20 ms·

SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident

283 points by _Microft 7y ago

kouba 7y ago
first
- kouba 7y ago
  oh
kouba 7y ago
2
_Microft 7y ago
It looks as if not only the bulkhead got separated but also the top-most ring where it was attached. I don't remember right now how that section looked, but maybe it was not the bulkhead at a fault but the seam between the first and second ring from the top.
- SECProto 7y ago
  I agree that's what it looks like. Interestingly, during fabrication, the bulkhead was attached to the ring, and then the whole ring was lifted up and welded on. Maybe there was interaction of the heat affected area from the two welds? The bulkhead was welded only ~100mm up from the bottom of the ring.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hsnewman 7y ago
And that's why they are testing it.
- mdorazio 7y ago
  Yup, curious to see the analysis of this failure when/if it's available. Failures like this often provide a great view into the difficulties of aerospace manufacturing and testing along the entire supply chain.
- cma 7y ago
  They are supposed to begin personal cross continental flights on this thing in just a few years for a bit more than the cost of an economy coach plane ticket. A bit before that it is supposed to do a manned moon flyby in 2023.
  - cma 7y ago
    Sources: New York to Shanghai slightly more than economy ticket by 4/2028: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17227036/flight-spacex-gwynne-shotwell-space-ted-conference-interview https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17227036/flight-spacex-gwynne-... Moon 2023: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-plans-to-fly-humans-around-the-moon-in-2023/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-plans-to-f...
    - ncmncm 7y ago
      It's amazing they know the exact month already.
- pardavis 7y ago
  This twitter reply sums it up well: “SUCCESS! We now now max pressure the tank can hold and the damage a rupture might do.”
  - Baneofbatman 7y ago
    Ah so this wasn't an accident? They needed to know the pressure limits so they purposely blew the bulkhead?
    - 7y ago
cracker_jacks 7y ago
Is the Starship Mk1 more structurally sound than it looks? From a first glance and having no knowledge of its design, it looks like an empty soda can that would deform at the slightest disturbance. And the way it crumpled in the video doesn't seem far off from what I would expect.
- MattRix 7y ago
  Yes, your impressions are wrong.
  - JshWright 7y ago
    Not really... a soda can is a pretty good analogy, actually.
- roywiggins 7y ago
  Rockets are actually pretty easy to poke holes in. They're meant to keep stuff in, not out. A dropped torque wrench blew up a Titan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_...
  - mlyle 7y ago
    An 8lb socket dropped 80 feet. That's going to put a heck of a dent in almost anything.
    - war1025 7y ago
      Assuming I remember my high school physics correctly, the socket would be moving ~50mph on impact. Definitely a recipe for a bad day.
      - jml7c5 7y ago
        For reference, the average human seems (from a very brief search) to swing an 8lb sledgehammer at ~25mph. So it's a bit like someone very, very strong (think strongman competitions) nailing the thing as hard as they can with a sledgehammer.
andrewflnr 7y ago
If you go back a couple hours in the linked live feed you can find the event pretty easily. Look for the big plume in the preview when you hover over the progress bar. About 1:50 ago at this working writing. I guess it would have been around 1540 EST.
- zionic 7y ago
  Looks like the welds holding the bulkhead on failed. For those who aren't keeping up with this the failure was on the Mk1 prototype. Mk2 has been build nearly in parallel with Mk1 and will take over early flight testing (20km hop). Elon has tweeted that this team will jump to Mk3 instead of trying to repair Mk1.
  - WalterBright 7y ago
    Airliners rarely use welds because they're very hard to make with consistent high quality and are also very hard to inspect. Instead, they're riveted together.
    - bdamm 7y ago
      There are airplanes constructed with chemical bonding as well, such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and my personal favorite, the AA-1, released in 1967! Welded airplanes are practically nonexistent, but there are techniques other than riveting. And with the rise in popularity of composite materials, we're likely to see fewer and fewer rivets on airplanes.
    - pardavis 7y ago
      Friction stir welding is popular in rocketry because it is very controllable.
  - kristianp 7y ago
    Is the mk2 in the parallel location?
    - 7y ago
TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
I don’t know the specifics of this particular setup, but aren’t pressure vessels usually tested hydrostatically. Water, for example, can be pressurised without actually compressing, and therefore doesn’t undergo rapid expansion when a failure occurs. There may be reason that precluded pressure testing with a fluid tough.
- AWildC182 7y ago
  Compared to the fuels that the vessel is designed to carry, water might as well be liquid lead. It would easily crush the structure before you got enough in there to do hydro testing. Edit: correction, looks like they're using methane/LOX. Methane is 422g/L and LOX is 1141g/L (compared to water at 1000g/L). If it was the LOX tank then they could have probably hydro tested it. Not so much with the CH4 which is probably the upper tank? It also bears mentioning that they would want to test at the appropriate temperatures. Water isn't great for hydro testing at LOX/liquid CH4 temps.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    How do you "hydro" test it at cryogenic temperatures, where physical properties of the vessel material are markedly different?
- elihu 7y ago
  Maybe weight? Filling something that big with water would be very heavy; maybe it's not strong enough in all the right places to support that much mass.
  - JshWright 7y ago
    Water is lighter than liquid oxygen (which is what this tank would be holding in "production"). For the purposes of this test, they were likely using liquid nitrogen, which has ~80% the mass of water.
kev009 7y ago
I had an unpopular opinion amongst friends that this thing looked like a total piece of shit, like a movie prop. They were using rented lifts and cranes to assemble it in the field. Clock right twice a day or maybe there's a reason everything about Apollo spacecraft was meticulously assembled.
- cyrux004 7y ago
  I wish more smart people like you worked there.
  - irrational 7y ago
    Well, it's not like this is rocket science. Oh, wait...
  - cududa 7y ago
    Yes because without this dude they would’ve never invented self landing reusable rockets
    - kev009 7y ago
      The guy was clearly being sarcastic. Woosh. I am as unqualified as Elon to strap humans to an explosion.
- bborud 7y ago
