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 vent capacity.
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
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.
- "The astronauts considered the Shuttle-Centaur missions to be riskiest Space Shuttle missions yet,[85] referring to Centaur as the "Death Star".[86]"
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.
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.
Yes for systems, not always for structure. A failed wing spar means everybody dies. For real-world examples, there were two 747 crashes caused by improper repairs to a rear pressure bulkhead or aircraft skin. When the repairs eventually failed, the explosive decompression caused catastrophic damage to the tail in one instance, and total structural failure resulting in a mid-air breakup in the other.
The response to this was to make sure repairs are carried out correctly so the structure doesn’t fail, not to somehow make two redundant bulkheads or two skins.
Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis had the main fuel tank directly in front of him. This was in spite of his primal fear of being burned alive. In some airplanes you sit on the fuel tank.
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
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.
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!
Actually the Super Heavy (first stage) already uses heavy CO2 based fire suppression. Hopefully not that necessary in the long term, but should make it possible to get on with the testing in the short term.
What is a long term solution for this? Is there something more than "build tanks that don't leak"? I'm sure spaceX has top design and materials experts, now what ;-).
It might not even be about fire suppression. Oxygen and different gases can pool oddly in different types of gravity. If oxygen was leaking, it may be as simple as making sure a vacuum de-gases a chamber before going full throttle.
We know nothing, but the test having good data on what went wrong is a great starting point.
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.
> 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.
Also water would make it hotter, given this is liquid oxygen.
It's not liquid at the point of ignition, that's the thing: if you mixed liquid oxygen and fuel nothing would happen expect the fuel would freeze. For a fire to take place the temperature must reach the fire point temperature, and if you manage to get your fire below this temperature then the fire stops. I don't know how low this temperature can be when the oxidizer is pure oxygen and maybe it's so low water wouldn't be enough, but then you can imagine using other fluids. The problem being the mass burden it adds to a spacecraft, I'm not it'd make any sense given that such q leak should happen in the first place.
I believe LOX is injected into the engine as a liquid, it gets atomised rather than boiled?
And you can have fires where both fuel and oxidiser are solid: thermite reactions.
"Fire point" seems to be more of a factor for conventional fire concerns, albeit I'm judging a phrase I've not heard before by a stub-sized Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_point
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.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, it's not the same thing at all: in the case you're talking about you're shielding against nominal heat, which is not the same thing as contingency planning to extinguish a fire that shouldn't be there in the first place.
just increased venting to keep any vapor concentrations of fuel and oxidiser below that capable of igniting, even simple baffling could suffice as the leaks may be trasitory and flowing out of blowoff valves, so possibly a known risk.
Space x is also forgoeing much of the full system vibriatory tests, done on traditiinal 1 shot launches, and failure in presurised systems due to
unknown resonance is common.
Big question is did it just blow up, or did the automated abort, take it out, likely the latter or there would be a hold on the next launch.
There’s no way that was anything but the automated abort — it was a comprehensive instantaneous rapid event. Or I guess I’d say, however it started, the automated abort kicked in and worked.
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.
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.
> 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"
My #1 rule for all engineering: simplicity is harder than complexity.
I truly wish more software engineers thought this way. I see a lot of mentality in software where people are even impressed by complexity, like "wow what a complex system!" like it's a good thing. It's not. It's a sign that no effort has been put into understanding the problem domain conceptually, or that no discipline has been followed around reducing the number of systems or restraint over adding new ones.
I've seen incredibly good software engineers join teams and have net negative lines of code contributed for some time.
If we ever encountered, say, an alien race millions of years ahead of us on this kind of technology curve, I think one of the things that would strike us would be the simplicity of their technology. It would be like everything is a direct response and fit to the laws of physics with nothing extraneous. Their software -- assuming they still use computers as we understand them -- would be functional bliss that directly represented the problem domain, with every state a pure function of previous state.
We might get to this kind of software eventually. This is still a young field. Simplicity, being harder than complexity, often takes time and iteration to achieve. Often there's a complexity bloat followed by a shake out, then repeat, over many cycles.
> Their software -- assuming they still use computers as we understand them -- would be functional bliss that directly represented the problem domain, with every state a pure function of previous state.
I love that this is also a model of reality. Everything is made of differential equations.
While the video post does mention "Right in front of us", and it may have appeared that way to the pilots, it wasn't. Gauging relative distance and altitude between aircraft in flight can be notoriously deceptive even to experts, especially in the case of intensely bright, massive, unfamiliar objects at very high speed and great distance.
The RUD was in orbit over 146 kilometers up and >13,000 mph. I'm sure using the FlightAware tracking data someone will work out the actual distance and altitude delta between that plane and the Starship 7 orbital debris. I suspect it was many dozens of miles away and probably still nearly orbital in altitude (~100km).
Stupid comment. Several flights had to be diverted because of the break-up, and anyone in flight at that time would be rightly concerned about barely-visible high-speed shrapnel showering a much larger area than where the visible debris are - especially when you are responsible for keeping your hundreds of passengers safe in a very unexpected situation with no rehearsed procedure to follow.
It would have been impossible for the pilot to know if that debris was shortly in front of them and at co-altitude or extremely far in front of them and at a significantly higher altitude.
In this case it was almost certainly the latter. But the uncertainty alone was enough to warrant diverting.
got me. There's literally an HN rule about this: [0]
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I feel like the world would be a better place if people would tone down the ad-hominem in their day-to-day discourse just a little bit.
Sure. In a similar way as when the moon is low on the horizon and I stand in my back yard facing it. There's the moon. It's right in front of me... :-)
As I said, the debris was likely closer to around ~100km in altitude. Commercial airliners fly around ~10km in altitude. Appearing to be at a similar altitude as the plane and "in front" of it was an optical illusion because the debris was intensely bright, very far away, very high and moving several times faster than a bullet. While we don't have exact data yet, I believe it is highly likely there was zero chance of that plane ever hitting that debris given their relative positions. It couldn't even if the pilots weren't mistaken about how close the debris was and they had intentionally tried to hit it. The debris was too far, too high and moving at hypersonic speeds (hence the metal being white hot from atmospheric friction).
Starship's flight paths are carefully calculated by SpaceX and the FAA to achieve this exact outcome. In the event of a RUD near orbit, little to no debris will survive reentry. Any that does survive won't reach the surface (or aircraft in flight) until it is far out into the Atlantic Ocean away from land, people, flight paths and shipping lanes. For Starship launches the FAA temporarily closes a large amount of space in the Gulf of Mexico to air and ship traffic because that's where Starship is low and slow enough for debris to be a threat to aircraft. These planes were flying in the Caribbean, where there was no FAA NOTAM closing their airspace because by the time Starship is over the Caribbean, it's in orbit. If there's a RUD over the Caribbean it's already too high and going too fast for debris to be a threat to aircraft or people anywhere near the Carribean. The only "threat" in the Caribbean today was from anyone being distracted by the pretty light show in orbit far above them (that looked deceptively close from some angles).
> the debris was likely closer to around ~100km in altitude. Commercial airliners fly around ~10km in altitude
(Not wishing to ask the obvious, and depending on the size of the pieces) debris at 100km altitude pretty much always ends up being debris falling through 10km ... right?
No pictures or reports of anything falling in the Caribbean. People just love adding to the drama, they will later backtrack and explain that by “rain down” they meant the light show.
It would be extremely unlikely due to the laws of physics, last time I checked they were still in effect.
At the incredible speeds Starship was moving (>13,000 mph) by the time it was over the Caribbean, debris from a Starship is expected to burn up by the time it reaches the surface. But you said "depending on the size", so let's imagine it's a different spacecraft carrying something that won't entirely burn up, like the Mir space station from several years back.
In that scenario, debris from 100km will survive to pass through 10km. The point is: if the mass becomes debris >143km high traveling at >13,000 mph over the Caribbean - it doesn't pass through 10km anywhere near the Caribbean. Even though the friction causing tempered metal to glow white hot is slowing it, the trajectory is ballistic so by the time it slows enough to get that low (10km) it's hundreds or thousands of miles East from where the explosion happened (and where that airplane was).
It's weird because given these orbital velocities and altitudes, our intuitions about up and down aren't very useful. Starship exploded in orbit over the Caribbean, so planes in the Caribbean were safe from falling debris. If it was Mir instead of Starship, planes hundreds or thousands miles to the East of the Caribbean would be at elevated risk. My high school astronomy teacher once said something like "Rockets don't go up to reach orbit. They go sideways. And they keep going sideways faster and faster until they're going so fast, up and down don't matter anymore." While that's hardly a scientific summary, it does give a sense of the dynamics. You'll recall that Mir was intentionally de-orbited so it would land in a desolate part of the Indian Ocean. So, did they blow it up right over the Indian Ocean? Nope. To crash it in the Indian Ocean, given the altitude and speed, they "blew it up" on the other side of Earth, like maybe over Chicago (I actually don't recall where the de-orbit began, but had to be very far away).
> so by the time it slows enough to get that low (10km) it's hundreds or thousands of miles East from where the explosion was seen
Appreciate that, the question would be, do we know that there won't be any aircraft at the right (wrong) altitude in that area(?!)
With aircraft regularly travelling thousands of miles, would be interesting to know whether route choices are made to avoid being "under"* the track of a rocket's launch?
There are people on HN far better qualified than I to discuss both orbital mechanics and spacecraft safety assessments but I'll give it a layman's stab based purely on the high-level concepts (which is all I know).
They know there's little to no risk to aircraft or people hundreds or thousands of miles to the East of a Starship RUD in orbit because they know exactly what's inside Starship and how it's built. They model how it will break up when traveling at these insane speeds and how the metal masses will melt and burn up during re-entry. They actually test this stuff in blast furnaces. It's a statistical model so it's theoretically possible a few small bits could make it to the ground on rare occasion, so we can't say debris will never happen - but there's been a lot of history and testing and the experts are confident it's extremely safe.
The case of the MIR space station was very different than a Starship. MIR was built a long time ago by the Soviet Union and they used a big, heavily shielded power plant. That lead shielding was really the part that had a significant risk of not burning up fully on re-entry. Starship, Starlink satellites and other modern spacecraft are now usually designed to burn up on reentry. However, there are still some things in orbit and things we'll need to put in orbit in the future that won't entirely burn up on reentry. There will always be a very small risk of an accidental uncontrolled reentry causing a threat. However, these risks are vanishingly small both because we design these spacecraft with redundant systems and fail-safes and because Earth is mostly uninhabited oceans, much of our landmasses are unpopulated or sparely populated, even in the unlikely event one of the few spacecraft with a large mass that won't entirely burn up has failed and is de-orbiting out of control, we can still blow it up - and timing that at the right moment will still put it down in a safe place (like it did with MIR). There's no such thing as absolute 100% perfect safety. But you're far, far more likely to die from a great white shark attack than be injured by satellite debris.
More to the point, a huge number of meteorites hit Earth every year and it's estimated over 17,000 survive to hit the surface. There are a bunch listed right now on eBay. Do you know anyone injured by any of the 17,000 space rocks that crashed into our planet this year or any airliners hit by one?
That description of heavy lead shielding of a power plant on Mir surprises me since photos show it as having solar arrays. Wikipedia also gives the power source as solar with no mention of lead components. Can you add further details of this?
> At the incredible speeds Starship was moving (>13,000 mph) by the time it was over the Caribbean, debris from a Starship is expected to burn up by the time it reaches the surface.
Don't the heat tiles at least make it through? And possibly large hunks of metal like the thrust frame and engines.
As I said, I'm only familiar with the high level concepts of vehicle launch safety and not qualified to assess detailed scenarios. I'm just a guy interested enough to read some technical articles and skim a few linked papers several years ago when there was a lot of heat about launch safety from Boca and not much light. When there's a lot of heated rhetoric in the mass media, I find it's better to check directly in scientific and engineering sources.
I dove deep enough to a get sense that these questions have been extremely well-studied and not just by 2020s FAA and SpaceX but going back to the Shuttle and Apollo eras. The body of peer-reviewed engineering studies seemed exhaustive - and not just NASA-centric, the Europeans and Soviets did their own studies too.
Your question is reasonable and occurred to me as well. Components engineered to withstand the enormous heat and pressure of orbital re-entry should be more likely to survive a RUD scenario and subsequent re-entry burn for longer. From what I recall reading, this fits into a safety profile required to ensure very, very low risk because even if a tiny percentage of mass occasionally survives to reach the surface, the actual risk that surviving mass presents is a combination of its quantity, mass, piece size, velocity and, most importantly, where any final surviving bits reach the surface.
I recall seeing a diagram dividing the Boca orbital launch trajectory into windows, like: right around the launch pad, out over the gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Atlantic, Africa, Indian ocean, and so on. The entire path until it's out over empty Atlantic ocean has minimal land, people and stuff under it. The gulf of Mexico is by far the highest risk because the rocket is still relatively low and slow. A RUD there could potentially be a lot of stuff coming down. There's not a lot out there in the gulf, just a few ships and planes but the FAA closes a huge area because, while the statistical risk is very low in an absolute sense, it's still too high to take chances.
For later windows, they don't close the corridor underneath to plane and ship traffic because the rocket's much greater speed and altitude later in the flight allows more precisely modeling where the debris field will come down. There was another diagram showing a statistical model of a debris field impact zone as an elongated oval with color-coded concentric rings dividing the debris mass into classes. The outermost ring is the debris that breaks up into smaller, lighter pieces. It's the widest and longest but it's the stuff that's much lower risk because it's smaller and slower.
The smallest concentric ring in the middle is where the small amount of heavier pieces most likely to survive will come down, if any do survive. As you'd expect, that innermost ring is shifted toward the far end of the oval and is a much smaller area. The headline I took away was that there's a very small amount of higher mass debris that both A) is less likely to break up into tiny, lower mass pieces, and B) is less likely to completely burn up. This is the higher-risk mass and, due to its mass, it tends to stay on trajectory, go fastest, farthest and not spread out much. In short, the statistical model showed a very high probability of any higher risk stuff which survives coming down in a surprisingly tiny area. The overall safety model is based on a combination of factors working together so it meets the safety requirements in each window of the flight for each class of mass. The carefully chosen launch location, spacecraft design, component materials, flight path and a bunch of other factors all work together to put the small amount of higher risk stuff down somewhere that fits the safety profile of very, very low risk to people and property. Disclaimer: I've probably got some details wrong and left some things out but this is the sense I got from what I learned. I came away feeling that the safety work done on space launches is comprehensive, diligent and based on a long history of robust, peer-reviewed science backed up by detailed engineering tests as well as real-world data from decades of launches, RUDs and de-orbits.
A fun side story: a few months ago I was at the Hacker's Conference and Scott Manley ("Everyday Astronaut" on YouTube) was attending as he often does. He brought along some interesting space artifacts just to set out on a table for casual show and tell. I was able to pick up and examine a Starship heat tile that was fished out of the gulf of Mexico. It was surprisingly light weight. Sort of like a thick wall piece from a styrofoam picnic cooler. It had a very thin hard shell on one side. This shell was clearly very brittle as it had already been broken up and I was holding an index card-sized shattered piece that weighed maybe a couple ounces. This was clearly not something that was going to maintain structural integrity post-RUD. Once it wasn't packed tightly together into a smooth aerodynamic surface, it's gonna shred into tiny pieces. And that seemed by design - which apparently worked as intended because even without a RUD, at the low and slow speeds over the gulf and near the launch pad it did shatter into small, light pieces - assisted only by the rocket tipping over into the water followed by the relatively mild explosion of the remaining propellant (mild compared to an unimaginably violent orbital RUD, that is). Holding it I remembered the debris field oval diagram and thought, "this is smaller, slower, safer stuff in the outer zones."
Oops! I somehow conflated two space YouTubers who I sometimes watch and appreciate. Scott Manley is just Scott Manley on YouTube. Thanks for the correction.
I know this is just another reddit post so could be fake, but supposedly debris is already washing ashore in Turks and Caicos. Specifically in this post a heat shield tile, but the poster mentions other stuff on the beach. So at least some debris probably dropped nearby.
As I said above, the safety model predicts some lightweight stuff with a consistency not much stiffer than tin foil and coated styrofoam could fall not that far downrange. However, that's also the exact stuff that doesn't present serious risk to people or property.
So even if those claims are true, just finding a little debris doesn't invalidate the safety model or indicate there was ever unacceptable risk. The real question is if any debris from a higher risk class fell in a place the safety model didn't predict and why. That would certainly be notable and worth incorporating into future safety models.
In the absence of solid confirmation, I'm going to stick with the model and the basic physics. If the debris is just the expected stuff, I'm sure SpaceX regrets littering the beaches and should definitely pay for some crews to pick that stuff up and trash it.
Yes, both spectacular and beautiful. I guess Starship can now say what the legendary comedy actress (and sex symbol) of early cinema Mae West said:
"When I'm good... I'm very good. But when I'm bad... I'm even better." :-)
Combined with another tower catch, that's two spectacular shows for the price of one. Hopefully the onboard diagnostic telemetry immediately prior to the RUD is enough to identify the root cause so it can be corrected.
I remember being woken up by the thunder from Columbia.
Lost it over the years but I used to have a photo of about 20 vans of people parked on our property doing the search for debris. Don't think they found any on our land but there was a 3 ft chunk about 5 miles down the road.
My understanding is that there are areas which are noted as being possible debris zones across the flight path, but that aircraft are not specifically told to avoid those areas unless there an actual event to which to respond.
If my understanding is correct, it seems sensible at least in a hand-wavy way: you have a few places where things are more likely to come down either unplanned or planned (immediately around the launch site and at the planned deorbit area), but then you have a wide swath of the world where, in a relatively localized area, you -might- have something come down with some warning that it will (just because the time it takes to get from altitude to where aircraft are). You close the priority areas, but you don't close the less likely areas pro-actively, but only do so reactively, it seems you'd achieve a balance between aircraft safety and air service disruptions.
They do but its not clear to me whether the area where it broke up was actually included in the original NOTAM. The NOTMAR definitely does not according to the graphic shown on the NASASpaceflight stream. They are still live so I can't link a time code but something like -4:56 in this stream as of posting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nM3vGdanpw
This video, the map elsewhere in this subthread, and the stream recording give a nicely detailed view into what went down. It seems like everything went like it was supposed to in terms of pre-warning, but based on the video the information didn't make it to pilots with coinciding flight plans until after the fact.
As far as I understand airline pilots have a high level of authority and diverting probably was the right call depending on the lag between seeing it and knowing what it was or if there was a risk of debris reaching them. They wouldn't necessarily know how high it got or what that means for debris.
Yeah... and ATC for a good while didn't have any estimate for time to resolution. So, do you run the airplane's fuel down to a minimal reserve level in hopes that the restrictions might lift... or just call it done and divert?
I think it's an absolutely reasonable choice to just say comfortably divert rather than try to linger in hopes of it not lasting too long and possibly ending up diverting anyway... but on minimums.
The planes diverting were downrange. Also, I doubt they had much information to go off, and were essentially flying blind about where the debris were unless they had a direct line to NORAD.
Do you have a better explanation why they are doing donuts over the pacific at the time of reentry, then were diverted?
The ATC is up on YouTube - I heard it on the vatsim channel. ATC would not let pilots transit the designated danger airspace without declaring an emergency. So they did.
I don't have. Maybe they were indeed diverted because people got scared? Still seems pointless given the distances involved. Most reports are coming from social media / people watching flightradar24, and news media is just picking those up.
The number of SpaceX video clips that I know are "actual things really happening" which still activate the involuntary "Sci-Fi / CGI effect" neurons in my brain is remarkable.
Indeed. The one that still flips a bit in my brain is the two Falcon rockets landing in unison side by side. I'd say it was high-end CGI except no director would approve an effects shot of orbital rockets landing in such a perfect, cinematically choreographed way.
It would just be sent back to ILM marked "Good effort, but too obviously fake. Rework to be more realistic and resubmit."
Such an unbelievable moment. And I also think an indicator of how much better society could be if we focused more on doing amazing things. The comments on YouTube are just filled with hope optimism and general awesomeness. FWIW that link goes straight to the moneyshot - it's always so much better if you watch it all the way through. It's an amazing broadcast.
When I was in elementary school back in the 1970s, I read every sci-fi book in the tiny school library. They were all old, even then. Early stuff by Asimov, Heinlein and Bova. Paperbacks on cheap pulp with cover paintings of rockets sitting upright on alien terrain. Tiny people in space suits climbing down ladders to explore a new world.
With the Apollo moon landings in recent memory, I'd read those sci-fi books late at night with a flashlight under the covers of my bed and then fall asleep thinking about how "I'll still be alive 50 years from now. I'll get to actually live in the world of the future. Maybe I'll even work in space." And by the time I graduated from high school it was already becoming clear things were going much to slow for me to even see humans colonizing Mars. And that was reality until about a decade ago.
So, yeah. Watching the live video of the first successful Starship orbital launch with my teenage daughter... I got a little choked up, which surprised me. Felt like discovering a very old dream that's been buried too long. And somehow the damn thing's still alive. Or maybe I just got something in my eye. Anyway, I know it's too late for me to ever work off-planet. But maybe not for my kid... so, the dream lives on. It just had to skip a generation.
Thank you for this beautiful comment. I could have written it word for word. I still watch every Starship launch with my kids, and CRS-7 was the first Falcon launch that we missed watching live. At that time we were waiting months between launches. And I'm currently petting a dog named Asimov while writing this.
SpaceX brought our childhood dreams back. But more importantly, SpaceX is bringing our naive childhood expectations to fruitation.
Seeing a rocket land vertically goes against almost 70 years of what we "know" about rockets. Falcon 9 rockets landing on legs seem unnatural enough; now we have a rocket, the size of a 20-story building, landing on chopsticks.
There are lots of vertical-landing rockets ... in science fiction, and only before Sputnik in 1957. Once actual space programs came about and lots of engineers understood just how difficult landing a rocket is compared to launching it, they all went away. Fictional vehicles became more and more complex to make them "realistic" (that is, consistent with real spacecraft on the news), or just didn't bother with the details at all and went to quasi-magic technologies like in Star Wars and Star Trek.
SpaceX is taking us to the future by going with something from the past.
SpaceX landing and catching boosters is amazing, but landing rockets is not new: all the Apollo LMs, indeed everything ever landed on the Moon was done with "vertical-landing" rockets.
Yes, and that was all the experimental program did. No humans on board, no payloads, no orbit, not even suborbital as they stayed close to the ground.
The Falcon 9 puts humans into orbit then turns around and lands not far from the launch tower. It's then brought in for maintenance and a few weeks later launching again - some of them have done 20 flights.
You’re comparing an experimental program that lasted 6 years with a company founded 22 years ago. How many payload flights did space-x do 6 years into its existence?
Inadvertently perfect timing for this footage. Glowing and backlit by the setting sun, against clear and already darkening evening sky... couldn't plan the shot any better if you tried.
Let's hope no debris came down on anyone or anything apart from open water.
Only used once, when the Soviets dropped a nuclear reactor on Canada.
> States (countries) bear international responsibility for all space objects that are launched within their territory. This means that regardless of who launches the space object, if it was launched from State A's territory, or from State A's facility, or if State A caused the launch to happen, then State A is fully liable for damages that result from that space object.
The convention does not prevent national law from providing private liability which may come into play between entities subject to the jurisdiction of the same state or between the state who is liable to other states under the convention and entities operating within the state. So, there is no need to update the convention; the states from which private launches operate simply need adequate domestic law to cover both fully-internal liability and private launcher liability for claims against the government under the convention. (And the US generally does, with the basic regulatory regime being adopted and the private space launch industry operating in the 1980s; it is not an issue that arose with Musk/SpaceX.)
No expert, but I would assume, the USA would front it, but then take a case against SpaceX. So it would be Boat Owner v. USA, then USA v. SpaceX shortly after. Although I could be totally wrong.
But yea, seems appropriate to update it or if that is going to be the process, write it in stone.
As I recall a village in Australia also billed NASA with their standard municipal littering fine, for skylab debris that landed there, and the bill was paid 20+ years later by a radio station as a publicity stunt.
Most things put into space are designed to burn upon uncontrolled descent through orbit. And then the overwhelming majority of Earth is water and even on land the overwhelming majority of land is either completely uninhabited or sparsely inhabited. And then even if against all odds somehow something doesn't burn up in the atmosphere, and somehow lands in a densely populated area - the odds of hitting a spot with somebody or something relevant on it is still quite low. The overall odds of actually hitting somewhere really bad are just astronomically low.
Nonetheless, recently NASA won the lottery when part of some batteries they jettisoned from the ISS ended up crashing through a house in Florida. [1] Oddly enough there are treaties on this, but only from an international perspective - landing on your own country was not covered! But I'm certain NASA will obviously make it right, as would SpaceX. If they didn't, then surely the family could easily sue as well.
Rules of the water says smaller ship yields right of way to bigger ship. Sounds like you screwed up if your yacht got hit by a bigger ship. Of course that applies when the vessels are not tied up. If a big ship his a docked boat, that's an entirely different scenario
Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.
Canadians: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.
Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.
Canadians: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.
Americans: This is the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the United States' Atlantic fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers and numerous support vessels. I demand that YOU change your course 15 degrees north, that's one five degrees north, or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship.
There is a lovely bit of complication with it! Not saying to correct you, just because i think it is a lovely bit of trivia even though it has nothing to do with space debris.
Both sailing and power driven vessels need to give ways to (among other things) “vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver”. And an aircraft carrier launching or recovering aircraft is considered to be restricted in her ability to maneuver (quite rightfully so, it is hard enough to land on them without the ship swerving left and right).
So that means that a mighty aircraft carrier needs to (at least according to the regulations) dodge tiny sailing ships, but once they start launching or recovering aircraft it is the responsibility of the sailing ship to avoid them.
Source: Rule 18 of the ColRegs (The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea 1972)
For funsies i would call it a “vessel not under command”. At least after the breakup that feels to fit.
But for real, i think the simple answer is that debris falling from space is outside of the scope of the ColRegs. Simply speaking they come too fast so you can’t maneuver your vessel out of their way, and unless you are a warship you don’t have the tools to even know where exactly they will hit. If you try to run you might even put yourself in their path. After all from the most unlucky position they would be just bright stationary spots on the sky getting ever so slightly bigger. Until they start to get bigger faster and faster. (Constant bearing and decreasing range being the hallmarks of an impending colision.)
