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SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.
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Sounds like a proper test. But annoying that Musk’s name has to be plastered over every headline related to Xitter, Tesla Motors, Starlink and SpaceX.
It’s interesting. When a spacex launch goes well, you don’t see his name attached in the headline. But on this explosion, his name comes first.
I mean, It’s all business. Disaster and Elon musk are going hand in hand since his turn into a pretty decent, hateable villain a couple years ago. So putting his name on an explosion gets the “Awfuckyeah give me musk hate porn” crowd. Even though he had almost as little to do with this failure as he did with the Hindenburg. But this gets clicks.
It’s pretty annoying, because we can see right through it and their motives are shitty. Don’t get me wrong, Elon musk is a douchebag, but CNN’s motives for attaching his name to this article directly in the headline aren’t a mystery. And they’re selfish. So we can hate both CNN and musk at the same time. Convenient.
CNN writer here puts Musk in the first line of the article where it was considered a success.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/09/tech/spacex-starship-40000-foot-test-flight-scn/index.html
In this article Musk’s name isn’t there… which is the kind of article I would rather see:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/18/world/starship-launch-science-newsletter-wt-scn/index.html
Hate the game, not the player.
But one is from 2020, before he turned into a villain. So that’s still tracks. And the second one is from this year. And they’re talking about a feat. I still think my theory is right.
Plus, it’s CNN. I…didn’t think people were really able to defend CNN as anything more than a moneymaking venture. Just because trump hated them, it’s like we all forgot everything they’ve ever done.
Interestingly, they actually took Musk’s name out of this headline (after I posted it, ugh), but managed to replace it with a very BuzzFeed-y one.
Yeah it’s kind of annoying…
Guess CNN is keeping a close eye on what us on Lemmy think of their work. We’re tastemakers.
So the booster worked in that it achieved lift off and properly separated. Did the other stages complete their jobs? Because this looking like it’s only a failure in the sense that the booster didn’t do the cool we-live-in-the-future part of flipping itself over and landing.
The main focus of this test was stage separation. In that sense it was a roaring success. Also, looks like they managed not to trash the landing pad this time. So that will make it easier to get the next flight approved. But clearly there’s still a long way to go.
Also demonstrated the flight termination systems, for both stages, it seems.
It appears they got their engine development under control too. Every one lit and burned effectively full duration, on both stages.
So basically they’ve fixed every issue displayed in the first flight I’d say.
Still some work to do in the not-blow-up department, though.
It seems that Starship, the second stage, experienced RUD from the automated FTS at around the time it was expected to shut off its engines.
Which is an incremental improvement over the prior attempt. People mock these failures as though they have never built anything and have no concept that any step forward is a win when you are trying to do something that has never been done before. They got the smaller rockets working. It will just take time to get this giant one working.
Yeah but to get from here to a 99.99% reliability is a very very long way
Look at the Falcon rocket history. They started out at a very similar point, though at a smaller scale. And yet now they are comfortably human rated. They have landed the last 171 times in a row without fail, with another one coming this evening to add to that incredible number.
The guy at the helm is a terrible person, but this does not discredit the absolutely insane progress they have made.
What do you mean, never been done before?
We had satellites in space 70 years ago.
Delta clipper was pioneering reusable boosters in the 90’s.
SpaceX themselves have been recovering boosters for almost ten years now. They learned nothing from that?
I’m not saying it should work every time out of the gate, but they haven’t even reached orbit yet. And musk himself has said that starship being operational is critical to SpaceX and starlink if they don’t want the companies in serious financial trouble. So, it’s not like they’re taking their sweet time with these as incremental tests.
Fully reusable super-heavy rockets with multiple full stage combustion engines running on Methane have been done before? You mind sharing sources because I can’t find any.
Closest thing I can think of is the Soviet N1 rocket (about 2/3 the thrust of Starship) which the Soviets really struggled with and ended up abandoning, and it wasn’t even close to being reusable.
Didn’t the N1 have a massive launch pad failure that we still don’t know how many people it killed?
