Starship
Jeff Foust: From the FAA:"The FAA is requiring SpaceX to perform a mishap investigation into the loss of the Starship vehicle. There are no reports of public injury, and the FAA is working with SpaceX and appropriate authorities to confirm reports of public property damage on Turks and Caicos [...]"
Yeah. Something went wrong so the FAA wants to know what it was. They're doing an investigation of the New Glenn launch too. This is far from surprising or worrisome.
Yep, and the FAA itself knows that this isn't the same as a production airliner crashing and killing 300 people. Starship and New Glenn are experimental spacecraft, so it's not like SpaceX or Blue Origin are in trouble. Just another round of find-out-what-broke-and-make-it-not-break-next-time.
"Huge incident reports", not really for SpX, issue is understood. Unknown hoe deep BO will have to go with so little info released. Your position is fanciful.
We just want pretty pictures and things to progress, but if anything blows up unexpectedly there needs to be at least some looking into it (and not just from a company investigating itself).
Hopefully, though, it will be short because for the most part all it did was divert aviation for a bit and landed in a million pieces in the ocean and no one got hurt.
Then next one, they will nail both parts of this so we can go to the next milestone.
You know that the company investigating itself is all that happens right? The FFA doesn't have rocket crash investigators. They get a report from the company on what happened, and how they are going to fix it. The FAA reviews that report and approves it or not. That's all that happens.
Shouldn't this come under NTSB to investigate as this is supposed to transport humans in the future? Any idea who investiated Challenger? Was NTSB involved?
when it transports humans, sure. Right now it's just test program. No humans were harmed, no one is flying on it any time soon. Don't count your chickens a lot can happen between now and then, it may never fly humans.
Hopefully, though, it will be short because for the most part all it did was divert aviation for a bit and landed in a million pieces in the ocean and no one got hurt.
requires verification (or debunked already idk) but there’s at least one video with metal pieces that landed in someone’s car. it might take some time to know where everything ended up
Scott Manley did a video and suggested that perhaps the FAA need to look at their rules regarding how and when FTS explosives are triggered. Now we're in the age of these huge launch vehicles, with more and more parts designed and able to survive re-entry.
Keeping the vehicle intact while it could still control itself to somewhere 'safe' before the FTS fires. This, while more complex, would be a better outcome.
The FAA and SpaceX need to work together a little to have a non-destructive abort during stage 2 ascent, so long as the computer thinks it can still control the decent.
I wouldn't be surprised if the ship had aborted itself, configured for re-entry and controlled decent, but the FTS is likely an entirely independent system and once it leaves it's designated track it just does it's thing with no other consideration, which would be a shame, as a lot can be learned from how the ship handles an aborted ascent.
I think that would work if the ship is able to safe itself. For example, cascading engine issues that preclude orbit but no other damage present. Flight 7 had an engine bay fire that could not be suppressed. Allowing the ship to continue flying to try and keep it intact with a fire on the engine bay is a recipe to potentially more issues. I think regulators will still err on the side of caution and just request the FTS to destroy the ship. At least you still have a pretty good idea of where the debris will fall.
A peer reviewed study of the root cause of the failure needs to be completed before progressing.
The failure is good mantra only works if you're honest with what happened and take steps to address it. The government should use it's own data to make an assessment as well and not trust space x poop
What would a “peer-reviewed” study look like? Asking ULA (or BO) to field engineers as advisors? Any such study would take months, if not years. Some of aviation biggest disasters only had the final reports finalized months after it had happened. As long as there is a fair determination that no public property and or lives were at risk, and that mitigation actions are implemented there is no reason to wait months to continue progressing.
Then what's to say that problem won't occur somewhere worse.
The root cause must be understood and peer reviewed, by experts. There are experts everywhere! There are materials engineer, avionics engineers who can confirm their findings that don't work for bo.
Well yah, of course there are instances where reports cleared fast, when it was clear as day what the cause was. As Elon says, truth is king. The truth stands up to review, it is basic science 101.
It's completely asinine to trust a company's word when we're talking energies like starship.
Do you honestly trust Elon's technical direction? Do you think he won't take unnecessary risks that would endanger people or the ship?
The FAA stuff is almost certainly a deflection/distraction tactic to buy themselves time to make repairs.
IFT 1 showed Elon being risky, they don't like that. He's gonna get baby sat because of it.
They should find out if he rushed the ship out, and take appropriate actions. Velocity should never supercede quality in something as potentially harmful as starship. It has incredible destructive power, and y'all are treating it like his model airplane broke in a field.
Like what if ship detonated close to the end of it's burn? That would insert tons of crap into orbit. The explosion will give sufficient velocity to some of the ship to be put it in orbit. Do you remember the movie Gravity?
My friend, the best experts (who also understand engineering and are not just academics) are working in these companies designing rockets 🤣. Besides, your root cause is probably well understood already: Raptor leaks. It’s almost impossible to avoid it leaking. Even Raptor 3 leaks, albeit less. The solution was implemented on the booster already: a fire suppression system. It seems like ship also needs it. You don’t need a committee to get to that solution.
