extremely literally a description of what occurred.

It’s one thing to feel defensive about a misleading headline. This is just fanboyism.

jjoonathan6• 3 years ago

It invites unreasonable expectations. That's not a theoretical problem, you can see examples all over this thread.

pfannkuchen4• 3 years ago

There are, of course, multiple ways to describe any situation in a literally accurate way. A canonical example is "glass half empty" vs "glass half full".

If a glass is expected to be at one tenth of its capacity, but then, by surprise, it is found to be at one half of its capacity, then it is a bit odd to write the headline "Glass Half Empty". We would instead expect something like "Glass Half Full by Surprise", or at least "Glass at 50% Capacity". I don't think one has to be a fanboy of glasses or liquids to take issue with that framing.

segasaturn• 3 years ago

I'm wondering what the environmental impact of all of these exploding rockets is though. Surely they won't be able to fish every piece of the rocket out of the ocean, along with all of the fuel.

sebzim4500• 3 years ago

The fuel is just methane (which mainly burned?) and oxygen, although I suppose this version did also use hydraulic fluid.

mkaic11• 3 years ago

It's extremely, extremely tiny compared to the impact of the thousands of commercial airplane flights that happen every day. Plus, methalox burns very cleanly, second only to the much more dangerous and finicky hydrolox in terms of environmental friendliness.

Kreutzer• 3 years ago

Destruction of the sensitive ecosystems in and around the ocean, no doubt.

jjoonathan6• 3 years ago

They did have to weld over the pez dispenser, though. Have they sorted that out on the new rockets? A blow-away structural component or something?

DemocracyFTW23• 3 years ago

So yeah OK by that metric if a rocket lifted to a height of 1m above the launch pad, so technically being beyond it, before spontaneously disassembling, it's technically a success. Not 'moving goalposts'.

mkaic11• 3 years ago

I'm not sure what your point is here — a stainless steel skyscraper-sized rocket powered by 33 methalox full-flow staged combustion engines just made it all the way through max-Q and most of the way to orbit before exploding on its first ever attempt! I'd definitely count that as an unqualified success.

mempko7• 3 years ago

Actually the 'fail fast, learn faster' and 'launch often' approach is what the Soviets did. SpaceX is following the same methodology 20 years later but with far better technology and learnings. Though it seems they are again attempting the Soviet N1 rocket attempt of using more than 30 engines in Starship.

It's historically different in US aerospace, but not Soviet aerospace.

wellanyway3• 3 years ago

We get it, you are communist. Go away now.

bmitc16• 3 years ago

Were the goalposts set arbitrarily low? What did the Apollo program define as success for Saturn V test launches?

idontwantthis• 3 years ago

Well they managed to kill two astronauts in a rocket without even launching it.

MeteorMarc• 3 years ago

Good moment to watch the Apollo launch failure in Koyaanisqatsi again: https://vimeo.com/400276071 from 9:47

moffkalast9• 3 years ago

Or the Atlas ones from The Right Stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rwi_0DEd_0

bonetruck• 3 years ago

But it got off the pad and through max Q. Awesome achievement regardless!

bryanlarsen3• 3 years ago

I don't think it actually hit max Q. I know the announcers announced it, but they were following a script. It should have been at max Q at the time, but with the loss of 3-6 engines it would not have been going as fast as scheduled.

hindsightbias2• 3 years ago

FAA will be wanting to talk to that Range Safety Officer. Waiting for it to break up on it’s own can’t be a best practice.

gvb2• 3 years ago

As long as the trajectory of the vehicle stays within the "safe trajectory box", the range safety officer has no reason to blow the rocket up.

SpaceX acquired a huge amount of data that would have otherwise been lost if the RSO was "quick on the trigger."

Example of a different rocket failure where the range safety officer let the rocket survive until it exceeded the safe trajectory box:

"Astra Rocket 3 LV0006 drifting launch & failure (NASASpaceFlight footage)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxVoBlgzZlQ

hindsightbias2• 3 years ago

You can’t assume you can trigger a system after it has undergone extreme structural loads or failure. So waiting until that happens while rocket is, charitably, careening does not ensure staying in any box.

I doubt they had any uplink or downlink during that mode so there’s no data to be had.

Prediction: the FAA will come down hard on them.

marcuskaz• 3 years ago

"a rapid unscheduled disassembly" - what a phrase for an explosion

dzader3• 3 years ago

generic term - lot of time aerodynamic forces rip the vehicle apart and isn't an "explosion"

7e2• 3 years ago

Well, it wasn’t disassembled either. That implies you can reassemble it. This just a funny phrase designed to cover an embarrassing situation. SpaceX just farted in an elevator.

wilg• 3 years ago

For people who don't know, this phrase is intended as a joke. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10022/who-coined-t...

pruthvishetty• 3 years ago

Better headline: SpaceX successfully launches the biggest rocket in history.

abledon• 3 years ago

LOL they are still salty about the 'publicly funded' tag

bmitc16• 3 years ago

As they ahould be. SpaceX and Tesla have received substantially more taxpayer money than NPR.

Also, they weren't labeled as "publically funded". They were labeled as "U.S. state-affiliated media". That is untrue and is a political hit at the behest of Musk.

Hamuko• 3 years ago

I'm seeing a lot of people salty about "Starship explodes". Isn't that also an accurate description of what happened?

sdfghswe• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure "launching" isn't the hard part.

b0sk• 3 years ago

That 2029 timeline seems a tad aggressive - https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087167893/elon-musk-mars-202....

BitwiseFool• 3 years ago

Regrettably, I was unable to watch the launch live. I'm looking forward to seeing the footage and hearing about all the analysis that will go into understanding what happened.

awb• 3 years ago

Any guess as to how big the debris field is and what risk there is to people on the ground? Does the flight plan just take it over largely uninhabited land?

mkaic11• 3 years ago

The launch site is right on the coast and the flight path took it over the ocean, with a strict exclusion zone for boats enacted beforehand.

brucethemoose22• 3 years ago

It launches on the Texas coast near the Mexican border, going towards the ocean, for this very reason.

trollied• 3 years ago

The launchpad is right next to the Gulf Of Mexico. It launches straight over water.

jtchang• 3 years ago

I can't believe I am alive to witness this.

I can imagine 100 years from now a SpaceX plaque will be in some museum timeline with this very event being one of many "failures". It's so hard to put that into perspective when you are actually living these events. I think partly because society has been conditioned to expect success out of all things when in reality true technological progress is rarely a straight line.

throwaway4aday3• 3 years ago

and all the haters will be forgotten, deservedly so.

GiorgioG2• 3 years ago

It seems the issue was the rocket failed to separate at the designated time.

