SpaceX's Starship SN4 Launch Vehicle Prototype Explodes After Static Engine Fire Test (techcrunch.com) 78
SpaceX had just conducted yet another static fire test of the Raptor engine in its Starship SN4 prototype launch vehicle on Friday when the test vehicle exploded on the test stand in Boca Chica, Texas. TechCrunch reports: This was the fourth static fire test of this engine on this prototype, so it's unclear what went wrong vs. other static fire attempts. This was a test in the development of Starship, a new spacecraft that SpaceX has been developing in Boca Chica. Eventually, the company hopes to use it to replace its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket, but Starship is still very early in its development phase, whereas those vehicles are flight-proven, multiple times over.
SpaceX had just secured FAA approval to fly its Starship prototype for short, suborbital test flights earlier this week. The goal was to fly this SN4 prototype for short distances following static fire testing, but that clearly won't be possible now, as the vehicle appears to have been completely destroyed in the explosion following Friday's test, as you can see in the stream from NASASpaceflight.com. The explosion occurred around 1:49 PM local time in Texas, roughly two minutes after it had completed its engine test fire.
SpaceX had just secured FAA approval to fly its Starship prototype for short, suborbital test flights earlier this week. The goal was to fly this SN4 prototype for short distances following static fire testing, but that clearly won't be possible now, as the vehicle appears to have been completely destroyed in the explosion following Friday's test, as you can see in the stream from NASASpaceflight.com. The explosion occurred around 1:49 PM local time in Texas, roughly two minutes after it had completed its engine test fire.
That is why we test. (Score:3)
We gain more knowledge in failure than success.
Bill Gates quotes (Score:5, Insightful)
"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose."
"It's fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."
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The Falcon 9 is a heavily-tested rocket that is very different to the Starship prototypes. Different engines, different structural design, different type of fuel, ... The least-tested component is the Crew Dragon module, but one of those has already been to the ISS, and has been through both on-ground and in-flight abort testing. There have been zero Falcon 9 Block-5 launch failures (there was one Block-4 RUD). There was one engine shutdown due to some cleaning fluid igniting (it was left after refurbishmen
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And more importantly, initial armchair analysis of this failure makes it look like it was a leak from where the fuel hoses are joined to the rocket test stand. The explosion came 2 minutes after the test fire, after gas started billowing out of the test platform.
More than anything this looks like a failure of the test platform rather than the rocket. It seems like the static fire might have shaken loose a hose, and when they were trying to detank the rocket the hose popped off, leading to uncontrolled venti
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Gain Silos blow up. It's what they do.
Re:That is why we test. (Score:5, Funny)
We gain more knowledge in failure than success.
True, but debugging rockets is a lot harder than debugging software.
You can't just put a breakpoint right before engine.explode();
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True, but debugging rockets is a lot harder than debugging software.
You can't just put a breakpoint right before engine.explode();
True, but someone botched the debugging code with a forgotten Metric/Imperial conversion and only had it doing Break();
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You *always* need to debug.
The question is only how your debugging is distributed across the design, simulation, and testing phases. Each phase delivers much more subtle and accurate results than the one before, but is also more expensive.
SpaceX has become the undisputed leader in cost-effective launches by doing a huge amount of iterative development in response to real-world testing. When their test vehicles are orders of magnitude cheaper to build than the competition's, they can afford to do that, and
Oh there was a BREAK point (Score:2)
There absolutely was a BREAK before the BOOM. :)
Re: That is why we test. (Score:1)
My rocket launched just fine. We don't import that library.
Re: That is why we test. (Score:1)
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You can't just put a breakpoint right before engine.explode();
Yeah but there's workarounds to that, such as starting the video recording one and a half hours before the event so you don't miss the critical point.
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I wonder just how fast their cameras are. I'd love to see what happened in extreme slow motion.
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I don't doubt that they had good slow motion cameras, but as they had just finished a static fire, all those cameras would have been busy saving the data from that static fire. Pitty that - we so rarely get to see such photogenic explosions.
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I suppose a good one would generate data a lot faster than even a high speed disk array could store it, wouldn't it?
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You can't just put a breakpoint right before engine.explode();
this test begs to differ.
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Where was a mention that this was just as easy as software fixing?
Yea if the engine explodes you got to have to make a new one. After a long Root Cause Analysis.
Software you can run it over and over again, and have the program crash at the same point. Than you can debug and put in a patch without a full rewrite.
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We gain more knowledge in failure than success.
SpaceX seems pretty knowledgeable about these Starships blowing up. :-)
On a more serious note, can't the engine systems be tested outside a prototype vehicle, perhaps with the fuel tanks positioned outside the blast radius, or is everything too integrated and/or are they trying to test more than the propulsion systems? I mean, it would be nice to just blow up an engine rather than a whole ship.