Musk said that part of the launch licensing was a requirement to estimate the potential damage to whales in the ocean. He said that the odds turned out to be so low that in his opinion if a whale gets hit it had it coming.
Given that the engine telemetry shown on the broadcast showed the engines going out one by one over a period of some seconds, I could easily imagine some sort of catastrophic failure on a single engine that cascaded.
It could be many things, plumbing to the engines, tank leak, ect. You could see fire on the control flap actuators, so the ship interior was engulfed in fire at the same time the first engine was out.
do we know when this video was taken? this could just be ship breaking up during re-entry because it lost altitude control. not necessarily the moment of the primary failure.
the flight termination system is sort of a shaped charge that's designed to rupture the oxidizer and fuel tanks. Even if only a few % fuel remains, it'll be a big boom.
That doesn't explicitly say that it wasn't FTS. Activation of the FTS is never scheduled and it results in rapid disassembly. There's speculation that it flew for a significant time after losing telemetry. FTS is designed to activate if it goes off course (if it's still on course, it's better to keep flying).
Yeah, I was wondering if it was FTS. I guess it doesn't really matter as FTS is just designed to intentionally cause the same kind of RUD that happened anyway. The main criteria is a RUD sufficient to ensure pieces small enough to burn up on reentry. From the looks of the explosion from the videos helpfully captured from the ground, the RUD certainly looked sufficient. Given it was 146km up at >13,000 mph, rolling down a window would trigger a sufficient RUD.
At those speeds, temps and pressures exploding into tiny pieces isn't just easy - it's the default. NOT exploding is much harder!
Yeah, most likely engine bay fire taking out systems one by one. Would be interesting to compare the telemetry cutoff with the video of explosion if possible. That could indicate if the fire even triggered an explosion, flight termination being activated or just reentry heating making the tanks explode.
Who knows where it started, but the fire was definitely in the payload bay in front of the header tanks if seen through the flap actuators during ascent, after speration at ~7:45 min
Or FOD in the LOx supply lines. The methane would keep following, even with the turbopump shut down, until the valve closes. And the methane turbopump might actually keep running with reduced supply oxygen - Raptors have two turbopumps.
Does anyone know the timing of when the breakup actually occurred?
I’m curious because I was on a flight to Puerto Rico from Florida at 3pm ET they diverted our flight. They didn’t really give us many details but said the “landing strips were closed”. Our friends on a slightly early flight diverted to ST Thomas. We were going to divert to a nearby airport in Puerto Rico (we were going to land in Aguadilla instead of San Juan) so I feel like these diversions wouldn’t be related but the timing seems pretty odd.
Side note: annoying that twitter/X requires login. I'd have sworn Elon said he was removing that requirement to login to view tweets (I think he discussed it with George Hotz).
> This is insane. You shouldn't need a twitter account at all unless you need to write something
George:
> Why did you put the pop up back?
Elon:
> We should not be prohibiting read-only scroll
So there seems to be agreement that twitter shouldn't require an account to read (view) posts. The Twitter Space is from 23 Dec 2022 so perhaps things changed since.
I just closed the login prompt for the insta link, and watched the video. So it does prompt one to login, but it definitely isn't required to watch the video from that link
That sounds... unlikely, to say the least. The ship blew up at 145km altitude over Turks and Caicos. Debris would fall thousands of kilometers to the east, if anything survives re-entry.
EDIT: at these speeds, over 20000km/h, the falling debris will travel a very long way before coming down. For satellite re-entry, the usual estimated ground contact point is something like 8000km+ downrange [1]. There is little chance debris would come anywhere near commercial flight altitude in the area around where the videos were made.
Apparently the planned splashdown was in the Indian Ocean near Australia, but this being an uncontrolled re-entry it could be far off from that, in either direction.
Im not sure what part you are skeptical about. The debris videos filmed at Turks and Caicos are about 800km east of the explosion video in the Bahamas. They appear to be real. Still high but coming down fast.
Airspace is big, but I wouldn't want to fly a Jet with hundreds of people near it either.
I imagine aviation radar towers would only have the most limited data as the event unfolded.
Arlines are extremely cautious around these kinds of one off events.
It’s not about the calculated risks, but the uncertainty around if they have the right information in the first place. Sure it may have broken up at 145km miles, but what if someone messed up and it actually was 14.5km etc.
Yep, the point of saying “km miles” was the hypothetical uncertainty around units even for European airlines who use metric internationally. However, even within metric might be some question around units.
No, airlines do not build in a safety factor sufficient to cover an important measurement being off by a factor of 10.
They don't ground flights because the pilot might load 2,000 litres of fuel instead of 20,000 litres. They don't take evasive action in case the other plane is travelling at 5,000 knots instead of 500 knots. They don't insist on a 30-km runway because the runway published as 3 km might only be 300 metres.
You misunderstood what I’m saying. Airlines have systems to validate the amount of fuel loaded and currently aboard aircraft that have been battle tested across decades including fixes due to past issues etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
They don’t have that level of certainty around what altitude a rocket exploded, or other one off event.
Unlike fuel gauges, land surveys, and radar, fast-breaking news of explosions carries a significant risk of mistransmission or inaccuracy. They might know when/where the explosion occurred, but not necessarily have much confidence on how fast debris might have been ejected and in which directions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE ATC was being extremely cautious and diverting planes over quite a large area for quite some time to avoid the risk of debris hitting airplanes.
Can you not understand the difference between a stated measurement of a runway or drain fuel requirement, and a stated location of a unique explosion that happened just a few minutes ago? Are you prepared to bet 200 lives that no one fat-fingered the number?
> at these speeds, over 20000km/h, the falling debris will travel a very long way before coming down.
Without air resistance, falling 145 km takes 172 seconds, which would result in the debris falling 956 km east of the explosion point if it were moving horizontal to the ground to begin with. With air resistance, it is substantially shorter as everything is decelerating proportional to the velocity cubed. If we approximate the terminal velocity of the debris as 500 km/h, to a first order approximation it would travel approximately 79 km east. The distance from West Caicos island to Grand Turk island is 138 km, for reference.
Satellites are moving much faster and at much higher altitude. Starship was not in orbit.
I'm not at all qualified to speculate. So I'll just add that for those unfamiliar with him, the person who posted that tweet is an astrophysicist with a popular YT channel.
It’s crazy how fast that ship is moving and how big the explosion was that it looks like something much, much lower in the air went boom. It was transitting the sky faster than a commercial aircraft does. So it gives an impression more like a private aircraft breaking up at 5-10k feet.
Separation is much closer to the launch pad in Texas, the booster barely makes it downrange at all before turning around. This being filmed from the Bahamas with this much lateral velocity, gotta be the Ship breaking up. Likely the FTS triggered after enough engines failed that it couldn't make orbit / planned trajectory.
I dont think so. I think it is the breakup, with a large mass visible. most of the material will continue on until it parabolically renters and burns up in a visible manner
I'd say it might be after the loss of the craft. It was losing engines for a while then lost telemetry. This would have been a bit later when it started tumbling in the atmosphere on re-entry. Hopefully we'll know for sure in a few days.
Maybe it did, or is it public that it didn't? A possible sequence (very typical in rocket failures) is: fire, engine failure(s), loss of control, rupture due to aero forces or FTS activation, explosion due to propellant mixture. Not all of these have to happen, but it's a typical progression. Before the days of AFTS the FTS activation would be pretty delayed.
Nope. That's definitely an explosion (source: I'm in the rocket business). However it may not be an explosion of the whole stage. Probably of the engine section.
I think this was the first test of StarShip v2. I'd be surprised if everything worked after they redesigned the whole StarShip. That would be like refactoring Microsoft Windows by hand-typing new code and expecting it to run without errors on the first try.
While the telemetry was still going, you could see Ship engines going out one by one. Earlier when there was video there was what looked like flames visible inside one of the flap hinges, definitely shouldn't be there on ascent. Presumably something failed internally and caused the Ship to shut down before reaching target trajectory, at which point either FTS or the failure itself caused it to blow up, as seen on the Insta reel.
On the NSF youtube channel they pointed out that at some point the methane indicator started decreasing much faster than the LOX indicator, which points to some sort of leak. It would explain why the engines started to shut down.
Or slightly wrong. An FTS is programmed to be conservative. Particularly on unmanned flights. Doubly particularly on reëntry. Triply so on experiments bits.
Imo if SpaceX thought it was possibly FTS they wouldn't say RUD. They still had telemetry for multiple seconds as it pitched wildly and engines failed, if FTS didn't trigger then it probably didn't at all.
Another failure, another few months of figuring out why this isn't working and can't stick to its flight path. They caused chaos for many commercial planes, so they'll definitely need some full reports to the FTA to know what they're doing about this, why the debris is falling over flight paths, and so on.
First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon.
To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew.
Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone.
NASA (with the shuttle and saturn V) had a completely different idea on rocket development (and blue origin seems to follow their mindset), which is fine. but to say that this is "failure fetish" when spacex has an amazing track record is just hating for the sake of hating.
SpaceX’s track record is too fetishized by the Musk fanboys. Falcon 9 has some weird Demi god status even though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz.
Part of why it has "weird Demi god status" is that it is not only so reliable but also so cheap.
Soyuz is not reusable. Falcon 9 is. That is why Falcon 9 is so celebrated. No other rocket company or state-sponsored space agency comes close to its track record of cheap, reliable, reusable rockets.
Soyuz? an expendable rocket with 40% less payload capacity? How is that a competitor to falcon 9? More like a competitor to rocketlab's current generation.
Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data
New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time
Per wiki on Apollo
> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $182 billion in 2023 US dollars)[22] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[23]
Different budget, different number of people working on this stuff and different mindset. Actually the Apollo program was also iterative and it paid off.
The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers.
SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.
They are inventing a little, but the basics of rocket flight are now well understood. You can get a university (probably post grad) course on it. And nothing that they are doing is all that revolutionary, definitely not compared to what Apollo did (going from airplanes and ballistic missiles to orbital space flight and then Moon missions).
Consider that even reusable self-landings boosters were being worked on in the 90s, before funding was cut off. And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight, launching some kind of payload to orbit.
- "And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight,"
That doesn't resonate as true to me.
The first Ariane 5 flight blew up [0]. That Europe's current heavy-lift workhorse with 112 successful launches (including JWST), but the first one blew up.
The first PSLV blew up [1]. That's India's current workhorse with 58 successes, but flight #1 was not successful. Their GSLV did not reach its correct orbit on its first flight either [2], though it didn't blow up.
The first Delta IV Heavy did not blow up, but it failed to reach its correct orbit [3]. That was US' largest launch vehicle for most of the 21st century.
The first Long March 5 failed to reach its correct orbit, and the second one blew up [4]. That's China's current heavy-lift launch vehicle, since 2016.
South Korea's first orbital rocket RUD'd both its first flights, in 2009 and 2010 [5].
Japan's newest orbital rocket was launched in 2023, and that blew up [6].
Rocket Labs' Electron has a current >90% success rate, but the first one blew up [7].
You're right that I exaggerated, sorry about that.
Still, many of these are more successful than Starship:
The first GSLV was still able to deploy a satellite, just in a lower orbit than intended.
The first Delta IV had the same problem, satellite deployed, but in a lower orbit than planned.
The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one did blow up).
The Rocket Labs' Electron did get destroyed. However it was later found that nothing at all was wrong with the vehicle, it was a failure in the ground software, and an identical vehicle successfully carried out its mission 7 months later.
In contrast, the first two Starships blew up completely due to engine issues, and no Starship has deployed even a test payload of some kind to orbit. In fact, until today, none even carried a payload of any kind, they have all been flying empty.
> Still, many of these are more successful than Starship:
Your definition of success doesn't leave room for anomalies. Your mindset seems to be "if you try and it's doesn't turn out perfectly, it's a failure" -- which results in spending tons of time and money iterating behind closed doors (or even worse, trying to model/calculate the whole thing without many test runs), and only unveiling the result when it's "perfect". This approach costs more time and money, and more embarrassment if/when the product fails in public. It also doesn't build a culture of learning a lot from anomalies.
Meanwhile, SpaceX doesn't care about iterating, testing, and failing in public. So they skip all the costly effort of trying too hard not to fail, setting expectations that they get it right the first time, and not learning as much from anomalies.
Anomalies, properly understood, are opportunities to learn and improve -- and never something to be ashamed of. The only true "failures" are to give up because it's too hard, to stop learning from the data that anomalies provide, or to never try in the first place because you're too afraid of anomalies.
- "The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one did blow up)."
The Wikipedia entry describes it as "suboptimal but workable initial orbit", which I interpret as a partial failure (coming from a military entity that's universally opaque about its failings). They're not inclined for language like "partial failure" that we get out of transparent countries—contrast that first Delta IV-H, which also reached a "workable" orbit—just not the intended one.
- "However it was later found that nothing at all was wrong with the vehicle, it was a failure in the ground software, and an identical vehicle successfully carried out its mission 7 months later."
Also true of the Ariane 5 explosion: that was a software bug (unhandled integer overflow) in the flight control unit. The important part isn't whether it's hardware or software, but whether they got it right or not, before launch.
Compare how much money each company spent before the first/second/etc flight. The ENTIRE program has so far cost less than one set of SLS engines - that they took from older rockets without changes.
They have explicitly and publicly chosen to rapidly iterate without spending billions to make sure the first try goes well - it's simply different culture. The first Starship wasn't even something you could actually call a rocket, it was a water tower with a bunch of rocket engines.
They wanted data about the engines and got them - mission 100% accomplished, that's not a failure in any way except for media shock value because "wow such boom". Come on, you call yourself an engineer? Do you not try your software or hardware before 100% completion? You don't have CI with integration and e2e tests? There's no other way to do this cheaply and quickly, you have to try.
Call me when any other company achieves what Falcon9 did, then we can discuss issues of SpaceX engineering culture and how others are better. But they are not, few test flights are not interesting, what's interesting is that they are 10 years ahead of everybody else and offer by far the cheapest and by orders of magnitude most reliable orbital lift service.
Others should stop waiting 10 years before the first flight and accept some risk, the world would be much better by now.
this doesn't even scratch the surface. Slow motion cameras and real time sensors for debugging hardware issues, computer simulations, 3d printing.
Apollo program directors would advocate to start a nuclear war with ussr if they could get hands on that kind of tech.
But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??
Apollo program was a major achievement, probably the largest in the history of humanity as of yet. But SpaceX definitely should get a credit for "breaking things", or for running agile dev cycle with hardware ("hardware heavy"). Let's just strap engines to a fuel tank and try to fly it. Let's just build a body by welding steel plates together and see what happens. Let's just launch this thing to 20 miles and see if we can make it aerobrake and land it with the engines. Iterate by learning and constantly improving. Nobody done it at that scale as of yet.
(Which of course is only possible if you have the Founding Father with a few billion $$ just laying around)
SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before, and done it faster and at a lower budget than anyone has done before.
Every other national space agency and private company had both infinitely more money, time, and engineers than SpaceX did (when founded) yet they were making zero progress on reusable rockets, cheap super heavy lift capacity to orbit, and America had no way of taking their own astronauts to the space station!
Musk (hate him or love him) founded a company from nothing which has exceeded the capabilities of nasa and the us government, the European space agency, and the russian space agency, as well as ULA, Boeing, Lockheed etc.
They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused. They have the most cost effective rocket ever made for taking loads to orbit. They have reused rockets up to 20 times! They have build the most powerful rocket ever built which is fully reusable. They have built the most efficient and powerful rocket engines ever built before. And they have done it all incredibly quickly starting from nothing.
Oh and they also built a massive internet constellation providing fast and cheap satellite internet to the whole world, saving countless lives and also helping stimulate economies across the world as well as enabling more remote work etc.
So much of what they have done was considered impossible or not economical or not practical or so difficult other countries or companies didn’t even TRY.
So yes. Given their success it’s worth trying to understand their development methodology, which is iterate fast and fail lots and learn lots. Given how much they’ve kicked the shit out of the SLS program in capability and budget and also how they’ve crushed Blue Origin (which started earlier with more budget) who both operate in a more old fashioned way, I would certainly say it’s important to acknowledge they may be doing something right!
The achievements you quote are highly overblown. SpaceX sells capacity to orbit somewhat cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best.
They also don't have any fully reusable rockets today, and Starship is still probably a year or more from being production-ready. It remains to be seen how reusable Starship will actually be, how long it will take to refurbish and get ready for spaceflight, and how many reentries it can actually take. And it still remains to be seen how much Starship will actually gain from being fully reusable, by the way - landing a rocket costs lots of extra fuel, so it's not a no-brainer that a fully reusable rocket would have a much better cost/kg-to-orbit than a non reusable one. Especially for anything higher than LEO, Starship can't actually carry enough fuel, so it depends on expensive additional launches to refuel in orbit - a maneoveur that will probably take another year or more to finalize, and that greatly increases the cost of a Starship mission beyond LEO.
Finally, Starlink is nice, but it's extremely expensive for most users outside very rich areas of the world, and has in no way had the impact you are claiming. Laying out cable internet is FAR cheaper than satellite internet can ever be, especially in rural areas, so beyond cases where cables and even wireless are completely impossible (ocean, war-torn areas), it doesn't and won't ever have any major impact. I'm also very curious where you got the idea that it "saved countless lives".
10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible. Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.
As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.
Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition
> ULA was awarded a DoD contract in December 2013 to provide 36 rocket cores for up to 28 launches. The award drew protest from SpaceX, which said the cost of ULA's launches were approximately US$460 million each and proposed a price of US$90 million to provide similar launches.[16] In response, Gass said ULA's average launch price was US$225 million, with future launches as low as US$100 million.
I suspect SpaceX margins are very high and they can fund the starship development. Margins/prices may change as BO reaches reusability.
> 10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible.
Maybe some. Others had been working on this in the 90s already. Not to mention Spaceshuttle, which achieved these milestones (with a vastly different design) in production.
> Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.
Reuse is currently partial. The economic advantages have largely failed to materialize, at least to the extent that they were promised.
> Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition
Why compare to ULA? Look at Ariane 6, or Soyuz-2 - they have similar numbers to Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is 22 800 kg to LEO for $70M. Ariane 6 is 21 500 kg to LEO for $115M. Soyuz-2 is 8600kg to LEO for $35-48M (so about $92-129M for a Falcon 9's worth of cargo). More expensive, but not by some huge margin.
> As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.
This is a completely different take than the previous comment. Sure, it's successful in the developped world in certain industries. This is nothing like "saving countless lives" or "helping stimulate economies across the world", which is what I was responding to.
Your using how much they charge, not how much it costs... You seem to not understand any kind of sales strategy or atleast basic game theory here.
>More expensive, but not by some huge margin.
Obviously no matter what it costs them, they are going to price themselves slightly under the going rate to fill their launch manifest. Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.
Reuse is cheaper... the fact that you can even begin to contemplate that makes no sense. They lose the upstage with only one engine and they even recover the fairing. The combined cost for RP-1 and LOX is approximately $300,000–$500,000.
Relative to total launch cost the fuel cost makes up a tiny fraction (~0.5–1%), which is about $67 million for a Falcon 9 commercial launch.
Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.
The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10, where the next nearest competitor is the Proton-M by Khrunichev at 4300. Which puts them in a completely different league of the space shuttles Cost Per kg to LEO of $18,000 to $54,000.
> Your using how much they charge, not how much it costs... You seem to not understand any kind of sales strategy or atleast basic game theory here.
I'm using the only public information about this that we have. The Ariane 6 and Soyuz-2 numbers are also prices and not costs, by the way. We don't know how much Russia or the ESA actually spend per launch, we only know what they are asking others to pay for it.
> Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.
Don't forget refurbishment costs and fuel costs and R&D amortization.
> Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.
You mean Falcon Heavy here (SuperHeavy is the first stage of Starship, it doesn't carry payload). I left Falcon Heavy out for two reasons.
First and most importantly, it is very rarely used in comparison to Falcon 9 (it was only flown twice in 2024, for example). SpaceX themselves are not using it for their Starlink sattelites, even though that should be the perfect use case for it.
Second, it was never flown with anything close to the nominal payload, at least according to Wikipedia. The highest payload ever flown was ~10k kg to GTO, where it's supposed to support up to 26 700 kg. Note also that the 63 800 kg figure is for an expendable Falcon Heavy - if you want to recover it, it's less than 50 000 kg. Also, the price per launch seems highly optimistic, given that launches in 2024 were actually $152M and $178M, each flying with ~5000 kg, giving a MUCH worse number than what we were looking at.
> The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10
These numbers are very likely pure fantasy. Starship development got $3B just from NASA, that you seem to not amortize in any way. If you just look at the costs of the actual rocket construction itself plus fuel, without R&D, the numbers go WAY down for many other rockets as well (including Falcon 9).
so, what your saying is that you admit SpaceX is a world class provider of launch services, but you don't like it cause it's not THAT much better than everything else?
I'm saying that SpaceX is a world-class provider of space launch services, and leads the market on virtually any metric, but they aren't, as some are claiming in this thread, orders(!) of magnitude cheaper than others in the business. I'm just trying to counter balance some of the narrative here that presents SpaceX like some savior almost sent from the future.
It's so convenient for you to live in an imaginary world where spaceX is deceiving everyone and hasn't really achieved anything and it's all just empty hype, right?
Given how little we know about the cost structures of any of these space launch systems, yes.
Consider that Russia was charging less per seat to the ISS in 2007, back when they ahd to compete with the Shuttle, then SpaceX is charging NASA today. And not a little less - almost half ($25M in 2007 dollars, $38M in today's dollars, vs SpaceX charging $55M today).
Does this mean that the Soyuz was much cheaper than Falcon 9? Probably not, it just means that there is so much margin on both sides that we can't estimate much.
> They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused.
The space shuttle did this over 40 years ago. You can argue SpaceX have the first economical one 40 years later, but the second stage isn't reusable. Once they get starship working they might have it.
Their finances aren't public but there is some stuff to go on where we can say Falcon is probably economical despite not recovering the second stage.
This TED talk from Gwynne Shotwell says they will have reuse of starship so dialed in that in 3 years (from now) they will be competitive with commercial airliners and be operating for consumers in production:
To be safe enough for that I would have expected thousands of flawless flights by now. They said in 2020 it was still on track for 2028 but the Dear Moon project was canceled since that last update.
Are you not considering the fact that the huge external tank and the two SRBs were destroyed every time? Not to mention the insane costs of refurbishing each space shuttle, not the mention the insanely bad safety of the shuttle and the 14 astronauts who died in it!
Space shuttle, while cool, was really, really bad design, bad safety, and totally uneconomical. It was definitely cooler than Soyuz, but Soyuz was cheaper and more safe.
There's a reason the US abandoned space shuttle and had to beg the Russians to use Soyuz to send their astronauts to the space station.
Recovering parts that landed in the literal salty ocean and need massive refurbishment to work again isn't really reusable in the same way that Falcon is though really is it? Trying to compare the two is honestly disingenuous.
Calling Space Shuttle to what SpaceX have done really is like comparing chalk and cheese.
Space shuttle cost (inflation adjusted) about 700M per launch(!!). Compared to Falcon 9 (10-20M). Superheavy and starship will start costing maybe 100M and rapidly decrease to maybe 10-20M also, but with more than double the carrying capacity of shuttle as well as in generally being far more capable.
The SRBs could land in the ocean with parachutes and be recovered and refurbished. Shuttle wasn't economical as I mentioned, and definitely the space shuttle wasn't safe.
What you claimed was: "They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused." That was known as the space shuttle.
The ~$40 million tank was expendable so you are right it wasn't full reuse either. Starship jettisons parts too, I believe the hot staging ring? And the Falcon series throws away the whole upper stage.
Space Shuttle isn't a "rocket" like Falcon 9 is though, it couldnt go to space by itself. So saying its the first reusable rocket is really stretching credibility.
Falson 9 is a one piece rocket, as is Superheavy.
The Space Shuttle got to space with the help of other rockets, tank etc.
And all those other parts were recovered after most flights and re-used after refurbishment on future flights. Since there's no other name than "Space Shuttle" for the whole rocket, it will do. Note that Starhsip is also ambiguous, as it refers both to the entire two stage rocket, but also just stage 2.
The whole world combined VS SpaceX has less mass to orbit.
Either whole nations are not interested in that much mass to orbit or they don't have the capability. Or financial means/incentive to compete against that commercial entity.
But they do and at least in China they start to work on reusable rockets and ULA is for sale because they don't have one.
Nobody credits boeing with a achievement of caring most people in planes. We credit Wright brother with creating first airplane.
Cargo rockets is to elo is an old tech, a participation award for you and your convincing arguments (you and you ilk - producing numerous 'achievements' called 'etc. etc.').
> But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??
NASA lost a good number of probes in the process of getting the expertise to do that.
And likely quite a few test devices in building out the skycrane.
> wtf does that have to do with Curiosity program? All of these are 2+ decades old.
That’s 20 years of learning how to design and land things on mars. They wouldn’t have been able to build Curiosity without the past experiences. The Curiosity program itself started in 2002, just a couple years after the missions above.
What people say is that knowledge in the field is extremely hard to transfer, and easily lost. As an example, apparently we are completely unable to rebuild the Space Shuttle and Saturn rocket, even though technology is vastly more advanced today. Each vehicle really is a “program” including all its people and supply chain. This is also something SpaceX is trying to change by building actual production lines for their engines and bodies, not one-off builds.
Do you not count the Saturn 1B rocket capsule that caught on fire on the pad and burnt the Apollo 1 astronauts alive?
What about Apollo 13?
> but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land
The "promise land" in this analogy is visible past the desert. What's not known is what route to get there.
In your tortured analogy, the people who "are really fetishizing iterative failure" are not doing that; they're fetishizing the fact that the person walking through this desert is trying, and if they hit a barrier, they iterate and try again until they reach the promise land. Along the way they are accomplishing what was once thought to be impossible.
The command module fire had zero to do with the Saturn V. Apollo 13 again was the command and service module, and in that case the crew was "returned safely to the Earth".
NASA put people on the first flight of the shuttle to space, which turned out after the fact to have 1 in 12 chance of killing the crew. Can't do that in 2025.
