I am getting tired of hearing and reading the constant attempts to put a spin on this event. A partly failed test run has an obvious interpretation, nobody is concerned about investors pulling out of SpaceX, and they will have the new one stacked before long. Why dress it up? One might say that the rocked had enough spin already.
I'm the author. It's not spin. It's about preserving and bringing back the early spirit of what made rockets progress so quickly.
Yuri Gagarin's launch on Vostok 1 and the launch of Apollo 11 are 8 years 3 months 4 days apart. Or, 3,017 days. For reference, it took 11 years between SLS' announcement and an uncrewed launch. It'll be around twice the time difference between Vostok 1 and Apollo 11 before the SLS delivers humans to the moon.
Humanity progressed so quickly during Project Apollo because they were accepting of "failure" and willing to embrace the associated risk. Post-Apollo and post-Challenger, this willingness and risk appetite completely disappeared leading to paralysis.
When we call something as awesome (in the traditional sense of the word) as yesterday's test a "failure," we are implicitly rejecting the Apollo paradigm and embracing the SLS one. I think it's harmful for humanity, in the long run, to do so.
We should build and launch more rockets. Some of them will explode. Such is life.
Apollo cost a nontrivial fraction of GDP. It was risky indeed, but we shouldn’t forget that the project had spectacular resources available, far more than SLS.
IIRC Apollo cost around a quarter trillion dollars in today’s money.
On the other hand, Starship is costing less to develop than SLS, but with a bigger rocket, groundbreaking* new engines and full reusability while SLS is a disposable with warmed-over Shuttle technology.
That wasn't some college guys blowing up a lab, this was a pretty costly failure. Surely the reliability of the engines could have been tested without the spaceship part of the stack. Someone took shortcuts and paid for it.
Not really. How would you test a rocket engine at low atmospheric pressure? You can't exactly stick a rocket engine in a vacuum chamber and light it. Then once you're launching something into space, you may as well have a first stage to go along with it. Are you saying they should have launched the booster stage by itself? Why? What would they learn from that? Would you ever expect them to launch a booster on it's own in practice?
An interpretation that is obvious can be easy to arrive at - but that does not make it correct, only low effort. If the test had not failed then it was not ambitious enough. If they had not pushed the rocket to its current breaking point then they would not have learned as much about it, or its current modes of failure.
Sometimes it is worth looking past the obvious interpretation. I thought the article was a good read, kudos to the author.
Why? The world is filled with unwarranted hype and spin and yet this particular instance stands out especially to exasperbate you so?
Do you go around whenever a new album is about to drop and tell people the single is meh and they should in fact not be excited? What is your actual motivation here to take the wind out of peoples sails?
If the spin is unwarranted gravity, as we saw, will take care of it without your input. If the hype is unwarranted it will evaporate on its own even without your input.
So what are you contributing here? How does your attitude benefit anyone/thing? Pessimism is perfectly fine don't get me wrong - but if you are so pessimistic why even bother to make this sort of remark..
Man that test yesterday was great, here's a list of successes:
* Did you see them hold and restart the countdown in the last minute, just the ability to do that at all is amazing
* The full startup sequence which is super complicated for 33 engines worked
* The six second hold down and release system worked - holding down a rocket with twice the thrust of Saturn V
* They found out the limits of the pad, and we know now they were already working on a cover for the pad with water cooled steel that wasn't ready in time
* Stage 0 worked, launched the rocket, and the flight computers on the rocket worked as well
* The rocket was able to maintain stable flight with many engine outs
* The launch tower was cleared, that is a huge milestone to get past. Blowing up the launch tower really sets you back, it's also like too much damage to collect really good data from, as well as it probably would of blown up the propellent farm as well which sets you back with regulatory agencies.
* The engines survived what looks like multiple failures without taking out the rest of the vehicle
* There is tons of data from build and test to correlate all the engines that worked vs the ones that didn't and find all kinds of correlations. Lots of engines, lots of test data.
* It made it past max Q, another big milestone
* The tanks held their pressure the whole way up
* It made it all the way to stage separation, this is where many rockets flown for the first time have their failure so this is par for the course
* FTS (flight termination system) worked, no better way to test it than actually setting it off
* They probably flew with tons risks and unknowns that we'll never know about, but now they have the data to resolve.
Similar to Falcon Heavy, they are cheering because holy crap this thing is actually working
This is still in the USA. They still had to get approval from the EPA to set up all of this stuff. I realize this comment is satire, but the reason this location was chosen has to do with orbital mechanics. A launch pad close to the equator can send payloads to a larger range of orbital inclinations.
