Falcon 9 booster landings became such a normal event that it's only news when it fails. Meanwhile every other rocket provider just tosses their booster in the ocean. (Edit: Rocket Lab does recover it from the ocean, using a parachute)
In any case, SpaceX was on a streak for so long but these past few months they got a failure (-ish?) on their second stage and now this. With so many launches every week it's bound to happen sometime, I guess.
Yeah, though it's a little weird that two failures should happen in relatively short order.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. But they definitely want to be alert, because a third time would suggest that something else is going on. Perhaps a slip in manufacturing standards.
I wouldn't get too worked up, given that 23 launches is utterly unprecedented. Still, it's odd.
Is it really weird that two very overworked boosters fail after they both get overworked around the same time? The only odd thing is that they have multiple very overworked boosters.
The two failures aren’t related though if I’m not mistaken. This is an issue on a first stage on landing while the other was an issue on a second stage engine.
I think it’s just a weird coincidence. But they’re also launching so often that it was bound to happen.
I think they also had some 200+ consecutive successful landings which is wildly impressive.
I'm halfway through Neal Stephenson’s "Baroque Cycle" and it's absolutely delightful but it sure requires frequent dictionary/Wikipedia consultation, at least for me.
This ability to look things up on the fly is why I love ereaders, despite the newproblem of finishing one book on my TBR list and having bought more than one book referred to in the first book. A divergent sequence of books I fear.
I much prefer their design to starship. It's optimising for the hardest part of the trip: re-entry.. Also re-entering like Apollo and not like the space shuttle is a good thing imo. It doesnt rely on an ablative heat shield or tiles, also it doesnt have extremely heavy / complex / vulnerable actuated fins yet it can get lift and steer itself simply with it's shape and by rotating the whole craft like Apollo.
SpaceX is a mix of mindblowing engineering with sometimes baffling decisions. I can never help but wonder how much input Elon has, and if he is responsible for all those questionable choices, as he honestly appears to be a bit of an idiot.
I've been following Starship's development avidly, but knowing he's involved always makes me cringe a little.
> SpaceX is a mix of mindblowing engineering with sometimes baffling decisions. I can never help but wonder how much input Elon has, and if he is responsible for all those questionable choices, as he honestly appears to be a bit of a idiot.
Let me get this straight. You believe that Stoke space is somehow the near perfect design. The designer or Shuttle and Starship were probably idiots for not coming up with the same ideas as Stoke. But maybe the reason that they are so dumb, is simply because Musk is part of the design team.
Maybe you should consider, just maybe, that if Starship isn't exactly like Stoke spaces design, it could have actual reasons. Maybe, just maybe the most successful rocket company in history had actual technical reason for their design choices. But no that couldn't be it, could it?
But instead of asking the saying 'Stoke Space design seems really awesome, I wonder why SpaceX made difference choices', you just jumped to 'well Musk is cringe and therefore that must be the reason'.
"You believe that Stoke space is somehow the near perfect design"
- I said I much prefer it to starship, not that it's near perfect.
"The designer or Shuttle and Starship were probably idiots"
- I dont know much about the design of Starship, that stuff is not in the public domain atm. But the space shuttle designers were not idiots, they just had to deal with some impossible requirements from higher up. The space shuttle as-built has some clearly bad design elements (eg. the shuttle itself not being on top of the stack at launch, as it was in the original design). It had a famously long and torturous design process with many different stakeholders all wanting it to be capable of wildly different missions. Just one example: https://youtu.be/_q2i0eu35aY?feature=shared
So one could say management meddling with the design is what killed the space shuttle. I am wondering is the same meddling happening in SpaceX?
Im just baffled that you seem uninterested in actually consider technical reasons of why Starship is not the same as Stoke space. The only thing you seem to wonder about if it is managment meddling.
Of course we dont know exactly why each decition was taken, but there are some pretty clear technical reasons that one could think about before using 'cringe' as an explnaition.
On Musk making Starship decisions:
"Elon’s direct engineering management style may help him maintain alignment between Mars-oriented designs and the greater defense-oriented requirements of an SDI system"
> SpaceX is a mix of mindblowing engineering with sometimes baffling decisions. I can never help but wonder how much input Elon has, and if he is responsible for all those questionable choices, as he honestly appears to be a bit of an idiot.