Apollo 6 (2nd Satun V launch) was "less than nominal" and warranted a congressional hearing. It did succeed, but luck played a part. George Mueller declared later that Apollo 6 was a failure for NASA.
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure
Subassemblies that made up Saturn V went through several hundred (inflation adjusted) billion dollars' worth of iterative failure before the Apollo program was announced.
The only reason it WAS announced was all of the iterative failure that had been paying off.
The day JFK uttered "shall go to the moon in this deck-aid", the F-1 engine had already been exploding and failing for three years.
My memory is hazy, from a brown bag I went to at work 15 years ago, but they blew up around 50 F-1s before one worked right.
And while the Saturn isn't an upgraded Jupiter it is EXTREMELY closely related to Jupiter and Jupiter had a shit-ton of failures before they got it right, turned around, and used all of that knowledge to build Saturn.
The shuttle programme was signed off in 1972, had it's first flight in 1977, and it's first crewed flight in 1981. Starship has been going for 5 years (albeit on the back of lots of other SpaceX work.) It's getting to orbit in the same time that Shuttle took to 'fly' on the back of a 747. A few lost ships is a pretty small price to pay for going twice as fast on delivery.
It’s pretty weird to get any engineering thing right on the first test, no? The entire development strategy would have to be based around that goal. I think the standard engineering strategy would be to test early and often.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but, especially during the Cold War, the US government had a big incentive to appear infallible that SpaceX doesn’t have. Are we sure there weren’t more tests in secret? USG also has access to huge tracts of land that is off limits, and rocket tests are easily ‘national security issue’ enough to justify being conducted in secret. Just a thought.
A lot of people have been shitting on SLS for being too expensive over the last 5 years, but it's worth noting that the Artemis program has been completely fucked due to SpaceX massively missing its milestones on Starship. So many people believe that Elon Musk is going to bring humanity back to the Moon, but he is largely the reason that humanity is not back on the moon already.
The GAO put out a report on this a few months ago, pointing out the failures of SpaceX here (including massive cost overruns) much more than the supposed cost overruns of SLS. Incidentally, after this GAO report came out, Elon Musk became very interested in being in charge of managing "government waste."
"There was no heat shield issue" and "it was investigated and resolved" cannot both be true. There was a heat shield issue; they investigated for two years, and it has caused a delay.
Artemis II has no Starship dependency. It's entirely SLS/Orion.
Your own article agrees with me:
> Artemis 2 likely would've been delayed by a year or so, to late 2026, had a heat-shield replacement been required, NASA officials said today. But the mission team still needs more time than originally envisioned to get Orion up to crew-carrying speed, explaining the roughly six-month push.
> "The heat shield was installed in June 2023, and the root cause investigation took place in parallel to other assembly and testing activities to preserve as much schedule as possible."
Complete nonsense. There are many issues with Artemis timeline.
And of course its completely ridiculous to blame a program that received 2 billion $ and only really started a few years ago, vs things like SLS Orion that have been going for decades and absorbed 50 billion $.
Maybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.
Increased launch cadence is an operational achievement, not an engineering one.
And I'm not so sure that they actually decreased price to launch all that much. First of all, it's definitely not "several orders of magnitude", the best numbers quoted are maybe half price or so for a Falcon 9 compared to another contemporary rocket. And by my understanding, the US government at least is paying about as much for Falcon 9 as it was for a Soyuz to bring an astronaut to the ISS, at least.
According to this [0] article from Business Insider, from 2006 to 2019, per seat costs for NASA from Russia rose from less than $25M ($38M inflation adjusted) to around $81M ($101M inflation adjusted). The cost per seat in 2012, the year after the USA lost crewed space launch capability entirely, was ~$55M ($75M inflation adjusted). According to this [1] article from Reuters, NASA is currently paying Boeing $90M, and SpaceX $55M per seat.
So, NASA today is paying Boeing more than the monopoly prices Russia charged (up to 2016 or so), and paying both of them more than Russia was charging back when they were competing with the Space Shuttle. And it's paying SpaceX about half of the top price it payed Russia per seat, still nowhere close to an order of magnitude in cost savings.
An operational achievement means excellence in building the same vehicle over and over, to the right tolerances, and operating it the same way every time, without fing anything up.
An engineering achievement means excellence in designing a new vehicle, or updating an existing one, or inventing a new procedure, and finding the right tolerances that allow that to be replicated over and over without excess cost.
So using some wholly new process, like the continuous innovation involved in casting large parts, how would I separate ops and engr?
Forgive my ignorance. I'm just wondering how Ford's quality circles, or the Toyota Production System would work if ops and engr were treated aa separate silos.
Since we're kibitzing about rockets, I suppose the example above could have been ramping up production of Raptor engines to 1 per day (IIRC), while improving performance and reducing costs. If I wanted to emulate that process, using your methodology, where would I start?
That's a 60billion government program I guess to match the program you need to match that as well, starship is doing what it's doing at a tenth of a cost so far.
> To date, no Starship has been recovered after flight.
This is irrelevant, as none of the flights included any plans to recover the Starship. The objective for each flight has been to dump the vehicle in the sea at the target zone.
That “first success” was actually on the back of a long series of related rockets with technology and engines inherited from a huge missile program. Those NASA eggheads didn’t start from zero on a shoestring budget and make things work on the first try! The Saturn V was just a stretched version of the Saturn series of rockets. These all cost hundreds of billions in today’s money to develop!
Second, they’re not “the same thing”. A single-use piece of technology has very different design constraints and engineering considerations as a reusable piece of technology.
A single-use weapon is a bomb. A reusable weapon is a sword. Just because you can shove a fuse into some explosives doesn’t mean you can forge a sword that won’t shatter on first use.
An equivalent example from space technology are explosive bolts. NASA uses them extensively, SpaceX never does… because they’re not reusable and not up-front testable. They’re expensive too. So instead they iterated (and iterated!) on vacuum-rated actuators that can serve the same role. This is a non-trivial exercise that resulted in a few RUDs. This is why NASA didn’t even try! It’s harder and not needed if reusability was a non-goal.
> First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components.
There were 16 taxi and flight tests with Enterprise before the launch in 1981 (Approach and Landing Tests - Enterprise) where the first 8 were uncrewed. Just saying there were prior test flights using it.
There was something like 4 years of testing before the proper launch.
That "landing" (is it still considered a landing if it's chopsticked a few meters before it touches the ground?) is so unnatural it almost looks fake. So big and unimaginable that it feels like watching fx on a movie!
The close-up camera right after was interesting, I thought it captured on the grid fins, but it looks like there are two small purpose-built knobs for that.
Yeah, that shot is so clean and smooth it feels like a render. Absolutely iconic even after a dozen rewatchings. The iris flares and the framerate… gotta hand it to whoever planned that shot and placed that camera. A+ videography.
As another commenter pointed out, it's down to better cameras; higher resolution and framerates than "traditional" cameras used in this kind of recording. But it could be better still, the camera setup in the clip still gets a lot of shaking from the blasts.
IIRC they use regular off the shelf gopro cameras to mount on the ones going into space. Granted, the mount is ruggedized metal else the cameras wouldn't survive, lol [0].
I'm also reminded of NASA's cameras which were mounted on the mechanisms of an anti-air gun, great for slow and precise movements. I'm sure they still use that today but I couldn't find a good source. I did find an article about NASA's ruggedized cameras for use on spacecraft and the like though [1].
> it's down to better cameras; higher resolution and framerates than "traditional" cameras used in this kind of recording
It looks cool because of the angle and framing though, someone knew exactly what they were doing. Without the angle/framing, you can have all the resolution and framerates in the world, it still wouldn't look as cool. It's a cinematographic choice that made that shot.
> But it could be better still, the camera setup in the clip still gets a lot of shaking from the blasts.
I'd love to hear ideas how you'd prevent the shaking. Forget gimbals or similar semi-pro setups as they wouldn't be nearly enough. What are you attaching it to, in your better setup? A drone would be blown away, and anything attached to the ground would likely start to shake regardless of your setup.
If cutting edge engineering with conventional physics looks fake to you folks imagine what a hard time you’re going to have with real videos of actual UFOs.
It's not twisted and not ad hominem. No attack on a person, just a statement of the relative difficulty of appreciating something truly new when cutting edge looks fake.
IIRC, the grid fins are not strong enough to support the rocket, and reinforcing them would add too much weight to the vehicle.
The plan is to catch the second stage the same way, and the starship in flight now is the first to have mockup pins to test the aerodynamics and see if they cause issues during reentry.
I found the same when the first Falcon Heavy executed the simultaneous booster landing. Watching them both come down, within moments of each other at neighbouring pads was incredibly cool.
Its sad that Gerry Anderson never got to see this. It's like something from a Thunderbirds episode.
You can hear some sounds in the stream that I think are one of the presenters weeping during the launch and landing sequences. I think I would be similarly awe struck to witness such a thing
The clearance is amazing -- probably bigger IRL than it looked on the camera, but it looked like only a foot or two between the chopsticks arm and the top of the rocket! The control algorithms on the gimballed engines must be insanely precise.
Since I’ve never seen an f9 landing, watching ift5 land was kinda mind blowing. Even 6k away you can tell it’s really big but moved with a grace and smoothness like a hippo in water only with crackling flame.
Oh no they lost the ship after the booster landed! Seems like they lost an engine, then I saw fire around the rear flap hinges in the last images before they cut out, and then the telemetry showed more engines shutting down until it froze.
During ascent I also noticed a panel near the front fins that seemed to be loose and flapping. Probably not related but who knows.
Back a few years ago. This was the starship that in 2024 would reach Mars with humans, with so much space taken by crew and materials, and almost no fuel, and "10 times cheaper". And currently is an empty shell. Nice fireworks and show, but no meaningful payload yet. Not even LO. And this will be ready for 2026 artemis mission?
I’m not a big fan of Elon Musk, but this is just the typical executive talking up their product and to some extent being overly optimistic about timelines. You’d think with the quantity of software engineers in HN this would be obvious, but the (rightful IMO) disdain for Elon Musk is resetting people’s brains.
If you think delays in aerospace constitute "lies," you're not going to have a good time following any aerospace company. Unexpected delays are par for the course.
In about two years, when these things will be launching hundreds of starlink satellites like clockwork, you’ll just move the goalposts and find something else to criticise.
I’m saying this with confidence because it’s the established history of SpaceX critics. Everything from reusable rockets, space internet, full-flow staged combustion, etc.. has had its naysayers that all shut up and found something new to critique once SpaceX showed it was possible and even profitable.
At this stage you may as well just come out and say “I don’t like Elon”.
If not SpaceX, it would be all NASA. NASA lies about their budget all the time, with massive overruns. For example, the Artemis overrun exceeds the entire cost of Starship development so far [1].
Not to mention that each Artemis launch is of the same order of magnitude cost as the entire Starship program. Each engine is about the same cost as Falcon 9 launch!
This is version 2 of Starship, with some upgrades, such as longer starship.
"Upgrades include a redesigned upper-stage propulsion system that can carry 25 per cent more propellant, along with slimmer, repositioned forward flaps to reduce exposure to heat during re-entry.
For the first time, Starship will deploy 10 Starlink simulators" [1].
Will be interesting to hear the postmortem on the second stage. The booster part seemed to work pretty flawlessly with the exception of a non-firing engine on boost back which then did fire during the landing burn.
If the person doing their on-screen graphics is reading this, I wonder if you have considered showing tank LOX/CH4 remaining as a log graph. I believe it decreases logrithmically when being used (well it would if you keep 'thrust' constant) so that would create a linear sweep to the 'fuel level' status.
I don't believe they throttle the engines up or down much during the second stage burn. Fuel decreases ~linearly and thrust is relatively constant. Acceleration increases as fuel mass decreases.
The engines are able to throttle but they run all of them at 100% throttle for most of the second stage's first burn, I expect. For efficiency. The telemetry showed all of them firing at the same time. The vacuum engines will be used by themselves for on orbit maneuvers and the sea level engines will be used by themselves for landing, but for the first burn to reach orbit they need all the thrust they can get.
I would be surprised if that was the case, my reasoning to that is that computing where a thing is going, when it's under going with changing acceleration AND changing mass, is pretty complicated. Especially if you already have the capability to throttle the engines and keep 'a' constant.
They might, I'm not saying your wrong, I'm just saying that I cannot imagine how you would justify the added complexity of doing it that way.
The computations are complicated but not that complicated relative to everything else SpaceX is doing. It's much more important to optimize the propellant mass by using it most efficiently than to simplify some computations. And it's probably most efficient to burn the propellant as fast as possible.
Any extra time spent during a burn is wasted fuel. Intuitively, any time before the rocket is in orbit, some part of the rocket thrust is resisting the force of gravity or else it would fall back down to earth. The longer that time is, the more thrust (and thus fuel) was spent negating that force. It's the main reason why the Falcon 9 boosters do a 'hoverslam' on return and land at close to full throttle - any extra time during that burn is less fuel efficient.
Better fuel efficiency = more payload to orbit = plenty of justification for the extra complexity.
Admittedly gravity losses are more significant at the beginning when the booster/ship are ascending purely vertically than later in second stage flight which is mostly horizontal, but definitely still a factor.
reminds me of the classic joke:
a man walking down a street, stops and asks another person if they know what time it is. The person responds: I'm sorry as I don't have a watch on me, but you see that car parked over there? when it explodes, it should be 5pm
Yeah, I prefer this "when this comment is XY old" format the most when communicating internationally. Closely followed by UTC, of course.
I hate having to convert from some time zone which I don't know by heart; with the additional risk of getting daylight savings or something wrong and missing the event.
I wonder how much of the second stage flight is autonomous and if they need to continually need to give it a go to continue, or if it aborts automatically after some time of lost telemetry. But maybe it already exploded anyways.
The flight control loops are strongly latched. They are constantly checking the state of discretes, control surfaces, and intended guidance. If any critical parameter gets out of range for a period of time or if any group of standard parameters gets out of range the vehicle will simply cease powered flight.
In the Space Shuttle, given that it was human rated, the "Range Safety" system was completely manual. It was controlled by a pair of individuals and they manually made the call to send the ARM/FIRE sequence to the range safety detonators.
Incorrect it failed asymmetricaly in such a way that would pitch the vehicle in circles. Normally the sea level raptors are turned off and the space raptors are slowly brought down together.
Right, I just watched it again and it didn’t look normal.
But interesting that telemetry showed the failures starting a few seconds before loss of telemetry, the videos posted here show a massive explosion later on. So something was going wrong for some time before, and the explosion was only a consequence of that.
Or it was the FTS reacting to the engine failures.
Or if you would like additional commentary and extra camera views, there are independent channels such as Everyday Astronaut, NASASpaceFlight, Spaceflight Now, etc.
uBlock Origin blocked any ads if there was any and I didn't have any issues (Ungoogled Chrome). I didn't pay for Twitch and TVV LOL Pro works fine for me.
What worries me about space innovation is the fact that there is such little margin for error. Materials are being stressed so much while trying to defy the laws of physics that the smallest angle error, the smallest pressure mismatch, smallest timing error, and boom. This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes. Now imagine these risks, while you're halfway to mars. Is it possible that we just have no found/invented the right materials or the right fuel/propulsion mechanism to de-risk this, and that is where we should be allocating a lot more resources?
Because people rarely go to space, and it was much more dangerous when the last person died than it is today. The vast majority of flights are unmanned, just like this test was.
If you want to continue playing apples to oranges though, nobody has died on a spaceflight in the last twenty years. How many have died on airplanes in that timeframe?
[correction: there was one additional fatal flight in 2014 with the destruction of SpaceShipTwo. I would argue that one doesn't count, though, as it was more akin to a relatively mundane aircraft accident than anything else.]
The requirements of orbital launch are unyielding. If you make a car 50% heavier, it will have worse mileage and handling, but it will still get you where you need to go. If you make a spacecraft 50% heavier, it will never reach orbit.
> This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes.
Cars are small, and they still go up in flames routinely all on their own (for older cars, aged fuel lines rupturing is a top cause, for newer cars shit with the turbocharger), it just doesn't make more news than a line in the local advertisement rag because usually all it needs is five minutes work for a firefighter truck.
Trains had quite the deadly period until it was figured out how to deal with steam safely - and yet, in Germany we had the last explosion of a steam train in 1977, killing nine people [1].
Can someone please please PLEASE tell SpaceX PR/Streaming team that the speed (per SI system) is measured in meters per second, not kilometers per hour? The speed of sound is approx 300 m/s, orbital velocity is approx 8,0000 m/s (depending on altitude), free fall acceleration on Earth is 9.81m/s, 1.63m/s on the Moon, the speed of light is apporx 300,000,000 m/s, people learn these numbers in middle school. It's not 1000 km/h, or 28,000 km/h, it just looks so weird.
Edit: ok, acceleration is meters per second per second, but my point stands.
I understand the appeal of using the same combinations everywhere, but I thought the great thing about the metric system was that it was easy to convert. So 8000 m/s is 8 km/s.
In the official BIPM brochure, hours are technically classified as "Non-SI units accepted for use with SI." This puts them in the same category as liters, hectares, tonnes, decibels, etc.
I can read Wikipedia too. All the calculations are done in m, s, g, etc. if you want to dumb it down to the public you might as well go in miles per hour, leagues per day, etc., spaceflight is not the place where it is appropriate.
> spaceflight is not the place where it is appropriate.
But, a video stream meant for the public consumption is. SI are standardized for the context of calculations, not necessarily for human consumption, which happens to be why nobody gives the weather in degrees kelvin.
...which has nothing to do with NASA the US government organization, or the NSF (FYI). It's just some independent streamers who apparently know you can't get trademark claims against you by the federal government.
NASA allows them to place cameras as media on nasa property some are even permanent. and are credentialed media for launches. so I am guessing NASA is okay with it.
If you're referring to NSF streams from Starbase (Starship program), all of the cameras are installed on public land. There's no law prohibiting you setting up a Web cam (with autonomous power supply) in the middle of the forest, or on a riverbank, or on a dune 1400 feet from the OLM.
They started doing it when SpaceX was launching their first fuel tanks literally in the middle of nowhere, you can just sit on a side of the road a few hundred feet away and record (or even stream) everything from a basic Webcam. Eventually more and more people liked it and started contributing, then came branded T-Shirts, etc.
Now there's whole cottage industry in Boca with people spending weeks and months there, setting up and streaming from the cameras, they have trailers/control rooms, high quality equipment, daily and weekly updates, 24x7 streams, etc. NSF is a big player, Tim Dodd is another one, there's quite a few smaller players too.
NSF DOES seem to have some sort of agreement with SpaceX on streaming some of SpaceX's livestreams (ie when Ship goes out of visible range and SpaceX is the only place you can get video and of course telemetry). They didn't use to that until shortly after SpaceX streams moved to X (and immediately got replaced on YT by AI generated Elon peddling bitcoins).
Yeah, they have been covering space stuff for decades by now. They have literally dozens of remote cameras by now around Starbase and the Cape, funded by merch sales and community contributions. :)
NSF was started by Chris Bergen, a meteorologist by trade and a space exploration enthusiast, in early 2000s as a hobby forum (good old phBB) for people to chat about space and rocketry. I'm sure he couldn't even dream about becoming so popular so he didn't spend too much time coming up with a name (ie to protect himself against copyright infringement lawsuits). In fact I'm sure he would love to change the name now as they try to cover space programs all over the world (it's too late as people know them as NSF).
So you wouldn’t exactly get a copyright claim when abusing the NASA logo but it’s still illegal.
I couldn’t find anything about the NASA word itself though, just some articles reciting guidelines by NASA not to imply an endorsement by NASA. I don’t know how that’s enforced though.
You cannot _misuse_ any official government logo or seal. Which effectively means creating a fake document with a real seal and then publishing it. The concern is fraud not sharing content.
You are allowed to basically reproduce the work without any worries whatsoever.
Spoken like someone who is generating their opinion from their channel name alone.
Those "independent streamers" provide live launch streams with multiple feeds using their own equipment and to top it off they have numerous very knowledgeable hosts for all their streams. At this point I suspect they are covering every US based launch from all the major players. Hell, today they broadcasted both the New Glenn and Starship launches less than 24h apart.
But yeah, let's get hung up on an organization name that originated as an Internet forum for discussing all things....... NASA!
I didn't watch the official stream from Blue Origin (watched that one from my phone in bed so no multistreams that time lol) but it wouldn't surprise me one bit.
Sure, you'll get better telemetry info and the onboard views from the ships that these companies launch in their streams, but the commentary is sub-par at best (they are always sounding so "corporate official" to me) and they just don't provide the best views for watching it live.
I love that these space flight companies have opened up their development process to let the public follow along, I just think they aren't as good at producing live streams as some of these channels that have taken off over the last 5+ years.
The National Science Foundation is also a division of the US government, and the National Sanitation Foundation (which goes by NSF) is also a well-known large and established private org.
Amazing. 2nd ever catch of the booster via the 'chopstick' arms. Looks like the starship itself won't be splashing down west of Perth, instead telemetry has been lost (assuming RUD - "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly").
It is amazing to see the number of fairly significant changes they tested in this launch. I guess that is the advantage of private space flights and rocket launches where the speed of development is must faster than in a place like Nasa or any government run space program.
I am not surprised that stage 2 failed because they were testing with a lot of the thermal tiles removed.
That was so impressive. I was lucky enough to live in Florida and see the rockets go up. Standing on the beach and watching the first Falcon Heavy launch will be something that will always stick with me. Great job SpaceX.
Failure of an entirely new, previously thought to be impossible combination of technologies.
This is like complaining that your first attempt at new programming language paradigm resulted in a compiler that is slow and sometimes has internal errors!
There's an autonomous flight termination system which triggers if it strays outside the planned flight corridor; any debris that survives reentry should then land in the advertised safety zone.
If it doesn't explode it might be light enough to survive reentry, after sailing on for a short while. In that case a large chunk of metal will come down either off the coast of South Africa or if continues on in its orbit potentially off the coast of Australia.
[1] has the planned flight path, as well as the impact zones.
the onboard control system and flight termination system are programmed to explode if it deviates from a specific and allowed path of trajectory/speed/functional engine thrust. The last thing anyone wants is a partially broken starship going into an uncontrolled suborbital velocity that lands on a city in Africa.
They have a bunch of explosives strapped on the rocket and can give a radio command to blow the ship up. It can even decide to explode itself if the readings go haywire.
It is called the Flight Termination System and it is very common on non-manned flights now.
It could be noted that manually operated flight termination systems have been used even on manned spaceflight, each and every space shuttle flight had a termination system under human ground control.
Clever product placement of iPhone and Starlink and excellent storytelling. Space age technology used to connect astronauts to their loved ones on earth. Can’t be done any better.
The first Falcon 9 landing happened after 8 attempts at controlled splashdown or landing. Time from the first attempt to the first successful landing was a little over 2 years. In the year after their first successful landing, they succeeded in 5 out of 8 attempts. This wikipedia article has details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_first-stage_landing_t...
Starship has had 7 tests in the past 20 months. The first test barely got off the pad due to engine failures. The stages failed to separate, so it was blown up shortly after liftoff. The second test did separate, but the booster blew up shortly after stage separation and the ship blew up shortly before engine shutdown, raining debris across the Atlantic similar to today. The third test got to space, but the booster landing burn failed and the booster impacted the ocean at close to the speed of sound. The ship couldn't maintain orientation and burned up on reentry. The fourth test succeeded at all goals (soft booster splashdown and successful reentry, though the flap did burn through). The fifth test was a success (booster catch and soft ship splashdown, though again with some flap burnthrough). The sixth test aborted the booster landing due to antennas on the tower being damaged by the rocket exhaust at launch, but did splash down softly offshore. The ship also reentered and splashed down on target.
Today's ship failure is a setback, as it will likely take a few months for the FAA investigation to be completed. That said, SpaceX still seems likely to recover a ship intact this year, and at that point it will only be a matter of time before they can launch an order of magnitude more stuff into orbit than they can with the Falcon 9 fleet (and at much lower cost).
SpaceX started Starship development in 2012. Despite 12 years of work, its best test flight reached space but not orbit, sending a banana to the Indian Ocean.
While NASA's SLS began in 2011 and successfully flew around the Moon in 2022.
Blue Origin's New Glenn also started development in 2012 and reached orbit on it's first flight with an actual payload.
When they say SpaceX is fast, what do they mean exactly?
It's similar to last time if you saw that, the first stage will come back towards the launch site and they will try to catch it with the landing tower chopsticks, while the second stage does a soft landing in the ocean after going halfway around the earth.
As far as new stuff, they are trying to deploy some simulated satellites from the second stage and will try to relight one of the engines.
I also saw mention somewhere that this is V2 of Starship upper stage? Somewhat longer, and I’m sure a bunch of other changes to enable mass simulator deployment.
Yes, about 2m longer. Also some modifications to the heat shield, including testing new types of heat shield tiles. Also non-structural versions of new catch pins to see how they perform on reentry
Edit: also, they are reflying one of the raptor engines that was on the previous flight (Engine 314, because pi).
Space X has failed after 3 billion US tax payer dollars to take a banana into low earth orbit. Needless to say we aren't going to Mars last year watching a woman in a long dress floating in the cargo bay behind a curtain of glass windows playing a violin for entertaining the dozens of astronaut's which don't have space for food, water, belongings or life support.
The point was about Starship - it has never successfully flown with any amount of cargo. The 3 billion number from the poster before makes it clear they were only referring to Starship, not all of SpaceX.
SpaceX is an extremely successful space launch company, and Falcon 9 is the best we've ever had. It's just Starship that seems to be going much worse.
Falcon 9 was once in the same spot; simulator payloads (a wheel of cheese), years of delays, a bunch of smashed-up first stages and drone ships, etc. Even more so if you count the Falcon 1 failures.
Starship has already demonstrated several key things work - the new engines, catching the booster, and on-target intact reentry of the second stage, all for about as much money as a single SLS launch is projected to cost. (Thus far, they've only had one for $26B.)
Feels like one SpaceX could and should deal with by DMCAing the channels. Even if getting people watching their official channel instead isn't that important to them, stopping people rebroadcasting their content whilst faking their brand identity to scam people feels like the most legitimate reason for sending takedowns going...
