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Massive explosion rocks SpaceX Texas facility, Starship engine in flames
(interestingengineering.com)
this post was submitted on 25 May 2024
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In the early days of Starship I was a little bit optimistic. The "move fast and break things" strategy had quickly succeeded when SpaceX was trying to land boosters, so I was hopeful that each exploding Starship was one step closer to a working spacecraft.
But at this point it's just sad. I don't see anything resembling progress.
I think the boosters were a "fake it till we make it" thing that luckily worked out. I don't think Starship will ever make it into space.
That's a bonkers take. It's the largest and most powerful rocket in history and it's already made orbit. The raptor engines are the first full flow staged combustion engines to ever be put into a production rocket (This is a holy grail of rocketry). All estimates suggest that it's also probably much cheaper to build than any of the other heavy lift rockets. And that was accomplished while also building full reusability into the design...
The work they've done is nothing short of astounding. Which makes your take come off as either insane, blind, or biased.
It has not made orbit.
It has done a suborbital flight.
The difference between getting to space and getting to orbit is well, an orbit.
Starship did not achieve the speed needed to maintain an orbit around the earth, if it can do so has not been proven.
Getting something that big off the ground is impressive, but we did it 50 years ago with slide rules and pencils. Getting something off the ground should not be a success for a company that already has an orbital rocket in frequent use. Having 3 vehicles fail to achieve orbit, fail to demonstrate critical features like fuel transfer and engine relight, and fail to re enter the atmosphere while under control, is not a success. I do not buy the SpaceX corporate spin that “everything after clearing the pad is icing on the cake” that’s not good enough for a critical piece of hardware that is supposed to take humans to the moon and land them there.
If ULA can develop a rocket that completes its mission on the first launch, and NASA can do the same, because they take the time to check everything, then why are we giving SpaceX the pass to move fast and break things when it’s clearly not working. They do not have a heavy lift orbital rocket. They have a rocket that can, from all evidence, achieve a suborbital flight while completely empty.
And remember, this is not private money they are burning every time one of these explodes or burns up in the atmosphere. They were given 3 billion American Tax dollars to develop this thing. And now the Government Accountability Office has not even been shown that the Raptor engine is even capable of achieving the mission goals for Artemis. And their test articles are behind schedule and routinely failing in catastrophic ways.
I want to see humans back on the moon in my lifetime. I think we need to go and set up a colony so that we can explore our solar system better and develop technologies for sustaining humanity both off of earth and in the harsh conditions we will face as our climate changes. Anything that threatens the mission of establishing a human presence off of earth needs to be looked at closely and realistically.
Back in the 60’s we knew that the only way to get humans to the moon was to keep the equipment reliable and redundant, anything else was asking for people to die. We seem to have lost that simple insight in recent years, and Starship is the epitome of that hubris. A ridiculously complicated vehicle with a complicated flight plan that has not been shown to work in any capacity. That needs to be pointed out and investigated if for no other reason then it is delaying a major mission.
"Starship did not achieve the speed needed to maintain an orbit around the earth, if it can do so has not been proven. "
Arguing this point makes you seem either uneducated on the launch or just someone shitting on SpaceX because musk. If you were actually familiar with the launch profile you would know starship nearly reached orbital velocities but did not on purpose, so it could reenter the atmosphere and test the heat shield.
So you'd be technically right in your statement, however knowing the full details of the situation makes your take stupid.
And it was a safety measure in case they lost control that would ensure it would burn itself up and not become space junk. This guy is a nut job lmao. SpaceX is badass!
setting all politics and social issues from the CEO aside.
Right but I think that was their point though no? That, for safety reasons, they didn't make it to orbit. Seems like a pretty cut and dry "no" they didn't make it to orbit just like that person said. And the reason was that they didn't know if it would make it. Which kind of supports their point.
I'm not going to claim to know enough either way (besides Elon Musk being an idiot), but they don't seem wrong there.
It seems like you guys are mad that it didn't make orbit and get defensive when people point it out.
Because the longer a launch goes the easier it is. Basically there are critical phases of flight and there's the actual continuous operation of the rocket all the time. Things like clearing the tower, max q, stage separation, engine re-lighting are all insanely complex operations, but once all that's done and all you need to do is burn the engines for longer it's pretty easy to just burn more rocket fuel on a flight that has been working the whole time. its something that is much less risky to the mission going on. Things can go wrong, but the chance is much higher during one of those complex things.
While completely empty.
An empty vehicle does not have the same performance as one with cargo.
Ignoring this point make you seem either uneducated on space flight or just someone blinded by the tech bro philosophy of “trust me bro it’ll work next time”
¯_(ツ)_/¯ while starship performance is ass compared to what they want they could still have easily put cargo onboard, you are talking about the most successful and likely profitable spaceflight company in history here you know?
SpaceX gets a lot of credit from space fans because they have proved the haters wrong time and time again, people just like you were saying the exact same garbage about falcon 9 and reusing the booster, now that SpaceX succeeded at that they practically own earth's entire launch industry and will revolutionize it again with starship.
I'm sure we will get lots of "failures" (expected test vehicle losses) along the way for you to doom on, but at the end of the day SpaceX will be the winners like they always are at the end of the day.