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.
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.
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.
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.
There were multiple unexpected "energetic events" seen by observers apparently due to some of the engines failing around liftoff. These "energetic events" could have contributed to greater than expected downward force under the launchpad. If correct, it seems positive that the excess energy was directed downward still permitting the liftoff. That the ship was able to continue the flight through Max-Q and up to MECO and starting the separation spin maneuver seems like a very positive sign. I believe they've already started construction of upgraded launch facilities which include fire trenches and water deluge systems. This first launch facility was basically a V 0.1 test and it appears to have done its job of getting a Starship test article in the air. It's important to remember their development strategy is pipelined and intentionally test-to-failure with multiple improving prototypes in simultaneous parallel construction. Today's test ship was already several versions old.
Also, the rocket didn't exactly "blow up", it apparently lost attitude control during the separation spin maneuver and couldn't achieve the parameters necessary for stage separation. The subsequent rotations appeared to be attempts at automated attitude recovery. The eventual termination was a controlled FTS initiated when SpaceX determined the flight was unrecoverable. I found it incredible that a supersonic rocket about twice as big as anything humans have ever launched was able to rotate several times at around 1300 Mph and over 100,000 ft altitude while maintaining structural integrity. Fortunately, it appears they were able to delay detonating the controlled demolition charges long enough to receive the vital telemetry data that was the entire reason for today's test. That this early prototype managed to load fuel, pressurize, ignite engines, clear the tower, reach MaxQ, MECO, start the separation turn and then down link all the data makes it a massive success from SpaceX's perspective. Everything after MaxQ was pure bonus territory. The engineers at SpaceX must be thrilled to be ingesting all that sweet data from hundreds of internal sensors and start comparing real-world performance against their simulation models.
"test-to-failure" means that when you realize you may have made a mistake, you don't automatically scrap all your work to fix the mistake before continuing down the development path. You complete that prototype and test it because there are a thousand more mistakes to discover. Even if the known mistake will for sure result in a catastrophic failure, there may still be a large window of opportunity for productive mistake discovery before that for-sure failure ends that test run. You want to discover and fix mistakes in parallel, not serially.
Obviously there are judgment calls for when a mistake might prove too costly even in a test run. But manifestly SpaceX has damn good judgment in that regard. If you don't like how the sausage is made, just avert your eyes; don't complain about how ugly the sausage making process is.
From the launch commentary, the rocket is designed to do a 180 at that altitude for the separation event. So a couple extra rotations isn’t going to hurt anything. Additionally, air density at 100k ft is ~1/80th of sea level, which helps.
You mean it should have separated on a 180-flip? Boosting rocket all the way there to break and start orbiting in opposite direction? No way. F9 doesn't do that. The booster should have flipped without starship. That was mistake on commentator side - they were talking all the time like everything is normal. Even when we all saw it started to twist, commentator sayd something like: waiting on separation.
Anyways, the stress rocket experiences in a position like that is such that they break up, because its not designed for positions like that - we have seen that on failing rockets videos. This one did multiple flips with upper stage attached that shouldn't be there on rotation. And thats great :)
This is kind of dumb. SpaceX not only was aware of the damage that would likely be caused, but there are already steel pieces of a flame diverter that arrived a couple of weeks ago at Starbase:
https://twitter.com/CosmicalChief/status/1644405156132290560...
They intentionally chose not to install it yet to accelerate the launch (it has been two years without flight testing, they need more data and this booster needed to be gone). It's a perfectly fine decision, it just means more repair after this inaugural flight than normal. If the cost of the repair is less than the cost of delay (and delay impacts Starlink, various payload customers, and especially NASA's Artemis program), then you're a poor manager if you choose delay.
The media have largely been completely ignorant about this kind of testing. Exception being those who have space as their main beat, like Space News, etc. Everyone in the space industry pretty much understands the concept of a test regime that has a high probability of failure. They understand that it's about an order of magnitude cheaper and about 3 times faster than the usual defense contractor "failure is not an option" approach. That's why you had such supportive comments from the NASA Administrator and anyone else who is actually in this industry.
It sounded like Elon also put a decent probability on the rocket exploding on the pad. In that case, the flame diverter would likely have been destroyed anyway.
> I think it's unlikely that SpaceX wasn't aware of the damage that would be caused.
"SpaceX" isn't a unified mind. It's not even a hivemind, no company is.
We keep saying "company knew about X", but it's a such a mischaracterization of how companies, or any group of humans, work. Yes, some people in the company might have known it, but for various reasons, be it poor communication, mistaken assumptions, willful ignorance, or what have you, that information wasn't acted upon. Companies have complicated and chaotic dynamics. We Do Not Have An Algorithm For Truth.
In effect, "Company knew about X" is practically a meaningless oxymoron.
Yes, the "company" may be the "responsible entity", but as a century of corporate history demonstrates, that doesn't mean very much in practice, as the individual people within the company who might theoretically be tagged can weasel out of consequences.
My issue with this take is that companies have used leverage and lobbying to get to define when a company isn't a single entity and when it is not, always in their advantage. For example, a company is involved in a human death: the company is suddenly not a single entity and is instead simply part of this complex system of moving parts out of which emerged a human death. As another example, a corporation wants to donate to politicians (for "reasons"): the company is suddenly a single entity and even individual (!) who has constitutional rights to political donations.
Companies flip flop back and forth between them being a collective and individual at will and to their singular benefit.
Or maybe they estimated the chances of the launch pad being entirely obliterated during the launch attempt as pretty high and didn't want to invest more money into it than absolutely necessary?
Turns out they were indeed right! The hole is Boring Company-worthy.
Joking aside, the test was successful, but the missing concrete and what seems to be 50 meters of sand below it is a problem for the next test launch schedule. The pad they’ll need for reusability will be as impressive as the rocket itself.
Interesting article. He doesn't really speak of a large hole in the ground and huge chunks of debris flying around though. More of the effects of the heat and sound energy on wildlife which is not quite as obvious.
He raises some good points indeed, not sure why it was flagged at all.
> IMO, we (as a whole) should spend less time spreading ANY information online, use more time to think before speak
When it comes to insensitive tweets vomited out over the internet I totally agree. Though even those of us more considerate can contribute to this by simply not following people who do that. I'm personally not even using Twitter at all and I never did even before Musk took it over. I find the signal/noise ratio way too low there and anything really interesting there makes Hacker News anyway. But anyway that's a tangent.
So, if you read something that really makes you think: "Wow that's really an insensitive hot take", just block the person from your feeds, no matter who they are. Especially if it's not the first time. Makes your life a lot more relaxing. And it's more effective than wishing that haters are gonna stop hating.
However this particular article was thoughtful and came with a lot of explanations, diagrams and source links. It was pretty hard criticism of SpaceX and the FAA but it was not agressive or flaming. To me it seems pretty well thought out and it gives balance to a complex story by showing a side to it I wasn't aware of yet. Not saying the story itself is balanced, but it gives balance to the other media which are overwhelmingly positive and don't cover the ecological side at all.
In other words, this is not the thing that should be cut from being spread online, in my opinion.
The author has clearly written about this before but that doesn't necessarily invalidate them or make them biased. They can also simply be right and been ignored so they keep writing about it. When you 'go fast and break things' it's important to consider the things you are breaking, even if they are not very obvious. One of the questions that comes to my mind is: "Why is this thing even in the middle of protected habitats?"
I read that article shortly before it was black-holed. When I was done, I wanted to read some of the discussion around it. When I saw that it was nowhere to be found, I distinctly remember thinking “what the hell is going on with this place?”
I think you'll find that Hacker News can be quite hostile to something viewed as "alternative" information, especially if it relates to certain companies. I found the article quite interesting and actually quite informative and evidence driven.
The gist of the comment is not on the downvotes of that particular comment in and of itself, as much as the overall behaviour of HN and using itself as a data-point to support the hypothesis. At the time of writing I made a prediction on the behaviour of HN. I did not make a comment about the votes of a particular comment after the fact, therefore, I am clear.
> gist of the comment is not on the downvotes of that particular comment in and of itself
The gist doesn’t matter. You commented on being downvoted. That’s against the guidelines and gets flagged. Your comment is stronger without the throwaway bit at the end.
There has always been some of that on HN. But the ideas which get downvoted have slowly shifted over time.
I’ve been on HN for well over a decade. I remember it being more startup focused, and more libertarian politically. My perception is that it became a bit woke for awhile, but now the backlash to that sort of thinking has happened in earnest.
We have all the comments going back to the start of the site. I’d love to see an analysis of what HN believes and how it has changed over time as a new generation has joined the community.
And yet here we are in a thread discussion how the rocket did more damage than anyone thought.
That article was always going to be flagged, strictly because of its content. Maybe it could have snuck in with a headline like "Great news, SpaceX wisely found ways to launch rocket 20% more powerful than they planned for", but I doubt it.
The title is a completely reasonable and accurate reflection of the opinions that the author presents. If there’s disagreement about the opinions, that’s what discussion is for. I think this kind of thing is indicative of hn being on a bit of a downward slide.
This is disingenuous when you consider that it's not really over the top, and less subjectively, mods have other tools available to them, like renaming submission titles.
With hindsight, we can now actually conclue that it was in fact, over the top. They claimed that buildingds would be destroyed and neighboring communites would be scarred for life.
A 10x-100x increase in sound beyond approved levels, intentionally skipping or lobbying to skip approvals, ignoring environmental impact, and using designs as if they were approved when it was really earlier, much different versions are not examples of gray areas.
Fair point, there's definitely some hyperbole there. "More than anyone thinks" would mean the author doesn't think it will damage as much as he's saying either.
Sort of implies the article was hyperbole, which it was.
> it's unlikely that SpaceX wasn't aware of the damage that would be caused
If there is a material chance you won’t clear the tower, building an elaborate pad is overkill. I disagree that a new mount means months of delays—SpaceX has been building these faster than legacy operators.
> need one that won't turn to a hail of debris and a crater
They have these. At their permanent launch sites. This is a test site. That the rocket reached max Q suggests this isn’t a problem needing solving right now.
One usually throttles down around max Q, so it's unclear from outside.
> rest with nozzles dented by rocks at ground escape velocity
Now we're speculating beyond the data. (Actually, we have counterfactual data: it reached max Q. That doesn't happen if you have mis-shaped nozzles causing flow separation.)
Earlier you seemed to imply that you could achieve max Q with six engines out by not throttling down as much. Why does the same not apply to overcoming possibly dented engine nozzles?
Thanks for posting that link. I found the article informative and actually well-written and driven by evidence and examples.
It is really striking to me how people are willing to throw the environment under the proverbial bus and literal rocket in order to further some false idea of improving humanity. We're actively killing a live planet, currently the only planet known to be able to house human and life in general for that matter, to reach a dead planet on the whims and wishes of paper billionaires.
Ignoring the complexity of accomplishing that, such an enterprise would cost an immense amount of material and pollution. Also, it would not stabilize or decrease mining on Earth.
no one thats been following the test campaign for Super Heavy is surprised by the damage. the damage to the pad has been documented after the 3, 14, and 33 engine Static fires in the run up to launch. I believe they said SpaceX has been experimenting with different concrete formulations in the repairs after each static fire. There has also been photos of what appears to be flame diverters on site at Starbase, and I think they have even done a crude test fit of them under the OLM at some point recently.
Yeah, I think it's been surprising to a lot of people. There have been a lot of questions among people who follow space as to why they didn't start with a flame diverter and water deluge system.
I guess they felt the delay to install one would be too long, and they really wanted to get this launched? Or maybe they had reason to believe they'd get away with it... seems implausible given the forces involved.
Hopefully the data will work that out. Raptor 1 seemed to have quality control issues in that some percentage of engines would fail, hopefully this isn't also the case for Raptor 2 or at least can be worked out.
It was expected. They have moved deluge equipment from Canaveral and have partially installed it, which they wouldn't have done if it wasn't expected to be needed.
Surely considering what the Saturn V launchpad used - a rather huge hole in the ground lined with concrete and an insane amount of water being released to dampen sound and damage ???.
I think this non deluge system was 100% intentional as a cost saving measure to just see if the asset acquired clearance from launch tower. The next iteration of launch will have one.
They predict shattered glass,damaged foundations of beachside homes, and people scarred for life by the launch.
This was hyperbolic fearmongering. The actual launch was very close to baseline expectations. The lack of launch pad flame channels was common knowlegle, and no great insight.
This entire blog is dedicated to environmental complants about SpaceX operations. If there had been flame channels, the author would instead be writing about how they are pointed at sensitive environmental habitat.
Would strongly disagree. Reading the article it doesn't sound like fear-mongering at all.
In fact their concerns about FAA cutting corners in allowing SpaceX to build such a facility seem quite legitimate. Especially if they are passionate about protecting sensitive environment habitat which is a voice that we need more of in this world.
So this needs to be stressed: the only reason the area around Starbase is protected habitat is because SpaceX built Starbase there. Because space launches fall under FAA and thus Federal regulation, the area around them becomes Federal land and subject to Federal environmental review and protection. This is the same reason Cape Canaveral is surrounded by protected wetlands - it's because the Cape Canaveral launch complex is there.
But that's predicated on the facility existing. If SpaceX hadn't bought that land - and they did buy it - it was for sale - then those wetlands would not be protected habitat at all.
Are you still of the opinion that the article was not close to the truth at all? Windows were shattered, the highway next to the facility was damaged and is still closed, Port Isabel was showered with dust and debris, and more.
Go through that article to find every specific prediction you can (e.g. broken glass & damaged foundations in the town 8.5km away). Then compare these to what happened.
When I tried it, I found that they were more incorrect than they were correct and the biggest harms predicted were the things they were the most wrong about.
the wide angle makes it look a lot further away from the rocket than they really were - The camera is about 440m away from the rocket.
The damage shown in the video appears to be entirely caused by debris while the article was suggesting possible property damage ("shattered glass and damaged foundations ... from a miscalculated sonic blast") to towns 8500m away - 20 times further
Wow! You can see the chunk nail the corner of the NASASpaceflight stream van (on the left of the frame) at 0:15.
Unlucky hit! But I guess lucky it missed the camera gear.
The team was chuckling on the stream about how they opened the vehicle windows for airflow to the electronics gear inside... but SpaceX helped them open it even more.
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.)
> After that, they still have a fair way to go on Raptor reliability
I suspect the debris from blowing a whole in the ground was the biggest contributing factor for the engines out. It looked like at lease 4 we're gone before it left the pad.
That's my thinking, but ignition is a staggered 6 second duration, so there's at least a window for adverse directional flow.
But looking at that pad and the damage to it- without deluge dampening, I bet the RC spalling might have been a bigger issue than just ground blowback.
Put a blowtorch to some concrete a and watch how quickly trapped moisture starts causing miniature explosions and flying shrapnel.
The output power of a rocket is different than a blow torch. The sound pressure alone is near or above atmospheric pressure. That concrete is being exposed to vacuum and more than 1atm pressure fairly rapidly. The heat on top of that and if the concrete has any moisture, the water inside is going to rapidly sublimate and condense several times a second. That is on top of the concrete being slammed into by an entire atmosphere of pressure in the meanwhile.
There is a reason that NASA dumps a few million liters of water under their rockets.
My understanding is that one of the Starship prototypes were damaged by flying debris during a static fire. I think the available evidence points towards it being possible.
> About 2 secs after starting engines, martyte covering concrete below shattered, sending blades of hardened rock into engine bay. One rock blade severed avionics cable, causing bad shutdown of Raptor.
is real, I guess not. What used to be in that crater couldn't just move sideways, it had to go up to get out of the hole. Engine exhaust hit the center of the crater, dislodged rocks, pushed them away radially and up the sides of the hole.
Four of the six engines later seen to have gone dark were in the outer ring. Coincidence?
Rocket "engines" aren't like engines in your car. The bell and the plumbing for it is the engine. There's not too many moving parts besides a pump. Any sort of damage to the bell can cause a failure.
The bells are cooled by pumping super cold fuel over them, a rock hitting those thin lines of fuel could rupture a line, or divert on causing a failure in the bell which eventually (seconds) ends in an engine rich fuel mixture.
> 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
In my life experience so far, humans having gut feelings it 99% of the time complete nonsense. But people forget the 99 times and that one time their gut was right they tell that story forever about how smart they were.
Correct gut feelings are just your subconscious running the numbers without bothering you about it. A human having a (correct) gut feeling that the numbers are wrong just means that the human has not chosen the correct numbers to look at, or possibly that a human has made an error in telling the computer how to calculate the numbers.
Yes, computers are really good at making calculations, but we have to tell them which calculations to make, so there's still (will always be?) a weak link in the chain.
> I was a bit disappointed with the number of engine outs
Who knows if they were controlled tests, you need failures to understand the reliability domain. Engineering is about handling failure, not success. You learn very little from success, esp with so many free variables.
Not necessarily; low gravity plus lighter weight means much, much lower thrust on landing in those locations. F9 lands on the drone ships with one engine, for example. It also looked like today's launch involved a hold-down period while they lit them all; that wouldn't be the case for landing either.
Intuitively it seems like more would be better so that in the case of that engine failing you could use the other engines to push up and maybe light another engine.
Of course, if there's two engines and one fails, it's going to tilt. Same with 3, though to a lesser degree. 4 engines lessen it even more, etc. etc.
Or maybe they can detect a bad center engine on descent (it doesn't light or flame is detectably not the right) and then go to outer engines. Or drop it in the ocean. Hope there aren't people on that one.
> Intuitively it seems like more would be better so that in the case of that engine failing you could use the other engines to push up and maybe light another engine.
The landing F9 first stage is so light even one engine at minimum throttle has a thrust-to-weight ratio greater than one; they can't throttle it down enough to hover. Three lit engines would send it shooting back up rapidly.
The booster is securely clamped to the launch stand. However the starship is only resting on top of the booster - the two parts of the ship are not clamped together.
