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.