Let me answer that for you: it's well-documented and confirmed by many insiders, including Tom Mueller and Gwynne Shotwell, that a) Musk has always had a lot of technical input, and b) he is responsible for the good choices that made SpaceX into what it is today.
Of course the truth falls afoul of the "Musk is evil now" memo mentioned downthread, so you keep believing what you believe.
It fascinates me how people can turn "Musk has a toxic personality" into "Musk can only be the money man, must be stupid, and cannot have any technical skills." As if the tech industry hasn't already had a proud tradition of brilliant asshole CEOs named Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg, and Ellison just to name a few.
Being an asshole isn't required for success, but it unfortunately also doesn't necessarily inhibit it either.
Hey, we all received the memo - Musk is evil now. So please, play your part.
All jokes aside - having different implementations/ideas competing for similar goals is nothing but good. We cannot pretend to have "min-maxed" space travel or rocketry at this point in time - so there's still lots of ideas to experiment with.
Any organization that can successfully design, assemble, test, and launch a new rocket into space is a huge victory for the US, space exploration, and ultimately the world. Making space more accessible is likely to lead to all kinds of new discoveries and technology that benefits earth and beyond.
Starship is still in development and is running into significant delays and they have yet to show even a depot, tanker and lunar lander mockup. What real world results are you talking about? It is not like the current version of starship could deploy a payload because they removed the payload doors to make reentry easier. The last test flight took many steps back to test upper stage reuse, which is a capability that won't be needed any time soon and could have been tested in parallel with other changes. Sure, with every test they are incrementally developing the rocket, but from my perspective the progress between launches is the same as if they hadn't done any test launches. There is no magical development speedup coming from their approach, mostly because they are taking many detours. The attempt to launch without a deluge system was just a waste of time and their first rocket. They could be moving faster, but they don't.
"It's optimising for the hardest part of the trip: re-entry."
Is it really the hardest part?
I would say that for fully reusable rockets, the hardest part is quick turnaround. For future space activities, it will be a huge economic difference if you can send the ship back in, say, 12 hours vs. 120 hours.
I agree with this, I may have said the same thing.. But I was thinking that the tech used for re-entry is what tends to increase the turnaround time (Eg. ablative heat shields, tiles). Making something that's rapidly re-usable which can also withstand re-entry from orbital speeds is probably the greatest challenge in this domain.
The shuttle was originally envisaged to be cheap and rapidly re-usable for the time. As built it didnt turn out that way, it would have been overall cheaper and probably faster to launch a fully un-reusable rocket than a shuttle.
Yeah, my guess is that quick turnaround is a function of mainly two variables: a good protection of the ship during re-entry and very reliable engines that require little to none manual checking and can withstand lower thousands of cycles before needing refurbishment.
Of those two, I am fairly sure that SpaceX can produce great engines. The Raptors are not quite there yet, but their 4th or 5th iteration will likely be extremely good.
Not so sure about the heat shields. Much less aggregated corporate experience there.
It was quickly taken down, but there was a video on YouTube from someone who got hold both of a Space Shuttle and a Starship heat shield tile. He analyzed it with a microscope. He found that the material was nearly identical. I do wonder why SpaceX thinks they can make a ceramic heat shield work when it needed lots of checks and refurbishment for the Space Shuttle. Recently Musk even said they will add an ablative heat shield in certain areas.
On the other hand, the at least the reusability of the lower stage shouldn't be a problem.
From what I understand, they are trying to keep their unique type shape count very low relative to the shuttle, which should make tile replacement a lot cheaper. Nonetheless, the tiles seem like the weakest aspect of the whole design. Recall that the early proposals didn't have tiles at all, so the tiles existing now is already and acknowledgement that not everything is going according to the ideal path.
I wonder whether they considered using a metallic heat shield with heat resistant alloys. The cancelled VentureStar space plane was planned to use this approach:
Yeah, but it isn't clear whether they ever considered a metallic heat shield. At some point in the past it was considered an improvement over ceramic tiles, since the VentureStar was planned as a Space Shuttle successor that fixed its shortcomings.
Not at all. The tiles just consists of two layers. The main body and the dark layer on top. According to the electron microscope analysis, the two tiles were mostly the same.
I mean more, the size and shape of the ship, the size/shape/thickness of the tiles, the attachment method, the substrate material, the flight profile...
I'm not seeing where SpaceX could have achieved a major innovation here that solves the problems the Space Shuttle had with the heat shield. I think the latter used glue rather than pins, but probably not because the Space Shuttle people couldn't make pins. If it was that easy...
