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SpaceX launches Starship Flight 8 - Loses attitude control
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- Prickle 2y agoYou can watch a number of different SpaceX and non-SpaceX camera views from this livestream by Everyday Astronaut. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edUNsegCqQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edUNsegCqQs At the time of writing this comment, Launch is T+2 Minutes. Tower booster catch is Go.
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- bell-cot 2y agoLooks like SpaceX is now 0 for 2 on Starship getting to orbit(-ish). Edit: The 0 for 2 is on Starship Block 2.
- ceejayoz 2y agoFirst stage had a couple engine issues but made it back. Second looks like a goner - spinning out of control.
- vessenes 2y agoI noticed one of the engines they lost on launch came back on the final burn. That’s interesting! Hopefully we’ll hear more about that, along with the full debrief on what happened to ship. What a gut punch. Sooo close
- s1artibartfast 2y agoLooks like we will get another fiery reentry. Flight 8 lost control at 146 km altitude & 20,400 km/h. Flight 7 failed at ~144 km altitude& 20,000km/h. Will be interesting to see how the debris overlap. Maybe some more footage from the Caribbean Edit: Starship reentering as viewed from Cape Canaveral, Florida https://x.com/nstewwx/status/1897795175633592384 https://x.com/nstewwx/status/1897795175633592384 View from the Bahamas https://x.com/norcrossusa/status/1897796234502349117 https://x.com/norcrossusa/status/1897796234502349117 Dominican Republic ( Reportedly - this one looks more like Flight 7 to me) https://twitter.com/justflyandrock/status/1897795683840823799 https://twitter.com/justflyandrock/status/189779568384082379... Edit2: More https://twitter.com/TrevorMahlmann/status/1897796003245314474 https://twitter.com/TrevorMahlmann/status/189779600324531447... https://x.com/GeneDoctorB/status/1897798175081005540 https://x.com/GeneDoctorB/status/1897798175081005540 https://x.com/VirginOrbitNS/status/1897797904942706738 https://x.com/VirginOrbitNS/status/1897797904942706738
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- cozzyd 2y agoGood thing the FAA acquiesced to another launch!
- s1artibartfast 2y agoThey can hold launches if they want, but I doubt it will come to that as long as nobody was hurt.
- vessenes 2y agoI, too miss the days of horses before these death trap horseless carriages took the road. We should never have allowed them on the streets. No, really — since you wrote that comment 1,755 people have died in car accidents worldwide. Zero from SpaceX.
- cozzyd 2y ago
- chasd00 2y agoCrazy losing two starships in a row after the initial successes. Mechazilla seems to be doing a good job though.
- TheAlchemist 2y agoThat's OK if it's the government paying for it. Mechazilla makes for a nice show, but Starship was supposed to be landing on the Moon by now.
- enraged_camel 2y agoIsn't the Moon landing scheduled for late 2026? Still an absurdly unrealistic timeline even if everything had gone perfectly so far, but still.
- fernandopj 2y agoEven the Sep 2025 mission around the Moon seems unrealistic TBH
- danso 2y agoAs of December, the earliest mission date is 2027: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-shares-orion-heat-shield-findings-updates-artemis-moon-missions/ https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-shares-orion-heat-shi... > For the Artemis II crewed test flight, engineers will continue to prepare Orion with the heat shield already attached to the capsule. The agency also announced it is now targeting April 2026 for Artemis II and mid-2027 for Artemis III. The updated mission timelines also reflect time to address the Orion environmental control and life support systems.
- ceejayoz 2y agoThe government isn’t paying for this. SpaceX’s Starship contracts pay out at various milestones. This won’t have checked any new boxes.
- TheAlchemist 2y ago
- bayarearefugee 2y agoNot suggesting any conspiracy theory or anything, maybe its just a quirk of the moderation system, but how is it that none of the Flight 8 posts have escaped out of the 'new' bin? Like its not even that these Flight 8 stories didn't make the front page, they just aren't visible at all dozens of pages in on the non-new view despite having more visible 'points' than a lot of posts that are visible out there.
- numpad0 2y agoYeah, maybe too high "controversial" score if that's a thing here. Musk related stories tend to attract crazy people raging about fabricated "hate" and downvoting "anti-Musk" wherever Reddit-style voting system exists. But it's insane that Starship experimental launches were once more popular than how Apple M3 is right now as recent as few months ago, and now it's less popular than Nissan R35 GT-R being discontinued or even "Automatically tagging politician when they use their phone on the livestreams" article. Even if it had been actually manipulated, there should be a lot more comments here through search and inflows from other social media, if there _were_ public interest for it. It's the biggest flying object on Earth, in a while and for a while. And it's getting just 30 or so comments. It's insane.
