Starship successfully launches.....

P

PaulS

Touchdown! Greaser!
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PaulS
...except for the "rapid unscheduled disassembly" of the first stage after separation while maneuvering to land. I love the line. All in all a great day.
 
OffPoint.jpg

Nauga,
who can see the cross-controls from here
 
Both stages experienced RUDs. The first stage separated at 2:49 and about 8 seconds later it experienced a RUD. At 8:04 the second stage engine cutoff and the craft exploded seconds later. You can see the little puff in the video.


The talking heads at about 12:00 stated the first indications are the second stage Automated Flight Termination System (that is, an AI) triggered a self-destruct. Oops.
 
Domenick said:
The talking heads at about 12:00 stated the first indications are the second stage Automated Flight Termination System (that is, an AI) triggered a self-destruct. Oops.
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Did they state that the FTS used AI or is that your interpretation? I'll be astonished if that got independent range safety approval.

Nauga,
who doesn't want to blow it
 
Probably some practical joke a programmer put in. Code line 8970090 - "Self Destruct after Staging". Those crazy software guys - what you going to do.

I do prefer the Apollo era Jack King play by play style vs the motivational speaker commentator they have for Starship.
 
Domenick said:
Both stages experienced RUDs. The first stage separated at 2:49 and about 8 seconds later it experienced a RUD. At 8:04 the second stage engine cutoff and the craft exploded seconds later. You can see the little puff in the video.


The talking heads at about 12:00 stated the first indications are the second stage Automated Flight Termination System (that is, an AI) triggered a self-destruct. Oops.
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I'm sorry but that guys voice is annoying....

A far cry from Jack King

 
any idea how far along the flightpath the 2nd stage made it before RUD?.... and where will/did the wreckage fall?
 
WDD said:
Probably some practical joke a programmer put in. Code line 8970090 - "Self Destruct after Staging". Those crazy software guys - what you going to do.

I do prefer the Apollo era Jack King play by play style vs the motivational speaker commentator they have for Starship.
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Yeah...I REALLY do not care for the talking head amateurish commentary style either....but I guess that's what an 'expert' looks like today....

Regardless, I sure do wish they would launch some of these starships from Florida. I would absolutely love to see one go up!
 
nauga said:
Did they state that the FTS used AI or is that your interpretation? I'll be astonished if that got independent range safety approval.

Nauga,
who doesn't want to blow it
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That was stated when the first one in April blew up. What was reported at the time is they have two systems for ATS. Either can trigger it. One is a manually defined set of rules, the other is an AI that was based on a simulator training.

Tim
 
I said I would be, and I am. I wonder what kind of firebreaks they have in place given a system that needs to be absolutely reliable.

Nauga,
and NOLO
 
Brad W said:
Yeah...I REALLY do not care for the talking head amateurish commentary style either....but I guess that's what an 'expert' looks like today....
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John Insprucker is the Chief Integration Engineer, and is on the wall of honour at the National Air and Space museum. What exactly is your definition of an amateur?
 
Damn, missed the second RUD. Still a success though in my mind.
 
PaulS said:
Damn, missed the second RUD. Still a success though in my mind.
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Based on what? The Saturn V designed 60 years ago had a 100% success rate. Space X not so much. This ad was put up yesterday by Space X.
Wanted, retired NASA engineers, competitive pay and benefits, bring slide rule!
 
It’s a success in that they made progress and collected a lot of data. Same development style that gave us the Falcon and Dragon today.

It’s a different development path vs Saturn era NASA. Apollo era NASA had nothing to do with cost efficiency, and used massive amounts of money and resources to test and develop before launching the Saturn 5. And even then the second unmanned Saturn 5 test barely made it to orbit. Had serious problems with resonance vibrations, and as well the second stage lost 2 engines.
 
I forget the name, but a fairly recent head of NASA was a major reason why NASA is helping fund SpaceX.
The head effectively stated he would rather do ten missions and have eight fail then only do one and have it be a success. Basically, he was advocating for a huge culture change at NASA, and to allow for failure. Previously NASA required everything to be CMMI Level 5, this was guy was more along the lines of we should do CMMI level 2 for anything without a human on board. If a human was eventually going to be on board, fly it first a few dozen times on CMMI level 2, then do the failure analysis required of level 5 after it is working.

