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 ...
Daily Mail has no clue they’re testing PROTOTYPES ,LOL
Other than that, I aint much for EVs but to those ignorant people on here...eventually they'll figure it out as long as they keep the GD federal government out of it. The huge problem I have with it is that the federal government is purposely killing oil and coal making all Americans suffer.
They had EVs back in the early 1900s-delivery trucks in the cities.
This was an amazingly successful launch. No one, not even Musk, thought this would be as successful as it was.
Several firsts:
1) The most powerful rocket in mankind’s history cleared the tower.
2) The launch pad held up under the largest thrust ever attempted.
3) This flight lasted four minutes!
5 of the rockets did not fire in this vehicle. It still made it as far as it did.
VERY IMPRESSIVE!!!!!!!!!!!
Elon Musk is my hero. He will be thought of in the same manner as Edison, Tesla, the Wright Brothers, Einstein, Newton, and so on. He is one of the most impressive men of our age.
This is how you do it. They got good data and a lot of stuff worked. Now they try again. This is how the early days of rocketry worked.
These days NASA spends $3 Billion sitting around in meetings and launches very little.
I wish I could buy stock in SpaceX.
The Falcon 9/heavy had some failures too but now they go up every month or two without a hitch.
Rockets from the Falcon 9 family have been launched 223 times over 13 years, resulting in 221 full mission successes (99.1%)
The active version, Falcon 9 Block 5, has flown 162 missions, all full successes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches#Launch_outcomes
The science-ignorant media just sees the flames at the event and wants to laugh at Musk.
You are EXACTLY correct. On both points.
Click, click, click. Click Vampires sucking the good out of the story for maximum clicks by writing the most negative, manipulative headline possible. I will not add to their click total.
definition of rocket scientist: someone who blows shit up until something flies ...
As I posted else where....
Partial postmortem..... Raptor exploded causing the APU which provides hydraulics to gimbal the engines blew.. total loss of engine control which caused the tumble ... failure to separate also due to holding pins being hydrophilic also.
from Nasa Space flight youtube feed
Now that's what I call, breaking news. :^)
Using only 27 of its 33 eventual engines, and with twice the thrust of the Saturn V, managed 244 seconds of flight, which is about 240 seconds more than the USSR's N1 booster managed on its first test flight. :^)
Frankly, I didn't think that big beast would clear the tower, and I enjoy a rocket blowing up as much as a nice clean routine mission. :^D
It took four test flights of the Falcon 1 to have one go perfectly, I doubt that the Starship will require even three.
Whatever you read...read it again...
The booster started its flip maneuver but the stage separation had failed causing an out of control flight.At that point mission control should have hit the destruct button.
Also, looks like 6 raptors failed to start which could have caused the failure.
All in all, it was a great success.
And link it to 4/20
Hysterics here
We’re not going to live on Mars. Mars is completely exposed to solar radiation due to the absence of a magnetic field significant enough to protect life.
reminds me of the euphemistic phrase “conscious uncoupling”.
What are you talking about?
Elon said it would be insane to expect there would be total perfection on this first flight.
It is why NASA always did the test fires on Wallops
Soviet N1 moon rocket exploding | 0:59
georgH | 257 subscribers | 1,762,945 views | November 12, 2006
Probably burned at full at lot longer times with that payload. If it is over water there might still be materials to examine. If it was an engine failure that could be a significant issue.
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