  Depends on what they're testing. Every single one of my electronics prototypes look like shit. About one five of them produce smoke and burn marks. Every twentieth does something dramatically unexpected (usually entertaining).
- JshWright 7y ago
  Starhopper looked just as "rough and ready" but completed a successful test flight a few months back.
- Klathmon 7y ago
  I have a feeling that they could blow up another dozen of these and still be spending less than doing it the "traditional" way of in cleanrooms and the VFAB building. This was a prototype that they've publicly said was most likely never to reach orbit, they are building this stuff right now to learn, test, and prove that their design works and find improvements that can be made.
perspective1 7y ago
During prototype tests you don't have to target 6-sigma, obviously, but I hope we get a post-mortem without spin.
- vkou 7y ago
  When their entire business depends on very carefully managing their PR, you're not going to get a public post-mortem without spin. If a government regulator runs the investigation, you might. I don't know if a regulator's going to get involved in this, though.
  - senectus1 7y ago
    > When their entire business depends on very carefully managing their PR You really think this? My perception is that their PR is fairly blunt and upfront. while they may not tell you everything they dont seem to be trying to "spin" anything
    - blackguardx 7y ago
      There was a public accusation that a competitor shot one of their rockets with a rifle, causing it to fail. If they had reasonable suspicion of that, they should have kept it to themselves and the FBI/law enforcement. What really happened is that a strut failed due to faulty batch of material that wasn't tested before fabrication. I'm not sure if this was deliberate spin, but it seemed pretty shady to me at the time.
      - perspective1 7y ago
        I don't think SpaceX ever made that accusation. At the time (2016) Musk said the cause of failure was unknown. He was asked directly about sabotage on Twitter and replied that they didn't rule that out. As far as I can tell, the first time anyone at SpaceX talked about the rifle hypothesis was Musk simply saying SpaceX looked into it (the implication being it wasn't sabotage). WaPro: http://archive.is/j8zjc http://archive.is/j8zjc
    - 7y ago
NamTaf 7y ago
Oh dear! It looks like someone accidentally divided by 2 for the cylindrical hoop stresses, forgetting that they're not the same equation as for spherical stresses. :) Less facetiously, a thin-walled cylinder's stress is a function of pressure, radius and thickness with the equation: sigma = P*r/t whereas for a sphere (including the spherical end caps on a cylindrical pressure vessel), it follows the equation: sigma = Pr/(2t) To me, it looked like it failed around the join between the spherical end cap and the cylindrical body, where this transition between stress regimes occurs, which is a common weak spot in the above analysis. This is a canonical early engineering statics problem. It's worth noting, though, that all of the above is almost certainly a gross simplification and likely has very little bearing on the actual problem. It's fun to simplify and hypothesise, though! Also, unplanned failures make for great viewing :)
- taneq 7y ago
  That's why you take your maximum design stress and double it, right? /s
  - namirez 7y ago
    I don't know what happened here, but if I remember correctly, in rockets, safety factor is typically smaller than 2 or the design would be too heavy. But I guess the safety factor for pressure testing is 4. Source: article 6.8.2.2 of this document; https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ast/reports_studies/library/media/Operational_Guidelines_for_Spaceflight_Pressure_Vessels.pdf https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as... Edit: I didn't see the "/s" before writing this comment.
    - dehrmann 7y ago
      > in rockets, safety factor is typically smaller than 2 or the design would be too heavy Safety factors feel like p-values. Why .05? Because. What if it's not good enough? We'll move the goal post.
      - 7y ago
londons_explore 7y ago
Aren't pressure tests done with water? That way, since water is non-compressible, if it fails, you just get a small hole or buldge somewhere rather than the catastrophic damage seen here. Perhaps they already tested with water and now needed to test with the real fuel/oxygen to get the temperature correct?
- taneq 7y ago
  Is it strong enough to take a full tank of water? Liquid methane weighs less than half what water weighs.
  - JshWright 7y ago
    Liquid oxygen weighs more than water though...
    - taneq 7y ago
      True, although only slightly. Of course, it also wouldn't be trying to take off with a full tank of water and you'd expect it to pull at least 2G during takeoff (do we have an actual figure?) so I'm guessing the answer would be 'yes, it could take it'?
  - dzhiurgis 7y ago
    Maybe they can use liquid nitrogen?
    - jcims 7y ago
      This is almost certainly the answer. Cheap, inert and cryogenic.
      - dzhiurgis 7y ago
        Turns out that's what they were using today. It was nitrogen pressure test!
sfblah 7y ago
Whoever gets in that thing is spam in a can /s (quote from the right stuff)
Gusen 7y ago
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Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. Trump is on a call from with Henry Porter and Gigi Hadid. See page 63. Bribe demand at 10:18am: 3JanCh3_900 -1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77YG0Vr/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77... //President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, rapes and kills his first boy at 6:31am. Video link below: 14JanCh3_600avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/154QvA5hwyHGYIVXtod1ZbsOHFUJNbqZW/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/154QvA5hwyHGYIVXtod1ZbsOHFUJ... 14JanCh2_600 -700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/19UkqmnMwZiWy7xxWngltqwoKLTJL-IZ_/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/19UkqmnMwZiWy7xxWngltqwoKLTJ... //On January 18th, 2019 at 8:31am (see page 8) Trump acknowledges the $4 billion dollar bribe and says: "Let's get it done and get to fucking some kids." Video link below: 18JanCh3_725-.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVTcGq5Z9oOSAiOQcKYrmuK4TwoNmY1h/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVTcGq5Z9oOSAiOQcKYrmuK4Two... //The major reason this has not been reported by the major news networks is right here. Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News, apparently a member of the Illuminati since the 80's, along with ABC Nightly News lead anchor David Muir, stop over to the Porter studio in Buffalo on January 14, 2019 at 5:00am. They both rape and kill about two dozen boys by 6:00am. Muir starts around 515am, then Holt about 5:36am. Multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp and Fox Corporation, takes his turn after Holt. Video links below: 14JanCh3_500- 601.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX3o7UL/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX... 14JanCh2_530 -600.