Ackart

That’s a lot of fox

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lupi
@lupi

anyway here, their opsec at boca chica is so bad that this picture of the vehicle breakup from an onboard camera has leaked like five different times


lupi
@lupi

i suppose we should start with figuring out what things here were successful and what were not. a lot of spaceflight fanatics will say "they gathered data, and that's all that matter" and like. sure. maybe. but in a general sense, let's think about this. what did they prove here?

if you're seeing this without anythin' below it, i just spent like two hours writing out a longwinded historical explanation of why things panned out this way for starship as a reply to this. Do check it out, it's far more interesting if far less compact.

Things that were a success:

  • it flew. it turns out when you put enough rocket engines and fuel behind something, it will move. who knew.
  • it got most of the way through first stage flight. that's kinda nifty considering that stage design had never flown before.

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.
  • they may not have blown up their facilities, but they sure did manage to wreck them plenty serious nonetheless
  • as you can see from the onboard camera view in the previous post, not all of the thermal tiles that are meant to keep the thing from melting during reentry stayed on. this is generally bad
  • it blew up. this one was kinda expected at some point i don't think anyone sane expected any measure of success from the bastard battleship but even still it manages to find ways to defy our expectations and fail in strange ways.

It's worth noting that at the moment, this vehicle is the recipient of a sole-source contract to be our lunar lander. This is the basket we chose to put our eggs in, despite being fully aware of spacex's history of underbidding to get government contracts.

I hope the other contenders have been working on their bids still, because we were going to offer the option to bid on future landings to them.

i have a lot of opinions about starship and the space program as a whole that i've developed over years of following it, like... I moved to florida to be closer to it, i share my launch photography here regularly on @aWildLupi, but there's a lot I could say and I don't even know where to start here. If you ever want me to chime in on something with all I know at this point, don't be afraid to ask, i like sharing.


lupi
@lupi

i figure the rundown is good but i was about to start talking folks ears off in comments, and i've had this conversation in discord a lot today already, but like. We know elon musk is a shitstain, but SpaceX is a successful company despite him, despite being a meat grinder for aerospace graduates with an average employee retention period of like, 2 years.

How could they design a rocket that's as undeniably successful as falcon 9, one that captured the commercial launch market and has a annual flight rate rivaling that of entire countries, a success record that's seen hardly a blemish since the rocket was still young 7 years ago, and then, turn around and make... this. How do we get from there to here? It's a bit of a long road, really. It'll take us from the 1990s, to the early days of spacex, to today, with some detours to talk about shuttle. As this is a rough history blended with some amount of editorializing, I'm not going to have a lot of sources to hand, if you have any questions on something I'll try to hunt it down and edit it in over time.


MisfitMouffette
@MisfitMouffette
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in reply to @lupi's post:

yeah, that's what i was referring to, I just didn't have a quick link to cite. I mean, between the crater, the concrete sent flying all across their facility, and all the tanks being caved and venting.

NASA's not gonna let them use the identical launch mount they spent last year building next to pad 39a lmao

oh I assumed you were referring just to OLM but yeah it's not great anywhere down in boca chica rn

also, on one of the facility cams there looked to be a big fire in the tank farm for about 15 minutes right after the flight, but I have no idea what that was

also also, lmao I didn't know that they'd assumed that this was just gonna work and decided to build one down at KSC too, fuckin idiots

it's been confirmed to be the latter; the telemetry on the live feed showed that it was descending through 35km after an apogee at about 39km -- supposedly the planned stage 1 apogee was nearly 80km so if anything it's a surprise that they didn't declare the trajectory off-nominal and blow it up earlier

i've heard both ways, but then i'd heard the FAA confirmed it was detonated.

but yeah, this whole thing was just. why did they allow this to happen, what did you learn? you learned taht if you put enough engines under anything and give them enough fuel, it will go up.

Also that they are horrendously behind on meeting objectives for the NASA HLS contract, which hinges on this thing actually working, which hinges on it not being a fundamentally flawed design from the ground up, designed by a team that did not include anyone from spacex who had actually worked on rockets or launchpads.

Like i'm not even bullshitting you (despite being a bull), when Musk spun up boca chica for this, he brought almost nobody with any history or expertise from Hawthorne or the Cape to help design the rocket or infrastructure.

That, and a hatred of regulation, are why it didn't have a goddamn flame trench, because like. They didn't understand why it would need one, "it won't have a flame trench on mars 🤓"

hjksdfkjhsdkjhfjsgdfhgg holy shit I can't believe the reason they decided not to use 60-year-old engineering best practices is because they didn't want to have to go to the trouble of getting environmental permits to dredge up protected wetlands

THEY COULD'VE BUILT A HILL!