I know this was in the last decade or so. Does anyone recall who it was?

Tim
 
Just finished the Musk biography. Dude is crazy, but man the way he pushes for success is remarkable.

They will succeed. I’d bet my house on it
 
Jeff767 said:
Based on what? The Saturn V designed 60 years ago had a 100% success rate. Space X not so much. This ad was put up yesterday by Space X.
Wanted, retired NASA engineers, competitive pay and benefits, bring slide rule!
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Based on budget. Apollo program had unlimited budget.
 
Another POV is Starship vs SLS. SLS had a flawless test launch. And is decades late and 10s of billions over budget.
 
The attitude shown by Jeff767 seems to be typical of people who fundamentally don't understand the difference in development philosophies as described well by the posters above. You can learn more, quicker, by developing something that's "pretty good", testing it in flight, and seeing what needs to be changed.

Just look at Falcon 9 and the number of "failures" that experienced in early development. Today it's the most reliable and cost effective rocket in the industry, launching an order of magnitude more than any other provider. SpaceX are now trying to make another huge step out, and are doing pretty damn well.

The idea that SpaceX would be desperate for old NASA engineers and their slide rules is lame "boomer humour" at its most stereotypical.
 
Brad W said:
any idea how far along the flightpath the 2nd stage made it before RUD?.... and where will/did the wreckage fall?
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Wreckage all fell into the Atlantic Ocean. Given the second stage experienced a RUD only eight minutes into the flight at an altitude of 148 km (92 sm, 80 nm), it couldn't have been more than a few hundred miles offshore. The downrange distance was not displayed.

The flight plan profile was suborbital. I'm not sure if the goal was to attain orbital velocity on a suborbital flight, but the maximum speed was 24,124 kph (14,991 mph). Minimum orbital velocity for low Earth orbit is about 17,000 mph.

I too believe SpaceX will be successful.
 
I believe they wanted to do a simulated landing near Hawaii. Three quarters of an orbit?
 
Jeff767 said:
Based on what? The Saturn V designed 60 years ago had a 100% success rate. Space X not so much. This ad was put up yesterday by Space X.
Wanted, retired NASA engineers, competitive pay and benefits, bring slide rule!
Click to expand...
Didn't a crew get incinerated in a Saturn V? The technological advances over saturn V are astronomical. Space X reusing boosters, launching more than one rocket in a day? Space X is blowing the competition away. Not even close. Think about it, 33 engines firing at once, capable of lifting the most payload ever. Huge goals bring huge risk, they will figure this out, probably within the next year.
 
PaulS said:
Didn't a crew get incinerated in a Saturn V?
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No

The loss of what would have been Apollo 1 was the CM/SM stack. I’m not even sure it had been mated to the Saturn 1B booster
 
Bob Noel said:
No

The loss of what would have been Apollo 1 was the CM/SM stack. I’m not even sure it had been mated to the Saturn 1B booster
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Same program, split hairs as much as you want. Sometimes lessons learned come with a price.
 
PaulS said:
Same program, split hairs as much as you want. Sometimes lessons learned come with a price.
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wow - if you call that splitting hairs... smh... kind of hard to discuss things when we don't have a common language.
 
Bob Noel said:
wow - if you call that splitting hairs... smh... kind of hard to discuss things when we don't have a common language.
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Oh come on, the apollo program was not 100% successful, there were failures with the program, at least one mission not completed and at the end of the day, the Saturn V was abandoned because it was too expensive.

Even with it's issues though, the program achieved it's goals, I'm not trying to minimize that. But dissing SpaceX, which is on it's way to becoming the most successful space endeavor to date ..... well, it just feels like it isn't about space x.
 
Can’t compare Apollo to Space X. That’s only one NASA program to several rocket programs under Space X. A proper comparison would be NASA in its earlier years to Space X. Mercury was blowing up rockets like it was The Forth of July.

