15 ms·

SpaceX’s Starship SN1 prototype blows up during pressure test on its Texas pad

99 points by eternalny1 7y ago

gpm 7y ago
The pressure vessel failed during testing with nitrogen, no explosion occurred. This probably isn't that much of a surprise, they knew the welds were far from ideal and already had improvements on the way. > We had the wrong settings! To make the welds super flat & strong, we’re building a heavy duty, custom planisher, but just having the right settings is a major improvement. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1232556310874533888 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1232556310874533888 The next version is already being assembled right beside where this one failed.
- DennisP 7y ago
  So I guess a better title would be that it popped.
- vl 7y ago
  Well, on the bright side, this was the first Starship that flew.
- Narkov 7y ago
  It definitely was an explosion. I think you mean it wasn't a combustion. >explosion > a violent expansion in which energy is transmitted outwards as a shock wave. > a sudden outburst of something such as violent emotion, especially anger.
bpodgursky 7y ago
If the SLS blew up during testing, it would set the program back a literal decade (or more). If the James Webb telescope failed during deploy, it would be a $10-$20 billion loss -- and it would never be re-attempted. NASA needs to re-learn from SpaceX's ability to iterate on cheap designs and flush out flaws quickly. I say re-learn, because they DID know how to do this correctly during the Gemini / Apollo eras (TONS of rockets blew up before they attempted human spaceflight). But culturally, something went deeply wrong, perhaps when we reached the Space Shuttle era, and they lost the willingness to ever accept failure or pushing limits -- the same process we tell tell children is critical to ever learning.
- jiggawatts 7y ago
  Giving things a "red hot go" doesn't exist in the vocabulary of bureaucrats. If you have no personal vested interest in success, the only thing to optimise for is to minimise risks, because failures are rewarded with a dressing down at a minimum, career dead end at worst. Elon Musk is known for rewarding for success, not punishing for failure, but instead reserving punishment for those that didn't even both trying. Meanwhile, "not even trying" is the default mode of operation for 90% of public servants I've worked with...
  - frankharv 7y ago
    Yea but consider the cost. Just slinging weld on a tank costs time and material. How much money was wasted by not properly manufacturing this tank. I don't understand how he has succeeded with such rube goldberg engineering. Isn't this the second pressure vessel to fail on pressure testing? Doing it wrong once is OK. Doing it wrong twice means you learned nothing from your first failure.
    - nexuist 7y ago
      It’s a pressurized tin can. It’s not a rocket. The entire thing could get nuked from orbit and SpaceX would still lose less money cleaning up the radiation than they would if Starship failed - potentially with people on board. They’re at a “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” stage in the engineering cycle. They’re using (and abusing) processes never meant to be used for spaceflight, so in a lot of ways nobody there really knows how to do things correctly without trying and testing it. Imagine trying to learn a language like Go without being able to access any documentation on it. You would waste a ton of time and utterly fail at simple tasks too.
      - HarryHirsch 7y ago
        People have been building pressure vessels since the days of the steam engine and cryogenic pressure vessels since the early 1900s. Robert Goddard's first liquid engine ran on liquid oxygen, that was in 1926. The metallurgy and processes are well understood, an explosion shouldn't have happened, yet Musk managed to have one twice in a row. Fire engineering and management, Space X is beginning to look like Boeing!
redis_mlc 7y ago
Maybe somebody can explain this to me. Welds are supposed to be tested at the weld level, not at the vehicle level. So what is wrong with their process or QA?
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Isn’t the entire prototype part of the QA?
- gpm 7y ago
  I'm not a welder, but you're talking about A prototype that was manufactured in a tent and in a field, with welds being done in that field only a few days ago. I doubt much QA or weld level testing was done. A prototype on which they knew welds were less than ideal... And specifically a prototype of a rocket being built with new materials and new manufacturing methods. Rockets have the nearly unique distinction of having to be strong enough and no stronger because being stronger wastes mass which lowers the very important payload to orbit number. Bursting a few pressure vessels as they figure out where that point on the strength curve is seems pretty reasonable to me. We don't (yet) know at what pressure this burst at, if it burst near the total pressure needed to achieve their safety margin I imagine they will be ecstatic. I wouldn't interpret this test failure as a process, or QA failure without more information.
  - redis_mlc 7y ago
    > A prototype that was manufactured in a tent and in a field, with welds being done in that field only a few days ago. I doubt much QA or weld level testing was done. What you're describing is how farm tractors are repaired, not how aerospace mfg. is conducted. You can't "test out" bad metallurgy, welding or mfg. in rockets.
    - gpm 7y ago
      What I'm describing is literally how this rocket was made... literally the whole thing is being live streamed by people living nearby with both 24/7 cams on the facility and frequent higher quality closer films and pictures being taken. Occasionally there are tweets from Elon about the process too. You are far from the only one who is skeptical that this is a valuable process, but there isn't any room to debate that it is what they are doing. Edit: Here is a recent timelapse of some of that welding, as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7bIvLhI1hY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7bIvLhI1hY
grecy 7y ago
Elon just said this 12 hours ago: "Failure has to be an option. What you want is to reward success but there should be minor consequences for trying and not succeeding. And major consequences for not trying #AWS2020" [1] They are rapidly iterating, and I expect them to destroy up a lot of Starship hardware in the next few months as they perfect it. [1] https://youtu.be/dPwxfzvhlLA https://youtu.be/dPwxfzvhlLA
- nikofeyn 7y ago
  we've come a long way from "failure is not an option". this is typical musk spin. of course we can't be afraid to fail, but that isn't what happened here. catastrophic failures should not be considered "oh well" situations. move fast and break things isn't a design and engineering approach worth subscribing to. i'd appreciate a more measured response from spaceX. the quote "Not much to worry about here" from spaceX is pretty annoying. a less dismissive tone would be better, because from my point of view, they just had a pretty large and expensive failure. that's bothersome from someone getting a ton of public funding. a response of "we take failures very seriously" rather than basically "yea, that'll happen" would be more professional.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    If you don't own any SpaceX stock and aren't planning on flying on one of their spaceships when the time comes, why do you care?
    - laichzeit0 7y ago
      How, exactly, would one own SpaceX stock?
      - babesh 7y ago
        https://www.baronfunds.com/product-detail https://www.baronfunds.com/product-detail One of the Baron Funds invested in SpaceX.
  - missosoup 7y ago
BooneJS 7y ago
How much has SpaceX had to “start over” from what NASA and others have researched over the decades?

