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Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the

• coldtea 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • fsloth 2y ago
    It sounds like he's talking to investors and not to general public. In my experience in corporate america you communicate efficiency by proclaiming a checklist of things to do - plausible, but not necessarily accurate things - and then let engineers figure it out. Nobody cares of the original checklist as long as the problem gets resolved. It's weird but it seems very hard to utter statement "I don't have specific answers but we have very capable engineers, I'm sure they will figure it out". It's always better to say (from the top of your head) "To resolve A, we will do X,Y and Z!". Then when A get's resolved, everyone praises the effort. Then when they query what actually was done it's "well we found out in fact what were amiss were I, J K".
    • the_duke 2y ago
      He's talking to the FAA, because this will trigger an investigation and would usually mean months of no launches.
      • cmsj 2y ago
        Fortunately (for him) he'll be President on Monday and can then order the FAA to let him do whatever he wants.
        • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
          King. Presidents are elected.
  • 14 2y ago
    Even NASA years into their existence has suffered catastrophic fatal failures. Even with the best and most knowledgeable experts working on it we are ultimately still in the infancy of space flight. Just like airlines every incident we try and understand the cause and prevent it from happening again. Lastly what they are doing is incredibly difficult with probably thousands of things that could go wrong. I think they are doing an amazing job and hope one day, even if I miss it, that space flight becomes acceptable to all who wish to go to space.
    • rob74 2y ago
      I you are referring to the two Space Shuttle accidents, both of them could have been avoided with just a little bit more care - not launching in freezing temperatures for Challenger, and making sure insulation foam doesn't fall off the tank for Columbia.
      • hnaccount_rng 2y ago
        In hindsight yes. The trick is knowing which of the thousands of things to do are necessary. And yes, that’s how you end up with preflight checklists
      • thrwthsnw 2y ago
        The history of rocketry goes much further back than the space shuttle. The shuttle was supposed to be a step towards reusability but didn’t succeed or progress the way they thought it would. Starship is continuing that dream of full reusability and their approach is working. You can’t plan everything on paper when it comes to hardware especially when attempting things that have never been done before, you just don’t have the data in that case. You have to build prototypes and test them to destruction. All manufacturers do this.
  • razemio 2y ago
    Can you name a space company with less failures? Also I think it is unfair to even compare SpaceX to anything else, because of the insane amount of starts / tests combined unparalleled creativity. According to this website their current success rate is 99,18%. That's a good number I guess? Considering other companies did not even land their stages for years. https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/07/31/ula-vs-spacex/#:~:text=on%20a%20Falcon.-,Mission%20Success%20and%20Launched%20Rockets,booster%20landings%20without%20a%20hitch https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/07/31/ula-vs-spacex/#:~:text=....
    • input_sh 2y ago
      It says right there in your source that that figure refers to Falcon in particular. For comparison, Starship's current track record is 3/7 launch failures (+1 landing failure). There's an order of magnitude difference between them. If they were cars, it'd be like comparing the smallest car you can think of vs one of the biggest tanks ever made.
      • rvnx 2y ago
        It’s like comparing the reliability of the Model 3 and the Cybertruck.
      • razemio 2y ago
        I ignored those, since the starship at this stage can be considered a prototype. I am just trying to argue, that calling SpaceX unreliable, especially compared to its competitors and time to market, is bold.
      • zarzavat 2y ago
        The usual definition of success for a rocket is getting the payload to the intended orbit. Since Starship doesn't have a payload yet, at least not a real one, its "success rate" is not measuring the same thing. I'd say that only the 7th mission was legitimately a failure, because there was some rerouting of flights outside the exclusion zone. The other six missions were successful tests since nothing other than the rocket itself was affected.
      • 2y ago
  • pmontra 2y ago
    Test flights. My tests keep failing until I fix all of my code, then we deploy to production. If code fails in production than that's a problem. We could say that rockets are not code. A test run of a Spaceship surely cost much more than a test run of any software on my laptop but tests are still tests. They are very likely to fail and there are things to learn from their failures.