Launch clamps are released on command of the engine computer - i.e when it detects that sufficient engines are running correctly it commands a clamp release.
Note that Starship Booster's outer engines are actually started using feeds from the launch pad. They need power and pressurized nitrogen from ground equipment to start. The outer engines are not able to restart once off the ground.
So the clamps are required to keep the vehicle in place until all the engines that will start have had a chance to do so. They're also useful if there is an abort during engine start so the vehicle remains secure.
I may be incorrect and they are now using explosive bolts. I've seen those mentioned elsewhere.
However the engines were on the whole time, producing >1G of thrust along the direction of the booster. So that force is going to hold the StarShip and the booster together. But you would expect some lateral force from air friction to push the stack apart at some point.
Might just be the thrust-to-weight being under 1 while they light the engines, but it visibly sits there for a signifcant amount of time, much more than you'd get with a landing suicide burn.
That makes sense, but on mars? Full payload, very little atmospheric drag, little atmosphere to keep the blastolith from scrubbing the bottom of the vehicle. I am talking generically since presumably the first stage won't be landing on mars.
Mars is far off enough it's entirely speculative on how they'll handle this. Drop some robot bulldozers first? Specialized landers for landing pad construction crews? Bring the heavy cargo via a separate non-atmospheric craft built in Earth orbit? Hover from height for a while to blow debris off a rocky flat spot?
I don't have the answer, but IMO cheap mass to Earth orbit is the biggie that enables a whole bunch of options.
There was an idea of adding aluminum powder to exhaust and hovering a little over the pad, so that you deposit a solid metal surface where you intend to land.
they’re not going to land with all the 30+ engines turned on and they won’t need the same amount of thrust since the first stage is gonna be mostly empty. Plus they won’t land the first stage on the moon or on mars.
And the plan is to grab the first stage before it touches ground anyway. So this is mostly an issue on liftoff.
There was a time where people questioned if 33 of them packed in like this would work at all. Pretty impressive that it does and survives multiple engine failures.
> After that, they still have a fair way to go on Raptor reliability
They seem to have worked fine individually and in smaller groups. There could be issues with the plumbing, which they seem to be iterating on quite a lot with the newer boosters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The issue is that that dirt and rocks flying around damages all the other expensive equipment at the launch site. There is going to be some very dead kit down there. They can't do that every time.
But big dust clouds also upset people, and SpaceX can't afford to fall out with the locals.
I was on South Padre Island watching the launch, and I was stuck in traffic on South Padre Island for almost an hour afterwards, and I did not observe this.
It’s possible that some of the dust reached South Padre or Port Isabel, but neither seemed to be “covered” in it.
I mean the concrete dust that got airborne as it was being blown apart. It's airborne silica and is toxic which is why construction workers wear masks when producing it.
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 $$$.
Because they achieved what they were trying to do? They said if it got 50 seconds into flight it was a success and it did. No Spin, they literally mentioned this objective before the flight, it's more wild for people to suggest that it wasn't despite it exceeding it's objectives.
I listened to Musk give a QA about this last week before the initial launch date. He very clearly defined success as reaching orbit, and stated that success wasn’t likely.
Pouring more concrete is not very expensive. It takes a month to cure completely, but the next test is multiple months out regardless. By that time they'll have the deluge equipment installed.
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...
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.
Sorry, i've seen this spelling enough to now ask if this is a word that I don't know about or if it's just a mis-spelling of complete. Not trying to pick on you. I've had errors before, especially in space stuff (altitude & attitude).
There’s also usage of that spelling in Magic: The Gathering. One of the biggest villain factions in the Lore of the game, Phyrexians, assimilate beings against their will and brutally “perfect” them through magical and surgical means. The process is called “Compleation” - https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Compleation
I usually edit my posts after posting (sometimes multiple times), I find going back and rereading them I always find errors. Will leave that mistake for prosperity and context. Dyslexia is both a gift and a curse, but only if you let it.
I find this interesting because the word "English" literally means "fisherman". The "Eng" is an archaic short form for the word that today we call "angle" - referring to the hook that the fishermen used, with it's distinctive angle. At the time, the people to whom were referred to as such still lived on the northern European continent, they would migrate to the island some time later.
TL;DR: Compleat and Complete were originally different spellings for the same word. In UK, compleat is still just an archaic spelling. In USA, compleat is used as an adjective to refer specifically to having all the necessary elements or skills.
I’ve never heard it in the USA outside of in old book titles. I’ll add The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague DeCamp as another prominent example. That’s from 1975 and probably a conscious reference to The Compleat Angler, along with a pun on a prior anthology called The Incomplete Enchanter.
Even the examples cited in the article seem like they’re out of older books deliberately invoking antiquity with the spelling. The only recent example (Bova, Mars, 1992) is from the SF/F genre where esoteric words like that get batted around more in general.
So I’m going to go with that being about as common in US English as UK—used for effect only.
>> 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.
I don't need to know the internal - it's pretty obvious. When you are test launching a rocket, MaxQ is the moment to test (aside from ignition, which you can test with static fire, so not really "test launching a rocket"). So SpaceX wants to test the booster launch; they have tested everything else on the ground that they realistically can at this point. That means ignition, get off the pad, MaxQ. Everything after that point is gravy.
Of course there are plenty of systems after maxq they want to test, but not to sound like a software project manager, but "is the juice worth the squeeze?" Everything past maxq may not happen if the rocket goes RUD before or at that point, so how many points do you really want to be putting into stage separation, boostback, reentry, when those engineers could be triple checking Stage 0, fueling, start sequence, and liftoff?
Was it supposed to tumble and explode? Of course not. How many weeks of delay of booster launch is "don't tumble during stage separation" worth? SpaceX says on the order of zero, save it for the next unit in the heckin rocket assembly line (that is wild to say out loud but that's what it is).
Great post. I think a huge number of points were also put into the 10 seconds directly after liftoff.
I.e, if the ship is going to fly, ensure it doesn't need termination in range of the tower. Anything to ensure the next test article in the pipe can be ready to fly in minimum time.
I was told for something I was working on "if it works perfectly the first time, you may have spent to much time on it. "
But they designed it to fly and it did for a while. I'm fairly certain they didn't design it to tumble and explode. If it had flown better and not exploded one would have to say it was more successful.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
It absolutely applies here - they didn't want to build the launch mount in Florida until they had actual info from a launch. They also iterate their rockets with each new one (even production rockets, ie falcon 9, gets iterative changes). The lessons from this launch will be key to informing changes before future launches.
I dont know what you mean by having no opportunity to change anything. There are several full stacks of rockets constructed and waiting to fly. They'll likely take what they learned on this flight and perform some upgrades to those boosters while they're refurbishing the ground equipment. That particular rocket might be gone, but there are several newer ones waiting to go!
Well, yeah. In this sense, it's the second-worst thing that could have happened, with the worst outcome being injured or dead people. But they probably didn't expect such a bombastic finale so quickly.
> they probably didn't expect such a bombastic finale so quickly
Is this some mind game you are playing? They said they don't expect the test to go smoothly, and that their goal is to learn as much as possible. They did this multiple times, before the test, during the test, by the CEO, on the stream, everywhere.
They told us that if they can learn from the test that is success, if the rocket on top of that clears the tower that is a win.
And then you comment that they didn't actually mean any of that. Why? Why is it not easier to take them at their word?
> it's the second-worst thing that could have happened,
Not at all. As you say the worst thing would be injured or dead people. Second worst would be damage to third party property. Fourth would be breaching their allowed airspace. Third worst would be a failure where the telemetry and tracking also failed and that prevents them from learning.
You're not prototyping rockets correctly if you don't expect in the back of your mind some chance of bombastic events. They are the epitome of "engineer it to within an inch of its expected safety margins for the mission".
Sure once you are going for human rated you want all those bugs figured out, but how do you find those safety margins without pushing up to and over them?
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.
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.
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
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).
Pretty solid reasoning. Pretty clear that correct attitude of the spacecraft would be a go/no-go for booster separation.
Wonder if people heard the sonic boom on the ground. If it hit MaxQ and went past it then it would be supersonic at that point.
Presumably they have two flight abort systems (one booster, one ship), a separation, even under non-ideal circumstances, could provide test data. The safety issue would be addressed by setting the self destruct to occur post data collection or imminent danger which ever came first :-). Based on the NOTAMs the FAA sent out they seem to have had a pretty long footprint over the Atlantic for things to go wrong.
Hopefully they will give us a deep dive on what happened!
You can see the vapor ghosting off it when they call MaxQ which is a visual confirmation. I assume people could hear it on the ground too unless it's too high?
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).
I have seen that analysis too, the twitter thread suggested that both HPUs on the booster eventually failed before second stage separation. That could be quite significant.
Also the lack of gimballing capability could presumably have the booster continuing to thrust as it attempted to maintain attitude control even as it reached the MECO point.
I wonder how much of this learning can be applied to the next launch as they may have design issues that are already "baked in" to the built boosters.
The good news here is that the gimballing system that failed today was already obsolete. The booster that launched today (B7) was the last prototype that was built with hydraulic gimballing (B8 might of had it, but that booster was scrapped). Subsequent boosters starting with B9 were built with an electrically actuated gimballing system. So the HPUs that supported the old system aren't present on the newer prototypes.
Perhaps the better news, then, is that there was much more to test than thrust vectoring. The structural integrity of a new rocket design under load, the challenges of a new engine design in flight, the ability to light a large number of engines in the correct sequence, etc.
In fact, it is possible the least of what they need to sort out is thrust vectoring: SpaceX has a lot of experience using thrust vectoring in their current production rockets, they have repeatedly demonstrated solid vectoring control throughout the program in Boca Chica, incuding the flight of "Hoppy", the test articles SN5 &SN6, and Starship high altitude tests SN8, SN9, SN10, SN11, and SN15. While there were failures in those programs, the thrust vectoring really wasn't the issue.
In reality, huge amounts of test data that doesn't depend on the thrust vectoring methodology was collected and remains valid from the test flight. And while there might be reasons we might consider SpaceX engineers sub-standard or that other factors compromise their judgement.... I'm sure they've considered what they can and can't learn from the test flight given that the some parts of B7 are obsolete... and still thought the exercise is worthwhile.
I for one will trust their judgement on this point.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
There are also mistakes versus the unknown, you can only know the true value if its a mistake after measurement.
The key is to measure the value at the earliest possible time to reduce the amount of sunk costs.
And simulation doesn't buy you anything here either. Simulation will many times cost more than an actual test article and still may not simulate reality accurately.
> 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.
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?
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.
ELI5: The atmosphere is pushing back against you, like how you feel wind when you run, but as you go higher in the air there is less of it to push back against you, so at a certain point the push back is less.
Sure our MIC has grown a bit fat on the teat, and the US government has done some very unpleasant things, but to totally boycott someone cause they work on weapons systems, I don't think is really the right mood.
I believe he work(s/ed) on anti-ship guided missiles. I'm sure the Ukrainians are grateful to all those who worked on guided missiles when a Javelin pops a T-72 or the Moskva was sunk.
(not saying Destin worked on the Javelin, or that the Ukraine ASGM was built using tech. Just the general concept)
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
Musk said something before the launch to the effect "Clearing the tower is a success." Musk said after something to the effect, "Expecting perfect would be crazy."
And here I am thinking about the Saturn launches that von Braun oversaw 55-ish years ago.
(Saw the launch this morning, BTW. Just happened to be road-tripping in Texas this week and thought we'd pop down for a look-see.)
A private company just launched the largest rocket ever built. It was a test. Tests fail, but failed tests aren't failures, theyre learning opportunities.
SpaceX had several of these types of failures when testing and iterating on falcon 9. It now sends people to the ISS.
There is a PR battle going on with this, there always have been but in particular, Elon is associated very publicly with this company and he's no longer a darling due to the Twitter fiasco. SpaceX has to remind people quite strongly that these are tests, failure is a part of the process, and there will be a big push by his enemies to make this out to be some catastrophic failure because some people want to make him look bad.
Its a failure, but it's a testing failure, so its a success. If the entire thing had exploded on the pad I'd agree with you, but it didn't, it made it through several of it's test objectives and was well worth it for the data alone.
I could frame this. Task failed successfully. Maybe folks need more experience in hard science (I'm a former bench chemist), but the only way a test can truly fail, is if someone or something is harmed, or you don't collect good data.
Blowing up rockets is arguably better than successful missions (provided you get telemetry), cause you found an edge of the envelope.
> Its a failure, but it's a testing failure, so its a success.
Cultural misunderstanding then. Only in USA failure is seen as learning opportunity. Most other countries punish you severely for failure, hard enough to discourage you from trying ever again.
This is why SpaceX could only happen in the USA. And why other countries are left behind while Americans are flying to Mars.
@ 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."
They may not have defined the test as aggressively as you would have liked them to, but it's their test, they get to choose what they're testing.
The topic has been beaten to death in the comments, but it comes down to sematics around success and goals.
They didn't meet every goal hopeped for, but how much or which constitutes sucess? This will be in the eye of the beholder. SpaceX said they would consider it sucessfull if it leaves the launch pad/site.
I might call it a failure because it didn't land a human on the moon, and it doesn't matter if that was not the expectation or intent of SpaceX today.
It is ultimately subjective. You might be happy with your life, but I might call it a falure. Is one of us right, both?
So you seem to be defining "success" in terms of completing pre-planned flight events, which is fine. However, this is not the only metric by which one can define and assess success. Surely you must agree it depends on the objective.
We might as well be arguing over if the launch was "good" or "bad", -it is subjective.
One objective question you can ask is "Did the test complete the pre-specified criteria which SpaceX said they would consider a success?", which it did.
We could then debate if they have a dumb criteria for Success, and what we think is a better one.
Success is defined by meeting objectives. Primary objective was to not blow up the vehicle on the pad. Great success here.
Secondary objectives indeed aren’t met. I think everybody realizes by now that the big hole where the pad used to be is a bigger problem that it seemed initially. Any solutions are expensive and time consuming.
> everybody realizes by now that the big hole where the pad used to be is a bigger problem that it seemed initially
I'm seeing a lot of speculation and little engineering on this. Is there a good post hoc take on why it's a big problem?
Counterfactuals: it wasn't a production pad. It was designed to be expendable. That's why you don't put a bunch of expensive kit like deluge equipment on and around it; there's a meaningful chance you never clear the tower.
The problem isn’t that it didn’t survive, the problem is the style it went out with: how much of it didn’t survive, how far the rocks were flung (far!), how far dust settled (very far!) and the amount of engineering needed to build a flame diverter which can be called any sort of reusable. Also the amount of fresh water needed for the deluge will be simply epic.
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?
we do a magnitude more environmental damage every day, and it's not brought up, it's not about past environmental damage. People get up in arms about littering, and they liter the air out their tailpipe for hours every week.
It is brought up. People complain about the destruction of the earth due to mining, oil consumption, etc. Large numbers of people exclusively ride transit and use bicycles. Just because some people are hypocrites doesn’t mean we shouldn’t assess the environmental consequences of space travel.
> 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.
Keep in mind that the B7 and S24 were both obsolete designs. B7 had previous gen Raptor engines, with next gen being (presumably) simpler design and more reliable; it had hydraulics-driven mechanism to gimbal the engines (the next gen has electric motors); and the engines had less isolation/protection against RUD of neighboring engines than B9 and above. I'm less familiar with S24 but do know that its design is obsolete to a great degree as well. So realistically they both could have been sent to scraps, or launched just to get some initial testing done. The only thing I think SpaceX could have done better was the launch pad design (flame diverter and water deluge), and I think it was pretty clear after the static fire that it was completely necessary.
SpaceX took a risk, with the worst case scenario being launch pad and ground infrastructure being blown up to shreds, which did no happen. I agree that everything else was just icing on the cake. So I would put that to the W.
My understanding is that the engine on the B7 aren’t really powerful enough, so if a few go out, then the rest are just “fighting gravity” and not really accelerating the ship.
The new engines should have more net acceleration and should therefore tolerate a few engines failing.
Perhaps research should progress beyond combustion engines? Is blowing things up the only way? And my sense of wonder has been pretty much extinguished by the realization that space is a locus of human power dynamics and incorporation, not a utopian pursuit, but very selfish.
Much cheaper satellites. Used for things like predicting weather, monitoring climate change, allowing for communication that serve as an alternative for travel, advancing the frontiers of science, and so on.
Yes, advances in technology are used for wasteful things too, that doesn't mean they aren't still good for humanity.
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.
>> 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.
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.
Completely agree. I've worked in "old space" and the fundamental problem is that they can't afford to experiment. SpaceX has the option to physically test an idea that's holding them up before investing in fully bringing it up to production quality, only to have to redo all that work next iteration. That's why they can make new things and do it cheaper and faster.
Ironically, "old old space" = Soviet space was so damn good at innovating it probably would have made SpaceX look old-fashioned. Really I don't think there's a fundamental reason why we can't have two SpaceX's (Spaces X?) so why is there no other?
Haha I had a feeling someone would bring this up. To me, old space isn't farther back in time in the golden age of space, but rather what the space industry eventually calcified into. New space is like a Renaissance.
There are other new space companies, but they're just not as good.
Except SpaceX’s failure rates are similar with every other successful launch system. Rather than looking at failure as a constant rate you need to consider these numbers change with every flight. Initially major design flaws are identified and workers become more skilled at a process, eventually new errors creep in etc etc.
They have greatly benefited from being able to use modern tools and seen where other systems failed. Many rocket companies have failed when trying to go fast and break things because it isn’t an easy shortcut. Instead SpaceX has used the normal approach used by other successful organizations and simply executed it well.
> Except SpaceX’s failure rates are similar with every other successful launch system.
Falcon 9 has the record for most consecutive successful orbital launches. Their last failure was AMOS-6 in September of 2016. Since then they've had 189 successful launches in a row.[1] In that same time Soyuz has had 113 launches with 3 failures. Soyuz's longest success streak was 100 launches from 1983 to 1986.[2] The US's Delta II had 100 consecutive successes from 1997 to 2018, though it has since been retired. A total of 155 Delta IIs were launched with 2 failures.
