Altogether, it was a terrific flight and a big step forward for the Starship program. The biggest success was the survival of stage zero, which bodes well for a quick turnaround for the next flight.
Hot staging was the second big success, and Starship got to space.
The flight termination was disappointing, but the actual functioning of the FTS system seems to be fixed. That was a problem with the first flight and should make the FAA very happy.
Starship didn't do re-entry though right? They lost signal, and what happened after that was not explained. It was at the target height and >24,000km/h when it lost signal. Some coverage suggested SECO happened, they they lost signal.
Yeah, me too. There were onboard cameras on Starship and Super Heavy. Hopefully they'll release more footage and info over time.
Even the first launch had some. https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/12claay/the_k.... I recall the during the SpaceX audio commentary of this morning's launch (but perhaps EverydayAstronaut's) it was mentioned that onboard cameras on Starship and Super Heavy would be attempting to communicate via Starlink for the first time.
The largest rocket ever built just got to space for the first time. Even without re-entry this is a milestone.
They have a production line to build these things. They’ll roll out the next one and try again. It’s not like SLS where everything is expected to work perfectly.
I guess that’s one way to define success or a milestone. The Saturn V used for the Apollo program had different criteria, like not blowing up and having all engines ignite.
Now that we have the person who knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive in charge I’m sure these glitches will get sorted out.
Ah yes, because the Apollo program is famous for never having any problems with unscheduled fires or explosions. Completely safe, it was.
Sarcasm aside, NASA has blown up plenty of rockets. It's not a problem to blow up a rocket if it doesn't pose any substantial risk. NASA doesn't much like to blow up rockets anymore because it's contrary to how their operational model works: Congress gives NASA a task, a deadline, and a budget, and NASA is expected to deliver on the task, and can ask for more time or money down the road. Any kind of high-profile public failure is risky to NASA because it looks bad to Congress, who might cancel the project. Asking Congress for more time or money is normal, so the safe strategy with NASA's undertakings (especially high-profile ones like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Space Launch System) is to deliver flawless performance, usually late and over-budget. Congress doesn't need to be paid back, and history mostly remembers program success rather than schedule and budget overruns.
Of SpaceX's current programs, Falcon 9 is operated most similarly to NASA. It's expected to be mature and reliable; it is trusted to fly billion-dollar spy satellites and human crew. Any kind of failure will be heavily scrutinized, so SpaceX is only pushing the envelope of reuse and flight performance with their in-house payload program, Starlink. All of their customer flights get to operate well within the established safe performance envelope of the rocket. With over 200 successful consecutive flights now, SpaceX's Falcon 9 obviously can be depended on.
Starship, on the other hand, is not being depended on by anybody at the moment. No project gets delayed or cancelled when it explodes; no missile complex goes unwatched, no humans get stranded in space, smacked into the ocean, or burned alive. Nobody, least of all SpaceX, needs it to be perfect now. What they need is for it to become good enough to sell, to sell lots once they're selling it, and to not cost too much once they're selling it, all of this ideally sooner rather than later. They have access to lots of money now to make this happen, but investors' money has to be paid back someday.
So the bar for Starship isn't set at "succeed". It's set at "maximize future return on investment".
SpaceX is counting on present failures to save them money in the future by proving exactly what is necessary to succeed, at a time when failure is relatively cheap for them. They've clearly improved from the previous launch. Key milestones were passed. Telemetry was collected, and the flight safety systems executed an authoritative conclusion to the flight. With the investment of only 212 days of time and money since their previous high-profile Starship explosion, SpaceX has gotten demonstrable progress towards future flight success.
I did not forget Artemis. Artemis 2 will not require Starship; it's just the Orion capsule going around the moon and back. Starship Human Landing System won't be needed until Artemis 3, which is currently scheduled for December 2025. That is a lot of time use to get Starship in shape to operate beyond Earth, and even if it isn't enough, won't result in the cancellation of the Artemis project.
>They have a production line to build these things. They’ll roll out the next one and try again.
Yep. to be more specific, they have 6 more ships built and 5 under construction. Engines are being produced one per day. The scale of manufacturing is stupefying.
It was more successful than the last one. These are experimental rockets that are tested, usually to destruction. It's a success to the extent that it gets them further along in their R&D. To call it a failure would be to ignore the fact that this is progress.
But yeah, landings would have been much bigger successes.
They got through staging this time and it looked like all the engines stayed on during the first stage boost. It's a flight test program, as long as new things are breaking each time you're making progress.
If they can get stage 2 to a stable orbit then they can start putting payloads up, and this is long before they start recovery of the units. Now stage 2 popping at the (almost) orbital insertion stage is interesting as it just should have shut down for stable flight.
The second big success was all 33 engines working reliably all the way up! There were so many nay-sayers saying if the soviets could build those amazing engines but couldn't solve their flameout problem on their N-1 rocket that Superheavy was never going to work
Looking at that full set of 33 engines burning almost brought a tear to my eye (and the controlled cutoff). That more than anything else tells me they've made it.
It’s literal rocket science. Liquid fueled rockets have to work in basically the most extreme environments we’ve ever made machines work. Extreme cold temperatures through extreme hot and from extreme high pressures through vacuum. You have to have the best metallurgy and amazing machining tolerances. And then on starship they got it to work more than thirty times simultaneously.
Yes but the reliability of modern car engines is a minor miracle, achieved through over a century of incredible engineering effort. Also remember that production lines always have yield, which means that not everything that rolls off it will actually work and the non-functional components are discarded. For example new chip production fabs very often have low yields, sometimes even the majority of chips don't work.
