Science SPACEX "Starship" explodes shortly after launch

SPACEX​

"Starship" explodes shortly after launch​

The unmanned "Starship" giant rocket of the US space company SpaceX has exploded during its first test flight. The largest and most powerful rocket ever built took off on Thursday from the SpaceX spaceport Starbase in Boca Chica in the US state of Texas. However, just over three minutes after launch, the rocket detonated, live footage showed.​

Online since today, 3:41 p.m. (Update: 3:57 p.m.)

At that point, the first booster stage called "Super Heavy" should have separated from the "Starship" space shuttle. SpaceX spoke on Twitter of a "rapid unplanned breakup prior to stage separation." "Teams will continue to evaluate data and work toward our next flight test," tech billionaire Elon Musk's company added. The launch was delayed by a few minutes: the countdown had been briefly interrupted to check some more details. Afterwards, the launch was released after all. Actually, the "Starship" of the private space company SpaceX of tech billionaire Elon Musk should have already taken off on Monday for a first short test flight. But that was postponed shortly before the planned launch because of a problem with a valve.

Enormous setback
The "Starship" rocket system - consisting of the roughly 70-meter-long "Super Heavy" booster and the roughly 50-meter-long upper stage, also called "Starship" - is intended to enable manned missions to the moon and Mars in the future. The "Starship" system is in itself designed so that the spacecraft and rocket can be reused after returning to Earth. The explosion, however, is an enormous setback for the initiative. The U.S. space agency NASA has selected "Starship" to fly humans to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years in the Artemis 3 mission at the end of 2025. Even flights to Mars should be possible with the rocket.

First attempt briefly halted
The launch of the 120-meter-high rocket from SpaceX's Starbase spaceport in Boca Chica was stopped on Monday less than ten minutes before the planned ignition. As a kind of dress rehearsal, however, the countdown continued until ten seconds before the originally planned launch time. The reason given for the abort was a technical problem with the pressure equalization on the most powerful space rocket ever built. Musk wrote on Twitter, apparently a valve had frozen. However, he said SpaceX had "learned a lot" from the launch attempt. It was only in February that almost all of the rocket's first stage engines had successfully ignited for the first time during a test in Boca Chica. Musk then declared that the 31 engines ignited in the test were "enough to reach orbit".

Explosion after first landing
Apart from the size and the associated possibility of transporting large loads, the reusability of all rocket components pursued by SpaceX is another central element of the "Starship" program. The declared goal is to significantly reduce the cost of operating spacecraft. SpaceX reported the first successful landing of a prototype in May 2021. Shortly thereafter, the explosion of the rocket made headlines. It was the third explosion within a few months - yet Musk remained convinced that the "Starship" rocket would soon be "safe enough" to transport people.

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Private moon orbit with billionaire and artists
Since last year, SpaceX has been trying to launch its spacecraft into orbit for the first time. At the beginning of the year, Musk had initially set a launch date of February or March - but at the same time made this dependent on the further course of testing. The schedule will be missed by at least a few weeks. A first private space mission is also planned for this year. The Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa recently announced his intention to circumnavigate the moon in a "starship" together with eight artists. The moon will then also be the destination of a mission pursued jointly with NASA.

Central role for NASA moon program
NASA is currently planning to use "Starship" as a landing module in its Artemis program in 2025 at the earliest. The rocket is significantly larger and more powerful than NASA's SLS rocket, which the space agency plans to use to put astronauts into orbit around the moon from 2024.​

After several weeks in space, the unmanned "Orion" capsule of NASA's Artemis 1 lunar mission returned to Earth in December​

According to NASA plans, the "Starship" mission is dependent on the progress of the Artemis-2 mission. After the Artemis-1 mission, which ended in December with the return of an unmanned Orion space capsule to Earth, a manned orbit of the moon is now on the agenda. The next step will be to bring astronauts to the moon again with the "Starship". NASA put the last humans on the moon in 1972 with the Apollo 17 mission. The USA was the only country to put twelve astronauts on the moon with the Apollo missions between 1969 and 1972.

Space suits ready
Artemis 3 will be much more complex, according to NASA, combining the SLS "Orion" system with spacecraft built and flown by SpaceX. The NASA plan calls for a four-person "Orion" crew to dock in space with a SpaceX lander that will carry two astronauts to the lunar surface for nearly a week.

