SpaceX Mars Rocket Prototype Explodes During Test Flight (cnn.com) 90
"SpaceX's fourth attempt to successfully launch and land its Mars rocket prototype has once again gone up in flames," writes smooth wombat. CNN reports: SpaceX engineer John Insprucker, who hosted a webcast of the test launch, said the rocket, known as SN11, had a normal ascent and that all appeared to be well before on-board cameras lost signal and the vehicle was subsumed by fog moments before landing. Insprucker said the company will share updates on social media once SpaceX engineers are able to check out the landing site. The area surrounding the vehicle must be cleared before liftoff for safety reasons.
Insprucker said the company is not expecting to recover video footage. "Don't wait for landing," he advised webcast viewers. Independent video streamers that recorded the flight did not capture the last stretch of the flight either due to fog, but NASASpaceflight -- a media site -- reported that one of the outlet's cameras may have been struck by debris from the rocket. Footage of the launch pad showed SN11 was nowhere in sight after the rocket's descent. For his part, Musk tweeted: "At least the crater is in the right place!" He later added: "Looks like engine 2 had issues on ascent & didn't reach operating chamber pressure during landing burn, but, in theory, it wasn't needed. Something significant happened shortly after landing burn start. Should know what it was once we can examine the bits later today."
Insprucker said the company is not expecting to recover video footage. "Don't wait for landing," he advised webcast viewers. Independent video streamers that recorded the flight did not capture the last stretch of the flight either due to fog, but NASASpaceflight -- a media site -- reported that one of the outlet's cameras may have been struck by debris from the rocket. Footage of the launch pad showed SN11 was nowhere in sight after the rocket's descent. For his part, Musk tweeted: "At least the crater is in the right place!" He later added: "Looks like engine 2 had issues on ascent & didn't reach operating chamber pressure during landing burn, but, in theory, it wasn't needed. Something significant happened shortly after landing burn start. Should know what it was once we can examine the bits later today."
Damn fog (Score:3)
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It does seem pretty weird. The point of these tests is to collect data, and visual data is a pretty important part of that. If there was no fog it would probably be pretty obvious what the failure was.
It obviously exploded in the air, and from the audio (boom right after ignition) it sounds like it was some sort of engine explosion. Unfortunately they really do seem to be having a lot of issues with the raptors, which kinda sucks, as solutions to these types of issues can be fiendishly difficult to fix. The
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It obviously exploded in the air, and from the audio (boom right after ignition) it sounds like it was some sort of engine explosion
The explosion may very well have been due to FTS activation.
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It does seem pretty weird. The point of these tests is to collect data, and visual data is a pretty important part of that. If there was no fog it would probably be pretty obvious what the failure was.
It obviously exploded in the air, and from the audio (boom right after ignition) it sounds like it was some sort of engine explosion. Unfortunately they really do seem to be having a lot of issues with the raptors, which kinda sucks, as solutions to these types of issues can be fiendishly difficult to fix. They might have to look into metallurgical changes, or even a redesign some of the sub systems which is not going to be something they can do really fast.
Having said that this is being pretty greedy - they are making remarkable progress, I guess we all just want to see this tin can swinging around the moon ASAP.
I would be happy if it swung around the moon, without exploding.
And yeah - it did seem a lot odd that they took off in dense fog. When your device is showing a track record of rapid disassembly, those visuals are pretty important At some point, despite the faithful being pleased to "get data" Spacex will have to start taking off and landing without the big booms.
I still want to find out how the settlers will be getting to the ground after they land. That's gonna be quite the drop. We better have it soon
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>I still want to find out how the settlers will be getting to the ground after they land. That's gonna be quite the drop. We better have it soon, since Mars is only a few years away from people landing on it.
What's to find out? I mean, it'll be cool to see the final version, but they've been showing renders since long before the move to steel - and while some details have changed, the basic system has not: they'll have a crane that extends out a big cargo door at the bottom of the fairing section. I b
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>I still want to find out how the settlers will be getting to the ground after they land. That's gonna be quite the drop. We better have it soon, since Mars is only a few years away from people landing on it.
What's to find out? I mean, it'll be cool to see the final version, but they've been showing renders since long before the move to steel - and while some details have changed, the basic system has not: they'll have a crane that extends out a big cargo door at the bottom of the fairing section. I believe they even demonstrated a prototype system for the Lunar variant recently, or will soon, and I can't think of any reason they'd use something fundamentally different for Mars. Not if it's sturdy enough to demonstrate on Earth.
