SpaceX Starship 36 Anomaly

Is this actually true?

Amazon was pretty notorious for poor culture and high employee turnover yet the company performance has been stellar. Covid-era twitter clearly cared a ton about employee morale but the product stagnated.

I find it's often the opposite causality, IE the success/trajectory of the company is the primary component that determines morale. An increasing stock price makes employees happy.

Not just that but he aggressively fires people for little or nothing, spontaneously rescinds outstanding offers, fires contractors, initiates hiring freezes, cancels bonuses and throws up Nazi salutes on national television.

So I’ve heard working for him can present challenges.

Von Braun went from burning through Jewish slave labor to build super weapons to Hitler to hosting TV specials on space travel with Walt Disney in Orlando Florida. Are we going to see the reverse progression with Elon?

Von Braun was just a geek who passionately wanted to work on rockets. He didn't worry much about what payloads they would carry or whom they would land on, just as people working at Meta or Palantir don't sweat those sorts of details. He wasn't so much immoral as amoral.

As it happened, the only people willing to pay von Braun to build rockets were Nazis, so (shrug) Nazis it was. If the Americans had recruited him in the 1930s, he would have become a loyal American and a credit to his adopted country, just as he ended up doing after the war. If Stalin had been willing to sponsor him, well, he'd have raised the red banner and become a loyal Communist.

There was never any point in prosecuting von Braun as a Nazi, or even thinking of him as one. Treating him as a war criminal, even though he technically was one, would have been a pointless, performative waste of badly-needed talent, like destroying captured V2s instead of studying them.

Elon Musk? He has no such excuse. Musk can be anything, do anything, say anything. He came to America early and made his fortune doing things that a lot of us respected and even envied him for. Then he chose to attach his name to far-right causes, throw Nazi salutes, and do the Kraft durch Freude dance at Trump rallies. Turned out Musk didn't care about building rockets or going to Mars quite so much as he cared about being an immature asshole. In that sense he took a path diametrically opposite that of Wernher von Braun.

So, yeah, if I worked for SpaceX, I wouldn't exactly bust my ass to make the leader's vision happen after losing trust in the integrity of said leader. I'd simply leave and find employment elsewhere, leaving behind people with fewer options.

Ref: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro&t=17s

Turns out skillset usually trumps justice, as long as you're willing to make the right post-hoc mea culpas.

DOGE is not a joke. DOGE is the modern equivalent of an enclosure act - privatisation of state data for private profit and political leverage, some of which will be wielded by hostile countries.

And Musk was personally responsible - not just for that atrocity, but for poisoning the world's leading progressive social media site, for being complicit in the neutering of countless world-leading science projects, for defunding basic research at NASA and firing hundreds of employees with solid achievements and genuine passion for space science, for gutting the FAA, and so on.

I cannot say enough unkind things about the man. The fact that he has any kind of following at all after the last year is both shocking and disappointing.

> he came off as a very skilled engineer.

No, he did not. I still can't believe people bought his BS so easily - "it must be true, because he said it!" No, it isn't, never was, never will be. And I don't even care about that salute - Musk lost all his credibility around 2015 when he promised self-driving cars (coming next year! for the past 10 years, and counting), then by lying about the Solarcity roof tiles (and basically committed fraud for which he didn't go to prison - go figure).

It is also quite dehonestating to those _real_ engineers working for Tesla or Spacex, who actually know their stuff. It was them who made Musk possible, not the other way around.

> all that great work by thousands of talented people in his companies..

Exactly.

Same happened for me. It started with the Thai cave rescue and his submarine where it showed that he is a big attention whore. From then on he seemed to lose his mind.

I still have to respect Starlink, accelerating adoption of EVs and the work SpaceX does. His businesses have reshaped several industries big time. It takes a lot of courage and insight to pull this off.

Children need heroes to look up to, I’m glad that children of right wingers can look up to him but who do children of left wingers have to look up to? Jeff Bezos is hardly inspiring.

The pattern "I used to be [...] fan, but|however|... because of [...] I'm not anymore" is like em dash in the world of propaganda.

One benefit of being quiet is that people may assume you're more competent than you are.

If you're loud, that collapses into a more realistic appraisal.

Please get out of your bubble. It’s affecting your perception of reality. I recommend reading the book “they thought they were free” - before it’s too late (for those around you)

This is what I have read so far:

https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/1lfayba/em_update_o...

So yeah, a QC problem, it seems.

With this one, given the seething hatred for Musk these days, I wouldn't rule out sabotage.

It's not the most likely cause, but in a world where people have been torching Tesla dealerships, I'm sure there's a lot of people now who really want to see Starship fail.

The Soviet program had plenty of that.