99 points by eternalny1 7y ago

gpm 7y ago

The pressure vessel failed during testing with nitrogen, no explosion occurred. This probably isn't that much of a surprise, they knew the welds were far from ideal and already had improvements on the way. > We had the wrong settings! To make the welds super flat & strong, we’re building a heavy duty, custom planisher, but just having the right settings is a major improvement. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1232556310874533888 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1232556310874533888 The next version is already being assembled right beside where this one failed.

DennisP 7y ago
So I guess a better title would be that it popped.
vl 7y ago
Well, on the bright side, this was the first Starship that flew.
Narkov 7y ago
It definitely was an explosion. I think you mean it wasn't a combustion. >explosion > a violent expansion in which energy is transmitted outwards as a shock wave. > a sudden outburst of something such as violent emotion, especially anger.

bpodgursky 7y ago

If the SLS blew up during testing, it would set the program back a literal decade (or more). If the James Webb telescope failed during deploy, it would be a $10-$20 billion loss -- and it would never be re-attempted. NASA needs to re-learn from SpaceX's ability to iterate on cheap designs and flush out flaws quickly. I say re-learn, because they DID know how to do this correctly during the Gemini / Apollo eras (TONS of rockets blew up before they attempted human spaceflight). But culturally, something went deeply wrong, perhaps when we reached the Space Shuttle era, and they lost the willingness to ever accept failure or pushing limits -- the same process we tell tell children is critical to ever learning.

