Alright everybody, get in!
We're going to Mars!
(remembering all the explosions in the 1950's and 1960's of course)
Posted on 03/03/2021 7:22:54 PM PST by Yo-Yo
The big boom notwithstanding, it's a major milestone for SpaceX.
SpaceX's latest Starship prototype went out in a blaze of glory.
The Starship SN10 spacecraft touched down successfully after a high-altitude test flight today (March 3), a major milestone for the company and its crewed Mars ambitions. But the vehicle didn't manage to hold itself together, exploding about eight minutes after landing.
The big stainless-steel SN10 (short for "Serial No. 10") launched from SpaceX's South Texas site at 6:15 p.m. EST (2315 GMT), rose 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) into the sky and then came back to Earth for a smooth touchdown 6 minutes and 20 seconds after liftoff.
Video: Watch SpaceX's Starship SN10 land and explode
It was the third high-altitude test flight for a Starship vehicle but the first to feature a successful landing. SN10's two immediate predecessors, SN8 and SN9, flew well during their jaunts — on Dec. 9, 2020 and Feb. 2 of this year, respectively — but both hit the ground hard and ended up in pieces.
"Third time's a charm, as the saying goes," SpaceX principal integration engineer John Insprucker said during SpaceX's launch webcast today. "We've had a successful soft touchdown on the landing pad that’s capping a beautiful test flight of Starship 10."
But that wasn't the end of the story. Some flames were visible near SN10's base shortly after landing, and that was a sign of things to come: the vehicle exploded on the landing pad at about 6:30 p.m. EST (2330 GMT), rising up and crashing down again in a huge fireball.
SpaceX is developing Starship to get people and payloads to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations, and to fly any other missions the company requires. Indeed, SpaceX plans to eventually phase out its other flight hardware — the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets and Dragon cargo and crew capsules — and let Starship shoulder the entire load, company founder and CEO Elon Musk has said.
Starship consists of two elements: a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) spacecraft called Starship and a giant rocket known as Super Heavy, both of which are designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Both will be powered by SpaceX's next-generation Raptor engine — six for Starship and about 30 for Super Heavy, Musk has said.
The final Starship will be brawny enough to get itself off the moon and Mars, but it will need Super Heavy's help to get off our much more massive Earth. After launching Starship to Earth orbit, the huge booster will come back down to Earth for a vertical landing, as Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy first stages already do.
Musk believes that Starship's combination of rapid reusability and power — the system will be able to loft more than 110 tons (100 metric tons) to low Earth orbit, according to its SpaceX specifications page — is the breakthrough that will make ambitious feats such as Mars settlement economically feasible. And Mars settlement is Musk's driving ambition; he has repeatedly said that he founded SpaceX in 2002 primarily to help humanity become a multiplanet species.
SpaceX is iterating toward the final Starship spacecraft via a series of increasingly complex prototypes. For example, the first Starships to get off the ground were single-engine vehicles that flew about 500 feet (150 m) high. SN8, SN9 and SN10 all sported three Raptors, as well as forward and rear flaps for aerodynamic control, so they flew much higher.
SN10 put those flaps to use today as it soared through the South Texas skies. The vehicle performed a number of precise in-flight maneuvers, including a sustained hover at the 6.2-mile maximum altitude, a horizontal descent and a dramatic "landing flip" to get itself vertical in time for touchdown.
All of that happened a bit later in the day than SpaceX had planned. SN10 was originally scheduled to launch at 3:14 p.m. EST (1814 GMT) today, but that attempt was aborted just after engine ignition when the spacecraft's computer sensed something anomalous. The abort was caused by a "slightly conservative high thrust limit," Musk said via Twitter this afternoon. SpaceX soon increased that limit and got SN10 ready to fly just three hours later.
We'll see many more test flights in the weeks and months ahead, for SpaceX is already building multiple SN10 successors, as well as the first Super Heavy prototype. Musk has said that the company aims to get a Starship prototype to orbit this year, and he expects the final spaceflight system to be flying people regularly by 2023.
SpaceX already has an operational Starship flight targeted to launch that year — the "dearMoon" mission booked by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. Maezawa is looking for crewmembers to join him on that six-day journey around the moon, so throw your hat in the ring if you're interested.
Mike Wall is the author of "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.
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That’ll buff right out.
In other news, millions of women today felt something funny in their stomachs as they had never something so big rise like that before. SpaceX erected a space ship of epic proportion.
They just don’t make them like they used to!!!
Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy would disagree with you.
Water landing = you throw most of the thing away because seawater does evil things to components.
Runway landing, vertical takeoff = you throw much of your payload away in wings and such.
“How many rockets blew up when NASA was getting started? “
That Goddard guy had no shortage of designs and implementations that blowed up real gud.
Now I know why I hate parking garages.
NASA has a far worse safety record both overall and in the same development timeframe as SpaceX.
May I remind you that NASA managed to design three people to literal death in their first multicrew capsule? And it wasn’t even a launch failure?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
Also worth mentioning that for a while in the 50s and 60s, it was a meme that our rockets always failed while the Russian ones didn’t. It was even quoted in the book The Right Stuff. You maybe want to look at this list: http://claudelafleur.qc.ca/Scfam-failures.html
Maybe should also remember the explosions in 1986 and 2001, too...
Unlike NASA, Musk is likely to find and correct management errors (if any) that may have contributed to the failure.
Er, that should have been 2003 not 2001.
I remember when we lost a KH-11 during a failure. Late 1980’s?
Maybe it was a Vandenberg launch for a polar orbit.