Aperocky3• 3 years ago

It seems to be flipping before that, means nothing to separate if it was rolling.

GiorgioG2• 3 years ago

It was supposed to flip and separate in the same motion.

7e2• 3 years ago

Feynman’s comments on the poor Space Shuttle design process apply double to this rocket.

Diederich4• 3 years ago

Heavy/Starship design process is poor? Can you expand on that?

mhandley2• 3 years ago

I'm really interested to see the hole it dug under the launch mount. The NASA SpaceFlight van took a direct hit from a fast moving chunk of concrete.

https://twitter.com/JerryPikePhoto/status/164905272269878477...

https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/1649053476276797440

Edit: it really did dig a crater (this was flat concrete under the pad before):

https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/1649062784167030785

bob1029• 3 years ago

I wonder if this was expected or not. This video immediately comes to mind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMbUeO4iGhY (Why SpaceX Cares about Concrete)

This probably explains why some of the engines didn't make it off the pad. That is some incredible damage.

adastra223• 3 years ago

Depends on what you mean by "expected." It was absolutely not supposed to happen, although a lot of people in the industry have been shouting "we have flame trenches for a reason!"

uguuo_o• 3 years ago

I have done work for NASA on this problem through SBIRs. The risks have been known for a long time, and to my team the extent of the damage was not surprising. NASA/SpaceX just don't have the computational tools to assess these types of risks at this time.

baq13• 3 years ago

Why dig a flame trench if you can have your test article make one for you. Efficiency!

fnordpiglet5• 3 years ago

When I dig, I only dig with super massive rockets.

corbulo• 3 years ago

Its trying to get to the moon one way or another

Symmetry3• 3 years ago

Needing to make a big flame trench and deluge system might be the big takeaway from this flight. I'm not happy at the construction delays that'll entail but it that's what it takes for enough engines to get through liftoff it's what needs to be done.

saberdancer3• 3 years ago

From what I understand that was already planned - this was only launch without it.

saberdancer3• 3 years ago

NSF on their stream did talk that this is the only launch that will be done without water system - my understanding is that it would be used during launch to reduce damage to the pad.

cubefox15• 3 years ago

Yes, they have a water deluge system, but that might not be enough, and they also need a flame diverter.

mhandley2• 3 years ago

If I'm calculating correctly from the frame rate, the lump of concrete that hit the van was doing about 330 mph after the impact. I couldn't find a pair of frames to compare before impact.

pugworthy• 3 years ago

The liftoff video at https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1649097087248891904 shows some clear debris hitting the ocean.

gridspy14• 3 years ago

This video filmed near the pad shows the huge chunks of debris from the pad hitting everything nearby (cars, cameras, etc) and is quite spectacular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thA8jlgcJ-8

shthed• 3 years ago

https://twitter.com/unrocket/status/1649425500526329863

Better view of the hole and damage to the launch mount

nsxwolf• 3 years ago

When is the next attempt? Days, weeks, months?

ericd• 3 years ago

Sounds like they're aiming for a few months: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1649050306943266819?cxt=...

destitude2• 3 years ago

People seem to have forgotten (or simply have no clue) how all the previous SpaceX projects worked. Also seem to be ignoring the fact they are by far the most successful launch company today so I think they know what they are doing.

mkaic11• 3 years ago

Exactly! Falcon 9 is not only the most-launched rocket in history, it's also the most reliable rocket in history! And people got all caught up in sensationalism when Falcon 9 explosions were still common, too — I guess it doesn't drive ad revenue to wax on about the value of iterative design and rapid, frequent failures.

atlgator• 3 years ago

Pretty sure they terminated it when the separation phase didn’t go as planned.

kfrzcode• 3 years ago

I'm astounded to see the coverage on this bury the lede; today was historic in that Starship has 2x the thrust of Saturn V, i.e. this was the biggest rocket ever. And they did it, extremely successfully. Their goal was to get the thing off the pad without ruining Stage 0 (launch/pad). Now the newer, shinier revisions get to go up and we'll see orbit attained this year probably. We'll have private Starship missions to the moon in the next president's term of office.

kortex12• 3 years ago

Initially posted this as a reply, but going top-level, cause the hot takes are too spicy for my liking.

So the plan was to test x, y, and z. Launch sequence and takeoff, stage separation and Starship engine light, and the post-launch stuff like booster wet landing, reentry, and heat tiles. The booster by itself is not aerodynamic, so the only way to test x is with a starship on top. And if you have starship, you might as well test y and z. But it's not a primary goal. Any more effort in polishing y and z is "premature optimization". X was the test. SpaceX did the X, we got max Q.

On the most recent SmarterEveryDay video on encasing a Prince Rupert's drop in glass, sculptor Cal Breed talks about the moment when a process fails. He could stop there and restart, saving some time, but instead all the pressure is off, and he "makes as many mistakes as possible" for the rest of the build. Quote is towards the end, but the whole vid is worth a watch.

https://youtu.be/C1KT8PS6Zs4

https://www.calbreed.com/

Edit: also, they needed the flight plan all the way through "total success" in order to file with the FAA. You can't just have "oh sweet, 100% of booster things worked, we now have a suborbital craft careening on a parabolic trajectory". I didn't read a flight plan, but I imagine they must have spelled out each possible outcome exhaustively.

spuz• 3 years ago

That's an interesting point about the flight plan - if the intention of the flight was to test the vehicle at max Q, then the rest of the plan is almost a contingency.

SpaceX: We expect the vehicle to reach 40km at which point it will probably blow up.

FAA: Ok but what if it doesn't blow up?

SpaceX: Well I suppose we could separate the stages.

FAA: And then what happens?

SpaceX: Well I suppose we could try to land the first stage and launch the second stage into the ocean...

etc etc.

samwillis8• 3 years ago

You joke but that's all also import rehearsal for all the teams responsible for each stage of the flight. The compleat plan, in full detail, with the "expectation" that it will happen is essential to learning.

If you don't start practicing these details until later in the development you have missed an opportunity to fine tune them and prepare for all eventualities.

s1artibartfast26• 3 years ago

It's not even about the FAA requirements, it is just bare minimum engineering to ask where will this rocket go if it doesn't blow up mid-air?

sandworm1018• 3 years ago

> the intention of the flight was to test the vehicle at max Q, then the rest of the plan is almost a contingency.