They could do what TikTok does and require you to have x number of followers from your videos before allowing live streaming, but then you just make a market for sockpuppet followers.
The channels are usually with stolen credentials. i.e. when you see an Elon Musk stream on your home page, it's because a creator you Subscribe to had their channel taken over and the content replaced with fake Musk streams.
People really under-value the credentials for such things and I think it's part of the same problem as when streamers who aren't used to this life yet forget about privacy considerations and end up with a phone number or worse home address known to fans.
If you have a meaningful Youtube income, you need to spend some of your next Youtube check on say two Security Keys. If you like them, buy some more for everything else, but since Youtube is your income, step one lock Youtube with Security Keys.
Once that's required, errors of judgement possible through limited understanding or sleep deprivation cease to be a problem. Baby didn't sleep properly all week, some idiot screwed up your banking, and now Youtube keeps sending emails. You get another stupid Youtube email or at least you think so and either
1. You give Bad Guys your password and maybe OTP, so they steal the account and maybe in 5-10 days you and your fans can seize back control, meanwhile it's used to run scams
OR
2. Even sleep-deprived, confused and bewildered you will not post your physical Security Keys to Some Russian Guy's PO Box, Somewhere else, 12345. Your account remains in your hands because without that physical object they can't get in.
Integrity, mainly. Elon is not an honest person and he will use any power at his disposal arbitrarily to silence people he dislikes when he feels like it.
The most absurd example of all is the very recent case where Elon pretended to be a pro gamer and got caught. A streamer called Asmongold covered the topic on his stream, which triggered Elon to arbitrarily remove Asmongold's verified checkmark and remove his gaming badge. Considering the low stakes of this matter I find the actions ridiculous and don't trust Elon with having basically admin access to the platform at all.
I've also heard plenty of horror stories about the ruthless way the engineering in X is currently done, often carelessly breaking stuff. However I have to point out that the service is and has been far far more stable than the "haters" have predicted back when Elon took over and fired all those people.
The most important payload for this flight was data. The ship was always going to be lost so from a standpoint of testing this was a huge success! I'm excited to see how quickly they resolve whatever happened and get IFT 8 going.
Beefed it the day after New Glenn makes orbit on the first try. Different philosophies, I know, but if I were at SpaceX I would be pretty unhappy right now.
I absolutely cannot relate to the HN excitement over rockets. What is the point? What are we going to do with them? It feels like half religion half misplaced techno-positivism.
(Also a person who actively platforms outspoken neo-nazis runs the company that is launching them)
Many of the techie people on HN undoubtedly dreamed of building and flying rockets at some point in their tweens / teens till the harsh realities of the material world took over. So they are vicariously living childhood dreams... Just like many "normal" people live theirs by following sports teams or celebrities. To each their own :-)
It sometimes feels like it: everything blows-up and thread here is like "what a success", Second stage explodes - "beautiful" (while trash is falling into ocean).
Yeah there is a huge amount of rationalizing how the debris aren’t a problem. Everyone is certain it will burn up before hitting the ground, and if it doesn’t, it will land somewhere that doesn’t matter… but I don’t think anyone knows that for sure?
Rockets are cool but it’s everyone’s planet, if this continues to make a huge mess, do us regular earth citizens have recourse?
It seems like they have the chopsticks catch down pretty well, but the ship exploded over the Atlantic so there's gonna have to be more tests before the ship can think about an RTLS test.
More generally, getting the ship to work reusably seems like it will be a considerably greater challenge than reusing the boosters.
Except for that whole second stage and payload part.
Actually I thought there would be less risk with the second stage changes, significant as they were, than the second catch. (Maybe there was less risk, of course, and the dice just didn't roll that way).
@elonmusk
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 vent capacity.
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
At this point in time the humanity has nothing to offer to any other intelligence (if there is any) out there, nor it doesn't have a need itself to go outside of its own planet, and the big mess that it made out of it. It's akin of letting a toddler walk out of the door and roam into a busy street merely for a satisfaction of its curiousity. What is more likely to happen is that the valuable resources that we still have will be gone (it won't take long, as consumption is growing at exponential rate), without ability to recover - a one way ticket to stone age. It's nice to dream and look at the stars, but can we please sort the shit here first?
Every one of these are like right out of a sci-fi novel. It makes me truly excited for our future in a way little else out there does.
Between this, AI (even in its current LLM form), and mounting evidence suggesting the entire solar system is teeming with at least microbial life, we are going to become an interplanetary species far sooner than many “skeptics” imagine.
We are just one more lander / sample mission / whatever away from having solid proof of life elsewhere in the solar system. That is gonna jumpstart all a huge race to get humans out into deep space to check it all out.
People worry about AI stealing their jobs… don’t worry. We need that stuff so humans can focus on the next phase of our history… becoming interplanetary. Your kids will be traveling to space and these (very overhyped, don’t get me wrong) LLM’s will be needed for all kinds of tasks.
It sounds crazy but I maintain it’s true and will happen sooner than you’d think.
I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number. There is nothing in space to travel to until we build extremely complex habitats, and that can't be done with manual human labor, it requires mostly automatic drones and maybe a handful of human controllers living in the ship that brought them there.
And building habitats that any significant amount of people (say, 1000) could actually live in will take a loooong amount of time and a huge amount of resources. And the question of "why would anyone waste time and resources on trying to live in conditions more inhospitable than anything the Earth can ever become, even with a major asteroid crashing into it in the middle of a nuclear war and a global pandemic?" will crop up long before more than one or two of these are finished.
> I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number
Someone born today will have children living into the early 2100s. The first flight ever was a little more than a hundred years ago. Using your kind of logic, no one would have predicted most of the technology we take for granted today.
> It makes me truly excited for our future in a way little else out there does.
Hate to break it to you, but Space X isn't it. You can't have a CEO that is not aligned to the truth and reality to lead a company into something that is beneficial for humanity.
I like how chopsticks catch (a very impressive feat) completely distracts everyone from totally fucked timeline and already spent budget on mars mission. Its like any criticism is being drowned in loud cheers. Only time will tell, but I hope I will be wrong on this one
What's the criticism exactly? Like I don't get your point? Yes they are behind on timelines and on Mars, does that mean that we should post reddit-tier cynical comments every time about that? I'm not saying that you're doing that, it's more that I don't get why this is surprising.
And on the other hand, it's also funny to see how "skeptics" (whatever that means in this case) dismiss or belittle achievements that were claimed to be impossible a few months or years ago (for example, the chopstick landing). It's like a never ending treadmill of
this is impossible->okay it happened, that's cool, but now xyz is impossible.
Plus, it seems normal to me that people care less about some sort of budget details or delays than really cool technical feats.
I’m in a slightly different boat. The CEO’s rubbish behavior sucks, but the company shouldn’t be diminished by that. The people behind SpaceX are a modernd day Apollo Program. Absolute marvels of engineering.
They are making the impossible merely late. Which, you know, is still pretty fucking cool.
I’d love to see any other country or competitor catch a stainless steel rocket larger than the Statue of Liberty that was just cruising back to earth at sub orbital velocity. Everybody else is so far behind it’s not even funny.
Spacex is cool as shit. Screw the “skeptics” and haters. Some people have a complete lack of imagination.
Why does that matter? SpaceX is setting themselves up for failure by insisting that they need to nail re-entry first. Whenever they focused on a test flight for re-entry I'm wondering why they aren't working on more important things like the payload doors or orbital brimming. They will get the re-entry tests for free!
And even if they don't. The upper stage is cheap enough that it can be expended and still be cheaper per flight than Falcon Heavy. So that tells me that the delays are on purpose. Their test flight planning is designed to maximize ego stroking.
Still a failure in my book, it blew up before it could deliver its payload so they couldn't do many the tests they intended to do.
It is possible they will have to add one more test launch to their schedule, delaying commercial operations because of that.
It is not a complete failure, but to me, it is more failure than success, even by SpaceX test flight standards.
Compared to the previous flight, that I consider a success, the booster catch was nice, but it is not the first, and they have plenty of tries left to perfect it, so it is not in the critical path.
they didn't get the telemetry after, what it was, 16 min(?) hope they'll find the reason which will be hard without black boxes like on airplanes. as every engineer knows it works flawlessly only at the end. if ever.
the booster was the same, great, but not surprising.
IIRC they had 30 cameras on board & who knows how many sensors (probably hudreds ?).
So even if an engine bay fire burned the electronics and interrupted all coms (or FTS blew it up) they should already have a lot of data by that point showing how it went wrong.
SpaceX has a way of making the nearly impossible expected. We have forgotten quite quickly that booster catch is still a very experimental feature. Return to base on this flight wasn't routine yet.
Didn't expect it to disintegrate completely. At least they figured out what happened. Well, one step at a time. But that means no orbital flight for next couple of missions.
Looks like second stage broke up over Caribbean, videos of the debris (as seen from ground):
https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662?t=HdHF...
https://x.com/realcamtem/status/1880026604472266800
https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115
Moment of the breakup:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE52_hVSeQz/
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 vent capacity.
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130
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
- "The astronauts considered the Shuttle-Centaur missions to be riskiest Space Shuttle missions yet,[85] referring to Centaur as the "Death Star".[86]"
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
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.
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.
High reliability of airliners is achieved by having redundancy of all critical parts. The idea is no single failure can cause a crash.
For example, if system A has a failure probability of 10%, if A is redundant with another A', the combined failure probability is 1%.
That of course presumes that A and A' are not connected.
Yes for systems, not always for structure. A failed wing spar means everybody dies. For real-world examples, there were two 747 crashes caused by improper repairs to a rear pressure bulkhead or aircraft skin. When the repairs eventually failed, the explosive decompression caused catastrophic damage to the tail in one instance, and total structural failure resulting in a mid-air breakup in the other.
The response to this was to make sure repairs are carried out correctly so the structure doesn’t fail, not to somehow make two redundant bulkheads or two skins.
Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis had the main fuel tank directly in front of him. This was in spite of his primal fear of being burned alive. In some airplanes you sit on the fuel tank.
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
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.
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!
I'm not sure there's fire suppression effective enough for this type of leak (especially given rocket constraints)
Aerospace fire suppression is generally Halon, which would purge the cavity with inert gas.
Actually the Super Heavy (first stage) already uses heavy CO2 based fire suppression. Hopefully not that necessary in the long term, but should make it possible to get on with the testing in the short term.
What is a long term solution for this? Is there something more than "build tanks that don't leak"? I'm sure spaceX has top design and materials experts, now what ;-).
I think its likely not the tanks but rather the plumbing to engines and the engines themselves leaking (sense lines, etc).
Next engine revision (Raptor 3) should help, as it is much simplified and quite less likely to leak or get damaged during flight.
That's interesting
However if you see the stream you can see one of the tanks rapidly emptied before loss of signal
It seems this was not survivable regardless of fire or not
It might not even be about fire suppression. Oxygen and different gases can pool oddly in different types of gravity. If oxygen was leaking, it may be as simple as making sure a vacuum de-gases a chamber before going full throttle.
We know nothing, but the test having good data on what went wrong is a great starting point.
Replying to this comment so people can see the incredible video of the breakup taken from a diverting aircraft:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
If you can displace the oxidizer/air remaining in the volume why not.
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.
If it was really an oxygen/fuel mix burning I don't think you can do much of anything to stop that.
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.
> 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.
Also water would make it hotter, given this is liquid oxygen.
It's not liquid at the point of ignition, that's the thing: if you mixed liquid oxygen and fuel nothing would happen expect the fuel would freeze. For a fire to take place the temperature must reach the fire point temperature, and if you manage to get your fire below this temperature then the fire stops. I don't know how low this temperature can be when the oxidizer is pure oxygen and maybe it's so low water wouldn't be enough, but then you can imagine using other fluids. The problem being the mass burden it adds to a spacecraft, I'm not it'd make any sense given that such q leak should happen in the first place.
I believe LOX is injected into the engine as a liquid, it gets atomised rather than boiled?
And you can have fires where both fuel and oxidiser are solid: thermite reactions.
"Fire point" seems to be more of a factor for conventional fire concerns, albeit I'm judging a phrase I've not heard before by a stub-sized Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_point
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.
First stage (Super Heavy) is flushing the engine bay with massive ammounts of CO2.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, it's not the same thing at all: in the case you're talking about you're shielding against nominal heat, which is not the same thing as contingency planning to extinguish a fire that shouldn't be there in the first place.
Not an expert but I'm not too sure about shockwave in a confined space.
How does Halon works?
just increased venting to keep any vapor concentrations of fuel and oxidiser below that capable of igniting, even simple baffling could suffice as the leaks may be trasitory and flowing out of blowoff valves, so possibly a known risk. Space x is also forgoeing much of the full system vibriatory tests, done on traditiinal 1 shot launches, and failure in presurised systems due to unknown resonance is common. Big question is did it just blow up, or did the automated abort, take it out, likely the latter or there would be a hold on the next launch.
There’s no way that was anything but the automated abort — it was a comprehensive instantaneous rapid event. Or I guess I’d say, however it started, the automated abort kicked in and worked.
Would be unpleasant if there was crew. Of course this thing is pretty far from human eating.
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.
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.
> 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"
My #1 rule for all engineering: simplicity is harder than complexity.
I truly wish more software engineers thought this way. I see a lot of mentality in software where people are even impressed by complexity, like "wow what a complex system!" like it's a good thing. It's not. It's a sign that no effort has been put into understanding the problem domain conceptually, or that no discipline has been followed around reducing the number of systems or restraint over adding new ones.
I've seen incredibly good software engineers join teams and have net negative lines of code contributed for some time.
If we ever encountered, say, an alien race millions of years ahead of us on this kind of technology curve, I think one of the things that would strike us would be the simplicity of their technology. It would be like everything is a direct response and fit to the laws of physics with nothing extraneous. Their software -- assuming they still use computers as we understand them -- would be functional bliss that directly represented the problem domain, with every state a pure function of previous state.
We might get to this kind of software eventually. This is still a young field. Simplicity, being harder than complexity, often takes time and iteration to achieve. Often there's a complexity bloat followed by a shake out, then repeat, over many cycles.
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I've written something good when others look at it and say: "pshaw, anyone could have written that!"
> Their software -- assuming they still use computers as we understand them -- would be functional bliss that directly represented the problem domain, with every state a pure function of previous state.
I love that this is also a model of reality. Everything is made of differential equations.
Modern space ships are very likely to change that, as designs mature and improve.
Early aviation was extremely dangerous. Now a plane is among the safest places to be.
I could imagine the risk going down to a few times air travel after 50+ years of operating a mature launch system.
> (as seen from ground)
As seen from a plane in the air with the break up right in front of it:
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
While the video post does mention "Right in front of us", and it may have appeared that way to the pilots, it wasn't. Gauging relative distance and altitude between aircraft in flight can be notoriously deceptive even to experts, especially in the case of intensely bright, massive, unfamiliar objects at very high speed and great distance.
The RUD was in orbit over 146 kilometers up and >13,000 mph. I'm sure using the FlightAware tracking data someone will work out the actual distance and altitude delta between that plane and the Starship 7 orbital debris. I suspect it was many dozens of miles away and probably still nearly orbital in altitude (~100km).
Spectacular light show though...
Stupid comment. Several flights had to be diverted because of the break-up, and anyone in flight at that time would be rightly concerned about barely-visible high-speed shrapnel showering a much larger area than where the visible debris are - especially when you are responsible for keeping your hundreds of passengers safe in a very unexpected situation with no rehearsed procedure to follow.
Nobody is saying it wasn’t prudent to divert.
It would have been impossible for the pilot to know if that debris was shortly in front of them and at co-altitude or extremely far in front of them and at a significantly higher altitude.
In this case it was almost certainly the latter. But the uncertainty alone was enough to warrant diverting.
> Stupid comment.
Aim higher on HN.
Ok, this:
> Stupid comment
got me. There's literally an HN rule about this: [0]
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I feel like the world would be a better place if people would tone down the ad-hominem in their day-to-day discourse just a little bit.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
this.
It's in front of them enough.
Sure. In a similar way as when the moon is low on the horizon and I stand in my back yard facing it. There's the moon. It's right in front of me... :-)
in a way that if they kept their heading there was a higher than acceptable risk of impact and they had to divert, yes.
As I said, the debris was likely closer to around ~100km in altitude. Commercial airliners fly around ~10km in altitude. Appearing to be at a similar altitude as the plane and "in front" of it was an optical illusion because the debris was intensely bright, very far away, very high and moving several times faster than a bullet. While we don't have exact data yet, I believe it is highly likely there was zero chance of that plane ever hitting that debris given their relative positions. It couldn't even if the pilots weren't mistaken about how close the debris was and they had intentionally tried to hit it. The debris was too far, too high and moving at hypersonic speeds (hence the metal being white hot from atmospheric friction).
Starship's flight paths are carefully calculated by SpaceX and the FAA to achieve this exact outcome. In the event of a RUD near orbit, little to no debris will survive reentry. Any that does survive won't reach the surface (or aircraft in flight) until it is far out into the Atlantic Ocean away from land, people, flight paths and shipping lanes. For Starship launches the FAA temporarily closes a large amount of space in the Gulf of Mexico to air and ship traffic because that's where Starship is low and slow enough for debris to be a threat to aircraft. These planes were flying in the Caribbean, where there was no FAA NOTAM closing their airspace because by the time Starship is over the Caribbean, it's in orbit. If there's a RUD over the Caribbean it's already too high and going too fast for debris to be a threat to aircraft or people anywhere near the Carribean. The only "threat" in the Caribbean today was from anyone being distracted by the pretty light show in orbit far above them (that looked deceptively close from some angles).
> the debris was likely closer to around ~100km in altitude. Commercial airliners fly around ~10km in altitude
(Not wishing to ask the obvious, and depending on the size of the pieces) debris at 100km altitude pretty much always ends up being debris falling through 10km ... right?
Apparently quite a bit of debris made it to the ground -
> The locals here are pissed in Turks and Cacos. Huge dabris rained down everywhere
It's from the pilot at the reddit link above.
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
No pictures or reports of anything falling in the Caribbean. People just love adding to the drama, they will later backtrack and explain that by “rain down” they meant the light show.
It would be extremely unlikely due to the laws of physics, last time I checked they were still in effect.
At the incredible speeds Starship was moving (>13,000 mph) by the time it was over the Caribbean, debris from a Starship is expected to burn up by the time it reaches the surface. But you said "depending on the size", so let's imagine it's a different spacecraft carrying something that won't entirely burn up, like the Mir space station from several years back.
In that scenario, debris from 100km will survive to pass through 10km. The point is: if the mass becomes debris >143km high traveling at >13,000 mph over the Caribbean - it doesn't pass through 10km anywhere near the Caribbean. Even though the friction causing tempered metal to glow white hot is slowing it, the trajectory is ballistic so by the time it slows enough to get that low (10km) it's hundreds or thousands of miles East from where the explosion happened (and where that airplane was).
It's weird because given these orbital velocities and altitudes, our intuitions about up and down aren't very useful. Starship exploded in orbit over the Caribbean, so planes in the Caribbean were safe from falling debris. If it was Mir instead of Starship, planes hundreds or thousands miles to the East of the Caribbean would be at elevated risk. My high school astronomy teacher once said something like "Rockets don't go up to reach orbit. They go sideways. And they keep going sideways faster and faster until they're going so fast, up and down don't matter anymore." While that's hardly a scientific summary, it does give a sense of the dynamics. You'll recall that Mir was intentionally de-orbited so it would land in a desolate part of the Indian Ocean. So, did they blow it up right over the Indian Ocean? Nope. To crash it in the Indian Ocean, given the altitude and speed, they "blew it up" on the other side of Earth, like maybe over Chicago (I actually don't recall where the de-orbit began, but had to be very far away).
> so by the time it slows enough to get that low (10km) it's hundreds or thousands of miles East from where the explosion was seen
Appreciate that, the question would be, do we know that there won't be any aircraft at the right (wrong) altitude in that area(?!)
With aircraft regularly travelling thousands of miles, would be interesting to know whether route choices are made to avoid being "under"* the track of a rocket's launch?
There's apparently another video of the debris, this one appears to show very clearly that the debris is "going sideways"* rather than coming vertically down https://x.com/kristinafitzsi/status/1880032746032230515?s=61
* apologies for the poor phrasing :)
There are people on HN far better qualified than I to discuss both orbital mechanics and spacecraft safety assessments but I'll give it a layman's stab based purely on the high-level concepts (which is all I know).
They know there's little to no risk to aircraft or people hundreds or thousands of miles to the East of a Starship RUD in orbit because they know exactly what's inside Starship and how it's built. They model how it will break up when traveling at these insane speeds and how the metal masses will melt and burn up during re-entry. They actually test this stuff in blast furnaces. It's a statistical model so it's theoretically possible a few small bits could make it to the ground on rare occasion, so we can't say debris will never happen - but there's been a lot of history and testing and the experts are confident it's extremely safe.
The case of the MIR space station was very different than a Starship. MIR was built a long time ago by the Soviet Union and they used a big, heavily shielded power plant. That lead shielding was really the part that had a significant risk of not burning up fully on re-entry. Starship, Starlink satellites and other modern spacecraft are now usually designed to burn up on reentry. However, there are still some things in orbit and things we'll need to put in orbit in the future that won't entirely burn up on reentry. There will always be a very small risk of an accidental uncontrolled reentry causing a threat. However, these risks are vanishingly small both because we design these spacecraft with redundant systems and fail-safes and because Earth is mostly uninhabited oceans, much of our landmasses are unpopulated or sparely populated, even in the unlikely event one of the few spacecraft with a large mass that won't entirely burn up has failed and is de-orbiting out of control, we can still blow it up - and timing that at the right moment will still put it down in a safe place (like it did with MIR). There's no such thing as absolute 100% perfect safety. But you're far, far more likely to die from a great white shark attack than be injured by satellite debris.
More to the point, a huge number of meteorites hit Earth every year and it's estimated over 17,000 survive to hit the surface. There are a bunch listed right now on eBay. Do you know anyone injured by any of the 17,000 space rocks that crashed into our planet this year or any airliners hit by one?
That description of heavy lead shielding of a power plant on Mir surprises me since photos show it as having solar arrays. Wikipedia also gives the power source as solar with no mention of lead components. Can you add further details of this?
There were quite large areas of airspace closed just for this reason via NOTAMS - with airlines grumbling about that even before launch.
> At the incredible speeds Starship was moving (>13,000 mph) by the time it was over the Caribbean, debris from a Starship is expected to burn up by the time it reaches the surface.
Don't the heat tiles at least make it through? And possibly large hunks of metal like the thrust frame and engines.
As I said, I'm only familiar with the high level concepts of vehicle launch safety and not qualified to assess detailed scenarios. I'm just a guy interested enough to read some technical articles and skim a few linked papers several years ago when there was a lot of heat about launch safety from Boca and not much light. When there's a lot of heated rhetoric in the mass media, I find it's better to check directly in scientific and engineering sources.
I dove deep enough to a get sense that these questions have been extremely well-studied and not just by 2020s FAA and SpaceX but going back to the Shuttle and Apollo eras. The body of peer-reviewed engineering studies seemed exhaustive - and not just NASA-centric, the Europeans and Soviets did their own studies too.
Your question is reasonable and occurred to me as well. Components engineered to withstand the enormous heat and pressure of orbital re-entry should be more likely to survive a RUD scenario and subsequent re-entry burn for longer. From what I recall reading, this fits into a safety profile required to ensure very, very low risk because even if a tiny percentage of mass occasionally survives to reach the surface, the actual risk that surviving mass presents is a combination of its quantity, mass, piece size, velocity and, most importantly, where any final surviving bits reach the surface.
I recall seeing a diagram dividing the Boca orbital launch trajectory into windows, like: right around the launch pad, out over the gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Atlantic, Africa, Indian ocean, and so on. The entire path until it's out over empty Atlantic ocean has minimal land, people and stuff under it. The gulf of Mexico is by far the highest risk because the rocket is still relatively low and slow. A RUD there could potentially be a lot of stuff coming down. There's not a lot out there in the gulf, just a few ships and planes but the FAA closes a huge area because, while the statistical risk is very low in an absolute sense, it's still too high to take chances.
For later windows, they don't close the corridor underneath to plane and ship traffic because the rocket's much greater speed and altitude later in the flight allows more precisely modeling where the debris field will come down. There was another diagram showing a statistical model of a debris field impact zone as an elongated oval with color-coded concentric rings dividing the debris mass into classes. The outermost ring is the debris that breaks up into smaller, lighter pieces. It's the widest and longest but it's the stuff that's much lower risk because it's smaller and slower.
The smallest concentric ring in the middle is where the small amount of heavier pieces most likely to survive will come down, if any do survive. As you'd expect, that innermost ring is shifted toward the far end of the oval and is a much smaller area. The headline I took away was that there's a very small amount of higher mass debris that both A) is less likely to break up into tiny, lower mass pieces, and B) is less likely to completely burn up. This is the higher-risk mass and, due to its mass, it tends to stay on trajectory, go fastest, farthest and not spread out much. In short, the statistical model showed a very high probability of any higher risk stuff which survives coming down in a surprisingly tiny area. The overall safety model is based on a combination of factors working together so it meets the safety requirements in each window of the flight for each class of mass. The carefully chosen launch location, spacecraft design, component materials, flight path and a bunch of other factors all work together to put the small amount of higher risk stuff down somewhere that fits the safety profile of very, very low risk to people and property. Disclaimer: I've probably got some details wrong and left some things out but this is the sense I got from what I learned. I came away feeling that the safety work done on space launches is comprehensive, diligent and based on a long history of robust, peer-reviewed science backed up by detailed engineering tests as well as real-world data from decades of launches, RUDs and de-orbits.