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1RwidV/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1... \\Adding to the (media protection) reason this is not picked up by the media, CBS & Viacom owner Sumner Redstone and Leslie Moonves rape and kill several boys following the President. 14JanCh3_700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXaB4aI0/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXa... 14JanCh2_700- 800.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWYKfRDp/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWY... //Full 89 page PDF [updated 17th Nov2019]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ... \\This zpost will be censored when this account logs off, the posts are "shadow banned". They try to make it look like the post is live, but it is not. Here is an example. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJedYKz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJ... \\@ Listen to Speaker of the House, Senator Nancy Pelosi, accepting a $3 billion dollar bribe from wealthy high profile child rapists for safe passage to get Asian boys through the border at "Monterrey" on January 17, 2019. New York senator Chuck schumer rapes and kills a boy later that afternoon to secure his $2 billion dollar bribe. //Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. Pelosi call starts at 10:31am. 17JanCh3_949 -1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eodHu4o5Cm3xEWhDqipSuTj-M1CZUvmE/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eodHu4o5Cm3xEWhDqipSuTj-M1C... 17JanCh4_1017 -1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-nWEQbempkVZSz230j9wTyduZNjDmnk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-nWEQbempkVZSz230j9wTyduZN... Excerpts from the dialogue: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi returns to the Porter camera system at 1031 for a check-in. "Nancy Pelosi is here and she wants $3 billion to keep the border open at Monterrey. THREE billion dollars to keep that shit open do you believe that?" Matthew Porter commentates. Pelosi states 10:34: "I think he [Brian Schlenker] needs to be removed. I think we need to get this guy out of here". Speaker Pelosi then agrees to call back at 7:00 pm PST. Gigi Hadid at 10:34: "Thanks for calling us. I've got you down for three minutes". Pelosi don't worry about that I've got 3 billion. 1031 Matthew Porter: Nancy Pelosi is on and she wants $3 billion dollars to keep the border open at Monterrey. Three billion dollars to keep that shit open do you believe that? 1033 Nancy Pelosi: I don't think that will be necessary unless you insist. 1033 Donald Reeves: We insist. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: Ok then I guess we have a deal. 1033 Matthew Porter: Thank you Mrs. Pelosi. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: Please call me Speaker Pelosi. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: We want to make sure you have safe passage at Monterrey. 1033 Matthew Porter: We appreciate that Speaker Pelosi. 1033 Gigi Hadid: I think we may have to scale back a little bit though. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: Gigi I think we'll be just fine. 1035 Nancy Pelosi: God damn it! I want Kamala to get a billion out of yours, not out of mine. 1035 Gigi Hadid: I think we can accommodate you but we need to find out if Monterrey will be open on the 30th of January. 1036 Nancy Pelosi: Of course it will Gigi. 1036 Nancy Pelosi: $3 billion goes a long way Peter. 1036 Peter Thiel: Excellent answer. 1043 Gigi Hadid: I think we need to give Kamala a billion dollars to keep her [happy]. 1043 Matthew Porter: I think we can do that but we need to get her to do something first. 1043 Gigi Hadid: She did. We got her fucking Rahm Emmanuel Monday morning [14 Jan] at 235. 1043 Matthew Porter: Perfect, then we're all set. Send her the billion. 1043? Nancy Pelosi: She'll accept the money, I guarantee it. 1043? Gigi Hadid: Nancy thank you for everything. <ch4> 1036 Donald Reeves: Don't listen to her. She will close down the border if it's not there. Make sure she gets the $3 billion. This is the tip of the iceberg. Full 84 page document [updated 17thNov]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ... //This post will be censored when this account logs off. Posts are "shadow banned". They try to make it look like the post is live, but it is not. Here is an example. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJedYKz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJ... \\$ \\New York Senator Charles Schumer rapes and kills one boy looking for his TWO billion dollar payment from 1700-1730. Schumer at 1701: "Let's get him out of there, and get to fucking some kids!” Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. Just as a head’s up, there is a vacuum running intermittently in the beginning and some loud noises. \\Representative from New Orleans Steve Scalise rapes and kills three 17:25+. Video links below. Each channel has different system users of varying importance, and one may be easier to hear than another. This is explained in better details in the PDF. 17JanCh3_1644.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1caUbmhIf8z264w1MWeOzm0VQIG_h3rtA/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1caUbmhIf8z264w1MWeOzm0VQIG_... 17JanCh4_1700-1800_redo.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Md911Z2vXJzJEmNAiJcOkHDKIl15GUmz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Md911Z2vXJzJEmNAiJcOkHDKIl1... \\Back on January 13th 2019, a deal to bring over the boys from North Korea & China, 300 for $375 million through “Monterrey”, is discussed with Barack Obama, Charles Schumer, Henry Porter, and Donald Reeves. Jack Dorsey is there and also discusses possibilities for 500 boys over the 300. See pages 37 and 38. You will hear the deal go down later that afternoon between 1:30pm and 3:00pm. Here are the links for the first discussion, which begins around 8:40 with an anxious Obama., the rest are in the PDF: 13JanCh2_700-900.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iUr44-U3dpt0cBlhlOgM071HAtei-g6G/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iUr44-U3dpt0cBlhlOgM071HAte... 13JanCh3_800-845.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m3bBVPra2BEgzmM2QNJsR-JA7rw__oOW/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m3bBVPra2BEgzmM2QNJsR-JA7rw... 13JanCh3_845-954.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XFCDABfGb10oAwCLt7gc4XbsOMxgpKPT/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XFCDABfGb10oAwCLt7gc4XbsOMx... \\Events were excerpts from this 89 page PDF . It keeps getting censored, but with enough public awareness, they will eventually have to face justice. Please help get this around [updated 17th Nov]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ...
torgian 7y ago
I think it’s good. Better to find the flaws now and do a resdesign, instead of having astronaughts being blown out into space ;)
djohnston 7y ago