I've seen renders and animation. And while quite cool, there is a huge gap between CG and the real world.
Perhaps it's just my cynicism, but I recall as a child seeing actual devices. Apollo capsules, lunar landers, moon buggies. Even these days, I've seen the NASA inflatable modules for the space station and eventual travel to Mars. So much I can see or at least see real things. Real plans
And this is the big issue I'm concerned about. We see what we see. We see a rocket in extremely early stages. We
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*ahem*, use a slow ramp, they love the slow ramp, it really gets their dicks hard. [tenor.com]
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*ahem*, use a slow ramp, they love the slow ramp, it really gets their dicks hard. [tenor.com]
Now that's exciting! 8^)
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Hey, I'm with you on the rocket itself - they're pushing hard on the boundaries of what's possible.
But assuming they can land a rocket safely on Mars - I just don't see that there's anything that interesting in the details of the crane they use to lower stuff the last couple hundred feet to the ground. Cranes are ancient technology, there's nothing particularly complicated or cutting edge about them. The lunar one might need a few tweaks to deal with the highly abrasive un-weathered lunar dust, but on Mar
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>>- Sabatier process fuel synthesis from CO2 and water. Musk has talked about doing it eventually, why wait? Start building and testing the modules that can be installed on the floating launch facilities now.
It is my understanding that Elon has initiated a 'prize' for development of CO2 capture and conversion technologies [nbcnews.com] and will test them on the natural gas power/CH4 extraction plant he is building at Boca Chica.
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I still want to find out how the settlers will be getting to the ground after they land. That's gonna be quite the drop. We better have it soon, since Mars is only a few years away from people landing on it.
I thought the plan was to detonate at low Mars altitude. Spreading dna all over the place. Then waiting for evolution to kick in. Survival of the fittest.
Hah! they might just be successful at that!
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I still want to find out how the settlers will be getting to the ground after they land. That's gonna be quite the drop.
I would imagine a ladder or even ramp of some kind. If all else fails the gravity is quite low so they should be fine. One giant leap and all that.
Re:Damn fog (Score:4, Insightful)
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Aircraft manufacturers test under different conditions - but not at the start of the program. Generally, the test program looks something like this:
1. initial flights near the home airport. These are scheduled for good weather, and postponed if there's fog. You want the best possible conditions for these, to have the biggest margin for error possible.
2. flight envelope expansion until the entire flight envelope (speeds, rates of roll/pitch/yaw, etc) has been covered.
3. climate testing: move the aircraft to
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Before this flight, they had three failures to survive landing out of three attempts. I would have thought getting it to work in ideal conditions is surely a prerequisite to finding out which conditions are problematic.
That said, I'm not a rocket engineer and I don't work for SpaceX. They clearly thought these conditions wouldn't affect the test, so I think we should believe them
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they are making remarkable progress
If by making remarkable progress you mean they are getting very good at blowing up spaceships -- I agree.
Nothing about this is progress - you engineer a solution to work and test that it works. What SpaceX appears to be doing is throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if a launch finally sticks a landing. This is hacking not engineering - you should know what you are doing before launch and have the launch do what you planned. I hope they launch on the 4th of July... that will probably be the first la
Re:Damn fog (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't disagree with what you're saying, and I'm certain that while they'll get a tin can into orbit quite quickly using this 'agile' process, they will eventually have to do all the meticulous planning and engineering stages that they are skipping right now to get the thing anywhere near human rated.
But you've got to admit this is much more entertaining. There is also a lot to be said for having a lifting platform that, while not human rated, is dirt cheap to build and fly.
I sort of just consider Musk an engineering reality TV show these days. Most of his stuff is a bit wacky, but hey, it's better than watching financial engineers sit around and discuss new forms of derivative trading contracts, or lawyers discuss innovations in employment law. Or even Tim Cook trying to get excited about smaller bezels. Engineering innovation is pretty dead right now, and Musk is at least doing something interesting.
Re: Damn fog (Score:2)
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Apparently the local officials were getting pissed at them for blocking the road to the beach all the time. They may not have had another launch window for some time, so they decided to go for it. The telemetry is the important thing anyway. And in this case, the pieces.
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Isn't it possible to predict likely fog? It's obviously not a good idea to test early prototypes in fog.
Space flight is hard (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Space flight is hard (Score:5, Insightful)
and they are basing everything off 50 years of government research that they get for free
While technically true, their access to that information is not exclusive. What has Boing and ATK done with their access to the same data?