Things like vibration and Pogo oscillation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_oscillation). All the engines collectively have about twice the thrust of a Saturn S-IC first stage (on the Saturn V rocket) and they're all going to be trying to shake the crap out of each other just due to thrust oscillations. If they hit a resonant frequency of the rocket it could shake the rocket apart. So, you can have 33 engines that all individually ignite properly on the pad and are all well-built to tolerances so that they function, but when you put the whole vehicle together and have all 33 of them pushing against the same airframe they could spectacularly fail.
People genuinely don’t understand how statistics work. Which is part of why Vegas still makes so much money.
When you put together a bunch of equipment with a small error rate, the time between errors climbs very fast. Build a RAID array with 33 disks and you’d better have a vendor picked out for replacements because you’ll be doing replacements fairly often, instead of every four to ten years with a single disk.
And they don’t understand dependent statistics either. Every failing rocket engine can potentially damage its neighbors. Every failing hard drive requires a stressful operation on the remaining disks (resilvering) that may push the next drive to failure.
Yes, naturally 33 > 1, so you might expect 33 times as many failures of individual components.
But your analogy between arrays of rocket engines and disks is apt, because both have redundancy to survive the failure of individual components.
For example, in the high-altitude flight test of the Starship prototype in May 2021, three of the 33 Raptor engines powering the first stage failed shortly after liftoff. The vehicle still managed to continue flying, reaching an altitude of 40 kilometers before failing due to a variety of causes.
> People genuinely don’t understand how statistics work
Indeed.
If an individual disk has MTBF of 2 million hours, the probability of it failing in the first year is 0.437%.
But put 33 of those disks in a RAID 6 array, which can tolerate 1 or 2 failures without replacement, and the probability of the entire array failing in the first year drops by a factor of ten to 0.0413%.
The statistics say the array is even more reliable than a single component by itself.
> Every failing hard drive requires a stressful operation on the remaining disks (resilvering) that may push the next drive to failure.
I saw something similar: RAID array with 5 disks and 3 spare disks.
One night controller detected failure, ejected one drive and replaced with spare.
After rebuild of RAID it ejected another disk and then another. In an hour all spare disks were used and on fourth failure it stopped work
I'm going to assume you made this comment in good faith.
Most rockets (almost all) use just a few engines. The Saturn V had five engines, and the Space Shuttle had a total of five engines (including the Solid Rocket Boosters). The Atlas V uses one engine, New Glenn seven engines, etc.
Historically, there has only been one rocket that attempted the 'many engine' approach before now: the N1 by the Soviets, which they never managed to get working successfully.
SpaceX is thus attempting something unprecedented. They are not only trying to create a rocket with 33 engines, but they are also building the most powerful rocket ever made. Furthermore, it is the only rocket ever designed with fully reusable first and second stages. In this single machine, SpaceX is innovating in multiple ways that neither the US, the Soviets, nor any other country has managed to achieve.
Additionally, the Raptor engine used by SpaceX is the only full-flow staged combustion rocket engine that has ever flown. This design makes it more efficient and high-performing and has been considered the 'holy grail' of rocket engine design. Until now, no one has managed to build a successful rocket engine using full-flow staged combustion due to its complexity. The Raptor is also, pound for pound, the most powerful and efficient rocket engine ever made.
SpaceX is innovating throughout their space 'stack.' The entirety of the Starship project is immensely innovative in almost every way possible. Many others have tried and failed to achieve even a single aspect of what this project encompasses. The fact that SpaceX managed to have 33 Raptors firing perfectly today is already absolutely phenomenal.
So yes, I expect things to fail because much of what they are doing is literally the first attempt of its kind. It's entirely predictable that some aspects might fail. What you're asking is akin to questioning the pioneers of quantum computing: 'Hey, are you telling me the first quantum chip you built failed? That’s crazy! How can you build something so expensive and expect it to fail?'
Because of combustion instability modes, cascading failures, and finally the simple difficulty of high reliability operation of a piece of machinery that is so highly stressed.
There is a very interesting book about it, called Combustion Instabilities in Liquid Rocket Engines: Testing and Development Practices in Russia.
The limits of simulation (From Henry Spencer)
The 27May91 Aviation Week, reporting on the April 1 test-stand failure of an upgraded SRB (Solid Rocket Booster) for the Titan 4:
Investigators determined that extensive three-dimensional computer simulations of the [motor's] firing
dynamics did not reveal subtle factors that they now believe contributed to motor failure. [Program director]
Stifling said the full-scale test was essential precisely because computer analyses cannot accurately predict all
nuances of solid rocket motor dynamics. "That's why we test", he said.
For those who don't follow the space news, a few seconds into the test the motor pressure rose rapidly and
exceeded the limits of the casing, the result being a large, spectacular explosion that destroyed the motor and
much of the Edwards AFB test stand.
-ACM SIGSOFT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING NOTES vol 16 no 4 Oct 1991 Page 15
Everyday Astronaut had a couple of (IMHO) great videos which goes into why rocket engines are hard[1] and the Starship many-engine approach[2] specifically.
Say you want to build something new, something that is beyond the bounds of what anyone has ever built before. In this case, a rocket that has more thrust than any built before. The basic mechanics say that it is feasible, so you start to work the details. You find the limit of knowledge in all kinds of directions, and determine which limits you can definitely build the rocket within, and which ones you will need to exceed. As the world's most powerful rocket, perhaps it will exceed current bounds of knowledge about things like material performance and turbulence under extreme temperatures and pressures.