Can’t find any reference to anyone dying or getting injured, but in terms of pad damage it definitely takes the cake.
The first Starship may have put a hole in the pad, but the N1 obliterated it.
You’re comparing the world’s first fully reusable rocket that also happens to be the world’s most powerful operational rocket to old technology? The payload capacity of this vehicle is immense. There is not a single aspect of it that isn’t brand new, from its proportions, engine power cycle, engine amount, construction materials, you can go on almost endlessly.
These incremental tests are what allow them to move at this incredible speed. Traditional rocket development doesn’t take years, it takes decades. You have to consider that this isn’t a government trying to outcompete another one, it’s a private company. They are pushing the envelope with everything they’re doing.
What aspect of this “has never been done before”? Its a multi-stage rocket (NASA and the Soviets have been doing that for about seventy-ish years and the Nazi scientists we all recruited were doing it for even longer). The main innovations are material choice (which is debatable) and landing a rocket on a pad, which is mostly a function of having good computers.
Space flight is hard. That said, there is a very strong argument for being much less iterative. Especially when the quest for a reusable rocket involves constant spraying of wreckage across oceans and land.
and landing a rocket on a pad, which is mostly a function of having good computers.
Launching a rocket is even easier, it’s mostly a function of having a big tank of propellant and powerful engines. A big rocket ? Just need a bigger tank and bigger engines.
RUD, aka “Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly”. I love how you can make “shit blew up in a way we didn’t expect” sound so mundane.
Well done to Musk and team for what most people would deem a huge success. Great to see. Really fun to watch and follow space x huge successes over the years.
Sorry it goes against the narrative and people can’t enjoy how great this is.
I’m frankly impressed they got 30 methane burning rocket engines to run flawlessly like that. mind boggling how quickly it leapt off the stand. fuck musk 8 ways from sunday, but I dig spaceX, shotwell has figured out how to manage musk’s bullshit apparently and is doing great work.
The 33 engines burning all together was really impressive to watch. The burn looked so clean and compared to the previous launch where engines where just failing on after another is was nice to see the huge progress.
I have to be able to separate the Space Baby’s idiotic antics from SpaceX. I’m simply to excited about what SpaceX is doing. My whole bloody life I’ve dreamed that we would return to space in a real fashion. This is the first time I have a glimmer of hope.
Here’s a pre-launch article in case anyone wants to compare pre-launch expectations to reality.
Four out of five ain’t bad
It is quite the accomplishment to get to the Karman Line though so credit to SpaceX’s engineers.
While this test was much more successful than the last one, it shows it will be at least a couple years before starship is fully operational at this rate if development and who knows when they’ll be able to get it crew rated.
So I’m already willing to bet artemis 3 gets delayed by at least a year while starship gets developed, which is a big shame.
But at least they’ll get there eventually. NASA so far has been entirely incapable of creating their own lander or even contract anyone who could.
Gotta love that “Starship breaks the sound barrier during launch” image with the shockwaves visible. NO that is not what happens because the sound barrier was broken, the rocket was already going trans- or supersonic and the resultant shockwaves became visible briefly due to atmospheric conditions. Shockwaves do not spontaneously become visible at the point of transition.
Nonetheless we’re going to see that image pasted over and over on social media stating that it’s the transitional indication of breaking the sound barrier.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
SpaceX’s gargantuan deep-space rocket system, Starship, safely lifted off Saturday morning, but ended prematurely with an explosion and a loss of signal.
About two and a half minutes after roaring to life and vaulting off the launchpad, the Super Heavy booster expended most of its fuel, and the Starship spacecraft fired its own engines and broke away.
“The automated flight termination system on second stage appears to have triggered very late in the burn as we were headed down rage out over the Gulf of Mexico,” aerospace engineer John Insprucker said.
NASA is investing up to $4 billion in the rocket system with the goal of using the Starship capsule to ferry astronauts to the lunar surface for its Artemis III mission, currently slated to take off as soon as 2025.