We don't know what the intention or internal expectation was. What we have are public statements, which are generally more conservative in order that every success be an amazing surprise, every failure an expected event. What SpaceX was internally hoping for, what they were aiming for, and the details of what actually happened will remain a mystery for a while.

reeboo• 3 years ago

Destin is a national treasure.

wanderingstan• 3 years ago

In my part time work as an artist this has been my experience as well: my best work always seems to happen after a “mistake”, then the pressure is off and I just start playing and experimenting. In the rare case where I execute a planned design with no mistakes, the outcome is generally stale and doesn’t live up to how I imagined it.

lazyasciiart• 3 years ago

That doesn’t apply here because they have no opportunity to change anything after the mistake, right?

908B64B197• 3 years ago

To me it's an incredible achievement.

Raptor engine development started in 2012. Starship's development started around the same time. They now achieved max Q and got flight data all the way to booster separation. On real, flight ready hardware. By an all-American team started right here in California using private funding from an already profitable all-American privately developed launch platform (the Falcon 9).

This is in contrast to the SLS and it's predecessor the Constellation program (the SLS really being an evolution of the Ares I and V) that started in 2005 and, so far yielded a single successful test flight. Almost 30 billions sunk in "research and development" (for Shuttle derived hardware?). Excluding launch costs.

Or even really the crown jewel of the European Union, Ariane 6, a technological dead-end delayed once again and already 15 years behind the Falcon 9.

soperj7• 3 years ago

This is in contrast to the SLS and it's predecessor the Constellation program (the SLS really being an evolution of the Ares I and V) that started in 2005 and, so far yielded a single successful test flight

You forgot to include that this was also by an "all-American team".

KptMarchewa• 3 years ago

I don't disagree, but SLS has successfully flown. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUiEdqcLg-k

outworlder4• 3 years ago

The thing that bothers me about this rapid unplanned disassembly development methodology is all the environmental damage that this thing is doing. It was bad enough blowing up next to a wildlife preserve, but now they are (with some degree of certainty) blowing it higher up and scattering fragments across a huge area. The rockets are not getting any smaller.

so the only way to test x is with a starship on top.

Why did they have to test "x" now? We don't have to go multi decades between launches, but couldn't they have delayed and tested when they had a more reasonable chance of success?

Maybe after building a flame trench/diverter too.

soperj7• 3 years ago

The road to the coast likely did more damage than blowing up a hundred vehicles.

greenhearth2• 3 years ago

This is the real legacy of propulsion flight. What is the end goal of this? Moon trips for rich people? Disgusting.

politician3• 3 years ago

What are your thoughts on volcanoes?

JumpCrisscross14• 3 years ago

couldn't they have delayed and tested when they had a more reasonable chance of success

Probably not. These are new designs. Modelling only goes so far. The way you learn is testing, refining and repeating. I frankly didn’t expect it to clear the tower; max Q on the first shot is a testament to how far computational methods have come.

m4rtink2• 3 years ago

A bunch of stainless steel rain is not that bad as pollution goes.

chasd0011• 3 years ago

this was a test, they didn't have anything left to test except for a flight. delaying would be pointless, everything else had already been tested.

edit: one other thing, they crashed and burned a lot of starships too. I don't see this being that different it's just bigger.

samwillis8• 3 years ago

Exactly, the two untested things were stage zero (all the new ground infrastructure) and stage one (booster).

I think it's clear one of their biggest lessons is that the construction of the launch mount is wrong, and it REALY needs a flame diverter. Take a look at this photo: https://mobile.twitter.com/LabPadre/status/16490627841670307...

That massive hole in the ground should not have happed, and I suspect that was not an expected possibility. It is a very costly mishap and could mean completely rebuilding the launch mount. With the excavation and rebuild, that could be months or even as long as a year.

On top of that there was significantly more debris making its way to South Padre, the political fallout (pun intended) will be significant, and could cause issues with launch licenses going forward.

tellurion• 3 years ago

One of the response to that tweet has a before pic for comparison: https://twitter.com/intrepidpursuit/status/16490707601981317...

dsfyu404ed2• 3 years ago

Need to see the numbers before passing judgement. Dirt is cheap compared to concrete. Depending on how many cycles the concrete is expected to last it may be cheaper both short and long term to just have "ablative dirt" and bulldoze around afterwards "reloading" the launcher. There's also other variables like how long it takes for the engines to stabilize and the launcher to release the rocket, weight of rocket, etc that would go into it.

sbuttgereit3• 3 years ago

I agree with this assessment and probably the biggest problem in the test. After that, they still have a fair way to go on Raptor reliability; I was a bit disappointed with the number of engine outs: clearly the engines have not arrived. I think the big win of the day was the overall resilience of the vehicle. It seemed to handle (what looked to be) possibly explosive engine failures and kept going and stayed intact... even through the tumbling.

I think this is a case where the engineers can look at the numbers and calculate for a limited variety of well defined (and foreseen) scenarios, but that they continue to fail to have an intuitive sense of the power of the thing that they built. Given the complexity of the real world, they can "engineer" themselves into an undue sense of certainty about what will happen when they light a rocket of this power... and I think we see the result of that. As an aside, this is precisely where I think we'll some of the biggest failings for LLM based AI... it can get you some nice words to describe a situation and may be able to do all the calculations... but having that gut feeling that maybe there's more to a situation than the numbers would have you believe is still something that humans can do better (though not SpaceX this time around).

In closing, if I had a binary choice of "successful" or "unsuccessful" for this test... I'd still probably call it successful. But only just; it's a very qualified success given some of the test parameters SpaceX had set for themselves.

(of course we could find out about even more damage to "stage 0" which might shift my assessment... but we know that they're in the process of putting in a deluge system at least already, so I'm being a bit more charitable regarding expectations than I might otherwise be.)

samwillis8• 3 years ago

Thinking about this a little more, that was the longest duration burn with all engines. I imagine it's a bit like water behind a dam, a small leak very quick grows into a catastrophic failure.

A small fault in the concrete slab grew into a catastrophic blow out. I worry about the integrity of the massive concrete piles they put in.

DanTheManPR• 3 years ago

I was surprised to see so much equipment right next to the launch vehicle in the video. Would all that have gotten damaged during the launch?

kortex12• 3 years ago

Woof, that's a hole! Yeah I completely forgot "w", all the stage 0 stuff. There's only so much you can test with wet dress rehearsals, at some point you need to just launch a fully loaded rocket from it and see how it behaves.

On top of that there was significantly more debris making its way to South Padre

Tim Dodd got coated in dust and sand (probably pulverized concrete) kicked up from the launch well outside the exclusion zone (iirc his studio is just over 5km). That's not just a bad sign from the engineering and politics/perception point of view, but I'm sure EPA has some feelings on that amount of rapid unscheduled geology.

vannevar• 3 years ago

That massive hole in the ground should not have happed, and I suspect that was not an expected possibility.