- alextingle 2y agoWell, this one was much like the last one, and less interesting than the one before that. I'm pretty sure that if/when they manage a test that demonstrates a significant step forwards, then the interest will return.
- tim333 2y agoI, and probably other people, are less enthusiastic about Musk projects since his recent antics. Also it's a bit similar to the last flight. (Re the antics see for example a Tesla story - 537 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170090 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43170090 and personally I'm not keen on his Ukraine stuff eg https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/2/21/musk-vows-to-fix-x-after-polls-show-high-support-for-ukraines-zelenskyy https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/2/21/musk-vows-to-fix...)
- namirez 2y agoIt’s a poor design. When you have 33 engines, the failure rate is 33 times higher. Although I’m not sure what’s the absolute minimum number of engines for a successful mission. Regardless, it will go down in history as another unreliable design like the space shuttle.
- yakz 2y agoThe booster did the job and was recovered.
- namirez 2y agoTrue but on the way down, two out of 15 Raptors didn't fire. And of course the Raptor on the Starship failed too.
- decimalenough 2y agoThey could still recover and catch the booster precisely because they had that redundancy. For Starship, the spinning out of control was caused by four (!) out of 6 engines shutting off prematurely, from which they clearly could not recover.
- fastball 2y agoI think you have it backwards, given that the stage which failed has 6 engines, and the stage that did its job and landed back on its own launch tower (inconceivable less than a decade ago) has 33 engines.
- jbverschoor 2y ago“rapid unscheduled disassembly“ So with the FAA now in Elon’s way, what will DOGE do about FAA officials?
- ls612 2y agoIt’s very concerning that Starship failed twice in almost exactly the same way. That suggests some broader failure at Spacex to root cause the issues.
- vessenes 2y agoIf you read the 7 debrief and fixes they made, I wouldn’t be surprised if they overdid something. But I agree it seems like it’s a similar problem. Happily they will tell all soon.
- kemotep 2y agoFalcon 9, the last SpaceX Rocket design before Raptor has a 99.34% success rate. To match the success of SpaceX’s previous rocket design the next ~450 launches of a rocket using a Raptor engine needs to not fail a single mission. Starship really is a make or break moment for SpaceX. They will lose all competitive advantage as the European Space Agency, China, and other private entities such as Blue Origin begin to catch up. The failure of SLS is still able to carry a payload to the moon at a 100% mission success rate so far. The whole Artemis program probably needs to be scrapped at this point.
- ekianjo 2y ago> as the European Space Agency, China, and other private entities such as Blue Origin begin to catch up. Catching up when? In 20 years? Nobody is close to doing what spacex is doing right now
- kemotep 2y agoYeah no one is close to Starship levels of payload. But SpaceX is 0 for 2 testing any kind of payload capacity for Starship and it’s been over 2 years of testing now. 12 if you count BFR. If SLS is an abject failure due to costs and time then its 100% mission completion record makes it currently more capable than Starship. So is no one close? Is Starship a failure? How many times do we have to watch a rocket explode when other programs and systems don’t and be told it’s all part of the plan this was actually a successful launch?
- ekianjo 2y ago> 100% mission completion They launched once. You don't make up stats on n=1 > So is no one close? Is Starship a failure? How many times do we have to watch a rocket explode when other programs and systems don’t and be told it’s all part of the plan this was actually a successful launch? They mentioned it every single time before a launch: this is for learning. They expect things to go wrong. They don't expect things to be successful every single time. And they launch way more often than just any other company out there, so it's fair to say they are less careful about being 100% ready and rather want to test things and iterate on them. They also failed many times with the earlier rockets until they finally got it right - why do you think this time it will be different?
- techpineapple 2y agoI have a question for those who understand this better than me. How do you tell the difference between "Moving fast and allowing failure lets you learn faster" break into "We've hit a roadblock and now we're just wasting money". It seems like they're getting close but of course the last 10% is much harder than the first 90%. Like they don't have the money for 100 more learning flights right? I suppose only they have the answer to this question, but less things failed this time than last time would be a decent metric.
- roeles 2y agoI think the difference lies in how you move from iteration to iteration. As long as you have a goal for each iteration - to fix what you learnt the last time, or to change something to get a new data point on it - that sounds like allowing failure. I would expect you to converge towards a working state, on a large scale. If you are trying stuff without any hypothesis or deliberate plan, that sounds to me like the second.