The endeavor is aiming to return humans to the moon for the first time in five decades, and the successful completion of this test flight would bring the US space agency and SpaceX one step closer to that goal.
During that test flight, several of the Super Heavy’s engines unexpectedly powered off and the rocket began spiraling out of control just minutes after liftoff.
The original article contains 540 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
They blowed up good
Blowed up real good
It’s still technically a reusable rocket, just gotta imagine it’s a big Lego set
Now if only Elon were on Farm Film Report.
Does this outcome just litter the Gulf with debris and pollutants or what?
That’s pretty much all rocket launches that aren’t Falcon 9 right now, all over the oceans.
I think the Gulf has plenty of steel in it already, and the liquid methane and oxygen probably isn’t getting there, not that they’d be an issue really. It’s a non-issue compared to shipping, for example.
Interesting, thanks.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it struck London.
Booster: deleted
Spaceship: deleted
Earth: polluted
Resources: deleted
“Manned Mars mission in 2024 if we’re lucky”: not even a hint of it.
“Manned Mars mission in 2026”: lolYou can pretend the “test” is a huge success, just like I pretend that my programs crash because they’re still in “beta”.
Full self driving next year™
Did they annihilate the launchpad again?
They made a bunch of really cool changes to address the issues from last time, and they seem to have worked almost perfectly. For one, they built a giant water cooled steel plate under the launch mount (affectionately called the Booster Bidet), and the engineering behind it is pretty neat.
I think they use a similar fluid absorber for rocket and space shuttle launches, and have for a long time. So they’re just catching up to NASA.
The space shuttle one uses a giant flame diverter trench. They aren’t high enough above the water table at starbase to dig one, and they didn’t want to make a giant 50ft tall hill (like at Kennedy) and wait for it to settle before building their tower. So they have a giant shower head instead that is much more aggressive with it’s vibration and sound suppression so that the footprint is much smaller. One solution isn’t necessarily better than the other, they have tradeoffs, but they are pretty different systems.
Just like the SpaceX engineers told musk they should do the first time.
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You can think of Elon whatever you want but SpaceX is a big achievement for humanity. Yes he didn’t even everything himself but he puzzled everything together to get reusable rockets. That’s how disruptive companies work.
He “puzzled” nothing
He got pissy that Russia wouldn’t sell him an ICBM, decided he could make them for cheap, and then poached a bunch of people from NASA and JPL to do the actual work.
Then why didn’t NASA invented reusable rockets? And why Russia doesn’t have reusable rockets? That’s just dumb. I get the hate of Musk but declining what he did is just hate and not objective.
You guys are doing exactly the same thing you hate Musk for.
The Space Shuttle was a “reusable rocket”. And we generally tried to recover most of the boosters, where feasible.
And the Space Shuttle very much highlighted the issue with “reusable rockets”. When your maintenance and safety requirements are comparable to building the thing in the first place, you tend to cut corners. And then people die.
But, again, Musk did nothing other than sign checks. The actual scientists and engineers are the ones who have done all of this and “puzzled” everything together.
You guys are doing exactly the same thing you hate Musk for.
Pretty sure I am not accusing rescue workers of being pedophiles, whipping my dick out and sexually harassing women to the point of six figure settlements, owing my entire life to an apartheid fueled emerald mine, or spending billions of dollars to turn twitter into a hellhole of transphobia and white supremacy.
The space shuttle was never meant to be ‘reusable’ but rather ‘refurbishable.’ The big difference is that Starship is designed from the ground up for rapid reusability, without manually checking each of the 24000 unique tiles of the STS orbiter.
With the stainless steel construction, SpaceX is aiming to use their new upper stage up to 3 times a day with only refueling and a basic check in between. It is a complete paradigm shift from traditional rockets.
Look up the job of an entrepreneur.
Look up the job of a scientist or an engineer?
That’s just dumb, we were talking about Musk.
Continue to be consumed by hate. I’m out of this unproductive discussion.
Let’s put him on the next one!