A fun side story: a few months ago I was at the Hacker's Conference and Scott Manley ("Everyday Astronaut" on YouTube) was attending as he often does. He brought along some interesting space artifacts just to set out on a table for casual show and tell. I was able to pick up and examine a Starship heat tile that was fished out of the gulf of Mexico. It was surprisingly light weight. Sort of like a thick wall piece from a styrofoam picnic cooler. It had a very thin hard shell on one side. This shell was clearly very brittle as it had already been broken up and I was holding an index card-sized shattered piece that weighed maybe a couple ounces. This was clearly not something that was going to maintain structural integrity post-RUD. Once it wasn't packed tightly together into a smooth aerodynamic surface, it's gonna shred into tiny pieces. And that seemed by design - which apparently worked as intended because even without a RUD, at the low and slow speeds over the gulf and near the launch pad it did shatter into small, light pieces - assisted only by the rocket tipping over into the water followed by the relatively mild explosion of the remaining propellant (mild compared to an unimaginably violent orbital RUD, that is). Holding it I remembered the debris field oval diagram and thought, "this is smaller, slower, safer stuff in the outer zones."
Everyday Astronaut is Tim Dodd.
Oops! I somehow conflated two space YouTubers who I sometimes watch and appreciate. Scott Manley is just Scott Manley on YouTube. Thanks for the correction.
I know this is just another reddit post so could be fake, but supposedly debris is already washing ashore in Turks and Caicos. Specifically in this post a heat shield tile, but the poster mentions other stuff on the beach. So at least some debris probably dropped nearby.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1i3na4a/...
As I said above, the safety model predicts some lightweight stuff with a consistency not much stiffer than tin foil and coated styrofoam could fall not that far downrange. However, that's also the exact stuff that doesn't present serious risk to people or property.
So even if those claims are true, just finding a little debris doesn't invalidate the safety model or indicate there was ever unacceptable risk. The real question is if any debris from a higher risk class fell in a place the safety model didn't predict and why. That would certainly be notable and worth incorporating into future safety models.
In the absence of solid confirmation, I'm going to stick with the model and the basic physics. If the debris is just the expected stuff, I'm sure SpaceX regrets littering the beaches and should definitely pay for some crews to pick that stuff up and trash it.
No, all or the absolute majority of it burns around 50km.
The ISS is in the front of every plane and behind it every 90 minutes.
To be clear, you’re claiming that this was in fact behind them?
No, I think he is claiming that if they kept flying straight they would not collide with any debris.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
Fiery the angels fell, Deep thunder rolled around their shores, burning with the fires of Orc
That is absolutely insane. Honestly, I would probably assume a MIRV given the current environment.
What a strangely beautiful sight. While I was excited to see ship land, I'm also happy I get to see videos of this!
Yes, both spectacular and beautiful. I guess Starship can now say what the legendary comedy actress (and sex symbol) of early cinema Mae West said:
"When I'm good... I'm very good. But when I'm bad... I'm even better." :-)
Combined with another tower catch, that's two spectacular shows for the price of one. Hopefully the onboard diagnostic telemetry immediately prior to the RUD is enough to identify the root cause so it can be corrected.
I felt.. bad watching that breakup, it reminded me of Columbia.
Which coincidentally launched 22 years ago today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-107
I remember being woken up by the thunder from Columbia.
Lost it over the years but I used to have a photo of about 20 vans of people parked on our property doing the search for debris. Don't think they found any on our land but there was a 3 ft chunk about 5 miles down the road.
I remember waiting for the sonic boom, that never came…
OTOH I remembered Columbia too and I felt good knowing that Starship is being tested thoroughly without jeopardizing the crew.
The space-shuttle could not fly to the orbit automatically. It had to have people on board, and the first flight, IIRC, came close to a disaster.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted, but I thought this too.
Meta-commentary is annoying (yes, I realize the irony.)
As long as the debris has no effect wherever it lands, I agree with you
A lot of flights seem to be diverting to avoid it...
https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lfvhpgmqqc2...
Does SpaceX bother with NOTAM for its launches?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM
It seems like the flights should have been planned around it so no diversion would be needed.
My understanding is that there are areas which are noted as being possible debris zones across the flight path, but that aircraft are not specifically told to avoid those areas unless there an actual event to which to respond.
If my understanding is correct, it seems sensible at least in a hand-wavy way: you have a few places where things are more likely to come down either unplanned or planned (immediately around the launch site and at the planned deorbit area), but then you have a wide swath of the world where, in a relatively localized area, you -might- have something come down with some warning that it will (just because the time it takes to get from altitude to where aircraft are). You close the priority areas, but you don't close the less likely areas pro-actively, but only do so reactively, it seems you'd achieve a balance between aircraft safety and air service disruptions.
They do but its not clear to me whether the area where it broke up was actually included in the original NOTAM. The NOTMAR definitely does not according to the graphic shown on the NASASpaceflight stream. They are still live so I can't link a time code but something like -4:56 in this stream as of posting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nM3vGdanpw
Since i couldn't find the time code in the video, i put a map together with both NOTAM and NOTMAR.
map: https://github.com/kla-s/Space/blob/main/Map_NOTMAR_NOTAM_Sp... description: https://github.com/kla-s/Space/tree/main
Lets hope this is the year of Linux desktop and i didn't violate any licenses or made big errors ;)
Actually, this video is a good indication for exactly what transpired:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE
It's ATC audio captured during the event.
This video, the map elsewhere in this subthread, and the stream recording give a nicely detailed view into what went down. It seems like everything went like it was supposed to in terms of pre-warning, but based on the video the information didn't make it to pilots with coinciding flight plans until after the fact.
As far as I understand airline pilots have a high level of authority and diverting probably was the right call depending on the lag between seeing it and knowing what it was or if there was a risk of debris reaching them. They wouldn't necessarily know how high it got or what that means for debris.
Yeah... and ATC for a good while didn't have any estimate for time to resolution. So, do you run the airplane's fuel down to a minimal reserve level in hopes that the restrictions might lift... or just call it done and divert?
I think it's an absolutely reasonable choice to just say comfortably divert rather than try to linger in hopes of it not lasting too long and possibly ending up diverting anyway... but on minimums.
Understandable, but an over reaction. Any debris not burning up is falling down after minutes.
Would you bet hundreds of lives and millions of dollars on that?
Yes. Space debris near orbiting speeds doesn't fall straight down, it's simple physics.
If anything planes much further downrange (thousands of km) should be diverted, not immediately under the re-entry point.
The planes diverting were downrange. Also, I doubt they had much information to go off, and were essentially flying blind about where the debris were unless they had a direct line to NORAD.
Do you have a better explanation why they are doing donuts over the pacific at the time of reentry, then were diverted?
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/ABX3133
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N121BZ/history/20250...
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/NKS172
I was on r/flightradar24 and someone was listening on ATC and heard that one of the flights declared emergency due to fuel.
Other planes were also caught up in the chaos but SJU was at capacity apparently
The ATC is up on YouTube - I heard it on the vatsim channel. ATC would not let pilots transit the designated danger airspace without declaring an emergency. So they did.
I don't have. Maybe they were indeed diverted because people got scared? Still seems pointless given the distances involved. Most reports are coming from social media / people watching flightradar24, and news media is just picking those up.
There are several, all at the same time, all in the same area, where the debreis was seen.
Why do you think it is pointless?
If I am a pilot and the tower says "debris seen heading east of Bahamas", I probably wont want to keep flying towards that direction.
Yeah, it is probably low risk, but I dont have a super computer or detailed map of the Starship debris field or entry zone.
> donuts over the pacific
Atlantic
Doh!
Nuts!
It wasn’t at orbital speeds yet.
Over 21000km/h when it broke up, compared to ~28k for stuff orbiting in LEO. Should still go quite far.
Yes, although drag is gonna be… substantially higher like this as well.
Does melting down not reshape metallic particles into ideal droplett parts ?
No.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/world/africa/kenya-space-...
More as long as there were no humans onboard
Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
The number of SpaceX video clips that I know are "actual things really happening" which still activate the involuntary "Sci-Fi / CGI effect" neurons in my brain is remarkable.
Yeah. I know that feeling.
That tower catch. That _had_ to be a new version of Kerbal, right? The physics looked good, but there's no way that was real...
Indeed. The one that still flips a bit in my brain is the two Falcon rockets landing in unison side by side. I'd say it was high-end CGI except no director would approve an effects shot of orbital rockets landing in such a perfect, cinematically choreographed way.
It would just be sent back to ILM marked "Good effort, but too obviously fake. Rework to be more realistic and resubmit."
Just to link that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbSwFU6tY1c&t=1793s
Such an unbelievable moment. And I also think an indicator of how much better society could be if we focused more on doing amazing things. The comments on YouTube are just filled with hope optimism and general awesomeness. FWIW that link goes straight to the moneyshot - it's always so much better if you watch it all the way through. It's an amazing broadcast.
When I was in elementary school back in the 1970s, I read every sci-fi book in the tiny school library. They were all old, even then. Early stuff by Asimov, Heinlein and Bova. Paperbacks on cheap pulp with cover paintings of rockets sitting upright on alien terrain. Tiny people in space suits climbing down ladders to explore a new world.
With the Apollo moon landings in recent memory, I'd read those sci-fi books late at night with a flashlight under the covers of my bed and then fall asleep thinking about how "I'll still be alive 50 years from now. I'll get to actually live in the world of the future. Maybe I'll even work in space." And by the time I graduated from high school it was already becoming clear things were going much to slow for me to even see humans colonizing Mars. And that was reality until about a decade ago.
So, yeah. Watching the live video of the first successful Starship orbital launch with my teenage daughter... I got a little choked up, which surprised me. Felt like discovering a very old dream that's been buried too long. And somehow the damn thing's still alive. Or maybe I just got something in my eye. Anyway, I know it's too late for me to ever work off-planet. But maybe not for my kid... so, the dream lives on. It just had to skip a generation.
Thank you for this beautiful comment. I could have written it word for word. I still watch every Starship launch with my kids, and CRS-7 was the first Falcon launch that we missed watching live. At that time we were waiting months between launches. And I'm currently petting a dog named Asimov while writing this.
SpaceX brought our childhood dreams back. But more importantly, SpaceX is bringing our naive childhood expectations to fruitation.
Seeing a rocket land vertically goes against almost 70 years of what we "know" about rockets. Falcon 9 rockets landing on legs seem unnatural enough; now we have a rocket, the size of a 20-story building, landing on chopsticks.
There are lots of vertical-landing rockets ... in science fiction, and only before Sputnik in 1957. Once actual space programs came about and lots of engineers understood just how difficult landing a rocket is compared to launching it, they all went away. Fictional vehicles became more and more complex to make them "realistic" (that is, consistent with real spacecraft on the news), or just didn't bother with the details at all and went to quasi-magic technologies like in Star Wars and Star Trek.
SpaceX is taking us to the future by going with something from the past.
SpaceX landing and catching boosters is amazing, but landing rockets is not new: all the Apollo LMs, indeed everything ever landed on the Moon was done with "vertical-landing" rockets.
Not to rain too much on your harping, but the DC-X program did vertical landing 30 years ago.
Yes, and that was all the experimental program did. No humans on board, no payloads, no orbit, not even suborbital as they stayed close to the ground.
The Falcon 9 puts humans into orbit then turns around and lands not far from the launch tower. It's then brought in for maintenance and a few weeks later launching again - some of them have done 20 flights.
You’re comparing an experimental program that lasted 6 years with a company founded 22 years ago. How many payload flights did space-x do 6 years into its existence?
No, you made that comparison two posts up. I just replied to you ))
Nice, what happened of it?
It happened at about the time budgetary winter happened for the us space budget, so there was no follow-up on the demonstrator.
Excitement guaranteed
>What a strangely beautiful sight.
"My god, Bones, what have I done?"
It’s a pretty expensive way to make fireworks.
Inadvertently perfect timing for this footage. Glowing and backlit by the setting sun, against clear and already darkening evening sky... couldn't plan the shot any better if you tried.
Let's hope no debris came down on anyone or anything apart from open water.
I take it if SpaceX debris hit and destroyed a boat the owner can claim damages from SpaceX?
Does international space law allow for this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Liability_Convention
Only used once, when the Soviets dropped a nuclear reactor on Canada.
> States (countries) bear international responsibility for all space objects that are launched within their territory. This means that regardless of who launches the space object, if it was launched from State A's territory, or from State A's facility, or if State A caused the launch to happen, then State A is fully liable for damages that result from that space object.
But don't forget about a local government in Australia fining NASA $400 for littering after debris from Skylab re-entry landed there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab#Re-entry_and_debris
I feel like it should be updated. When it was written it wasn't like every Musk could launch high-orbit rockets on sundays. Only actual states did.
The convention does not prevent national law from providing private liability which may come into play between entities subject to the jurisdiction of the same state or between the state who is liable to other states under the convention and entities operating within the state. So, there is no need to update the convention; the states from which private launches operate simply need adequate domestic law to cover both fully-internal liability and private launcher liability for claims against the government under the convention. (And the US generally does, with the basic regulatory regime being adopted and the private space launch industry operating in the 1980s; it is not an issue that arose with Musk/SpaceX.)
FAA launch licenses require substantial liability insurance. 500 million in this case.
https://drs.faa.gov/browse/excelExternalWindow/DRSDOCID17389...
No expert, but I would assume, the USA would front it, but then take a case against SpaceX. So it would be Boat Owner v. USA, then USA v. SpaceX shortly after. Although I could be totally wrong.
But yea, seems appropriate to update it or if that is going to be the process, write it in stone.
States can set whatever rules they like internally. The US can make SpaceX pay them back if they want.
Every rocket flight has to be approved by the government. No launch until FAA (and also FCC) OK's it.
Does the thing have to have got into space and then come back for this to apply?
As I recall a village in Australia also billed NASA with their standard municipal littering fine, for skylab debris that landed there, and the bill was paid 20+ years later by a radio station as a publicity stunt.
Most things put into space are designed to burn upon uncontrolled descent through orbit. And then the overwhelming majority of Earth is water and even on land the overwhelming majority of land is either completely uninhabited or sparsely inhabited. And then even if against all odds somehow something doesn't burn up in the atmosphere, and somehow lands in a densely populated area - the odds of hitting a spot with somebody or something relevant on it is still quite low. The overall odds of actually hitting somewhere really bad are just astronomically low.
Nonetheless, recently NASA won the lottery when part of some batteries they jettisoned from the ISS ended up crashing through a house in Florida. [1] Oddly enough there are treaties on this, but only from an international perspective - landing on your own country was not covered! But I'm certain NASA will obviously make it right, as would SpaceX. If they didn't, then surely the family could easily sue as well.
[1] - https://www.space.com/space-debris-florida-family-nasa-lawsu...
It's probably similar to if a US ship crashed into your yacht.
Rules of the water says smaller ship yields right of way to bigger ship. Sounds like you screwed up if your yacht got hit by a bigger ship. Of course that applies when the vessels are not tied up. If a big ship his a docked boat, that's an entirely different scenario
There is a whole hierarchy of right of way on the water, but a better rule of thumb is that the less maneuverable boat generally has priority.
https://www.whoi.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Abbreviated-...
And of course there's the old tale:
Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.
Canadians: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.
Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.
Canadians: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.
Americans: This is the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the United States' Atlantic fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers and numerous support vessels. I demand that YOU change your course 15 degrees north, that's one five degrees north, or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship.
Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_ur...
> Rules of the water says smaller ship yields right of way to bigger ship. Sounds like you screwed up if your yacht got hit by a bigger ship.
Not necessarily. Steam is obliged to give way to sail, even when the sailing ship is much smaller.
There is a lovely bit of complication with it! Not saying to correct you, just because i think it is a lovely bit of trivia even though it has nothing to do with space debris.
Both sailing and power driven vessels need to give ways to (among other things) “vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver”. And an aircraft carrier launching or recovering aircraft is considered to be restricted in her ability to maneuver (quite rightfully so, it is hard enough to land on them without the ship swerving left and right).
So that means that a mighty aircraft carrier needs to (at least according to the regulations) dodge tiny sailing ships, but once they start launching or recovering aircraft it is the responsibility of the sailing ship to avoid them.
Source: Rule 18 of the ColRegs (The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea 1972)
Where do Methalox-powered vehicles lie in this hierarchy?
And if the Starship is not under power yet falling and using the flaperons for control, is that considered "under sail" for purposes of right of way?
For funsies i would call it a “vessel not under command”. At least after the breakup that feels to fit.
But for real, i think the simple answer is that debris falling from space is outside of the scope of the ColRegs. Simply speaking they come too fast so you can’t maneuver your vessel out of their way, and unless you are a warship you don’t have the tools to even know where exactly they will hit. If you try to run you might even put yourself in their path. After all from the most unlucky position they would be just bright stationary spots on the sky getting ever so slightly bigger. Until they start to get bigger faster and faster. (Constant bearing and decreasing range being the hallmarks of an impending colision.)
https://www.npr.org/2024/06/23/nx-s1-5016923/space-debris-na...
Musk said that part of the launch licensing was a requirement to estimate the potential damage to whales in the ocean. He said that the odds turned out to be so low that in his opinion if a whale gets hit it had it coming.
https://jabberwocking.com/did-elon-musk-really-have-to-study...
If a whale got hit, would the whale be able to file for damages?
Given that the engine telemetry shown on the broadcast showed the engines going out one by one over a period of some seconds, I could easily imagine some sort of catastrophic failure on a single engine that cascaded.
It could be many things, plumbing to the engines, tank leak, ect. You could see fire on the control flap actuators, so the ship interior was engulfed in fire at the same time the first engine was out.
Given the huge spread of the debris, it must have been a decent sized boom, no? I mean that's got to be 10's of miles wide in this video.
https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115
do we know when this video was taken? this could just be ship breaking up during re-entry because it lost altitude control. not necessarily the moment of the primary failure.
the flight termination system is sort of a shaped charge that's designed to rupture the oxidizer and fuel tanks. Even if only a few % fuel remains, it'll be a big boom.
For context, The lower stage reportedly has 150 tons of propellant on board when it lands.
The whole thing (booster et al) is around 1/3 as tall as the Eiffel tower... for context
The full stack is taller than some skyscrapers... for context.
It wasn't FTS, it just blew up: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1880033318936199643
That doesn't explicitly say that it wasn't FTS. Activation of the FTS is never scheduled and it results in rapid disassembly. There's speculation that it flew for a significant time after losing telemetry. FTS is designed to activate if it goes off course (if it's still on course, it's better to keep flying).
Yeah, I was wondering if it was FTS. I guess it doesn't really matter as FTS is just designed to intentionally cause the same kind of RUD that happened anyway. The main criteria is a RUD sufficient to ensure pieces small enough to burn up on reentry. From the looks of the explosion from the videos helpfully captured from the ground, the RUD certainly looked sufficient. Given it was 146km up at >13,000 mph, rolling down a window would trigger a sufficient RUD.
At those speeds, temps and pressures exploding into tiny pieces isn't just easy - it's the default. NOT exploding is much harder!
Oh interesting, maybe that's why the debris looked so interesting
Yeah, most likely engine bay fire taking out systems one by one. Would be interesting to compare the telemetry cutoff with the video of explosion if possible. That could indicate if the fire even triggered an explosion, flight termination being activated or just reentry heating making the tanks explode.
Who knows where it started, but the fire was definitely in the payload bay in front of the header tanks if seen through the flap actuators during ascent, after speration at ~7:45 min
The single instance of a fire that could be seen in the stream was in the hinge area of a bottom flap.
I noticed that the CH4 tank level was much lower than the O2 tank level. That suggests a leak.
Or FOD in the LOx supply lines. The methane would keep following, even with the turbopump shut down, until the valve closes. And the methane turbopump might actually keep running with reduced supply oxygen - Raptors have two turbopumps.
There's a flickering flame briefly visible on the flap hinge of the second stage in the last footage it sent down.
Most Sci-Fi real footage I have ever seen.
Edit: Reminds me of "The Eye" from star wars Andor
https://youtu.be/9lrr0CWHDGA?t=43
Wow. It reminds me of the comet scene from Andor. I wonder if suborbital pyrotechnics will become a thing one day.
> one day
today!
Watching those videos, my hand naturally looks for the roller ball from too much time playing missile command
Probably one of the most expensive fireworks (but probably still cheaper than the first Ariane 5 launch), but it looks very cool.
I think the N1 test flights are also a contender. I still remember something about kerosene raining for 15 minutes after the explosion.
Does anyone know the timing of when the breakup actually occurred?
I’m curious because I was on a flight to Puerto Rico from Florida at 3pm ET they diverted our flight. They didn’t really give us many details but said the “landing strips were closed”. Our friends on a slightly early flight diverted to ST Thomas. We were going to divert to a nearby airport in Puerto Rico (we were going to land in Aguadilla instead of San Juan) so I feel like these diversions wouldn’t be related but the timing seems pretty odd.
Depending on the precise launch time (4:36/4:37 PM CST) "Ship exploded at ≈T+00:08:26": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_7
I'm not worried about the Starship itself, but it looks kinda dangerous. Is it?
It's very likely it exploded on purpose by SpaceX after it wasn't showing good data (aka Flight Termination System). Specifically over water.
Is there a video you don't need to log in to view?
The fourth one (instagram) doesn't require login.
Side note: annoying that twitter/X requires login. I'd have sworn Elon said he was removing that requirement to login to view tweets (I think he discussed it with George Hotz).
Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=49m30s
Elon:
> This is insane. You shouldn't need a twitter account at all unless you need to write something
George:
> Why did you put the pop up back?
Elon:
> We should not be prohibiting read-only scroll
So there seems to be agreement that twitter shouldn't require an account to read (view) posts. The Twitter Space is from 23 Dec 2022 so perhaps things changed since.
Instagram requires login. Twitter does not.
Twitter started requiring login post acquisition. Never did before.
I just closed the login prompt for the insta link, and watched the video. So it does prompt one to login, but it definitely isn't required to watch the video from that link
I'd have sworn I was unable to view tweets recently without logging in. But maybe I was wrong.
Instagram lets me view the video without login (I have to click the 'X' in the top-right of annoying popup, but I can watch it without logging in).
It's not just you, they've been inconsistent about letting you see tweets.
Musk's promises never age well, but, really, this particular dialog should be a meme.
https://mastodon.social/@BNONews/113840549980938951
for the record I was able to watch without logging in, on Firefox Linux
Where will this debris land? Can it impact airplane routes?
https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1880032865209184354
>Commercial flights are turning around to avoid potential debris.
That sounds... unlikely, to say the least. The ship blew up at 145km altitude over Turks and Caicos. Debris would fall thousands of kilometers to the east, if anything survives re-entry.
EDIT: at these speeds, over 20000km/h, the falling debris will travel a very long way before coming down. For satellite re-entry, the usual estimated ground contact point is something like 8000km+ downrange [1]. There is little chance debris would come anywhere near commercial flight altitude in the area around where the videos were made.
Apparently the planned splashdown was in the Indian Ocean near Australia, but this being an uncontrolled re-entry it could be far off from that, in either direction.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457652...
Im not sure what part you are skeptical about. The debris videos filmed at Turks and Caicos are about 800km east of the explosion video in the Bahamas. They appear to be real. Still high but coming down fast.
Airspace is big, but I wouldn't want to fly a Jet with hundreds of people near it either.
I imagine aviation radar towers would only have the most limited data as the event unfolded.
Arlines are extremely cautious around these kinds of one off events.
It’s not about the calculated risks, but the uncertainty around if they have the right information in the first place. Sure it may have broken up at 145km miles, but what if someone messed up and it actually was 14.5km etc.
Main priority to prevent accidents is to migrate away from this imperial system.
You can forget to carry a 1 in metric, too.
It won't save everything will will reduce at least two possibles routes of mistake (wrong unit, or imprecise conversion).
OP wrote "km miles", which would create an incident.
SpaceX uses metric system for that exact reason, because in the past, on Mars, accident happened because of imperial measures.
Yep, the point of saying “km miles” was the hypothetical uncertainty around units even for European airlines who use metric internationally. However, even within metric might be some question around units.
No, airlines do not build in a safety factor sufficient to cover an important measurement being off by a factor of 10.
They don't ground flights because the pilot might load 2,000 litres of fuel instead of 20,000 litres. They don't take evasive action in case the other plane is travelling at 5,000 knots instead of 500 knots. They don't insist on a 30-km runway because the runway published as 3 km might only be 300 metres.
You misunderstood what I’m saying. Airlines have systems to validate the amount of fuel loaded and currently aboard aircraft that have been battle tested across decades including fixes due to past issues etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Transat_Flight_236
They don’t have that level of certainty around what altitude a rocket exploded, or other one off event.
Unlike fuel gauges, land surveys, and radar, fast-breaking news of explosions carries a significant risk of mistransmission or inaccuracy. They might know when/where the explosion occurred, but not necessarily have much confidence on how fast debris might have been ejected and in which directions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE ATC was being extremely cautious and diverting planes over quite a large area for quite some time to avoid the risk of debris hitting airplanes.
Can you not understand the difference between a stated measurement of a runway or drain fuel requirement, and a stated location of a unique explosion that happened just a few minutes ago? Are you prepared to bet 200 lives that no one fat-fingered the number?
What if the information comes outside a system they control or organization they have no prior experience with?
> at these speeds, over 20000km/h, the falling debris will travel a very long way before coming down.
Without air resistance, falling 145 km takes 172 seconds, which would result in the debris falling 956 km east of the explosion point if it were moving horizontal to the ground to begin with. With air resistance, it is substantially shorter as everything is decelerating proportional to the velocity cubed. If we approximate the terminal velocity of the debris as 500 km/h, to a first order approximation it would travel approximately 79 km east. The distance from West Caicos island to Grand Turk island is 138 km, for reference.
Satellites are moving much faster and at much higher altitude. Starship was not in orbit.
Certainly causing delays.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-17/spacex-launch-to-go-a...
I'm not at all qualified to speculate. So I'll just add that for those unfamiliar with him, the person who posted that tweet is an astrophysicist with a popular YT channel.
Yeah, most likely an understandable overreacting givent the fireworks. But better safe than sorry in this case. :-)
east of Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Draw a line from Boca Chia to Turks and keep going
A great circle line tho
HN comments is just reading strangers steam of consciousness now?
It’s crazy how fast that ship is moving and how big the explosion was that it looks like something much, much lower in the air went boom. It was transitting the sky faster than a commercial aircraft does. So it gives an impression more like a private aircraft breaking up at 5-10k feet.
The last one is stage separation, not an explosion. You can clearly see the "exploded" rocket continuing to fly afterwards.