THATS WHAT WE DID AT KSC! ALL OF OUR LAUNCHPADS ARE ON FILL! The SLS pad is literally a hill of concrete!

before the comments get too deep i'm starting to draft a more long form post about How They Messed This Up So Fucking Bad and it's gonna be fun lmao

they had spare cones from scrapped Starship prototypes they probably could've just jammed on the front, that's what relativity did anyway, but they also decided to skip wet dress rehearsals and full stack static firings that would have exposed how inadequate the pad was for this so

[elon fanboy voice] ah well you see they collected much data here as you may or may not know. next time they will simply not do the exploding failure things, and will instead do the NYOOM success things,,

in reply to @lupi's post:

Of course! For as much as I go on about space, I really don't get to dive into my opinions and knowledge about history and policy, and I really ought to do that more. One of these days, i'll make that thread about why the 90s were absolutely bananas in spaceflight and why that my favorite spaceflight time period. It's one of few times in history the US government has tried to stabilize a regime instead of the opposite, when the state department went panic mode after the USSR collapsed. It's great.

Ngl, at first I thought you were kinda overreacting based on an explosion on an explicit test flight, but you make some good points. Especially if they can’t get this thing flying properly by mid-next year, which sounds like a real possibility with this many flaws. And of course the comparisons to the shuttle are much more damning, because that’s how a spacecraft really fails even if it did fly reliably.

I hope they figure this shit out. At least Elon is busy with Twitter lol, the engineering team might have a chance to get some common sense decisions made while he’s distracted.

yeah, I realized it would read that way but these are absolutely thoughts that I've had since well before today's test (spring 2021, at least), having seen the way the program shook out. I's why I added that whole penultimate "late edit" section.

Like, we all knew it was going to explode, or fail spectacularly. That thing was not making it to its perfect Hawaiian retirement. The argument I'm trying to make is that it failed before it ever left the ground, and the test was only symptomatic of that.

As to "figuring shit out", as of last year, Hawthorne management has assumed control of the site and is trying to pick up the mess Musk's cowboy team left them with, but i don't know if there's anything to be saved. They might've just invested too much in a design that really has no saving grace.

wait, is that why they were reporting that the launch staff all supposedly cheered when the damn thing blew up? (q.v. stories like this one from CBS: https://archive.is/cQ4mG) I saw that little detail and I was astonished--like, sure, even a failed launch can provide useful information, but a catastrophic and expensive failure is still a failure so...what was with the party atmosphere?

knowing that this is some special skonks-works team of Elon Musk loyalists makes things so much clearer.

~Chara

I mean i get it, they were all stunned the thing flew at all, and I can't fault anyone for being excited at the spectacle. But we all knew it was gonna blow up. Like, maybe we didn't all know, maybe some folks believed it would truly succeed. But there's a reason Emerald Mines did his best to tamp down expectations and say what he did ahead of time.

Not everyone who works on it are loyalists, not anymore, last year SpaceX and NASA audited the site and discovered how bad it was, and Hawthorne management completely took over. I didn't include that detail because all the mistakes that would lead to this failure had already been made before it, but it is at least a detail I do feel i might be worth finding room for in a subsequent edit.

the whole reaction of spacex fans online to this confuses me

like sure I understand that any data they could get from this launch is useful, but surely they would gotten much better data if they had invested in a launch system that didn't immediately cause heavy damage to both their rocket and facilities on use?

Oh it gets worse. This isn't even the worst sand-related incident SpaceX has had.

In short, when Starship SN8 blew up after pulling off the first successful landing of a Starship vehicle, the team at boca, "in an effort to accelerate testing and development," scavenged engine parts from the debris of a rocket that blew up and put them to use on the next starship, SN9.

So Boca Chica is on the beach, right? Beaches have sand. When your rocket parts get scattered across the beach after it blows up, the rocket parts get sand in them.
You're not cleaning that shit out of 'em either, look at what Nauka had to go through when its far simpler engines and propellant lines/tanks were found to have foreign object debris in them.

As Starship SN9 came in to land, the engines didn't all start, they puked their guts out and the thing slammed into the ground because the engine parts had sand in them, and the last thing you want in an environment like "complicated rocket engine plumbing" is fucking sand.

