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SpaceX Starship SN4 launch vehicle prototype explodes after static engine test
- 101404 6y agoToo bad, especially because only yesterday they put a weight simulator onto it. So it looked like it was going to fly. Well, it did fly, just not in one piece.
- defterGoose 6y ago"Fly apart"
- justaguy88 6y agorapid unscheduled hop
- 101404 6y ago... multi-directional hop
- dreamcompiler 6y agohttps://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10022/who-coined-the-phrase-rapid-unscheduled-disassembly https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10022/who-coined-t...
- unstatusthequo 6y agoYeah given the delayed and soon upcoming actual human scheduled flight, this would have been maybe nicer to put off a couple days... just optics but still...
- darkteflon 6y agoAgreed - my first thought too.
- whatshisface 6y agoWatch this: "It's actually good optics that it exploded, because it shows they aren't changing their schedules for the sake of optics. Political pressure to make the schedule fit the public's feelings was a major contributor to the Challenger disaster. So, having a tank blow up the day before a manned launch shows that SpaceX has overcome the challenges of the past." (See? That spin makes the turbopump look like a stator. If I have a point it's that talking about optics is pointless, because you can make the optics anything you want by casting the right light.)
- ncmncm 6y agoSkip to "1:48 CT".
- whoopdedo 6y agoThey're getting good at this. Has Elon considered pivoting from a space flight company into the demolition business?
- incompatible 6y agoHard to compete when there are so many out on streets willing to demolish for free.
- ls612 6y agoThe trick is to actually get them to demolish the things we want demolished instead of the nearest Target store.
- Diederich 6y agoDisappointing to be sure, but it's why they already have SN5 (nearly?) complete and SN6 is well on its way. I like how Elon Musk contrasted past and currently planned human space activity as 'Apollo' and the potential future as 'D-Day'. The goal is to cheaply and quickly mass manufacture interplanetary space craft. I think that imploding/exploding early serial numbers are an expected early part of that path.
- moneytide1 6y agoNot disappointing - the more things that go wrong during the extensive series of tests developed and cataloged over the past several decades, the more we can correct and cement into permanence. I'm looking forward to SN747 (the number corresponds with one of Boeing's standardized atmospheric flight models) sometime in 2024. I'm probably not thinking big enough though.
- lutorm 6y agoBelieve me, it's absolutely disappointing. Not unexpected, mind you, but people would definitely prefer to not have things blow up.
- missosoup 6y agoMusk was pretty clear in an interview that he does want things to blow up. He wants the testing to push and exceed the limits so those limits become well defined. It sounds quite reasonable.
- kanox 6y agoI doubt this was a deliberate beyond the limit.
- missosoup 6y agoThat's the point - they're discovering the limits. The other way to do this would be to over engineer, have more conservative testing, etc. But Musk has been clear that they've explicitly chosen a strategy of fast iteration, and breaking things instead. And that's one of the primary things that gives them an edge over NASA.
- watersb 6y agoRocketry is unforgiving. That's why they test.
- trca 6y agoBest way to figure out how complex things fail is to keep pushing them to their limit and observe
- phkahler 6y agoThis on definitely started at the bottom. It almost looks like a leak created a FAE (fuel air explosive) mixture around it. It also blew out the methane flare on the right.
- dreamcompiler 6y agoLooks like the methane flare is what lit it, although it's difficult to judge distance in the video.
- davidmurdoch 6y agoIt didn't. You can play it back frame by frame and see that it started beneath SN4.
- Nerada 6y agoFor some reason this link re-routes me to "advertising.com".
- pmontra 6y agoAll links to Techcrunch go to https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=1_cc-session_<an https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=1_... uuid> and Blockada [1] blocks them on my Android devices. I stopped visiting Techcrunch since they started to do that. I can always google the same news on a different site. [1] https://blokada.org/ https://blokada.org/
- rrmm 6y agoIf you catch the audio on this from the nasa space flight forum (I think?), it was pretty funny. They were speculating if it was a lox purge (vs a methane purge). They assumed lox, since if it were methane, the flare would..... BOOOM. The timing was very perfect. EDIT: https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/1266442087848960000 https://twitter.com/NASASpaceflight/status/12664420878489600... has the audio with it.
- Pfhreak 6y agoA bit later they run the tape back frame by frame and determined the fire definitely didn't come from the flare stack. (Though in realtime it happens so fast they weren't sure.)