You're right, Mexico would be a better place to launch rockets from. You want to be close to the equator, and on an east coast so you can launch rockets over the water and avoid dropping boosters on people. Rockets generally are launched to the east to take advantage of Earth's rotation (we're all moving about 1,000 mph to the east, so launching west requires about 2,000mph extra Delta v). SpaceX is a USA company, and I believe their rocket technology is considered a government secret and must stay in the USA. So that's why SpaceX themselves aren't putting launch pads in Mexico.
Also I believe equatorial orbits are still possible to achieve from USA launch sites, it just means more fuel/ reduced payload.
Interestingly, the James Webb telescope was launched from French Guiana, which is almost right on the equator.
Also Israel is one of the few countries that regularly launches their rockets to the west, as they only have a West Coast.
For example, even though Rocket Lab was founded in New Zealand it is now a US based company. It operates launch facilities both in New Zealand and the US and pretty sure it builds stuff in both countries.
If the earth is rotating to the east, and we launch a rocket that drops boosters from the east coast, doesn't that mean that the land mass would move under where the boosters would drop? Wouldn't the earth need to be rotating towards the west for it to move the land mass away from the launch site?
Because I already have momentum from the earth, but a rocket will be disconnected from the earth for far longer than I would be jumping. The path of a rocket would start to curve away from the launch site due to no longer being connected from the earth for such a long time.
1) An object will maintain its momentum forever unless some force acts upon it.
2) In the case of the rocket, it accelerates eastward. Even if parts fall off, and they slow down because of the drag of the atmosphere, and they slow down all the way to the speed of the atmosphere, the atmosphere is more or less moving eastward at the same speed as the earth's rotation, so any part would be unlikely to land any further west than where it detached from the rocket. And if there was no atmosphere on earth any part that fell off a rocket during its ascent to orbit would fall according to a ballistic trajectory and would most certainly land farther east than where it fell.
Rockets fall under some pretty big restrictions government wise. You know, guided missiles and all that. While SpaceX is a private company, the people allowed to work on their rockets are very much restricted. I believe they can employ Americans and Canadians, but anyone else is not allowed to work there.
The European Space Agency launches out of French Guiana in South America for this reason.
I assume we don't launch out of Mexico because rocket technology is tightly controlled by ITAR, so there's no way the government would allow any of it to go to another country's sovereign territory.
On the other hand the United States has a lot of overseas colonies which are nearer to the equator. Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, a lot of atolls in the pacific, Guam. Even Hawaii is more southern.
I assume shipping to the launch pads is a major issue, especially for the Apollo, Space Shuttle and SLS programs which were/are build all over the place in the continental US.
Mostly agree with your positive conclusions- but I can’t help thinking about the poor judgement re the known weaknesses of the launchpad.
The concrete was nowhere near strong enough to withstand that much thrust - thousands of lumps of flying concrete are obviously going to damage the engines, they were lucky that none of them pierced the fuel tanks
3 months ago, we started building a massive water-cooled, steel plate to go under the launch mount.
Wasn’t ready in time & we wrongly thought, based on static fire data, that Fondag would make it through 1 launch.
Looks like we can be ready to launch again in 1 to 2 months.
From what I understand, when they plan to land on the Moon or Mars, they won't have a flame trench setup (on the Moon/Mars), so it needs to be able to land and take off from the ground.
Moon or Mars would only get the second stage of the starship, with 9 engines (was it?), not the super-heavy with dozens. So, it's okay to only have the flame trench on Earth.
How are FAA and EPA going to view the event? What are the external ramifications for SpaceX for this event?
FAA has already grounded Starship from further flights after this event, till they investigate matter on their own. There are also reports of dust clouds triggered by the explosion in Texas dropping dust in a large area in Texas.
Just FYI, they always ground vehicles after they explode, until the investigation clears them as safe (within bounds of the license).
So this is par for the course, and unless the investigation turns up an issue that entails unacceptable risk to people, natural environment, or built environment we should see a return to flight as soon as the launchpad is rebuilt etc.
Are the remnants of rocket fuel mixed into the dust hazardous?
SpaceX has specifically told folks in the town not to touch any debris or handle and call them.
They are also VERY careful about handling dragon capsules etc. though I think that’s more for the thruster, rather than the engines.
