The timing of the Flight 8 failure was similar to Flight 7 in January, which also featured several engine shutdowns and a loss of communications about eight and a half minutes after liftoff. However, SpaceX says the two failures had different causes.
“While the failure manifested at a similar point in the flight timeline as Starship’s seventh flight test, it is worth noting that the failures are distinctly different,” the company stated.
In the case of Flight 8, SpaceX said one of the center Raptor engines in Starship suffered a hardware failure, details of which the company did not disclose. That failure enabled “inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition” that caused the loss of the Raptor. Immediately thereafter, the other two center Raptor engines shut down, along with one of the three outer vacuum-optimized engines with larger nozzles. The vehicle then lost control authority.
The company said it made changes to the Raptors in the Starship upper stage, with “additional preload” on key joints and a new nitrogen purge system as well as improvements to the propellant drain system. A future version of Raptor in development will also have reliability improvements to address the problem seen on Flight 8.
On Flight 7 in January, SpaceX, said the vehicle suffered a harmonic response several times stronger than expected, creating additional stress on the vehicle’s propulsion system. That caused leaks that triggered a fire in the engine bay.
“The mitigations put in place after Starship’s seventh flight test to address harmonic response and flammability of the ship’s attic section worked as designed prior to the failure on Flight 8,” SpaceX said.
Hey, ngl, I used to watch every single one of these - I would set alarms to wake up for weird launch times and everything. But now, I’ve fully stopped caring. Kinda hard to give a shit when the guy who owns the thing is an overt fascist and is aggressively helping to tear apart the country and what remains of it’s government and turn it into an authoritarian hellscape.
Inb4 tHiS isN’t a PoLitiCAL cOmMuniTy - we don’t live in a vacuum, and SpaceX losing its shine due to massive, obvious insider dealing as a direct result of the overtly fascist CEO being tied at the hip to our scintillatingly fascist ruling regime kinda kills my enthusiasm for literally anything he’s affiliated with.
Plus, other space companies are starting to do interesting stuff too. SpaceX isn’t the only player in new space any more.
massive, obvious insider dealing
Is this an accusation pertaining to SpaceX?
Uh, yeah. They basically had the bid for the new nonsense missile defense contract orangeboi wants to do in the bag before it was even announced.
Also, when NASA granted the HLS contract to SpaceX, I’ll give you one single guess where the director of that program
usedwent to work.Are you saying that the person who was director of NASA’s HLS program, at the time it granted a contract to SpaceX, had previously worked at SpaceX?
Sorry, no, I got it the other way around:
Kathryn Lueders, the program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program granted SpaceX the HLS contract (after personally telling ONLY SpaceX about the secret maximum bid price, and not the others), because somehow SpaceX suddenly and mysteriously lowered its bid to just below the maximum price. Also, the contract had several requirements around FRR’s waived, but Lueders ONLY informed SpaceX. This is legal somehow.
In 2021, Lueders granted SpaceX the HLS contract. In November 2022, Lueders added another 1.1 billion for the “option B” (Artemis 4 and on).
On May 15th 2023, Lueders anounced she’d leave NASA, and start as general manager for Starship, directly below Shotwell.
On May 31st 2023, under new leadership, Nasa awarded a second contract to Blue Origin for a second moon lander.
Looks like DEI to me…
The missing piece here is that Lueders was sidelined by the administration, and only left NASA after that. I guess we can all agree that this was punishment for her awarding the contract to SpaceX, and the only question is whether she deserved that punishment.
I don’t know. I don’t even know if the claims are true. But having an idea of your maximum price, and only telling any bidders what that is if they are a little bit over, doesn’t seem to me like the kind of thing that would be an uncommon occurrence in government procurement.
My weak guess is that, prior to this year at least, SpaceX has been operating at a vastly lower level than Old Space in terms of dubious business practices, and the baby steps they took in that direction were expertly countered by the masters of the art, and that’s why we’re even talking about this level of detail in the only (?) contract that SpaceX contentiously won, and not the dozens they contentiously lost.
People think SpaceX is this big success but if you compare them to space travel in the 60’s they really aren’t.
Test flight 8 didn’t make it to orbit.In the 60’s the Saturn 5 went into orbit on its first test flight.
On its 3rd test flight it took humans around the moon.