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

Sure, even with Falcon 9 many found it iffy to have so many engines - but it turned out fine. Hopefully modern control hardware and QA can handle also 30+. :)

Full reusability would totally change the game. It'd be an order-of-magnitude cost reduction. Maybe even 2 orders of magnitude (cost per kg to orbit)

If you didn't want to go to mars, you wouldn't be making starship at all.

It's pretty clear there is barely enough commercial launch demand for falcon 9 (it already has ~100% of the non-foreign launch market, and there isn't a huge amount of price elasticity), so no reason at all to develop starship, apart from humans in space.

Being a fan of railways, I tend to compare to electric locomotives. The heaviest Vectrons are about 90 tons, and they would fit into the payload bay:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectron_(locomotive)

Now that would be high-speed rail.

It's an Abrams tank.

An Abrahams tank would be one designed to carry the Holy Hand Grenade.

:)

Those first two with engine failures you mentioned were caused by contamination issues inside the vehicle, solved by adding filtration systems. Those last two were on the second stage so no comparison to the N1 with its massive numbers of engines and the ninth flight you mentioned wasn't even an engine failure.

The part that I found interesting was ~"Anyone can build a bridge, but it takes an engineer to just barely build a bridge. That's what Starship V2 is, a mass and complexity reduction. Maybe they took away too much."

I'll defer to Scott Manley any day -- this seems like a refinement of what I said.

Smallest orbital anything so far is 31ft(9.54m) long, 20in(54cm) wide, 2.9t/2.6t(2600kg?), does 9lbs(4kg) to random-ish LEO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-520

How does this compare to the cube-square law scaling effects applied to propeller- and wing-lifted vehicles like quadcopters/helicopters and RC aircraft/jumbo jets? Or even the squat shape of a housefly that zigs and zags through the air like an acrobat compared to the ponderous lift-off of a large goose?

I understand vaguely that those operate and scale based on the area (a square function of their length) of their lifting surfaces, and are pulled down by their mass (a cube function of their length).

A little Estes toy rocket lifts off the pad much more aggressively (in the blink of an eye!) than a full size rocket...

I'd posit that Mark Rober just used a hobby rocket to put that selfie satellite into orbit. Perhaps he's the first?

I don't believe there's any performance advantage for full-flow, which SpaceX alone is attempting. The only point is to lower the combustion temperature inside the turbines, at the expense of (much) higher flow rates through those turbines, in order to increase their lifespan.

(There's a large difference between staged combustion generally and gas-generator engines, which throw away performance by dumping fuel out of the turbine exhaust).

> So there's some sort of curve, zero at both ends, between overall rocket size and the payload to orbit.

This doesn't follow. Engineering complexity is not a limit on payload to orbit, it is a fundamentally different parameter. Yeah building a mile tall rocket would be hard, but it would get a shit ton of payload to orbit. There is no maximum beyond which making a bigger rocket starts to reduce your payload to orbit.

> But then you have another curve that I think starts small and increases near-monotonically, which is the complexity/likelihood-to-fail factor to the size of the rocket. It's (relatively) easy to launch a toy rocket, (fairly) simple to build a missile-sized sub-orbital rocket, difficult to build a small-to-medium orbital rocket, and apparently very difficult to build a Saturn/N-1/Starship-sized rocket.

Complexity does not increase with size, people just become more risk averse with size. Toy rockets fail all the time, just nobody really cares. No one would bet the lives of multiple people and hundreds of millions of dollars on a successful toy rocket launch. If complexity increases, it is with capability. If you want to land on the moon, you need something a bit more advanced than a hobby rocket. There is no reason to believe a floatilla of physically smaller rockets capable of achieving any given mission will be less complex in aggregate than a single physically larger rocket.

> Whatever you build, it would land on the moon perhaps once, and never again.

But it would also never land on Mars, so it would be a waste to build it for that. Build it for what it will actually spend its life doing.

Not saying SpaceX won't go to Mars, but if/when they do it will likely be several rocket generations later and possibly with specialized rockets, with a significant portion of it being one-time-use as you ain't returning.

This seems off. According to this: https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo (or in more detail: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTKMekJW9F8Z... )

Total lunar effort from 1960-1973, adjusted for 2024 USD: $326 billion

Launch vehicle costs (Saturn V): $113 billion

I think this is what should be compared against the total Starship program cost starting from 2020 until such time it completes 6 lunar landings (not counting SLS or other costs).

Or, for the year that Starship actually lands on the moon, compare against the Saturn V launch vehicle costs for 1969, inflation adjusted: $5.9 billion. See: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTKMekJW9F8Z...