I know ch4+o2 should convert to co2 and h2o but I’m unsure what other particulate could be included in the dust. Like concrete remnants (concrete dust is really bad to breathe) paint, or other additives or chemicals that were still n the pad and rocket.
It's mostly silica dust from concrete turning into powder, you don't want to breathe it for sure, but it's not like this is a rocket filled with hypergolic fuels.
Yeah, it seems it did eventually. Yet, I'm surprised that it took a whopping minute (25% of total flight time) to ignite after deviation from the flight plan. Was that intended too?
Usually there is a defined "flight envelope" and if it deviates from that, they detonate. I'm guessing they simply waited as long as possible, and once it left the designated buffer is when they finally detonated it.
As long as you leave runway to safely set it off, you'd want to delay it as much as safely possible to collect as much data as possible. The cost of this launch spread over 3 minutes means the cost per second is extremely high. Another 10 seconds of data is millions of dollars worth of data.
It's honestly not even worth engaging on this topic anymore. People who understand the space industry know exactly what's going on, everyone else just woke up to headlines about an explosion and mouthed off based on how annoyed they are about the various idiot things Elon's been tweeting.
None of the Twitter drama matters, they'll go back to work on the rocket and it will work or it won't. (It probably will.)
Musk and hype, sure to get clicks. Increased 10 fold for impressive explosions. And it was an impressive explosion.
I just wonder how the public perception, explicitly including on HN, would have been if SLS had blown up. I remember some people calling them out for delaying the initial launch.
Right now, I love seeing two options. Even if NASA cost a gazillion more dollars, we have two mechanics at work : cathedral building (NASA) and Bazaar building (Iterate quick, learn of mistakes)
Personally I think the budget of NASA is inconsequential to say the defense budget. Not sure what the general HN vibe is, but probably mostly leaning towards “waste of my tax dollars / inefficient”
I don't know exactly in this case, but congressmen have always been making NASA rockets more expensive. They often made it so that at least a part of the rockets were built in their respective states, making things more expensive than needed.
I am more of an aero than a space guy, so there is that. While everybody sees the risk of loosing prototypes during testing as almost likely, and non-desastrous as long as there is no loss of life (which was far more accepted until, say, the 60s), nobody would call a failed flight test resulting in a complete hull loss a sucess. The testing until failure happens on component and system level before anything flies the first time.
Maybe actual space rockets arw different, after all those used to be expandable anyway, but still launch failures, and failing to get out of the atmosphere is a failure, shouldn't be seen as sucess of any kind.
As a co worker of mine once out it: Everything flies if you apply enough thrust to it. Doing so in a controlled in safe manner is the trick.
Well, it did successfully lift off the pad. I honestly didn't think it would make it that far.
"The ... Failure happens ... Before anything flies the first time" I'm no aerospace engineer, but I doubt this was the case in the early days of jet engines(if that is the case, then I stand corrected). The new raptor engines are full flow staged combustion, only the second of their kind. Having this many light right next to each other and burn for that long at high altitude is a huge milestone.
I am curious what milestone contracts SpaceX may have had sitting around waiting for a Starship flight to pay out actually.
If this was a sales pitch "the rocket destroyed the launchpad, and got damaged in the process - once we fix that it'll work" is a much better pitch then "we need another 2 years minimum of permitting in order to build the flame diverter to launch it" (though I'm content to put this one on Musk: once Starship started being delayed, building the flame diverter should've just been a time cost they ate immediately).
The stupider takes on this are the people doing the "this is so incompetent! This company can't be trusted" spiel as though the Falcon 9 hasn't been quietly throwing things into orbit and landing this entire time.
The first jet engines were used on actual aircraft during WW2, for obvious reasons speed trumped safety across the board. Heck, back then people thought installing liquid fuel rocket engines in wooden glider aircaft was such a good idea, they actually built and used them in combat. I'm too lazy to read up on the actual development history of the first jet powered fighter jets so.
And yes, depending on aircraft, a lot of components are tested until failure before they are installed in actually flying aircraft.
It sounds like they knew this older version was more likely to fail, so they just launched it to clear out the backlog. Sure they got data, but they might just confirm suspected problems. See launch pad damage for an example of a known weakness.
All that tumbling? The flight was lost so why wait? I think they really really wanted stage separation to happen and "kept trying".
The approach you describe has been NASA's approach with SLS, and it's been very slow and expensive. Being willing to blow things up and learn from failures is not only way cheaper and faster but it results in very reliable rockets. SpaceX proved that already with Falcon.