I wouldn’t compare NASA’s Apollo budget to equating to a quality product either. We’re talking massive bureaucracy, shortcuts due to time constraints and primitive computers vs today. They were operating in uncharted waters. Space X has the advantage from learning from NASA’s mistakes. I would hope they could produce a better product today vs NASA of the 1960s.

To have a RUD is a learning point but to say they’re happy about it? Eh, maybe happy it was pilotless but it’s still a setback that’s gonna require more time and money to resolve. I would rather learn from the faults of a successful launch.
 
Bob Noel said:
Not hardly
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It was close to unlimited. It was a very large amount. Space race / Cold War after all. Glad they spent it.

But Space X now has to make something that is also economically viable - which wasn’t a requirement for Apollo.

Which will lead to being more efficient. Thus NASA SLS will become operational at 10X the cost about the same time Space X opens the first Marriott on Mars LOL.
 
Velocity173 said:
Can’t compare Apollo to Space X. That’s only one NASA program to several rocket programs under Space X. A proper comparison would be NASA in its earlier years to Space X. Mercury was blowing up rockets like it was The Forth of July.
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Note to mention there are manuals and guidelines on how to built space stuff in the 21st century, not to mention catalogs where appropriate, space-qualified hardware can be simply purchased. All stuff NASA didn't have in the '60s, and, in fact, ended up writing the manuals and guidelines and the specifications for those space-qualified materials.

A while back there was an explosion with fatalities during testing of one of these "new space" programs. One of my co-workers was livid...the exact problem had been discovered and documented in the '70s, but of course, that was old fuddy-duddy NASA stuff that the new company figured it could ignore. It's like someone building a homebuilt plane in 2003, and claiming it was so easy that the Wright brothers had to have been idiots.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Yep - Space X, today’s NASA, and the rest are building on the shoulders of the old NASA.

Inventors vs industrialists, pioneers vs settlers, etc. We’ve moved from the old NASA pioneer “can we just get into space” to today’s “let’s make money” Space X, ULA, etc.

But the question is what is most efficient development process? Space X with the learning by “real world full up testing and accepting that something will go wrong” appears to be working.
 
wanttaja said:
Note to mention there are manuals and guidelines on how to built space stuff in the 21st century, not to mention catalogs where appropriate, space-qualified hardware can be simply purchased. All stuff NASA didn't have in the '60s, and, in fact, ended up writing the manuals and guidelines and the specifications for those space-qualified materials.

A while back there was an explosion with fatalities during testing of one of these "new space" programs. One of my co-workers was livid...the exact problem had been discovered and documented in the '70s, but of course, that was old fuddy-duddy NASA stuff that the new company figured it could ignore. It's like someone building a homebuilt plane in 2003, and claiming it was so easy that the Wright brothers had to have been idiots.

Ron Wanttaja
Click to expand...

That's a classic scenario, typical engineer behavior, very unfortunate and a byproduct of allowing bean counter types to control engineering departments. They run out the older, experienced engineers because they cost more, and won't do stupid things. The experienced engineers that do stick around get disillusioned and "retire in service".
 
Jeff767 said:
Based on what? The Saturn V designed 60 years ago had a 100% success rate. Space X not so much. This ad was put up yesterday by Space X.
Wanted, retired NASA engineers, competitive pay and benefits, bring slide rule!
Click to expand...

This post reminds me of all those giggling during each falcon 9 RUD back when they first tried to land them.
 
Datadriver said:
Apollo was 257 billion in 2020 adjusted dollars

According to Musk, SpaceX has spent 10 billion so far on Starship since 2012.

Where do you think Starship would be right now if they had spent literally 25x that over the same period?
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Depends, if SpaceX was limited to the materials, knowledge and everything else of the Apollo program. SpaceX would be in just about the same place as the Apollo program was, and spent just the same amount of money.

The Apollo program, was in many ways run the same way as SpaceX is today. The difference is later NASA became adverse to failure, and implemented extremely complex and cumbersome processes to try and eliminate failures.

SpaceX has the incredible advantage of largely trying to commercialize what is already known, and being willing to accept failures along the way. This can be done by any company who has the guts to risk a few billion; and sees how the change in culture can make significant savings.

Tim
 
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