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Not at all clear the engine was at fault. And the engines are all tested before they leave the factory
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And the engines are all tested before they leave the factory
Not quite. These are built in CA and then shipped to McGregor, tx for extensive testing.
Re: That is why we test. (Score:1)
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You can test your components all you like, but you still need system integration tests.
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Engines are also tested outside the vehicle. But that doesn't teach you how the engine and vehicle will interact as a combined unit. The last combined engine/vehicle failure was due to the thrust puck (structure that transmits engine thrust into the rest of the rocket) giving way. It's easy to forget how ridiculously huge the forces from these engines are, relative to how lightweight you have to build rockets.
That said... this failure does not appear to have anything to do with the engine. There was qui
Re:That is why we test. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you've never read it, I highly recommend 'IGNITION! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants" by John D. Clark. The exploration and discovery of modern rocket propellants by one of the participants. Available free here: http://www.sciencemadness.org/... [sciencemadness.org] The introduction by Isaac Asimov (himself a chemist) includes the following:
Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don't mean garden-variety crazy or a merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity. There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.
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Rocket propellants are serious loony juice. They are basically high explosives, and you try to make them go "woosh" instead of "boom". One propellant I found was hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane. I just love the name, don't you? It is considerably more powerful than TNT. Another surprising propellant is red fuming nitric acid. Apparently, you only have to look at the stuff a bit funny, and it will boil off into steam and NO2, which is your propellant gas. I believe the trick to doing this kind of chemistry is
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According to Derek Lowe's amusing Things I Won't Work With [sciencemag.org] blog post on Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane from 2011:
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Yikes!
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This needs real e-book-ification. I read it on a Kindle a few years ago. The mediocre OCR, the unhelpful placement of footnotes, and the laughable attempts at interpreting chemical bond diagrams were all impediments to the content itself---which was great.
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All of the Raptor engines are tested at MacGregor [nasaspaceflight.com]
What is happening at Boca Chica is prototyping of the StarShip, which is intended to eventually be orbit-capable after the SuperHeavy booster is ready.
The last several months have been spent designing prototypes, building out infrastructure, developing new assembly capabilities and, for the time being, blowing stuff up
This is pretty much how Elon has called the tune (move fast and break things) and will likely result in sub orbital hops in June
I invite you al [youtube.com]
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That would be a better argument if they didn't keep finding out things that other people already knew and wrote down 50 years ago.
They are starting from scratch, with the expected results - when it is completely unnecessary, aside from hubris.
Re: That is why we test. (Score:3)
Their requirements and subsequent design are rather different compared to 50 years ago. The raptor engine uses other fuel and is a full flow type, one of the first out of experimental phase. Tanks and piping must withstand reuse, are made if other materials, the rocket has to operate both on sea level and in vacuum (mind this a second stage rocket). There is no easy way to your goal and be sure theyâ(TM)ve read everything about saturn 5 to soyuz to The space shuttle.
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The GP gave you several examples of novel features of Starship. The most obvious being that the raptor is the first full flow staged combustion engine to ever fly.
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Let's not be too hasty. It doesn't really count unless the whole engine flies in the same direction.
Up until now, it's really only flown a hundred metres or so. Some of it probably went further than that in this test.
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That's 100 metres or so further than anyone else has gotten such an engine to go.
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We gain more knowledge in failure than success.
Sure, but given the incredibly small safety margins planned for in rocketry, I am pretty sure that Elon's dreams about replacing commercial planes with rockets will stay a dream, if only because passengers usually do not volunteer for others to gain knowledge from their untimely deaths.
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That's fine, passengers are usually are not invited to participate in rocket tests. Though I feel for those poor souls who make the first flight in the Boeing Starliner - at over a billion dollars a launch they can't afford to test it properly before they start carrying passengers.
SpaceX's iterative design strategy has allowed them to make Falcon 9 the safest and cheapest rocket ever flown.
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Average failure rate of rockets so far: on the order of 1%. Failure rate of airliners: 1000 times lower. They've got a ways to go.
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Average failure rate of the final Block 5 Falcon 9s: 0.00%
There's been that single engine-out failure due to a cleaning mistake, but it didn't compromise the mission as the rest took up the slack - redundancy is nice that way. And there's only been one RUD of the earlier designs.
Granted, they've got a ways to go to master landing before I'd want to fly that way, and it'll take a LOT more flights before modern airline-level failures would become apparent, but Falcon 9 was never intended to land with passeng
A bad day to blow up a rocket (Score:3)
SpaceX has the public's attention right now because in less than 24 hours they are going to try to launch astronauts. The first manned flight from the US in 10 years, and the first ever by a private company.* This isn't really a good day to be having your rockets blow up. Bad PR.