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According to NASA, an orbital fuel depot and a space tanker are required in addition to the Starship. The new space suits developed for the mission in collaboration with Axiom Space were unveiled by NASA in mid-March. In the "Starship" program, the moon is only the first stopover on the first manned mission to Mars, which Musk has already announced for 2029.
red, ORF.at/Agencies​

Source (German)

 

[JustSomeDong]

I wish Gerry Bull had gotten funding and finished his initial vision for his "Supergun." Fascinating story of a troubled genius. He claimed up, until he was murdered, that he could have put small payloads into orbit for about 500$/kg, and the engineering seemed plausible. He was a tragically flawed sperg with horrible business sense, but really was a brilliant dude.

 

[Screamer_2]

The whole Artemis program is a laugh riot. Spend billions and billions of dollars and nearly 20 years of development making a rocket that will be dependent on multiple Space-X launches. I guess Elon has a really good coke connection.
View attachment 5072945

Their back up is even more retarded. Relying on Blue-Origin who hasn't even put a rocket into orbit. To build another lander. Which also requires multiple launches and space refuelling. By a company that literally doesn't even put shit in space.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Still just blows my mind how many people let their personal feels about Musk lead them to clap their hands like retarded seals when a SpaceX rocket goes boom. Like Musk or not, SpaceX is at least doing something to try and continue innovation and solve a problem.

I mean, as much as I boost spacex (lol boost), I clap like a retarded seal when they go boom anyway, because it's fucking funny. Biggest fireworks ever.

Their back up is even more retarded. Relying on Blue-Origin who hasn't even put a rocket into orbit. To build another lander. Which also requires multiple launches and space refuelling. By a company that literally doesn't even put shit in space.

Their other alternative was ULA, who would probably inflate their initial estimate by a couple of orders of magnitude after the contract was signed, deliver 20 years late, and then have it fail half way to the moon, because they put a sprocket in backwards and now the capsule thinks its engines are mounted on its nose. Blue Origin might actually seem speedy in comparison.

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

I still go back and re-watch the first time a space x booster returned to earth in one piece. It was my "moon landing" moment for me.

 

[Falcos_Commisar]

I still go back and re-watch the first time a space x booster returned to earth in one piece. It was my "moon landing" moment for me.

VTOL or VL rockets were a thing back in the late 1980s/ early 1990s with the Delta Clipper. Difference was back then no one really cared about reusability cost (and the space shuttle was around) and total lbs to orbit was the important metric.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

Even the OG Lunar Lander was technically a VTOL rocket.

As for Starship, it's biggest flaw is Zero Crew escape system. If something goes wrong (I cannot FUCKING STAND the infantile " rapid unscheduled disassembly" term SpaceX uses, it reeks of troonery) then everyone on that particular Starship is DEAD.

Hence my desire for Starship to be cargo only.

Build something big in orbit then fly the crew up in a safe vehicle.

 

[dustbuster]

As for Starship, it's biggest flaw is Zero Crew escape system. If something goes wrong (I cannot FUCKING STAND the infantile " rapid unscheduled disassembly" term SpaceX uses, it reeks of troonery) then everyone on that particular Starship is DEAD.

The challenger had a crew escape system.
It didn't work.
To my knowledge no crew escape system has yet to work in an actual emergency for a spacecraft.
Anything capable of removing a crew rapidly enough from the kind of catastrophic failures that occur at the ludicrous speeds rockets reach would turn the humans inside into wall paste.

Bear in mind rockets are roughly 90-95% high explosive.
Anything capable of removing a human from that kind of catastrophic failure would need to be instantaneously able to move at speeds well beyond what is conventionally referred to as "hypersonic".
"crew escape systems" are a fraud designed to quell public opinion.

 

[McMitch]

I cannot FUCKING STAND the infantile " rapid unscheduled disassembly" term SpaceX uses

That turn of phrase is less an infantile reduction and more military sarcasm towards the jargon rocket engineers would use in the 60’s. It permitted rocketry as a science because it’s self-depreciating, and eventually became normal vernacular to describe an event.

 

[teriyakiburns]

The challenger had a crew escape system.

The STS "escape system" consisted of a long boom that they would extend out of the hatch, to which the crew would attach parachute cords. Then they'd jump out. It was only ever designed to be used if the ship was in a safe glide, and only as an alternative to ditching or a rough landing. It didn't have anything that could remove the crew from danger in any other circumstance, such as an engine failure or an explosion. This was one of the fundamental problems of the shuttle's design. Starship does have the same problem, as its design currently stands.