Falcon 9's current successful landing streak of 110 missions exceeds the competition's best launch streak. By any metric one can measure, SpaceX has the most reliable rocket.
You can always slice and dice data to make one side look better.
The actual number of successes vs partial successes vs launch failures vs fatalities are the best data we have. Throwing away any of that data because it makes you look worse isn’t a good idea.
Similarly we needs to understand that there’s a huge difference between risk and what actually happens. People get lucky in Vegas every day, what matters to most of us is the accuracy of the estimate of underlying odds not just the exact outcomes out to seven decimal places.
> actual number of successes vs partial successes vs launch failures vs fatalities are the best data we have
Current vehicles are vastly different from the originals. What we’re trying to do is predict the probability of the next launch failing. Equally weighting far historicals and recents is bogus statistics.
> What we’re trying to do is predict the probability of the next launch failing.
I thought we were comparing methods. Unless the next payload is yours then the odds of the next launch failing is meaningless to most of us, but we can learn something from the methods used.
But sure, if you have a bet in Vegas or something then feel free try and calculate things as closely as possible. Just understand that several of Soyuz failures didn’t kill the crew so there’s other metrics people might care about.
What does this mean? The question most of us care about is which method resulted in a more reliable rocket. And SpaceX’s track record shines uniquely in that respect. The frequency, moreover, makes the results robust. Legacy rockets like Ariane will never reach that confidence because the likelihood of fluke successes won’t have been minimised when the rocket is retired.
As to why their methodology is important this isn’t the Falcon 9 this is a new launch system which is likely going to have multiple failures before it’s own streak can begin.
So sure, we can reasonably assume that Starship will get to a state of reliability similar to current Falcon rocket, eventually. We can’t assume the first few commercial Starship launches are going to even approach that level of reliability. And in fact the best point of comparison may be the early days of Falcon 9.
Speaking of methodology, it's incorrect to relate a development test result to reliability or risk. Source is my personal experience doing reliability calculations for a NASA rocket component and working with the statisticians incorporate my numbers into their risk model.
You have it mixed up. I've worked with the stats at NASA. Mission success and failure counts. Test quantity and quality count, test freedom counts, how they learn from test counts, but the test result does not count. This isn't a mission.
This was a partially successful test nothing more and nothing less. I get people really really think SpaceX had done an excellent job and I don’t disagree but people who are comparing the end result of a long process Aka the current state of falcon 9 with a new system like Starship are going to be disappointed.
Starship is extremely likely to fail repeatedly before achieving anything close to the same streak as the Falcon 9 has. That’s not an issue with SpaceX that’s an inherent aspect of doing something really difficult.
I don't think you realize this, but when you said that we can't exclude the test failure from the risk/reliability assessment, that's exactly what you're saying. I didn't realize until just now that you're actually defending the test failure as being acceptable.
This isn't a production flight so why are you treating it at one? What if I told you that you can't compile your code until you deploy it for the first time and you don't get to change it much after that? I'll leave you to contemplate that thought experiment yourself.
I am not treating this as anything but a test flight. Several government test flights have similarly achieved core objectives while failing to achieve every objective.
I guess I'm not sure what point you're making. If you consider a test flight failure to be part of the overall failure rate, then you're treating it the same as a "real" flight. The government is constrained to less experimentation on every level from a daily basis up through test flights. Overall they do less useful engineering and more unnecessary work.
> Except SpaceX’s failure rates are similar with every other successful launch system
Really? I make is 189 successful F9 launches since the last issue in 2018 (there's a couple of landing failures, but given that everyone else apart from the space shuttle has a 100% loss...)
If you look at the "finished product" of block 5 that makes 162 launches and zero failures.
That's reliability far beyond any other launch system, including the space shuttle and Ariane 5 which are the only ones to come close in numbers of launches. Ariane 5 is certainly a reliable system as far as spaceflight goes, but it flies 3 times a year, Falcon 9 flies 3 times a month
Hardly, landing on launch pad had a lower success rate and requires significant fuel so many otherwise perfectly reusable boosters were sacrificed for a higher launch payload.
They got great publicity from it, but landing vertically is a major compromise.
Sure, ignoring past failures can always make someone on a winning streak look invincible. But calculating the underlying odds to hit even a 200 long winning streak with the observed failure rates on other systems wouldn’t be particularly unlikely.
These systems all are quite good, and they have tended to get better over time.
My point would be that while SpaceX does save lots of money, it doesn't do so by producing cheap or less reliable rockets. It would never accept a failure rate any different than anyone else because, in aerospace, that isn't really a thing. SpaceX can certainly blast forwards with different business practices and different tolerance for developmental risks, but the final product will not be fundamentally different than anyone else: near-perfect machines resulting in near-perfect performance. There will never be a "cheap" version of a commercial rocket with an accepted less-than-perfect failure rate. Spaceflight is an all-or-nothing game.
> My point would be that while SpaceX does save lots of money, it doesn't do so by producing cheap or less reliable rockets.
It does though. During the development process. SpaceX will do five launches with lower reliability vehicles before the big launch providers will even do a single launch, and those five will have be cheaper in total. Of course, they aren't putting essential cargo (or god forbid people) on these higher risk test flights. By the time they're doing that they have developed certainty in the design.
A number of Tesla related non-deaths can be attributed to Autopilot safety features working as promised. Tesla will argue that the number is higher, based on number of crashes per mile statistics. I'm not sure if that's true, but assuming for everyone who died due to an Autopilot failure, someone else survived a human error crash that didn't happen, would that be a good thing? What about if it was, for example, 10 people saved for every 1 killed?
And statistically many more people would have died without AP. But you're correct in that Tesla is using the same playbook on FSD as SpaceX, launch HW (and SW) early and iterate often, and I'd bet they'll save way more lives trying to get to autonomy like SpaceX rather than like NASA (the Waymo approach).
> But you're correct in that Tesla is using the same playbook on FSD as SpaceX
Except Tesla, unlike SpaceX, is willing to put passengers in its test vehicles. The SpaceX approach would be to let a bunch of FSD Teslas crash into things and each other before giving them payloads.
Putting someone in an experimental rocket is quite different from being essentially a safety driver required to pay attention and take over at any time. If you have an accident on FSD is is probably (though not always) your fault for not paying attention.
I “unwillingly” have to share the road with people who murder 40,000 people a year with their vehicles. Thankfully we are developing the technology to get these reckless maniacs out of the driver’s seat.
> And statistically many more people would have died without AP.
Citation needed. Not Tesla's "stats" that if the people compiling them completed anything more than high school statistics are intensely misleading.
Comparing a subset of miles driven on the simplest and easiest roads (because the systems can't be used and are turned off) and comparing to accident stats across ALL roads is disingenuous to the extreme, and Tesla continues to tout it.
Short of pulling over, humans don't have the opportunity to say "let's disengage, because it's a bit challenging", and then not have to worry about "counting" any accidents from there forward.
Agreed. It’s like if I unit tested 0.01 percent of my code but ran the unit test 10 million times, with no failures, and claimed it was therefore “statistically” better than code that had been 100% manually tested.
SpaceX does not have a difference in intended reliability, or a difference in design reliability. (At least for the rocket as a whole. One could argue that 33 engines allows lower engine reliability through redundancy)
What they DO have is a significant difference in prototype reliability for live launch. This is clear when you look at their launch history.
Or one could say that SpaceX has basically the same tolerance for failure as the traditional rocket companies had back in the 50s and 60s when they too were first learning to build rockets. That pre-launch "tolerance" is basically zero, with every post-launch failure being investigated as a mistake to be corrected rather than an acceptable cost of doing business.
I don't think that is accurate. There is a difference between 9%, 99%, and 99.999% confidence of success going into a launch.
You can almost always delay builds and launces to run more simulations, tests, and studies and increase confidence.
A simple example is SpaceX could have chosen to wait until they had a booster test with 100% engine ignition before moving on a full launch. Instead they choose move forward anyways without more stationary booster testing.
> There will never be a "cheap" version of a commercial rocket with an accepted less-than-perfect failure rate. Spaceflight is an all-or-nothing game.
Why? If you're launching people I see why you want near-perfect, but if you're launching something with a low replacement cost (ex: getting fuel to orbit to support other projects) it seems to me that as volumes get large enough eventually "use lower quality and accept a slightly higher probability of failure" starts to be cost effective.
Because there is no way of building a cheaper rocket with a less reliability. Take aircraft. Does anyone deliberately build cargo aircraft with less reliability than passenger aircraft? Does anyone build a smaller airliner with less reliability than the big airliners because fewer lives are at risk in the smaller aircraft? No. All aircraft are designed and built to amazingly high standards because, in such as complex high-energy environment, there is no money to be saved by building less-than-perfect machines.
Most cargo planes are expected to run out of civilian airports where a failure could result in debris launching themselves into populated vehicles or buildings. In contrast a crop duster launching off a dirt runway and expected to go no more faster than highway speeds actually can be built fairly loose, and often are. For example, this duster here [1] won a award in the 70s for innovations like a "pressurized cockpit" and "air conditioning".
Listen, we don’t need to speculate. Read the History of Falcon9 development.
Your comments in this thread all go against the development approach of that rocket— Falcon9 is a stable platform now as it is used in production. In the development phase there were tons of explosions. This all happened in the past.
No. All aircraft are designed and built to amazingly high standards because, in such as complex high-energy environment, there is no money to be saved by building less-than-perfect machines.
But this is totally false. There are entirely different standards applied if you want to design an aircraft for commercial airline passenger transport vs for general aviation. There are entirely different requirements for instrumentation reliability if you're building a day-VFR aircraft vs one that is allowed to fly in instrument conditions. And there are entirely different requirements for aircraft that you sell to the public vs ones that you build yourself.
The aviation side is full of examples of exactly the sliding scale you're saying doesn't exist.
> there is no way of building a cheaper rocket with a less reliability
Of course there is. The famous example is radiation hardening. SpaceX opted for redundancy instead. Not only cheaper, but more modern, too.
> in such as complex high-energy environment, there is no money to be saved by building less-than-perfect machines
SpaceX has launched zero humans. (EDIT: Totally wrong!) It aims to, so target reliability is high. (I would argue their track record in production is a product of their willingness to push the envelope in tests.) But there is a large market for cheap, if unreliable, launches. Because there is an emerging market of cheap satellite makers.
I'm with you on spaceflight but people definitely have built small cargo carrying UAVs to a lower standard than passenger aircraft. Such a thing is conceivable anyway.
Ya but smaller UAVs aren't operating in the same energy environment. They are small enough that them randomly dropping on people's houses doesn't matter much. Aerospace is about things large/fast/high enough that all failures put lives at risk.
Okay, so you're not saying it has to be expensive, but almost the opposite? Perfect and slapdash have similar production cost, so properly designed rockets will all be just about perfect?
> My point would be that while SpaceX does save lots of money, it doesn't do so by producing cheap or less reliable rockets
Indeed, if we assume that the each launch is an IID binomial coin flip (which isn’t really the right way to evaluate right-censored data), and observe (by reading Wikipedia) that SpaceX has had at least 450 successful Falcon 9 launches since the last in-flight failure, then they have at least five nines of reliability:
0.999995^450 ~= 449/450.
Which appears to be an industry-leading stat.
For context (excluding the Columbia re-entry failure), the space shuttle only had 4 nines:
I'm going to challenge those numbers: Using a posterior probability density function for a binomial distribution, the lower bound in Falcon 9 reliability is .9934 with 95% confidence (assuming 450/450 successful trials). The reliability of F9 could be much lower than five 9s and still reasonably give you 450/450 successful trials. There's only a 0.44% chance that F9 reliability is at least five 9's given the data.
Sounds exactly the same. There are no cheap aircraft. Everything that flies is subject to innumerable laws and regulations to ensure that it is built to exceedingly high standards. There is no such thing as a discount aircraft with lesser reliability. Some are cheaper than others but none are deliberately less-reliable, not in any fundamental way. Even ultralights have to abide many regulations.
To me, this comment implies that SpaceX is better/smarter than NASA, Northrop, Boeing, et. al. That may be true, but it's worth remembering that the goals are very different. Because of congressional oversight, SLS is largely a jobs/pork program. Spaceflight is incidental.
> To me, this comment implies that SpaceX is better/smarter than NASA, Northrop, Boeing, et. al.
I don’t think SpaceX has smarter engineers. I don’t think they even have smarter managers, since many of their executives used to work for NASA and/or traditional aerospace firms (e.g. President+COO Gwynne Shotwell started out in aerospace at a private non-profit research centre doing contract engineering work for the NASA Space Shuttle and the US military space program)
One big difference is Elon Musk at the founding of SpaceX told his executives to take big risks (as in “if this fails we go bankrupt”). I think Tory Bruno at ULA is a great CEO, but no way is Boeing or Lockheed-Martin ever saying to him “we want you to take such big risks that we might go bankrupt if they fail”. He, and all the people under him, are only allowed to take small-to-medium sized risks. But that puts a definite limit on what they can achieve compared to SpaceX whose executives and engineers have the freedom to make much riskier decisions
>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.
I'm not the best way to frame this is "first one to a single successful launch". Reliability matters when you're dealing with high-risk scenarios, so a better measure is "probability of a given launch being successful".
That only matters after you’ve gone operational though. The difference here isn’t risk appetite for operational launches, it’s risk appetite for test launches. SpaceX expects to do many, many more test launches than SLS, in fact counting Starship upper stage launches they’re already well ahead.
I'm not asking as a 'gotcha' question, I'm acknowledging that the sample size matters. A lot of these statistics are bandied about without really elaborating on the full context of the way reliability is actually measured in industry.
Without checking for the most up-to-date numbers, I believe the F9 is slightly better than Soyuz on raw numbers (successful flights / total attempted). But Soyuz probably has around 6-7x more flights, meaning we have much more confidence that the Soyuz numbers accurately reflect reality.
Soyuz has only had 140 flights, and had some non lethal mission failures in recent decades. It’s a manned mission vehicle only though. Overall I don’t think you can really say one is more reliable than the other, they’re both very reliable. I’m just saying the suggestion that SpaceX approach is inherently less safe is very much contrary to the evidence.
Having said that I do think propulsive landing for crewed vehicles is pretty scary. F9 firsts stage landings have been pretty reliable for a while, and they now have several boosters with 10 or more flights, so we’ll see. It’s not like capsule landings are 100% safe either.
There has been over 140 crewed launches. For context, you seem to be counting both test/demo, crewed, and uncrewed F9 launches. Again, I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but there's probably ~10 crewed F9 launches, so it's an order magnitude difference using the same metric. It's gets better though, when comparing total launches.
This is true -- there is a lot of small number statistics in estimating the reliability of launch vehicles. And there are a lot of small risks you never see until you accumulate a lot of lunches. But that question is completely incidental to the design methodology.
A new vehicle will always be unproven. But one that's flown 5 times in testing (4 of them unsuccessfully) before its first flight will have had more flight time on most of its systems than something like the SLS where you take 10 years to think about what could go wrong and then do one test launch and call it good.
As long as the organization has and maintain a culture that is aggressively seeking out problems large and small, and proactively fixing aprox. all of them, you will end up with a program with a high rate of operational success.
It's the X-origin vs Slope issue - steeper slope always wins.
The problem is maintaining that aggressive problem-seeking culture after long periods of success
This is part of the culture distinction. On one hand SpaceX is attacking problems, but IMO they often don't go towards attacking the root causal understanding. That means there's a possibility of unknown latent risk.
As an example, they had issues with failures related to their COPVs rupturing. On the one hand, they addressed the problem by redesigning their system. On the other, they never really investigated fully why the COPVs were failing in the first place. Instead, NASA decided to fund that investigation on their own. One possible consequence is that their redesign didn't fully address the risk because they never fully investigated the root cause.
But the apples to oranges here is >1 launches (SpaceX, some successful and some unsuccessful) vs 1 successful launch (traditional modern aerospace).
From an outcome perspective, it's hard to ever see the lower launch rate dominating from any perspective.
You don't have economies of manufacturing scale, because your assembly rate is so low it doesn't make sense not to treat each as exquisite.
You don't have rapid iteration on manufacturing improvements, because the tyranny of safety checks on manufacturing time balloons {time from fix to flight}, after a proposed fix is identified.
And most importantly, you leave yourselves extremely vulnerable to unknown-unknowns, that you can't imagine in the design phase.
For example, if NASA had been launching the shuttle more rapidly, with the bulk of those being uncrewed launches, they probably would have picked an uncrewed launch to test expanding the temperature bounds at Cape Canaveral, and Challenger would have exploded without a crew.
As was, NASA's shuttle launches were so rare that there wasn't acceptable launch rate and weren't low-impact launch opportunities to do so. So they tested it on a crewed mission with disastrous results.
Point being: they backed themselves into a low-volume/high-risk corner of their own strategic design
SpaceX's most brilliant achievement was using Starlink to artificially boost launch demand and give them a minimally-profitable/break-even place to sink higher-risk launches.
> Point being: they backed themselves into a low-volume/high-risk corner of their own strategic design
Because they knew they had to "get it right" the first time because a bunch of buffoons(congress) would consider any crash or explosion as a failure and pull funds immediately.
>Because they knew they had to "get it right" the first time because a bunch of buffoons(congress) would consider any crash or explosion as a failure and pull funds immediately.
I agree with many of your points, but it comes across as slightly biased because you don't acknowledge a single downside to any of them.
>You don't have rapid iteration on manufacturing improvements, because the tyranny of safety checks on manufacturing time balloons
Rapid iterations has obvious benefits. But there are also downsides because it makes it harder to arrive at a stable, reliable design, it introduces vendor issues, etc. Tesla is also known for iterating faster compared to their major competitors but it has resulted in logistics and reliability issues.