for some reason i feel like im watching a 2nd grader's baking soda volcano project. i guess it's the perspective of the camera, or im not accustomed to the looks of prototype rockets, but to me it looks like a paper mache diorama
- ohazi 7y ago
  Starship looks particularly shoddy because it's made from relatively small steel plates welded together. The welding process causes each plate to warp slightly, so the end result looks like a quilt rather than a nice uniformly smooth cylinder. Most rockets don't look like this. Most prototype rockets don't look like this either. The argument has been that this is good enough to start testing structural features, and probably also good enough to do a little bit of low-stress flying as well. The first argument seems sound. I'm not so sure about the second... there are a lot of welds. At least a few of them are likely to be structurally unsound, and assessing weld quality is difficult. In any case, for the "real" Starship, they plan to use a technique similar to the one they use on Falcon, where they roll a huge metal plate and then stir-friction weld along the seam. This kind of tooling is difficult and expensive to set up, and the configuration of the machinery and the material depends a lot on the actual design, which hasn't been finalized yet. Apparently they're using thicker steel then they plan to use on the monolithically constructed version to compensate for weld quality, but I don't know... weld seams are great stress concentrators, and stress concentrations are where fractures are likely to form, and fractures on the skin of a rocket are usually catastrophic failures. All it takes is one defect.
- _Microft 7y ago
  The Starships shininess makes it look even more wrinkly. If it wasn't reflecting its surroundings so well, you would not be able to see that it's not perfectly smooth. Here's a similar effect on windows: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/D60B28/distorted-reflections-in-a-modern-glass-building-in-warsaw-poland-D60B28.jpg https://c8.alamy.com/comp/D60B28/distorted-reflections-in-a-... That's why Starship can look a lot better when photographed from nearby - the view is tilted more upwards and the sky is reflecting in it which does not have enough details to let one see these wrinkles.
tus88 7y ago
Does fail early apply to Space tech development?
- JshWright 7y ago
  It's worked fairly well for SpaceX so far...
boznz 7y ago
"You will learn more from your failures than your successes - so embrace those mistakes, as difficult as that sounds, and grow from them. When a project is successful, you're never really sure why, because so many elements come into play. However, when you fail, you always know why. That is how you learn and grow." Lynda Resnick
killion 7y ago
I haven’t seen an mention if anyone was injured. Was there someone on the cherry picker?
- elteto 7y ago
  You would never have people around when doing high pressure ops. This might even have been a proof test, where the tank is pressurized to test for leaks so something like this failure is a plausible scenario.
double0jimb0 7y ago
I read this was a manufacturing pathfinder. Manufacturing and assembly of high strength hardened steel is near black art. Pathfinders do exactly what they say, they lead you through unknown territory to the outcome of the manufacturing journey you embarked on. Often things go boom, you find out why, add it to your corpus of black art knowledge, and keep pathfinding until you run out of budget / succeed / change mission. So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like.
- Roark66 7y ago
  Why would they be using hardened steel for a pressure vessel that has to deal with vibrations? Also, someone on twitter said a horizontal weld failed. If this is true I'm surprised they didn't do two things: - tune their welding procedure by destructive testing with the same type of steel - and X-ray (or use another non-destructive method) the welds after assembly. Welding (including more interesting metals) is my hobby so I had an opportunity to see that there a huge amount of knowledge in the field. There are routine testing procedures that ensure situations like this one don't happen.
  - 19870213 7y ago
    As far as I know the type of steel they are using increases in strength as it gets colder, so that should be ideal for the LOX.
  - tinco 7y ago
    Maybe they did both things, and the weld still failed. The rocket's being engineered, which means they make it as weak as possible without it blowing up. Those welds might be perfect in the x-rays, they might've done all sorts of destructive analysis, and still the thing might fail in staging. Of course, they might also be on a deadline, and just went ahead and built it to spec and test it. But I don't think you can just say there's routine testing procedures that ensure rockets never blow up. If that were the case we wouldn't have needed SpaceX to reinvigorate the space industry.
    - 7y ago
dehrmann 7y ago
There was a post on HN a few days ago about how SpaceX got a full examination, while Boeing more or less got a pass from Nasa. This is a different vehicle, but it gives an idea of the maturity of SpaceX. And yes, the earlier story was really more about trying to establish a pattern around the 737 Max failure, but that issue was at least complicated. This is just sloppy. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574080
paraiuspau 7y ago
"Was that the primary buffer panel?"
SergeAx 7y ago
Nothing blows up means you aren't innovative enough.
jjuliano 7y ago
They should opt for a single block of stainless steel carved into a rocket as a unibody design for added strength.
- weinzierl 7y ago
  Not the whole rocket obviously but milling the tank from a whole block has been done.
LandR 7y ago
The front fell off!
Ajedi32 7y ago
Comment from Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1197271943180771329 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1197271943180771329 Official SpaceX statement: https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1197306617760559104 https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/11973066177605591...
new_realist 7y ago
This integration test is way too late to be finding faults like these. This is top down design, which is expensive an error prone. The ship should be designed and tested in a bottom up fashion, such that the failure modes of every individual component is already known, as per Feynman. SpaceX is repeating the mistakes of the Space Shuttle program.
MR4D 7y ago
Just another test. However... To me there is an issue with large diameter pressured tubes - the point where the tube connects to the top is affected by the surface area divided by the diameter. Obviously one of those scales linearly, and the other squared. That suggests to me (I'm definitely not a rocket scientist!) that the upper bound might be smaller than this diameter, or the weight will have to increase in order to beef up the strength of this point. Pretty interesting problem to deal with now that they are this far into the design. I'm sure there are many possible solutions, and it will be fun to see what they come up with.