"Oh, but they got data!" Yeah. And how useful is that data when their testing methodology was flawed from the start and their results were tainted by knowingly putting parts from a rocket that blew up into the damn thing? What did you actually learn? What did you actually prove?

phewwwww. i hadn't been following Starship that closely besides the high-profile stuff, my general opinion of it was "i have Opinions (mostly about lack of crew escape) but more SHLVs is good" - this program is a complete mess, huh?

yep! did you see my previous comment to someone else talking about their famous sand incident? I think that says a whole lot about how the program has always been fucked.

and as a cherry on top, the fact that we know about that Sand Event, and the fact that within an hour we had leaked stills from onboard cameras during the tumble, the fact that their operational security is. nonexistent. that's a good sign too

apropos of nothing but why do we always launch from sea level? wouldn't we save measurable amounts of effort by launching from, say Denver, skipping a full mile of the strongest gravity and thickest atmosphere? is it just because Florida and Texas are the only places on earth where you can drop flaming debris on people with no consequences?

you don't launch over land because then you drop stages on people

that's why launch sites are always by the ocean (except in china) because then your fallen stages don't hit people and towns (except in china) (but they're slowly spinning down their inland launch sites. even so, i don't recommend looking up videos of chinese rocket stages landing on rural villages)

if you can find a mile high cliff near the ocean go for it, but those don't exist

as far as gravity and atmosphere losses, what you actually save is minimal compared to the herculean effort it takes to establish a launch site in such conditions. A rocket is only in the lower atmosphere for a short while.

other launch sites used include:

  • wallops island, virginia
  • vandenberg, california,
  • kourou, french guiana
  • tanegashima, japan
  • mahia, new zealand
  • wenchang, china (their one coastal launch facility)

as a largely landlocked country (save the arctic circle) with no convenient coastal colonial holdings (like europe with french guiana), Russia had really no choice and was by and large lucky that most of their landholdings are barren and uninhabited for their baikonur, vostochny, and plesetsk cosmodromes

florida was chosen for many reasons, but you'll note that a lot of these are at low to moderate latitudes because the closer to the equator you are, the more efficiency you gain from the earth's rotation giving you a speed boost

One of the most cursed things I've watched was a long march launch where the rocket IMMEDIATELY turns after taking off and then flys off to do terrible things. But the scary part wasn't the terrible things, rather the extremely distorted voice talking during the launch combined with things going Obviously Wrong.

Intelsat 708 was.... There are a lot of sinophobic and warmongering (read: bullshit) reasons the united states does not interface with the chinese aerospace industry or CNSA anymore, but Intelsat 708 and the way it was handled? that was also one of them I can find entirely fair and reasonable.

I saw some of the news, which just focused on the "we got data from this"-angle. Which sure, they learned that flame trenches are kinda important. Something that every serious launch site has had since 1950s. Thanks for the write-up, really makes me wonder how long it's going to take until the contract for the lunar launch vehicles gets yanked, because I don't believe for a second that these cowboys will be able to unfuck this clusterfuck in time for the planned lunar missions.

I remember reading the old Wired article on SpaceX years and years ago that I've seen people cite as the start of the Musk mythmaking, but really the only thing I recall from that article is how Musk had originally insisted that they didn't actually need countdowns but then enough rockets exploded that he eventually conceded that point. And it feels like he has repeatedly been making the same mistakes ever since.

just commenting to commend you on writing a post that made me more interested in rockets and rocket history than any Kennedy Space Center field trip, "hey so what is it that made my work shake earlier" google search, or general 10 years of sideline-exposure to the space program by living on the space coast.

I'm glad! Like, this is such high praise that I'm struggling to figure out what to say in reply.

There are a lot of really fascinating things about it that a lot of people miss out on because they're only interested in the equipment or the promises of those who make it.

For example, if you ever catch the North Brevard History Center in downtown Titusville open, there's a whole binder of preserved newspaper clippings in the back from Titusville residents fighting NASA to keep Playalinda Beach open after NASA decided they would permanently close the access road for "safety/security" around the Shuttle. That binder absolutely fascinates me. (also, across the street is a pretty good ice cream place)

That in itself is a fraction of a whole story and a whole twitter thread I did once, and really ought to do again here with what i've learned since, and a clearer goal in mind.

I really need to get up there sometime. The binder sounds interesting and there's probably some info there about the various small towns/villages NASA wiped off the map to make KSC in the first place as well.

On a previous visit, I talked to one of the docents and it turned out she lived in one of them. She talked about the school bus ride being so long that you had your homework done before you got home, 'cause it really was out in the sticks from the mainland.

They have a large canvas print of an aerial photo from one of those towns on display as well, it hung in the bank that used to be across the street.

That story of the towns we lost fascinates me in a way as a part of the history. You can trace the old A1A through where North Atlantic splits from the modern alignment all the way through to where it resumes in Ormond Beach. But that's a whole post in and of itself.