IMO SpaceX's most brilliant achievement was leveraging govt contracts to work out the kinks of their designs, which could then be leveraged at a lower risk for Starlink. In effect, they let the public take the burden of the risk (because the govt is really the only entity capable of shouldering that size of a risk for an unproven quantity) and then transitioned to a private means of revenue in Starlink. (I'm not saying that as a slight btw, I think it's mutually beneficial).
Frankly comparing Tesla and SpaceX is getting to be a tiresome argument. They're owned by one "eccentric" billionaire, but he's not an engineer, they don't share staff, facilities or manufacturing outside of "hey this alloy is pretty good".
SpaceX's strategy for the Falcon 9 worked and it's one of the most reliable rockets in the world, flying the most often.
>Frankly comparing Tesla and SpaceX is getting to be a tiresome argument.
You're focused on the wrong takeaway. You're making this about a person, I'm talking about a process. I used Tesla because it's easy to see how one culture translates to the other. Insert any company that uses rapid iteration in place of Tesla if you prefer.
The point is that there are certain circumstances where rapid iteration is useful and others less so. When reliability matters, rapid iteration may be working against you. (It's a continuum, of course, so the real question is where is that tipping point)
>SpaceX's strategy for the Falcon 9 worked
The point I'm driving at is there is a distinction to be made when finding out why certain iterations didn't work vs. just changing the design without fully understanding the failure mechanisms of the first. One leads to a greater understanding than the other. It's a difference in an engineers mindset and a scientists mindset.
No. I am not saying it’s the “industry” as much as the context of risk. That's why it doesn't matter if the analogy is Tesla or some other safety-critical manufacturer. To be clearer: how many F9 launches have carried humans?
Now go look at the history of Shuttle for the equivalent number of launches at that risk level. Would you claim they are equivalent in terms of human-rated safety?
If not, it’s only because you have the benefit of knowing the long-tail probabilities with the Shuttle.
>It's the same industry. Building the same type of product.
By extension of your logic, Starship should then already have the same launch reliability as F9. So either this is an example of a low-probability event, or your logic is flawed.
There were 135 space shuttle launches, of which 2 failed. There have been 162 launches of the F9 block 5 with 0 failures. Why do you think we have more knowledge of the long-tail probability of the Shuttle than F9?
True, few of those F9 missions were crewed, but that's the point. There's no difference between a crewed and a noncrewed F9 launch vehicle, so there's no reason to think the presence of humans would change the risk. So, you get to accumulate most of that reliability data without putting people at risk doing so.
>Why do you think we have more knowledge of the long-tail probability of the Shuttle than F9?
Because the nature of the two programs was fundamentally different. The Shuttle was a product contract, while CCP is a service contract. On the former, the govt has much more control, and will detail more rigorous acceptance criteria. This generally gives a much higher pedigree on quality control. On the latter, they take a much more hands off approach and have limited insight.
As an analogy, imagine you are making a big bet on acquiring a software company. One company gives you their source code, shows you all their most recent static analysis, unit test results, allows you to interview their programmers etc. The other company allows you none of that, but gives you a chance to play around on their website to see for yourself. Both systems seem to work when you try the end product, but which do you have higher confidence in?
At the end of the day, "reliability" is just a measure of how much confidence we have that a product will do what we ask of it, when we ask.
Are you asserting that we gain better insight into the reliability of a system by thinking about it deeply rather than by observing it perform its function? Because I don't believe that for a minute.
I'm not saying you can get by without thinking, but it's difficult for humans to estimate the reliability of a complicated system. Reality, though, has no problem doing it.
Plus, I think your analogy is flawed. NASA surely has a more hands-off approach on the CCP than on the Shuttle, but to say it's hands-off is misleading. They do have a lot of access.
No, I'm not saying by "thinking about it" (although that has its place). Everything I listed is a form of testing. But there's a distinction between iterative testing at a lower level, and end-to-end testing. Again, both have their place.
Take the example of the F9 strut failure. They could have tested the material outside of the final test configuration and saved themselves a lot of trouble. They chose to forego that testing, and instead 'tested ' it as part of part of their launch configuration. (I put it in quotes because it's not clear to me that this was a conscious testing decision).
There’s also a difference between “we’re not completely sure of the fundamental principles, but our testing indicates it works” and “our testing indicates it works and we have a solid understanding why”. The latter allows you to know the limits of your application much more readily. The risk in the former is that you don’t know what you don’t know, so you can never be wholly sure if you’re good or lucky. And luck can be fickle. And this is also where rapid iteration can lead to issues: the more you change, the less sure you can be about whether your results are attributable to luck.
>Plus, I think your analogy is flawed. NASA surely has a more hands-off approach on the CCP than on the Shuttle, but to say it's hands-off is misleading. They do have a lot of access.
They have many engineers who want more access and are effectively told to back off because it's not their place in this type of contract. So I'm not saying they have no access, I'm saying they have very limited access by comparison. It would have been better if I made the analogy that they get the results to a small select number of tests, but not all.
Considering his vast wealth of knowledge and expertise in the field he might as well be called an engineer. In fact probably more so than many real engineers.
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.
I feel like the N1 is unfairly demonized. They didn't have the benefit of modern closed loop computer flight controls that we have now. Detailed fluid dynamics simulations. Modern manufacturing techniques and production accuracy.
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!
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.
It depends on what you count as a chip. Modern "chips" are actually a great many things all one one slab of silicon. Failure then knock out single components, resulting in the final chip going into one bin or another. And each of those components can be as complex as an entire "chip" from a few years ago. That is really creating reliability through numbers. Within every component any slight error will still brick that component. The binning process is really a edge case where the fab is playing at the margins. Any slight increase in error rate would quickly see every chip going into a "bad" bin, with the entire processing becoming uneconomical. Intel, and everyone else building chips, strives for perfection with a zero tolerance mantra.
But binning is largely binning against performance curves: "we doped this side of the wafer just a little too much and it's a little slow, but this one from the other side is just right" - while checking for faults (full chip scan and other manufacturing tests) result in dies being thrown out.
> 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.
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.
SpaceX is just doing what the Soviets did. The Soviets preferred to launch and learn just like SpaceX does today. Soviets also ran on a much smaller budget than NASA and preferred simplicity over complexity and constant tweaking.
The Soviets proved that methodology works and SpaceX continues it to this day. I have a feeling most that follow SpaceX think they are trying a new revolutionary approach here.
The N1 didn't really fit the testing driven development approach, they couldn't static fire the flight engines, they ended up relying on test firing extra engines from the same batch and assuming all in a batch were the same.
I'm no rocket expert, but the Wikipedia article you linked seems to have an idea about that:
>Adverse characteristics of the large cluster of thirty engines and its complex fuel and oxidizer feeder systems were not revealed earlier in development because static test firings had not been conducted.[9]
Time and money. Powers at be decided to stop funding the project. If SpaceX goes bankrupt next year, they could fail too and it won't have anything to do with the technology.
Strategically, they were caught with their pants down when the US demonstrated they were serious about going to the Moon. The soviet space program was great at sending cosmonauts to LEO, but they had no ability, and no desire to spend the time and effort to develop the ability, to go to the Moon.
They planned and expensed the N1 as if it was another LEO Soyuz variant.
The N1 was always doomed to fail because the USSR spies had been found and were given misleading information and plans for the US space program. The US intelligence community snuck bugs into the N1 design by sneaking them into the designs their spies thought they were stealing.
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.
>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.
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.
But you still need to do it for something like a rocket that is supposed to carry people in the future. In to long term, it's better to evaluate reliability of every component at the beginning, than do it after if fails.
You actually don’t. With a high launch cadence you can make statistical inferences about the reliability of the system as a whole. This isn’t the 80s where you launch one disposable rocket every 6 months. Starship is fully reusable and will likely fly multiple times a week carrying non human payloads.
Have you heard of instances where airplanes failed due to something as basic as a nut or a screw not meeting the required specifications? It's difficult to trust the reliability of a rocket, which is largely based on statistics, when you're putting hundreds of people on it. How can we be certain that NASA/FAA and other organizations will permit such a risk?
The crash of Partnair Flight 394 in 1989 resulted from the installation of counterfeit aircraft parts. Counterfeit bolts, attaching the vertical stabilizer of a Convair CV-580 to the fuselage, wore down excessively, allowing the tail to vibrate to the extent that it eventually broke off.
This happens to aircraft, and the only way to ensure it doesn't happen to rockets is to have extreme control of your supply chain.
You can’t verify the reliability of an aircraft by flying it 1000 times because you’d be putting the life of the pilots at risk. Autonomous rockets have no such constraint. You could launch starship an unlimited number of times without putting a single person at risk.
It's not even about putting the life of the pilots at risk - it's about cost.
It's starting to look like the lack of flame diverter was a huge mistake that will cost a lot of money and time, how do you think this will affect the whole project? What if after they fix the launchpad, it gets destroyed again, simply because some other preventable failure? How many more of these "tests" can they have without going bankrupt?
Pouring new concrete is cheap, they’ve already done it multiple times from damage due to test fires. Each time they reformulate the concrete and it needs less repair.
After they get to orbit they can start putting payloads on board, and the tests will pay for themselves. I’d say the risk of bankruptcy is very low.
Edit:
Just saw photos of the crater under stage zero. Looks like they do need a flame diverter lol.
Once they realized they needed a flame diverter, I think they traded off the cost and delay of putting one in vs the cost of just filling the hole each time.
It's totally feasible for them to keep testing and keep refilling that hole while in parallel they build a perfect launch pad with a flame diverter somewhere else. That way they don't have a gap in testing cadence.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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...
Right. The criteria for this test was "Failure = CATO (catastrophic at takeoff)". It took off, it didn't CATO, it even hit max Q, therefore success. That's not "partial success". That's 100% success, you won the game show, but you didn't get all the points in the sudden death bonus round.
[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.
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.
I was just poking that the parable ignores that the iterative side also requires an additional element - a target state to converge to over time, whatever that may be - repetition isn’t sufficient.
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.
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.
> 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.
Nothing contradicts that. SpaceX does do this contextually. Once they nailed down the Falcon 9 rocket, the boosters and the Merlin engine, they mostly stopped messing with it and focused on operational excellence. But to get to that point they failed fast, because it's the most effective way to get reliability.
See the last comment of my OP. The risk I'm poking at is a cultural one, where "failing fast" becomes an acceptable mode of operating, regardless of the context.
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).
Alternative take: SpaceX is so new they don't know what they don't know.
Take their example of a failed F9 strut, where the material supplied by a vendor didn't come close to meeting the necessary specs. A mature aersopace company would have processes in place to check the material for these specs before use. SpaceX has since levied these new process checks, but prior to that failure lots people may have pointed to them as being more efficient because of their 'streamlined' process.
A mature aersopace company would have processes in place to check the material for these specs before use.
Would a "mature aerospace company" also know to not use O-rings outside the temperature range specified by its engineers? Or know to test whether foam traveling at high velocity would penetrate the TPS?
Look, this is hard stuff. It's very easy to tell when you screw up, but very difficult to tell how close you are to screwing up. You're deluding yourself if you think some entities are immune to screwing up just because they've been around.
Whataboutism aside, I’m not delusional; I’m quite upfront that these types of biases exist at every organization that is staffed by human beings.
The difference is I don’t allow “gosh, space is hard!” as a rationale for thinking one organization is immune to those shortcomings. So instead of taking a look and asking something like, “Hmmm. Every other organization seems to have a supplier vetting process for safety critical stuff, I wonder if we should too?” We can instead just pretend we’re smart and different and be forced to learn already solved problems the hard way. The supplier thing is very standard quality control process stuff that transcends industry. Knowing if foam can penetrate tile or o-rings operate out of spec are not, precisely because they were non-standard conditions. That’s not to say that the decisions weren’t flawed, but I don’t think it’s as good of an analogy as you may think. Besides, the investigations largely pointed to broken cultures so I don’t know if that’s the type of company you want SpaceX associated with.
What’s the saying? “A fool learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from somebody else’s”
That's fair, my point was just that you made it sound like "mature aerospace companies" were some special beings that didn't make mistakes.
It's good to learn from other people's mistakes, but you also can't let everything people have done before go unchallenged or no progress would ever be made from rockets that cost $2B per launch.
Yeah, I realize now that probably wasn't worded as well as it could have been. To say it differently, I would expect well-run companies (whether 'mature' or not) to have the processes in place to better control the well-known problems. When it comes to those 'unknown unknowns' sometimes you can't learn except by trial-and-error.
Or, you can take a risk-informed approach, and understand what risks are prevalent (e.g., the risk of a bad vendor) and put the appropriate checks in place to mitigate that risk. "Learning" doesn't always mean taking the highest risk option and just rolling the dice.
Indeed, and one way to verify you meet the spec is to test it, which they did and found it to be deficient. Having done so, they decided to improve their process. This is the definition of learning from your mistakes
This is an really optimistic outlook. One way to test the rocket is also to see if it fails when humans are aboard. But it may not be the best way to balance risk and what you learn.
It would have been much more economical to test a coupon of the material upon receipt, like what is considered standard practice throughout aerospace companies. Or, like you said, you can blow up a rocket and launch pad instead. Same result, different risk profiles.
I don't think anyone would argue it would have been better had they known better and done things right the first.
The question is how you transition from the state of not knowing to knowing.
If you have poor processes and a lack of knoledge, how do you get better?
In this specific instance, the root cause analysis and remediation are vastly more complicated that presented in this thread. It is not like SpaceX wasnt doing testing on incoming materials at all or ignorant of the concept.
You’re right. Like most failures of this type, it’s rarely simple and these forums are super conducive to long-form discussion. They did checks, but they were inadequate.
Regarding knowing if you have a poor process or not, it depends on the uniqueness of your problem. For proteins that are relatively common, like material checks, you can shorten your learning process by looking at other organizations that have been through it for decades. For more exotic non-standard problems, you might have to learn the hard way.
I think the distinction I'm making is that the "form" of learning you take should be proportional to the risk and that all forms are not equal in value.
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?
That is a real issue. I think part of it involves creating a culture where it's acceptable to make failures as long as those failures were the result of a sound decision process.
What you don't want is a culture that is either a) afraid to take any risk because they are afraid of career consequences or b) willing to roll the dice with bad decision processes due to biases and bad incentives.
Example for a): bureaucrats who are unwilling to push the envelope because a bad outcome would effectively end their career
Example for b): making high-risk decisions due cost/schedule pressure, like competition for a contract
Early modern sailors were uneducated manual labourers with few economic prospects in a world where simply living as a lower class individual was more dangerous than nearly any job that exists in the developed world today. Sailing often paid better than jobs on land which made up for the risk, and it offered the potential of massive reward to the high class leadership of the vessel.
There is no consummate economic incentive for being an astronaut. The incentive is the experience and making some impact on science, and while that motivates many people the probability of attracting the best and the brightest goes down as the probability of exploding goes up.
I'd say there's unlikely to be enough of an economic incentive to justify riskier manned space travel until the earth becomes a whole lot less habitable.
If what you're saying is true, how come astronaut programs have many more applicants than they can take? People have other goals in life beyond economic incentives.
People volunteer for the military, and I don't think anyone's under any illusion this is risk free. The important thing is not lying to people about the risk involved.
>People have other goals in life beyond economic incentives.
They acknowledged this point, though:
>The incentive is the experience and making some impact on science
I think you might be interpreting their last point differently than me. I took it to mean that the "Mars or bust" is an inspiring, but impractical, narrative.
I don't know what you're talking about. The Space Shuttle blew up twice, killed too many people out of sheer incompetence. And it flew again both times. Both times because NASA needed the vehicle to deliver on its promises. The Space Shuttle should never have flown after Columbia was lost. But it did, because NASA decided to live with the risks.
My expectation is that as soon as someone gets something going beyond Earth orbit and beyond the need to obtain launch licenses from the FAA, the zero-tolerance safety culture will be reduced. The Martians will build nuclear power plants.
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.
I've worked in aerospace. The organizations (both public and private) would all claim to fail "within the confines of a safe environment".
One small BS detector is when there's some unplanned/unmitigated test outcome that gets characterized as a "test anomaly" rather than being transparent about the details.
>they've already mapped out the failure modes and are able to prevent them when it really matters
This remains to be seen. The shuttle also had all their failure modes mapped out. As did CST-100. Yet massive failures still occurred.
Well in the case of the Shuttle both accidents that killed people were due to previously identified failure modes. At the end of the day, risk will always be a number greater than 0%. At some point someone is going to have to make a judgement call that the risk is low enough to proceed, and sometimes that call is going to be wrong.
The failure modes may have been known but the effects were not. A FMEA needs both to work.
Regarding the foam, they had a difficult time even recreating it after the fact. It was apparently only on a lark that they decided to turn the gun up to 11 and, viola, now the foam had the physical properties capable of damaging the tile catastrophically. So, yes, they knew the mechanism of foam shedding but did not realize the effect properly.
With the o-rings, they similarly just didn’t have the test data for this conditions. They incorrectly extrapolated on the test data they did have.
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).
> 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.
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?
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.
Until now, every kg we launch has been horrendously expensive. So all things in orbit and sent to other planets have lots of expensive design features to reduce weight or to reduce size in the fairing.
StarShip is so huge and the reuse will be so cheap that it's going to be 100x or more cheaper. We could send heavy equipment into space and on to other planets that just didn't make sense before.
Once Starship can land 100 tons on the moon, the question isn't "what can we fit" but "how do we fill all this capacity usefully?!" So the science objectives we can achieve grow enormously.
The viability of the Starlink constellation depends on getting large numbers of satellites on orbit quickly. And the newest generation of Starlink birds are too large to fit in the Falcon 9 fairing.
If you are planning on several y and z anyways, absolutely. 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.