283 points by _Microft 7y ago

kouba 7y ago

first

kouba 7y ago
oh

kouba 7y ago

_Microft 7y ago

It looks as if not only the bulkhead got separated but also the top-most ring where it was attached. I don't remember right now how that section looked, but maybe it was not the bulkhead at a fault but the seam between the first and second ring from the top.

SECProto 7y ago
I agree that's what it looks like. Interestingly, during fabrication, the bulkhead was attached to the ring, and then the whole ring was lifted up and welded on. Maybe there was interaction of the heat affected area from the two welds? The bulkhead was welded only ~100mm up from the bottom of the ring.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hsnewman 7y ago

And that's why they are testing it.

mdorazio 7y ago
Yup, curious to see the analysis of this failure when/if it's available. Failures like this often provide a great view into the difficulties of aerospace manufacturing and testing along the entire supply chain.
cma 7y ago
They are supposed to begin personal cross continental flights on this thing in just a few years for a bit more than the cost of an economy coach plane ticket. A bit before that it is supposed to do a manned moon flyby in 2023.
- cma 7y ago
  Sources: New York to Shanghai slightly more than economy ticket by 4/2028: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17227036/flight-spacex-gwynne-shotwell-space-ted-conference-interview https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17227036/flight-spacex-gwynne-... Moon 2023: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-plans-to-fly-humans-around-the-moon-in-2023/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacex-plans-to-f...
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    It's amazing they know the exact month already.
pardavis 7y ago
This twitter reply sums it up well: “SUCCESS! We now now max pressure the tank can hold and the damage a rupture might do.”
- Baneofbatman 7y ago
  Ah so this wasn't an accident? They needed to know the pressure limits so they purposely blew the bulkhead?
  - 7y ago

cracker_jacks 7y ago

Is the Starship Mk1 more structurally sound than it looks? From a first glance and having no knowledge of its design, it looks like an empty soda can that would deform at the slightest disturbance. And the way it crumpled in the video doesn't seem far off from what I would expect.

MattRix 7y ago
Yes, your impressions are wrong.
- JshWright 7y ago
  Not really... a soda can is a pretty good analogy, actually.
roywiggins 7y ago
Rockets are actually pretty easy to poke holes in. They're meant to keep stuff in, not out. A dropped torque wrench blew up a Titan. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_explosion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_...
- mlyle 7y ago
  An 8lb socket dropped 80 feet. That's going to put a heck of a dent in almost anything.
  - war1025 7y ago
    Assuming I remember my high school physics correctly, the socket would be moving ~50mph on impact. Definitely a recipe for a bad day.
    - jml7c5 7y ago
      For reference, the average human seems (from a very brief search) to swing an 8lb sledgehammer at ~25mph. So it's a bit like someone very, very strong (think strongman competitions) nailing the thing as hard as they can with a sledgehammer.

andrewflnr 7y ago

If you go back a couple hours in the linked live feed you can find the event pretty easily. Look for the big plume in the preview when you hover over the progress bar. About 1:50 ago at this working writing. I guess it would have been around 1540 EST.

zionic 7y ago
Looks like the welds holding the bulkhead on failed. For those who aren't keeping up with this the failure was on the Mk1 prototype. Mk2 has been build nearly in parallel with Mk1 and will take over early flight testing (20km hop). Elon has tweeted that this team will jump to Mk3 instead of trying to repair Mk1.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Airliners rarely use welds because they're very hard to make with consistent high quality and are also very hard to inspect. Instead, they're riveted together.
  - bdamm 7y ago
    There are airplanes constructed with chemical bonding as well, such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and my personal favorite, the AA-1, released in 1967! Welded airplanes are practically nonexistent, but there are techniques other than riveting. And with the rise in popularity of composite materials, we're likely to see fewer and fewer rivets on airplanes.
  - pardavis 7y ago
    Friction stir welding is popular in rocketry because it is very controllable.
- kristianp 7y ago
  Is the mk2 in the parallel location?
  - 7y ago

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago

I don’t know the specifics of this particular setup, but aren’t pressure vessels usually tested hydrostatically. Water, for example, can be pressurised without actually compressing, and therefore doesn’t undergo rapid expansion when a failure occurs. There may be reason that precluded pressure testing with a fluid tough.

AWildC182 7y ago
Compared to the fuels that the vessel is designed to carry, water might as well be liquid lead. It would easily crush the structure before you got enough in there to do hydro testing. Edit: correction, looks like they're using methane/LOX. Methane is 422g/L and LOX is 1141g/L (compared to water at 1000g/L). If it was the LOX tank then they could have probably hydro tested it. Not so much with the CH4 which is probably the upper tank? It also bears mentioning that they would want to test at the appropriate temperatures. Water isn't great for hydro testing at LOX/liquid CH4 temps.
- m0zg 7y ago
  How do you "hydro" test it at cryogenic temperatures, where physical properties of the vessel material are markedly different?
elihu 7y ago
Maybe weight? Filling something that big with water would be very heavy; maybe it's not strong enough in all the right places to support that much mass.
- JshWright 7y ago
  Water is lighter than liquid oxygen (which is what this tank would be holding in "production"). For the purposes of this test, they were likely using liquid nitrogen, which has ~80% the mass of water.

kev009 7y ago

I had an unpopular opinion amongst friends that this thing looked like a total piece of shit, like a movie prop. They were using rented lifts and cranes to assemble it in the field. Clock right twice a day or maybe there's a reason everything about Apollo spacecraft was meticulously assembled.

cyrux004 7y ago
I wish more smart people like you worked there.
- irrational 7y ago
  Well, it's not like this is rocket science. Oh, wait...
- cududa 7y ago
  Yes because without this dude they would’ve never invented self landing reusable rockets
  - kev009 7y ago
    The guy was clearly being sarcastic. Woosh. I am as unqualified as Elon to strap humans to an explosion.
bborud 7y ago
Depends on what they're testing. Every single one of my electronics prototypes look like shit. About one five of them produce smoke and burn marks. Every twentieth does something dramatically unexpected (usually entertaining).
JshWright 7y ago
Starhopper looked just as "rough and ready" but completed a successful test flight a few months back.
Klathmon 7y ago
I have a feeling that they could blow up another dozen of these and still be spending less than doing it the "traditional" way of in cleanrooms and the VFAB building. This was a prototype that they've publicly said was most likely never to reach orbit, they are building this stuff right now to learn, test, and prove that their design works and find improvements that can be made.

