Starship Flight 7

Replying to this comment so people can see the incredible video of the breakup taken from a diverting aircraft:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...

Aerospace fire suppression is generally Halon, which would purge the cavity with inert gas.

Actually the Super Heavy (first stage) already uses heavy CO2 based fire suppression. Hopefully not that necessary in the long term, but should make it possible to get on with the testing in the short term.

just increased venting to keep any vapor concentrations of fuel and oxidiser below that capable of igniting, even simple baffling could suffice as the leaks may be trasitory and flowing out of blowoff valves, so possibly a known risk. Space x is also forgoeing much of the full system vibriatory tests, done on traditiinal 1 shot launches, and failure in presurised systems due to unknown resonance is common. Big question is did it just blow up, or did the automated abort, take it out, likely the latter or there would be a hold on the next launch.

It might not even be about fire suppression. Oxygen and different gases can pool oddly in different types of gravity. If oxygen was leaking, it may be as simple as making sure a vacuum de-gases a chamber before going full throttle.

We know nothing, but the test having good data on what went wrong is a great starting point.

If you can displace the oxidizer/air remaining in the volume why not.

This might be one of those components where it just needs to be built without problems, and improved safety means fixing individual design and manufacturing flaws as you find them, until you’ve hopefully got them all.

This can work. Fundamental structural components of airliners just can’t fail without killing everyone, and high reliability is achieved with careful design, manufacturing, testing, and inspection. I’m not sure if a gigantic non-leaky tank is harder to pull off that way, but they might have to regardless.

We’re going to have to accept that space travel is going to be inherently dangerous for the foreseeable future. Starship is in a good position to improve this, because it should fly frequently (more opportunities to discover and fix problems) and the non-manned variant is very similar to the manned variant (you can discover many problems without killing people). But there are inherent limitations. There’s just not as much capacity for redundancy. The engines have to be clustered so fratricide or common failure modes are going to me more likely. Losing all the engines is guaranteed death on Starship, versus a good chance to survive in an airliner.

All other practical considerations aside, I think this alone sinks any possibility of using Starship for Earth-to-Earth travel as has been proposed by SpaceX.

Given that a) most human rated rockets have had 0 flights before use, and b) I'd expect each starship to have at least 10 flights, and at least 100 in total without mishap before launching, the statistics should be good

Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis had the main fuel tank directly in front of him. This was in spite of his primal fear of being burned alive. In some airplanes you sit on the fuel tank.

Would be unpleasant if there was crew.

19 people have died in the 391 crewed space missions humans have done so far. The risk of dying is very high. Starship is unlikely to change that, although the commoditization of space flight could have reduce the risk simply by making problems easier to spot because there's more flights.

Test flights.

My tests keep failing until I fix all of my code, then we deploy to production. If code fails in production than that's a problem.

We could say that rockets are not code. A test run of a Spaceship surely cost much more than a test run of any software on my laptop but tests are still tests. They are very likely to fail and there are things to learn from their failures.

Even NASA years into their existence has suffered catastrophic fatal failures. Even with the best and most knowledgeable experts working on it we are ultimately still in the infancy of space flight. Just like airlines every incident we try and understand the cause and prevent it from happening again. Lastly what they are doing is incredibly difficult with probably thousands of things that could go wrong. I think they are doing an amazing job and hope one day, even if I miss it, that space flight becomes acceptable to all who wish to go to space.

He just means MORE checking for leaks.

They already implemented a whole host of changes to the vehicles after the first test back in 2023. There's a list of corrective actions here.

https://imgur.com/a/Y9dd43o

Can you name a space company with less failures? Also I think it is unfair to even compare SpaceX to anything else, because of the insane amount of starts / tests combined unparalleled creativity.

According to this website their current success rate is 99,18%. That's a good number I guess? Considering other companies did not even land their stages for years.

https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/07/31/ula-vs-spacex/#:~:text=....

It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.

It sounds like he's talking to investors and not to general public.

In my experience in corporate america you communicate efficiency by proclaiming a checklist of things to do - plausible, but not necessarily accurate things - and then let engineers figure it out.

