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Watching pieces of the ship melt off, but then seeing it make a relatively controlled landing, is perversely confidence building. If it can survive that kind of
by delichon 2y ago
Watching pieces of the ship melt off, but then seeing it make a relatively controlled landing, is perversely confidence building. If it can survive that kind of damage on a control surface maybe it's a quite robust craft.
- ceejayoz 2y agoYeah, and what a useful recording for "where do we buff up the heat protection?"
- liamkinne 2y agoSurvivorship bias!
- gibolt 2y agoHopefully the takeaway is something straightforward, like thicker shielding in one area and not a big redesign of the flaps
- dotnet00 2y agoThey already do have some pretty significant flap redesigns in the pipeline. Slightly smaller and placed slightly farther back from the centerline.
- Maxion 2y agoThats... not quite survivorship bias.
- neuronexmachina 2y agoYeah, survivorship bias doesn't quite apply if there's real-time telemetry. ;)
- amoss 2y agoPart of the build up said that they had deliberately weakened / thinned some of the tiles in order to test what the tolerance was. It seems that they must have gotten some incredible data about the mode of failure.
- convery 2y agoThat was for the base of the ship, so that they could add more sensors.
- idontwantthis 2y agoIt looked like plasma got between the flap and the body. I wonder if that means something broke/melted to allow that, or if the design just allowed it accidentally.
- dotnet00 2y agoThey've been concerned about burn through in that area for a while, but they didn't get to test it before now to understand how it'd perform in reality. IIRC they were even calling out that they were surprised that the temperature readings in other parts were in good agreement with the simulations, which is probably indicative of the limited confidence they had for that part.
- lsaferite 2y agoIt looked like the flap was starting to glow internally in the middle, right before the burn-through on the hinge point. I wonder if it maybe had a lost tile on the other side that evolved into the burn-through we saw in the video.
- dylan604 2y agoI imagine this is what happened to Columbia
- api 2y agoI’ve said for a while that we won’t be ready for the real space age until you can have a rusty pickup in space. What I mean by that is that we have it down well enough that the tech exceeds tolerances and can degrade gracefully. You see this in some sci-fi where there are rust bucket old ships that work.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ryandvm 2y agoYou have to be careful how much wisdom you glean from fiction. The sheer hostility of space kind of precludes the "she's a good ol' ship" trope. When your door doesn't shut on your pickup, you can bang on it a bit. When your door doesn't shut on your spacecraft, you've got a ship full of corpses that look like a blob fish brought up from the Marianas Trench.
- merek 2y agoAgree, a successful mission needn't be a perfect mission
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Simon_ORourke 2y agoAny mission you land and can walk from is a successful mission.
- golol 2y agoExactly. Everyone was worried about reentry, but perhaps more concerning than the question of whether the headshield tiles work was the question how well the material below can handle failures. Now we know significant failures of tiles do not have to lead to mission loss.
- cryptonector 2y agoFailure of the tanks would undoubtedly have been catastrophic. Partial failure of a flight control surface proved survivable.
- mathsmath 2y agoIt's also worth noting part of the craft flew (intentionally) without heat tiles, and another part with thinner tiles. They're gathering a ton of data to make it robust! Many of these engineers built Falcon 9, and I have a pretty high degree of confidence they'll shake out the issues. SpaceX operates very differently from traditional aerospace, so we'll likely see many more issues come up before Starship is human rated.
- rkagerer 2y agoTwo tiles were intentionally left out, in a non-critical area (the anticipated damage was still bad for re-usability, but tolerable for re-entry) and instrumented with sensors to collect data like just how hot it gets.
- cubefox 2y agoGetting it human rated is likely much harder than reusing the upper stage a couple of times. The difficulty is that Starship has 1) no launch abort system, and 2) the belly flop landing is much more dangerous than conventional and proven capsule based landing. To get the system human rated, they may have to fly tens or even hundreds of flawless cargo missions first.
- cryptonector 2y ago
- dotnet00 2y agoReminiscent of the booster in IFT-1 just doing spins in the air, refusing to break up even after the flight termination system was triggered. Completely unlike KSP with its wobbly rockets.
- aeternum 2y agoA KSP with more realistic physics would just be amazing. Unfortunately from the KSP2 vids it looks like they instead doubled-down on wobblyness.
- _nist 2y agoThis is one successful landing. I think its robustness needs a lot more successful landings than this. Plus, its not even landing like it was originally designed to land, its just landing in the ocean like any other rocket expect with thrust vector control rather than parachutes.