perspective1 7y ago

During prototype tests you don't have to target 6-sigma, obviously, but I hope we get a post-mortem without spin.

vkou 7y ago
When their entire business depends on very carefully managing their PR, you're not going to get a public post-mortem without spin. If a government regulator runs the investigation, you might. I don't know if a regulator's going to get involved in this, though.
- senectus1 7y ago
  > When their entire business depends on very carefully managing their PR You really think this? My perception is that their PR is fairly blunt and upfront. while they may not tell you everything they dont seem to be trying to "spin" anything
  - blackguardx 7y ago
    There was a public accusation that a competitor shot one of their rockets with a rifle, causing it to fail. If they had reasonable suspicion of that, they should have kept it to themselves and the FBI/law enforcement. What really happened is that a strut failed due to faulty batch of material that wasn't tested before fabrication. I'm not sure if this was deliberate spin, but it seemed pretty shady to me at the time.
    - perspective1 7y ago
      I don't think SpaceX ever made that accusation. At the time (2016) Musk said the cause of failure was unknown. He was asked directly about sabotage on Twitter and replied that they didn't rule that out. As far as I can tell, the first time anyone at SpaceX talked about the rifle hypothesis was Musk simply saying SpaceX looked into it (the implication being it wasn't sabotage). WaPro: http://archive.is/j8zjc http://archive.is/j8zjc
  - 7y ago

NamTaf 7y ago

Oh dear! It looks like someone accidentally divided by 2 for the cylindrical hoop stresses, forgetting that they're not the same equation as for spherical stresses. :) Less facetiously, a thin-walled cylinder's stress is a function of pressure, radius and thickness with the equation: sigma = P*r/t whereas for a sphere (including the spherical end caps on a cylindrical pressure vessel), it follows the equation: sigma = Pr/(2t) To me, it looked like it failed around the join between the spherical end cap and the cylindrical body, where this transition between stress regimes occurs, which is a common weak spot in the above analysis. This is a canonical early engineering statics problem. It's worth noting, though, that all of the above is almost certainly a gross simplification and likely has very little bearing on the actual problem. It's fun to simplify and hypothesise, though! Also, unplanned failures make for great viewing :)

taneq 7y ago
That's why you take your maximum design stress and double it, right? /s
- namirez 7y ago
  I don't know what happened here, but if I remember correctly, in rockets, safety factor is typically smaller than 2 or the design would be too heavy. But I guess the safety factor for pressure testing is 4. Source: article 6.8.2.2 of this document; https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ast/reports_studies/library/media/Operational_Guidelines_for_Spaceflight_Pressure_Vessels.pdf https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/as... Edit: I didn't see the "/s" before writing this comment.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    > in rockets, safety factor is typically smaller than 2 or the design would be too heavy Safety factors feel like p-values. Why .05? Because. What if it's not good enough? We'll move the goal post.
    - 7y ago

londons_explore 7y ago

Aren't pressure tests done with water? That way, since water is non-compressible, if it fails, you just get a small hole or buldge somewhere rather than the catastrophic damage seen here. Perhaps they already tested with water and now needed to test with the real fuel/oxygen to get the temperature correct?

taneq 7y ago
Is it strong enough to take a full tank of water? Liquid methane weighs less than half what water weighs.
- JshWright 7y ago
  Liquid oxygen weighs more than water though...
  - taneq 7y ago
    True, although only slightly. Of course, it also wouldn't be trying to take off with a full tank of water and you'd expect it to pull at least 2G during takeoff (do we have an actual figure?) so I'm guessing the answer would be 'yes, it could take it'?
- dzhiurgis 7y ago
  Maybe they can use liquid nitrogen?
  - jcims 7y ago
    This is almost certainly the answer. Cheap, inert and cryogenic.
    - dzhiurgis 7y ago
      Turns out that's what they were using today. It was nitrogen pressure test!

sfblah 7y ago

Whoever gets in that thing is spam in a can /s (quote from the right stuff)