I guess one advantage of SpaceX compared to NASA is that the former are very trial and error based in their design, so they can iterate much more. NASA tends to design and plan everything in advance and only build it at the end. So when the Space Shuttle reusability didn't quite pan out, they couldn't easily change things up.
To add & also imo, it's probably good thing that it's not designed to mimic old stuffs. Biplanes with train car fuselages and automobiles with horse carriage aesthetics went out of fashion quick. Space transport systems with a cargo plane design didn't work all that well too.
Meanwhile, if we look at Apollo style reentry, it just works. From first time and every time and even for interplanetary entries. Clearly that's something that isn't broken and not in need of a fix.
Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX by a rich guy that had far more money than Elon Musk did. To cringe at SpaceX leadership is idiotic; the leadership is what made the difference between a company that has dominated the space industry (putting even every single national program around the world combined to shame) and one that has never put a single object into orbit.
Not money. Not timing. Not even the engineers, because Blue Origin had every opportunity to hire the best. It was the leadership.
If you're interested in this subject, modern tusk hunters and science-fiction, then let me recommend the book "Tusks of Extinction" (2024) by Ray Nayler [0].
Very interesting read (his previous book "The Mountain in the Sea" (2022) is, however, much better and IMHO one of the best sci-fi books I've read in a long time).
Seeing the Starship's flap visibly burning in the reentry heat and still survive well enough to move around and get to a splashdown was just incredible. Amazing progress in just four test flights.
That flap is already a legend, kept at it even mangled by hot plasma, crazy accelerations and pressures, spitting molten steel at the camera. What a role model, the little flap that could.
I wonder what the odds are that some deep sea salvage group is moving to collect that this very instant (or being contracted for such). If Starship lives up to even a fraction of its potential, that [not so] little guy is going to have some serious historicity.
They had a plane flying in the area shortly after landing, probably to drop some marker for a group to come around and recover the black box. I think they've stopped bothering with preserving the test articles though, in the process of test driven development, they're going to have so many "historic" test articles, that it's kind of pointless.
They still would've been in position to put down a marker, since they had to be prepared for that before they knew they'd be able to maintain telemetry down to the water, and if they're already in position, it doesn't hurt to place the marker anyway.
According to ChatGPT, a Starship has 1000 cubic meters internal volume, and weighs 120 tons empty, which my manual math says is a density of 0.12, which means it should easily float in the ocean.
It looked like the booster exploded when it submerged after soft splashdown. There was some fire and the stream cut off. Maybe that's what happened to the ship too.
I think they had a tug go out to drag it to deeper water and make sure it sunk - there was some ship (ocean) commentry I saw in a couple of places showing the tracking data.
Also lost an engine at startup and another engine during the landing burn on the booster. Judging by the debris maybe a third engine during landing burn shutdown (or maybe that was the second engine just exploding a bit more).
Still a successful test, still a lot of work to do before they can meet their promises for Artemis (which require >10 back to back launches for one lunar mission...)
True. Heard SpaceX commentator today saying they plan 4 launch towers in near term. Hopefully the major issues that lead to FAA investigations are resolved and the cadence can ramp up. Probably won't be long before Starship's launch as often as Falcon 9s today.
The FAA's license authorization for this flight mentioned that they wouldn't require a full mishap investigation unless someone got hurt, property got damaged, or debris fell outside the designated areas, so the turnaround for approving the next flight should be pretty quick. https://x.com/SciGuySpace/status/1798089390708687106 has the full text.
This says failure of Raptor during landing is excepted from investigation, doesn’t that imply that FAA will have to investigate the failure of Raptor during launch?
I think that makes sense. Failures on launch are potentially a risk to the surrounding area, whereas you're dropping massive chunks of metal on the target areas for touchdown anyway. What shape, size or how many pieces of metal at that end doesn't materially change the risk profile.
Saw a post TF4 interview with Musk where he said they will go for catch next flight unless there are some known issues during post flight analysis. He also said that the booster landed around 6km from its initial target landing coordinates. I hope that doesn't mean another ocean landing to stick the coordinates before trying chopsticks, but either way can't wait.
In any case, SpaceX was on a streak for so long but these past few months they got a failure (-ish?) on their second stage and now this. With so many launches every week it's bound to happen sometime, I guess.