> There is a sharp difference between those who play status games, and those who are interested in creation and exploration. That difference can be measured in explosions.
I found the article enjoyable and quotable.
Throwaway designs should be considered a serious option in any formal engineering thought process. Especially ambitious high-risk high-impact projects. So many compounding benefits.
B) Launch two rockets each with a 70% chance of success
We should do (B) because it has a 91% chance that at least one of the rockets succeeds, and a 49% chance two rockets succeed--an outcome that is impossible under scenario (A). With the right telemetry, the 51% chance that at least one fails will give us valuable knowledge that helps us improve our rockets the next launch.
Of course, the calculus changes if we let failure-averse marketing people run our rocket company.
The calculus also changes dramatically based on the cost of the payload. If it's the JWTT you'd definitely want to double the launch cost to increase probability 20%.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadYuri Gagarin's launch on Vostok 1 and the launch of Apollo 11 are 8 years 3 months 4 days apart. Or, 3,017 days. For reference, it took 11 years between SLS' announcement and an uncrewed launch. It'll be around twice the time difference between Vostok 1 and Apollo 11 before the SLS delivers humans to the moon.
Humanity progressed so quickly during Project Apollo because they were accepting of "failure" and willing to embrace the associated risk. Post-Apollo and post-Challenger, this willingness and risk appetite completely disappeared leading to paralysis.
When we call something as awesome (in the traditional sense of the word) as yesterday's test a "failure," we are implicitly rejecting the Apollo paradigm and embracing the SLS one. I think it's harmful for humanity, in the long run, to do so.
We should build and launch more rockets. Some of them will explode. Such is life.
Also, I owe you an email! I'm writing it now :)
People are mad about whatever dumb thing Elon did with Twitter this week.
Even when applied to Twitter, the question presents itself:
Are you really happy with what it was before?
The only path from "then" to "better" is through "doing lots of stuff, some of it stupid".
IIRC Apollo cost around a quarter trillion dollars in today’s money.
* (Admittedly a little too groundbreaking.)
Sometimes it is worth looking past the obvious interpretation. I thought the article was a good read, kudos to the author.
Do you go around whenever a new album is about to drop and tell people the single is meh and they should in fact not be excited? What is your actual motivation here to take the wind out of peoples sails?
If the spin is unwarranted gravity, as we saw, will take care of it without your input. If the hype is unwarranted it will evaporate on its own even without your input.
So what are you contributing here? How does your attitude benefit anyone/thing? Pessimism is perfectly fine don't get me wrong - but if you are so pessimistic why even bother to make this sort of remark..
* Did you see them hold and restart the countdown in the last minute, just the ability to do that at all is amazing
* The full startup sequence which is super complicated for 33 engines worked
* The six second hold down and release system worked - holding down a rocket with twice the thrust of Saturn V
* They found out the limits of the pad, and we know now they were already working on a cover for the pad with water cooled steel that wasn't ready in time
* Stage 0 worked, launched the rocket, and the flight computers on the rocket worked as well
* The rocket was able to maintain stable flight with many engine outs
* The launch tower was cleared, that is a huge milestone to get past. Blowing up the launch tower really sets you back, it's also like too much damage to collect really good data from, as well as it probably would of blown up the propellent farm as well which sets you back with regulatory agencies.
* The engines survived what looks like multiple failures without taking out the rest of the vehicle
* There is tons of data from build and test to correlate all the engines that worked vs the ones that didn't and find all kinds of correlations. Lots of engines, lots of test data.
* It made it past max Q, another big milestone
* The tanks held their pressure the whole way up
* It made it all the way to stage separation, this is where many rockets flown for the first time have their failure so this is par for the course
* FTS (flight termination system) worked, no better way to test it than actually setting it off
* They probably flew with tons risks and unknowns that we'll never know about, but now they have the data to resolve.
Similar to Falcon Heavy, they are cheering because holy crap this thing is actually working
This is Texas. You get a tax break for causing accidental explosions, based on the kilotonnage achieved.
Also I believe equatorial orbits are still possible to achieve from USA launch sites, it just means more fuel/ reduced payload.
Interestingly, the James Webb telescope was launched from French Guiana, which is almost right on the equator.
Also Israel is one of the few countries that regularly launches their rockets to the west, as they only have a West Coast.
For example, even though Rocket Lab was founded in New Zealand it is now a US based company. It operates launch facilities both in New Zealand and the US and pretty sure it builds stuff in both countries.