Interestingly, this post predicting exactly this kind of damage was flagged on HN just days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35590279

I think it's unlikely that SpaceX wasn't aware of the damage that would be caused. They have a pretty good engineering team, and that aspect didn't involve an anomaly, it was the vehicle operating as planned at launch. But admitting the inadequacy of the launch facility would've undoubtedly led to significant delays. Fortunately for SpaceX, the rocket blew up, which will draw media attention away from the damage on and around the launchpad.

fzeroracer• 3 years ago

It's been wild to see people here try and spin this as a success story, because the rocket launch was missing things known to be required and the end result was as you mentioned. Massive destruction of the surrounding area which is going to require months of rebuilding and tons of $$$.

ca_tech• 3 years ago

I had a long history of supporting live events like this. One of the most common phrases we heard from the engineers was: "Well... that didn't act like the model"

That is why we test real things in the real world. While the rocket did not operate as expected, so much information from this launch is going to go back into engineering.

vidanay• 3 years ago

That short interview with Cal Breed was the absolute best 60 seconds of video I have seen in quite a while. The raw footage should be re-edited into a longer video.

kortex12• 3 years ago

I could watch him just doing his thing for hours. He's the epitome of all the best things about an artisan/apprentice relationship: "Here's what you did wrong, I'm not mad, but if you continue to f&ck this up it's gonna cost a lot of time, or worse, cause injury". Like just the correct amount of hardass where you learn quick and begrudge them in the moment, but at the end of the day, you know they are right. All too easy to end up too loosey goosey, or just a d!ck.

bombcar• 3 years ago

There's a similar thing with a check ride for a pilot license; the examiner has to tell you when you fail (because plane is expensive, etc) - and ask if you want to continue. Almost everyone recommends that you do even though you're guaranteed not going to pass; because if there's anything else you want it caught for the debrief.

stephc_int134• 3 years ago

I don't like this.

I fully understand that rocket launches are going to fail a few times before succeeding, I don't get the need for gaslight.

This feels like North Korea style propaganda.

s1artibartfast26• 3 years ago

Where is the gas lighting? They said getting off the launch pad would be a win going into it and people are pointing this out after the fact. There is no hypocrisy or doublethink involved

rektide• 3 years ago

"makes as many mistakes as possible" is such a wonderful attitude! learn something, especially when you are in unexpected terrain.

nerpderp826• 3 years ago

Causally attributed mistakes as possible. Mistakes on their own aren't useful unless you can determine a causal relationship.

ge96• 3 years ago

yeah it's sad so much hate

first time in a long time a rocket of this scale (number of engines) since N1 has been made

Cthulhu_• 3 years ago

I think the thing that a lot of people are still stuck at is the NASA attitude of "we've spent a lot of money on this already, we Need to make sure it works first try".

Whereas SpaceX is more like Kerbal Space Program in that if it blows up, at least you're having fun.

And while they had some failures early on with their early rockets, the Falcon 9 is now a very reliable craft that's done dozens of successful missions, successful recoveries (which I think they still consider a bonus rather than a goal) and re-uses, and a streamlined launch process, which has become more economic - and possibly profitable - over time.

I will add "possibly" profitable though, given that it feels like the majority of their launches is for their own Starlink project, which is costing them billions - but it's a project to ensure use and reuse of their rockets, instead of the company going stale waiting for customers.

chasd0011• 3 years ago

i think people forget they crashed a lot of starships doing the suborbital tests before they got one right. I think we'll see the same with the booster, expect more qualified tests success before you see something a layperson would call 100% success.

gridspy14• 3 years ago

To build on what you said:

Elon Musk also said during one of the Tim Dodd interviews that the shuttle had so many limitations because they locked in the design too early. One limitation is the difficult, fragile and hard to reuse heat-shield on the shuttle.

The NASA approach makes it far to expensive to change the design down the road, since that requires resetting all the analysis. Whereas the SpaceX approach never stopped changing things and always tested them in flight.

Much cheaper to take a known good and polished design like Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon and do the analysis after you've proven it works well for non-human flights.

octobus20212• 3 years ago

I know I'm being nitpicky, but Falcon 9 completed 223 missions since 2010 with 221 being total success, and 60 missions completed in 2022 alone. So way more than "dozens".

verdverm• 3 years ago

I'm not sure they reached the Max Q they were after. Sure the announcer said those words, but given how many engines were out very early, they were not likely at the intended altitude or speed. You can see when the call out Max Q, the vehicle is already travelling at an angle, not in line with the trajectory. You can also hear a time gap between when the announcer says "max q" at the intended time and when control says it later, when even more engines are out.

The launch pad is not in great shape either https://twitter.com/LabPadre/status/1649062784167030785

inglor_cz• 3 years ago

They certainly reached some Max Q, given that Q is bounded continuous function on a finite interval.

ChuckMcM3• 3 years ago

Good analysis of the goals of this test. That said, the failure was interesting to me.

In the SpaceX feed they were waiting for the second stage to separate and light, and it didn't do either. So first question is why didn't it separate? I think that is the relevant one because I would expect them to have interlocks that would prevent the second stage from starting up if it were still attached to the booster. The interlocks would explain not starting up the second stage engines.

One anomaly I noticed was that the booster did not appear to shut down 100%, ever. If that was the case, that would be important because the onset of "zero g" from engine shutdown is a well tested way for the next stage to know that the stage below it has stopped firing.

Some (many? all?) spacecraft rely on the physics of the expended boost stage being much lighter than the remaining stack. This disparity means atmospheric drag on the lower stage has a bigger effect than it does on the upper stage. If the second stage retention system "lets go" when it detects zero-g, then the two pieces will begin to separate, slowly at first, and then faster when the very un-aerodynamic opening to the top of the booster gets into the slip stream.

Depending on how the second stage interlock works, it could be timed (wait t seconds and then light up) or radar (wait for distance between first and second stage) or some communication between the booster and the stage. By time is cheap, but risks a slowly separating booster being "too close" and having it become damaged from the blast of the vacuum engines starting up. Radar is likely most reliable (and most expensive), and comms would work by there is a lot of ionization going on at that speed that makes them more difficult.

So questions I would look at; First, if all the raptors didn't shut down, why not? Second, did the booster attempt a rotation and re-entry burn with the second stage still attached? Third, is there a way to "abort to orbit" this scenario where the second stage decides to let go and light up even though the first stage hasn't shut down?