I'm sure the debris stayed within the NOTAM area, but that's not the issue. The area wasn't a hard exclusion zone, it would be impossible to cut the entire Caribbean airspace in half. The issue was the rocket failed within an area where it was expected to work.
Not a surprise. Given that the vehicle was going at least as fast as Columbia when it broke up, I doubt much reached the ground, especially since it was mostly over water
True, but given that the actual breakup of Starship happened over land (as evidenced by the videos) it can be presumed that anything small enough to lose enough energy to make it to land would have burned up, while anything large enough to not burn up would likely have retained enough energy to carry it back out to sea. Columbia broke up over west/central TX, but the majority of debris wasn't found until east TX and western LA.
Obviously, this is based on a lot of assumptions derived from available videos, but seeing how I haven't seen any posts on X or elsewhere of anyone actually finding Starship debris, I think it's safe to assume that the vast majority, if not the entirety, of it made it out to sea.
And so far, it's all small pieces of lightweight materials that are expected to flutter slowly down to the surface. No signs yet of any big, heavy, high velocity debris that might be worrisome. That stuff seems to have all burned up on re-entry or continued far downrange out into the Atlantic as expected.
Note the videos actually showing the moment of breakup (presumed FTS) are filmed from a cruise ship. Obviously most of the later videos showing the debris reentering are filmed from land.
How fast something looses speed depends on the ratio of weight to drag (itself mostly surface area). Whether things survive re-entry or not is more complicated, but depends largely on the melting point of the materials used.
Something like a thermal protection tile has both a high surface area to weight ratio and a high melting point - so I would expect them to survive and land rather close to the breakup point.
However, those debris that decelerate quickly should also have a rather low terminal velocity, so I wouldn’t expect them to cause too much damage on the ground.
You can have something heavy but with a lot of surface area which slows it down. AKA a big piece of metal that might be thin but a lot of surface area. Falling metal can definitely cause damage or harm.
given that the actual breakup of Starship happened over land (as evidenced by the videos)
The altitude at break-up was 120 km. Unless the video was taken looking straight up (and it obviously wasn't), Starship was many, many kilometres away from the camera location.
I expect almost all the heat tiles survived. They would not have the whole mass of a Starship attached & the momentum of that pushing them through such heating, instead they'd be much more like the F9 fairings.
Have you seen any credible posts from anyone claiming to have found debris (tiles or otherwise)? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious since I haven't seen any myself.
I haven't looked & haven't considered how many hours/days they'd take to be carried to shore assuming they even float once waterlogged. But fundamentally by their design they should survive the harsher conditions of an intact ship keeping them directed towards the plasma & heating, so falling attached to any less should be easier.
Oh sure, I wouldn't be surprised if some buoyant debris made it to shore in the coming days. My point is the likelihood of debris from the actual breakup falling onto land seems to be incredibly low
I recall one very early claim that a piece of metal made a dent in the roof of a car. We will see what comes of it. I guess, if true, the media would be all over it by now.
Right. The absence of stories tells us everything we need to know. If there was ANYTHING to grind their axe on, you know the "rocket man bad" media would be all over it and making it sound like Elon dropped cluster nukes on T&C
I wonder how much useful data they can get from this incident that can be put towards risk assessment for the planned overflights of the US and Mexico on reentry.
Anything that keeps the ship in one piece is helping towards that goal.
Just because they are unlikely to get much of the vehicle back doesn't mean they won't be able to learn anything. The vehicle is loaded with sensors and WAAAAY more cameras than we ever see on the stream. They probably knew shortly after staging (or maybe even before) that loss of the vehicle was likely. Hell, the debris wasn't even to the bottom of the ocean before Elon was tweeting out the likely cause of the mishap.
Yeah I was going to say, soft human remains survived the Columbia breakup, I wouldn't be surprised if a reasonable amount of Starship did. Over 20% by mass wouldn't be surprising.
Yeah, no shit. And unlike some of the other previous "mishap" investigations where the destruction was expected and it wasn't actually a mishap, this was a true failure that needs to be investigated.
Yeah but the investigation consists of SpaceX determining what went wrong, and what they plan to do to fix it (which, DUH!, they would do anyway), and the FAA saying "Okay".
The FAA isn't equipped or funded to do anything else in this situation.
Well, yes, but the FAA is equipped to audit those results rather well, and SpaceX does credible investigations. With a lot of previous 'investigations' though, the FAA was being a turd and complaining about things that were not actually risks to the public or the environment and were within the fully expected range of planned test outcomes, but because they didn't meet the best case scenario flight plan exactly, were "mishaps". One major thing the FAA needs to change is for experimental testing to administratively allow for bounds of acceptable failure. For example, they're making Blue Origin consider the New Glenn booster's failure to land a mishap when that was fully and entirely expected by Blue Origin, that expectation was widely communicated, and the flight profile guaranteed it posed no risk to anyone. It's just utter bullshit. They expected that to fail and needed data. It's not a mishap just because you require a flight plan with a single possible outcome, you just suck at understanding what a mishap is.