Adjacent to this discussion is the "All Up Testing" concept from the Saturn era. The conservative testing strategy was to test each component individually, then put them together and test them as a system. All up eschewed this conservative approach, testing everything that was ready. It's only marginally germane to this discussion, but a great historical note since other commenters are comparing the Starship with the Saturn V.
Maybe if you were only planning on doing something once. They've already nearly completed the next rocket. The whole point of this launch was a test. There was nothing on it. The next iteration will also be a test, and likely the next few after that. They'll even fly their own satellites up on test vehicles until they've worked out more of the kinks. Then before you know it, it'll be as reliable as falcon 9 and launching 100 times a year.
Look at all the Martian rovers. That is a notoriously hard environment to operate in, so success has often been defined as "the rover functions for at least 30 days". And then some rovers ended up working for over a decade. That doesn't mean that every rover that didn't last an entire decade was a failure though! It just means that, regardless of whether you hit your main goal, if you still have something working left over at that point, of course you keep using it.
The main goal here was to clear the pad and get some atmospheric experience with the entire stack. Goal met. But of course they had contingency plans to get as much more experience with it as possible, if things continued to function nominally (as they have with some rovers, or indeed some previous first SpaceX test flights, like the Falcon Heavy).
As you point out, "success" depends entirely on your goals for the task.
SpaceX said their goal was to get off the launch pad going into this, which indeed may have been setting a low bar for success. However, there is no other alternative definition.
If you are tasked with recording X, and anything else beyond is bonus, doing X is success.
If the rocket had exploded on the pad, that would’ve been an unsuccessful test. The launch pad and tower are way more expensive than the rockets and take much more time to replace. They call it “stage 0.”
Btw this isn’t moving the goalposts. Clearing the launch tower was always the success criterion; the rest is gravy.
yeah I think many people saw the launch as the launch of the finished Starship+booster when what was really happening was a test of maybe v0.0.2 if not pre-alpha. It's not done yet, there's a long ways to go before the expectation becomes 100% success.
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.
Raptor2 also is being upgraded with things like electric gimbaling vs hydraulics. I think that was a hydraulic unit at the bottom of super heavy that exploded a few sec after lift off. So... electric gimbaling it is then. ;)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Unusually, the ejection system was tested with live bears and chimpanzees; it was qualified for use during 1963 and a bear became the first living being to survive a supersonic ejection.
I was thinking more in terms of the B-1 crew escape capsule [1] consisting of the whole cockpit equipped with rocket engines and parachutes to push it away from the plane and allowing it to land in one piece. The same could be done with the top of Starship, the part above the fuel tanks.
They want to carry 100 people. An escape system for those many people is the same scale of a commercial airliner escape system, which is designed to be operated on a stationary plane, on land or water. Astronauts will be well trained to use it but I think that there must be a lot of openings to let 100 people get out quickly in mid air. Maybe they'll agree that Starship is its own escape system.
Before the "Ejection escape systems" there are a few paragraphs about "inflight crew escape system"
> The vehicle was put in a stable glide on autopilot, the hatch was blown, and the crew slid out a pole to clear the orbiter's left wing. They would then parachute to earth or the sea
But 100 people is a different matter IMHO.
Ejections seats and capsule were not pursued, the Wikipedia page explains the reasons.
The big problem with the Space Shuttle was that the orbiter was located next to the fuel tank and between the solid boosters instead of on top of it. This made it impossible to perform the normal "accelerate away from the big boom" manoeuvre which normal rocket escape systems use. On Starship the passengers will be situated above the explosives instead of next to them/between them. As to whether it is possible to add escape engines of sufficient power to pull away the nose cone, push it up into a parabolic trajectory of sufficient height to give parachutes the chance to deploy I don't know but at least it could be done in theory where the design of the Space Shuttle and its "close cousin" Buran made this impossible.
We also went by "Human Interference Task Force" and "Angus MacHammer and the Ukrainian Glowplugs," renown in North Texas for our musical mediocrity. We were once introduced as "DJ Control Rat and MC 1000 Inch Buddha," which was interesting 'cause we were completely unrelated to MC 1000 Foot Jesus and played bluegrass.
Fun, little known fact: The Shuttle program's only successful post-launch abort was performed by Challenger in STS-51-F (not to be confused with Challenger's STS-51-L, which ended... suboptimally)
If you're counting the capsule itself, Starship qualifies too.
If you're talking about the launch escape tower, that's for during launch. It's gone by the time you reach orbit, leaving you in the same scenario of Lunar Starship in the event of a failure; in space, but no way to get down.
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?
Salt water is bad … evil stuff … they already try to avoid siting on the pad as much as possible to reduce salt spray corrosion from the sea air… even the barge trip back to land is less than ideal… salt water is the enemy of any complicated metal objects… so they are doing everything possible to avoid hitting the salt water and to keep the rocket as far away from it as practicable.
> 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.
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.
This is pretty hyperbolic. In the shuttle era, these contingencies were thought of and planned for. The amount of preparation NASA would do before shuttle launches was incredible, including flying medical and rescue teams to the chosen launch abort sites.
"Preparations of TAL sites took four to five days and began one week before launch, with the majority of personnel from NASA, the Department of Defense and contractors arriving 48 hours before launch. Additionally, two C-130 aircraft from the space flight support office from the adjacent Patrick Space Force Base (then known as Patrick Air Force Base) would deliver eight crew members, nine pararescuers, two flight surgeons, a nurse and medical technician, and 2,500 pounds (1,100 kg) of medical equipment to Zaragoza, Istres, or both. One or more C-21S or C-12S aircraft would also be deployed to provide weather reconnaissance in the event of an abort with a TALCOM, or astronaut flight controller aboard for communications with the shuttle pilot and commander."
Do you think that is fundamentally different with, say, Boeing or SpaceX?
If you look through all the failures and close calls in aerospace they are often rooted in human psychological errors. The pressures that lead to them may change with different organizations, but they don't go away.
This almost sounds like the start of a joke.... 'so an engineer, a politician, and an accountant walk into a bar.' One's the head of SpaceX, one's the head of NASA, ones the head of Boeing. So yeah, I do think there's a fundamental difference there.
So how would you characterize that difference, both in terms of strengths and weaknesses? I have a few thoughts but would be curious to hear yours first.
While this is an interesting question I'm not going to give an especially interesting answer. I see things as you might imagine. And while it might seem unfair I'd also appeal to reality. It's now been more than half a century since a human left low earth orbit. NASA and Boeing (et al) had all this time to succeed. They failed, and there's no real excuse for their failures besides themselves, and their own motivations.
Keeping it brief SpaceX/engineer is genuinely trying to get people to Mars, largely driven by ideological reasons with extensive technical creativity/competence backing them up. Accountant/Boeing wants to make more money. Outsource our software development to guys in India bidding $9/hour? Awesome! That's another 0.037% profit, what could go wrong!? Something doesn't work? Who cares!? We're on a cost+ contract baby, what you call "failure to deliver", I call delivering value to my shareholders!
And then there's the politician. In this particular case, he's not only a life long politician but also 80 years old on top. The only 'bright side' is that, due to his political influence, he's gone to space before. On the other hand Charles Bolden was a genuine astronaut and absolutely everything one would think they would want from a NASA head, yet he was a miserable failure. It may simply be that political style leadership (even when not a politician) isn't really conducive to meaningful progress in modern times.
>They failed, and there's no real excuse for their failures besides themselves, and their own motivations.
I'd argue the incentive wasn't there until CCP. That was the fundamental difference in the last 20 years. Without CCP, I don't think SpaceX would be successful, either. But I will say they've done much more than the Boeing at executing on that incentive.
I do think you may be overly cynical in your characterization, though. It wasn't too many years ago that Boeing was listed as the most desirable company to work for by college students. The reason isn't that they thought it was because they couldn't wait to gouge the public coffers, it was because aerospace has always been considered a sexy engineering discipline. You'll almost never find a civil engineering firm on those lists because "roads and commodes" just aren't considered cool.
Back to the question, I'll weigh in with my perspective. They are all responding to incentives, albeit different ones. But we have to acknowledge the downsides of each. SpaceX is awesome, but they aren't without their own psychological pressures and biases. I've brought it up elsewhere in this thread, but they have wanted to rapidly iterate rather than fundamentally understand some of their design issues. I suspect this is partly cultural (where operational tempo matters more than scientific rigor...i.e., "we don't need to know why it works, as long as it works") and some of it is business (i.e., they have specific contractual deadlines to consider). Those are also some of the issues that lead to mishaps dating back to Apollo and Shuttle.
Considering you seem to think the legacy downsides are due to the business/shareholder side, do you see the same issues encroaching on SpaceX if they go public?
Absolutely, I do believe that SpaceX going public will largely be the death of that company. And, depending on when this happens, it could even herald the second death of space in America. The one thing that's good here is that Elon has stated that he will not be taking SpaceX public until transit between Earth and Mars is well established.
The point I'd make is that leadership really matters. Boeing, at its peak, almost certainly had orders of magnitude more talent than SpaceX did in its early years - in no small part because of what you mentioned. And they absolutely had many orders of magnitude more money and access to funding. But their leadership was just absolutely abysmal, and consequently the potential of that talent was left completely untapped.
But on the other hand, like you mentioned there are incentive problems. Even though Boeing failed to tap into their potential, their stock price has been constantly and steadily going up for decades. Even their planes literally falling out of the skies was but a brief stumble, the damage there largely repaired owing to the start of a profitable new war. So in this regard I doubt their leadership is particularly disappointed with their results. They achieved what they set out to do after all. And that's pretty disappointing.
>The point I'd make is that leadership really matters.
I wholeheartedly agree. You're probably aware, but there have been a number of good write-ups detailing an overall erosion of engineering leadership at Boeing [1].
>Elon has stated that he will not be taking SpaceX public until transit between Earth and Mars is well established.
I think maybe the difference between you and me is that I take many of Musk's promises with a boulder of salt. If I was a gambler, I'd bet that we see some wordsmithing about what the definition of a "well established Mars transit" when it comes time for an IPO.
A decade ago, the word was that SpaceX would go public "when we are reliably launching F9." Then Tesla went public and Elon decided he didn't want anything more to do with public companies. If anything, I think that statement should only be interpreted as it absolutely not happening before that condition is fulfilled, not that it will happen once it is.
... they have wanted to rapidly iterate rather than fundamentally understand some of their design issues.
You say this with seeming knowledge of the thoroughness of SpaceX's failure investigations. Care to elaborate how you can say this with such authority?
In large engineering organizations, it is not uncommon for highly specialized engineers to not be aware of the status of the overall project. Plus, you hear A LOT of different stories, rumors and expectations as projects progress. I'm SURE they started with "Oh Yeah! This Baby is Going into ORBIT!" but as time went on they were like "Well.. we don't have time to build these 18 components to spec, so we loosened the tolerance so we think it'll launch but might explode 10 seconds later." And the nameless drone in sector 47 only heard the first projection.
I would be very surprised if Shotwell didn't have an all-hands to set the whole team's expectations beforehand.
SpaceX is well known to have a very "flat" management structure. They expect all their scientists and engineers to learn, understand, and contribute across-the-board.
I've have my own version of this more times than I can count.
For me, I run a trading firm and when I started it was "if we can survive the day without losing a ton of money, its a win." I was happy if the positions even made it to the exchange the way we wanted, haha.
Which is rightly, awesome... They just launched an 11 million pound firecracker....
It would be AWESOME if elon included actual fireworks which would go off in the event of a RUD to add some fabulousness to such events.
In fact, all the devices that are stripped out for these test launches should be replaced with their equivalent weights in fireworks. Detonate them when possible during a RUD to allow for more spectacle!
This is a fantastic idea, I'm sure the FAA will be thrilled when SpaceX asks them for permission to turn their rocket into a disneyland night-time spectacular orbital missile!
All Americian launches have a Flight Termination System (FTS) which is a bomb attached to ensure the off-course vehicle explodes before returning to earth. There are personnel in the control room who can activate the FTS when something goes wrong and there is a danger to people on the ground.
That is what detonated the StarShip today.
You'll find it was notably absent in Soviet rocket tests, for instance with the N1 which veered off course, returned to the ground intact and exploded there instead.
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.
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.
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
>> 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 ;)
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.
You touch upon an interesting advantage that private space engineering has that, depending on one's attitude on the topic, may or may not be fair.
NASA has to do everything in the public eye and their process reflects this. Private enterprise is allowed to hide information, which implies they are allowed to massage information.
(... this probably says unfortunate things about the nature of governance by public sentiment that it's best not to think about over-much if one is super-fond of democracies as engines of progress...)
True. On the other hand, we do know that SpaceX has taken about $10 billion in funding since its inception.
With that, they developed Falcon 1, Merlin engines, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, first full-flow staged combustion engine in the methalox Raptor engine, Starship, Starship Heavy, Dragon, Crew Dragon, Re-usability, Starlink satellite manufacturing and 4,000 satellites launched to orbit, and quite a bit more.
The SLS has spent 23.8 billion in nominal dollars so far. SpaceX has received about 9.8 Billion total investment, which puts an upper limit on operating losses.
$9.8 billion legally-obligated-disclosable total investment. The disclosure requirements for NASA are stricter than for private industry (and there may also be an apples-to-oranges question on auditing and accounting: if NASA grants a company $500 million to do R&D, and that company turns around and pays its staff and fabrication costs with that money, is that a billion of expenditure on the SLS project or $500 million?).
I agree there are some Apples to oranges comparisons issues. For example, you would want to add pure R&D grants to the SpaceX total.
I don't follow your NASA example though. We know the NASA/government spend amount for the SLS (23.8 billion). We don't need to speculate on if there is double counting of government spend and contractor spend.
The problem is that the public and Congresspeople don't tend to see it that way. They aren't generally of the opinion that spending a couple billion to blow something up on the pad or shortly after launch is an acceptable resource expenditure (especially not at the Congressional level).
Rocket specialists know this is part for the course, but most of the public isn't rocket specialists.
I believe you underestimate the modal American congress-person and rate-payer.
In congress, maybe about 25% of them can't be bothered to remember what state they're from. They don't really matter as they'll pretty much vote however the last person to talk to them wants them to vote. This is why congressional legislative directors try to schedule appointments immediately before their congress-person votes.
About 10% of congress-people are SUPER sharp and will understand this whole "you have to break eggs to make an omelet" concept. 50% more could be educated. The remainder will act randomly depending on what the internal polling says.
SSL and Boeing and the old school guys know a critical part of their job is to lobby congress-persons and staffers. They're not paying them off, they're just making campaign contributions to ensure they get access to pitch their side of the story.
As for the modal American voter? They don't care about space. They care about whether they're getting a raise next year, the mortgage is paid and inflation doesn't price them out of a good meal every now and again. When they get economic security, THEN they start caring about other things like who goes in what bathroom, why they can't buy TANG or light-bulbs at the grocery store anymore or whether they're getting value for money in their national space program.
My gut feeling after doing polling for a few years is the numbers are about the same: 25% of American voters can't tie their shoe-laces, 10% will understand you sometimes fail when you try to do something innovative and the remainder will need some convincing.
The good news is (effectively) no-one in the US looks at national budgets. Heck, most congressional staffers never read the whole thing, just the bits they're interested in. Many (most?) voters (and congress-persons) look to membership organizations for direction. If someone is a member of the Planetary Society, and they happen to be chatting w/ their elected representative, you can be pretty sure they'll mention how important the space program is. If someone is a member of Drunk Middle-Aged Regressive Science Haters of America, you can probably guess what they think about anything with the pong of science about it. Fortunately, this latter class of Americans usually doesn't know who their congress-person is or that they have a congressional representative.
So... to make an already long post short... I don't think you have to convince EVERYBODY, just the people that matter. The message that "it's okay to fail from time to time as long as you're making substantial forward progress" is something at least half of the people who affect US budget priorities can get their brainstems around.
[And as an aside... having worked with US congress-people in the past, I can report they're frequently much smarter than you give them credit for. And you don't get to be a Legislative Director in a congressional staff without being reasonably sharp. But they do worry about how large donors will respond to their votes. We're entering a phase of debt-ceiling debates. The GOP controls congress at the moment and we'll see a lot of wheeling and/or dealing. It's quite telling to see what each party thinks is important. Biden seems to have invested a small portion of personal reputation in the SLS, probably because of it's history over the Obama administration. Despite it's actual benefits, various GOP members may use that to rail against it (SLS) as a proxy for railing against Biden. (I'm trying to avoid being partisan here, some Dems railed against the Constellation program during the Bush years, so I'm not saying it's ONLY something the GOP does. It's just the typical railing against the other party to try and fire up your base so you don't have to explain why you didn't follow-through on your campaign promises.) But I ramble...]
> NASA has to do everything in the public eye and their process reflects this. Private enterprise is allowed to hide information, which implies they are allowed to massage information.
That would be a good point if we were talking about NASA vs Blue Origin. But SpaceX is arguably building more in the open than NASA.
> How would you argue that? I mean, please step me though this argument.
The person I replied to was making the case that NASA can't take risks because they develop in the open whereas private companies can develop in hiding, so they can take more risks.
But a quick glance on reddit, nasaspaceflight, and youtube tells me that SpaceX is very much developing in the open, and to a greater extent than NASA.
Which means that there is some other reason why SpaceX feels more free to take risks than NASA.
In contrast, Blue Origin is famous for not disclosing almost any information to the public. For a long time Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA, was the one providing the most public information on Blue Origin's BE-4 engines.
If you cared to, you could download the entire US federal budget, NASA's budget, NASA's contracts with SSL, Boeing, SpaceX, etc. and all the ancillary data regarding milestones and results. You could, if you wanted, download more information that you might ever want about Blue Origin's contracts w/ the federal government. And SpaceX's contracts with the federal government.
Not everything is there, but enough to get a very decent picture of what's going on. Sometimes relevant information takes YEARS to be published.
But it's not easy to find. I've had to directly email people sometimes. Sometimes stuff is classified for no good reason other than someone thought at one point that a particular program was dual-use (commercial/military). Sometimes you DO have to file FOIA agreements.