Nobody cares of the original checklist as long as the problem gets resolved. It's weird but it seems very hard to utter statement "I don't have specific answers but we have very capable engineers, I'm sure they will figure it out". It's always better to say (from the top of your head) "To resolve A, we will do X,Y and Z!". Then when A get's resolved, everyone praises the effort. Then when they query what actually was done it's "well we found out in fact what were amiss were I, J K".

Stupid comment. Several flights had to be diverted because of the break-up, and anyone in flight at that time would be rightly concerned about barely-visible high-speed shrapnel showering a much larger area than where the visible debris are - especially when you are responsible for keeping your hundreds of passengers safe in a very unexpected situation with no rehearsed procedure to follow.

It's in front of them enough.

To be clear, you’re claiming that this was in fact behind them?

I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.

Which coincidentally launched 22 years ago today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-107

OTOH I remembered Columbia too and I felt good knowing that Starship is being tested thoroughly without jeopardizing the crew.

The space-shuttle could not fly to the orbit automatically. It had to have people on board, and the first flight, IIRC, came close to a disaster.

I remember being woken up by the thunder from Columbia.

Lost it over the years but I used to have a photo of about 20 vans of people parked on our property doing the search for debris. Don't think they found any on our land but there was a 3 ft chunk about 5 miles down the road.

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, but I thought this too.

A lot of flights seem to be diverting to avoid it...

https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lfvhpgmqqc2...

More as long as there were no humans onboard

The number of SpaceX video clips that I know are "actual things really happening" which still activate the involuntary "Sci-Fi / CGI effect" neurons in my brain is remarkable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Liability_Convention

Only used once, when the Soviets dropped a nuclear reactor on Canada.

> States (countries) bear international responsibility for all space objects that are launched within their territory. This means that regardless of who launches the space object, if it was launched from State A's territory, or from State A's facility, or if State A caused the launch to happen, then State A is fully liable for damages that result from that space object.

Most things put into space are designed to burn upon uncontrolled descent through orbit. And then the overwhelming majority of Earth is water and even on land the overwhelming majority of land is either completely uninhabited or sparsely inhabited. And then even if against all odds somehow something doesn't burn up in the atmosphere, and somehow lands in a densely populated area - the odds of hitting a spot with somebody or something relevant on it is still quite low. The overall odds of actually hitting somewhere really bad are just astronomically low.

Nonetheless, recently NASA won the lottery when part of some batteries they jettisoned from the ISS ended up crashing through a house in Florida. [1] Oddly enough there are treaties on this, but only from an international perspective - landing on your own country was not covered! But I'm certain NASA will obviously make it right, as would SpaceX. If they didn't, then surely the family could easily sue as well.

[1] - https://www.space.com/space-debris-florida-family-nasa-lawsu...

It's probably similar to if a US ship crashed into your yacht.

https://www.npr.org/2024/06/23/nx-s1-5016923/space-debris-na...

Musk said that part of the launch licensing was a requirement to estimate the potential damage to whales in the ocean. He said that the odds turned out to be so low that in his opinion if a whale gets hit it had it coming.

https://jabberwocking.com/did-elon-musk-really-have-to-study...

Given the huge spread of the debris, it must have been a decent sized boom, no? I mean that's got to be 10's of miles wide in this video.

https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115

I noticed that the CH4 tank level was much lower than the O2 tank level. That suggests a leak.

Yeah, most likely engine bay fire taking out systems one by one. Would be interesting to compare the telemetry cutoff with the video of explosion if possible. That could indicate if the fire even triggered an explosion, flight termination being activated or just reentry heating making the tanks explode.

As another commenter pointed out, it's down to better cameras; higher resolution and framerates than "traditional" cameras used in this kind of recording. But it could be better still, the camera setup in the clip still gets a lot of shaking from the blasts.

IIRC they use regular off the shelf gopro cameras to mount on the ones going into space. Granted, the mount is ruggedized metal else the cameras wouldn't survive, lol [0].

I'm also reminded of NASA's cameras which were mounted on the mechanisms of an anti-air gun, great for slow and precise movements. I'm sure they still use that today but I couldn't find a good source. I did find an article about NASA's ruggedized cameras for use on spacecraft and the like though [1].

