SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s interesting. When a spacex launch goes well, you don’t see his name attached in the headline. But on this explosion, his name comes first.
I mean, It’s all business. Disaster and Elon musk are going hand in hand since his turn into a pretty decent, hateable villain a couple years ago. So putting his name on an explosion gets the “Awfuckyeah give me musk hate porn” crowd. Even though he had almost as little to do with this failure as he did with the Hindenburg. But this gets clicks.
It’s pretty annoying, because we can see right through it and their motives are shitty. Don’t get me wrong, Elon musk is a douchebag, but CNN’s motives for attaching his name to this article directly in the headline aren’t a mystery. And they’re selfish. So we can hate both CNN and musk at the same time. Convenient.
So the booster worked in that it achieved lift off and properly separated. Did the other stages complete their jobs? Because this looking like it's only a failure in the sense that the booster didn't do the cool we-live-in-the-future part of flipping itself over and landing.
The main focus of this test was stage separation. In that sense it was a roaring success. Also, looks like they managed not to trash the landing pad this time. So that will make it easier to get the next flight approved. But clearly there's still a long way to go.
It seems that Starship, the second stage, experienced RUD from the automated FTS at around the time it was expected to shut off its engines.
Edit: RUD is Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. Basically an explosion. FTS is Flight Termination System, which explodes a rocket if something goes wrong in a potentially dangerous way.
Which is an incremental improvement over the prior attempt. People mock these failures as though they have never built anything and have no concept that any step forward is a win when you are trying to do something that has never been done before. They got the smaller rockets working. It will just take time to get this giant one working.
On the one hand I want to enjoy Musk failing, but at the same time I want to praise the people who are putting all their time and effort into the project, so this comment speaks to me.
While this test was much more successful than the last one, it shows it will be at least a couple years before starship is fully operational at this rate if development and who knows when they'll be able to get it crew rated.
So I'm already willing to bet artemis 3 gets delayed by at least a year while starship gets developed, which is a big shame.
NASA so far has been entirely incapable of creating their own lander or even contract anyone who could.
The first part of your statement is screwy: NASA doesn't build stuff themselves, they set mission requirements. Their normal approach is to pay a contractor to design and build something to satisfy those requirements. In the case of SpaceX, the company designs and builds with (more of) its own money and then sells rides to NASA.
The second part is screwier: the only US lunar Landers have been traditional NASA programs. What are you basing your assertion that NASA can't procure one on?
Gotta love that "Starship breaks the sound barrier during launch" image with the shockwaves visible. NO that is not what happens because the sound barrier was broken, the rocket was already going trans- or supersonic and the resultant shockwaves became visible briefly due to atmospheric conditions. Shockwaves do not spontaneously become visible at the point of transition.
Nonetheless we're going to see that image pasted over and over on social media stating that it's the transitional indication of breaking the sound barrier.
I think the Gulf has plenty of steel in it already, and the liquid methane and oxygen probably isn't getting there, not that they'd be an issue really. It's a non-issue compared to shipping, for example.
Booster: deleted
Spaceship: deleted
Earth: polluted
Resources: deleted
"Manned Mars mission in 2024 if we're lucky": not even a hint of it.
"Manned Mars mission in 2026": lol
You can pretend the "test" is a huge success, just like I pretend that my programs crash because they're still in "beta".
SpaceX’s gargantuan deep-space rocket system, Starship, safely lifted off Saturday morning, but ended prematurely with an explosion and a loss of signal.
About two and a half minutes after roaring to life and vaulting off the launchpad, the Super Heavy booster expended most of its fuel, and the Starship spacecraft fired its own engines and broke away.
“The automated flight termination system on second stage appears to have triggered very late in the burn as we were headed down rage out over the Gulf of Mexico,” aerospace engineer John Insprucker said.
NASA is investing up to $4 billion in the rocket system with the goal of using the Starship capsule to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface for its Artemis III mission, currently slated to take off as soon as 2025.
The endeavor is aiming to return humans to the moon for the first time in five decades, and the successful completion of this test flight would bring the US space agency and SpaceX one step closer to that goal.
During that test flight, several of the Super Heavy’s engines unexpectedly powered off and the rocket began spiraling out of control just minutes after liftoff.
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They made a bunch of really cool changes to address the issues from last time, and they seem to have worked almost perfectly. For one, they built a giant water cooled steel plate under the launch mount (affectionately called the Booster Bidet), and the engineering behind it is pretty neat.