I'm completely not coming down on anyone for not spending their time doing this. It takes a fair amount of time to piece things together from spreadsheets and contract addenda.
But it is possible.
What SpaceX does is they make it easy to see what they're doing. They upload videos to YouTube and Shotwell speaks at events and conferences from time to time. But you are getting their side of the story. Every now and again Casey Dreier over at the Planetary Society will dig up some previously difficult to find nugget of information about how various programs are being funded and exactly what they're being funded for. But Dreier's job is to focus more on planetary exploration missions rather than aerospace development, so I don't think he's focusing on SpaceX, SLS and Blue Origin.
You can only massage information so far though. The costs do actually matter and you can't turn a profit if all of your launches are horrendously expensive (above what you're charging for them), and you just keep it a secret.
What's the value add on your comment? Of course costs matter for IBM and Amazon! They're publicly traded companies, and they need to make a profit or else!
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.
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.
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.]
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 $1.6M per launch as long as the GSA doesn't audit them too closely.
There's a myth in US government purchasing that competition drives costs down, and that's probably true for commodities. But Starship class super-heavy-launch vehicles aren't commodities. There's a TREMENDOUS amount of cost (both opportunity cost and dollars) associated with fiscal oversight of large projects. The hope has always been that when Blue Origin built something to compete, it would bring total costs down. I am skeptical.
They literally have another booster/starship ready to go. The project cost may be 2-10B but the individual launch vehicles will cost less than 200M$ each.
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.
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.
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
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!".
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
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.
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.
Possible, but I don't think that's the full explanation. When the booster did a static test at half throttle, not all of the engines were able to light as well. SpaceX clearly chose to go ahead with a launch without waiting for a booster test with 100% ignition
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.
I guess "Largest rocket test in history successfully launched" doesn't generate enough traffic compared to the pessimistic "explodes minutes after launch."
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?
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.
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.
Exactly. Falcon 9 took years and a couple dozen launches to optimize the countdown and flight profile to the current best in class general purpose medium weight launcher with the flight hardware remaining relatively constant (if for nothing else than certification reasons.)
Yeah, that's why you engineer, and test before trying to launch something like that.
There won't be any other attempt this year - I can bet my lunch money on this.
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.
There was a lot of wrong with the launch from the start - failed engines, destroyed pad, parts of the rocket flying off during the start. Yes, it's amazing that it went for as far as it did, but there is no way they can fix all of it quickly.
Everything you just listed is very probably all from a single root cause (the pad not being able to handle the force) and the fix could be as simple as using a bigger water deluge system / having a pad that isn't just a flat block of concrete / etc.
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.
SV first stage had 5 engines, vs 33 on the Starship's booster. Which I think answers your question :)
I don't know about other metrics for comparing engine efficiency. But the design requirements seem quite different here - they have to be restartable (not something the F1 engines on the SV had to worry about), probably more steerable, and able to throttle down to quite low power for landing. And presumably the fact that there's so many in an array also imposes its own constraints on the design.
> > > Is 2x thrust accomplished by scaling # of engines, or are the engines 'more-thrustful' per unit because of engineering advances?
> > SV first stage had 5 engines, vs 33 on the Starship's booster. Which I think answers your question :)
> it doesnt, please eLI5
I kinda suspect bad faith/trolling, but if not... 6.5 times the number of engines for twice the thrust means that you are getting less thrust per engine.
No trolling, but one of the the things I like to promote on HN is for people to ELI5 as much as possible, given the fact that our knowledge will evaporate over time... so I want people to, as much as possible, divulge as much as one can before they kick the can...
Yah, I just though this wasn't really subject matter expertise. It's not quite ELI"5", but I thought reasoning using ratios would be universal/intuitive.
Having a whole bunch of engines means loosing a few at launch won't end in disaster. That means you can pursue more high-risk, high-performance engine designs.
Starship at this point is mostly a shell. Internal human grade components aren't there yet. We have no idea what the final cost will be. But doesn't matter since NASA is the one paying.
> We have no idea what the final cost will be. But doesn't matter since NASA is the one paying.
The HLS contract SpaceX has gotten from NASA is a fixed-fee contract (like most contracts NASA gives out these days), so the final cost absolutely matters to SpaceX's bottom line. Anything they spend beyond the contracted amount they'll have to come up with themselves. A good example of this is Boeing, which is now booking losses on the Starliner program every quarter because it has gone over time and budget.
What? This makes zero sense. The cost to create a crew capsule is extremely well understood because they've been made countless times before. Also to imply the cost of that would put any dent whatsoever into the 5b vs 50b comparison is ridiculous. The cost of adding a crew capsule is a rounding error on total cost.
Actually we do know what NASA will be paying. Its all in the public contract. And its fixed cost, so it will not cost NASA more, no matter how often it blows up.
That doesn't give us details about how much it will cost SpaceX but its good information.
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.
And by all excitement and history and nostalgia, if we are honest, the moon landing program was a massive waste of money. Like the Egyptian pyramids. The are impressive, yes ...
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
>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"
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.
Agreed, I think us software people are too used to the 'safety' and conveniences of the abstract world of software. Besides the comparatively smaller amount of people working on software for safety critical stuff, most of us are too used to just being able to quickly hack together fixes, where for safety critical stuff you do have to work with similar rigor as 'real' engineering and failures result in similar reviews of processes leading up to them.
For example, after Starliner's first test flight's software debacle, NASA ordered a full safety review of all of Boeing's software practices, for all of their projects - planes and spacecraft. Most of us don't have to deal with that amount of rigor over buggy code.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
“We consider any data received that helps inform an improved future build of starship a success. From a milestone standpoint, our main goal is to clear the pad. Every milestone beyond that is a bonus. The further we fly, the more data we can collect.”
They've been saying (Elon at a minimum) multiple times that they expect the first flight to end in a giant ball of flames. That there's a "if everything goes extremelly well" plan that reaches quasi-orbit and lands back nicely... doesn't make this the expected goal. It's not like they can submit a flight plan to the FAA that's "we'll launch and explode somewhere along the way". They need to draw up a nominal plan, with the full understanding (by reasonable people) that the flight really isn't expected to actually fulfill that entire plan.
It's pretty amazing that the rocket went past the launch pad, yet alone survived past max-Q to begin with!
It’s the first time this rocket has had all 33 engines attempt to light and fully throttle up.
SpaceX has no test facility capable of withstanding a full thrust booster test on the ground.
Also SpaceX has more boosters and ships complete and in various stages of assembly. A complete loss of the pad would have been much more damaging to the program.
It's a giant shaking and trembling structure built in a fail-fast iterative manner using unexpected materials (stainless steel) and processes (regular welding). Assemble all this in history's largest rocket ever, and expect everything to go perfect the first time?
I wouldn't have been surprised if the whole thing shook itself apart on the lift pad and blew up.
I don't know about you, but when I rapidly build and assemble large complex structures like a cowboy, I certainly expect a ton of failures on my first trials. When stuff goes much further than I expected, I'm in awe and disbelief.
It's a matter of expectations. No one set out with the goal of blowing up a rocket but it was very much an expected likely outcome. By clearing the launchpad, the team met their milestone. Anything beyond that is simply additional data to improve the next iteration.
I'm no fan of the SpaceX model but if it works for them and the safety of those on the ground is prioritized, it seems to work better than any other model tried here.
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.
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.
> “I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won't be boring,” Musk promised at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. “I think it's got, I don't know, hopefully about a 50% chance of reaching orbit.”
I stand corrected. That apparently was indeed the original context of his statement. The Internet has ways of morphing words.
I do recall he did express some level of concern about the launch pad being damaged if the rocket failed to launch though (it still looks like it was damaged to some degree from the launch.)
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.
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.
> “I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won't be boring,” Musk promised at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. “I think it's got, I don't know, hopefully about a 50% chance of reaching orbit.”
It's a difference between "definition of success" and "the plan". They can't just say "we want to get off the pad and whatever happens afterwards, meh", they have to point it somewhere. So they plan out a whole flight to maximize useful data per additional success, but consider some subset of the plan to be an overall success.
I might go to the grocery store with a list of five things, but I only really need two things. Coming home with 3 things would be a success.
Who cares? It's a lot of arguing over semantics that doesn't end up meaning anything in the grand scheme of things. SpaceX continues making progress on the development of Starship, and the tiny little mishaps that depend mostly on chance along the way don't end up actually mattering in the grand scheme of things.
If you watch the launch broadcast, the hosts set the expectation that they success meant achieving thrust-to-weight of >1 and clearing the launch facility.
Furthermore, we don't know there was a failure to separate. If I had to guess, once the vehicle was in an unstable attitude outside of the nominal flight path, they triggered the self-destruct and purposefully didn't try to separate.
there is something about this launcher and the launch that looks exeedingly wrong to me cf a saturn v (i realise spacex is trying to launch larger masses)
First-stage burnout speed was too low for orbit, I think. Telemetry peaked at 2,148 km/hour = 597 m/s – I don't know the nominal values but this seems non-viable to me.
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.
SpaceX is a great demonstration of an "ideal mix" of new and old. It has a lot of "classic" "measure twice; cut once" planning, but also an absolutely essential "YOLO" mindset for live testing, which can cause big failures, but also give the most valuable data.
Their manned flights have been great (except for that toilet thing...).
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.
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.
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.
Things are, they don’t fail or succeed in a qualitative sense. You can only fail against some objective measure. If you do nothing, you still haven’t failed. But you haven’t done anything either. If you try something and you establish an objective measure to achieve and it fails, you and your efforts _have not failed_. The positive action of doing still is, and the positive action of analyzing the failed objective still is, and it opens the way to another action as an evolution of the original action.
But things just are what they are. They aren’t good or bad. Good or bad is your interpretation of the way things are. If you consider doing nothing good, then you succeed by not trying. If you consider trying good, then you succeed by simply trying.
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.
>> It looks like the stages failed to separate and it started to spin.
Most complicated part of building any rocket by far and Starship's is a lot more complex than any previous one by far. It was always the most failure prone part but everything else looks great.
I kinda wish they'd have let it keep going in order to get the telemetry.
The altitude and velocity when things went sideways were in MRBM territory, not ICBM territory so the only thing they would have hit would have been the Atlantic ocean.
they let it go well past the point it was clear to lay observers that it was out of control. i expect they got all the uncontrolled-descent telemetry they really had a use for.
> 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".
@ 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."
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."
You can gather information by just leaving the rocket on the pad. Saying, “we can’t fail no matter what,” ahead of your failure doesn’t mean anyone else has to accept you didn’t fail.
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.
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.
There seems to be some collective amnesia as to how SpaceX operates. The pedantry over the meaning of "failure", toward the negative, is disappointing.
What's with these orange flames about 70 and 120 seconds into the flight and with the fire at the bottom of the spacecraft that you can see in the SpaceX stream at T+2:10?
Looks like the propellant line issues from earlier flight tests - that sort of stuff is really not at all supposed to happen.
This looked exactly like my problems in KSP. Rocket starts to be uncontrollable, I try to separate, previous stage is still under thrust which means I am unable to separate and then boom.
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.
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.
Why? It had pretty advanced engines, conservative fuel choices, architecture optimized for low requirements at manufacturing. And it was originally planned for Mars missions, not LEO missions.
> Korolyov opted to a novel design which was too wide (17m!!)
Why too wide? Technical decisions were made with all degrees of justifications available at the time. That it's wider than anything else till today, including Starship, doesn't make it "too wide".
> Combine this with other technical mistakes (the shape led to the extra weight while the modularity wasn't required, too much drag, etc)
Extra weight in weight-carrying construction is compensated, at least to a degree, by lesser weight of spherical tanks. Modularity was present so even N-11 was considered - two upper stages of N-1. Too much drag - comparing to what?
N-1 was quite state of the art technically when it was created. I don't see how calling it a technical blunder can be justified.
N1 got funding in 1964 and had it's first stacked test flight in 1969 (5 years). Starship was announced in 2017 (though the raptor engines in 2016) and had it's first stacked test flight today (5 years). So far development speed is the same, even with SpaceX's better technology.
Whatever technical issues N1 had, could have been resolved with enough iterations. We have no idea if Starship will work and if it does have design problems, we won't know until years from now if it fails or succeeds.
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.
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!
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?
As though hack journalists need actual reasons to write hit pieces about Musk. They’ll write them no matter what. The articles will generate plenty of clicks, they will have zero impact on anything that matters and they will change nobody’s mind about anything.
Public perception matters (it eventually drives whether a businessman can do business, since all business is trust-based), but Musk buying Twitter has had a lot more effect than any journalist writing about him ever could.
A rocket is a structure designed to be as light as possible while containing as much energy as possible.
That combination is inherently explosive in any sort of failure.
Historically we can see that there are two modes of rocket development when it comes to failure tolerance. 1. Iterate fast and blow stuff up (e.g. mercury/redstone, spacex) or 2. Iterate slowly, at massive cost, with fewer catastrophic failures (space shuttle, Apollo, SLS).
When it comes to safety, the slow and expensive route has a dubious track record. Of course, slow and expensive is producing much more complex vehicles, until today, at least.
As others mentioned the hit pieces will come anyway. The success that SpaceX has had so far very clearly shows that aiming high and embracing failure is the best way to develop rockets.
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?
That's not being contested. What will be in conflict, I think, is engineering versus how that engineering may be perceived. Given enough time, investors and critics of government subsidies may also question whether "failure success" became an excuse.
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.
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.
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.
i.e not only do they make rocket engines they make the worlds most advanced and complicated rocket engines and they make so many of them you could consider them mass produced. (as far as rocket engines go that is)
These engines require a very delicate dance of chamber pressure, temperature, fuel/oxidiser mix, turbo pump speeds, etc to get started but it's all worth it in the end for their insane efficiency and thrust/weight.
Yes, SpaceX makes all their own engine, even inventing their own materials. They are building these very vertically integrated. SpaceX is pretty much the undisputed best rocket engine company in the world. They build more engines then anybody in the world and its not even close. And the Raptor is the most advanced engine in the world.
Rocket engines have different challenges then airplane engines. They are as hard in some ways but easier in others.
Rocket engine operate in a far more extreme environment, peak stressed are far larger, failures and issues far more violent. But the big advantage is that they only have to operate for a few minutes at the time (at least on the first stage). Jet engines need to operate for 1000s of hours.
SpaceX has upped the level significantly, interdicting higher efficiency full flow stage combustion and making them reusable and being able to launch quickly and reliably. So they complexity of Raptor is much higher then your typical first stage rocket engine.
I would say the complexity of a modern jet engine might still be higher, but its hard to estimate these things. Not sure how you would do that scientifically.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shotwell is also awesome, that is certain. They all are. I personally think the first man down the ladder on mars should be a woman, and it would be great if it were her. However, Elon founded that company (and personally hired Shotwell) and has been a continual source of engineering inspiration, for several decades. His direction has pretty much forced the global automotive industry to go electric. People may not like some of the things he tweets, but at the end of the day, he is not going to be a historical footnote.
Nah. It could imply that there are many equally qualified people for the job, and having a woman do it is beneficial in its own right. Y'know, to show that it is possible in the first place, contrary to our entire history so far??
> I personally think the first man down the ladder on mars should be a woman
Shouldn't it just be the commander of the mission?
The way you speak is so condescending to women, as though they wouldn't have the ability to earn their place and it has to be handed to them. I can't speak to your intentions but it's not equality if you thought it was.
You're making the meritocracy argument and it is disingenuous. You don't have a monopoly on understanding "equality" and it is certainly not as simple in our society as you assume.
"seems fair to me" is hardly enough basis for a claim either. I did go on to state how it is impossible in our society today - do you actually disagree with that?
Theres nothing disingenuous about thinking the person that earned the honor should be the one to do it. Your claim that I think I have a monopoly is disingenuous. GP stating it should be a woman, just for being a woman, is being disingenuous.
Most women I know appreciate the "perks" of being a woman, but none of them are under any delusion about it. They would be insulted if they lost on equal footing, and were rewarded for it anyway. I've never met anyone who was happy knowing someone let them win.
If you want to make an argument that men and women are never on equal footing, I could understand that but I'm not even sure what you are proposing instead.
What I'm saying is that "earned the honor" - or rather that there is a single "best person" - is already a flawed assumption. Meritocracy is thoroughly debunked so anyone asserting it is either way out of touch or being disingenuous.
The reason is because of historical oppression and entrenched systems of oppression still in place today. In that context, meritocracy only serves to reinforce the status quo.
I'm sure NASA can come very close to a true meritocracy - but that doesn't change the fact that there are benefits to having women in visible positions of power, accomplishment, etc. There will be multiple qualified people for any job, and it is 100% acceptable to choose someone because they come from a historically underrepresented group, solely to increase visibility and enfranchisement of that group.
> but that doesn't change the fact that there are benefits to having women in visible positions of power, accomplishment, etc
So you're making the same proposal. You want to hire a woman because she's a woman. This is a massive disservice to female empowerment.
> There will be multiple qualified people for any job, and it is 100% acceptable to choose someone because they come from a historically underrepresented group, solely to increase visibility and enfranchisement of that group.
This is an absurd line of thinking. If two people truly are equally qualified, some immutable trait like race, sex, etc. should not be the determining factor. If you are ok with someone being hired for a job because they are a native american or a woman, then you should also be ok with someone choosing to only hire white men and asian men. Both of these scenarios are racist/sexist.
This post quotes top SpaceX engineers like Tom Mueller, Kevin Watson, Garrett Reisman, Josh Boehm, and others like John Carmack about Musk's involvement in engineering:
Life is not a zero sum game. Clearly Elon and Gwynne work very well together and Gwynne is a very talented operator. Both talents are essential but I do believe Elon’s talent would be harder to replace.
I think HN likes to minimize the individual effort and success of great leaders because it plays against their personal beliefs. And I say this as someone who doesn’t like Musk very much.