- rrmm 6y agoYup. but the timing was just too good. It was like the methane wanted to have a say in the conversation: "Acccctuaally,....BOOM"
- ashtonkem 6y agoThat video was almost certainly taken with a telephoto lens a long distance away, and telephoto lenses tend to compress distance. The flare could’ve been a long way away from the rocket, and a telephoto lens would make them look much much closer.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoYes you can see also that the shockwave arrives at the camera more than a second later.
- Kye 6y agoBest illustrated with dolly zooms. Even side-by-side stills don't quite capture how significant the effect is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeyjyZ6UZII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeyjyZ6UZII
- dmlittle 6y ago
- visviva 6y agoWould it have really killed their schedule so much to push this until after tomorrow's crewed flight? They're obviously unrelated, but it sucks to have this is the headlines the day before they launch astronauts.
- ghostpepper 6y agoThe astronauts are both veterans and one would assume they understand that this was not only a prototype ship but a prototype engine. Falcon has 50+ successful flights over four years since its most recent failure. Hopefully they're not phased by this.
- carapace 6y agos/phased/fazed/
- ghostpepper 6y agothanks, TIL
- visviva 6y ago> Hopefully they're not phased by this. I doubt they are - my comment is about the PR impact.
- Kye 6y agoI get cynical about people sometimes, but I have to believe the average person can understand the difference between a bleeding edge test and the launch of a proven system. They don't stop driving when someone dies trying to break the land speed record. I don't see a PR problem.
- sneak 6y agoI thought the same thing at first, but I doubt very much this will be reported very widely. Despite it being huge in our circles, most people don’t follow this stuff very closely. Unless both SpaceX and NASA are pushing out stories at max volume with included press kits, anything they do will be basically niche at best. Recall on the FH test flight how the loss of the center core was not announced immediately, and as a result of SpaceX delaying the announcement of the loss by an hour or three, very nearly 100% of the reporting on the topic was about their successful launch and landing of the two (heh) boosters, with no mention whatsoever of the fact that the launch also contained a failure. An absolutely masterful PR decision, and one I learned a lot from, but also evidence of how fickle, inaccurate/incomplete, and flighty/shallow media attention is. For the vast majority of people and media outlets: nobody really pays attention to rockets in general, especially while the nation is burning/dying/being impoverished. You have to be insanely loud to penetrate that fog. This isn’t headline news.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoThis is the 4th Starship that has imploded or exploded. They only lost 3 Falcon 1's before their first successful flight, and Elon has publicly stated that a 4th failure would have bankrupted the company. Those three Falcon flights were attempts to reach orbit with rockets that weren't prototypes so the failures were more significant, and they probably blew up a bunch of Falcon prototypes behind closed doors prior to the launch attempts, but it's interesting how three failures on Falcon was a big deal but four failures on Starship isn't. SpaceX is certainly in a different and much less precarious position now than it was in 2006-2008.
- sneak 6y agoThat’s how it goes with building something properly large, isn’t it? The speed range on first gear is more narrow than second, and third, and so forth. I’m just glad SpaceX has the cash flow and team to be able to pursue something as ambitious as BFR. Humans are going to need many thousands of rockets like that one if we are to survive.
- tsimionescu 6y ago> Humans are going to need many thousands of rockets like that one if we are to survive. There is no chance in the next hundred years (I would bet more like 200-500) of a self-sufficient colony anywhere away from the earth. If humanity can't survive without rockets, it can't survive at all. Not to mention that it is basically impossible to imagine that any technology that could allow a self-sufficient colony on another planet couldn't much more easily allow humans to live on earth after any catastrophe you could imagine short of cosmic ray events. It's much, much harder to live on Mars than on a post-apocalyptic earth, regardless of which apocalypse you care to choose (nuclear war, nuclear meltdowns in all nuclear power plants, catastrophic global warming, super volcanoes, meteor impact the size of the Cambrian event, you name it). Sure, in the enormously long term there may be a need to leave the earth before the sun ages too much, or to try to have a chance against planetary collisions or gamma ray bursts.
- dnautics 6y agoIt's interesting that a company with a revenue stream can tolerate more failure of declared prototypes more than one without can tolerate operational (if early stage) deployments?