Anything capable of removing a crew rapidly enough from the kind of catastrophic failures that occur at the ludicrous speeds rockets reach would turn the humans inside into wall paste.

A typical human can survive a constant acceleration of around 20gs for about 10 seconds before suffering severe injury, which is far less than the 12 to 15 gs (plus around 3gs from the rocket) required by a launch escape system. It's going to hurt, but it's not going to kill or even seriously injure the crew.

 

[dustbuster]

The STS "escape system" consisted of a long boom that they would extend out of the hatch, to which the crew would attach parachute cords. Then they'd jump out. It was only ever designed to be used if the ship was in a safe glide, and only as an alternative to ditching or a rough landing.

This is false.
The entire crew compartment was hardened and designed to come down in 1 piece.
Unfortunately, they never installed the explosive bolts or chute deployment system due to "weight concerns"
The compartment was blown off and NASA later admitted it fell, in one piece, into the ocean, where it finally smashed due to the force of impact.
The admission also included the high probability numerous people inside remained conscious the entire way down.

A typical human can survive a constant acceleration of around 20gs for about 10 seconds, which is far less than the 12 to 15 gs (plus around 3gs from the rocket) required by a launch escape system.

Show me a single escape system that can outrun a liquid hydrogen explosion.
Not a proposed one, not a theoretical one, an actual, tested one.

 

[Vecr]

The challenger had a crew escape system.

Only the missions with two pilots had ejection seats. I don't think the Challenger ever had them fitted, and it absolutely did not on the mission where it blew up.

 

[teriyakiburns]

The entire crew compartment was hardened and designed to come down in 1 piece.

No, it wasn't. The cabin was integrated into the structure of the ship. That "hardening" you're talking about is only the enclosed, airtight crew decks. It wasn't designed to come out. There is absolutely no provision in the outer structure to allow it to come out.

 

[dustbuster]

No, it wasn't. The cabin was integrated into the structure of the ship. That "hardening" you're talking about is only the enclosed, airtight crew decks. It wasn't designed to come out. There is absolutely no provision in the outer structure to allow it to come out.

Yes, it was, and the fact you provided no citation proves you're lying.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Yes, it was, and the fact you provided no citation proves you're lying.

The fact that you provided no citation means that you're lying first.

 

[Homoshrexual2]

Anything capable of removing a crew rapidly enough from the kind of catastrophic failures that occur at the ludicrous speeds rockets reach would turn the humans inside into wall paste.

The first usage with a crewed mission occurred during the attempt to launch Soyuz T-10-1 on September 26, 1983. The rocket caught fire, just before launch, and the LES carried the crew capsule clear, seconds before the rocket exploded. The crew were subjected to an acceleration of 14 to 17 g (140 to 170 m/s2) for five seconds and were badly bruised. Reportedly, the capsule reached an altitude of 2,000 meters (6,600 ft) and landed 4 kilometers (2.5 mi) from the launch pad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_escape_system#Usage

 

[ConsentAccidentVictimNo98]

You have working rockets in falcon and falcon heavy, which suffered similar setbacks during their development. All these complaints don't seem to take into account how fundamentally the orbital launch space has changed, and just how cheap launches are now, thanks to spacex blowing up a few of those rockets.

That is misleading, there have only been two lost falcon rockets (technically three including grass hopper). Only one of these being during flight (CRS-7). It has been a remarkably safe rocket. The last one lost was quite awhile ago. It was iterative as a means of trying to land boosters, and most of the upgrades done were meant to support this, take the stretching of the rocket for propulsive landing. Starship has been trying to do everything all at once.

Every shuttle launch prior to Challenger was a disaster waiting to happen because of unidentified problems in the design of the solid boosters (in fact worse; identified, but ignored), which more than likely would have been very visibly uncovered by the sort of destructive testing spacex is performing. Or if not, then something else would have been.

No, with Challenger the engineers knew it should not have launched. IT was a management call. Even with Columbia, those on the ground were aware of major risks.

I appreciate that, but the Soviets - apparently armed only with tinfoil, superglue, poverty and vodka, managed to get relatively more impressive and orders of magnitude more complex tech in to space, with fewer resources and zero past experience to go on.