Fun to watch though, its a pretty amazing rocket and that they didn't have 4 (or 5) of the raptors firing when it started off was another thing to look into. On pad aborts are a thing too, but as the parent states, there are faults that you won't get any useful data, and those you note and continue on through. I think the non-start of the raptors was of the latter.

chasd0011• 3 years ago

a few seconds after liftoff a hydraulic unit on the bottom of the booster blew off. That could have had all kinds of ramifications for further events down the road like stage separation and MECO. I'm actually surprised it maintained as good of control is it did given i'm sure that controlled at least some of the gymbaling too.

The cartwheel is on purpose. They're using the angular momentum of the flip for boost back to fling the starship off instead of the usual explosives. I think it cartwheeled multiple times because of multiple attempts to get Starship to separate. Whatever was holding Starship to the booster wasn't letting go which could have been a hydraulic failure (see my first paragraph).

gvb2• 3 years ago

In the SpaceX feed they were waiting for the second stage to separate and light, and it didn't do either. So first question is why didn't it separate?

T+00:16 - Shortly after liftoff, when the engine graphic first appears, three engines were out. https://youtu.be/-1wcilQ58hI?t=2721

T+00:28 - Sparks are seen in the engine exhaust and some flashes. https://youtu.be/-1wcilQ58hI?t=2733

T+00:40 - A fourth engine is marked out. https://youtu.be/-1wcilQ58hI

T+01:02 - A fifth engine is marked out (just after the announcer says "we're throttled down and throttled back up") https://youtu.be/-1wcilQ58hI?t=2766

T+01:08 - More sparks (streaks) come from the engine https://youtu.be/-1wcilQ58hI?t=2773

T+01:16 - There is a shot of the aft of the rocket and it looks like six engines are out https://youtu.be/-1wcilQ58hI?t=2781

T+01:19 - MaxQ is called https://youtu.be/-1wcilQ58hI?t=2783

My totally uninformed speculation is that the first stage did not achieve the target velocity (and trajectory?) due to the 6(?) engine failures so the first stage continued to burn and the second stage never separated because the separation conditions were not met (velocity/trajectory).

hef19898• 3 years ago

Just in case, if Arianne 6s first launch fails as well, can cut them as much slack as we cut SpaceX here in HN? Or do we go full Ariane cannit builf rockets, because of legacy and Europe blocking innovation?

baq13• 3 years ago

Arianne 6 is sorely needed and is a decade behind right now. Not sure it deserves cutting it slack… though I’ll cheer when it gets off the pad as I cheered when the starship did.

timeon• 3 years ago

Seems bit petty dragging Arianne here.

KennyBlanken• 3 years ago

I didn't read a flight plan, but I imagine they must have spelled out each possible outcome exhaustively.

Uh, yeah, about that...these commercial space flight companies are less than awesome about correct flight plans. Virgin Galactic, for example, wildly blew their flight plan on the flight with His Sirness aboard...and suffered zero repercussions for it, I might add.

dfgdfg34545456• 3 years ago

SpaceX did the X, we got max Q.

What does this mean?

detaro• 3 years ago

max Q is the point of largest aerodynamic load during a launch/flight.

asdfman123• 3 years ago

The more time I spend on this site the more I realize everyone here watches the exact same YouTube channels.

foxyv2• 3 years ago

I can't believe it made it off the pad! The fact it made it up to stage separation is crazy. That was the first flight with all the Super Heavy engines at once. I'm just blown away right now. 33 Raptor engines firing all at once without a single failure! The original hoppers had trouble running 1-3 raptors at once!

There is just so much that could go wrong with this design and they knocked it out of the park! I'm betting SpaceX is pretty freaking happy right now.

kawfey• 3 years ago

without a single failure

well..at least 8 engines failed on the way up. At least a majority of them were lit!

There was lots of very heavy debris that left the pad and flew hundreds of feet away upon ignition; I have a feeling that some debris came back up and hit an engine or two.

foxyv2• 3 years ago

I kind of meant the kind of failure that results in the engines going off like a bundle of dynamite sticks when their neighbors get frisky. But yeah, 8 is a bit much. Any idea what the debris was?

jppope• 3 years ago

Terrible title. This should have been reported as a major accomplishment... in the title. Many people won't read the article, and without doing so they would never know that this was a win.

kernal• 3 years ago

The launch was nominal.

armatav• 3 years ago

That’s progress!

beefman• 3 years ago

Disgracefully negative headlines and coverage of this historic event from AP, BBC, and NPR this morning.

RoyGBivCap3• 3 years ago

Watching so-called adults throw tantrums over people they hate being allowed a voice is such a disappointment.

oconnor663• 3 years ago

minutes after launch

But not seconds! :)

davidw2• 3 years ago

I continue to think that this is cool stuff, while being very, very dismayed by what he's doing with Twitter. I don't understand what the attraction of the latter is for someone with the wherewithal to work on spaceships.

mkaic11• 3 years ago

Agreed. It's incredible to me how good Musk can be at running SpaceX and simultaneously how bad he can be at running Twitter — strengths and weaknesses, I suppose...

bottlepalm3• 3 years ago

I use Twitter, not much has changed for me. Tweets still work, my feed still works, what’s the issue?

cubefox15• 3 years ago

He has released a lot of "Twitter files" data regarding highly questionable FBI interference and things like Twitter Trends manipulation in the past. And he has released large parts of the recommendation algorithm. And there is now a tab "following" which only shows you the tweets of the people you follow. And most importantly, free speech seems to be upheld much better than in the past, where people got blocked for extremely questionable reasons.

So all-in-all, he seems to be doing great. The one thing that is worse is that replies show now mostly people with blue checkmark instead of tweets with a lot of likes or followers.

davidw2• 3 years ago

All that "twitter files" stuff was nonsense though. And then he pissed off the guy he paid to do it by blocking substack. Which wasn't very 'free speech' of him at all.

He's stumbling around rudderless.

SergeAx2• 3 years ago

What's really dreading for me, is that the first launch showed, that the problem of synchronous work of many engines, which doomed N1[0], was not solved. SpaceX knew about it from the start and placed it's bet on 50 years of technological advances. I don't want to think about the scenario where that bet is lost.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)

panick21_23• 3 years ago

Falcon Heavy has 27 engines, Starship 33. Its not that different. And if anything Starship has a simpler engine configuration. This is not some unsolvable problem.

SergeAx2• 3 years ago

Falcon Heavy has 3 packs of 9 engines, each pack is thoroughly tested. They can treat the whole package as 3 sources of thrust, manipulating them as a one (which they actually do). Every booster has its own fuel tanks, lines and so on.

