Posted on 04/20/2023 8:12:51 AM PDT by Red Badger
Story by mguenot@businessinsider.com (Marianne Guenot,Morgan McFall-Johnsen,Kate Duffy) • 13m ago
SpaceX launched its new Starship mega-rocket on Thursday after a frozen valve stopped the first attempt. The mega-rocket exploded about three minutes into its flight but managed to clear the pad. Musk previously said he estimated a 50% chance of success. SpaceX launched its new Starship mega-rocket toward space for the first time on Thursday, after canceling its first attempt due to a valve issue.
Stacked atop its Super Heavy booster at SpaceX's new launchpad in Boca Chica, Texas, the black-and-silver vehicle was poised to prove itself as the biggest, most powerful rocket ever built.
The rocket successfully roared off the launch pad at 8:33 a.m. Central Time, but blew up about three minutes into the flight, at the point when it was due to separate from its booster.
Starship is the rocket on which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk is hinging his biggest aspirations — including building and populating a human settlement on Mars. NASA, meanwhile, is counting on Starship to land its next astronauts on the moon as soon as 2025.
The company live-streamed the flight attempt, in the broadcast embedded below.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
Sure, we all remember that. Not an engine thrust failure, per se, but the cold, shrunken o-ring allowing for the hot gasses to burn thru the external fuel tank.
Rob said NASASpaceflight NSF said it in post 35, they are not NASA as in US government NASA. NSF are fans that track spaceflights. They talk a lot and were probably guessing about what happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uouujjgkR3A
I’m going to try and store that term for later use.
Thanks for the clarification!
As Edison once said, “We have discovered a thousand ways to not make a light bulb.”..................
Jo...and others. A single engine system is mathematically less prone to a failure incident than is an airplane with 3 engines. 3 engines = 3 opportunities for a failure incident.
Obviously, if the single engine fails, I am hosed. 2 or 3 engines allow for continued flight, assuming airworthiness can be maintained.
Musk, a national treasure. Yes
The on-screen altitude ticker said they were at 34 Kilometers. That's 21 miles high.
I wouldn’t call the failures it took to reach the market capitalization of space X burning money
It’s the path to succes unless he fails
I think the first rockets failed first three times
Now he’s planets largest payload provider to orbit
Around 140 billion in outstanding shares valuation
1200 per pound per payload or around 62 million per launch so they claim
Post #66 is quite clear as to my mahtematical point. Read it again.
Nothing is said there about 2 or 3 plane motors failing at once, only that there’s more liklihood for a mechanical incident to occur on a plane with multiple motors.
That is so obvoius I can’t believe I have to go through it again.
I agree. Compare this to the recent Artemis flight. Sure, it was pretty much successful, but not until they had rolled it out and back so many times they were afraid they would wear it out doing that. Not to mention being over budget and behind schedule.
I found where NSF guys are talking about losing an HPU, one said “maybe the HPU exploded at 30 seconds”. The problem with that guess is that SpaceX seemed to have decent control of the rocket all the way up to about 2:10 into the flight.
I think musk average smaller rocket like now carries 25 ton payload
Or around 65 million per launch revenue
I think he’s launched over 220 revenue generating payloads so far
Around 14 billion revenue
And he did it burning money at first
A big chunk of his personal worth
If he believes in it he’s all in
It was old hardware; newer stuff at site but not yet mounted. The program is TEST TO FAILURE - it is the same way Falcon was done. Failures are expected - its how everyone learns.
Musk raises or uses his own funds, plus SpaceX is likely profitable from all the government and private contracts.
Taxpayers foot the bill for all the entire Federal budget. Since NASA is part of the Government, it pays for NASA launches. So you could say that the NASA budget pays for Falcon launches. Which money recycles through to jobs, hardware purchases, outsourced contracts, and so on at SpaceX.
RUDE. Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly Experiment
It’s funny…throughout the entire process they were playing down expectations. It’s kind of funny when they are just about saying, “This could blow up good.”
How are they supposed to test the largest rocket ever made? You can’t hide it. So, have a parade and what it blow up.
That is interesting about the used hardware. Can you elaborate? I suppose it performed well enough to gather enough system performance data. Three or so minutes is quite a long period during a rocket launch.
The more I think about it, this thing reminds me way too much of the Is Soviet N’1 rocket.
If you look at the back end of the N1, and look at the back end of the Super Heavy, they look about the same. N-1 had 30 engines. SH has 33.
The biggest Problem they had was that the Soviets could not come up with a working way to control all of the rockets. They did the best with the equipment they could. Now, I know that was some 55 years ago, but I don’t know how much better control they’d have. Yes, they have better computers with more computing power...but it’s just too damned many engines to control.
What they needed to develop was a BIGGER engine like the good ol’ F-1 from the Saturn V. Six or eight of these would be much better. IMO.
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