The idea that "great leaders" exists is in itself a personal belief, isn't it? In my opinion "great leaders" are jobs that need to be done, not specific people. If Musk's personal characteristics make him viable to be a "great leader", there's at least a million other people that could have taken his place.
Funny then that almost no other space company comes close in terms of success. That many other rocket startups before SpaceX have totally failed even those with more finances then SpaceX. Europe makes a vastly inferior rocket for 3x the price.
Maybe there are a million such people around, but apparently its very hard to find them.
Sometimes leaders get too much credit for what their team accomplishes, but I think it would be silly to deny that there are people who make unique contributions. Apple wouldn't have been Apple without Steve Jobs. SpaceX wouldn't be SpaceX without Elon Musk.
I’m have no doubts that she’s doing an incredible job but by all accounts Musk is intimately involved with the engineering in addition to being the head of the company.
Ah HN, where you can denigrate the hell out of anyone as long as you say it politely and sufficiently passive aggressively While clearly following obediently with the new "Elon Musk bad now" doctrine. Being blunt and direct is more virtuous through sheer honesty.
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.
For roughly 10 seconds the telemetry reported 5 failed engines, then the last engine to fail re-ignited. But from the photos it looks like a total of 6 engines were off for longer period of time, 5 at the outer rim and 1 of the inner 3.
Thats 6 of 33 engines out, or 18.18%. Incredible it was still accelerating upwards
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
That's not my problem. Space X can define their limit for what counts as success as they see fit. I totally acknowledge that getting this huge thing to any height is an achievement. But there's still a mismatch between what the general audience would label 'success' and what they do. So maybe talking about 'milestones' or something to that effect would be better. After all, in itself it is not yet a useful workhorse to put something in orbit at this stage (pun not intended), even though it's a probably necessary and helpful intermediate step given how finicky and complex rockets are. I was actually only poking fun at your 'not moving goalposts' combined with the idea that 'we call it OK if it doesn't explode right on the ground'. That sounds a lot like a moved goalpost if the aim is to get to the moon or even mars and back. It's a bit like that 'draw an owl in three easy steps' meme: draw a circle for the head, draw an oval for the body, now draw the rest of the owl.
I can't tell if you are serious. The equivalent would be: a child is trying to draw an owl. Instead of praising the child for drawing a crude owl on their first attempt, we are disappointed that the child did not meet the final goal of drawing a photorealistic owl at some point in the future. Just because the general public has a wrong idea about something does not mean that it is reasonable to reinforce the wrong idea.
So this thread is 5 days old at this point but for the record I still want to point out that whereas initially I was willing to play along and say, OK if those responsible for the launch define 'success' to mean 'clearing the launchpad' well than that was a 'success' alright. Even if it wasn't a success when you leave off the quotes.
But in the intervening days I read up quite a bit and found quite a spectrum of opinions. Turns out this launch made a loss of at least $300M (not to forget, of tax payer money) based on estimated costs of engines alone. Both the rocket and the launch pad suffered from design errors. The launch pad suffered heavy damage because it was apparently not built to withstand the forces present at launch. There's video footage of a parked car next to a palm tree at least a mile or so from the launch pad which both got peltered by debris and then engulfed in fast moving smoke clouds.
This is happening right in the middle of a nature reserve which none of those responsible have the slightest respect for.
But this is the state of affairs when you have a billionaire conman with a captive audience of fanboys, gullible media and those who are just hoping too hard for advancements in spaceflight.
The problem in that case is that HN users commonly don’t read the article to get the full story.
From TFA:
> SpaceX staff still cheered as Starship went down in flames. Successfully lifting the 400-foot-tall rocket off the launch pad is still a big step forward to its ultimate goal of one day ferrying humans to the moon and Mars, the company said.
> "With a test like this, success comes from what we learn," the company said in a tweet. "Today's test will help us improve Starship's reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary."
I suspect HN users read the article more often than most. I sure did. I stand by my assessment that the headline invites unreasonable expectations, and that it matters. A little, not a lot. Shrug.
That's reasonable and I agree kinda. I think I'm assuming a layman seeing this headline and (unfortunately) mostly not caring one way or the other. At least this version gets them an accurate depiction. I see how it reads differently to readers here though.
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.
That's another discussion because it didn't have anything to do with the rocket and was an issue with the command module during a simulation, if you are referring to the Apollo 1 accident, which unfortunately killed all three astronauts in the cabin. And it certainly wasn't designated a success. They also completely altered designs as a result of that event.
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.
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.
It is extremely tiny now- but definitely will be something worth thinking about when (here's hoping!) SpaceX and others reach their goals. When we run 100x or 1000x current launch capacity I don't think it's unreasonable to worry about rocket pollution.
Commercial passenger flights departing in the United States produced 179 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in 2019.
1 Ton of Methan produces 3 tons of CO2.
Starship+Booster fully loaded has 1000 tonnes of methane (and three times oxygen).
So a thousand Starship launches a year would be 3 million metric tons of CO2. Not nothing but (surprisingly?) less than 1.5% of commercial US flight industry.
Theoretically one can produce Methane climate neutral through bio gas. I found different prices for liquid methane (1000 to 2000 dollars?), with that it seems the fuel cost are only around 2 million per launch? That is cheap. A 1000 Starships would only cost 1 billion in Methan fuel (disregarding oxygen and heightened demand and economy of scales).
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.
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?
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.
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.
The recovery teams goal was to sink the booster even if it touched down safely. Their plan was to quite literally shoot it with small-arms until it took on enough water to sink. This is a documented best-case outcome for the launch. There were no plans to recover anything other than data
You know what this means... there was some dude in a boat this morning who was very disappointed he didn't get to shoot holes in a rocket. I would pay lots of money to have that job.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
You're leaning on a lot of hypotheticals and assumptions, right?
Do we even know how much a Starship launch costs? The only cost I can find is Musk saying they'd dropped $2-3B, but that was back in 2019. My point is...how can it not be a comparison when costs may (or, may not) be comparable?
I don't think the reason NASA Is risk-adverse is because of cost - it's because a similar explosion would effectively crash the entire NASA space program.
> You're leaning on a lot of hypotheticals and assumptions, right?
We know how much SLS cost in a lot of detail. Also remember, SLS development, the 20 billion is only to first launch to get to 1B they will likely drop another 10 billion or so and it will likely take until 2030.
We don't know about Starship, but it is far, far less. SpaceX could absolutly not spend 5 billion $ a year on the program.
And the complexity of Starship is in a different dimension.
So Starship for a fact is orders of magnitude cheaper then SLS and orders of magnitude more complex.
I disagree. I would be in favor of canceling SLS and Orion even if Starship doesn't exist.
SLS/Orion is simply the wrong architecture, and the wrong strategy. Independent of Starship or not. I have been arguing this since 2017, long before Starship was relevant.
When the Obama administration cancelled the Constellation program (with its ambitious Ares rockets which were designed reach Mars, unlike SLS), they intended to invest money instead in private companies. However, apparently a few members of the US Congress got worried that valuable "space knowledge" from the Space Shuttle / Constellation companies would get lost, so they funded SLS, and scaled down private space investments for several years. That's as much as I recall from US politics on that topic.
Of course in retrospect it would have been better to just contract private rocket companies, as intended by the Obama administration, even had SpaceX not existed. The loss of Ares rocket knowledge with its cost plus contracts and countless subcontractors wouldn't have been so bad. At the cost of the SLS program probably multiple private companies could have developed heavy launch rockets. But at the time it was apparently much less obvious how cost inefficient the NASA developed rockets really were. Now NASA funds SpaceX for part of Artemis 3, but that's only a small fraction of the money that is still poured into SLS.
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..."
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
« go all the way into orbit » (and down to Hawaï) seems totally fair as a flight plan. Being ok with aborting early is SpaceX decision and I totally get it. Nevertheless, « all they hope was to clear the tower » is quite hard to believe for me but this was only an opinion.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the first part of the flight was important and considered mostly a success.
Hmm... this seems like maybe taking things in an overly literal way. It sounds like clearing the tower was their threshold for a successful test - if they didn't get that far, it would be deemed a failure.
A phrase like "all I hope for" doesn't necessarily mean "the only thing I hope for" but instead usually means "the thing I hope for most (or above all)". If someone were to say, "all I want is a good night's rest", it doesn't mean they no longer want oxygen, for example. :)
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.
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.
I remember I think it was when they first landed the booster successfully, there was a big "USA! USA! USA!" cheer from mission control. I thought that was a bit of an ugly look myself.
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.
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.
Launch coverage was started and supported internally by SpaceX engineers and all the commentators are engineers who work on the rockets themselves. But I guess they are all paid corporate shills, not people who have spend many years working hard on a project and are exited about it.
> I really miss NASA launches
Those still exists ...
Not everything has to be the same. Each company has its own spin on its launch coverage and its own company culture.
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
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.
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.
Why? This is just the public viewing area from where SpaceX own employees watch from. And they worked on this thing for years, seems pretty realistic that they would be exited.
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!
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.
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.
The envelop is designed with safety in mind. If it leaves the envelop it has a certified self destruct system on board that will trigger and destroy the rocket.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Both Tesla and SpaceX have absolutely received grants, not just contracts and loans, from the government. Just last year, SpaceX requested and applied for $886 million grant from the FCC, which is nearly three times the annual budget of NPR. They were denied for that particular one, but they appealed the decision, complaining about it.
I'm not sure what misinformation you are referring to. It is a matter of fact that Tesla and SpaceX have received billions of dollars of government contracts, highly preferential loans, grants, subsidies, and tax incentives.
Another example, from Tesla's own report submitted to the SEC in 2020:
> As part of various governmental responses to the pandemic granted to companies globally, we received certain payroll related benefits which helped to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our financial results.
This was at a time in which Musk was railing against government bailouts. Tesla never gave more details on the government handouts this particular line was referring to.
> requested and applied for $886 million grant from the FCC
Because FCC asked private companies to put in bids. So companies responded.
Its not that SpaceX just went to the FCC and asked for money.
> It is a matter of fact that Tesla and SpaceX have received billions of dollars of government contracts, highly preferential loans, grants, subsidies, and tax incentives.
These things have to be analyzed more systematically and in comparison to their industry.
Tesla received a lone for Model S production, both Ford and GM also received loans. Tesla paid it back, Ford and GM have not yet done so.
Tesla received intensive for factories, so do all large industrial facilities.
ZEV credits are a universal mechanism, not given preference to any automaker.
Same for EV Tax Credit, applies to all car maker.
Tesla, I would argue has received very little in direct subsidy. The loan guarantee was small (400M and paid back quickly).
A drop in the bucket compared to GM. Even foreign companies got access to EV tax credit.
I could do the same for SpaceX.
Yes, Musk companies receive government help. But so do all companies in these industry. Having a space company without close ties to government simply isn't happening right now. It would be more viable for Tesla, but the US government has been mucking around in the care industry for 100 years and their international competitors do so to.
The misinformation is that government picked winners and that Musk companies are successful because of these subsidies. That the success of Tesla and SpaceX are because of subsidies. These myths are often repeated.
You're sliding around the issue, because the point is not about SpaceX and Tesla relative to their industries, which is debatable on its own. The point is that the CEO of both of these companies has mislabeled a news agency because he doesn't like them but claims he accurately has done so merely by having single-digit percentages of their total budget, or less depending on how you count from the federal, state, or local sources, from government sources. This is despite his own companies taking in billions of government support in different forms. That is the point. It's beyond hypocrisy, not to mention intentionally misleading and leaning into extreme propaganda.
> These things have to be analyzed more systematically and in comparison to their industry.
So, as mentioned, no they don't. This particular issue is completely independent of comparisons to other car and space companies.
If you really wanted to start comparing things, you need to start looking at other news agencies, the people who control those agencies, and how many tax breaks and kickbacks (a form of indirect and implicit government support) from the politicians they bankroll via donations.
The issue according to you is that musk is a hypocrite. But until you show evidence that musk's companies have requested and received significant grants and subsidies specifically for them, then your claim is just FUD.
You are drafting on this narrative that musk's companies are extravagant government leeches, when the truth is that they've gone the opposite direction, taking much less money from the government, avoiding cost plus contracts, and charging significantly less than competitors for services.
I saw your quote. It doesn't say how much, or the terms of the government help. Is it billions? Or was it much less? And did Tesla have to pay it back?
You are being disingenuous here - to claim that detailing the grants and subsidies that the companies took and determining whether the sky is blue are the same category is bad faith, sorry. I'm actually personally familiar with SpaceX's finances to a degree and am not aware of any significant grants or subsidies. I'm not just just challenging you to be contrarian, I'm asking for evidence.
And I didn't say you said that, I said you are drafting off of the narrative, the same way a bike rider drafts off the rider in front of them.
I wasn't really reacting to anything about NPR. I don't even know really what that is. I was just pointing out looking at these things in isolation is not very information.
> If you really wanted to start comparing things, you need to start looking at other news agencies
> I wasn't really reacting to anything about NPR. I don't even know really what that is. I was just pointing out looking at these things in isolation is not very information.
That's fine, but the NPR thing was basically the entire impetus of this comment train, so that particular commentary wasn't relevant.
Can you detail how much SpaceX received in grants and subsidies? I think you'll find it's negligible. The onus is on you to provide that data if you are making the claim. And let's not bring Tesla into this to confuse the issue.
> Can you detail how much SpaceX received in grants and subsidies? I think you'll find it's negligible. The onus is on you to provide that data if you are making the claim.
You're making a claim as well so the onus is on you just as much as me. And you can likely use Google as well as I can. Just search. It isn't hard to find. I'm not going to sit here and copy and paste links and articles all day that you can just as easily find. This is a forum, not a dissertation defense or an investigative journalism piece. Plenty has been written about this in news articles, SEC filings, and lawsuits.
> And let's not bring Tesla into this to confuse the issue.
It's not confusing the issue. It is part of the issue and was in my original comment. To be clear, the issue is that a CEO, who claims to be a supporter of free speech, of two companies, specifically SpaceX and Tesla, that have received billions in government support has intentionally, adversarially, and antagonistically mislabaled NPR as "U.S. state-affiliated media" because he is abusing Twitter to run his own fringe political agendas. The reason stated for the ban, which is not the actual reason, is barely even true, and is misleading, is that NPR is government funded.
Saying in making a claim is frankly nonsense. If someone claims there is a pink fairy flying behind the moon, and I challenge the claim, I am not making a claim, and it's not on me to prove that the pink fairy is not there.
I'm not making a claim, I'm challenging a claim. Once again don't confuse the issue.
And once again Tesla should not be brought into this. Musk is not SpaceX. There are thousands of people that work there and make the place tick. And they are a separate legal entity. It's not fair to throw them under the bus for anything that is happening with Musk or Tesla. I was obviously referring to SpaceX as I was talking about "services rendered".
Like I said elsewhere, just search. It's literally documented in several places. You just don't want to. I'm not going to waste my time finding it for you, posting it here, and then getting nuh-huh in response.
All that's required for this argument is any moderate amount of government support for Musk's companies.
> And once again Tesla should not be brought into this. Musk is not SpaceX.
Musk is CEO and so-called founder of both places. They're both relevant. I don't see why you think otherwise.
Please read my statements carefully. You have no reason to assume I didn't search for this data. I found all kinds of things on EV credits and government contracts, but that's not what I'm talking about. I couched my words specifically elsewhere in this thread: "requested and received significant grants and subsidies specifically for them", e.g. not EV credits and government contracts, and not small one-off grants and discounts. This is not so easy to find, and the distinction is important and relevant to how we should look at them. Just making abstract claims without backing data in context is a waste of everyone's time.
They aren't abstract claims. You just reject and adjust what you think is relevant. You can say "requested and received significant grants and subsidies specifically for them" all you want, but that doesn't mean it's the only relevant piece in this comparison and Musk's intentional mislabeling of NPR. It is not the only relevant piece. I don't even know if the thing you've quoted even exists. Almost all, if not every single one of, government contracts, grants, subsidies, are open to bidders, applicants, etc. and are often required to be so. That being said, several times contracts, grants, etc. can be "open" to others while basically written such that only the intended party is the only one that can match the requirements. But it doesn't even matter whether SpaceX received these mythical things you feel like only matters, because the point is that Musk used false claims against NPR. And if you make the same claims as he did to SpaceX and Tesla, then you have "U.S. state-affiliated companies". Furthermore, the small amount of money NPR receives are from funds that aren't specifically for NPR. In fact, NPR has even received loans from the government that they paid back.
The entire point being that NPR operates just as much as many entities do with respect to receiving government support and is probably the least state mouthpiece of any news organization. Yet, Musk applies bizarro logic because NPR doesn't fit into his fringe political ideology. He creates chaos in the vain of Vladislav Surkov and Trump to suit whatever thing he is trying to promote at the moment. This whole situation is hypocritical, misleading, full of false information, and childish. We're wasting time here talking about it.
Summary: NPR receives a modicum amount of government support. SpaceX and Tesla receive billions in government support. Read support as grants, subsidies, loans, contracts, etc. CEO of SpaceX and Tesla calls NPR "U.S. state-affiliated media", which has very strong and negative connotations for a new organization that are ultimately not correct from any vantage point. Elon Musk, said CEO, consistently rants about government "handouts", bailouts, support, etc. despite simultaneously being the beneficiary of these programs.
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.
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
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.
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
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?
For a very loose definition of intact. It had a crater gouged out underneath it including under some of the supports. They'll have to rebuild that, and "couple months" sounds optimistic.
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."
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.
That's exactly engineering. A complex system seldom has a 100% success on first launch, all engineering products are incremental success. There are thousands of small factors that can deviate a live test from their theoretical assumptions. The fact that they have got past the first hurdle for a completely untested product is worthy of appreciation. Just a few years back, everyone would have unanimously applauded the launch. But now, people are letting their personal bias about the CEO cloud their judgement about the achievements of the engineers working on the product.