Separation is much closer to the launch pad in Texas, the booster barely makes it downrange at all before turning around. This being filmed from the Bahamas with this much lateral velocity, gotta be the Ship breaking up. Likely the FTS triggered after enough engines failed that it couldn't make orbit / planned trajectory.
I dont think so. I think it is the breakup, with a large mass visible. most of the material will continue on until it parabolically renters and burns up in a visible manner
No, if that was taken from the Bahamas, that's an explosion connected to the loss of the 2nd stage.
Staging happens closer to the Texas coast and I don't believe you'd have line of sight to it from the Bahamas.
I'd say it might be after the loss of the craft. It was losing engines for a while then lost telemetry. This would have been a bit later when it started tumbling in the atmosphere on re-entry. Hopefully we'll know for sure in a few days.
That's for sure not stage separation, that's an explosion from the FTS rupturing the ship tanks.
If it was the FTS wouldn't the flight control systems send a message back to the ground saying "things are going sideways here, FTS Activated"
Maybe it did, or is it public that it didn't? A possible sequence (very typical in rocket failures) is: fire, engine failure(s), loss of control, rupture due to aero forces or FTS activation, explosion due to propellant mixture. Not all of these have to happen, but it's a typical progression. Before the days of AFTS the FTS activation would be pretty delayed.
Eh I'm thinking more it was a reentry explosion from pressurized tanks. Engines had failed a while before then.
This is over the Bahamas. Re-entry was much further east, near Turks and Caicos Islands.
Also, if a pressurized tank is reentering, that means the FTS failed to detonate.
Nope. That's definitely an explosion (source: I'm in the rocket business). However it may not be an explosion of the whole stage. Probably of the engine section.
Nevermind. It was probably the FTS like other people pointed out.
Does anyone know where the debris landed? In the ocean? Or just burnt out in the atmosphere?
Wasn't going fast enough to fully burn up. There'll be small pieces of debris scattered over quite a large area.
More views:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-S8CK6LgnD4
https://x.com/DavidCaroe/status/1880036195985682710
Even more:
https://x.com/jp_ouellette/status/1880029255813459973
https://x.com/Sitting_Analyst/status/1880033972748709995
https://x.com/nickpags45/status/1880028951885816056
Seen from an Airplane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zC0K0YZEzg
I have a boat and want to pick up floating heat tiles in the ocean, do you think we can find the parts by Puerto Rico?
No
I think this was the first test of StarShip v2. I'd be surprised if everything worked after they redesigned the whole StarShip. That would be like refactoring Microsoft Windows by hand-typing new code and expecting it to run without errors on the first try.
Where can I find the heat tiles? Will they be landing near Puerto Rico?
What a show
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE54iL7xbZL/?igsh=dTNtZ2Q4aHl...
It's beautiful. Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
Cue Aerosmith song.
Looks like work of the Flight Termination System. Something measurable had to go very wrong.
While the telemetry was still going, you could see Ship engines going out one by one. Earlier when there was video there was what looked like flames visible inside one of the flap hinges, definitely shouldn't be there on ascent. Presumably something failed internally and caused the Ship to shut down before reaching target trajectory, at which point either FTS or the failure itself caused it to blow up, as seen on the Insta reel.
On the NSF youtube channel they pointed out that at some point the methane indicator started decreasing much faster than the LOX indicator, which points to some sort of leak. It would explain why the engines started to shut down.
> Something measurable had to go very wrong
Or slightly wrong. An FTS is programmed to be conservative. Particularly on unmanned flights. Doubly particularly on reëntry. Triply so on experiments bits.
Depends on the programmers I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All of the exception handling was spent on the try/catch of the booster.
> Depends on the programmers I guess
It depends on the Air Force.
It wasn't FTS, it just blew up: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1880033318936199643
That doesn't negate FTS.
Imo if SpaceX thought it was possibly FTS they wouldn't say RUD. They still had telemetry for multiple seconds as it pitched wildly and engines failed, if FTS didn't trigger then it probably didn't at all.
Yeah I thought about that some more and at that altitude and speed the FTS is usually already deactivated.
Another failure, another few months of figuring out why this isn't working and can't stick to its flight path. They caused chaos for many commercial planes, so they'll definitely need some full reports to the FTA to know what they're doing about this, why the debris is falling over flight paths, and so on.
First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon.
To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew.
Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
i guess you didn't follow the falcon 9 failures right? here's two minutes of failures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone.
NASA (with the shuttle and saturn V) had a completely different idea on rocket development (and blue origin seems to follow their mindset), which is fine. but to say that this is "failure fetish" when spacex has an amazing track record is just hating for the sake of hating.
i would recommend, if you have the time, the book liftoff, by eric berger https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac... -- it was the book that opened my eyes to why spacex works like they do.
SpaceX’s track record is too fetishized by the Musk fanboys. Falcon 9 has some weird Demi god status even though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz.
I might have missed it, but I’ve never seen a Soyuz booster fly twice, let alone 25 times.
Part of why it has "weird Demi god status" is that it is not only so reliable but also so cheap. Soyuz is not reusable. Falcon 9 is. That is why Falcon 9 is so celebrated. No other rocket company or state-sponsored space agency comes close to its track record of cheap, reliable, reusable rockets.
Soyuz? an expendable rocket with 40% less payload capacity? How is that a competitor to falcon 9? More like a competitor to rocketlab's current generation.
It's been so weird to see people say willfully ignorant shit just because they don't like Elon Musk.
"though the launch vehicle is no different than the competitor like Soyuz"
That is ... so obviously and blatantly untrue. That is like saying that an old wooden biplane from 1917 is not different from Boeing 777.
Apollo WAS an impressive achievement
Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data
New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time
Per wiki on Apollo
> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $182 billion in 2023 US dollars)[22] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[23]
Different budget, different number of people working on this stuff and different mindset. Actually the Apollo program was also iterative and it paid off.
The Apollo program was inventing all of this technology, and using only extremely rudimentary computers, still doing many calculations with slide rulers.
SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.
SpaceX is inventing quite a lot, there's more areas where they started greenfield than where they got help.
They are inventing a little, but the basics of rocket flight are now well understood. You can get a university (probably post grad) course on it. And nothing that they are doing is all that revolutionary, definitely not compared to what Apollo did (going from airplanes and ballistic missiles to orbital space flight and then Moon missions).
Consider that even reusable self-landings boosters were being worked on in the 90s, before funding was cut off. And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight, launching some kind of payload to orbit.
- "And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight,"
That doesn't resonate as true to me.
The first Ariane 5 flight blew up [0]. That Europe's current heavy-lift workhorse with 112 successful launches (including JWST), but the first one blew up.
The first PSLV blew up [1]. That's India's current workhorse with 58 successes, but flight #1 was not successful. Their GSLV did not reach its correct orbit on its first flight either [2], though it didn't blow up.
The first Delta IV Heavy did not blow up, but it failed to reach its correct orbit [3]. That was US' largest launch vehicle for most of the 21st century.
The first Long March 5 failed to reach its correct orbit, and the second one blew up [4]. That's China's current heavy-lift launch vehicle, since 2016.
South Korea's first orbital rocket RUD'd both its first flights, in 2009 and 2010 [5].
Japan's newest orbital rocket was launched in 2023, and that blew up [6].
Rocket Labs' Electron has a current >90% success rate, but the first one blew up [7].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5#Launch_history
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PSLV_launches#Statisti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GSLV_launches#Statisti...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy#Launch_history
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_5
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naro-1#Launch_history
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H3_(rocket)#Launch_history
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron#Launch_sta...
You're right that I exaggerated, sorry about that.
Still, many of these are more successful than Starship:
The first GSLV was still able to deploy a satellite, just in a lower orbit than intended.
The first Delta IV had the same problem, satellite deployed, but in a lower orbit than planned.
The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one did blow up).
The Rocket Labs' Electron did get destroyed. However it was later found that nothing at all was wrong with the vehicle, it was a failure in the ground software, and an identical vehicle successfully carried out its mission 7 months later.
In contrast, the first two Starships blew up completely due to engine issues, and no Starship has deployed even a test payload of some kind to orbit. In fact, until today, none even carried a payload of any kind, they have all been flying empty.
> Still, many of these are more successful than Starship:
Your definition of success doesn't leave room for anomalies. Your mindset seems to be "if you try and it's doesn't turn out perfectly, it's a failure" -- which results in spending tons of time and money iterating behind closed doors (or even worse, trying to model/calculate the whole thing without many test runs), and only unveiling the result when it's "perfect". This approach costs more time and money, and more embarrassment if/when the product fails in public. It also doesn't build a culture of learning a lot from anomalies.
Meanwhile, SpaceX doesn't care about iterating, testing, and failing in public. So they skip all the costly effort of trying too hard not to fail, setting expectations that they get it right the first time, and not learning as much from anomalies.
Anomalies, properly understood, are opportunities to learn and improve -- and never something to be ashamed of. The only true "failures" are to give up because it's too hard, to stop learning from the data that anomalies provide, or to never try in the first place because you're too afraid of anomalies.
- "The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one did blow up)."
The Wikipedia entry describes it as "suboptimal but workable initial orbit", which I interpret as a partial failure (coming from a military entity that's universally opaque about its failings). They're not inclined for language like "partial failure" that we get out of transparent countries—contrast that first Delta IV-H, which also reached a "workable" orbit—just not the intended one.
- "However it was later found that nothing at all was wrong with the vehicle, it was a failure in the ground software, and an identical vehicle successfully carried out its mission 7 months later."
Also true of the Ariane 5 explosion: that was a software bug (unhandled integer overflow) in the flight control unit. The important part isn't whether it's hardware or software, but whether they got it right or not, before launch.
Compare how much money each company spent before the first/second/etc flight. The ENTIRE program has so far cost less than one set of SLS engines - that they took from older rockets without changes.
They have explicitly and publicly chosen to rapidly iterate without spending billions to make sure the first try goes well - it's simply different culture. The first Starship wasn't even something you could actually call a rocket, it was a water tower with a bunch of rocket engines.
They wanted data about the engines and got them - mission 100% accomplished, that's not a failure in any way except for media shock value because "wow such boom". Come on, you call yourself an engineer? Do you not try your software or hardware before 100% completion? You don't have CI with integration and e2e tests? There's no other way to do this cheaply and quickly, you have to try.
Call me when any other company achieves what Falcon9 did, then we can discuss issues of SpaceX engineering culture and how others are better. But they are not, few test flights are not interesting, what's interesting is that they are 10 years ahead of everybody else and offer by far the cheapest and by orders of magnitude most reliable orbital lift service.
Others should stop waiting 10 years before the first flight and accept some risk, the world would be much better by now.
this doesn't even scratch the surface. Slow motion cameras and real time sensors for debugging hardware issues, computer simulations, 3d printing.
Apollo program directors would advocate to start a nuclear war with ussr if they could get hands on that kind of tech.
But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??
Apollo program was a major achievement, probably the largest in the history of humanity as of yet. But SpaceX definitely should get a credit for "breaking things", or for running agile dev cycle with hardware ("hardware heavy"). Let's just strap engines to a fuel tank and try to fly it. Let's just build a body by welding steel plates together and see what happens. Let's just launch this thing to 20 miles and see if we can make it aerobrake and land it with the engines. Iterate by learning and constantly improving. Nobody done it at that scale as of yet.
(Which of course is only possible if you have the Founding Father with a few billion $$ just laying around)
This seems like a fairly disingenuous comment.
SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before, and done it faster and at a lower budget than anyone has done before.
Every other national space agency and private company had both infinitely more money, time, and engineers than SpaceX did (when founded) yet they were making zero progress on reusable rockets, cheap super heavy lift capacity to orbit, and America had no way of taking their own astronauts to the space station!
Musk (hate him or love him) founded a company from nothing which has exceeded the capabilities of nasa and the us government, the European space agency, and the russian space agency, as well as ULA, Boeing, Lockheed etc.
They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused. They have the most cost effective rocket ever made for taking loads to orbit. They have reused rockets up to 20 times! They have build the most powerful rocket ever built which is fully reusable. They have built the most efficient and powerful rocket engines ever built before. And they have done it all incredibly quickly starting from nothing.
Oh and they also built a massive internet constellation providing fast and cheap satellite internet to the whole world, saving countless lives and also helping stimulate economies across the world as well as enabling more remote work etc.
So much of what they have done was considered impossible or not economical or not practical or so difficult other countries or companies didn’t even TRY.
So yes. Given their success it’s worth trying to understand their development methodology, which is iterate fast and fail lots and learn lots. Given how much they’ve kicked the shit out of the SLS program in capability and budget and also how they’ve crushed Blue Origin (which started earlier with more budget) who both operate in a more old fashioned way, I would certainly say it’s important to acknowledge they may be doing something right!
The achievements you quote are highly overblown. SpaceX sells capacity to orbit somewhat cheaper than anyone else on the market, but not by some huge margin - half the cost or so, at best.
They also don't have any fully reusable rockets today, and Starship is still probably a year or more from being production-ready. It remains to be seen how reusable Starship will actually be, how long it will take to refurbish and get ready for spaceflight, and how many reentries it can actually take. And it still remains to be seen how much Starship will actually gain from being fully reusable, by the way - landing a rocket costs lots of extra fuel, so it's not a no-brainer that a fully reusable rocket would have a much better cost/kg-to-orbit than a non reusable one. Especially for anything higher than LEO, Starship can't actually carry enough fuel, so it depends on expensive additional launches to refuel in orbit - a maneoveur that will probably take another year or more to finalize, and that greatly increases the cost of a Starship mission beyond LEO.
Finally, Starlink is nice, but it's extremely expensive for most users outside very rich areas of the world, and has in no way had the impact you are claiming. Laying out cable internet is FAR cheaper than satellite internet can ever be, especially in rural areas, so beyond cases where cables and even wireless are completely impossible (ocean, war-torn areas), it doesn't and won't ever have any major impact. I'm also very curious where you got the idea that it "saved countless lives".
Feels weird to read such comments on HN.
10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible. Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.
As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.
Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition
> ULA was awarded a DoD contract in December 2013 to provide 36 rocket cores for up to 28 launches. The award drew protest from SpaceX, which said the cost of ULA's launches were approximately US$460 million each and proposed a price of US$90 million to provide similar launches.[16] In response, Gass said ULA's average launch price was US$225 million, with future launches as low as US$100 million.
I suspect SpaceX margins are very high and they can fund the starship development. Margins/prices may change as BO reaches reusability.
> 10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible.
Maybe some. Others had been working on this in the 90s already. Not to mention Spaceshuttle, which achieved these milestones (with a vastly different design) in production.
> Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.
Reuse is currently partial. The economic advantages have largely failed to materialize, at least to the extent that they were promised.
> Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition
Why compare to ULA? Look at Ariane 6, or Soyuz-2 - they have similar numbers to Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is 22 800 kg to LEO for $70M. Ariane 6 is 21 500 kg to LEO for $115M. Soyuz-2 is 8600kg to LEO for $35-48M (so about $92-129M for a Falcon 9's worth of cargo). More expensive, but not by some huge margin.
> As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.
This is a completely different take than the previous comment. Sure, it's successful in the developped world in certain industries. This is nothing like "saving countless lives" or "helping stimulate economies across the world", which is what I was responding to.
Your using how much they charge, not how much it costs... You seem to not understand any kind of sales strategy or atleast basic game theory here.
>More expensive, but not by some huge margin.
Obviously no matter what it costs them, they are going to price themselves slightly under the going rate to fill their launch manifest. Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.
Reuse is cheaper... the fact that you can even begin to contemplate that makes no sense. They lose the upstage with only one engine and they even recover the fairing. The combined cost for RP-1 and LOX is approximately $300,000–$500,000. Relative to total launch cost the fuel cost makes up a tiny fraction (~0.5–1%), which is about $67 million for a Falcon 9 commercial launch.
Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.
The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10, where the next nearest competitor is the Proton-M by Khrunichev at 4300. Which puts them in a completely different league of the space shuttles Cost Per kg to LEO of $18,000 to $54,000.
> Your using how much they charge, not how much it costs... You seem to not understand any kind of sales strategy or atleast basic game theory here.
I'm using the only public information about this that we have. The Ariane 6 and Soyuz-2 numbers are also prices and not costs, by the way. We don't know how much Russia or the ESA actually spend per launch, we only know what they are asking others to pay for it.
> Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.
Don't forget refurbishment costs and fuel costs and R&D amortization.
> Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.
You mean Falcon Heavy here (SuperHeavy is the first stage of Starship, it doesn't carry payload). I left Falcon Heavy out for two reasons.
First and most importantly, it is very rarely used in comparison to Falcon 9 (it was only flown twice in 2024, for example). SpaceX themselves are not using it for their Starlink sattelites, even though that should be the perfect use case for it.
Second, it was never flown with anything close to the nominal payload, at least according to Wikipedia. The highest payload ever flown was ~10k kg to GTO, where it's supposed to support up to 26 700 kg. Note also that the 63 800 kg figure is for an expendable Falcon Heavy - if you want to recover it, it's less than 50 000 kg. Also, the price per launch seems highly optimistic, given that launches in 2024 were actually $152M and $178M, each flying with ~5000 kg, giving a MUCH worse number than what we were looking at.
> The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10
These numbers are very likely pure fantasy. Starship development got $3B just from NASA, that you seem to not amortize in any way. If you just look at the costs of the actual rocket construction itself plus fuel, without R&D, the numbers go WAY down for many other rockets as well (including Falcon 9).
so, what your saying is that you admit SpaceX is a world class provider of launch services, but you don't like it cause it's not THAT much better than everything else?
I'm saying that SpaceX is a world-class provider of space launch services, and leads the market on virtually any metric, but they aren't, as some are claiming in this thread, orders(!) of magnitude cheaper than others in the business. I'm just trying to counter balance some of the narrative here that presents SpaceX like some savior almost sent from the future.
It's so convenient for you to live in an imaginary world where spaceX is deceiving everyone and hasn't really achieved anything and it's all just empty hype, right?
Half the cost is not "some huge margin"?!?
So, like, if you found a 50%-off sale on a car, you're telling me you wouldn't test drive it because it's not a very good deal?
What color is the sky in your world?
Given how little we know about the cost structures of any of these space launch systems, yes.
Consider that Russia was charging less per seat to the ISS in 2007, back when they ahd to compete with the Shuttle, then SpaceX is charging NASA today. And not a little less - almost half ($25M in 2007 dollars, $38M in today's dollars, vs SpaceX charging $55M today).
Does this mean that the Soyuz was much cheaper than Falcon 9? Probably not, it just means that there is so much margin on both sides that we can't estimate much.
> They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused.
The space shuttle did this over 40 years ago. You can argue SpaceX have the first economical one 40 years later, but the second stage isn't reusable. Once they get starship working they might have it.
Their finances aren't public but there is some stuff to go on where we can say Falcon is probably economical despite not recovering the second stage.
This TED talk from Gwynne Shotwell says they will have reuse of starship so dialed in that in 3 years (from now) they will be competitive with commercial airliners and be operating for consumers in production:
https://www.ted.com/talks/gwynne_shotwell_spacex_s_plan_to_f...
To be safe enough for that I would have expected thousands of flawless flights by now. They said in 2020 it was still on track for 2028 but the Dear Moon project was canceled since that last update.
The space shuttle lol?
Are you not considering the fact that the huge external tank and the two SRBs were destroyed every time? Not to mention the insane costs of refurbishing each space shuttle, not the mention the insanely bad safety of the shuttle and the 14 astronauts who died in it!
Space shuttle, while cool, was really, really bad design, bad safety, and totally uneconomical. It was definitely cooler than Soyuz, but Soyuz was cheaper and more safe.
There's a reason the US abandoned space shuttle and had to beg the Russians to use Soyuz to send their astronauts to the space station.
The Shuttle program only failed to recover 4 SRB's out of 270 launched - and 2 of those were on Challenger.
Why should we care what you think if you can't get something that basic right?
Recovering parts that landed in the literal salty ocean and need massive refurbishment to work again isn't really reusable in the same way that Falcon is though really is it? Trying to compare the two is honestly disingenuous.
Calling Space Shuttle to what SpaceX have done really is like comparing chalk and cheese.
Space shuttle cost (inflation adjusted) about 700M per launch(!!). Compared to Falcon 9 (10-20M). Superheavy and starship will start costing maybe 100M and rapidly decrease to maybe 10-20M also, but with more than double the carrying capacity of shuttle as well as in generally being far more capable.
The SRBs could land in the ocean with parachutes and be recovered and refurbished. Shuttle wasn't economical as I mentioned, and definitely the space shuttle wasn't safe.
What you claimed was: "They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused." That was known as the space shuttle.
The ~$40 million tank was expendable so you are right it wasn't full reuse either. Starship jettisons parts too, I believe the hot staging ring? And the Falcon series throws away the whole upper stage.
Space Shuttle isn't a "rocket" like Falcon 9 is though, it couldnt go to space by itself. So saying its the first reusable rocket is really stretching credibility.
Falson 9 is a one piece rocket, as is Superheavy.
The Space Shuttle got to space with the help of other rockets, tank etc.
And all those other parts were recovered after most flights and re-used after refurbishment on future flights. Since there's no other name than "Space Shuttle" for the whole rocket, it will do. Note that Starhsip is also ambiguous, as it refers both to the entire two stage rocket, but also just stage 2.
This reads like propaganda.
> SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before
Such as?
Maybe this will help you see it: https://x.com/dpoddolphinpro/status/1874191808751972447
The whole world combined VS SpaceX has less mass to orbit.
Either whole nations are not interested in that much mass to orbit or they don't have the capability. Or financial means/incentive to compete against that commercial entity.
But they do and at least in China they start to work on reusable rockets and ULA is for sale because they don't have one.
I guess that's an 'achievement'?
What would you consider an achievement then? The point of a rocket is to deliver mass to space.
Nobody credits boeing with a achievement of caring most people in planes. We credit Wright brother with creating first airplane.
Cargo rockets is to elo is an old tech, a participation award for you and your convincing arguments (you and you ilk - producing numerous 'achievements' called 'etc. etc.').
Landing boosters, reducing costs etc etc
Is that it? Landing boosters is not saving money as of now. Because a rocket engine is not a rental bike.
Hmmm I wonder if there was a tech that recovered a spacecraft and tried to reuse it to cut costs... hmmm... no, nothing comes to mind
Also SpaceX is charging Nasa more than russians did when they had monopoly over space flights.
Landing boosters saves money and helps with cadence.
SpaceX is charging NASA less. Even Boeing is charging NASA less than Russia.
> But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??
NASA lost a good number of probes in the process of getting the expertise to do that.
And likely quite a few test devices in building out the skycrane.
citation needed
You cant be making shit up and equating a test to blowing up 7 rockets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Observer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Polar_Lander
wtf does that have to do with Curiosity program? All of these are 2+ decades old.
Besides, you make it as if SpaceX couldn't learn from nasa mistakes, not to mention core team of SpaceX are ex-nasa already.
what kind of elon musk logic is that?
> wtf does that have to do with Curiosity program? All of these are 2+ decades old.
That’s 20 years of learning how to design and land things on mars. They wouldn’t have been able to build Curiosity without the past experiences. The Curiosity program itself started in 2002, just a couple years after the missions above.
What people say is that knowledge in the field is extremely hard to transfer, and easily lost. As an example, apparently we are completely unable to rebuild the Space Shuttle and Saturn rocket, even though technology is vastly more advanced today. Each vehicle really is a “program” including all its people and supply chain. This is also something SpaceX is trying to change by building actual production lines for their engines and bodies, not one-off builds.
> What people say is that knowledge in the field is extremely hard to transfer, and easily lost.
So you are saying that Curiosity team had probably not learned anything from those 20 years old programs?
You are literally strengthening my point...
No, that’s about “SpaceX learning from NASA’s past mistakes”. Re-read.
SpaceX getting credit for innovating in their own way doesn't mean NASA doesn't get credit for all the great things it has done.
> Every Saturn 5 was successful
Do you not count the Saturn 1B rocket capsule that caught on fire on the pad and burnt the Apollo 1 astronauts alive?
What about Apollo 13?
> but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land
The "promise land" in this analogy is visible past the desert. What's not known is what route to get there.
In your tortured analogy, the people who "are really fetishizing iterative failure" are not doing that; they're fetishizing the fact that the person walking through this desert is trying, and if they hit a barrier, they iterate and try again until they reach the promise land. Along the way they are accomplishing what was once thought to be impossible.
The command module fire had zero to do with the Saturn V. Apollo 13 again was the command and service module, and in that case the crew was "returned safely to the Earth".
Congratulations for neatly excluding Apollo 1, Columbia and Challenger's crews, may their memories rest heavy on your conscience.
Your supposed excellent programs killed people.
NASA put people on the first flight of the shuttle to space, which turned out after the fact to have 1 in 12 chance of killing the crew. Can't do that in 2025.
https://x.com/eager_space/status/1879291376418120184
Apollo 6 (2nd Satun V launch) was "less than nominal" and warranted a congressional hearing. It did succeed, but luck played a part. George Mueller declared later that Apollo 6 was a failure for NASA.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080120112115/http://www.hq.nas...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080227133401/http://www.hq.nas...
>Every Saturn 5 was successful
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure
Subassemblies that made up Saturn V went through several hundred (inflation adjusted) billion dollars' worth of iterative failure before the Apollo program was announced.
The only reason it WAS announced was all of the iterative failure that had been paying off.
The day JFK uttered "shall go to the moon in this deck-aid", the F-1 engine had already been exploding and failing for three years.
My memory is hazy, from a brown bag I went to at work 15 years ago, but they blew up around 50 F-1s before one worked right.
And while the Saturn isn't an upgraded Jupiter it is EXTREMELY closely related to Jupiter and Jupiter had a shit-ton of failures before they got it right, turned around, and used all of that knowledge to build Saturn.
The shuttle programme was signed off in 1972, had it's first flight in 1977, and it's first crewed flight in 1981. Starship has been going for 5 years (albeit on the back of lots of other SpaceX work.) It's getting to orbit in the same time that Shuttle took to 'fly' on the back of a 747. A few lost ships is a pretty small price to pay for going twice as fast on delivery.
Oh wow a company in 2020s is compared to company in 70s. Wow nice benchmark. We are going to be good as guys from 50 years ago.