Re:Space flight is hard (Score:5, Insightful)
What has Boing and ATK done with their access to the same data?
Profited...
Re: Space flight is hard (Score:1)
...he says, like that isn's SpaceX's goal.
Yeah, you thought keeping passengers alive was? ... Only if that is a strict requirement for making profit. Don't count on it being...
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You do. p(success) = 0.999,999 ^ 1,000,000 , which is still >0.
Re:Space flight is hard (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it is 36.7 %.
furthermore, I think Musk said "the best part is no part"
Re: Space flight is hard (Score:2)
The failure rate of the individual parts are individual events in many cases, and dependent events in other cases. This makes the probability of failure more complicated (but no less calculable) than your comment suggests.
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"The models they are testing are not designed to go to Mars. Neither are the engines. They aren't nearly big enough..." One word: booster.
Re: Space flight is hard (Score:2)
Big engines are harder to make and get heavier and heavier. You can get a better thrust to weight and IsP with a cluster of small engines. The specifications of the engines they are using and have ground tested exceed what is needed to get to Mars with people.
Not sure where you are getting your information.
Also, when have they done entirely reusable orbital rockets before?
The space shuttle main engines were âoereusableâ but required a total disassembly and $200 million refurbishment each time. Als
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People are reporting finding debris in the street. Hard indeed.
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What does that even mean?
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Presumably criminal negligence. What else could they possibly mean in context?
Re: Space flight is hard (Score:1)
Uum, shit happens.
Take enough tries and you "simply" driving your car turns into a death.
Of course we try to avoid it. But only up to a point. Otherwise we'd never get anywhere.
Sometimes it's just worth the risk. Even a human life is not worth $infinity.
If it was for Generation Pussy, we would have never reached the moon... or even left the trees. Cause "Somebody could break fingernail! Oh noes!".
Frankly, not for SpaceX, but for the original moon flight, I would not have thought twice about dying in the pr
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Sure, you've got to take risks to accomplish anything.
The problem comes when you start taking the kind of risks where other people pay the price, who were never given a choice.
If my building collapses and kills you, that's bad luck. But if it collapses because I cut a lot of corners building it and neglected maintenance - that's negligence.
(IANAL, not legal advice, etc)
If you're doing something that inherently risks other people's lives, like driving cars, flying airplanes, or launching rockets - we accept
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Debris-wise, it is hard to imagine the floppy insulation mat material being blasted five miles from just above ground level, it seems much more likely that it came off during ascent and was blown by the wind.
The scary idea that the FAA was supposedly pursuing/investigating was that the RUD of SS would resemble a fuel-air explosion and be much more destructive than SpaceX projected.
IMO, the use of FTS on SN11, and resultant huge cloud of fuel, without attendant explosion, kind of blows that idea out of the w
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I saw a whole lot of what looked like big chunks of sheet metal coming down - though again, no idea how far from the launch site it really was. Where are you getting floppy insulation from? I wasn't even aware there was such a thing on the Starship.
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People have posted pictures on twitter, here [twitter.com] and here [twitter.com].
Theories are insulating mat from up inside the engine skirt, or a copv wrap.
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People are reporting finding debris in the street. Hard indeed.
That's just more data! 8^)
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It's also a reason for the FAA to take an interest.
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It's also a reason for the FAA to take an interest.
And How! All that debris raining down on the locale is bound to perk people's ears up. As well, The launce site is way too close to Port Isabel and South Padre Island. And with pieces like this raining down: https://www.yahoo.com/news/spa... [yahoo.com] Just wait until one of these things gets loose on the area. I have a sneaking suspicion that the culture at Spacex will have them waiting way too long to push the self destruct button.
You can see it in Musk whining about how the FAA needs to get out of the way. http [yahoo.com]
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Re: Space flight is hard (Score:2)
Well if you want to do that, then the Germans copied Robert Goddardâ(TM)s liquid fueled rockets (Von Braun even admitted it), who got the idea of rockets from the metal encased Congreve rockets which were direct copies of the Indian Mysore rockets which in turn were improvements from the Chinese rockets (by way of Persia) who may have gotten the idea from somewhere else, who knows?
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who may have gotten the idea from somewhere else, who knows?
Was it aliens?
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and they are basing everything off 50 years of government research
They absolutely aren't. Where did you get that idea? Does Falcon 9 look like the Saturn I to you?