Sure, but spacex are building on the shoulders of what came before. Easy to save 200bn on research and development if someone else has already paid for it and shares the results for free.

I love this quote from Gwynne Shotwell when asked how they achieved that no government has: "The first is that we're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants."

Source: https://youtu.be/Dar8P3r7GYA?si=RHZ8lWFYKrd7qQhy&t=321

% GDP isn't an inflation adjustment.

0.8% US GDP in 1969 would be about 8B/yr today. Very different answer

> for up to 0.8% US GDP per year. Today that would be $200B/year, pure spent. Where is Space X today is making, ie. it has a revenue, $15B/year.

The likes of SpaceX are reporting costs in the range of $15B/year because NASA front loaded the cost of trailblazing launch technology half a century ago, with the technology available half a century ago.

Let's not fool ourselves into believing the likes of SpaceX are reinventing the wheel.

Also, those $15B are buying a fraction of the capabilities of SaturnV, and while SaturnV was proven effective and reliable 50 years ago, here we are discussing yet another "anomaly". Perhaps half these "anomalies" wouldn't exist if they weren't lean'ed into existence?

The Apollo programme had some serious human capital. The best minds aren't working on infotainment. (EDIT: not car infotainment, anyway...)

Car software is, perhaps counterintuitively, doing a lot more than the Apollo software did. Just think about the computers available at the time and how much memory they didn't have.

Obligatory bruised_blood comic: https://x.com/iamdevloper/status/1072503943790497798/photo/1

> At first people don't know the dangers and can go fast and loose: surgery, radioactive material, planes, cars, trains, rockets

Gas pipework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR486zloao0

This is an inane comparison.

Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS.

So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload.

It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule.

Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”.

The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.

The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.

Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful.

Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.

> You are comparing "sending a small crew for a few days on the Moon ASAP for propaganda purposes" with "setting up a permanent outpost on the Moon".

No, OP is comparing a launcher that worked reliably (it's in the history books) with a launcher which never performed a mission and is reporting "anomalies".

I don't think GP meant 10-15 Starships missions needed to carry the same payload, but 10-15 test launches necessary before it's ready for real. I think the Saturn V had only two test flights before it took people around the moon.

> That's complete nonsense. 10-15 Starship launches would land a lander that can carry like 100tons of payload orbit.

The burning question that I have now is whether a Starship explosion during lunar testing will be visible from Earth. I sure hope they would do it during a new moon too for maximum effect.

SpaceX is currently spending around $100m per launch for 'things that don't get into orbit', never mind land on the moon.

So yes, I suppose that is more inefficient, in a way.

Starship doesn't currently have launch abort modes

Many Saturns blew up during testing. Starship is still in testing.

Your arguments are strange, a mirage concocted to fit a narrative of denigration and darkness. You mock with zeal, yet have no point to the mocking.

Always with the mocking, you cause an ache which cannot be balmed. Cease, I pray you. Stop these machinations, this mad canter.

Falcon was built the same way. It blew up many times too, explosions aplenty. Now it is the most successful lift on the planet.

> Still, they blew up an awful lot less than other rockets of their size like N1 or Starship.

I think the only reasonable comparison would be after cost equivalency. The Starship has a long way to go, to catch up.

Well the military purpose was why the Shuttle was so crappy. The original design was smaller and meant to sit on top of its rocket. This would have probably prevented loss of crew in both of the instances where shuttle failed.

Eventually Starship will also be bid for military programs.

And Saturn V never had a military mission, neither had Shuttle.

This is a long but great video from Destin that goes over this in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU&pp=0gcJCdgAo7VqN...

> Building a heavier rocket is much harder ...

Disagree. The overall Starship system's problems are obviously in Starship, not in the Super Heavy booster. The latter is far heavier. But it only has to do 2 things well - sub-orbital launch, and sub-orbital precision return. And the launch tower's chopsticks give it a lot of help with the latter.

Vs. the Starship has to do far more things - all of them mission-critical - while being ruthlessly optimized for weight.

>So why not send a few lighter ones instead of a heavy one? This is what the launch market has concluded for a long time.

   I want to do Apollo again.[0]

Let’s assume starship works out and they come up with a nifty wide-opening payload door solution, one of the advantages will be payload volume as well as mass - the JWST’s main mirror would have fit inside without being folded (although the heat shield would not have).

So that's 3 issues in the last 2 flights and one static fire, all different, all with different root causes, all catastrophic. Block 3 will be a different vehicle, should they just skip Block 2 (scrap however many they already built) and move on to Block 3?

Sounds impressive, sure. Question is how much weight do you put into survey stats like those given Musk's extensive history of things like buying the influence he wants, putting his thumbs on the scales of his truth-bot, getting generous valuations based on hype and stories, knowing about "those vote counting computers" (Trump's own words), ruthlessly firing anyone who disagrees with him, etc etc etc.