Stalin-Era cosmonaut engineers are still, without any drama or over-exaggeration, the best the field has had to offer. Not to take away any accomplishments from other space agencies.

Honestly, it is also that they got started first and had a really good thing with the R7 rocket. The soyuz being an iterative evolution of it.

The re-usability of Falcon and Falcon Heavy has reduced the cost per kilo to orbit by thousands of dollars. Adjusting for inflation, the cost of getting a payload to orbit used to typically fall somewhere around 12000 - 15000USD per kg. With falcon and falcon heavy, the cost is currently somewhere around 800USD/kg and still falling, entirely because the ships are re-usable with only superficial refurbishment. The only previous attempt at reusability was the shuttle, which still threw away most of its stack on launch and required extensive overhauls after every flight. It was also crippled by feature demands from the military, who partially funded its development.

Focusing on launch costs is a fallacy as most of the cost in spaceflight is usually derived from the payload itself. There are a few exceptions to this of course, mainly SLS. But yeah, satellites can be really expensive.

What can Starship launch that 3-5 Falcon Heavy launches can't?

The falcon series of rockets is seriously limited by that of their payload space in the fairing. This, is really fucking important for select missions as they need room. Take for example the James Web Space Telescope. That was launched on the Ariane 5 because of how it had the widest fairing possible, which was important

You idiots need to look at recent history a little.

Note, that table is partly misleading due to how you're reading it. Those missions had their primary mission objective be a success. Landing attempts were done as a secondary objective afterwards. Furthermore, the first two attempts were actually using parachutes and were not propulsive landing. The benefit of the Falcon series of rockets is that of how the propulsive landing was added and tested later. It was basically a promised feature (alongside full reusability but oops, that never happened).

To my knowledge no crew escape system has yet to work in an actual emergency for a spacecraft.
Anything capable of removing a crew rapidly enough from the kind of catastrophic failures that occur at the ludicrous speeds rockets reach would turn the humans inside into wall paste.

Soyuz T-10 had a successful launch abort after a failed launch:

During the failed launches of the N-1, the Soyuz launch system variant for that rocket also worked. In recent years, an abort mode for the Soyuz rocket with a crew was used, which did not use the launch escape system but rather the service module of the Soyuz spacecraft to abort into a suborbital trajectory. Indecently, this launch was the first suborbital spaceflight with humans onboard for the Russian federation (With the Soviet Union only having done crewed orbital flights)

Only the missions with two pilots had ejection seats. I don't think the Challenger ever had them fitted, and it absolutely did not on the mission where it blew up.

And this is why for when the Soviets were attempting to make their own Space Shuttle, they specifically intended to limit the crew to that of 4 cosmonauts so they could keep the ejection seats as a launch escape mode.

The Soviets could have gone to the moon and honestly were pretty close but after 1969 they decided the cost wasn't worth it.

The Soviets technically had 2 rockets which would have been capable of lunar flight. The N-1 and the Energia. Energia was a success on both flights with it being able to lift 100 tons into orbit.

Show me a single escape system that can outrun a liquid hydrogen explosion.
Not a proposed one, not a theoretical one, an actual, tested one.

They do work

Oh, and got a clip of the N1. Really low quality but it does show it.

These are test articles; they're not expected to survive, though it would be nice if they did. Your complaint is exactly the same as the complaining about the early falcon 9s that were expended while testing re-usability features, when those losses were built in to the development programme.

Most of it was scepticism surrounding the ability of it to be cost effective, as well as profitable. The falcon stack was originally meant to be fully reusable. It was not developed in this direction because it was viewed to not be profitable.

 

[Post Reply]

Here's a citation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes

Spoiler: Ejection Seats

Ejection seats were not further developed for the shuttle for several reasons:

Very difficult to eject seven crew members when three or four were on the middeck (roughly the center of the forward fuselage), surrounded by substantial vehicle structure.

Limited ejection envelope. Ejection seats only work up to about 3,400 miles per hour (3,000 kn; 5,500 km/h) and 130,000 feet (40,000 m).
That constituted a very limited portion of the shuttle's operating envelope, about the first 100 seconds of the 510 seconds powered ascent.

No help during a Columbia-type reentry accident. Ejecting during an atmospheric reentry accident would have been fatal because of the high temperatures and wind blast at high Mach speeds.