- unnouinceput 6y agoFunny article, it stressed at least 4 times this is different from the normal flights ones they do regularly, otherwise covidiots/flat-earthears/conspiracists will fill forums with their cries. And I'm not sure they wont anyway.
- danso 6y agoI know these kinds of explosions aren't disasters per se, but at what point in development do these kind of destructive results become very unwanted? Or was that classic Calvin and Hobbes comic about bridge testing less of a joke than I had though? https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/11/26 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/11/26
- sacred_numbers 6y agoWhen you start making the same mistakes over and over. As long as they learn new things with each iteration it doesn't matter if they blow up 5 or 50 ships. The actual material cost of these prototypes is probably in the low 6 figures. The biggest cost is the labor, but by iterating rapidly they are learning new manufacturing techniques, so if they weren't blowing up these prototypes they would be stacking them in a field or tearing them down anyways, since the value is in the process, not the final product, at this point. Also, there are only an estimated 300 employees building Starships (although there are probably more working on engineering), so on-site labor costs are probably about a million a week. Since they can pop out a new iteration every few weeks they cost is probably only about a few million per ship. That's a lot of money in some industries, but it's a rounding error in rocketry. They could build dozens or even hundreds of prototypes for less than the cost of a conventional disposable rocket, like SLS. The idea that the cheapest way to build a rocket is to blow up dozens of prototypes is a bit counterintuitive, but I believe it's the future. Organizations that move more slowly to avoid failures will fall further and further behind, since the tortoise only wins if the hare falls asleep, which SpaceX shows no signs of doing. Civil engineers are able to use mathematical models to develop bridges because we've been building bridges for thousands of years, and they can build in huge safety factors. Fully reusable rockets have never been built before and can't afford the luxury of large safety factors due to the Rocket Equation, so testing to failure is the fastest way to learn, and when almost all of the cost is labor, fastest = cheapest.
- baking 6y agoThe latest from the President and COO of SpaceX is that there are 900 employees working at Boca Chica alone.
- londons_explore 6y agoI notice all the broken bits of rocket are in square panels. That indicates the welds failed rather than the steel sheets in the explosion. If you want to design something to be as strong as possible for the weight, you make the welds as strong as the sheets. In most cases, that means making the weld lines thicker than the rest, since the weld is typically formed in less ideal conditions so weaker. There are tricks to doing that like zig-zag weld lines, overlapped sheets at the weld, etc. Surprising spaceX hasn't done this, considering strength to weight is critical in rocketry.
- gexla 6y agoMaybe this is by design. Maybe they are giving more thought to how they want the shell to blow apart rather than making it as strong as possible. Once the thing decides it's going to explode, then the shell just needs an exit plan. The shell isn't going to hold anything together at this point.
- maxerickson 6y agoWhy would they prioritize behavior during catastrophic failure over the strength-weight ratio?
- gexla 6y agoWouldn't strength only need to get to a certain "good enough" point rather than "as strong as possible?" Maybe the shell is already at that point? And after that point, maybe all there is left to concern yourself with is how it behaves in an explosion. As with any thing designed to explode (grenade, bomb, etc.) Maybe they want for the thing to come apart in a certain way rather than holding together?
- maxerickson 6y agoSpace thingies are never light enough. That's why I asked about the strength-weight ratio and not the strength.
- 6y ago
- SergeAx 6y agoNow, that's what I'm calling "move fast and break things"!
- unixhero 6y agoThat's what tests are for.
- kilroy123 6y agoAll this time, I haven't been convinced that this steel approach is better in the long-run than going the advanced composite route.
- blackrock 6y agoAt some point during Research and Development, shouldn’t you figure out the math first?
- jokoon 6y agoI wonder how many unfilmed explosions NASA had during the space exploration period.
- vntok 6y agoI'd wager probably none or a handfew at most. Frame-by-frame video was and still is important to incident analysis.
- raverbashing 6y agoI think NASA not so many, but space exploration started pre-NASA. JPL predates NASA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlNz634TjN0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlNz634TjN0
- swarnie_ 6y ago"That was not nominal" Bloody brilliant. Hopefully they got some good data from that test
- shireboy 6y agoRapid unscheduled disassembly.
- risyachka 6y agoYou can't invent anything new without lots of fails. Let's hope they will blow them up as quickly as possible so we can see a flying one soon!
- kerng 6y agoThis thing should have blown up somewhere during launch, not while parked basically. People not happy.