[0] https://www.quora.com/Was-the-GoPro-camera-modified-for-the-... [1] https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Redefining_the_Rugged_Video_Camera

It the high dynamic range (HDR) that makes it look "unnatural" because we are so used to seeing over-compressed photos and videos.

Plus maybe something they do with stability and frame-rate.

They’re being rhetorical for emphasis. No need to twist it into an ad hominem.

I don't believe your ability of classifying videos as real or fake to be any greater than mine. Maybe you just have more confidence?

Part of why it has "weird Demi god status" is that it is not only so reliable but also so cheap. Soyuz is not reusable. Falcon 9 is. That is why Falcon 9 is so celebrated. No other rocket company or state-sponsored space agency comes close to its track record of cheap, reliable, reusable rockets.

I might have missed it, but I’ve never seen a Soyuz booster fly twice, let alone 25 times.

Soyuz? an expendable rocket with 40% less payload capacity? How is that a competitor to falcon 9? More like a competitor to rocketlab's current generation.

It's been so weird to see people say willfully ignorant shit just because they don't like Elon Musk.

"though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz"

That is ... so obviously and blatantly untrue. That is like saying that an old wooden biplane from 1917 is not different from Boeing 777.

SpaceX is inventing quite a lot, there's more areas where they started greenfield than where they got help.

this doesn't even scratch the surface. Slow motion cameras and real time sensors for debugging hardware issues, computer simulations, 3d printing.

Apollo program directors would advocate to start a nuclear war with ussr if they could get hands on that kind of tech.

But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??

Good point, must have been an O2 leak oxidizing random stuff.

At atmospheric pressure, yes.

But up at 140km altitude, the pressure is so low that I don't think even pure oxygen would lead to combustion.

He is a serial liar, but we can also actually see the engineering progress which is remarkable regardless of his overinflated timelines.

His lying doesn't change the incredible work by those engineers and other employees of SpaceX.

I hope you’re as vocal about your higher ups.

If you think delays in aerospace constitute "lies," you're not going to have a good time following any aerospace company. Unexpected delays are par for the course.

I don't think that's a useful framing.

If not SpaceX, it would be all NASA. NASA lies about their budget all the time, with massive overruns. For example, the Artemis overrun exceeds the entire cost of Starship development so far [1].

[1] https://www.space.com/nasa-sls-megarocket-cost-delays-report

The taxpayer pays for all the lies.

Your mom experiences much better vastly different than mine. Trust and transparency is not something we have in the current “free market”. Musk is neither the first nor the last lying executive.

Yes, on the first stage.

The computations are complicated but not that complicated relative to everything else SpaceX is doing. It's much more important to optimize the propellant mass by using it most efficiently than to simplify some computations. And it's probably most efficient to burn the propellant as fast as possible.

Any extra time spent during a burn is wasted fuel. Intuitively, any time before the rocket is in orbit, some part of the rocket thrust is resisting the force of gravity or else it would fall back down to earth. The longer that time is, the more thrust (and thus fuel) was spent negating that force. It's the main reason why the Falcon 9 boosters do a 'hoverslam' on return and land at close to full throttle - any extra time during that burn is less fuel efficient.

Better fuel efficiency = more payload to orbit = plenty of justification for the extra complexity.

Admittedly gravity losses are more significant at the beginning when the booster/ship are ascending purely vertically than later in second stage flight which is mostly horizontal, but definitely still a factor.

The flight control loops are strongly latched. They are constantly checking the state of discretes, control surfaces, and intended guidance. If any critical parameter gets out of range for a period of time or if any group of standard parameters gets out of range the vehicle will simply cease powered flight.

In the Space Shuttle, given that it was human rated, the "Range Safety" system was completely manual. It was controlled by a pair of individuals and they manually made the call to send the ARM/FIRE sequence to the range safety detonators.

The automated FTS is triggered if it leaves a pre-defined corridor (which is wider than the flight plan - substantially so in some places).

The AFTS has independent, hardened, validated inertial measurement systems.

Probably self destructs if anything goes wrong

Telemetry showed them lose engines one at a time, which isn’t a great sign.