Also, I don't remember a single engine failure during Falcon Heavy launches. Today we had 8 (?) of them.

dweinus• 3 years ago

Came here to see fan boys call an explosion a success; did not disappoint. This rocket is compared often to the Saturn V. Number of times the Saturn V exploded: 0. "Fail fast" for launching satellites is one thing, but this is meant to safely carry people.

stetrain5• 3 years ago

This launch was not carrying people. This system will not carry people from launch until dozens or potentially hundreds of successful flights have occurred.

SpaceX probably also has experience with crew safety given their track record with crew flights for NASA.

This test was not a total success nor a worst case failure. SpaceX were pretty clear on their expectations and this fell within them.

blake929• 3 years ago

I get that there are multiple endpoints being tested here and some of them may have been satisfied, but I feel like I'm living in a bizarro world on hacker news where people are arguing that multiple failed engines, a failed stage detachment and an exploding rocket worth millions of dollars and and carrying a large number of limited supply raptor engines is a "massive success". Can we just call it for what it is? Mixed results maybe? Is that not a fair assessment?

sidibe5• 3 years ago

Why can't you just be satisfied and just bask in the warm glow of SpaceX like the rest of this thread?

In all seriousness I don't follow space stuff much so I give the benefit of the doubt when 99% of posters give rave reviews... but I also know who is in charge of this company and the same thing was happening with Tesla a few years ago with every announcement/demo getting 99% of HN people giddy and just a few shouted down people saying "but..."

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Really doesn't seem that way

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17397271

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16587249

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16328676

Pretty even mix of enthusiasm and doomsaying. There's even people saying that Tesla will go bankrupt and Apple will absorb them.

Kiro2• 3 years ago

What's wrong with Tesla?

Kiro2• 3 years ago

I was under the impression that none of it was ever planned to be recovered. I.e. nothing was really lost here since it would have been destroyed either way.

mkaic11• 3 years ago

Well, they were hoping to possibly get a chance at soft-landing the Super Heavy Booster in the ocean, which might have allowed them to recover some stuff from it, but that was always viewed as a potential bonus, never a guarantee or even a primary goal.

superultra2• 3 years ago

I am generalizing but a lot of the space community and certainly a lot of SpaceX fans were deriding the several scrubbed launches of SLS/Artemis. I am not suggesting that it’s the exact same people, and the context for each vehicle is very different.

Nevertheless both the SpaceX and NASA approaches to this are valid engineering approaches.

Whether this particular failed launch is a long term success remains to be seen. If the next 5 Starship launches all explode, maybe the NASA approach of get it right first is the way to go when it comes to space flight.

panick21_23• 3 years ago

NASA approach cost 20 billion $ at least and has a per launch cost of 4-5 billion $ going forward. They didn't develop new engines and is mostly based on legacy avionics. There really isn't a comparison in those terms.

If SpaceX spends the next 10 years and another 10 billion $ on Starship. It would still be far superior to SLS.

maybe the NASA approach of get it right first is the way to go when it comes to space flight.

Again, it has to be pointed out that SLS is not close to the same thing, its a lot of legacy tech.

If SpaceX had to build a large booster auto of Falcon 9 tech they could likely design it to work on the first attempt. As they did with Falcon 9.

But Starship is just a different beast. With NASA methods, it would take multiple decades to get to first test and likely never get there.

physicles4• 3 years ago

Yeah it does seem kinda weird. But did you see the SpaceX employees cheering like mad? It’s pretty clear that they think they made a massive step forward today. Are they deluding themselves? They’ve optimized for iteration speed and will have another couple full vehicles ready to go in a month or two. The raptor engines aren’t limited in supply; they’re making 1-2 a day.

My guess is the biggest issue is the destruction of the pad. Building it up so that it doesn’t get destroyed by each launch will be a very expensive challenge.

tsukikage• 3 years ago

If the kickstarter got funded but didn't make any of the stretch goals, people may have hoped for more, but it's still a success.

supportlocal4h• 3 years ago

Somewhere there is a team that is over the top happy about an incredibly successful explosion. Their job was to make sure that if flight path deviated beyond some threshhold that the whole vehicle would be blown into tiny parts that would become ballistically safe. They were on the edge of their seats on how well that would work.

They saw the lift off team celebrate their success. They saw the booster team fist pumping. They saw the concern from the separation team and their own anticipation spiked. They saw the flight correction team studying realtime data intensely and taking some pride that all that spinning was semi-controlled. The anxiety for the demolition team had to be through the roof. Then, finally, it happened. The system they had spent so much effort to design and integrate finally deployed. It didn't fire prematurely. It didn't fail to deploy. It got everything exactly right.

There is still a ton of data to evaluate, and some improvements to be made. But that unnoticed team from the back of the shed at the back of the lot is celebrating picture perfect execution. Here's a salute to real engineers doing real work, getting it exactly right, and getting no credit. Well done.

xwdv• 3 years ago

One demolition team member had commented that his butt was clenched the whole time and when he finally saw the rocket explode it was like a euphoric release.

javajosh• 3 years ago

I have to say, "rocket demolition guy" has got to be one of the coolest job titles in the world.

moffkalast9• 3 years ago

I guess he finally learned how to use the three seashells.

hackernewds2• 3 years ago

This reads strangely like a PR damage control post

sixothree2• 3 years ago

This thread is absolutely filled with them.

ordu• 3 years ago

Is it possible to say "succesful failure" without sounding like a PR person doing a damage control?

I mean, lets imagine that "test early, test often" is a good engineering practice (it probably is, but lets do not discuss it here, just assume it as a premise instead). Lets imagine that SpaceX blowed up its rocket to gather more data. Is it possible to say "it was a succesful failure" without it looking as a rationalization?

It is an important question, because if the answer is "no" then your observation is not informative.

bottlepalm3• 3 years ago

It’s not, it’s been 20 years, you think people would be used to SpaceX failing their way to success.

But every time we have the same debate.

PoignardAzur• 3 years ago

Heh. Reminds me of that scene from the Tintin comic where the test moon rocket gets hacked by the bad guys and the good guys go "Holy crap, good thing we secretly installed a remote detonator in there!".

sunjester• 3 years ago

As planned. awesome.

whywhywhywhy• 3 years ago

The journalist narrative on this is petty and pathetic, all over some little blue icons...

Astounding feat of engineering.

pfannkuchen4• 3 years ago

I am really surprised at the negativity, it makes me want to stop coming here. How many here are actual engineers by profession? The default state of any novel engineering project is “not working”. Rockets are very hard among engineering projects. Failure here would look like the rocket doing nothing visible, perhaps a little bit of smoke. Neutral is the rocket exploding. Success is the rocket moving at all. The rocket actually flying and then making it to the point of attempting first stage separation is a shockingly amazing level of success for the first test run. The media should be congratulating the team and optimistically looking forward to future tests.

mkaic11• 3 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree. My engineering teacher in high school always used to tell us to fail fast and fail often and I think SpaceX has that down to a T — because failing in engineering isn't really failing, it's an integral part of the development process! Why spend countless billions trying to make sure everything goes exactly right on the first try when you could achieve an even higher final quality by just accepting that a few of your spaceships are going to explode, and that explosions are learning opportunities?