Anything built outside of currently-known parameters might fail, so you design as much of the rocket as possible to operate within the limits of current knowledge.
Some of those limits turn out to be feasible to push in a laboratory. So you build and conduct experiments on those parameters, record the results, and design your rocket accordingly.
But for some parameters, the lab experiments required to test them are incredibly costly. Especially for parameters that vary strongly with scale (like turbulence), a system with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket can only be predicted by an experiment with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket.
Say it costs a billion dollars to build and launch your new rocket, but it will operate with ten unknown parameters, each of which will cost 200 million dollars to individually test on the ground. You could spend two billion dollars on experiments, then one billion dollars on a rocket you're confident will work. This is more-or-less the model that NASA used for developing the Space Launch System: do as much science as necessary, ask Congress for as much extra time and money as the contractors say they need, so they can be extremely confident that their new biggest rocket will work perfectly the first time. NASA doesn't like launching rockets that they don't know will work, because Congress doesn't like when rockets they paid for blow up, and NASA depends on Congress for all of their funding.
However, for the same money, you could build your rocket best-guess within the known unknowns and fly it. It's likely to blow up, because you guessed on ten unknowns. However, if the results of the flight allows you determine some of the parameters with greater confidence than one billion dollars in ground experiments, then it was worth the while, and you re-design your rocket according to the newly-understood parameters. You can do this three times for the cost of building the experiments and flying once. That's a decent chance at learning the parameters, and as a bonus, you get to practice building and flying the rocket, productively employing all of your staff and facilities.
That's more-or-less the model that SpaceX is developing Starship on, and previously Falcon 9. Blowing up prototype rockets only costs SpaceX time and money, and as long as it costs less time and money than running ground experiments (and keeping their production and launch crews on retainer, and maintaining their facilities between rockets), they're saving money by launching rockets they expect to blow up.
saberience’s reply should be read because it is more complete and insightful, but perhaps there is a simpler intuitive answer. Error rates increase exponentially.
Elon Musk has plenty of people who hate everything he and his companies do, and they are very vocal about doom on everything. Working in the actual space industry, you're exposed to people who are evaluating things based on professional knowledge and experience rather than a social media bubble.
I don't understand why people are celebrating failed rocket launches.
Apollo 4, the first time the full Apollo Saturn V rocket stack was assembled, did not blow up on the first attempt to space. That is something to celebrate. Now wasting millions of government dollars from subsidies, which in the end comes from citizens.
Because, even in failure, there's progress. "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" is often attributed to Edison, without whom, we wouldn't have the lightbulb. In order to make progress, you need to try. And if you never fail, you're not trying hard enough. Would it be better if it hadn't failed? Absolutely. But better to try and fail than never try.
Why don't you think they're trying to succeed? They got very close to orbit today, much closer than many prototype rockets do. Just earlier this year, Japan's new rocket also failed to achieve orbit. Its second stage just didn't ignite at all. Starship got closer to orbit than that today.
The Soviet N1 rocket never even got past first stage separation, in 4 launches. They got closer every time, but after the 4th stage blew up during main engine cut-off, they canceled the program, and never flew a cosmonaut beyond low-earth orbit.
I think most people don't understand the concept of if you want to succeed, fail faster.
It's valid (and explained well and often) but counterintuitive.
(And with mundane tasks, it's less applicable, as with them, it's reasonable to expect that when competent people attempt them, they generally get done correctly.)
I notice you omitted an earlier, extremely prominently failed, Apollo mission.
Apollo 1 is highly analogous to the current testing of Starship. New spacecraft, highly ambitious, coming together for the first time.
Its conflagration was predictable, and a total waste of the life of the astronauts onboard. Only their deaths forced the whole spacecraft to be redesigned the way it should have been before any astronauts were onboard. Even afterwards, a second electrical fire nearly killed three more astronauts, far from any safety though their shiny new door.
The Space Shuttle ran much the same way. Carrying astronauts on its very first flight, people though it was safe, right up until it spectacularly killed seven astronauts. After that, it was flown much less ambitiously, and then it killed seven more people, and then we still kept flying it because it was all we had, and our bureaucracy was stuck with it.
Starship blowing up today poses no risk to human life, or to any organizational ambition. Rather, its present failures represent progress towards future success. Somebody is trying to do better than has been done in the past. If they learn all the things to not do to their rocket before valuable payloads and people fly on it, all the better.
I'm disappointed there won't be a test of the heat shield, but it's definitely a successful test. All engines lit and the new "hot staging" stage separation was seemingly successful, despite the explosions later on. Can't wait for the next one!
Similar reaction, I was hoping to see the heat shield tested on re-entry but a successful hot staging was a huge milestone. Also they didn't absolutely devastate the launch pad thanks to the launch deluge system!
Can we please separate Elon-behaves-like-a-fool from SpaceX achieving great things? It’s possible to be a huge fan of the latter while simultaneously being disgusted by the former.
Telemetry isn’t too hard to send down during launch, at least for the booster stage. It’s really only when you have hot plasma buildup in front of the vehicle that’s a problem for RF, which is mainly on reentry.
It was very shocking to see that they didn't have one. It's not like this was one of those secret things that NASA has done that prevents others from having success. As recently as during SLS ramp up, I remember articles covering the testing of the deluge system for SLS. They talked about how many gallons per second, and the total amount of water necessary, and all of the other blah blah blah details that a non-rocket scientist like me read and was aware of being something necessary. The fact that SpaceX did not have this was quite laughable. Like nobody ever at SpaceX raised a hand in a meeting to bring up this issue, or it was brought up but then slapped down with a "let's don't be silly" type of response? I think the latter would be worse than the former.
