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Space Exploration II: Always Looking up

MichVandal said:
Someday it will fully work as a system. In the meantime, Blue Ghost landed and is operating on the moon

And that was a ground test, not a launch. SX has been launching rockets long enough that this shouldn’t happen.
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SpaceX hasn't had the problems. It's strictly Musk's vanity Flash Gordon spaceship.
 
this debris is going to end up killing someone and it sucks that it's going to be someone whose family has absolutely no ability to hire representation good enough to own spaceX.
 
aparch said:
SpaceX hasn't had the problems. It's strictly Musk's vanity Flash Gordon spaceship.
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At this point, they are the same thing. Anyone left at this point who can't stand up to tell elmo that this design is not currently feasible and they are blowing money are part of the problem.

Mind you, this should be a reminder that we, as a country, are overpaying SX to put stuff into space, if they can afford constant failures of very expensive stuff.
 
According to Bluesky, this leaked photo from on board Starship shows the engine loss in question...

1000033837.jpg
 
I'm too lazy look it up- let alone I don't want to give any direct attention news to elmo- what did it do wrong?

And would it have been found during ground testing?
 
MichVandal said:
I'm too lazy look it up- let alone I don't want to give any direct attention news to elmo- what did it do wrong?

And would it have been found during ground testing?
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Welp, it appears one of the Raptor engines yeeted itself during the stage separation. Can't have a part failure if the part isn't there to fail.

One comment I saw said "upside, it's Starship's first payload delivery to low-earth orbit."
 
aparch said:
Welp, it appears one of the Raptor engines yeeted itself during the stage separation. Can't have a part failure if the part isn't there to fail.

One comment I saw said "upside, it's Starship's first payload delivery to low-earth orbit."
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Holy hell. Apparently it was two separate engines that lost their cones or the entire engine assemblies.

Christ. That's a really bad design if engines are just falling off.

Here's what it's supposed to look like
 

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aparch said:
Welp, it appears one of the Raptor engines yeeted itself during the stage separation. Can't have a part failure if the part isn't there to fail.

One comment I saw said "upside, it's Starship's first payload delivery to low-earth orbit."
Click to expand...
Based on that, I had to look it up. It sure seems that they could see this failure during ground testing of some kind. Can't really see those tests costing over $50M, though. Somehow people think that these launches cost $100M each.

When Apollo one happened, NASA took a year to figure it out, and then went to the moon pretty quickly. And that wasn't a rocket failure, it was a failure of some assumptions (where the required pure O2 atmosphere for space was somehow OK for ground testing- which illuminated a number of system problems.

The F-1 engine did have a HUGE flaw in it when originally made, but ground testing found it, further testing understood it, more testing solved it- and none of the Saturn launches failed.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I really don't see this new fangled fast failure model to be better than the old version, in any way at all- cost, timing, reliability, etc.
 
dxmnkd316 said:
IIRC that was an instability in the exhaust flow right? Caused a massive amount of vibration or something?
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Yes. Imagine how you figure that out with very simple data acquisition systems. And solve it with many small holes evenly distributing the flow. Without cad. That was where we really looked up to rocket scientists.
 
MichVandal said:
Yes. Imagine how you figure that out with very simple data acquisition systems. And solve it with many small holes evenly distributing the flow. Without cad. That was where we really looked up to rocket scientists.
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Yeah, these people have morphed into almost godlike figures in my head over the years. It's hard to fathom how brilliant and fastidious they were.
 
dxmnkd316 said:
Yeah, these people have morphed into almost godlike figures in my head over the years. It's hard to fathom how brilliant and fastidious they were.
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And the reason is that there are many engineers who are retiring now with an entire career assisted with computers knowing how hard of a job they had and they still managed to do it. It should be kind of embarrassing to SX engineers that they have had computers to aid them designing and making these rockets and they still suffer with problems that should have been figured out a long time ago. Especially since they have been launching rockets for many years now- it's not as if they are inventing anything new here.

Strip charts and slide rules designed the rockets and brand new computers were invented to take them to the moon. Crazy.
 
MichVandal said:
Based on that, I had to look it up. It sure seems that they could see this failure during ground testing of some kind. Can't really see those tests costing over $50M, though. Somehow people think that these launches cost $100M each.

When Apollo one happened, NASA took a year to figure it out, and then went to the moon pretty quickly. And that wasn't a rocket failure, it was a failure of some assumptions (where the required pure O2 atmosphere for space was somehow OK for ground testing- which illuminated a number of system problems.

The F-1 engine did have a HUGE flaw in it when originally made, but ground testing found it, further testing understood it, more testing solved it- and none of the Saturn launches failed.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I really don't see this new fangled fast failure model to be better than the old version, in any way at all- cost, timing, reliability, etc.
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Fail fast is fine for software. Get the beta version of your fish feeding scheduling app out there and let the users find the bugs for free - great business model!

Not so much if every bit of knowledge you gain literally burns up $100M of hardware.

TL/DR: Tech bros should stick to nconsumer apps.
 
LynahFan said:
Fail fast is fine for software. Get the beta version of your fish feeding scheduling app out there and let the users find the bugs for free - great business model!

Not so much if every bit of knowledge you gain literally burns up $100M of hardware.

TL/DR: Tech bros should stick to nconsumer apps.
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The way the video game industry is tanking that might not be a good idea either.
 
www.instagram.com

That's Not Right on Instagram: "Musk’s SpaceX has conducted eight test flights of its Starship rocket, with four resulting in explosions, reflecting a 50% failure rate. The most recent incident occurred on March 6, 2025, when Starship lost control an

22K likes, 189 comments - thatsnotrightpolitics on March 8, 2025: "Musk’s SpaceX has conducted eight test flights of its Starship rocket, with four resulting in explosions, reflecting a 50% failure rate. The most recent incident occurred on March 6, 2025, when Starship lost control and exploded...
www.instagram.com www.instagram.com
 
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