They cannot land with all three engines lit. In fact, it can fly up with one at full power. It hovered at 10,000 meters for a full minute on just one engine before shutting it down.
According to Elon Musk it requires two engines to successfully land. The flight of SN9 failed because one of the two engines SpaceX tried to start to land it, failed to ignite.
During the online Tweeting after the failure, a SpaceX fan on hearing Elon Musk’s explanation of why SN9 crashed Tweeted to Musk to ask about using all three engines to land. Elon said that even at the lowest power that each engine could produce, when three are combined it would cause the ship to go up, not land, so they have to only use two... but on SN9’s flight the second failed to start, and one is insufficient to slow the fall enough AND bring it to zero speed before fuel is expended. Another fan asked to assure that you have at least two running rockets, why not start all three, then shut down one when you know for sure you’re ok to land. Musk Tweeted back, "We never thought of that, we’re too dumb!"
That’s why all three engines were ignited right at first to start the vertical flip... to make certain there’d be two working for landing!
The goal is to time landing to nearly empty of fuel for safety.
I’ve been following the construction of these rockets. They’re built out in the open where the public can watch. The lower tank right above the engines is the liquid Methane tank... That would have to have been methane leaking out. Any high-pressure LOX left is in a very small tank up at the very tip of the nose cone. The valve that controls it would have been closed right at landing. There’s still some low pressure LOX left in the tank right above the methane tank (those tanks have a common wall), so the methane mixed with atmospheric oxygen likely from a breech in the tank wall caused by the crumpling of the ship on hard landing. The ships steel wall IS the tank wall, and the wall is the support for the upper structure, and remember, the whole ship bounced about ten feet on landing. NOT GOOD. Think of the force that can cause a 100 ton 16 story building to bounce ten feet and what that amount of force will do to 4mm steel!
Right after the landing one could see out gassing where there should be none... from the engine skirting, where the really, really hot engines are located. Normally, they recycle the methane back into holding tanks if the rocket is on the test stand... if not, say after doing a static fire, that which can’t be recycled, its exhausted into the atmosphere away from the hot engines and the LOX far away from the methane so the don’t mix. It’s not under the skirt.
Musk is a genius, and also a financial one. He’s using Telsa, Starlink and so on to support his main goal. People on Mars. This was ok progress for SpaceX. Within a year they should be landing hopefully.
See this list of launch/total mission failures from the opening of the Space Age to 2012: http://claudelafleur.qc.ca/Scfam-failures.html
We’ve lost more than just that one. In 1990 we lost a KH-12 when, upon orbital insertion, the satellite just exploded for no apparent reason. There was a 1986 KH-9 launch that exploded 16 seconds after launch, a 1985 KH-11 launch that died due to a first stage fuel system failure that shut down the engines early, and so on...
The really funny thing about that idea about the Soviet space program was that it was a complete myth! We now have access to their secret archives and they blew up far more rockets than we did! They just did not put their space program failures on National TV like us so everyone could watch them blow up rocket after rocket like us.
We now know their space program was one of build and try to launch rapidly, down and dirty, and cheap. If it explodes, "OK, Da, great! Find out why and fix that, launch the next one in two or three weeks. When that one explodes, find out why and fix that, rinse repeat, over and over again. Keep at it until it doesn’t go BOOM. AND, Keep it simple, stupid. You want more power? Easy, strap on more rockets.
Everyone was military, safety was second, third, or even last.
Except for the Soviet disregard for safety, Elon Musk is modeling their experiment to fly with SpaceX; don’t worry about blowing up rockets. Why? It works. Launch, crash, go BOOM? Fine. A crash or BOOM provides one more way that needs fixing. Figure it out, fix it, launch again, find the next oops.
Yeah, IIRC they tried to launch the KH9 to cover for the KH-11 which was lost. As I recall, that left only one bird of that type in orbit. (with the multiple capabilities that it had)
I think they had to plan Operation El Dorado Canyon using just that one bird.
True, it was a brute force development program... but the fact remains that in the end it did work and they ended up with some of the most powerful reliable launch systems.
And further, their systems continued to work once we had to retire STS. A lot of the recent and current US space launch systems fly on ex-Russian/Soviet liquid fueled rocket motors.
The Soviet designed rocket engines had a better, more efficient design than what we were using. They were showing about 16% more thrust by not throwing away the fuel and power used in the compressor stage like we were. They simply fed it back through and added it to the exhaust. Voila, more power instead of wasting it. SpaceX Raptor engines are a variant of that principle only simplified and even more efficient..
NASA wants to go back to the Moon using a lot of stored up 60 year old engine of which there are a limited supply, rehashed Space Shuttle Booster solid rockets, and a limited four man capsule approach. Elon is talkin about landin multiple Starships with 40 person crews, unmanned tanker ships that when emptied can be converted to Moon colony living quarters, farming space, etc. the Starship as configured now can comfortably carry a 60 person crew to Mars. The mission to Mars would be multiple Starships, not just one, because these ships are cheap and easy to manufacture. Musk anticipates building growth from 100 to 1000 a year in the first ten years.
Keep in mind, it’s the size of a sixteen story building, but only two/thirds of that is dedicated to fuel tanks and rocket engines. That leaves six floors, 36 feet in diameter, 10 feet high each for crew. Etc. Part of that is the nose, so adjusting for essentially a conic structure, it’s still 55,000 cubic feet of space. The ISS has 32,000 cubic feet of pressurized space, but it’s cramped by being in tiny tubes spread out over a lot of cramped modules, and its largest open space is still tiny.
Yup - I’m in favor of SpaceX and am often LMAO at NASA’s incompetence these days.
There are more embarrassments on that list I linked, too...
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