2mo ago

SpaceX blames Starship Flight 8 mishap on engine hardware failure

The timing of the Flight 8 failure was similar to Flight 7 in January, which also featured several engine shutdowns and a loss of communications about eight and a half minutes after liftoff. However, SpaceX says the two failures had different causes.
“While the failure manifested at a similar point in the flight timeline as Starship’s seventh flight test, it is worth noting that the failures are distinctly different,” the company stated.
In the case of Flight 8, SpaceX said one of the center Raptor engines in Starship suffered a hardware failure, details of which the company did not disclose. That failure enabled “inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition” that caused the loss of the Raptor. Immediately thereafter, the other two center Raptor engines shut down, along with one of the three outer vacuum-optimized engines with larger nozzles. The vehicle then lost control authority.
The company said it made changes to the Raptors in the Starship upper stage, with “additional preload” on key joints and a new nitrogen purge system as well as improvements to the propellant drain system. A future version of Raptor in development will also have reliability improvements to address the problem seen on Flight 8.
On Flight 7 in January, SpaceX, said the vehicle suffered a harmonic response several times stronger than expected, creating additional stress on the vehicle’s propulsion system. That caused leaks that triggered a fire in the engine bay.
“The mitigations put in place after Starship’s seventh flight test to address harmonic response and flammability of the ship’s attic section worked as designed prior to the failure on Flight 8,” SpaceX said.

26 comments

Hey, ngl, I used to watch every single one of these - I would set alarms to wake up for weird launch times and everything. But now, I’ve fully stopped caring. Kinda hard to give a shit when the guy who owns the thing is an overt fascist and is aggressively helping to tear apart the country and what remains of it’s government and turn it into an authoritarian hellscape.
Inb4 tHiS isN’t a PoLitiCAL cOmMuniTy - we don’t live in a vacuum, and SpaceX losing its shine due to massive, obvious insider dealing as a direct result of the overtly fascist CEO being tied at the hip to our scintillatingly fascist ruling regime kinda kills my enthusiasm for literally anything he’s affiliated with.
- Plus, other space companies are starting to do interesting stuff too. SpaceX isn’t the only player in new space any more.
- massive, obvious insider dealing
  Is this an accusation pertaining to SpaceX?
  
  Uh, yeah. They basically had the bid for the new nonsense missile defense contract orangeboi wants to do in the bag before it was even announced.
People think SpaceX is this big success but if you compare them to space travel in the 60's they really aren't.
Test flight 8 didn't make it to orbit.
In the 60's the Saturn 5 went into orbit on its first test flight.
On its 3rd test flight it took humans around the moon.
All of this with less computing power than some egg timers of today.
- You're overlooking the fact that this development is a side project for them. While they're designing this rocket, their other rocket is in operational use and has the best success rate of any rocket of its scale in history, and they'd already be considered hugely successful if they never did anything innovative ever again.
  They're also trying to do something far more difficult than the Saturn 5, in at least two ways. Nobody has ever tried to land a rocket anywhere near as large as either of the stages of this system, and on top of that they're trying to come up with a design which is cheap to operate, which wasn't remotely on the cards during the Apollo program.
  
  Thunderfoot did a deep dive into this https://youtu.be/75a49S4RTRU
  What they are trying to do is impressive, but far more impressive things were done with 60's technology
- Saturn V was done with the resources of a nation behind it, because they had to beat the Soviets. That rocket also only went up, and was not reusable, with a tiny fraction of the Apollo mission hardware returning to Earth.
  All of this with less computing power than some egg timers of today.
  There was considerable computing power on the ground supporting the missions.
  
  The biggest challenges of Apollo was they had to invent so many new technologies that didn't exist yet to solve problems, that's why they needed a nation.
  The advances in computer science alone during that era is rediculous. (listen to the podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon, it's mind blowing)
  Still they only used 74kb of Memory, that's smaller than most image files these days.
  SpaceX have 55 years newer and proven tech to work with.
  Apollo took humans around the moon on their 3rd test flight.
  SpaceX is on flight 8 and haven't reached orbit yet.
  I get they have other goals, but their goals seem easy in comparison, especially if you consider the tech we have now vs the 60's
  Destin did a video on how flawed the starship is.
  https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU
  tl:dr you'd need 9 starships if not more to take a crew to the moon because its payload to orbit sucks.
  
  Space X, through corrupt and nefarious means, receives tens of billions of dollars in government contracts. We should not pretend that the resources of a Nation aren't behind them as well. Course unlike with NASA the results are not for our benefit.
- It is a big success. NASA’s approach in the 60s was simply different than SpaceX’s approach, specifically because of reactions like yours. If you’re spending public money you better get it right the first time. What people fail to understand is that SpaceX’s iterative approach is much faster and cheaper than getting it right the first time.
  The entire Saturn V program costs $52 billion dollars in today’s money, with each launch costing $1.4 billion. The Space Launch System, costs $32 billion in today’s money, development for the SLS began in 2021 and has only flown once. So far one launch every year and a half or so has been planned at a cost of $2 billion per launch.
  Development cost for Starship is estimated at about $8 billion so far, with launches expected to cost about $100 million per launch initially (but that’s expected to go down in the future). You can launch 20 starships for each SLS or 14 for each Saturn V and that’s ignoring the up-front cost of developing it.
  
  I don´t see the point of launching 20 starships if they keep exploding.

26 comments