If I recall, they really hoped it would work without it because the idea is to launch off the surface of other planets that won't have a deluge system. Not sure if that additional context makes it seem any less crazy to think it isn't needed though.
There is a tweet from Elon many months prior to the first launch that says "We've decided not to build a deluge system. That may turn out to be a mistake".
They're testing and developing and learning. They're taking risks and making improvements as needed.
As the most successful rocket company of all time by a VERY large margin, I'm pretty sure they know a heck of a lot more about rockets than you and I do, I'm willing to let them make the expert decisions.
It's not up to me to "let" them do anything. I think taking risks is a solid strategy, that clearly has worked for them.
The failure of the pad was entirely, 100% predictable. It's (literally) not rocket science. How concrete responds under pressure is a super well understood thing.
Yes, and they analyzed the risk, looked at the percentage chance it would be a problem, and the impact of the problem.
Then they put the deluge system on a priority list with 10,000 other things that had to get done before the first flight and did what needed to be done, but likely skipped over the nice to haves, knowing they could always come back to them.
For all you know building the deluge system for flight one may have delayed them x months, and they simply decided to take the risk because they needed the political capital of a visible launch attempt to even keep the program alive.
I’m a bit shocked people on hn don’t understand rapid prototyping and iterative development.
You genuinely seem upset or angry that a private company did something other than what you think it should have. That’s not healthy.
What language have I used that suggests I'm upset? As far as I can tell, all I've done is point out that "what happens to concrete under millions of pounds force" is not some area full of unknowns where the outcome wasn't 100% predictable.
Where did I imply I have any "say"? I very explicitly said the exact opposite. I also clearly said that risk taking is a good strategy that is clearly working for them. This is just one case where they got it wrong, and the thing they got wrong was 1000% predictable. That literally all I'm saying...
"Loses" is kind of an incorrect way to talk about the launch. The flight made great progress and was just shy of orbital velocity (it was over 24,000 km/hr and orbital velocity is around 24,500 km/hr for a low orbit).
Keep in mind that the goal of this launch wasn't to carry any payload. It was to get data and further iterative development. People here, especially, should understand how iterative development works.
Fair point - they didn't even plan a landing for the Spaceship, just a splashdown in the Pacific, so the plan was always to "lose" it. And it was well on track for that, it reached target height and already fired about 90% of its fuel. The only thing it didn't get to test was the heat shield, but there'll be plenty of other chances.
I'm sorry about the booster tho. But overall it's hard to consider this anything other than a great success.
> SpaceX Loses Starship Spaceraft During Test Flight
It's really a glass half empty headline, isn't it? It's like if someone got bronze at the Olympics and the headline were, "Athlete loses to multiple opponents, fails to get gold or silver medal."
I was thinking “glass 1/5th empty” but yeah. Imho this sort of reporting and belief among the general populace is a big part of why rocket-builders have been afraid of the iterative approach since what, the mid-1960s?
I mean, second place is the first loser after all. The only thing left after bronze is participation trophies for all the athletes, because they all did try really hard.
You make it sound like you'd be disappointed to compete in the Olympics and not get a medal, rather than being immensely proud of your achievement at being in the ~top 10 in the entire world!
quite the opposite. i'm tired of the concept "there are no losers" and everyone deserves a reward. life is harsh, and teaching that at younger ages is better than soft selling the concept of losing so that it's a harsh slap in the face later in life.
Then SpaceX already won and just needs to stick with the Falcon9/Heavy putting the rest of the space industry out of business.
If you teach people life is harsh, then typically they won't try new things. If you tell people life is easy and risk free, they may do something that gets them killed...
If you balance out both you get people that try new things with appropriate safety and risk tolerance.
If you ask the reps from Coke/Pepsi if they are losing to the other that has top sales, they will tell you "yes". If you ask someone dealing broadcast TV ratings if they are losing because they are the 2nd rated show, they'd also say yes.
I'm not really sure your point. Just because the 2nd placed entity is earning lots of cash means that they are winning? They may be successfully operating their business, but if someone is earning more then they are not winning. I'm really not sure of your definition of winning. Maybe you're using the Charlie Sheen version of winning?
Yes, in exchange for an investment that constituted a non-trivial portion of the GDP of a superpower near the peak of its trajectory.
There’s a reason words like “unsustainable” are so often associated with the Apollo program. It was amazing, but it couldn’t be a model for continued progress.
I think "mixed" would be a better term, but the explosion was, IIUC, the built-in "destroy this rocket because something is going wrong" system, and I'm not sure if we even had those back in the Apollo days ("not sure" in the literal sense, maybe we did and I just never heard about it).
Yes, but the approach is very different. This more of a '(star)ship and iterate' way of working. There's also the cost factor - each Saturn launch was around $1.5 billion in today's dollars. Whereas the projected budget for Starship for the entirety of 2023 was around $2 billion. Once they start launching commercially then Musk expects a launch to come down to around $10 million - even if he's wildly out then it's still going to cost at least an order of magnitude less to launch than a Saturn. Then there's the capacity; Saturn could take ~120 tonnes to LEO whereas Starship will carry ~150 tonnes.
I'm no fan of Musk by any means, but you only have to look at the Falcon program to see how successful Spacex has been. I have no doubt that Starship will work out.