Gusen 7y ago

'Impeachment' Is A Diversion: The President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, raped and killed 15 boys in Buffalo, New York on January 10th, 2019. Complete and uncut audio of it all here, along with schumer, Obama, & Pelosi's direct involvement. PSA \\The completee audio from 10Jan 2019. Download the .mp3 file, put on headphones, and turn the volume all the way up. 10JanCh3_1255 -1557.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/18lTt_YKFEtsV6YDNzXFVQYLkStY-kSg2/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/18lTt_YKFEtsV6YDNzXFVQYLkStY... []Previously reported: This is audio of the President, Donald Trump, demanding a $4 billion dollar bribe from child rapists to “take a blind eye” on January 3, 2019. Trump becomes one on January 14, 2019. Also, this is the big reason the major networks do not report any of it. (Media moguls are in on it also) //Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. Trump is on a call from with Henry Porter and Gigi Hadid. See page 63. Bribe demand at 10:18am: 3JanCh3_900 -1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77YG0Vr/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77... //President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, rapes and kills his first boy at 6:31am. Video link below: 14JanCh3_600avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/154QvA5hwyHGYIVXtod1ZbsOHFUJNbqZW/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/154QvA5hwyHGYIVXtod1ZbsOHFUJ... 14JanCh2_600 -700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/19UkqmnMwZiWy7xxWngltqwoKLTJL-IZ_/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/19UkqmnMwZiWy7xxWngltqwoKLTJ... //On January 18th, 2019 at 8:31am (see page 8) Trump acknowledges the $4 billion dollar bribe and says: "Let's get it done and get to fucking some kids." Video link below: 18JanCh3_725-.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVTcGq5Z9oOSAiOQcKYrmuK4TwoNmY1h/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bVTcGq5Z9oOSAiOQcKYrmuK4Two... //The major reason this has not been reported by the major news networks is right here. Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News, apparently a member of the Illuminati since the 80's, along with ABC Nightly News lead anchor David Muir, stop over to the Porter studio in Buffalo on January 14, 2019 at 5:00am. They both rape and kill about two dozen boys by 6:00am. Muir starts around 515am, then Holt about 5:36am. Multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp and Fox Corporation, takes his turn after Holt. Video links below: 14JanCh3_500- 601.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX3o7UL/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX... 14JanCh2_530 -600.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1RwidV/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1... \\Adding to the (media protection) reason this is not picked up by the media, CBS & Viacom owner Sumner Redstone and Leslie Moonves rape and kill several boys following the President. 14JanCh3_700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXaB4aI0/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXa... 14JanCh2_700- 800.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWYKfRDp/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWY... //Full 89 page PDF [updated 17th Nov2019]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ... \\This zpost will be censored when this account logs off, the posts are "shadow banned". They try to make it look like the post is live, but it is not. Here is an example. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJedYKz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJ... \\@ Listen to Speaker of the House, Senator Nancy Pelosi, accepting a $3 billion dollar bribe from wealthy high profile child rapists for safe passage to get Asian boys through the border at "Monterrey" on January 17, 2019. New York senator Chuck schumer rapes and kills a boy later that afternoon to secure his $2 billion dollar bribe. //Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. Pelosi call starts at 10:31am. 17JanCh3_949 -1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eodHu4o5Cm3xEWhDqipSuTj-M1CZUvmE/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eodHu4o5Cm3xEWhDqipSuTj-M1C... 17JanCh4_1017 -1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-nWEQbempkVZSz230j9wTyduZNjDmnk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-nWEQbempkVZSz230j9wTyduZN... Excerpts from the dialogue: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi returns to the Porter camera system at 1031 for a check-in. "Nancy Pelosi is here and she wants $3 billion to keep the border open at Monterrey. THREE billion dollars to keep that shit open do you believe that?" Matthew Porter commentates. Pelosi states 10:34: "I think he [Brian Schlenker] needs to be removed. I think we need to get this guy out of here". Speaker Pelosi then agrees to call back at 7:00 pm PST. Gigi Hadid at 10:34: "Thanks for calling us. I've got you down for three minutes". Pelosi don't worry about that I've got 3 billion. 1031 Matthew Porter: Nancy Pelosi is on and she wants $3 billion dollars to keep the border open at Monterrey. Three billion dollars to keep that shit open do you believe that? 1033 Nancy Pelosi: I don't think that will be necessary unless you insist. 1033 Donald Reeves: We insist. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: Ok then I guess we have a deal. 1033 Matthew Porter: Thank you Mrs. Pelosi. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: Please call me Speaker Pelosi. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: We want to make sure you have safe passage at Monterrey. 1033 Matthew Porter: We appreciate that Speaker Pelosi. 1033 Gigi Hadid: I think we may have to scale back a little bit though. 1033 Nancy Pelosi: Gigi I think we'll be just fine. 1035 Nancy Pelosi: God damn it! I want Kamala to get a billion out of yours, not out of mine. 1035 Gigi Hadid: I think we can accommodate you but we need to find out if Monterrey will be open on the 30th of January. 1036 Nancy Pelosi: Of course it will Gigi. 1036 Nancy Pelosi: $3 billion goes a long way Peter. 1036 Peter Thiel: Excellent answer. 1043 Gigi Hadid: I think we need to give Kamala a billion dollars to keep her [happy]. 1043 Matthew Porter: I think we can do that but we need to get her to do something first. 1043 Gigi Hadid: She did. We got her fucking Rahm Emmanuel Monday morning [14 Jan] at 235. 1043 Matthew Porter: Perfect, then we're all set. Send her the billion. 1043? Nancy Pelosi: She'll accept the money, I guarantee it. 1043? Gigi Hadid: Nancy thank you for everything. <ch4> 1036 Donald Reeves: Don't listen to her. She will close down the border if it's not there. Make sure she gets the $3 billion. This is the tip of the iceberg. Full 84 page document [updated 17thNov]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ... //This post will be censored when this account logs off. Posts are "shadow banned". They try to make it look like the post is live, but it is not. Here is an example. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJedYKz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zxS8JESoIg7uxRkUgdptMsF6SuJ... \\$ \\New York Senator Charles Schumer rapes and kills one boy looking for his TWO billion dollar payment from 1700-1730. Schumer at 1701: "Let's get him out of there, and get to fucking some kids!” Download the video, turn the volume all the way up and put head phones on. Note: there is not much to see in the video, the audio is picked up from another [illegal surveillance] system. Just as a head’s up, there is a vacuum running intermittently in the beginning and some loud noises. \\Representative from New Orleans Steve Scalise rapes and kills three 17:25+. Video links below. Each channel has different system users of varying importance, and one may be easier to hear than another. This is explained in better details in the PDF. 17JanCh3_1644.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1caUbmhIf8z264w1MWeOzm0VQIG_h3rtA/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1caUbmhIf8z264w1MWeOzm0VQIG_... 17JanCh4_1700-1800_redo.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Md911Z2vXJzJEmNAiJcOkHDKIl15GUmz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Md911Z2vXJzJEmNAiJcOkHDKIl1... \\Back on January 13th 2019, a deal to bring over the boys from North Korea & China, 300 for $375 million through “Monterrey”, is discussed with Barack Obama, Charles Schumer, Henry Porter, and Donald Reeves. Jack Dorsey is there and also discusses possibilities for 500 boys over the 300. See pages 37 and 38. You will hear the deal go down later that afternoon between 1:30pm and 3:00pm. Here are the links for the first discussion, which begins around 8:40 with an anxious Obama., the rest are in the PDF: 13JanCh2_700-900.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iUr44-U3dpt0cBlhlOgM071HAtei-g6G/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iUr44-U3dpt0cBlhlOgM071HAte... 13JanCh3_800-845.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m3bBVPra2BEgzmM2QNJsR-JA7rw__oOW/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m3bBVPra2BEgzmM2QNJsR-JA7rw... 13JanCh3_845-954.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XFCDABfGb10oAwCLt7gc4XbsOMxgpKPT/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XFCDABfGb10oAwCLt7gc4XbsOMx... \\Events were excerpts from this 89 page PDF . It keeps getting censored, but with enough public awareness, they will eventually have to face justice. Please help get this around [updated 17th Nov]: FBI_FinalDraft_26Jul2019_BSchlenker.pdf https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJc9cGk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Sj9EN_pHmicKS6rFQlmk67knMdJ...

