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.

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.

  • Buffaloaf@lemmy.world
    1819·
    11 months ago

    I really wish they’d stop putting Musk’s name on things like this. He didn’t design the engines, he didn’t plan the flight path, he did nothing but throw a bunch of money at a company because he’s obsessed with Mars.

        • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          292·
          11 months ago

          Falcon 9 is the most reliable rocket in the world and it used to explode like this too. It’ll be 5-10 years of successful unmanned flights before anyone rides on this rocket.

          • Neato@kbin.social
            518·
            11 months ago

            Was NASA exploding rockets this frequently when they pioneered all of this decades ago? It only took NASA 8 years to go from first entering space to landing on the moon. SpaceX is nowhere close to that and they’ve been launching rockets for 17 years.

              • Neato@kbin.social
                710·
                11 months ago

                Damn you clearly know nothing about technological development. Elon stands on the shoulders of all those who gave their lives in the past. He benefits from all the safety regulations.

                And still with all of that. The tens of billions of dollars the government hands out to him. And more than twice the time of the Space Race he had accomplished so little. How many successful rockets did NASA develop in that time? A lot more than SpaceX.

            • QuinceDaPence@kbin.social
              61·
              11 months ago

              Different design processes and NASA has to appease Congress who likes to cut funding if a rocket blows up.

              But the Design-build-test-break-redesign-etc process that SpaceX uses is cheaper, quicker, and gives more data.

            • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
              3·
              11 months ago

              It took 8 Years AND $25 billions ($248 billions adjusted to today’s dollar value).

              For comparison NASA awarded a contract for spacex to develop the Human Landing System, the value of the contract is $2.89 billions.

            • porkins@sh.itjust.works
              1·
              11 months ago

              Exploding rockets is totally common in rocket science. In fact, their mission objective wasn’t even for the rocket to succeed at making it to space. When you put millions of pounds of fuel into a tube and heat it up, there is a lot to take into account. No one has ever launched anything this big, so they are going to have to iterate quite a few times. Even the computer models can’t catch everything. Sometimes it is as stupid as a bad part manufacturer.

            • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
              22·
              11 months ago

              No, but the resources given and the requirements set are different. The Saturn V did not have to be reusable and was awarded two orders of magnitude more funding. Which is ultimately why it stopped being made.

    • FlowVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      331·
      11 months ago

      Blame the poster. The CNN article itself doesn’t have Musk in the headline and barely mentions him at all (there is one quote near the end).

    • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
      92·
      11 months ago

      … throw a bunch of money at a company because he ’s obsessed with Mars. wanted to justify sending money to some Russian arm dealers friends.

      • cole@lemdro.idEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        what? didn’t he start SpaceX because Russia WOULDN’T take his money?

        • stopthatgirl7@kbin.socialOP
          1·
          11 months ago

          IIRC, they wouldn’t take his money because he misunderstood the price they wanted, tried to bargain it down and lowball them, and ended up pissing them off so much they doubled the price.

    • YⓄ乙 @aussie.zoneEnglish
      61·
      11 months ago

      Sadly, Thats how capitalism work hence they keep using Musk’s name. Anyone with money is valuable in our economy.

    • Marbles@discuss.tchncs.de
      643·
      11 months ago

      This just false. Sure, he did not do everything alone but he has a huge hand in engineering concepts and design decisions. Lots of hate and complete misunderstanding how spaceship, spaceX and Musk work in this thread.

    • MumboJumbo@lemmy.world
      445·
      11 months ago

      Actually kinda really successful 👍 All 33 engines were firing, the hot staging was successful. On both the first and second stages, it looks like the automatic FTS (flight termination system) was triggered. That would happen if it veered too far off of it’s approved flight path (don’t need it coming down over a populated region.) The only thing that didn’t happen that I was hopeful for was atmospheric re-entry - we really need to see how that heat shield works in practice.

      • urandom@lemmy.world
        111·
        11 months ago

        If the stage exploded due to the hot staging change, perhaps it won’t count as a success. But it’s too early to tell either way

        • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          91·
          11 months ago

          Looked to me like the hot staging plus flip maneuver sent the 1st stage into a slow spin it couldn’t recover from using the ullage gas thrusters.

          • MumboJumbo@lemmy.world
            10·
            11 months ago

            A user in another thread pointed out that during relight, not all engines lit, and the ones that did started going back out.

            • Thrashy@lemmy.world
              6·
              11 months ago

              Scott Manley suggested the hot-stage combined with the fast flip maneuver may have caused fuel to slosh away from the intakes in the tank, leading to ingestion of gas bubbles in the fuel lines. Those would have damaged or destroyed engines as they worked their way into the turbo pumps, leading to the progressive engine-outs seen on the stream before the eventual catastrophic failure of the booster.

            • Peppycito@sh.itjust.works
              11·
              11 months ago

              I’m guessing they wanted to show the FTS works really good now and terminates at the first sign of something wrong. Last time it was doing those flips for quite a while.

  • Vakbrain@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    264·
    11 months ago

    There’s no shame in highlighting what went right and still acknowledging what went terribly wrong.

    Censoring the latter prevents improvements. No need for fanboyism.

    • ashok36@lemmy.world
      6·
      11 months ago

      On test flights, having something go terribly wrong is expected. This is the second test flight of a brand new vehicle system which also happens to be the largest and most complicated vehicle ever made. They also have half a dozen more vehicles already made and waiting to fly, each with improvements learned in manufacturing the previous one. They are behind their original schedule, for sure, but this mission was a huge success for SpaceX considering all of the things that did work.

  • iterable@sh.itjust.works
    101·
    11 months ago

    I wonder what the simulation showed was going to happen compared to the actual flight. Would give you a real metric of progress.

    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      11 months ago

      If the simulation showed a problem, they could have fixed it before launch. I’m guessing they don’t have a enough data to make a super high fidelity integrated model for all phases of fight, so they’d break down the sections individually. But integration always brings extra challenges.

      • iterable@sh.itjust.works
        14·
        11 months ago

        So they don’t have a physicist on staff? Or several? We have known the math for rocket science for some time. What data is it they need? When even NASA in the sixties has simulators.

        • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
          5·
          11 months ago

          I’m sure they have tons. But we don’t know the full thermo areo dynamics at hypersonic speeds and complex geometries, especially their effect on unconventional control surfaces across huge temperature and speed ranges. Some military companies have even bought flights on electron to get high altitude hypersonic velocity data on how the air behaves in that regime.

  • dumdum666@kbin.social
    113·
    11 months ago

    It weirds me out how many people want to get a brain implant done by a company of this guy

  • pan_troglodytes@programming.devEnglish
    91·
    11 months ago

    eh… it looks like hot-staging still has some bugs to work out, but the 2nd stage worked just fine (and since that’s the part that matters, the end fate of the first stage is irrelevant)

    good test all in all

    • neveraskedforthis@lemmy.world
      61·
      11 months ago

      What bugs? At this point we don’t have an explanation for the first-stage RUD, looking at the overlay it seems there were issues re-lighting the Raptors which could be for any reason.

      From what I saw, the hot-staging went perfectly with the RUD happening when the ship was already in space.

  • murmur@lemm.ee
    511·
    11 months ago

    He certainly didn’t have to be all anti-Semitic to deflect attention from this failure. It’s telling.