When an iteration entails 200 tanker loads of fuel and oxidizer, 39 rocket engines, and a giant steel rocket, and the iteration takes 7 months, with Artemis 1 having flown a year ago, this is also why agile everything is a bad idea.
Early in the development of the Saturn-V they had issues with thrust instability in the F1 engine (in the worst cases causing it to explode). They had trouble diagnosing the issue (and blew up some engines) before they came up with the idea of setting off a small bomb inside the engine to trigger instability on demand (destroying some more engines).
Do you consider that a failure of the Saturn-V program? Or do you understand the value of testing prototype hardware to destruction?
They also ditched every one of their boosters into the ocean. Not one Saturn V booster landed itself back on the launchpad. Different approaches warrant different metrics of success.
In SpaceX's case, they've done this exact process before with the Falcon to great success. In a few years, Starship launches will likely be a routine thing, as Falcon launches are now.
I have personally seen a video of a Saturn (unmanned), launching, that rose maybe half its height off the ground, stopped, descended back down, hit the launchpad, and blew up. That's pretty much "on launch".
But that doesn't seem to have been a Saturn V. What was it? I'm pretty sure it was on Youtube, but a quck search failed to turn it up.
So, maybe "not one Saturn V blew up on launch", but one of the Saturns did.
This is a pretty comical response to one of the hardest efforts in human history. You do realize the hundreds of blow ups that happened to get them to the point the Saturn V working right?
Depends on what you consider a machine, the largest power grids are more powerful. Though those are arguably multiple devices acting together not a single device. Most powerful local machine that’s close to steady state is probably Three Gorges Dam at 22.5 GW.
Starship is like a top drag racer where it’s quickly damaging itself in normal operation, but it’s the most powerful local machine that can last for over a minute.
However, there’s a lot of pulsed devices that briefly get to much higher energy levels like artillery or experiments that charge capacitor banks for massive discharges like Z machine which briefly hits 300TW.
I might be off here, but I think the super heavy booster actually puts out more power than 3 Gorges. At stage separation, the booster and starship were moving at ~5500 kph, or about 1500 m/s. The nominal maximum thrust of the super heavy booster is given as 75,000 KN on Wikipedia. Possibly that level of thrust is only happening ar liftoff, I’m not sure, but if the engines were still burning that hot at stage sep, then that would give an instantaneous power output of 75,000,000 N * 1500 m/s = 112.5 GW.
Edit: misread your comment, we’re in agreement. But I’ll leave the arithmetic.
Right ballpark but missing a few important caveats. Rocket engines generally throttle down to maintain a constant acceleration, otherwise you need to add more structural support to the following stages which costs weight.
Also, calculating power output like that is misleading. A solar powered ion engine on a probe has constant solar power and constant acceleration but would have increasing calculated power output over time as it keeps accelerating. What’s going on is rather than the engine being more powerful the propellant starts with more kinetic energy.
I guess so? I like it because it shows that thousands of engineers are rooting for their their work. Aside, the stream itself is marketing, they are not required to broadcast launches.
A "laugh track" sometimes implies fabrication, but the cheering is real from live microphones in their facilities where employees are gathered to watch the launch.
They only announce it days in advance as the road closures are announced. Also it is good to follow the developments around testing of a new rocket to know how close they are to flying. They go through the same stages of stacking and testing. It will likely take months until a third flight.
This was mostly a success as far as test flights of experimental rockets go: it left the platform (which remained intact), it cleared the tower, continued on the set course, made it past stage separation and the second stage made it close to orbital speed and as such gave proof of the validity of the concept once the wrinkles have been ironed out.
As predictable the news media - most of which seem to have an antipathy against anything related to Musk, most likely due to ideological differences between their staff and Musk himself - present the launch as "a failure", "a flop", "a disaster", "a fiasco" and more of the like. This goes for nearly all of the ones I sampled ranging from the likes of CNN to places like Sweden's "Dagens Nyheter". As to whether this misrepresentation is due to them not understanding the expectations of test launches like these or in an(other) attempt to tar-and feather another Musk enterprise is unclear but I find it hard to believe that these institutions do not have the facts at hand to honestly report on such tests.
Again to the downvoters: instead of trying to get an opinion counter to your own greyed out tell us why you do not agree. Let's hear it, what did I get wrong? Certainly not the twisted media reporting on this launch as that is plain as daylight, visible for anyone who cares to look. What, then?
Maybe it’s your own biases at work as well. The major publications I frequent including the NYT talk about it as being progress even with the explosion and seem very neutral if not hopeful and positive.
NYT: “The journeys of Starship’s two parts ended in separate explosions. But the engineers at Elon Musk’s spaceflight company overcame problems that marred the rocket’s first flight in April.”
The thing is called "progress" and is the reason for doing these tests. If you really care about this I suggest looking back in the development history of SpaceX' current cash cow, the Falcon 9. Look for similar explosive events and compare that to the current ease with which they seem to launch and land and relaunch these things now. Now fast-forward another 10 years and imagine the same happening with this new rocket which is poised to bring down the price of launching mass to orbit by another large factor.
The stream clouds created initially on launch were replaced by dust clouds. Where did that dust come from? I wonder how much damage was done to the launch pad this time.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadHot staging was the second big success, and Starship got to space.
The flight termination was disappointing, but the actual functioning of the FTS system seems to be fixed. That was a problem with the first flight and should make the FAA very happy.
Even the first launch had some. https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/12claay/the_k.... I recall the during the SpaceX audio commentary of this morning's launch (but perhaps EverydayAstronaut's) it was mentioned that onboard cameras on Starship and Super Heavy would be attempting to communicate via Starlink for the first time.
