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.
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.