torgian 7y ago

I think it’s good. Better to find the flaws now and do a resdesign, instead of having astronaughts being blown out into space ;)

djohnston 7y ago

for some reason i feel like im watching a 2nd grader's baking soda volcano project. i guess it's the perspective of the camera, or im not accustomed to the looks of prototype rockets, but to me it looks like a paper mache diorama

ohazi 7y ago
Starship looks particularly shoddy because it's made from relatively small steel plates welded together. The welding process causes each plate to warp slightly, so the end result looks like a quilt rather than a nice uniformly smooth cylinder. Most rockets don't look like this. Most prototype rockets don't look like this either. The argument has been that this is good enough to start testing structural features, and probably also good enough to do a little bit of low-stress flying as well. The first argument seems sound. I'm not so sure about the second... there are a lot of welds. At least a few of them are likely to be structurally unsound, and assessing weld quality is difficult. In any case, for the "real" Starship, they plan to use a technique similar to the one they use on Falcon, where they roll a huge metal plate and then stir-friction weld along the seam. This kind of tooling is difficult and expensive to set up, and the configuration of the machinery and the material depends a lot on the actual design, which hasn't been finalized yet. Apparently they're using thicker steel then they plan to use on the monolithically constructed version to compensate for weld quality, but I don't know... weld seams are great stress concentrators, and stress concentrations are where fractures are likely to form, and fractures on the skin of a rocket are usually catastrophic failures. All it takes is one defect.
_Microft 7y ago
The Starships shininess makes it look even more wrinkly. If it wasn't reflecting its surroundings so well, you would not be able to see that it's not perfectly smooth. Here's a similar effect on windows: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/D60B28/distorted-reflections-in-a-modern-glass-building-in-warsaw-poland-D60B28.jpg https://c8.alamy.com/comp/D60B28/distorted-reflections-in-a-... That's why Starship can look a lot better when photographed from nearby - the view is tilted more upwards and the sky is reflecting in it which does not have enough details to let one see these wrinkles.

tus88 7y ago

Does fail early apply to Space tech development?

JshWright 7y ago
It's worked fairly well for SpaceX so far...

boznz 7y ago

"You will learn more from your failures than your successes - so embrace those mistakes, as difficult as that sounds, and grow from them. When a project is successful, you're never really sure why, because so many elements come into play. However, when you fail, you always know why. That is how you learn and grow." Lynda Resnick

killion 7y ago

I haven’t seen an mention if anyone was injured. Was there someone on the cherry picker?

elteto 7y ago
You would never have people around when doing high pressure ops. This might even have been a proof test, where the tank is pressurized to test for leaks so something like this failure is a plausible scenario.

double0jimb0 7y ago

I read this was a manufacturing pathfinder. Manufacturing and assembly of high strength hardened steel is near black art. Pathfinders do exactly what they say, they lead you through unknown territory to the outcome of the manufacturing journey you embarked on. Often things go boom, you find out why, add it to your corpus of black art knowledge, and keep pathfinding until you run out of budget / succeed / change mission. So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like.

Roark66 7y ago
Why would they be using hardened steel for a pressure vessel that has to deal with vibrations? Also, someone on twitter said a horizontal weld failed. If this is true I'm surprised they didn't do two things: - tune their welding procedure by destructive testing with the same type of steel - and X-ray (or use another non-destructive method) the welds after assembly. Welding (including more interesting metals) is my hobby so I had an opportunity to see that there a huge amount of knowledge in the field. There are routine testing procedures that ensure situations like this one don't happen.
- 19870213 7y ago
  As far as I know the type of steel they are using increases in strength as it gets colder, so that should be ideal for the LOX.
- tinco 7y ago
  Maybe they did both things, and the weld still failed. The rocket's being engineered, which means they make it as weak as possible without it blowing up. Those welds might be perfect in the x-rays, they might've done all sorts of destructive analysis, and still the thing might fail in staging. Of course, they might also be on a deadline, and just went ahead and built it to spec and test it. But I don't think you can just say there's routine testing procedures that ensure rockets never blow up. If that were the case we wouldn't have needed SpaceX to reinvigorate the space industry.
  - 7y ago

dehrmann 7y ago

There was a post on HN a few days ago about how SpaceX got a full examination, while Boeing more or less got a pass from Nasa. This is a different vehicle, but it gives an idea of the maturity of SpaceX. And yes, the earlier story was really more about trying to establish a pattern around the 737 Max failure, but that issue was at least complicated. This is just sloppy. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21574080

paraiuspau 7y ago

"Was that the primary buffer panel?"

SergeAx 7y ago

Nothing blows up means you aren't innovative enough.

jjuliano 7y ago

They should opt for a single block of stainless steel carved into a rocket as a unibody design for added strength.

weinzierl 7y ago
Not the whole rocket obviously but milling the tank from a whole block has been done.

LandR 7y ago

The front fell off!

Ajedi32 7y ago

Comment from Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1197271943180771329 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1197271943180771329 Official SpaceX statement: https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1197306617760559104 https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/11973066177605591...

new_realist 7y ago

This integration test is way too late to be finding faults like these. This is top down design, which is expensive an error prone. The ship should be designed and tested in a bottom up fashion, such that the failure modes of every individual component is already known, as per Feynman. SpaceX is repeating the mistakes of the Space Shuttle program.

MR4D 7y ago

Just another test. However... To me there is an issue with large diameter pressured tubes - the point where the tube connects to the top is affected by the surface area divided by the diameter. Obviously one of those scales linearly, and the other squared. That suggests to me (I'm definitely not a rocket scientist!) that the upper bound might be smaller than this diameter, or the weight will have to increase in order to beef up the strength of this point. Pretty interesting problem to deal with now that they are this far into the design. I'm sure there are many possible solutions, and it will be fun to see what they come up with.