Posted on 04/20/2023 8:39:48 AM PDT by Morgana
Elon Musk's SpaceX's Starship exploded into a ball of fire on 4/20 during its second failed orbital launch in a week.
The world's largest and most powerful rocket – which was unmanned - lifted off in South Texas and successfully cleared the launchpad, its first milestone.
But the craft was sent into a tailspin when the booster - called Super Heavy - failed to separate from the rocket in mid-air.
The mission ended at around four minutes when the failure sent both stages crashing toward Earth, imploding mid-descent over the Gulf of Mexico.
Despite the failed launch, the team at SpaceX reportedly cracked out champagne bottles and chanted 'go Starship' after the rocket's explosion. The entire Starship program cost around $3billion.
The companies leadership - including Musk - has repeatedly stressed the experimental nature of the launch and said any result that involved Starship getting off the launchpad would be a success.
Musk himself claimed last month that there was a 50 percent chance his spacecraft could explode during the launch.
The billionaire congratulated the SpaceX team on an exciting test launch of Starship' about 20 minutes after the explosion.
'As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation,' SpaceX tweeted.
The company shared on Twitter that its team will review data and work toward another flight for the rocket.
'With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today's test will help us improve Starship's reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multi-planetary,' SpaceX tweeted.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Theres been tons of explosions. Thats how they operate.
Totally sensational and misleading headline. Yes the thing exploded but that was not unexpected.
GEESH
I saw some video on ewetewb ... the answer is not too well. The ring it sits on seems to be OK-ish, but there's a big crater under it.
It's called a "Flame Trench", guys. I know you don't want one, but ...
He is absolutely worthy of being included among that group. As for those ridiculing what they ignorantly believe is a “failure”, SpaceX is following the same development philosophy as they did with Falcon 9; rapid testing of prototypes and iteration of improvements based upon what goes wrong until arriving at a highly reliable final product. Falcon 9 exploded many times, among other early results, and yet now it is by far the safest and most reliable rocket ever devised. It is BECAUSE of the mishaps during development and testing that the final product ends up being so reliable. By that point, they’ve already experienced, in real life, not in a computer simulation, the most likely things to go wrong and redesigned the vehicle to avoid them.
That approach seems chaotic to outsiders, but I think in the end it’s a better way to go than what an organization like NASA does, where they try to predict everything that could happen and build the flight hardware based upon those predictions, with very limited test flying before going into service. That seems riskier to me. If not for Elon Musk and SpaceX, NASA would still not have any way to transport astronauts to and from the ISS. It’s phenomenal what they’ve achieved.
I noticed that as well, and one of those that was not lit was one of the gimbaled engines.
Have to wonder if that affected maneuverability.
Especially considering that the Soviet Union wasn’t able to even get it’s multi-engine rocket off the launch pad.🤨
Even Musk admits that most people would not want to have his brain. It’s in constant motion. See this link:
Go to 10:38 in the video.
I can somewhat relate to him, my mind never shuts down except when I sleep. My relief is reading, something I’m addicted to others say. In second grade I was reading high school books. People around me think it’s odd that I can consume so much but to me it’s normal.
Objective-oriented.
Correction for you:
Danger Will Robinson
:)
That would be a false headline. SpaceX has conducted 25 successful launches of Falcon 9/Heavy as of yesterday 19APR2023 Rocket Lab has conducted four successful launches in that time period. In fact, America has conducted more successful space launches so far this year than the rest of the world combined.
By comparison, Russia (the whole country) has conducted 6 successful launches of anything as of yesterday 19APR2023.
China has conducted 17 successful launches so far this year, one short of three times Russia's count.
I know Russophilia is a popular disease around here, but it's really out of control when it leads to blatantly and ludicrously false statements. That dummy from Roscosmos really stuck his foot in his mouth.
Unless they go underground and then what’s the point of leaving earth, you can do the same thing here.
Up in smoke on 4/20. Oh well, it took a lot of failed V2 rocket tests to get us to the moon.
Yep. Everyone is acting like this is a failure. It was a significant leap in knowledge.
You all need to realize, they were ditching all the craft for splashdown to simplify this first launch. And the thing that went wrong is one of the more 'fixable' processes, unlike a launch pad detonation. It's a big win. Starship is viable. Mars, here we come.
An awesomely successful test...
Hope it makes that new moon team happy...
Actually it looked more like a controlled destruction, the separation failed to happen.
However, Elon has openly stated odds of this thing failing were probably around 50%...
Kudos to SpaceX and Musk... One more step closer to Mars.
Laz, he's going to be the Founding Father of Mars. He's going to land in one of the first sorties and unveil a Universal Constitution of Mars that will shock people out of their socks and drive an exodus to the Red Planet. That is History².
But you wouldn’t know that from the tone of the article. Elon Musk was pleased with the results of the test, and video shows many on the project actually applauding.
Not to mention the lack of free air (oxygen) to breathe, scarce water sources and very cold temps year-round. And how about that gravity of 38% as compared to Earth?
On Mars, we'd be the mole people, living underground. But, by all means, go and see how to best deal with these obstacles.
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