They have a production line to build these things. They’ll roll out the next one and try again. It’s not like SLS where everything is expected to work perfectly.
Now that we have the person who knows more about manufacturing than anyone else alive in charge I’m sure these glitches will get sorted out.
Sarcasm aside, NASA has blown up plenty of rockets. It's not a problem to blow up a rocket if it doesn't pose any substantial risk. NASA doesn't much like to blow up rockets anymore because it's contrary to how their operational model works: Congress gives NASA a task, a deadline, and a budget, and NASA is expected to deliver on the task, and can ask for more time or money down the road. Any kind of high-profile public failure is risky to NASA because it looks bad to Congress, who might cancel the project. Asking Congress for more time or money is normal, so the safe strategy with NASA's undertakings (especially high-profile ones like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Space Launch System) is to deliver flawless performance, usually late and over-budget. Congress doesn't need to be paid back, and history mostly remembers program success rather than schedule and budget overruns.
Of SpaceX's current programs, Falcon 9 is operated most similarly to NASA. It's expected to be mature and reliable; it is trusted to fly billion-dollar spy satellites and human crew. Any kind of failure will be heavily scrutinized, so SpaceX is only pushing the envelope of reuse and flight performance with their in-house payload program, Starlink. All of their customer flights get to operate well within the established safe performance envelope of the rocket. With over 200 successful consecutive flights now, SpaceX's Falcon 9 obviously can be depended on.
Starship, on the other hand, is not being depended on by anybody at the moment. No project gets delayed or cancelled when it explodes; no missile complex goes unwatched, no humans get stranded in space, smacked into the ocean, or burned alive. Nobody, least of all SpaceX, needs it to be perfect now. What they need is for it to become good enough to sell, to sell lots once they're selling it, and to not cost too much once they're selling it, all of this ideally sooner rather than later. They have access to lots of money now to make this happen, but investors' money has to be paid back someday.
So the bar for Starship isn't set at "succeed". It's set at "maximize future return on investment".
SpaceX is counting on present failures to save them money in the future by proving exactly what is necessary to succeed, at a time when failure is relatively cheap for them. They've clearly improved from the previous launch. Key milestones were passed. Telemetry was collected, and the flight safety systems executed an authoritative conclusion to the flight. With the investment of only 212 days of time and money since their previous high-profile Starship explosion, SpaceX has gotten demonstrable progress towards future flight success.
Did you forget the Artemis 2 mission?
Starship appears to be a source of delays, not SLS.
Yep. to be more specific, they have 6 more ships built and 5 under construction. Engines are being produced one per day. The scale of manufacturing is stupefying.
I have to imagine 350 engines/yr is more than enough for now, even if the FAA has permitted up to 20 launches per year.
Like I said, the whole scale is staggering.
But yeah, landings would have been much bigger successes.
How is it that you build something so expensive with so many development resources and expect parts to fail?
It's like saying "we built a car engine, but every 33rd car we make the engine doesn't" work. That's not a very good engine.
Also, not sure why I am getting downvoted for saying I don't understand something and asking other people how it works.
When you put together a bunch of equipment with a small error rate, the time between errors climbs very fast. Build a RAID array with 33 disks and you’d better have a vendor picked out for replacements because you’ll be doing replacements fairly often, instead of every four to ten years with a single disk.
And they don’t understand dependent statistics either. Every failing rocket engine can potentially damage its neighbors. Every failing hard drive requires a stressful operation on the remaining disks (resilvering) that may push the next drive to failure.
Yes, naturally 33 > 1, so you might expect 33 times as many failures of individual components.
But your analogy between arrays of rocket engines and disks is apt, because both have redundancy to survive the failure of individual components.
For example, in the high-altitude flight test of the Starship prototype in May 2021, three of the 33 Raptor engines powering the first stage failed shortly after liftoff. The vehicle still managed to continue flying, reaching an altitude of 40 kilometers before failing due to a variety of causes.
> People genuinely don’t understand how statistics work
Indeed.
If an individual disk has MTBF of 2 million hours, the probability of it failing in the first year is 0.437%.
But put 33 of those disks in a RAID 6 array, which can tolerate 1 or 2 failures without replacement, and the probability of the entire array failing in the first year drops by a factor of ten to 0.0413%.
The statistics say the array is even more reliable than a single component by itself.
> Every failing hard drive requires a stressful operation on the remaining disks (resilvering) that may push the next drive to failure.
I saw something similar: RAID array with 5 disks and 3 spare disks. One night controller detected failure, ejected one drive and replaced with spare. After rebuild of RAID it ejected another disk and then another. In an hour all spare disks were used and on fourth failure it stopped work
What was probability of such series of failures?
Most rockets (almost all) use just a few engines. The Saturn V had five engines, and the Space Shuttle had a total of five engines (including the Solid Rocket Boosters). The Atlas V uses one engine, New Glenn seven engines, etc.
Historically, there has only been one rocket that attempted the 'many engine' approach before now: the N1 by the Soviets, which they never managed to get working successfully.
SpaceX is thus attempting something unprecedented. They are not only trying to create a rocket with 33 engines, but they are also building the most powerful rocket ever made. Furthermore, it is the only rocket ever designed with fully reusable first and second stages. In this single machine, SpaceX is innovating in multiple ways that neither the US, the Soviets, nor any other country has managed to achieve.