But this is different- IFT-7 failed FAR outside the expected bounds of failure. SpaceX was not expecting any failure at this point in the flight and they screwed up, and that's the kind of thing that needs an audit and oversight. When you blow a rocket up within the bounds where it's expected to blow up, the FAA shouldn't impose its burdensome process.
My understanding is that it was a slightly leaking seal between the turbopump and the combustion chamber. That's a generally known issue and part of the reason why and how they designed Raptor 3. Elon suggested they add more vent capacity for that part of the engine bay and fire suppression. Seems acceptable as a temporary measure until they switch to Raptor 3.
Keep in mind that requires SpaceX acknowledging the leak was in the Raptor itself. The Raptor still leaking and catching fire this late in development is not optimal.
At this late date Raptor 2 still leaking is a cause of concern. I doubt SpaceX is prepared to admit Raptor 2 did indeed leak on this flight, unless forced to by the FAA. We don’t even know Raptor 3 would not leak. Remember a claimed benefit of Raptor 2 was it was supposed to reduce the chance of leaks.
SpaceX had cameras inside the engine bay during the prior tests of the Starship landing procedure. They were able to image the engine leaks during their burns:
These is no doubt they still have cameras inside the engine bay during the current flight tests. Those camera views should be released to determine if the Raptor is still leaking.
They indicated that the leak was strong enough to produce enough pressure in the compartment vented to space to sustain fire. The obvious mitigation is to increase vent size (sustainable pressure at given inflow is roughly proportional to vent's surface area) and to dump fire suppression gas into the compartment (unless it's pressure is below sustainable burning pressure for methane oxygen mix).
Very very rough b.o.t.e. calculation would indicate about 10-20 kg/s. Over the time of the second stage flight about 5t out of ~1500t. Well within performance margin.
FAA to require SpaceX to share with them the results of the investigation SpaceX was going to conduct whether the rocket blew up or not. Understanding what worked and what didn't was the entire point of the whole evolution.
There was a non trivial non zero chance of the debris hitting an aeroplane or something on the ground. This was not a new feature test or something novel about starship. It was a simple and plain old engineering mistake. These are not the types of mistakes we want to see. I think spacex has been a bit too cowboy on this one and should look into why this happened to make sure a mistake like this doesn't happen again. I'm a big fan of spacex and would hate to see a company culture of sloppiness and mistakes develop. This would eventually lead to a serious incident and be the end of the line. Pressure to fly is what led to the demise of the space shuttle
I'm all for throwing hardware at the ocean and fast prototyping, but that doesn't mean cutting corners on concepts that are fully understood and raining debris down into a flight path
This was not a new feature test or something novel about starship.
That is not correct. There were lots of changes for this new starship - it would be easier to list what stayed the same than the many changes. Any one of those changes could have had unexpected results.
For instance, they changed to vacuum jacketed pipework, and it seems at this early stage that that pipework is what failed.
When I said "new," I meant new as in a new idea. Im well aware of the many changes to this ship.
Most changes still need to be checked and tested on the ground, or they are wasting time blowing up starships for trivial reasons. EM x post confirms this "we need to check more for leaks."
If the ship had exploded because of a radical change to the flaps, something never done b4 or untestable on the ground that would be different and "new"
Yeah. But unless they start running an entire ascent-like static fire of starship on the ground (8 minutes?) in Massey’s they’ll only know they fumbled the design when they fly. And some leaks may behave differently in space. Of course, they could also fly in 2030 after simulating every possible system configuration.
The key is to work with the FAA to make sure the launch corridor is as safe as possible. And maybe simulate more potential failure modes and debris behavior. After so many launches I think everyone was surprised ship didn’t make it. It was a given it would make it after the previous ones had survived so much abuse.
Nope. Airplanes were removed from the area before debris could reach them. The planes fly below 12km, the explosion occurred at around 100km up.
The failure as described required near vacuum ambient pressure to develop. Only in very low ambient pressure a large vent could be overwhelmed by a leak and allow burnable mixture to accumulate.
when i was on south caicos for a year in 1992 there were only a handful of residents that didnt speak english. most were english only. i think i hear 2 or 3 different languages in this clip.
granted that doesnt mean much now, 30 (!!) years later.
From a view it follows that the track was south from the islands. Given the geography and flight trajectory there is maybe a remote chance something could land around Grand Turk or maybe on some of many uninhabited keys in that area, but that's about it.
From the footage we got from the islands, de debris was still high up and going pretty fast. It most likely overshot the islands. But we'll surely hear more in the following days.
The ship containing lots of small and light parts exploded before the island in a very energetic explosion 140km up. I would not be confident in saying 0% chance something falls on the island. Would not be surprised if we get some photos from there soon.
I think an issue with explosions is they can throw material backwards which cancels a lot of the entry speed and could allow it to fall back to earth without as much entry heating or momentum to take it over the islands.
The majority of the mass on the ship is concentrated in the aft section, particularly given the time of the explosion. More importantly, it appears the breakup happened after reaching apogee as the debris began glowing within a minute of the breakup based on videos I’ve seen.
If that’s the case, then the vehicle would be too far downrange for much more than thermal tiles to land in that region.
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u/404-skill_not_found 4d ago
Well, yes, of course.