In summary yeah, this launch was a massive success!

RetpolineDrama3• 3 years ago

How many here are actual engineers by profession?

Almost none, because "software engineers" aren't _actual_ Engineers! (ducks for cover)

But really, this was a huge step in the right direction on the cutting edge of propulsion science and spaceflight.

SpaceX will iterate and in a few months/years everyone here will be telling you how "they always knew it would work" and "starship succeeding was obvious"

jpgvm2• 3 years ago

Can confirm, am "Software Engineer" but from a family of Real Engineers™, what we do on a day to day basis only resembles engineering in the weakest sense.

Both professions iterate on failure but Real Engineers actually spend a significant amount of time studying each failure and drawing strong conclusions based on collected data. We can do that (and sometimes do) but usually just hack it and re-run the tests until it works, can't really do that with a physical test though unless you have reduced your problem down to a small test article (something programmers should always do because it's cheap and easy).

Our field is young and lacks the rigorousness of Real Engineering. We probably don't want to adopt all of it because our cost and risk profiles are hugely different but there is a lot to learn from Real Engineers about how to iterate better and get better bang for our buck out of our failures.

kanbara• 3 years ago

it’s great about cutting edge tech and spaceflight, but could do without the needless callout.

i and many engineers i know build, support, and run life-critical systems, emergency systems, flight software, and more.

software absolutely needs more discipline but to be so derisive isn’t ideal.

trafficante• 3 years ago

Politics ruins everything.

You can not be a fan of Musk the person and still appreciate stuff like this.

jansan• 3 years ago

I disagree (and I actually do have a degree in mechanical engineering). Success and failure is not binary. There is always an expectation range. If your result is at the bottom of that range, it is more of a failure, if it is at the upper end it is more of a success. Usually, in an iterative development process your result will be within the range, and in this case it is, too.

The minimum goal was to get the ship off the pad and not having it explode near it. The maximum goal was to achieve separation of stage 1 and reaching orbit. Discussing why the maximum goal was not reached has nothing to do with negativity, but is the natural thinking of an egineer who mainly tries to solve problems. So we naturally think about the ignition failure of some of the engines. Was is caused by the (obviously larger than expected) damage of the launch pad? Or is there a problem with reliability of the engines? Also, will the damage of the launch pad cause a delay for the next start? How can this be improved? These are all things that we are trying to find answers for fro our armchairs.

rootusrootus7• 3 years ago

I am really surprised at the negativity

I would wager that a good part of that is just a reaction to the over-the-top "massive success!" posts.

scaramanga2• 3 years ago

He (capital H) said it had a 50% chance of blowing up on the launchpad.

It blew up ~on~ shortly after leaving the launchpad.

Media says "it blew up ~on~ shortly after leaving the launchpad".

1,000 commentators arrive on HN to say "I am disturbed by the media/public/fellow HNers lack of faith / lies / mischaracterisations / ignorance of hard engineering / etc."

What's sad is that, as the sun rises on the dawn of one of history's greatest men's greatest successes, it's completely overshadowed by His victimhood. And to such an extent that His success can scarcely be commented upon without also pointing out His victimhood.

What a world we live in.

scaramanga2• 3 years ago

The irony is, I can hardly find the posts you are talking about since the comments section is flooded with posts lamenting on the unfair treatment of Musk, and those are the top voted posts.

So I mean, if you want to argue that HN doesn't have enough "weird nerds crawling out of the woordwork for any opportunity to cheerlead their heroo Musk" it's a point that appears to be refuting itself.

electrondood• 3 years ago

Lots of reactions to this, forgetting that the price of success is X failures.

Achieving reusable booster rockets "cost" X exploded ones.

pizlonator2• 3 years ago

This write-up is so bad. It’s almost like a caricature of bad takes. If I wanted to show someone an example of why journalists suck at their jobs, I think this would be exhibit A.

This rapid unscheduled disassembly was a huge success for SpaceX and everyone involved should be so proud. What a kick ass display of engineering prowess. That’s what the take should be, not “they tried to fly for an hour but it blew up after some minutes”.

rootusrootus7• 3 years ago

That might be overselling it. They should be happy with the result, and ready to attack the problems discovered so the next flight might be more successful. And sure, proud that they got it off the ground, though as a fairly mature rocket company I'd have figured that was table stakes.

But an actual kick-ass display of engineering prowess in recent memory was launching and deploying the Webb telescope.

mkaic11• 3 years ago

IMO both Webb's deployment and this Starship test can both be kick-ass displays of engineering prowess. Kick-assery doesn't have to be exclusive to fully-completed deep-space missions!

SubiculumCode• 3 years ago

I'm pretty Disgusted by the news spins on the SpaceX test launch

Elon's antics have soured SpaceX's news coverage, and those who hate Musk are cheering the explosion as proof that Elon sucks. Elon may, but SpaceX is rad, and this was a huge success. Politics makes us stupid

Buttons840• 3 years ago

[Spoiler ahead]

Watched the live stream, I knew they had a bad problem when it appeared the engines were facing upwards. My time with KSP has taught me that no matter how well you think the flight is going, the rocket is still more than eager to return to earth given the chance.

I wonder what actually caused the explosion? Did they scuttle it after a few flips? Did a tank break after a few flips and unplanned stresses? I guess we don't know yet.

sebsebmc• 3 years ago

It actually was expected to do a flip and perform stage separation. It was a problem when it kept trying to flip and Starship didn't separate.

The explosion at the end was the Flight Termination System. In case of uncontrolled flight you detonate the rocket to keep it from flying somewhere dangerous.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 3 years ago

From a PR perspective, I'm surprised that they don't have a procedure where they announce that they're considering to terminate, then announce that they'll blow it up, before actually doing it, if time allows.

I think there is a significant difference in public perception between "it blew up during the test" and "the test wasn't going to go anywhere good so they blew it up".

3-cheese-sundae• 3 years ago

If it starts pointing toward space you are a having a bad problem and you will not go to space today.

anonymouskimmer• 3 years ago

Great prediction.