jiggawatts 7y ago
Giving things a "red hot go" doesn't exist in the vocabulary of bureaucrats. If you have no personal vested interest in success, the only thing to optimise for is to minimise risks, because failures are rewarded with a dressing down at a minimum, career dead end at worst. Elon Musk is known for rewarding for success, not punishing for failure, but instead reserving punishment for those that didn't even both trying. Meanwhile, "not even trying" is the default mode of operation for 90% of public servants I've worked with...
- frankharv 7y ago
  Yea but consider the cost. Just slinging weld on a tank costs time and material. How much money was wasted by not properly manufacturing this tank. I don't understand how he has succeeded with such rube goldberg engineering. Isn't this the second pressure vessel to fail on pressure testing? Doing it wrong once is OK. Doing it wrong twice means you learned nothing from your first failure.
  - nexuist 7y ago
    It’s a pressurized tin can. It’s not a rocket. The entire thing could get nuked from orbit and SpaceX would still lose less money cleaning up the radiation than they would if Starship failed - potentially with people on board. They’re at a “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” stage in the engineering cycle. They’re using (and abusing) processes never meant to be used for spaceflight, so in a lot of ways nobody there really knows how to do things correctly without trying and testing it. Imagine trying to learn a language like Go without being able to access any documentation on it. You would waste a ton of time and utterly fail at simple tasks too.
    - HarryHirsch 7y ago
      People have been building pressure vessels since the days of the steam engine and cryogenic pressure vessels since the early 1900s. Robert Goddard's first liquid engine ran on liquid oxygen, that was in 1926. The metallurgy and processes are well understood, an explosion shouldn't have happened, yet Musk managed to have one twice in a row. Fire engineering and management, Space X is beginning to look like Boeing!

redis_mlc 7y ago

Maybe somebody can explain this to me. Welds are supposed to be tested at the weld level, not at the vehicle level. So what is wrong with their process or QA?

ceejayoz 7y ago
Isn’t the entire prototype part of the QA?
gpm 7y ago
I'm not a welder, but you're talking about A prototype that was manufactured in a tent and in a field, with welds being done in that field only a few days ago. I doubt much QA or weld level testing was done. A prototype on which they knew welds were less than ideal... And specifically a prototype of a rocket being built with new materials and new manufacturing methods. Rockets have the nearly unique distinction of having to be strong enough and no stronger because being stronger wastes mass which lowers the very important payload to orbit number. Bursting a few pressure vessels as they figure out where that point on the strength curve is seems pretty reasonable to me. We don't (yet) know at what pressure this burst at, if it burst near the total pressure needed to achieve their safety margin I imagine they will be ecstatic. I wouldn't interpret this test failure as a process, or QA failure without more information.
- redis_mlc 7y ago
  > A prototype that was manufactured in a tent and in a field, with welds being done in that field only a few days ago. I doubt much QA or weld level testing was done. What you're describing is how farm tractors are repaired, not how aerospace mfg. is conducted. You can't "test out" bad metallurgy, welding or mfg. in rockets.
  - gpm 7y ago
    What I'm describing is literally how this rocket was made... literally the whole thing is being live streamed by people living nearby with both 24/7 cams on the facility and frequent higher quality closer films and pictures being taken. Occasionally there are tweets from Elon about the process too. You are far from the only one who is skeptical that this is a valuable process, but there isn't any room to debate that it is what they are doing. Edit: Here is a recent timelapse of some of that welding, as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7bIvLhI1hY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7bIvLhI1hY

grecy 7y ago

Elon just said this 12 hours ago: "Failure has to be an option. What you want is to reward success but there should be minor consequences for trying and not succeeding. And major consequences for not trying #AWS2020" [1] They are rapidly iterating, and I expect them to destroy up a lot of Starship hardware in the next few months as they perfect it. [1] https://youtu.be/dPwxfzvhlLA https://youtu.be/dPwxfzvhlLA

nikofeyn 7y ago
we've come a long way from "failure is not an option". this is typical musk spin. of course we can't be afraid to fail, but that isn't what happened here. catastrophic failures should not be considered "oh well" situations. move fast and break things isn't a design and engineering approach worth subscribing to. i'd appreciate a more measured response from spaceX. the quote "Not much to worry about here" from spaceX is pretty annoying. a less dismissive tone would be better, because from my point of view, they just had a pretty large and expensive failure. that's bothersome from someone getting a ton of public funding. a response of "we take failures very seriously" rather than basically "yea, that'll happen" would be more professional.
- pdonis 7y ago
  If you don't own any SpaceX stock and aren't planning on flying on one of their spaceships when the time comes, why do you care?
  - laichzeit0 7y ago
    How, exactly, would one own SpaceX stock?
    - babesh 7y ago
      https://www.baronfunds.com/product-detail https://www.baronfunds.com/product-detail One of the Baron Funds invested in SpaceX.
- missosoup 7y ago

BooneJS 7y ago

How much has SpaceX had to “start over” from what NASA and others have researched over the decades?