2) In the case of the rocket, it accelerates eastward. Even if parts fall off, and they slow down because of the drag of the atmosphere, and they slow down all the way to the speed of the atmosphere, the atmosphere is more or less moving eastward at the same speed as the earth's rotation, so any part would be unlikely to land any further west than where it detached from the rocket. And if there was no atmosphere on earth any part that fell off a rocket during its ascent to orbit would fall according to a ballistic trajectory and would most certainly land farther east than where it fell.
I assume we don't launch out of Mexico because rocket technology is tightly controlled by ITAR, so there's no way the government would allow any of it to go to another country's sovereign territory.
I assume shipping to the launch pads is a major issue, especially for the Apollo, Space Shuttle and SLS programs which were/are build all over the place in the continental US.
FAA has already grounded Starship from further flights after this event, till they investigate matter on their own. There are also reports of dust clouds triggered by the explosion in Texas dropping dust in a large area in Texas.
I wonder if Texas experiences any natural dust storms.
So this is par for the course, and unless the investigation turns up an issue that entails unacceptable risk to people, natural environment, or built environment we should see a return to flight as soon as the launchpad is rebuilt etc.
SpaceX has specifically told folks in the town not to touch any debris or handle and call them.
They are also VERY careful about handling dragon capsules etc. though I think that’s more for the thruster, rather than the engines.
I know ch4+o2 should convert to co2 and h2o but I’m unsure what other particulate could be included in the dust. Like concrete remnants (concrete dust is really bad to breathe) paint, or other additives or chemicals that were still n the pad and rocket.
Yeah, it seems it did eventually. Yet, I'm surprised that it took a whopping minute (25% of total flight time) to ignite after deviation from the flight plan. Was that intended too?
None of the Twitter drama matters, they'll go back to work on the rocket and it will work or it won't. (It probably will.)
-Billionaire entrepreneur news? Check.
-Biggest rocket ever news? Check.
-Explosion that makes Michael Bay seem like an amateur? Check.
-Environmental disaster news? Check.
The list could probably go on for a while.
I just wonder how the public perception, explicitly including on HN, would have been if SLS had blown up. I remember some people calling them out for delaying the initial launch.
Personally I think the budget of NASA is inconsequential to say the defense budget. Not sure what the general HN vibe is, but probably mostly leaning towards “waste of my tax dollars / inefficient”
Maybe actual space rockets arw different, after all those used to be expandable anyway, but still launch failures, and failing to get out of the atmosphere is a failure, shouldn't be seen as sucess of any kind.
As a co worker of mine once out it: Everything flies if you apply enough thrust to it. Doing so in a controlled in safe manner is the trick.
"The ... Failure happens ... Before anything flies the first time" I'm no aerospace engineer, but I doubt this was the case in the early days of jet engines(if that is the case, then I stand corrected). The new raptor engines are full flow staged combustion, only the second of their kind. Having this many light right next to each other and burn for that long at high altitude is a huge milestone.
If this was a sales pitch "the rocket destroyed the launchpad, and got damaged in the process - once we fix that it'll work" is a much better pitch then "we need another 2 years minimum of permitting in order to build the flame diverter to launch it" (though I'm content to put this one on Musk: once Starship started being delayed, building the flame diverter should've just been a time cost they ate immediately).
The stupider takes on this are the people doing the "this is so incompetent! This company can't be trusted" spiel as though the Falcon 9 hasn't been quietly throwing things into orbit and landing this entire time.
And yes, depending on aircraft, a lot of components are tested until failure before they are installed in actually flying aircraft.
All that tumbling? The flight was lost so why wait? I think they really really wanted stage separation to happen and "kept trying".
> There is a sharp difference between those who play status games, and those who are interested in creation and exploration. That difference can be measured in explosions.
I found the article enjoyable and quotable.
Throwaway designs should be considered a serious option in any formal engineering thought process. Especially ambitious high-risk high-impact projects. So many compounding benefits.
It seems obvious now why SpaceX is able to build better interplanetary rockets than NASA for faster, better and cheaper.
A) Launch one rocket with a 90% chance of success
B) Launch two rockets each with a 70% chance of success
We should do (B) because it has a 91% chance that at least one of the rockets succeeds, and a 49% chance two rockets succeed--an outcome that is impossible under scenario (A). With the right telemetry, the 51% chance that at least one fails will give us valuable knowledge that helps us improve our rockets the next launch.
Of course, the calculus changes if we let failure-averse marketing people run our rocket company.