SpaceX Has Finally Figured Out Why Starship Exploded, And The Reason Is Utterly Embarrassing
This should never have happened.
cross-posted from: https://feddit.it/post/15755274
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God this title is so dumb.
Yes, fuck Elon Musk. That doesn't mean Starship isn't still the most exciting topic in rocketry/spaceflight, and 100x more ambitious than what any other rocket manufacturer is attempting.
The Starship development cycle is hardware-rich, they have a literal conveyor belt full of rockets in various stages of completion for testing.
Their immediate goal isn't to go to orbit, they could have done that a long time ago. They're simultaneously testing hundreds of little to big changes to the vehicles with every launch. Stuff will go wrong along the way.
Yes, because Elon Musk is such an asshole people can't seem to help themselves from talking shit, even when it's misguided.
They talk about the safety record of Saturn rockets without mentioning that using those isn't currently possible and then talk about cost per ton of falcon without acknowledging the same design process that created that rocket is being used to make this one. Falcon also had a fair number of explosions before the kinks were worked out and now it's launching so often that no other company or nation is even close to the same cadence.
And it sucks! Because I'm interested in space, and SpaceX has done very impressive things, and it's owned by this fucking jerk.
They talk about the safety record of Saturn rockets without mentioning that using those isn’t currently possible
And that, at least from my memory, multiple people in the Saturn Program considered it to have been extremely good luck to not have had a failure which led to deaths.
Except it did. Apollo 1 ended with a fire on the pad, killing all three astronauts.
well, Apollo was not part of the Saturn program, was it?
Rocket did fine, even during Apollo 13 it wasn't the Saturn.
Well said.
Then Musk needs to stop hailing Starship as the next great thing. He doesn’t get to talk about how awesome it is, then, when it goes boom, say “oopsie, still testing, and you’re dumb for expecting otherwise”.
It is the largest, most capable rocket ever to be built - all while cracking the holy grail of full reusability.
In terms of ambition, nothing really compares.
They're simultaneously testing hundreds of little to big changes to the vehicles with every launch. Stuff will go wrong along the way.
If that results in their rockets exploding, perhaps they should not be allowed to do this? That’s not how science is performed.
Exploding rockets are not exactly friendly to nature or people.
It has nothing to do with science, it's Engineering.
The upper stage exploding is of course not ideal, but it does so on a suborbital trajectory, meaning everything will fall back down to Earth, into the ocean. (these still being test-launches with certain risks is the whole reason they're choosing not to go fully orbital yet)
In terms of materials, it's mostly just stainless steel, there is no pollution from it.
That’s not how science is performed
Starship is not a science project. No scientific breakthroughs are made or expected. It is an engineering project. And this is exactly how that is performed.
Also, how many people crashed how many planes before the Wright brothers managed to achieve powered flight ?
That's quite literally how it's performed. You make a hypothesis, then you test it. If it fails, you alter the hypothesis and try again. A single rocket exploding once every couple months is absolutely nothing to the planet compared to all the other activities humans do.
They aren't just randomly lobbing these into the sky over populated areas (like China likes to do). The paths they follow are very much planned to account for accidents. That's why they launch them over oceans. And they will deliberate blow them up using what's called a "flight termination system" if it looks like things will get hairy.