Astronauts were skeptical of the ejection seats' usefulness. STS-1 pilot Robert Crippen stated:
...in truth, if you had to use them while the solids were there, I don’t believe you would [survive]—if you popped out and then went down through the fire trail that’s behind the solids, that you would have ever survived, or if you did, you wouldn't have a parachute, because it would have been burned up in the process. But by the time the solids had burned out, you were up to too high an altitude to use it. ... So I personally didn't feel that the ejection seats were really going to help us out if we really ran into a contingency.[15]

The Soviet shuttle Buran was planned to be fitted with the crew emergency escape system, which would have included K-36RB (K-36M-11F35) seats and the Strizh full-pressure suit, qualified for altitudes up to 30,000 metres (98,000 ft) and speeds up to Mach three.[16] Buran flew only once in fully automated mode without a crew, thus the seats were never installed and were never tested in real human space flight.

It doesn't seem like there was any realistic way to survive a serious incident while the solid rocket booster was firing, even after the improvements made post-Challenger.

 

[TJBirish]

. If something goes wrong (I cannot FUCKING STAND the infantile " rapid unscheduled disassembly" term SpaceX uses, it reeks of troonery) then everyone on that particular Starship is DEAD.

That term, as gay as it is, goes back at least to the '70s and was popular in the miliatry. It's been used in the rocketry business for decades. Not a new thing.

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

Another Starship explosion (Archive)

SpaceX Starship rocket explodes in setback to Musk's Mars mission​

By Jaspreet Singh and Cassell Bryan-Low
June 19, 20253:38 PM CDTUpdated 34 mins ago

• Explosion attributed to nitrogen storage unit failure, Musk says
• Starship rocket has faced multiple failures this year
• Huge rocket key to Musk's mission to reach Mars

June 19 (Reuters) - SpaceX's massive Starship spacecraft exploded into a dramatic fireball during testing in Texas late on Wednesday, the latest in a series of setbacks for billionaire Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program.
The explosion occurred around 11 p.m. local time while Starship was on a test stand at its Brownsville, Texas Starbase while preparing for the tenth test flight, SpaceX said in a post on Musk’s social-media platform X.

The company attributed it to a "major anomaly" and said all personnel were safe. Its engineering teams were investigating the incident, and it was coordinating with local, state and federal agencies regarding environmental and safety impacts, the company said.
"Preliminary data suggests that a nitrogen COPV in the payload bay failed below its proof pressure," Musk said in a post on X, in a reference to a nitrogen gas storage unit known as a Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel. "If further investigation confirms that this is what happened, it is the first time ever for this design," he continued.

The Starship rocket appeared to experience at least two explosions in quick succession, lighting up the night sky and sending debris flying, according to video capturing the moment it exploded.



The 400-foot (122-meter) tall Starship rocket system is at the core of Musk's goal of sending humans to Mars. But it has been beset by a string of failures this year.
In late May, SpaceX's Starship rocket spun out of control about halfway through a flight without achieving some of its most important testing goals. The Starship lifted off from SpaceX's Starbase, Texas, launch site, flying beyond the point of two previous explosive attempts earlier this year that sent debris streaking over Caribbean islands and forced dozens of airliners to divert course.

Two months earlier, the spacecraft exploded in space minutes after lifting off from Texas, prompting the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to halt air traffic in parts of Florida.
Videos on social media showed fiery debris streaking through the dusk skies near South Florida and the Bahamas after Starship broke up in space shortly after it began to spin uncontrollably with its engines cut off, a SpaceX live stream of the mission showed. Musk called that explosion "a minor setback."

The FAA said earlier this month that it had closed an agency-required investigation into the mishap, citing the probable cause as a hardware failure in one of the engines. SpaceX identified eight corrective actions to prevent a recurrence and the FAA said it verified SpaceX implemented those prior to the late May Starship mission.
In January, a Starship rocket broke up in space minutes after launching from Texas, raining debris over Caribbean islands and causing minor damage to a car in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru and Cassel Bryan-Low in London; Editing by Joe Brock, Aidan Lewis, Alexandra Hudson and Diane Craft

 

[Daddy's Little Kitten]

How could Trump do this?

 

[More AWS-8Q Than You]

How could Trump do this?

The Trump Curse is a powerful thing, calling the man God has apparently decided to give the Mandate of Heaven to a pedo has consequences. I wonder how many of Musk's beloved Jeets were involved in this?