The most likely outcome is that something will go wrong during this flight.

eatmyshorts• 3 years ago

Watching the mission, I noticed that engines kept shutting down. There are 33 of them. When they had turned off 7 of them, with 26 engines remaining lit, it started to lose control. The engineers all seemed ecstatic about the mission. I have to wonder if they weren't intentionally shutting off engines to see how many could fail while still retaining control. If that was indeed tested, the answer appears to be 6--they can operate nominally with 27 engines lit.

panick21_23• 3 years ago

It didn't start to lose control because the engines. It tried to do a stage separation flip and the stage didn't separate. Only then was it doing something that might have been out of control, or maybe it was trying to do the seperation again.

Control can be maintained with very few engine. I depends if its center engines or outer ring. Only the central cluster can gamble, 2 or 3 of those should be able to handle to rocket depending how full it is.

With only outer engines the could use differential thrust but the rocket isn't really designed to do that.

The Soviet N1 used differential thrust only. SpaceX prefers gimbled engines.

diebeforei4852• 3 years ago

News media headlines are being quite unfair for a test. They know it's a test launch, but they choose this sort of headline anyway, probably because "rocket man bad".

Maybe SpaceX should have painted "TEST" on all sides of the rocket so the flow of information to the public is immune to biased media. Like a shunt in a circuit.

abudabi123• 3 years ago

Learning from this failure the second stage can gain ailogic for stage sep to recover after release knowing five or more 1st stage engines failed on the way up. Looked like the rud happened at the 4:04 mark, poetic.

callumprentice2• 3 years ago

Anyone know how the controlled demolition works? I imagine something more sophisticated than a "radio controlled bomb" but maybe KISS.

rhcom2• 3 years ago

I was curious too. I found:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Solid_Rocket_Boo...

- https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5775/how-are-self-...

tldr: shape charges for solid boosters, dumping fuel for liquid

callumprentice2• 3 years ago

Excellent. Thank you.

eminence32• 3 years ago

I can't really judge if this was a success or a failure or what it means for SpaceX. But as an observer, I have to say it is fun to be able to watch launches of massively complex rockets, in real time, in very high quality video streams, even when they explode.

billbrown• 3 years ago

Isn't "spilling" methane directly into the stratosphere problematic?

holler2• 3 years ago

For anyone curious here's my video from watching the launch live at Isla Vista park on South Padre Island.

It's hard to state just how loud and insanely massive Starship is in general and compared to Falcon 9 (which I was fortunate to see launch twice recently). My bones shook and my ear drums felt like they might burst.

Incredible experience watching and meeting people from far and wide.

Highly recommend getting out to a future launch if you can!

https://youtu.be/1snFbRby7Ew

dizzant• 3 years ago

Great video, thanks for sharing!

holler2• 3 years ago

No problem!

limaoscarjuliet• 3 years ago

For a moment there, I thought Elon threw a cartwheel in right before separation just to show off :-)

Congratulations SpaceX! Big success!

throwaway202303• 3 years ago

Hey everyone time to show your political affiliation. Are you red pilled/republican or right of centre, maybe you get your news from Fox. let’s praise Elon for an amazing test flight. If you’re progressive, left wing, get your news from msnbc, lets join together in mocking a gigantic failure as Elons rocket explodes in the morning sky. There is no need to investigate the facts, pick a side and let rip.

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Hearing the cheers from the team after the explosion, it seems like good news

roeles• 3 years ago

I was surprised that max q happened at a velocity well below mach 1. The falcon 9 rockets traveled around mach 1 when they passed max q if I remember correctly.

MichaelMoser123• 3 years ago

Something optimistic:

"Skating away, skating away, skating away On the thin ice of the new day"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5D9HZyYI6g

(still it's a sad event :-( )

... i think it's the ghost of the Soviet N1 project - it's quite a challenge to have more than a dozen engines working togather; all of these engines start to responate - it's downhil from thereon...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9fkYIrRwbo

gumballindie• 3 years ago

5 kt lifting off into orbit is pretty darn impressive - well done to those that worked on it! In my view this was a total success, far from failure. Imagine laughing at this while the best you can do is deploy some lame JS to a server, while these people built this awesome machine.

LarsDu88• 3 years ago

People these days are spoiled and get disappointed when a rocket doesn't land, lol. Only one company makes rockets that can land.

joefigura• 3 years ago

Rockets always blow up on the first launch :)

It's a machine that's ~95% fuel by mass. Explosion is the default outcome, not exploding is a triumph of engineering.

omgomgomgomg• 3 years ago

Well, this rocket blew up faster than twitter.

I simply would thank everyone for the very good contributions on this matter, it provided highly interesting insights.

sourcecodeplz• 3 years ago

It definitely wasn't a failure. Have you people even watched the stream? That thing was huge, it barely got off the ground.

Congrats to the SpaceX team and to America really, whole world was watching.

mnot• 3 years ago

At liftoff, the rocket kicked up huge plumes of sand and dust around the pad. In Port Isabel, about 10 miles (6 kilometers)

Oh come on, AP

mavu• 3 years ago

Went POOOFH faster than twitter, but much less entertaining.

nytesky• 3 years ago

Wait, how come I can’t find the jokes about starship going up in smoke on 4/20? Are they being moderated away?

dbg31415• 3 years ago

Having everyone in the video cheer when it blew up was weird to me.

I guess it’s progress... but feels like catastrophic failure isn’t really something to cheer.

Just reminds me of Challenger blowing up. Y’know? Not a good feeling to watch these things explode.

rurban• 3 years ago

Bullshit article.

It talks about the missing engines (I saw 6 of 33 not igniting), causing the failure, whilst we saw the seperation to fail in 3 180° attempts. A minor thrust loss cannot explain the seperation failure. Also the starship raptors didnt ignite at all. Also the huge hole at the launch site could have been avoided.

mystertea• 3 years ago

Call this a hot take, but it seems news media are painting a disingenuous picture with this incident, casting it in the light of a failure when it clearly was not one; the goal was only to get the rocket to clear the launch pad, as stated in the video.

The article even states (a few paragraphs down) how Musk said not blowing up the launch pad would be a win, and quotes industry experts on how the launch signified good progress. Yet even so, the title and attempted takeaway is FAILURE, ROCKET EXPLODES MINUTES AFTER LAUNCH.

You can even identity little attempts to cast further dispersion around the positive news, to throw the lemmings off the scent: small business owner's windows broke gasp; RICH people are already booking tickets (see, this isn't for you, average Joe, you're excluded); A little girl CRIED on seeing the launch, etc etc.

This is not journalism; this is maybe 40% news and 60% propaganda. Disgusting how blatant it is, and how so many (ostensibly) intelligent people fall for it.

SpaceX Starship rocket explodes minutes after launch from Texas

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