Only in old fields with a long history of failures to learn from are engineers expected to be failure-free. You're absolutely right that civil or structural engineers should not be expected to build a few bridges or houses and hope that eventually they come up with a design that doesn't fall down anymore.
Starship is far outside the realm of rote engineering codes that just need to be faithfully executed. They've simulated and tested and validated as much as was reasonable, now they're working with and learning from full-scale prototypes. If it just worked, they wouldn't know how much margin they had. Now that it's exploded, they know a large number of components that were good enough for the phases of flight that it went through, and also the exact stress at which a particular component/system failed: that's incredibly valuable and useful information, and not something you can find on Stack Overflow or an ISO standard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
By "Flight Termination System" I meant some automatic process, if such a system exists. It might just be a big red button at this point (since the goal is data collection). or maybe it's a very generous flight envelope, but the tumble took it far enough off course that it tripped.
That would be an Autonomous Flight Termination System, which does exist (and is used on many newer rockets including Falcon 9) but I'd bet that a human pushed the button in this case.
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.
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.
Äh sorry but you are simply wrong. SpaceX was the first company to get certification to not have 'guy with button' anymore and have certified hardware on board that this job. This was vital part of how they decreased labor cost and increases launch rate.
As far as I know SpaceX has not launched in the traditional way since Falcon 1 and I am sure that they would never launch Starship that way.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t know the reasons for it, all I know is that the first part of the flip is intentional and the rest happened because stage separation failed.
I have heard some theories on why they do this. One is that it gets around the need for “ullage thrusters”, independent thrusters that fire early to provide initial momentum forcing the fuel to gather at one end of the tank to provide full uninterrupted flow to main thrusters. Another theory I’ve heard is that it’s an attempt to develop a stage separation mechanism that doesn’t require consumables like explosive bolts or heavy special-purpose equipment like hydraulic pushers. Both seem plausible to me given the goal of a truly re-usable rocket; the vision seems to be that you literally just fill up the gas tank and go again, you don’t have to refuel independent thrusters or install a new explosive decoupler.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
More frequent outages, ads in replies, a rather silly new verification system, viewcounts being visible on tweets, Musk publicly mocking a disabled employee, etc. I don't hate Elon, but the dude should really leave Twitter ASAP. He's an engineer, not a people person — I don't think he should be in charge of a social network, a service entirely focused on social interaction.
Meh, I haven't experienced any of those things. The view count is useful for me at least, less of a black box. The old Twitter didn't really seem to care about adding new features.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Falcon Heavy as complete system is still far more complex. You still need to coordinate all these cores. There is a reason every designer goes to single core as systems grow larger. SpaceX actually had initially planned to do a very large 3 core and then rejected it.
And Falcon Heavy was building on 10 years of Falcon 9 knowlage and an incredibly reliable engine.
Falcon Heavy was launching from a perfectly designed launch pad that didn't throw up huge chunks of debris everywhere.
Its incredibly that people are way to fast to jump to doomsday conclusion from one test.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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”
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)
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.
... 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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!
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”.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So if you "can't assume you can trigger a system" in this situation, you rely upon an automatic system, not a RSO. Which is exactly what SpaceX did. I'm sure this was fully documented in the approval process.
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.
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.
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?
I'm not sure the N1 actually killed anyone? The second launch resulted in the rocket falling on and destroying the launch pad (one engine exploded on liftoff, the computer turned most of the other engines off), but I don't think anyone died.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Once the stack was tumbling everyone in the SpaceX crowd knew the outcome (seeing as how they were standing behind Mission Control with better telemetry than is publicly transmitted they likely knew the rocket was going too slow or had too many engines out for an orbital speed test well before we did).
So yeah, cathartic big boom. Nobody got hurt, no customer cargo lost, company and their jobs aren’t at risk. Why not have some fun looking at the explosion then go back to work?
The article you posted doesn't really support calling him "outright anti-trans". From the article you used as support:
Twitter’s modified policy is a step back for the platform, especially when Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube don’t even maintain the same protections for trans people that Twitter once had. Last year, GLAAD gave each of these platforms fairly low scores in regard to LGBTQ safety, privacy, and expression but noted that Twitter and TikTok were the only two platforms out of the bunch that had specific policies against deadnaming and misgendering trans users.
So now the only major platform that has this policy is TikTok...famously 'woke' (silly term these days) companies like Google don't even seem to have this policy. The policy was only in place for the past few years at Twitter, so this in fact seems like its just a reversion to the mean rather than some kind of direct attack on trans rights.
The final paragraph makes clear that he is pull back specific things that Twitter used to offer to trans people:
> Twitter hasn’t completely pulled protections for trans users, however. Its Hateful Conduct Policy still explicitly prohibits attacking others based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” but the choice to intentionally remove all mention of misgendering and deadnaming seems like a calculated jab at the trans community.
I am not an LGBT+ person, but I also do not support targeted harassment of various segments of society just because they are different.
Musk has many issues, but what is the point of bringing his grudge with Trans? The rocket is a great success and in the grand scale of things is worth the ego grandstanding. The man has done nothing illegal and has accomplished a lot amazing things. Congrats to SpaceX, Elon, the Americans and Humanity.
What good is freedom of thought and speech if one cannot exercise it? I probably drank the old american koolaid and have not yet had my sip of the new one.
He has his freedom of speech! So did the person you're replying to. That's what the old American freedom of speech meant: you can say dumb things and other people can say that what you said was dumb.
The new koolaid is "I can say dumb things and if anybody calls me on it, I'm being oppressed." That has nothing to do with freedom of speech, there's no government here.
Sounds like you've been drinking plenty of the new koolaid.
> I probably drank the old american koolaid and have not yet had my sip of the new one.
The "old american koolaid" is to let your neighbor do whatever they please as long as "it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" (Thomas Jefferson). Trans people aren't hurting anybody, and it's a travesty that one of our major political parties has made demonizing trans people into a wedge issue as part of a manufactured culture war.
The three main talking points here are (1) mtf in female sports, (2) mtf in women’s only physical spaces, and (3) children undergoing irreversible operations that they may later regret. The first two indeed involve a co flick of interest, granted not one that’s generally physically hurtful.
As the parent of two daughters I am not sure I would be super supportive of MtF in female sports at a competitive level if it actually occurred to my family. It would probably feel unfair to my daughters. But regardless, I don't support harassment of transgender people as Elon Musk now allows on Twitter. To me these are separate things.
Being permitted to 'misgender' is relevant to criticizing policies that allow males to compete in women's and girl's sports.
If you're citing one of the many examples of when this has happened, but are compelled to use 'she' rather than 'he' to refer to the male athlete, then it rather dilutes the point being made.
It depends on the point of view from which such criticism is being made.
Someone who holds a belief that trans-identifying males are women, but considers that they should be excluded from women's sports because of the long-lasting pubertal effects of testosterone, would likely have no issue with referring to one of these males as 'she'.
However, someone who doesn't believe that that such males can be women, and that this is the primary reason why they shouldn't be eligible to compete in women's sports, is more likely to use 'he' in reference to one of these males, as it reflects their underlying philosophical view on the issue.
I guess from my point of view, I do not care much if someone born a male now identifies as a women if it isn't affecting me. They have the freedom to do so. There are segments who have taken to misgendering them on purpose as a form of harassment and I think that is wrong.
I view this argument as analogous to someone is trying to justify slurring other minorities. Why slur them? Just treat them as people who are just trying to get through life and all its challenges.
Also all this focus on slurring a specific minority makes those doing the slurring seem mean, non-credible and non-compassionate to their fellow human beings. If someone starts slurring another minority, I will immediate dismiss anything they say next because they are showing they harbor hate - it isn't a rational discussion anymore, all facts are going to be distorted, things that lead to cognitive dissonance are going to be dismissed, and my motivations will be questioned. Who has time for that?
Twitter's rule against 'misgendering' didn't just apply to people who were engaging in harassment though, it applied to everyone, and led to many campaigners for women's rights being banned from the platform.
One example is Meghan Murphy, a high-profile Canadian feminist. She was discussing the case of a trans-identifying male who had sued several female beauticians - who offered their services solely to women - for refusing to do a Brazilian wax, which for this individual would have involved the handling of male genitalia. She referred to this male as 'him', and as a result was banned from Twitter for about four years (with her ban only being lifted after Musk's purchase of the company).
So on one side we have a trans-identifying male who was using the Canadian legal system to try to punish women for refusing to touch his penis and testicles. On the other side, a feminist writer who referred to this male as 'he' and 'him' while criticizing him for this. In applying their 'misgendering' rule, Twitter took the side of the former and sanctioned the latter.
By removing this rule, Twitter is allowing feminists like Murphy to speak freely about issues such as this on their platform.
I know about that case as a Canadian and it doesn’t require misgendering to discuss accurately. No one is forcing you or her to pretend she isn’t trans.
Everyone agrees that this individual is trans-identifying. The issue is that under Twitter's previous rules, they were compelling gender-critical feminists to pretend that this male is a woman, under the threat of being banned from the platform.
Not just feminists either. Most people balk at phrases like 'her penis and testicles', even if they would normally play along with the fiction of this male being a woman.
It really does highlight the absurdity and dishonesty that is inherent in the belief system of gender identity, in that people are essentially being forced to say things that they don't really believe.
> The issue is that under Twitter's previous rules, they were compelling gender-critical feminists to pretend that this male is a woman, under the threat of being banned from the platform.
No-one is denying that Yaniv is trans-identifying. What gender-critical feminists (and others) are denying are his claims of being a woman.
The question is whether social media platforms should compel their users to tell lies when discussing people such as this. Which is what anyone who holds the view that this individual is a man would be doing if they are forced to refer to him as 'she' or 'her'.
> Here is a great article that does not deadname her nor misgender her while also talking about the case accurately
Yes but the fact that some newspaper editors choose to immerse themselves, their writers and their readers in this fiction doesn't mean that everyone else should be compelled to do the same.
You can see the other currently downvoted comment.
It's like a religion that feels it needs to insert "God is great" or "in his divine wisdom" into every sentence, just to make sure nobody questions their piety.
I think a lot of articles and tweets are focusing on the failure incorrectly. Their views are coloured by wanting to see Elon fail because they don't like his views. This was at least a muted success and not an outright failure and it is just a stepping stone.
I was trying to say, yes, Elon has pretty bad views these days, but this is still at least a semi-success, not a set back or failure.
SpaceX is successful despite of Elon Musk, not because of Elon Musk. SpaceX spends a lot of energy keeping Musks's insanity and emotional outbursts at bay. Tesla has also learned how to manage Musk, though not quite as successfully as SpaceX. Twitter is still figuring it out, but I'm sure that they too will learn how to manage Musk.
I think it's useful to compare Musk with fire. Fire is useful, if controlled. Fire can be very damaging if not controlled. You have to control Musk while giving him the semblance that he's the one in control. Kudos to those who've successfully been able to pull that off.
As I said, fire is useful. Vision is definitely one of Elon's strengths, along with enough knowledge to understand feasibility. Execution doesn't appear to be one of his strengths, but he's made good hires for people who also recognize Elon's strengths and weaknesses and can successfully manage him.
> but what is the point of bringing his grudge with Trans?
Let's not pretend like he just has a "grudge" with trans folks. It goes many orders of magnitude beyond that. Perhaps he was not, and maybe he even still is not a transphobe, but right now he's tweeting like a full-blown transphobic maniac on Twitter. [1] That's a severely negative personality trait. Discriminating against a group of people simply because of the way they were born goes against the fundamental values of the Western society, freedoms, and should be criticized harshly at any avenue. It's relevant here, not because of Musk's speech (which I firmly believe every person is entitled to), but because Musk is an influential figure who contributes so much thought, inspiration, motivation and soft/hard influence to the world that it must be noted he's actively acting like an unhinged transphobe. This can be harmful to people and too much influence from a transphobic personality can be harmful for the society, in turn. Just like, a lot of influence from good people is good for society, a lot of influence from bad people is bad for society. It's worth noting.
[1] We saw, in many instances not only Elon Musk but many other people exaggerating their personalities and beliefs on Twitter.
> What good is freedom of thought and speech if one cannot exercise it?
This is what I describe as the “worse is better” model of freedom. As if the only way we can measure freedom is by counting how many extremely awful things occur in the world and concluding that more awful things is a clear indicator that we have more freedom. Is this a uniquely American concept?
The underlying theme is that a non-optimal system that nevertheless minimizes chances of tyranny and/or violence is better than say a society ruled by philosopher kings. So it's not so much that "more awful things is a clear indicator that we have more freedom", but rather that a system that takes it upon itself to stamp out "more awful things" (per whose definition?) will ultimately diminish freedom for all, and various "awful things" are certain to follow.
It is a matter that is still subject to debate. What is your solution?
The dichotomy isn’t that we either laud the amount of bad things happening or stamp out freedom with tyrannical government. That’s precisely the ludicrous “worse is better” model I was criticizing.
And I’m fairly aware of Popper. I largely share his views, particularly those in The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Logic of Scientific Discovery. I don’t think he would point to, for instance, high murder rates as an indicator of freedom in a society or a preponderance of pseudoscientific theories as an indicator of freedom in a scientific community.
Of course not "lauding the amount of bad things". Rather we learn to live with some non-optimal outcomes as the price of preventing worst outcomes. Our system does not, and is not designed to, select the best, and sometimes very problematic individuals make a scene, but it denies the possibility of that becoming a permanent state of affairs.
"Yes I know Musk is bad and I'm not bad, see I'm not bad because I mention Musk is bad, I'm not one of them. That being said it was a nice rocket launch"
I think that article might be a little over-the-top. As mentioned in the article, Twitter has every protection that Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube have. In addition, Twitter's "Hateful Conduct Policy still explicitly prohibits attacking others based on “sexual orientation, gender, gender identity".
I think the outrage is Twitter moving from the head of the progressive pack to inline with everyone else. Since there isn't really an alternative to Twitter for the business world, I'd rather it did it's best to be 'average', not overly conservative or liberal.
Ignoring anti trans behavior by powerful people is default approval. I’m not saying everyone needs to include a disclaimer in every comment but you’re out of line for suggesting this is off topic and you should reflect on yourself for-why you’re so offended seeing people advocating for the rights of groups Musk is repressing.
I'm sorry to be pulled into commenting on a Great Culture War issue in a space thread, but this is really unfair framing.
When someone, or a group refuses to ban something, that doesn't mean they support it.
Just because the United States allows literal Nazis to speak about anything they want does not mean the United States supports Nazis, or is anti-Semitic.
The exact same principle is true of Twitter. If you allow people to post anti-trans rhetoric, that does not in any way mean you are anti-trans.
The last paragraph of the article shows how it is an outlier in terms of which groups can be targeted with harassment:
"Twitter hasn’t completely pulled protections for trans users, however. Its Hateful Conduct Policy still explicitly prohibits attacking others based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” but the choice to intentionally remove all mention of misgendering and deadnaming seems like a calculated jab at the trans community."
Yes, and that was what that line said before, too. The change removed a specific call-out for misgendering, and deadnaming. There were no specific call-outs for anything else.
Is this a targeted jab? I have no idea, but it certainly doesn't make someone outright anti-Trans, particularly when the hateful conduct policy continues to ban dehumanization based on gender identity.
Before:
> Slurs and Tropes
> We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.In some cases, such as (but not limited to) severe, repetitive usage of slurs, or racist/sexist tropes where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may require Tweet removal. In other cases, such as (but not limited to) moderate, isolated usage where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may limit Tweet visibility as further described below.
> Dehumanization
> We prohibit the dehumanization of a group of people based on their religion, caste, age, disability, serious disease, national origin, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
---
After:
> Slurs and Tropes
> We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. In some cases, such as (but not limited to) severe, repetitive usage of slurs, or racist/sexist tropes where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may require Tweet removal. In other cases, such as (but not limited to) moderate, isolated usage where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may limit Tweet visibility as further described below.
> Dehumanization
> We prohibit the dehumanization of a group of people based on their religion, caste, age, disability, serious disease, national origin, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
Referring to a male as 'he' isn't really in the same ballpark as throwing around racial slurs and so on.
When applied to a male who calls himself a woman, it's merely a philosophical disagreement over whether said male can transform himself to female simply by decree.
I think SpaceX fooled a lot of people (myself included) that Elon was some kind of genius of visionary. But given everything he has done and said and everything about his past that has come to light I C think it should now be clear that SpaceX is a success in spite of Elon not because of him.
Whoever is actually running the show has effectively built an insulating wall around Elon to limit his influence, especially from day-to-day operations.
A few months ago there was an unverified account of this from an alleged SpaceX intern. I can’t say it’s true but it certainly rings true.
We’ve seen from Twitter he’s not much of a businessman (the deal he got himself into was terrible) and not he’s talking about software many of us here realize just how clueless he is about Tech.
With SpaceX not many of us knew much about rocketry so you know what they say: in the valley of the blind the one eyed man is king.
27 of 33 engines fired. Performance was sub-nominal. When it was time for separation the vehicle did multiple clearly unplanned flips (during all of this the broadcast was talking about how great of a success this was, though the employees had quieted significantly knowing this was not going well). Add that Elon was looking pretty grim.
Making it clear of the tower seems like a remarkably low bar, so if that really was the measure of success, this thing is going to be ready for missions in about three decades. Like what an incredibly low accomplishment that would be.
And of course I feel overwhelmingly certain SpaceX doesn't consider this a success. The face-saving they put out for the sycophants to echo doesn't match the reality that this test proved extraordinarily little.
This article focuses on the failure and everyone is focused on the failure. I am saying that this is because many people don't understand that this is actually a success. A lot of people tend to take glee in things failing for Musk because of his views now, but this isn't really a failure, it is just a muted success.
I am woke now because I don't support allowing harassment of others? This is the first time anyone has ever called me woke.
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.
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.
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.