SpaceX Has Finally Figured Out Why Starship Exploded, And The Reason Is Utterly Embarrassing
SpaceX Has Finally Figured Out Why Starship Exploded, And The Reason Is Utterly Embarrassing
cross-posted from: https://feddit.it/post/15755274
You're viewing a single thread.
Title: SpaceX Has Finally Figured Out Why Starship Exploded, And The Reason Is Utterly Embarrassing
Thank you for sparing us from the clickbait title
-The incident highlights significant operational failures, as engine shutdowns should not cause communication loss, indicating a lack of redundancy in systems.
- SpaceX's pre-flight checks failed to identify potential leaks, suggesting inadequate safety measures or poor execution of checks.
These points are really silly. Two engines exploded causing the ship to tumble. I'm not sure what they think additional communications redundancy would help with at that point.
And how do you indefiy a fuel leak on the ground that hasn't happened yet? It was caused by vibrations at a resonant frequency that is only reached at a certain fuel level?
- Starship's design has been criticized for overestimating engine thrust capabilities, limiting its payload capacity to 40-50 tons, which is less than the Saturn V.
Who said that? That's really silly. And isn't that payload with full reusability?
Space is hard, it's literally rocket science. The embarrassing thing is it failed in the same way twice. But finding these resonance issues that only pop up in specific fuel states, makes sense it's hard to pin down. I think they'll need to characterize their vib spectrum as fuel burns down, then analyze the harmonics of the hardware and make sure they don't couple. It isn't easy, but they should be able to.
Edit: thanks for the summary, I just disagree with the article.
"A loss of communication with ground control occurred as the engines shut down, leading to the rocket's self-destruction sequence.
The incident highlights significant operational failures, as engine shutdowns should not cause communication loss, indicating a lack of redundancy in systems."
For the communication redundancy part: This is just my interpretation of what I'm reading and it could be 100% wrong.
The communications need a redundant power supply/ connection not associated with the engine. Because they didn't have the communication connection and the engines were on fire the self destruct was initiated. Where if they had communications maybe they could have done something else? Turn off fuel, changed location of impact, changed location of self destruct to not be where it was.
I could be wrong, Iam in fact not a rocket scientist
That’s also my interpretation. Which tracks with Musk companies, which tend to cut corners by cutting out redundancies.
At least with the Teslas, they also fail to isolate systems for cost cutting, and everything tied into the same bus causes a weird cascade with completely unrelated components when there are failures. If he’s forcing the same design philosophy with the rockets, that’s a completely moronic move.
That’s also my interpretation. Which tracks with Musk companies, which tend to cut corners by cutting out redundancies.
What are you always preparing for? Just go!
Also, I don't think the engines provide electrical power, that'd be from the batteries.
Edit: yeah, they use helium to spin the turbo pumps, so no electrical generator/motor on raptor.
Two engines exploded, blowing the back of the ship up, causing the ship to tumble, which lead to loss of communication a few minutes later. Abort was absolutely the right call. Saying communications need to be better is like saying you need a better bandaid for your stump of an arm after you blew it off with a grenade.
The communications failed because the ship was spinning faster and faster, and eventually the antenna tracking couldn't keep up.
As soon as the engines exploded, the mission was dead, so the best thing is to abort, which is what they did.
Scott Manley analysis, shows the pic of the missing engines. https://youtu.be/kJCjGt7jUkU
If they had control when the first 3, then 4 engines failed, why didn’t they shut off the remaining 2 engines that would go on to spin the rocket?
According to Manley, the remaining engines were non-vectoring, so there was never a way to keep flying straight with lopsided thrust. Shutting down would have kept it from spinning and allowed more data acquisition before aborting.
You saying shut down the engines from the ground? The vehicle computer would have a much better understanding of the system than the people on the ground during those first minutes. I'm guessing they just needed to trust their programming at that point.
If you’re talking milliseconds, yes, but it was many seconds between losing the engines and aborting. If they have the nasa level of engineers monitoring this, they sh out k f have noticed pretty fast. Either one should have shut them down faster.
Even the camera director had noticed and cut away to the studio.
Also starship hasn't started its operational lifespan. These are test articles still. They should absolutely be treating them with respect and due diligence since they are launching, but this is just highly public testing on a reusable rocket. Success not guaranteed and that's why they aren't flying real payloads (even of their own).
Also, pretty sure Apollo 1 was a great example of Saturn rockets not being flawless.
What does Apollo 1 have to do with the reliability of the Saturn rockets…?
No changes were made to the Saturn family of rockets due to the Apollo 1 fire.
The command pod was changed not use a pure oxygen environment, but that is an entirely separate vehicle to the rocket itself.
They say space is hard...
So you know that it’s ok...
🙏
Rocket-hands awarded post.