Then again, they are launching tons of rockets, and any cult leader has his followers, so what do I know...

Is the front supposed to fall off?

Let's wait for the engineers to confirm that isn't supposed to happen.

Maybe they should engineer them so that the front doesn't fall off

That seems like a poor example given how many failed attempts to land something on Mars that took place before they got to designs that would get it right in the first go.

Infinitely more fun to witness though.

It's easy to make structures that don't fail: just make them 5x stronger than anticipated max loads.

Sadly, this would make a rocket too heavy to reach orbit. So they end up being 1.1x stronger than anticipated loads. And it's hard to exactly anticipate loads. Vibration can add to a peak load, and it's notoriously hard to model how much vibration might happen. SpaceX rockets are filled with cryogenic methane at -160C, which causes everything it touches to shrink which creates forces between the parts that get cold and the parts that don't. A rocket-sized tank contracts by inches, but has to be supported by the structure around it. A single support member that doesn't move the right way can cause a fracture. So it's actually a hard problem.

It's clearly not the only way they know how to conduct tests, or none of their rockets would have ever left the pad.

They were incredibly crazy to use the RL-10 hydrogen engine for the supposedly cheap prototype flights.

A simple error like that should be caught before you fill the rocket with methane and liquid oxygen. If a simple error gets through to this point your procedures are bad, which is a big problem for a complex rocket with many parts that could have simple errors.

The error itself is probably easily fixed. Usually the bigger the effects, easier to fix.

The real problem is the damaged infrastructure. They don't have several launch towers in the pipeline like they have Starships. This is a "pause and rebuild" scenario, with the wait time much harder to parallelize with something else. Whatever time they spend until they have the second launch tower functional, I'd bet about half of it will be an overall addition to the whole project.

I worry that the current "favorable" FAA environment is leading to a regression in their engineering quality honestly.

There's a simple fault, and then there's the question of why did it happen anyway?

Beyond whatever design or production issues caused this particular anomaly there will also be the delays due to the fact they just blew up a lot of ground support equipment.

> This could be a "simple" production error (think "cracked pipe") which can be fixed with more effective monitoring of the construction, and not a major design flaw.

Good luck trying to get launch insurance for that without a full root cause and proof in double triplicate that this has been fixed.

Are you going to put you payload on one of those, a payload that will take 3 years to rebuild, and might end the company?

If your space program has "simple" errors, then you are incompetent. These have to be stomped out beforehand. Is this amateur hour?

Hey, what do you know, it was a COPV again!

https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1lf8huf/preli... ("Preliminary data suggests that a nitrogen COPV in the payload bay failed below its proof pressure...")

Depending on your mission profile, there are more ways how to get to the Moon and possibly back - the Surveyor space probes did direct ascent without entering lunar orbit & massive burn with an embedded solid rocket engine just before landing.

The soviet plan (if they actually managed to get the N1 to work) was to take the upper stage of that rocket all they way to the Moon (fueled by kerolox BTW) and use it for the final braking burn of the LK lander[1], before eecting the stage to crash on the surface while the lander used its engine for soft landing.

And then the lander would launch directly to lunar orbit using the same (or backup) engine, not dropping any stages, just the landing legs. This was forced by the much lower carrying capacity of the N1. There was just one cosmonaut landing as a result, with another one in the "lunar Souyuz" staying in lunar orbit. So just 2 people versus 3 in Apollo. And there was not even a hatch between the two modules & the cosmonaut was supposed to spacewalk (!) between the two before landing and after meeting back with the Soyuz spacecraft.

So if you can realistically do a single stage to landing & orbit on a body, I'm sure it will be the preferred option going forward, it has a significant benefits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK_(spacecraft) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-LOK

A third stage with the current Starship design would have to be under 100 tonnes and the payload would be small. It would have to do all the work of injecting into a transfer orbit, landing on Mars, and returning. It’s hard to imagine such a small craft getting all the way to Mars, with a crew, and returning them.

Starship is just not a good design for pushing a third stage into a transfer orbit by itself. It’s totally dependent on the idea of in-orbit refuelling and refuelling on Mars. Once you refuel it, the game changes completely.

It’s also not a workable solution for landing on the Moon without refuelling for the same reasons. In some ways the Moon is more problematic because you can’t manufacture methalox on the Moon.

Yes. My "if" could have been a "since it probably".

SpaceX does well: "He's not even running SpaceX, it's all Shotwell!"

SpaceX does bad: "He's spiraling out of control on drugs!"

Super slow motion clip.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1lf3g...