SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.
Sounds like a proper test. But annoying that Musk’s name has to be plastered over every headline related to Xitter, Tesla Motors, Starlink and SpaceX.
It’s interesting. When a spacex launch goes well, you don’t see his name attached in the headline. But on this explosion, his name comes first.
I mean, It’s all business. Disaster and Elon musk are going hand in hand since his turn into a pretty decent, hateable villain a couple years ago. So putting his name on an explosion gets the “Awfuckyeah give me musk hate porn” crowd. Even though he had almost as little to do with this failure as he did with the Hindenburg. But this gets clicks.
It’s pretty annoying, because we can see right through it and their motives are shitty. Don’t get me wrong, Elon musk is a douchebag, but CNN’s motives for attaching his name to this article directly in the headline aren’t a mystery. And they’re selfish. So we can hate both CNN and musk at the same time. Convenient.
CNN writer here puts Musk in the first line of the article where it was considered a success.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/09/tech/spacex-starship-40000-foot-test-flight-scn/index.html
In this article Musk’s name isn’t there… which is the kind of article I would rather see:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/18/world/starship-launch-science-newsletter-wt-scn/index.html
Hate the game, not the player.
But one is from 2020, before he turned into a villain. So that’s still tracks. And the second one is from this year. And they’re talking about a feat. I still think my theory is right.
Plus, it’s CNN. I…didn’t think people were really able to defend CNN as anything more than a moneymaking venture. Just because trump hated them, it’s like we all forgot everything they’ve ever done.
Interestingly, they actually took Musk’s name out of this headline (after I posted it, ugh), but managed to replace it with a very BuzzFeed-y one.
So the booster worked in that it achieved lift off and properly separated. Did the other stages complete their jobs? Because this looking like it’s only a failure in the sense that the booster didn’t do the cool we-live-in-the-future part of flipping itself over and landing.
The main focus of this test was stage separation. In that sense it was a roaring success. Also, looks like they managed not to trash the landing pad this time. So that will make it easier to get the next flight approved. But clearly there’s still a long way to go.
Also demonstrated the flight termination systems, for both stages, it seems.
It appears they got their engine development under control too. Every one lit and burned effectively full duration, on both stages.
So basically they’ve fixed every issue displayed in the first flight I’d say.
They pick and chose what was the “focus” every time there’s a launch. In reality focus is for everything to work. It didn’t work this time either. It was worse the first time, but this time at the moment it looks better. Things worked out but second stage blew up in LEO which can cause all kinds of issues with debris and other satellites.
They’ve been pretty transparent about their expectations for these early test flights, and today’s achievements match those expectations. For example, they didn’t bother securing all the thermal tiles because they didn’t really expect to survive re-entry.
The rocket didn’t go to LEO. This was intentional, because they knew that this flight was unlikely to survive and they’re as concerned about space debris as you are. All the debris either burned up or fell into the ocean.
I know you’re just trying to be negative, I assume because of Musk (I hate him too). You’re not being accurate, on purpose or otherwise it doesn’t matter. It didn’t even reach orbit. How did it blow up in Low Earth Orbit?
It seems that Starship, the second stage, experienced RUD from the automated FTS at around the time it was expected to shut off its engines.
Edit: RUD is Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. Basically an explosion. FTS is Flight Termination System, which explodes a rocket if something goes wrong in a potentially dangerous way.
Which is an incremental improvement over the prior attempt. People mock these failures as though they have never built anything and have no concept that any step forward is a win when you are trying to do something that has never been done before. They got the smaller rockets working. It will just take time to get this giant one working.
Yeah but to get from here to a 99.99% reliability is a very very long way
What do you mean, never been done before?
We had satellites in space 70 years ago.
Delta clipper was pioneering reusable boosters in the 90’s.
SpaceX themselves have been recovering boosters for almost ten years now. They learned nothing from that?
I’m not saying it should work every time out of the gate, but they haven’t even reached orbit yet. And musk himself has said that starship being operational is critical to SpaceX and starlink if they don’t want the companies in serious financial trouble. So, it’s not like they’re taking their sweet time with these as incremental tests.
Nah, I mock this and I’ve built shit. The fact that musk is failing at stuff we’ve done before is hilarious.
What aspect of this “has never been done before”? Its a multi-stage rocket (NASA and the Soviets have been doing that for about seventy-ish years and the Nazi scientists we all recruited were doing it for even longer). The main innovations are material choice (which is debatable) and landing a rocket on a pad, which is mostly a function of having good computers.
Space flight is hard. That said, there is a very strong argument for being much less iterative. Especially when the quest for a reusable rocket involves constant spraying of wreckage across oceans and land.
Well done to Musk and team for what most people would deem a huge success. Great to see. Really fun to watch and follow space x huge successes over the years.
Sorry it goes against the narrative and people can’t enjoy how great this is.
I’m frankly impressed they got 30 methane burning rocket engines to run flawlessly like that. mind boggling how quickly it leapt off the stand. fuck musk 8 ways from sunday, but I dig spaceX, shotwell has figured out how to manage musk’s bullshit apparently and is doing great work.
It is quite the accomplishment to get to the Karman Line though so credit to SpaceX’s engineers.
On the one hand I want to enjoy Musk failing, but at the same time I want to praise the people who are putting all their time and effort into the project, so this comment speaks to me.
You do realize that most of the money NASA has given SpaceX has been in the form of contracts to launch missions for them? I’m pretty sure very minimal tax dollars are going to Starship development right now, especially compared to other launch providers (ULA, Blue Origin, ect.) It’s because of SpaceX that America is able to launch Astronauts to space without using Russia since the Space Shuttle was retired.
One of the risky things is that second stage blew up in LEO, potentially causing a lot of issues with debris. We are yet to see the real consequences.
It blew up about 3000 km/hr short of orbit, so thankfully all of it has burned up in Earth’s atmosphere already :)
Here’s a pre-launch article in case anyone wants to compare pre-launch expectations to reality.