    • notorandit 2y ago
      Running a code test doesn't require firing a rocket. How would you test a rocket?
      • nicky0 2y ago
        Test code by running it. Test a rocket by launching it.
        • johnla 2y ago
          I would consider these launches test launches. Production is when they include commercial payloads and humans.
        • orwin 2y ago
          In production? I don't disagree that tests 'in production' are sometimes necessary (canary tests), but most of the quirks are often fixed by then. Honestly I thought they would be live testing fuel exchange in orbit by now. Seems pretty far from it sadly.
          • ricardobeat 2y ago
            That might still happen this year, it’s the next step in the development plan. What makes these launches “non-production” tests is that they are not carrying any valuable payload. Blowing up rockets like this is exactly what gives the company it’s advantage over competitors who try to anticipate everything during design stages.
          • 2y ago
  • askl 2y ago
    It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.
    • ericd 2y ago
      They're blowing up their own money, unless you still count it as being the taxpayer's after the government pays them for launch services.
      • pclmulqdq 2y ago
        R&D for starship has a several-billion-dollar NASA grant. Something like 30-50% of the money being blown up on this program is taxpayer money.
        • ericd 2y ago
          Fair. I think that was for HLS rather than the launch systems, but I guess if it’s already been disbursed, it’s probably all commingled. But that still means it’s not just taxpayer money, it’s mostly theirs. They’ve been raising equity rounds this whole time.
          • Alex-Programs 2y ago
            It hasn't been disbursed yet (entirely). They get rewards for certain accomplishments.
        • Workaccount2 2y ago
          The savings Spacex has promise of delivering to NASA make every dollar given to them probably an easy 2x-3x ROI. Without Spacex, the typical cohort of gov contractors would have been happy bleeding NASA dry with one time use rockets that have 10x the launch cost and carry 1/4 the cargo.
          • pclmulqdq 2y ago
            Sorry, Artemis carried more than one banana and actually made it to orbit. SpaceX has not provided any ROI yet. You can't compare the (very optimistic) promises of SpaceX against the actual returns of the rest of the industry.
  • Cipater 2y ago
    He just means MORE checking for leaks. They already implemented a whole host of changes to the vehicles after the first test back in 2023. There's a list of corrective actions here. https://imgur.com/a/Y9dd43o https://imgur.com/a/Y9dd43o
• raverbashing 2y ago
  I'm not sure there's fire suppression effective enough for this type of leak (especially given rocket constraints)
  • varjag 2y ago
    If you can displace the oxidizer/air remaining in the volume why not.
    • littlestymaar 2y ago
      The initial tweet says: > we had an oxygen/fuel leak If that's correct, then you can't just remove air. The only option would be to cool things down so it stops burning.
      • shellfishgene 2y ago
        If it was really an oxygen/fuel mix burning I don't think you can do much of anything to stop that.
        • littlestymaar 2y ago
          If you cooled the mixture at low enough temperature, you'd stop it from burning (like when you pour water on top of a camp fire), but it's not clear how you're supposed to do that in a spaceship where you can't carry a few tons of water for your sprinklers.
          • varjag 2y ago
            There are other methods too, e.g. fire inhibitors (like Halon or whatever is allowed now) or shockwave to disrupt fire boundary. But I doubt they are very practical on a spaceship.
            • littlestymaar 2y ago
              Not an expert but I'm not too sure about shockwave in a confined space. How does Halon works?
• api 2y ago
  Would be unpleasant if there was crew. Of course this thing is pretty far from human eating.
  • onion2k 2y ago
    Would be unpleasant if there was crew. 19 people have died in the 391 crewed space missions humans have done so far. The risk of dying is very high. Starship is unlikely to change that, although the commoditization of space flight could have reduce the risk simply by making problems easier to spot because there's more flights.
    • api 2y ago
      I could imagine the risk going down to a few times air travel after 50+ years of operating a mature launch system.
    • helpfulContrib 2y ago
      [dead]
    • gr3ml1n 2y ago
      The higher frequency of launches seems likely to have a big impact on reliability. It's no different than deploying once per day vs once per month. The more you do it, the more edge cases you hit and the more reliable you can make it. SpaceX also has a simplification streak: the Raptor engines being the canonical example. Lower complexity generally means less unexpected failure modes.