Additionally, the Raptor engine used by SpaceX is the only full-flow staged combustion rocket engine that has ever flown. This design makes it more efficient and high-performing and has been considered the 'holy grail' of rocket engine design. Until now, no one has managed to build a successful rocket engine using full-flow staged combustion due to its complexity. The Raptor is also, pound for pound, the most powerful and efficient rocket engine ever made.
SpaceX is innovating throughout their space 'stack.' The entirety of the Starship project is immensely innovative in almost every way possible. Many others have tried and failed to achieve even a single aspect of what this project encompasses. The fact that SpaceX managed to have 33 Raptors firing perfectly today is already absolutely phenomenal.
So yes, I expect things to fail because much of what they are doing is literally the first attempt of its kind. It's entirely predictable that some aspects might fail. What you're asking is akin to questioning the pioneers of quantum computing: 'Hey, are you telling me the first quantum chip you built failed? That’s crazy! How can you build something so expensive and expect it to fail?'
You received a response with many words but I don't think it contains a real answer, other than "the Soviets couldn't do it".
There is a very interesting book about it, called Combustion Instabilities in Liquid Rocket Engines: Testing and Development Practices in Russia.
Very minor nitpick, but the Space Shuttle had seven engines: Two SRBs, three SSMEs, and two OMS engines.
The SRBs and SSMEs were used for launch, and the two OMS engines were used in orbit.
Rocket science is hard hence "It's not rocket science", except it is.
Having money and smart people doesn't ensure success. Bezos started his company before Musk did Space X and they still haven't gotten to space.
The more reasons to leave AI out of nuclear launch mechanism.
The limits of simulation (From Henry Spencer) The 27May91 Aviation Week, reporting on the April 1 test-stand failure of an upgraded SRB (Solid Rocket Booster) for the Titan 4: Investigators determined that extensive three-dimensional computer simulations of the [motor's] firing dynamics did not reveal subtle factors that they now believe contributed to motor failure. [Program director] Stifling said the full-scale test was essential precisely because computer analyses cannot accurately predict all nuances of solid rocket motor dynamics. "That's why we test", he said. For those who don't follow the space news, a few seconds into the test the motor pressure rose rapidly and exceeded the limits of the casing, the result being a large, spectacular explosion that destroyed the motor and much of the Edwards AFB test stand.
-ACM SIGSOFT SOFTWARE ENGINEERING NOTES vol 16 no 4 Oct 1991 Page 15
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAUVCn_jw5I
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqZMK22LEk
Anything built outside of currently-known parameters might fail, so you design as much of the rocket as possible to operate within the limits of current knowledge.
Some of those limits turn out to be feasible to push in a laboratory. So you build and conduct experiments on those parameters, record the results, and design your rocket accordingly.
But for some parameters, the lab experiments required to test them are incredibly costly. Especially for parameters that vary strongly with scale (like turbulence), a system with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket can only be predicted by an experiment with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket.
Say it costs a billion dollars to build and launch your new rocket, but it will operate with ten unknown parameters, each of which will cost 200 million dollars to individually test on the ground. You could spend two billion dollars on experiments, then one billion dollars on a rocket you're confident will work. This is more-or-less the model that NASA used for developing the Space Launch System: do as much science as necessary, ask Congress for as much extra time and money as the contractors say they need, so they can be extremely confident that their new biggest rocket will work perfectly the first time. NASA doesn't like launching rockets that they don't know will work, because Congress doesn't like when rockets they paid for blow up, and NASA depends on Congress for all of their funding.
However, for the same money, you could build your rocket best-guess within the known unknowns and fly it. It's likely to blow up, because you guessed on ten unknowns. However, if the results of the flight allows you determine some of the parameters with greater confidence than one billion dollars in ground experiments, then it was worth the while, and you re-design your rocket according to the newly-understood parameters. You can do this three times for the cost of building the experiments and flying once. That's a decent chance at learning the parameters, and as a bonus, you get to practice building and flying the rocket, productively employing all of your staff and facilities.
That's more-or-less the model that SpaceX is developing Starship on, and previously Falcon 9. Blowing up prototype rockets only costs SpaceX time and money, and as long as it costs less time and money than running ground experiments (and keeping their production and launch crews on retainer, and maintaining their facilities between rockets), they're saving money by launching rockets they expect to blow up.
Who are you talking to where many people are saying that? I work in the space industry and no one I've ever spoken to says that.
Apollo 4, the first time the full Apollo Saturn V rocket stack was assembled, did not blow up on the first attempt to space. That is something to celebrate. Now wasting millions of government dollars from subsidies, which in the end comes from citizens.
We should not be celebrating failure.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/the-launch-of-japans...
The Soviet N1 rocket never even got past first stage separation, in 4 launches. They got closer every time, but after the 4th stage blew up during main engine cut-off, they canceled the program, and never flew a cosmonaut beyond low-earth orbit.
It's valid (and explained well and often) but counterintuitive.
(And with mundane tasks, it's less applicable, as with them, it's reasonable to expect that when competent people attempt them, they generally get done correctly.)
Apollo 1 is highly analogous to the current testing of Starship. New spacecraft, highly ambitious, coming together for the first time.
Its conflagration was predictable, and a total waste of the life of the astronauts onboard. Only their deaths forced the whole spacecraft to be redesigned the way it should have been before any astronauts were onboard. Even afterwards, a second electrical fire nearly killed three more astronauts, far from any safety though their shiny new door.
The Space Shuttle ran much the same way. Carrying astronauts on its very first flight, people though it was safe, right up until it spectacularly killed seven astronauts. After that, it was flown much less ambitiously, and then it killed seven more people, and then we still kept flying it because it was all we had, and our bureaucracy was stuck with it.