Imagine Mercedes said it, or Intel or anyone. They would be a laughing stock.
compare the cost
It’s pretty weird to get any engineering thing right on the first test, no? The entire development strategy would have to be based around that goal. I think the standard engineering strategy would be to test early and often.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but, especially during the Cold War, the US government had a big incentive to appear infallible that SpaceX doesn’t have. Are we sure there weren’t more tests in secret? USG also has access to huge tracts of land that is off limits, and rocket tests are easily ‘national security issue’ enough to justify being conducted in secret. Just a thought.
So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?
A Mars cargo mission, according to the timeline spacex set for themselves. https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F2HFqsVkiZc/YT9bPpXSKDI/AAAAAAAAG...
Thank you. This needs to be emphasized more.
A lot of people have been shitting on SLS for being too expensive over the last 5 years, but it's worth noting that the Artemis program has been completely fucked due to SpaceX massively missing its milestones on Starship. So many people believe that Elon Musk is going to bring humanity back to the Moon, but he is largely the reason that humanity is not back on the moon already.
The GAO put out a report on this a few months ago, pointing out the failures of SpaceX here (including massive cost overruns) much more than the supposed cost overruns of SLS. Incidentally, after this GAO report came out, Elon Musk became very interested in being in charge of managing "government waste."
This is a very partial telling of the current situation.
Orion is delayed due to a heat shield issue: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/nasa-identifies-cause-...
The first SLS launch was six years behind and massively over budget.
Lunar Gateway is almost certainly getting delayed.
None of these programs rely on SpaceX in any way thus far.
There was no heat shield issue, it was investigated and the resolved: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/nasa-delays-...
There is an issue with another dependency for Artemis 2 and 3, though - Starship is nowhere near where it needs to be.
"There was no heat shield issue" and "it was investigated and resolved" cannot both be true. There was a heat shield issue; they investigated for two years, and it has caused a delay.
Artemis II has no Starship dependency. It's entirely SLS/Orion.
Your own article agrees with me:
> Artemis 2 likely would've been delayed by a year or so, to late 2026, had a heat-shield replacement been required, NASA officials said today. But the mission team still needs more time than originally envisioned to get Orion up to crew-carrying speed, explaining the roughly six-month push.
> "The heat shield was installed in June 2023, and the root cause investigation took place in parallel to other assembly and testing activities to preserve as much schedule as possible."
Complete nonsense. There are many issues with Artemis timeline.
And of course its completely ridiculous to blame a program that received 2 billion $ and only really started a few years ago, vs things like SLS Orion that have been going for decades and absorbed 50 billion $.
Ah Elon time strikes again.
Maybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.
Decreasing price of a launch by multiple orders of magnitude and increased cadence is also an achievement that hasn't been achieved previously.
Increased launch cadence is an operational achievement, not an engineering one.
And I'm not so sure that they actually decreased price to launch all that much. First of all, it's definitely not "several orders of magnitude", the best numbers quoted are maybe half price or so for a Falcon 9 compared to another contemporary rocket. And by my understanding, the US government at least is paying about as much for Falcon 9 as it was for a Soyuz to bring an astronaut to the ISS, at least.
NASA pays both Boeing and SpaceX less than Soyuz was.
According to this [0] article from Business Insider, from 2006 to 2019, per seat costs for NASA from Russia rose from less than $25M ($38M inflation adjusted) to around $81M ($101M inflation adjusted). The cost per seat in 2012, the year after the USA lost crewed space launch capability entirely, was ~$55M ($75M inflation adjusted). According to this [1] article from Reuters, NASA is currently paying Boeing $90M, and SpaceX $55M per seat.
So, NASA today is paying Boeing more than the monopoly prices Russia charged (up to 2016 or so), and paying both of them more than Russia was charging back when they were competing with the Space Shuttle. And it's paying SpaceX about half of the top price it payed Russia per seat, still nowhere close to an order of magnitude in cost savings.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-cost-per-soyuz-sea...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/boeing-sending-first-astrona...
Less than Soyuz charged them. Soyuz was a very cheap platform to the Russians, but they also understood when they had their customers over a barrel.
I was comparing to the achievements of 60 years ago when they put people on the moon :) They are working towards that in a sustainable manner.
So…not something they achieved?
> ...operational achievement, not an engineering one.
How would I distinquish between the two, esp wrt rocketry?
An operational achievement means excellence in building the same vehicle over and over, to the right tolerances, and operating it the same way every time, without fing anything up.
An engineering achievement means excellence in designing a new vehicle, or updating an existing one, or inventing a new procedure, and finding the right tolerances that allow that to be replicated over and over without excess cost.
Aha.
So using some wholly new process, like the continuous innovation involved in casting large parts, how would I separate ops and engr?
Forgive my ignorance. I'm just wondering how Ford's quality circles, or the Toyota Production System would work if ops and engr were treated aa separate silos.
Since we're kibitzing about rockets, I suppose the example above could have been ramping up production of Raptor engines to 1 per day (IIRC), while improving performance and reducing costs. If I wanted to emulate that process, using your methodology, where would I start?
That's a 60billion government program I guess to match the program you need to match that as well, starship is doing what it's doing at a tenth of a cost so far.
Go to the moon, land a rover, wander about, come back with everyone alive... should be easy right?, I mean, it's already been done... RIGHT????
We'll have to get to parity with what we were doing 50-60 years ago.
The reusability is awesome, of course. More of that!
And also, still gotta get the basics right. Oxygen/fuel leaks aren't a great look (spoken as a not rocket scientist).
It needs to give him a job :-)
I will say, though, that booster catch is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.
Yes- very impressive feat of engineering.
> Every Saturn 5 was successful
On the other hand every Russian N1 wasn’t.
Rocketry is hard. It’s seems proven that if you’re a government space agency it’s even harder.
> To date, no Starship has been recovered after flight.
This is irrelevant, as none of the flights included any plans to recover the Starship. The objective for each flight has been to dump the vehicle in the sea at the target zone.
practically infinite resources and "classified" failures
As others have pointed out: Compare the budgets.
That “first success” was actually on the back of a long series of related rockets with technology and engines inherited from a huge missile program. Those NASA eggheads didn’t start from zero on a shoestring budget and make things work on the first try! The Saturn V was just a stretched version of the Saturn series of rockets. These all cost hundreds of billions in today’s money to develop!
Second, they’re not “the same thing”. A single-use piece of technology has very different design constraints and engineering considerations as a reusable piece of technology.
A single-use weapon is a bomb. A reusable weapon is a sword. Just because you can shove a fuse into some explosives doesn’t mean you can forge a sword that won’t shatter on first use.
An equivalent example from space technology are explosive bolts. NASA uses them extensively, SpaceX never does… because they’re not reusable and not up-front testable. They’re expensive too. So instead they iterated (and iterated!) on vacuum-rated actuators that can serve the same role. This is a non-trivial exercise that resulted in a few RUDs. This is why NASA didn’t even try! It’s harder and not needed if reusability was a non-goal.
I think wandering in the desert is done because there is a promised land. Yes, it doesn't mean that it exists.
But if you don't wander, you'll never find out. You gotta believe
I mean, yeah, it's a lot easier to build a rocket that only goes up.
> First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components.
There were 16 taxi and flight tests with Enterprise before the launch in 1981 (Approach and Landing Tests - Enterprise) where the first 8 were uncrewed. Just saying there were prior test flights using it.
There was something like 4 years of testing before the proper launch.
Musk derangement syndrome
you are quite stupid or purposely ignore Falcon 9
Right. Those are fair comparisons /s
That "landing" (is it still considered a landing if it's chopsticked a few meters before it touches the ground?) is so unnatural it almost looks fake. So big and unimaginable that it feels like watching fx on a movie!
The close-up camera right after was interesting, I thought it captured on the grid fins, but it looks like there are two small purpose-built knobs for that.
The times we live in!
You have perfectly described the feeling I had regarding the first belly flop demo (at least I think it was the first one?)
https://youtu.be/gA6ppby3JC8?si=wY7TQsbR_wxoud75&t=70 (ten seconds from the timestamp)
Yeah, that shot is so clean and smooth it feels like a render. Absolutely iconic even after a dozen rewatchings. The iris flares and the framerate… gotta hand it to whoever planned that shot and placed that camera. A+ videography.
As another commenter pointed out, it's down to better cameras; higher resolution and framerates than "traditional" cameras used in this kind of recording. But it could be better still, the camera setup in the clip still gets a lot of shaking from the blasts.
IIRC they use regular off the shelf gopro cameras to mount on the ones going into space. Granted, the mount is ruggedized metal else the cameras wouldn't survive, lol [0].
I'm also reminded of NASA's cameras which were mounted on the mechanisms of an anti-air gun, great for slow and precise movements. I'm sure they still use that today but I couldn't find a good source. I did find an article about NASA's ruggedized cameras for use on spacecraft and the like though [1].
[0] https://www.quora.com/Was-the-GoPro-camera-modified-for-the-... [1] https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Redefining_the_Rugged_Video_Camera
> it's down to better cameras; higher resolution and framerates than "traditional" cameras used in this kind of recording
It looks cool because of the angle and framing though, someone knew exactly what they were doing. Without the angle/framing, you can have all the resolution and framerates in the world, it still wouldn't look as cool. It's a cinematographic choice that made that shot.
> But it could be better still, the camera setup in the clip still gets a lot of shaking from the blasts.
I'd love to hear ideas how you'd prevent the shaking. Forget gimbals or similar semi-pro setups as they wouldn't be nearly enough. What are you attaching it to, in your better setup? A drone would be blown away, and anything attached to the ground would likely start to shake regardless of your setup.
It the high dynamic range (HDR) that makes it look "unnatural" because we are so used to seeing over-compressed photos and videos.
Plus maybe something they do with stability and frame-rate.
If cutting edge engineering with conventional physics looks fake to you folks imagine what a hard time you’re going to have with real videos of actual UFOs.
They’re being rhetorical for emphasis. No need to twist it into an ad hominem.
It's not twisted and not ad hominem. No attack on a person, just a statement of the relative difficulty of appreciating something truly new when cutting edge looks fake.
IIRC, the grid fins are not strong enough to support the rocket, and reinforcing them would add too much weight to the vehicle.
The plan is to catch the second stage the same way, and the starship in flight now is the first to have mockup pins to test the aerodynamics and see if they cause issues during reentry.
It seems like they'll need a lot of different vehicles to catch the second stage given the number of pieces I saw in the video.
I was surprised they were landing them on those fins, makes more sense now.
I found the same when the first Falcon Heavy executed the simultaneous booster landing. Watching them both come down, within moments of each other at neighbouring pads was incredibly cool.
Its sad that Gerry Anderson never got to see this. It's like something from a Thunderbirds episode.
You can hear some sounds in the stream that I think are one of the presenters weeping during the launch and landing sequences. I think I would be similarly awe struck to witness such a thing
I heard someone say it's like trying to land the Statue of Liberty. Turns out the statue is actually shorter.
The clearance is amazing -- probably bigger IRL than it looked on the camera, but it looked like only a foot or two between the chopsticks arm and the top of the rocket! The control algorithms on the gimballed engines must be insanely precise.
Since I’ve never seen an f9 landing, watching ift5 land was kinda mind blowing. Even 6k away you can tell it’s really big but moved with a grace and smoothness like a hippo in water only with crackling flame.
View of previous catch (flight 5) from a very distant vantage point was even more incredible for me. You can see the scale of things right there
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694
https://youtu.be/Vzyaud250Xo
https://youtu.be/ntmssdzp_qY
Anyone has similar view of this landing?
Edit: distant view of flight 7 by the same person
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1880044690428645684
Oh no they lost the ship after the booster landed! Seems like they lost an engine, then I saw fire around the rear flap hinges in the last images before they cut out, and then the telemetry showed more engines shutting down until it froze.
During ascent I also noticed a panel near the front fins that seemed to be loose and flapping. Probably not related but who knows.
Edit: Here's a video of the aftermath. Strangely beautiful. https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662
> fire around the rear flap hinges
I believe it's pretty hard to have a fire at that altitude. You need a leak of both methane and oxygen, and an ignition source.
I wonder if perhaps one of the engines split open and the exhaust wasn't going into the engine bell?
I mean blowing liquid oxygen on something with a hot heat source beside it typically turns things to fuel you wouldn't expect. Like metal.
At atmospheric pressure, yes.
But up at 140km altitude, the pressure is so low that I don't think even pure oxygen would lead to combustion.
There are two huge tanks providing the pressure here.
Good point, must have been an O2 leak oxidizing random stuff.
What a celestial bonfire. It indeed has a haunting beauty.
Back a few years ago. This was the starship that in 2024 would reach Mars with humans, with so much space taken by crew and materials, and almost no fuel, and "10 times cheaper". And currently is an empty shell. Nice fireworks and show, but no meaningful payload yet. Not even LO. And this will be ready for 2026 artemis mission?
I’m not a big fan of Elon Musk, but this is just the typical executive talking up their product and to some extent being overly optimistic about timelines. You’d think with the quantity of software engineers in HN this would be obvious, but the (rightful IMO) disdain for Elon Musk is resetting people’s brains.
Guy is a serial liar and you are making excuses on his behalf.
He is a serial liar, but we can also actually see the engineering progress which is remarkable regardless of his overinflated timelines.
His lying doesn't change the incredible work by those engineers and other employees of SpaceX.
I hope you’re as vocal about your higher ups.
The taxpayer is paying for these lies
If you think delays in aerospace constitute "lies," you're not going to have a good time following any aerospace company. Unexpected delays are par for the course.
If you think these are mere delays, then I have a bridge to sell to you
In about two years, when these things will be launching hundreds of starlink satellites like clockwork, you’ll just move the goalposts and find something else to criticise.
I’m saying this with confidence because it’s the established history of SpaceX critics. Everything from reusable rockets, space internet, full-flow staged combustion, etc.. has had its naysayers that all shut up and found something new to critique once SpaceX showed it was possible and even profitable.
At this stage you may as well just come out and say “I don’t like Elon”.
I don't think that's a useful framing.
If not SpaceX, it would be all NASA. NASA lies about their budget all the time, with massive overruns. For example, the Artemis overrun exceeds the entire cost of Starship development so far [1].
[1] https://www.space.com/nasa-sls-megarocket-cost-delays-report
Not to mention that each Artemis launch is of the same order of magnitude cost as the entire Starship program. Each engine is about the same cost as Falcon 9 launch!
The taxpayer pays for all the lies.
Ask NASA about MSR
This is version 2 of Starship, with some upgrades, such as longer starship.
"Upgrades include a redesigned upper-stage propulsion system that can carry 25 per cent more propellant, along with slimmer, repositioned forward flaps to reduce exposure to heat during re-entry.
For the first time, Starship will deploy 10 Starlink simulators" [1].
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/heres-what-nasa-would-...
[1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/musks-starship-ready-...
I found an article from earlier in the week about the changes for this version of the upper stage: https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/a-taller-heavier-smart...
Will be interesting to hear the postmortem on the second stage. The booster part seemed to work pretty flawlessly with the exception of a non-firing engine on boost back which then did fire during the landing burn.
If the person doing their on-screen graphics is reading this, I wonder if you have considered showing tank LOX/CH4 remaining as a log graph. I believe it decreases logrithmically when being used (well it would if you keep 'thrust' constant) so that would create a linear sweep to the 'fuel level' status.
I don't believe they throttle the engines up or down much during the second stage burn. Fuel decreases ~linearly and thrust is relatively constant. Acceleration increases as fuel mass decreases.
Don’t they throttle back at MaxQ?
Yes, on the first stage.
Oh! Second stage. Misread.
No, second stage has 3 vacuum engines and 3 atmospheric engines, so they'll have to be able to throttle for the cutover.
The engines are able to throttle but they run all of them at 100% throttle for most of the second stage's first burn, I expect. For efficiency. The telemetry showed all of them firing at the same time. The vacuum engines will be used by themselves for on orbit maneuvers and the sea level engines will be used by themselves for landing, but for the first burn to reach orbit they need all the thrust they can get.
I would be surprised if that was the case, my reasoning to that is that computing where a thing is going, when it's under going with changing acceleration AND changing mass, is pretty complicated. Especially if you already have the capability to throttle the engines and keep 'a' constant.
They might, I'm not saying your wrong, I'm just saying that I cannot imagine how you would justify the added complexity of doing it that way.
The computations are complicated but not that complicated relative to everything else SpaceX is doing. It's much more important to optimize the propellant mass by using it most efficiently than to simplify some computations. And it's probably most efficient to burn the propellant as fast as possible.
Any extra time spent during a burn is wasted fuel. Intuitively, any time before the rocket is in orbit, some part of the rocket thrust is resisting the force of gravity or else it would fall back down to earth. The longer that time is, the more thrust (and thus fuel) was spent negating that force. It's the main reason why the Falcon 9 boosters do a 'hoverslam' on return and land at close to full throttle - any extra time during that burn is less fuel efficient.
Better fuel efficiency = more payload to orbit = plenty of justification for the extra complexity.
Admittedly gravity losses are more significant at the beginning when the booster/ship are ascending purely vertically than later in second stage flight which is mostly horizontal, but definitely still a factor.
Designing a rocket that's strong enough to survive 100% thrust at maxQ also wastes fuel, because you've overbuilt.
The rocket is well beyond max Q by the time the second stage engines ignite. There’s no reason not to run them at full throttle at that point.
I thought the hoverslam was because the Merlin can't throttle down sufficiently to actually hover?
Yup, apparently Raptors have more dynamic range in their throttling.
When this comment gets 44 minutes old it's going to be T-0.
reminds me of the classic joke: a man walking down a street, stops and asks another person if they know what time it is. The person responds: I'm sorry as I don't have a watch on me, but you see that car parked over there? when it explodes, it should be 5pm
This comment was very helpful and exactly what I wanted to know opening this discussion, and made me chuckle on top of that, thank you!
Thank you, I was trying to convert Central Time to something understandable.
All their systems and logging are running in UTC, why can't they just give launch times accordingly.
Yeah, I prefer this "when this comment is XY old" format the most when communicating internationally. Closely followed by UTC, of course.
I hate having to convert from some time zone which I don't know by heart; with the additional risk of getting daylight savings or something wrong and missing the event.
Catch was successful again, very impressive.
They may have lost the second stage, though.
Yes, very much looks like it.
I wonder how much of the second stage flight is autonomous and if they need to continually need to give it a go to continue, or if it aborts automatically after some time of lost telemetry. But maybe it already exploded anyways.
The automated FTS is triggered if it leaves a pre-defined corridor (which is wider than the flight plan - substantially so in some places).
The AFTS has independent, hardened, validated inertial measurement systems.
Probably self destructs if anything goes wrong
If it has control issues or similar absolutely, but does losing comms count as going wrong for the FTS? If the flight itself is on track?
Absolutely. All those contingencies are planned out and coded down in software.
The flight control loops are strongly latched. They are constantly checking the state of discretes, control surfaces, and intended guidance. If any critical parameter gets out of range for a period of time or if any group of standard parameters gets out of range the vehicle will simply cease powered flight.
In the Space Shuttle, given that it was human rated, the "Range Safety" system was completely manual. It was controlled by a pair of individuals and they manually made the call to send the ARM/FIRE sequence to the range safety detonators.
Space is hard.
"we currently don't have comms on the ship"
edit: the spacex stream just confirmed the loss.
Telemetry showed them lose engines one at a time, which isn’t a great sign.
I think that’s the normal shutdown order to reduce shock, the timing was exactly the expected second stage shutoff time if I understood it correctly.
Incorrect it failed asymmetricaly in such a way that would pitch the vehicle in circles. Normally the sea level raptors are turned off and the space raptors are slowly brought down together.
One of the three sea level engines went out and stayed out. It didn’t look normal. The numbers stopped updating with one engine still on.
Right, I just watched it again and it didn’t look normal.
But interesting that telemetry showed the failures starting a few seconds before loss of telemetry, the videos posted here show a massive explosion later on. So something was going wrong for some time before, and the explosion was only a consequence of that.
Or it was the FTS reacting to the engine failures.
That could have been kinda sorta intentional. No big deal.
I miss the time before X broke so many things, like official streams being on Twitch where I've already paid for ad free viewing.
For future reference, you can stream SpaceX launches from the SpaceX website. They tend to be higher quality. I've never seen an ad there.
My big gripe is that X videos don't seem to support Chromecast at all. I used to watch SpaceX launches on my TV :(
Load it in Chrome and cast the tab. Sucks that you have to involve your computer for the duration, but that's the most reliable way to do it IMO.
Just watch the everyday astronauts coverage on YouTube! Great commentary, and feed from the official space x stream as well as their own cameras
Space.com's YouTube channel always has a mirror of the official SpaceX livestream:
https://www.youtube.com/@VideoFromSpace/streams
Or if you would like additional commentary and extra camera views, there are independent channels such as Everyday Astronaut, NASASpaceFlight, Spaceflight Now, etc.
I now use AirPlay to extend a MacBook screen to my TV and play the stream that way. But it's so needlessly complicated compared to before :/
> X videos
cough cough
There is an Android TV App apparently: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.x.xtv
uBlock Origin blocked any ads if there was any and I didn't have any issues (Ungoogled Chrome). I didn't pay for Twitch and TVV LOL Pro works fine for me.
Couldn't you make a twitch stream of it? X isn't injecting ads into the video, so just open it on X and stream it to twitch.
I'm glad it's not on Twitch. I don't like it being on X but twitch is worse since it's extremely hard to get any working Adblock on there.
What worries me about space innovation is the fact that there is such little margin for error. Materials are being stressed so much while trying to defy the laws of physics that the smallest angle error, the smallest pressure mismatch, smallest timing error, and boom. This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes. Now imagine these risks, while you're halfway to mars. Is it possible that we just have no found/invented the right materials or the right fuel/propulsion mechanism to de-risk this, and that is where we should be allocating a lot more resources?
It definitely happened with planes, we have a century of improvements that made them much much safer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_(material)#de_Havillan...
What makes you think this didn't happen in other industries? See the first iteration of the de Havilland Comet for a great example.
The Space Industry to date has killed many fewer people than planes, trains, or automobiles.
> The Space Industry to date has killed many fewer people than planes, trains, or automobiles.
Except as a proportion of passengers. In which case it's killed several of orders of magnitude more.
Because people rarely go to space, and it was much more dangerous when the last person died than it is today. The vast majority of flights are unmanned, just like this test was.
If you want to continue playing apples to oranges though, nobody has died on a spaceflight in the last twenty years. How many have died on airplanes in that timeframe?
[correction: there was one additional fatal flight in 2014 with the destruction of SpaceShipTwo. I would argue that one doesn't count, though, as it was more akin to a relatively mundane aircraft accident than anything else.]
The requirements of orbital launch are unyielding. If you make a car 50% heavier, it will have worse mileage and handling, but it will still get you where you need to go. If you make a spacecraft 50% heavier, it will never reach orbit.
> This did not happen when we were inventing cars, trains and air planes.
Cars are small, and they still go up in flames routinely all on their own (for older cars, aged fuel lines rupturing is a top cause, for newer cars shit with the turbocharger), it just doesn't make more news than a line in the local advertisement rag because usually all it needs is five minutes work for a firefighter truck.
Trains had quite the deadly period until it was figured out how to deal with steam safely - and yet, in Germany we had the last explosion of a steam train in 1977, killing nine people [1].
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesselzerknall_in_Bitterfeld
I wonder if the second stage failure was related to the metal flap seen here on the very left of the image: https://imgur.com/a/VS8IPdv
I watched this with my very young daughter and she pointed that out, she will be fascinated if that is the case!
Can someone please please PLEASE tell SpaceX PR/Streaming team that the speed (per SI system) is measured in meters per second, not kilometers per hour? The speed of sound is approx 300 m/s, orbital velocity is approx 8,0000 m/s (depending on altitude), free fall acceleration on Earth is 9.81m/s, 1.63m/s on the Moon, the speed of light is apporx 300,000,000 m/s, people learn these numbers in middle school. It's not 1000 km/h, or 28,000 km/h, it just looks so weird.
Edit: ok, acceleration is meters per second per second, but my point stands.
They are likely appealing to the common population who mostly think of speed in mi/h or km/h due to car speeds
I understand the appeal of using the same combinations everywhere, but I thought the great thing about the metric system was that it was easy to convert. So 8000 m/s is 8 km/s.
The problem is with the "hours" part. Which, not accidentally, is not even part of the SI.
In the official BIPM brochure, hours are technically classified as "Non-SI units accepted for use with SI." This puts them in the same category as liters, hectares, tonnes, decibels, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-SI_units_mentioned_in_the_...
I can read Wikipedia too. All the calculations are done in m, s, g, etc. if you want to dumb it down to the public you might as well go in miles per hour, leagues per day, etc., spaceflight is not the place where it is appropriate.
> spaceflight is not the place where it is appropriate.
But, a video stream meant for the public consumption is. SI are standardized for the context of calculations, not necessarily for human consumption, which happens to be why nobody gives the weather in degrees kelvin.
> if you want to dumb it down to the public you might as well go in miles per hour,
The blue origin launch this week used mph and feet of elevation, and I can definitively say that using modified SI is way way better than US customary
Tim Dodd is live as well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Px_b5eSzsA
Video of the breakup - https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE52_hVSeQz/
Pretty sure that's the flight termination system in action. It did well!
Two years ago: I really didn't think they'd make all those engines work at the same time. They did.
Waiting for the day when they can load more than a banana. But I fear, the planet will be uninhabitable before that's a thing.
They had some Starlink simulators they were planning to deploy (to a suborbital trajectory, to re-enter along with the ship) this launch.
This NASASpaceflight stream is up now: https://www.youtube.com/live/3nM3vGdanpw
As is Tim Dodd’s
https://www.youtube.com/live/6Px_b5eSzsA
Aside from coding, this is my favorite use of multiple screens.
> Aside from coding, this is my favorite use of multiple screens.
Great observation. I also do this. :-)
...which has nothing to do with NASA the US government organization, or the NSF (FYI). It's just some independent streamers who apparently know you can't get trademark claims against you by the federal government.
NASA allows them to place cameras as media on nasa property some are even permanent. and are credentialed media for launches. so I am guessing NASA is okay with it.
