Major Payne holds up well.
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FDNY deployed it’s brand new robot dog at the Manhattan garage collapse.
It’s ok. It’s not as if the NASA has not based the whole of the first phase of Artemis around SpaceX’ Starship. Eh? Oh.
Failures occurs in the course of progress. Hopefully there are learnings and improvement from this one.
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Of course. The concern here is that Musk has a history of over-promising and under-delivering, notably on delivery dates. He also has a history of pushing out technology that’s not ready.
It’s one thing to deliver cars years late with homicidal AI. It’s quite another to delay a $100 billion project or, worse, blow up with astronauts and payload aboard.
Did I say blow up? I used the wrong terminology. Here’s the official description:
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rapid unscheduled disassembly
another good band name
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So, a few things to note here:
- This was the first test flight. SpaceX has launched, and crashed, plenty of test flights, and with each iteration they have smoothed out the process. Remember when landing a Falcon booster was a big deal? Now it’s business as usual.
- NASA has launched, and crashed, their fair share of test flights. In fact, they had more failed rocket flights than successful ones before they strapped Alan Shepard to the top of a Mercury-Redstone. By comparison, SpaceX launched successful Falcon/Dragon missions, both test flights and ISS resupply missions, for a decade before they ever put a crew in one.
- Delays and cost overruns are commonplace in the space program. The consortium behind NASA’s new Space Launch System missed their target launch date by six years. Boeing Starliner is six years behind and counting. The ISS was so behind schedule that the Space Shuttle program had to be extended beyond its original expiration date in the 1990s. Let’s also not forget the slow, massively expensive boondoggle that the Space Shuttle ended up being.
- My impression, which may be wrong, is that SpaceX has been more immune to Elon’s whimsy than his other pet projects. They are not a perfect company by any means, but I’ll trust them a hell of a lot more than Tesla.
Overall, not much to see here.
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It’s becoming a meme already.
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Be sure to keep HH and the rest of us posted
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I expect they are budgeted to blow up few of these before they get it right.
Hasn’t every Starship launch so far gone kablooey?
Just the test ones
I think this was the first time they put one on a booster.
So I’ve been reading up on the rocket’s failure and, well…
Things that were not a success: (i was trying to get the read more thing to work but couldn’t)
- within moments of lifting off, several engines had been knocked out by the shockwave of the rocket’s exhaust reverberating off the flat ground below. more would fail for assorted and less obvious reasons throughout the flight, but the ones that failed before tower clear have a fairly apparent cause.
- it started tumbling at the end of first stage flight
- the two stages did not separate
- the rocket excavated a crater beneath the launch mount due to a lack of any flame trench/flame diverter/sound suppression system (this is why several engines were knocked out)
- as it excavated said crater, it sent chunks of concrete flying half a mile and one completely totaled a minivan that was being used to host a news outlet’s cameras remotely. (Nobody was harmed, this vehicle was in the keep out zone and just being used to stage remote cameras, but still)
- dust kicked up from the rocket excavating said crater rained down all over the protected wetlands upon which the SpaceX launch site sits, the dust falling at least as far as nearby Port Isabel and South Padre Island.
And because there’s a tweet for everything:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1313952039869788173?s=61&t=sTk7Ular7O9U-2JwcAQm_Q
Aspiring to have no flame diverter in Boca, but this could turn out to be a mistake
I take back some of the things I said yesterday. Just galaxy brain level stupid.
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I’ll read up on this tomorrow but for now I like this part:
Put a blue check on that.
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I’m no scientist, just a guy who still harbors resentment over never getting to go to Space Camp, but isn’t this very basic “let’s launch a rocket” stuff?
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It’s almost as if they were unaware of Newton’s Third Law.
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I don’t know that guy, he never paid to get verified.
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