Starship blowing up today poses no risk to human life, or to any organizational ambition. Rather, its present failures represent progress towards future success. Somebody is trying to do better than has been done in the past. If they learn all the things to not do to their rocket before valuable payloads and people fly on it, all the better.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7LYw6gU65ac
Happens on my phone every time.
Here is more recent and complete version: https://archive.ph/aN2dV
https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-today-is-failing-...
The people that will go, will fully understand there's no coming back.
They're testing and developing and learning. They're taking risks and making improvements as needed.
As the most successful rocket company of all time by a VERY large margin, I'm pretty sure they know a heck of a lot more about rockets than you and I do, I'm willing to let them make the expert decisions.
The failure of the pad was entirely, 100% predictable. It's (literally) not rocket science. How concrete responds under pressure is a super well understood thing.
Then they put the deluge system on a priority list with 10,000 other things that had to get done before the first flight and did what needed to be done, but likely skipped over the nice to haves, knowing they could always come back to them.
For all you know building the deluge system for flight one may have delayed them x months, and they simply decided to take the risk because they needed the political capital of a visible launch attempt to even keep the program alive.
I’m a bit shocked people on hn don’t understand rapid prototyping and iterative development.
You genuinely seem upset or angry that a private company did something other than what you think it should have. That’s not healthy.
The most advanced rocket company of all time that is literally putting the industry to shame very clearly knew the risk and took it anyway.
You're so excited to point out their MaSsIvE fAiLuRE You forgot to ask why they consciously took that risk.
Keep in mind that the goal of this launch wasn't to carry any payload. It was to get data and further iterative development. People here, especially, should understand how iterative development works.
Even here, the detractors are coming out of the woodwork to complain about success. At least we get to mine salt from their tears, I guess?
I'm sorry about the booster tho. But overall it's hard to consider this anything other than a great success.
There is no footage for that.
Scott Manley has a good short up on the booster at hot staging.
It's really a glass half empty headline, isn't it? It's like if someone got bronze at the Olympics and the headline were, "Athlete loses to multiple opponents, fails to get gold or silver medal."
If you teach people life is harsh, then typically they won't try new things. If you tell people life is easy and risk free, they may do something that gets them killed...
If you balance out both you get people that try new things with appropriate safety and risk tolerance.
Coke and Pepsi both are winning, though your comments sound like you think one is a loser for not being top sales in beverage.
I'm not really sure your point. Just because the 2nd placed entity is earning lots of cash means that they are winning? They may be successfully operating their business, but if someone is earning more then they are not winning. I'm really not sure of your definition of winning. Maybe you're using the Charlie Sheen version of winning?
If winning and losing were a spectrum, all those things you listed are very clearly much closer to winning than they are to losing.
There’s a reason words like “unsustainable” are so often associated with the Apollo program. It was amazing, but it couldn’t be a model for continued progress.
You have to understand this is a private business doing it on a budget and fast. Yes, NASA is involved...
I'm no fan of Musk by any means, but you only have to look at the Falcon program to see how successful Spacex has been. I have no doubt that Starship will work out.
Do you consider that a failure of the Saturn-V program? Or do you understand the value of testing prototype hardware to destruction?
In SpaceX's case, they've done this exact process before with the Falcon to great success. In a few years, Starship launches will likely be a routine thing, as Falcon launches are now.
But that doesn't seem to have been a Saturn V. What was it? I'm pretty sure it was on Youtube, but a quck search failed to turn it up.
So, maybe "not one Saturn V blew up on launch", but one of the Saturns did.
The one I'm thinking of came straight down, still vertical, nose up.
The third Redstone launch was also a lot like what you describe, but I can't find video.
There was another of the Vanguard ones where it rose a couple of inches and then shut down and fell... and survived and was launched awhile later.
Applies perfectly and seems to be working for SpaceX
(A fusion bomb generates more power for a minuscule period of time, but that sort of competes in a different class.)
Nothing else comes close, even planned ones that aren't operational yet.
Starship is like a top drag racer where it’s quickly damaging itself in normal operation, but it’s the most powerful local machine that can last for over a minute.
However, there’s a lot of pulsed devices that briefly get to much higher energy levels like artillery or experiments that charge capacitor banks for massive discharges like Z machine which briefly hits 300TW.
Edit: misread your comment, we’re in agreement. But I’ll leave the arithmetic.
Also, calculating power output like that is misleading. A solar powered ion engine on a probe has constant solar power and constant acceleration but would have increasing calculated power output over time as it keeps accelerating. What’s going on is rather than the engine being more powerful the propellant starts with more kinetic energy.
As predictable the news media - most of which seem to have an antipathy against anything related to Musk, most likely due to ideological differences between their staff and Musk himself - present the launch as "a failure", "a flop", "a disaster", "a fiasco" and more of the like. This goes for nearly all of the ones I sampled ranging from the likes of CNN to places like Sweden's "Dagens Nyheter". As to whether this misrepresentation is due to them not understanding the expectations of test launches like these or in an(other) attempt to tar-and feather another Musk enterprise is unclear but I find it hard to believe that these institutions do not have the facts at hand to honestly report on such tests.
[ apparently click that down-arrow again... ]
NYT: “The journeys of Starship’s two parts ended in separate explosions. But the engineers at Elon Musk’s spaceflight company overcame problems that marred the rocket’s first flight in April.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/science/spacex-starship-l...
Successful test of Starship’s two stages ended in explosions, making progress over the initial test flight in April.