Musk and SpaceX are normally very good at PR. Among the very, very best in the world, actually. This seems like a dumb mistake for them to not wait one work day, until Monday, to blow up a rocket engine. One work day later would
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Musk and SpaceX are normally very good at PR. Among the very, very best in the world, actually.
SpaceX might be OK at PR.
Musk is something of a nightmare at PR. He really has a tin ear when it comes to PR and bad things routinely happen at his PR events. Only the fact that he has such enthusiastic supporters keeps such events from becoming total disasters.
My guess is he has the stolid engineer's viewpoint that what matters is the results, and if you produce results everyone will come around and PR fluff is unnecessary or even degrading.
Disclaimer: Musk fanboi.
No such thing as bad publicity. Paris Hilton (Score:2)
Many years ago, when Donald Trump was a billionaire businessman rather than a bad politician, one of the key points in one of his books is that for him all publicity is good. He'd say something outrageous, the press would write about it, he'd get more famous. More famous - more money. (Just ask Paris Hilton).
> Only the fact that he has such enthusiastic supporters
Enthusiastic supporters and LOTS of supporters. He had a ton of enthusiastic supporters when he was dreaming about building electric cars - n
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please, Please, PLEASE no release of a Trump sex video!
[gag]
hawk
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Why don't we wait a few days to gain this particular bit of knowledge after the upcoming manned mission?
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"We gain more knowledge in failure than success."
We *may be able to* gain more knowledge in failure than in success. However, we are under no obligation to do so.
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Yes but at some point they do plan to have success right?
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Sadly, it is starting to add a whole new meaning to the concept of . . . static FIRING !
Sorry, just couldn't resist
cheers . . .
No obvious cause (Score:2)
There's no obvious cause from the video. [youtube.com] (Note: that's camera audio at a distance, not synced to the video.) The static fire itself had concluded, apparently successfully, a few seconds before the explosion.
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The static fire itself had concluded, apparently successfully, a few seconds before the explosion.
Yes. Although the previous static fire a few days ago had a real fire continue to burn close to the motor, after the test had concluded. That had to be extinguished, so something flammable was leaking.
Could be that in this test it was still leaking, but didn't actually catch fire until enough of it had accumulated for a BOOM.
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It's really hard to get that sort of destruction from an uncontained fuel-air explosion, and SN4 blew apart almost instantly, as if it were containing the explosion and then popped. I'm guessing something went through it vertically that we couldn't see, and the remaining fuel and lox were able to mix freely. Some are saying a pipe below SN4 burst, and I could believe that too if it ruptured or burned up through the interior of SN4.
SpaceX is putting NASA to shame (Score:3)
SpaceX tests a new vehicle once or twice a month while NASA would be/is taking years to do this.
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SpaceX tests a new vehicle once or twice a month while NASA would be/is taking years to do this.
SpaceX answers only to its shareholders, who dispassionately focus on the bottom line and understand risk.
NASA answers to politicians, who answer to the public. Perception is more important, so tests are done only when success is assured, and NASA systems end up expensively over-engineered.
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I get what you're saying. But to clarify: Elon Musk owns 54% of SpaceX shares, and has voting control over 78% of them. So SpaceX answers to Musk.
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The best shareholder is a sole shareholder.
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NASA answers to politicians, who answer to the public
Here, Let me fix that for you
NASA answers to politicians, who answer to the rich ppl, companies and foreign gov that bought the politician.
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Likewise, what R&D/Testing should NASA be doing that is funded by CONgress?
NEXT! (Score:3)
#5, you're up!
Number five is alive! (Score:2)
That's what I want to hear next time.
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When it goes live, can we name it Johnny?
It's not an "explosion" (Score:1)
As Elon says in the "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" video [youtu.be], that's just a "rapid unscheduled disassembly."
Totally different thing.
Ignition! (Score:3)
Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don't mean garden-variety crazy or merely raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity.
There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.
--- Isaac Asimov from the Foreword to "Ignition!" by John D. Clark
Look for the PDF online. You'll find it. A great read. Rocket science is hard.
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I'm about half-way through it, I recommended it higher in the thread.
http://www.sciencemadness.org/... [sciencemadness.org]
Poor timing (Score:2)
The same day SpaceX is about launch astronauts into space (weather permitting), I browse ./ over morning coffee and register a headline which in my mind translates into "SpaceX goes boom". I think my heart just skipped a beat.
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Same here. I was so relieved to find out it was only another Starship failure. In fact, these are becoming so common, I'm surprised it made the news.
Corporeal (Score:2)
Boca Chica
Well, we know where her mouth is, now. With her grand teton, soon we'll have an entire body.