All of this with less computing power than some egg timers of today.You’re overlooking the fact that this development is a side project for them. While they’re designing this rocket, their other rocket is in operational use and has the best success rate of any rocket of its scale in history, and they’d already be considered hugely successful if they never did anything innovative ever again.
They’re also trying to do something far more difficult than the Saturn 5, in at least two ways. Nobody has ever tried to land a rocket anywhere near as large as either of the stages of this system, and on top of that they’re trying to come up with a design which is cheap to operate, which wasn’t remotely on the cards during the Apollo program.
Thunderfoot did a deep dive into this https://youtu.be/75a49S4RTRU
What they are trying to do is impressive, but far more impressive things were done with 60’s technology
Thunderfoot
The guy who had a whole video about how Falcon 9 reusability would never work, and then quietly deleted it when proved badly wrong?
I’d stick with Destin if I were you …
I’ve been following him closely, the Internet never forgets. What video did he delete?
I’m asking you. If you’re a follower of his, I suggest you ask him to reupload any deleted videos to a second channel, for the sake of transparency.
This would have been a long time ago, obviously. Reusability is widely accepted these days.
Saturn V was done with the resources of a nation behind it, because they had to beat the Soviets. That rocket also only went up, and was not reusable, with a tiny fraction of the Apollo mission hardware returning to Earth.
All of this with less computing power than some egg timers of today.
There was considerable computing power on the ground supporting the missions.
Space X, through corrupt and nefarious means, receives tens of billions of dollars in government contracts. We should not pretend that the resources of a Nation aren’t behind them as well. Course unlike with NASA the results are not for our benefit.
The biggest challenges of Apollo was they had to invent so many new technologies that didn’t exist yet to solve problems, that’s why they needed a nation.
The advances in computer science alone during that era is rediculous. (listen to the podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon, it’s mind blowing)
Still they only used 74kb of Memory, that’s smaller than most image files these days.
SpaceX have 55 years newer and proven tech to work with.
Apollo took humans around the moon on their 3rd test flight.
SpaceX is on flight 8 and haven’t reached orbit yet.
I get they have other goals, but their goals seem easy in comparison, especially if you consider the tech we have now vs the 60’s
Destin did a video on how flawed the starship is.
https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU
tl:dr you’d need 9 starships if not more to take a crew to the moon because its payload to orbit sucks.but their goals seem easy in comparison, especially if you consider the tech we have now vs the 60’s
I’d say their goals seem much harder in an absolute sense, but perhaps roughly the same in comparison to the technology level.
They really do seem to be trying to create a Mars colonisation ship. Capable of transporting large amounts of mass for less money than it costs to transport small amounts of mass with existing rockets.
My response to Destin is that Starship is clearly not optimal for another ‘flags and footprints’ mission to the Moon, but is such a paradigm shift that even if doing such a mission as a ‘side project’, it could still very easily be better than all the alternatives. And if, like me, you care more about a permanent presence on the Moon, the case for Starship becomes even stronger.
It is a big success. NASA’s approach in the 60s was simply different than SpaceX’s approach, specifically because of reactions like yours. If you’re spending public money you better get it right the first time. What people fail to understand is that SpaceX’s iterative approach is much faster and cheaper than getting it right the first time.
The entire Saturn V program costs $52 billion dollars in today’s money, with each launch costing $1.4 billion. The Space Launch System, costs $32 billion in today’s money, development for the SLS began in 2021 and has only flown once. So far one launch every year and a half or so has been planned at a cost of $2 billion per launch.
Development cost for Starship is estimated at about $8 billion so far, with launches expected to cost about $100 million per launch initially (but that’s expected to go down in the future). You can launch 20 starships for each SLS or 14 for each Saturn V and that’s ignoring the up-front cost of developing it.
I don´t see the point of launching 20 starships if they keep exploding.
They won’t keep exploding, they just aren’t finished yet. It’s a different way of developing. You can spend lots of time and money validating your designs by calculating and modeling them, come to the conclusion it would have exploded, and go back to the drawing board (which is basically what NASA does) but it’s cheaper and faster to juist build one and see if it explodes. It just makes the inevitable bugs in the design a lot more visible to the public.
Add to this that even the best modeling doesn’t completely match with reality. For all their effort in getting it right the first time there were also issues with the Artemis 1 mission, maybe not as spectacular as an exploding rocket but it just goes to show that real life testing is a better method of exposing flaws.