      • londons_explore 2y ago
        > SpaceX also has a simplification streak: the Raptor engines being the canonical example. Not necessarily. Your engine which used to have 200 sensors perhaps now only has 8. But you now don't know when temperatures were close to melting point in a specific part of the engine. When something goes wrong, you are less likely to identify the precise cause because you have less data. Many of those sensors are not to enable the rocket to fly at all, but merely for later data analysis to know if anything was close to failure. In yesterdays launch, if the engines had more sensors musk probably wouldn't have said "an oxygen/fuel leak", but would have been able to say "Engine #7 had an oxygen leak at the inlet pipe, as shown by the loud whistling noise detected by engine #7's microphone array"
• perihelions 2y ago
  Reminds me of one of NASA's reckless ideas, abandoned after Challenger in 1986, to put a liquid hydrogen stage inside the cargo bay of the Shuttle orbiter [0]. That would have likely leaked inside that confined volume, and could plausibly have exploded in a similar way as Starship. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-Centaur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-Centaur - "The astronauts considered the Shuttle-Centaur missions to be riskiest Space Shuttle missions yet,[85] referring to Centaur as the "Death Star".[86]"
• Alive-in-2025 2y ago
  This sounds like one of those "and also" things. I'd say you add fire suppression AND ALSO try more to reduce leaks. It's got to be really difficult to build huge massive tanks that hold oxygen and other gases under pressure (liquid methane too will have some vapor of course). Are leaks inherently going to happen? This is meant to be a human rated ship of course, how will you reduce this danger? I know this stuff is hard, but you can't just iterate and say starship 57 has had 3 flights without leaks, we got it now. Since I have no expertise here, I can imagine all kinds of unlikely workarounds like holding the gas under lower pressure with humans on board or something to reduce the risk.
  • mavhc 2y ago
    Given that a) most human rated rockets have had 0 flights before use, and b) I'd expect each starship to have at least 10 flights, and at least 100 in total without mishap before launching, the statistics should be good
    • wat10000 2y ago
      I don’t think (a) is true. The Shuttle flew with people on its maiden voyage, but that’s the only one I can think of. (b) is true and should make it substantially safer than other launch systems. But given how narrow the margins are for something going wrong (zero ability to land safely with all engines dead, for example) it’s still going to be pretty dangerous compared to more mundane forms of travel.
      • laverya 2y ago
        Most rockets flew test flights before sticking people inside the same model, but most rockets are also single use and so each stack is fundamentally new. A future starship could plausibly be the first rocket to fly to space unmanned, return, and then fly humans to space!
  • wat10000 2y ago
    This might be one of those components where it just needs to be built without problems, and improved safety means fixing individual design and manufacturing flaws as you find them, until you’ve hopefully got them all. This can work. Fundamental structural components of airliners just can’t fail without killing everyone, and high reliability is achieved with careful design, manufacturing, testing, and inspection. I’m not sure if a gigantic non-leaky tank is harder to pull off that way, but they might have to regardless. We’re going to have to accept that space travel is going to be inherently dangerous for the foreseeable future. Starship is in a good position to improve this, because it should fly frequently (more opportunities to discover and fix problems) and the non-manned variant is very similar to the manned variant (you can discover many problems without killing people). But there are inherent limitations. There’s just not as much capacity for redundancy. The engines have to be clustered so fratricide or common failure modes are going to me more likely. Losing all the engines is guaranteed death on Starship, versus a good chance to survive in an airliner. All other practical considerations aside, I think this alone sinks any possibility of using Starship for Earth-to-Earth travel as has been proposed by SpaceX.
• anentropic 2y ago
  I wonder if it's related to the loose panel flapping about at the left of the screen here: https://youtu.be/qzWMEegqbLs?si=aUlI6zfkH3bZCmVm&t=111 https://youtu.be/qzWMEegqbLs?si=aUlI6zfkH3bZCmVm&t=111