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There's far more to a rocket than its external shape, and "based on" does not have to be a 1:1 copy. As an example, the pintle injector in the Merlin engine is based on the Apollo LM landing engine. You'll find lots of details in the Falcon 9 that build on earlier work and published data by NASA.
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the Merlin engine is based on the Apollo LM landing engine.
So you are saying Douglas Bader could have flown a Spitfire to the Moon if it had had better range?
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Move fast, break things (Score:3, Funny)
Re: Move fast, break things (Score:1)
*Laughs in John F. Kennedy*
Autopilot (Score:2)
I bet the crash was due to autopilot relying on visual data only, no radar necessary!
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How do humans drive in fog again?
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Duh... with fog lights. </snark>
Re: Autopilot (Score:1)
Re: Autopilot (Score:2)
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That loud noise wasn't RUD, it was the rocket's fog horn.
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At least we didn't miss the first perfect landing because it was obscured by fog!
What's new? (Score:2)
In other news, water is still wet.
I know they will eventually get it. But they are not currently instilling confidence.
3rd Party Watchers (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of the video that 3rd party watchers collected were pretty nuts. I liked the footage from NasaSpaceFlight [youtu.be]. You can see huge chunks of the ship just raining out of the sky and impacting the ground. It sounds like Tim Dodd (Everyday Astronaut) might have also lost about $20k in camera equipment when a piece landed on their equipment.
Serves as a nice reminder of why they clear the launch range before flight. Nothing like having an engine the size of car land on you.
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Reminds me of a story from the R&D on the VT fuse (during WWII). In order to monitor the RF from the proximity radar, they had to place a receiver near the target. Very near. And since there was some uncertainty about the projectile trajectory, the solution was to fire the gun straight up. And place the instrumentation shack under a steel plate a couple of inches thick. Once in a while, the technicians wee rewarded with a loud "Clang!" when the aim was particularly good. Fortunately, the tests were done
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Some of the video that 3rd party watchers collected were pretty nuts. I liked the footage from NasaSpaceFlight [youtu.be]. You can see huge chunks of the ship just raining out of the sky and impacting the ground. It sounds like Tim Dodd (Everyday Astronaut) might have also lost about $20k in camera equipment when a piece landed on their equipment.
Serves as a nice reminder of why they clear the launch range before flight. Nothing like having an engine the size of car land on you.
Getting "An Error occured" I wonder if the video is about to disappear for reasons.
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No.
Elon Musk Responds (Score:5, Funny)
Direct quote: "At least the crater was in the right place!"
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Direct quote: "At least the crater was in the right place!"
Gotta admit - that's pretty funny.
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Yeah, that's a winner.
MTCR (Score:2)
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And we give Iran grief for Ballistic missile research? Musk is a private citizen and we are allowing him to shoot missiles at Florida. Just because they hit the the target tail first does not make them any less ballistic.
To my knowledge, Musk hasn't expressed a desire to wipe out any nations. [archive.org]
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To my knowledge, Musk hasn't expressed a desire to wipe out any nations. [archive.org]
Oh dear, so much dramatic language between the Axis of Evil and the Great Satan.
When you strip away the hyperbole and bad translations, the speech meant the exact same thing as when the US calls euphemistically for "regime change". Either way, resources change hands, and a lot of innocent people die.
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Just because they hit the the target tail first does not make them any less ballistic.
The fact that they use control surfaces, and a landing rocket makes them not ballistic. Ghoul clearly has no idea what that word means.
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ALL ICBMs have control surfaces on their terminal phases else the craters would not be in the right place
Then they are not ballistic in the terminal phase. Ballistics is the study non non-guided projectiles.
Guided re-entry vehicle on top of a ballistic missile?
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Florida? Try Texas.
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The... (Score:2)
WOw (Score:1)
Ugggg (Score:2)
Couldn't have happened to an uglier rocket.
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Second, confirm that it works correctly.
Third, polish and optimize.
With the Starship, they're still working on the first step.
The fact that previously-flown Falcon 9 boosters tend to be rather sooty (from flying back down through their exhaust plume) means they're really not THAT fussy about the third step. But it's hard to argue that they've got the first and second steps nailed down pretty well with the Falcon 9. Given enough time, I expect the Starship will get there. The on
I Fully Support Mr Musks Efforts (Score:1)
How is this different than the last 10? (Score:2)
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There are no NASA facilities there. It's all SpaceX.