If you're referring to NSF streams from Starbase (Starship program), all of the cameras are installed on public land. There's no law prohibiting you setting up a Web cam (with autonomous power supply) in the middle of the forest, or on a riverbank, or on a dune 1400 feet from the OLM.
They started doing it when SpaceX was launching their first fuel tanks literally in the middle of nowhere, you can just sit on a side of the road a few hundred feet away and record (or even stream) everything from a basic Webcam. Eventually more and more people liked it and started contributing, then came branded T-Shirts, etc.
Now there's whole cottage industry in Boca with people spending weeks and months there, setting up and streaming from the cameras, they have trailers/control rooms, high quality equipment, daily and weekly updates, 24x7 streams, etc. NSF is a big player, Tim Dodd is another one, there's quite a few smaller players too.
NSF DOES seem to have some sort of agreement with SpaceX on streaming some of SpaceX's livestreams (ie when Ship goes out of visible range and SpaceX is the only place you can get video and of course telemetry). They didn't use to that until shortly after SpaceX streams moved to X (and immediately got replaced on YT by AI generated Elon peddling bitcoins).
Yeah, they have been covering space stuff for decades by now. They have literally dozens of remote cameras by now around Starbase and the Cape, funded by merch sales and community contributions. :)
NSF was started by Chris Bergen, a meteorologist by trade and a space exploration enthusiast, in early 2000s as a hobby forum (good old phBB) for people to chat about space and rocketry. I'm sure he couldn't even dream about becoming so popular so he didn't spend too much time coming up with a name (ie to protect himself against copyright infringement lawsuits). In fact I'm sure he would love to change the name now as they try to cover space programs all over the world (it's too late as people know them as NSF).
Trademark, not copyright.
The things real NASA produces are in the public domain and can be used for all purposes by anyone on earth, royalty-free, no copyright whatsoever.
I’m not sure about the NASA name itself, but apparently the graphic stuff is protected by a special law:
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-V/part-1221
So you wouldn’t exactly get a copyright claim when abusing the NASA logo but it’s still illegal.
I couldn’t find anything about the NASA word itself though, just some articles reciting guidelines by NASA not to imply an endorsement by NASA. I don’t know how that’s enforced though.
You cannot _misuse_ any official government logo or seal. Which effectively means creating a fake document with a real seal and then publishing it. The concern is fraud not sharing content.
You are allowed to basically reproduce the work without any worries whatsoever.
Spoken like someone who is generating their opinion from their channel name alone.
Those "independent streamers" provide live launch streams with multiple feeds using their own equipment and to top it off they have numerous very knowledgeable hosts for all their streams. At this point I suspect they are covering every US based launch from all the major players. Hell, today they broadcasted both the New Glenn and Starship launches less than 24h apart.
But yeah, let's get hung up on an organization name that originated as an Internet forum for discussing all things....... NASA!
Frankly, their coverage of New Glenn was quite a bit better than the official stream. :P
I didn't watch the official stream from Blue Origin (watched that one from my phone in bed so no multistreams that time lol) but it wouldn't surprise me one bit.
Sure, you'll get better telemetry info and the onboard views from the ships that these companies launch in their streams, but the commentary is sub-par at best (they are always sounding so "corporate official" to me) and they just don't provide the best views for watching it live.
I love that these space flight companies have opened up their development process to let the public follow along, I just think they aren't as good at producing live streams as some of these channels that have taken off over the last 5+ years.
They should rename themselves NSF, short for NSF Space Flight.
The National Science Foundation is also a division of the US government, and the National Sanitation Foundation (which goes by NSF) is also a well-known large and established private org.
NSF is taken, too.
I love that name and would 100% support that change lol
Amazing. 2nd ever catch of the booster via the 'chopstick' arms. Looks like the starship itself won't be splashing down west of Perth, instead telemetry has been lost (assuming RUD - "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly").
Anyone able to do some quick math to guess where the pieces might land based on the velocity+altitude?
Bits might end up in africa on land somewhere...
It is amazing to see the number of fairly significant changes they tested in this launch. I guess that is the advantage of private space flights and rocket launches where the speed of development is must faster than in a place like Nasa or any government run space program.
I am not surprised that stage 2 failed because they were testing with a lot of the thermal tiles removed.
It didn't get to the point of testing the thermal protection system.
That was so impressive. I was lucky enough to live in Florida and see the rockets go up. Standing on the beach and watching the first Falcon Heavy launch will be something that will always stick with me. Great job SpaceX.
Coders who require at least 7 iterations to properly implement a data entry form here grousing over a spaceship failure on the 7th iteration.
Failure of an entirely new, previously thought to be impossible combination of technologies.
This is like complaining that your first attempt at new programming language paradigm resulted in a compiler that is slow and sometimes has internal errors!
I noticed a strange debris at https://www.youtube.com/live/6Px_b5eSzsA?si=1hAiLjTrb7KUVaW7...
thought it was ice from the outside but now i'm curious
Speaking of exploding rockets, watch the hypnotic ending of Koyaanisqatsi with haunting music by Philip Glass:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OacVy8_nJi0
According to the comments, the footage in this scene is a Saturn V on a launchpad and then an Atlas-Centaur Missile.
Congratulations to the 14,000 SpaceX employees for their accomplishments.
What happens if the ship has exploded? Is there any kind of danger?
The flight paths are planned specifically so any potential debris has a high chance of landing in the ocean.
If it actually exploded (either on its own or because the flight-termination system kicked in) most of it should burn up on reentry though.
What happens if it doesn't explode and they just lost control over it? I'm mostly curios of the risks at that altitude.
The launch license requires them to build in a "flight termination system" which makes it explode if they lose control over it.
That system didn’t work on the first big test flight, when it went spinning end over end. Part of the reason there was an FAA investigation.
There's an autonomous flight termination system which triggers if it strays outside the planned flight corridor; any debris that survives reentry should then land in the advertised safety zone.
If it doesn't explode it might be light enough to survive reentry, after sailing on for a short while. In that case a large chunk of metal will come down either off the coast of South Africa or if continues on in its orbit potentially off the coast of Australia.
[1] has the planned flight path, as well as the impact zones.
1: https://flightclub.io/result/3d?llId=c5566f6e-606e-4250-b8f4...
the onboard control system and flight termination system are programmed to explode if it deviates from a specific and allowed path of trajectory/speed/functional engine thrust. The last thing anyone wants is a partially broken starship going into an uncontrolled suborbital velocity that lands on a city in Africa.
They have a bunch of explosives strapped on the rocket and can give a radio command to blow the ship up. It can even decide to explode itself if the readings go haywire.
It is called the Flight Termination System and it is very common on non-manned flights now.
If that system fails, can the rocket be shot down in time?
It could be noted that manually operated flight termination systems have been used even on manned spaceflight, each and every space shuttle flight had a termination system under human ground control.
Clever product placement of iPhone and Starlink and excellent storytelling. Space age technology used to connect astronauts to their loved ones on earth. Can’t be done any better.
Really says something when manufacturing and space launch cycle times are faster than some software projects.
Ikr, they’re testing 1 vehicle a month people, I’ve seen software projects tested slower
Seems they lost the ship , it is supposed to be v2 and had several changes
US scientists and engineers are second to none in the world. But they are distant second to their own marketing guys in innovation.
Rapid unscheduled disassembly!
RUD is in fact an old joke in rocketry, I believe invented by engineers to poke fun at marketing "innovation".
Cool video of the upper stage breakup from Turks and Caicos
Any idea how long it took them to get the Falcon right?
Or is comparing dev timelines for both a moot point because they are different classes of rockets
The first Falcon 9 landing happened after 8 attempts at controlled splashdown or landing. Time from the first attempt to the first successful landing was a little over 2 years. In the year after their first successful landing, they succeeded in 5 out of 8 attempts. This wikipedia article has details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_first-stage_landing_t...
Starship has had 7 tests in the past 20 months. The first test barely got off the pad due to engine failures. The stages failed to separate, so it was blown up shortly after liftoff. The second test did separate, but the booster blew up shortly after stage separation and the ship blew up shortly before engine shutdown, raining debris across the Atlantic similar to today. The third test got to space, but the booster landing burn failed and the booster impacted the ocean at close to the speed of sound. The ship couldn't maintain orientation and burned up on reentry. The fourth test succeeded at all goals (soft booster splashdown and successful reentry, though the flap did burn through). The fifth test was a success (booster catch and soft ship splashdown, though again with some flap burnthrough). The sixth test aborted the booster landing due to antennas on the tower being damaged by the rocket exhaust at launch, but did splash down softly offshore. The ship also reentered and splashed down on target.
Today's ship failure is a setback, as it will likely take a few months for the FAA investigation to be completed. That said, SpaceX still seems likely to recover a ship intact this year, and at that point it will only be a matter of time before they can launch an order of magnitude more stuff into orbit than they can with the Falcon 9 fleet (and at much lower cost).
WOW, the footage of Starship reentry was amazing
i still can't believe they can actually catch that first stage. it makes no sense, but works!
SpaceX started Starship development in 2012. Despite 12 years of work, its best test flight reached space but not orbit, sending a banana to the Indian Ocean.
While NASA's SLS began in 2011 and successfully flew around the Moon in 2022.
Blue Origin's New Glenn also started development in 2012 and reached orbit on it's first flight with an actual payload.
When they say SpaceX is fast, what do they mean exactly?
The last SLS launch was in November 2022. The next one is in April 2026. That is 42 months between launches.
Starship may not go 42 days before the next launch. SpaceX's Falcon 9 + Heavy has launched on average once every 12 days since 2010.
And while Starship was "in development" since 2012, that doesn't mean it was prioritized. The first prototypes were only made in 2018.
> as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary.
What a waste of time and resources.
Anyone care to give the non spacey folks like me the highlights of this launch?
It's similar to last time if you saw that, the first stage will come back towards the launch site and they will try to catch it with the landing tower chopsticks, while the second stage does a soft landing in the ocean after going halfway around the earth.
As far as new stuff, they are trying to deploy some simulated satellites from the second stage and will try to relight one of the engines.
I also saw mention somewhere that this is V2 of Starship upper stage? Somewhat longer, and I’m sure a bunch of other changes to enable mass simulator deployment.
Yes, about 2m longer. Also some modifications to the heat shield, including testing new types of heat shield tiles. Also non-structural versions of new catch pins to see how they perform on reentry
Edit: also, they are reflying one of the raptor engines that was on the previous flight (Engine 314, because pi).
Thanks, they also mentioned that they moved the upper flaps to reduce heating on them during reentry.
Preparing to launch 4:37pm CT (~45mins after this comment)
First 10mins watching gets you to space with engine shutdown.
38mins after launch engine turns back on. 10mins after that reentry starts. 1:06 after launch is the landing.
I think that covers it.
Space X has failed after 3 billion US tax payer dollars to take a banana into low earth orbit. Needless to say we aren't going to Mars last year watching a woman in a long dress floating in the cargo bay behind a curtain of glass windows playing a violin for entertaining the dozens of astronaut's which don't have space for food, water, belongings or life support.
> Space X has failed after 3 billion US tax payer dollars to take a banana into low earth orbit
Literally just lofted some satellites.
*tried to, but lost them all
No, they successfully sent two to the Moon on Weds. https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/14/science/nasa-launch-firefly-i...
The point was about Starship - it has never successfully flown with any amount of cargo. The 3 billion number from the poster before makes it clear they were only referring to Starship, not all of SpaceX.
SpaceX is an extremely successful space launch company, and Falcon 9 is the best we've ever had. It's just Starship that seems to be going much worse.
Falcon 9 was once in the same spot; simulator payloads (a wheel of cheese), years of delays, a bunch of smashed-up first stages and drone ships, etc. Even more so if you count the Falcon 1 failures.
Starship has already demonstrated several key things work - the new engines, catching the booster, and on-target intact reentry of the second stage, all for about as much money as a single SLS launch is projected to cost. (Thus far, they've only had one for $26B.)
You mean like later after it happens?
of course, no space x event is complete without the scam fake streams
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1VbZoYSyzA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMG8BbUjwRk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-uQNSxqQHY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYuUj777a0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqsGPQnAP-M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAC4JzHqRk4
It is incredibly to me that Google doesn't seem to give a shit about this. It would be so easy to fix.
Feels like one SpaceX could and should deal with by DMCAing the channels. Even if getting people watching their official channel instead isn't that important to them, stopping people rebroadcasting their content whilst faking their brand identity to scam people feels like the most legitimate reason for sending takedowns going...
They make new ones each time. By the time the stream is over, they’ve already promoted their shitcoins and don’t care what happens to the channel.
They could do what TikTok does and require you to have x number of followers from your videos before allowing live streaming, but then you just make a market for sockpuppet followers.
I suspect some of these channels are on stolen accounts.
One of them has the "Official Artist Channel" badge, and a handful of completely unrelated videos.
The channels are usually with stolen credentials. i.e. when you see an Elon Musk stream on your home page, it's because a creator you Subscribe to had their channel taken over and the content replaced with fake Musk streams.
People really under-value the credentials for such things and I think it's part of the same problem as when streamers who aren't used to this life yet forget about privacy considerations and end up with a phone number or worse home address known to fans.
If you have a meaningful Youtube income, you need to spend some of your next Youtube check on say two Security Keys. If you like them, buy some more for everything else, but since Youtube is your income, step one lock Youtube with Security Keys.
Once that's required, errors of judgement possible through limited understanding or sleep deprivation cease to be a problem. Baby didn't sleep properly all week, some idiot screwed up your banking, and now Youtube keeps sending emails. You get another stupid Youtube email or at least you think so and either
1. You give Bad Guys your password and maybe OTP, so they steal the account and maybe in 5-10 days you and your fans can seize back control, meanwhile it's used to run scams
OR
2. Even sleep-deprived, confused and bewildered you will not post your physical Security Keys to Some Russian Guy's PO Box, Somewhere else, 12345. Your account remains in your hands because without that physical object they can't get in.
Reminds me of the train wreck of searching for “ChatGPT” or “OpenAI” on the apple App Store — all scam results.
Actually similar to how Twitter used to be. (Of course now it has other problems.)
What problems does it have now?
Integrity, mainly. Elon is not an honest person and he will use any power at his disposal arbitrarily to silence people he dislikes when he feels like it.
The most absurd example of all is the very recent case where Elon pretended to be a pro gamer and got caught. A streamer called Asmongold covered the topic on his stream, which triggered Elon to arbitrarily remove Asmongold's verified checkmark and remove his gaming badge. Considering the low stakes of this matter I find the actions ridiculous and don't trust Elon with having basically admin access to the platform at all.
I've also heard plenty of horror stories about the ruthless way the engineering in X is currently done, often carelessly breaking stuff. However I have to point out that the service is and has been far far more stable than the "haters" have predicted back when Elon took over and fired all those people.
look similar. the same person milking google for ads money? must be another service providing fake 'watches' and 'subscriptions'.
Youtube key stakeholders' KPIs improve as well the Youtube ad revenue. I don't understand what you're on about. (/s)
Where do they get channels with half a million subs? Are those hacked?
to be clear, it seems like the feed on some of these are scraped from official ones, but include links to crypto "giveaway" scams.
it's funny how good the algorithm is to recommend this to you so you (I) can report it
All of the downsides of a heavily censored and politically editorialized platform, with none of the anti-fraud upsides.
Are these YT channels just mirroring the official one?
There is pretty much always at least one "live" "spacex" stream on Youtube. Typically with lots of viewers. This has been going on for years.
Google/Alphabet just sucks and should be dissected.
They were mirroring Twitter stream and switched to Elon talking about crypto within 10 seconds of the launch. Don't ask me how I know.
at least some do, but they are also inserting links to crypto scams.
Yes they stop the stream at some point and the viewer must pay crypto to continue the stream.
That’s hilarious
I blame SpaceX for this as they do not have official youtube stream. This is just amateurish.
They used to, before Musk bought Twitter.
The most important payload for this flight was data. The ship was always going to be lost so from a standpoint of testing this was a huge success! I'm excited to see how quickly they resolve whatever happened and get IFT 8 going.
Beefed it the day after New Glenn makes orbit on the first try. Different philosophies, I know, but if I were at SpaceX I would be pretty unhappy right now.
NG also failed the landing, so not really?
New Glenn lost its booster yesterday. Space is hard, tests will have failures.
Impressive string of success
The launch was a failure though.
Sorry, I only watched the chopsticks part
"rapid unscheduled disassembly"
> This marketing jargon speak for explosion is lulz
Wow that was incredible
I absolutely cannot relate to the HN excitement over rockets. What is the point? What are we going to do with them? It feels like half religion half misplaced techno-positivism.
(Also a person who actively platforms outspoken neo-nazis runs the company that is launching them)
The reason is pretty simple. The technology you are using right now, was created with knowledge that was obtained in orbit.
If you use GPS, you are inherently reliant on satellites, delivered with rockets.
Some of our resource shortages can be covered via resource acquisition in space.
Pushing the space frontier, is far more interesting and important, than mobile phone screen size, or fidelity.
It opens an entire new area to the sciences.
Also big explody tube warms the cockles of my heart.
Rockets are good. They give us hope that one day we ll explore the stars. Let people enjoy the small wins.
Also, the (IMHO false) hope that we can escape the planet after we destroy it. Well, maybe the few richest will be able to do that ...
Also the hope that we can go on vacation to the lunar hilton, or orbital O'Neill colony.
Many of the techie people on HN undoubtedly dreamed of building and flying rockets at some point in their tweens / teens till the harsh realities of the material world took over. So they are vicariously living childhood dreams... Just like many "normal" people live theirs by following sports teams or celebrities. To each their own :-)
> half religion half misplaced techno-positivism
It sometimes feels like it: everything blows-up and thread here is like "what a success", Second stage explodes - "beautiful" (while trash is falling into ocean).
Yeah there is a huge amount of rationalizing how the debris aren’t a problem. Everyone is certain it will burn up before hitting the ground, and if it doesn’t, it will land somewhere that doesn’t matter… but I don’t think anyone knows that for sure?
Rockets are cool but it’s everyone’s planet, if this continues to make a huge mess, do us regular earth citizens have recourse?
LGTM. Ship it.
It seems like they have the chopsticks catch down pretty well, but the ship exploded over the Atlantic so there's gonna have to be more tests before the ship can think about an RTLS test.
More generally, getting the ship to work reusably seems like it will be a considerably greater challenge than reusing the boosters.
Unbelievable. Congrats to the SpaceX team, again. Thank you for bringing the future into the present.
It was a failed launch though. Upper stage blew up.
I mean it's really the booster catch that's revolutionary here. Doing it twice proves that it's not a fluke.
"rapid unscheduled disassembly"
they did it!
Except for that whole second stage and payload part.
Actually I thought there would be less risk with the second stage changes, significant as they were, than the second catch. (Maybe there was less risk, of course, and the dice just didn't roll that way).
"Rapid unscheduled disassembly"
@elonmusk 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 vent capacity.
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
Musk've had Cybertruck QA team on this one.
Musk is going to end up killing a lot of people unintentionally.
Can someone tell me what's the point of all this? To export capitalism outside of solar system?
The point of a fully reusable launch vehicle? Similar to a fully reusable airplane or a car, I suppose.
We have various interests in sending things to space, why not do it cheaply?
Survival of our species, for one. Never the mind short-sighted folks like yourselves clawing us back the entire way.
It's the opposite of the survival. When locust consumes everything around, it dies out.
On a long-enough scale, this planet will die anyways. Let's first try to expand life and unlock the secrets of the Universe, as much as possible.
At this point in time the humanity has nothing to offer to any other intelligence (if there is any) out there, nor it doesn't have a need itself to go outside of its own planet, and the big mess that it made out of it. It's akin of letting a toddler walk out of the door and roam into a busy street merely for a satisfaction of its curiousity. What is more likely to happen is that the valuable resources that we still have will be gone (it won't take long, as consumption is growing at exponential rate), without ability to recover - a one way ticket to stone age. It's nice to dream and look at the stars, but can we please sort the shit here first?
Just to Mars, and maybe the asteroid belt. See [0].
[0] Expanse, The.
To export the enjoyers of capitalism (a.k.a. humans) outside this planet, to visit the stars.
beautiful although one wonders what they're trying to escape
Every one of these are like right out of a sci-fi novel. It makes me truly excited for our future in a way little else out there does.
Between this, AI (even in its current LLM form), and mounting evidence suggesting the entire solar system is teeming with at least microbial life, we are going to become an interplanetary species far sooner than many “skeptics” imagine.
We are just one more lander / sample mission / whatever away from having solid proof of life elsewhere in the solar system. That is gonna jumpstart all a huge race to get humans out into deep space to check it all out.
People worry about AI stealing their jobs… don’t worry. We need that stuff so humans can focus on the next phase of our history… becoming interplanetary. Your kids will be traveling to space and these (very overhyped, don’t get me wrong) LLM’s will be needed for all kinds of tasks.
It sounds crazy but I maintain it’s true and will happen sooner than you’d think.
> Your kids will be traveling to space
I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number. There is nothing in space to travel to until we build extremely complex habitats, and that can't be done with manual human labor, it requires mostly automatic drones and maybe a handful of human controllers living in the ship that brought them there.
And building habitats that any significant amount of people (say, 1000) could actually live in will take a loooong amount of time and a huge amount of resources. And the question of "why would anyone waste time and resources on trying to live in conditions more inhospitable than anything the Earth can ever become, even with a major asteroid crashing into it in the middle of a nuclear war and a global pandemic?" will crop up long before more than one or two of these are finished.
> I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number
Someone born today will have children living into the early 2100s. The first flight ever was a little more than a hundred years ago. Using your kind of logic, no one would have predicted most of the technology we take for granted today.
> mounting evidence suggesting the entire solar system is teeming with at least microbial life
?
> It makes me truly excited for our future in a way little else out there does.
Hate to break it to you, but Space X isn't it. You can't have a CEO that is not aligned to the truth and reality to lead a company into something that is beneficial for humanity.
Weyland-Yutani
Hi there
I like how chopsticks catch (a very impressive feat) completely distracts everyone from totally fucked timeline and already spent budget on mars mission. Its like any criticism is being drowned in loud cheers. Only time will tell, but I hope I will be wrong on this one
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-cool-cam
What's the criticism exactly? Like I don't get your point? Yes they are behind on timelines and on Mars, does that mean that we should post reddit-tier cynical comments every time about that? I'm not saying that you're doing that, it's more that I don't get why this is surprising.
And on the other hand, it's also funny to see how "skeptics" (whatever that means in this case) dismiss or belittle achievements that were claimed to be impossible a few months or years ago (for example, the chopstick landing). It's like a never ending treadmill of
this is impossible->okay it happened, that's cool, but now xyz is impossible.
Plus, it seems normal to me that people care less about some sort of budget details or delays than really cool technical feats.
I actually get this take, but for me it's the ultimate distraction and a way to legitimize the CEOs rubbish behavior.
"How can he be wrong when he is a genius and can land a rocket in two chopsticks?"
I’m in a slightly different boat. The CEO’s rubbish behavior sucks, but the company shouldn’t be diminished by that. The people behind SpaceX are a modernd day Apollo Program. Absolute marvels of engineering.
They are making the impossible merely late. Which, you know, is still pretty fucking cool.
I’d love to see any other country or competitor catch a stainless steel rocket larger than the Statue of Liberty that was just cruising back to earth at sub orbital velocity. Everybody else is so far behind it’s not even funny.
Spacex is cool as shit. Screw the “skeptics” and haters. Some people have a complete lack of imagination.
No, they are making the possible very late.
> very late
when was your fully reusable full-flow staged combustion rocket engine scheduled flight, again?
Why does that matter? SpaceX is setting themselves up for failure by insisting that they need to nail re-entry first. Whenever they focused on a test flight for re-entry I'm wondering why they aren't working on more important things like the payload doors or orbital brimming. They will get the re-entry tests for free!
And even if they don't. The upper stage is cheap enough that it can be expended and still be cheaper per flight than Falcon Heavy. So that tells me that the delays are on purpose. Their test flight planning is designed to maximize ego stroking.
Starship started development in 2012. SLS started development in 2011, New Glenn in 2012.
SLS flew in 2022 around the moon. New Glenn just flew, reaching orbit with an actual payload.
Starship hasn't reached orbit, the best they did was send a banana to the Indian ocean.
Remind me again how SpaceX is the fast company?
4M viewers. comparable to top politics events.
ship looks to be lost. this was the main part, so it's almost complete failure.
these tests are designed to fail — the data collected now will ensure they don't blow up with actual people on them. test seems like a success to me
Still a failure in my book, it blew up before it could deliver its payload so they couldn't do many the tests they intended to do.
It is possible they will have to add one more test launch to their schedule, delaying commercial operations because of that.
It is not a complete failure, but to me, it is more failure than success, even by SpaceX test flight standards.
Compared to the previous flight, that I consider a success, the booster catch was nice, but it is not the first, and they have plenty of tries left to perfect it, so it is not in the critical path.
they didn't get the telemetry after, what it was, 16 min(?) hope they'll find the reason which will be hard without black boxes like on airplanes. as every engineer knows it works flawlessly only at the end. if ever.
the booster was the same, great, but not surprising.
IIRC they had 30 cameras on board & who knows how many sensors (probably hudreds ?).
So even if an engine bay fire burned the electronics and interrupted all coms (or FTS blew it up) they should already have a lot of data by that point showing how it went wrong.
You're assuming the viewer count is accurate? That seems rather naive.
Let us say 2/3rds of a failure.
SpaceX has a way of making the nearly impossible expected. We have forgotten quite quickly that booster catch is still a very experimental feature. Return to base on this flight wasn't routine yet.
Almost a complete failure except for second ever caught first stage...
BTW they first tested a redesigned version of Starship today.
Booster works, we've seen that before. No satellites deployment, no new heat shield test. Separation works. But that's it.
Now the 'funniest' thing, this piece falls back where the ships are waiting. I hope it will miss this time too.
The ships are on the other side of the planet, near Australia. They’ll be fine.
Didn't expect it to disintegrate completely. At least they figured out what happened. Well, one step at a time. But that means no orbital flight for next couple of missions.
Starship test successfull: - engineers did that Starship explodes: - Musk's failure!