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Space

SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy Booster Came Within 1 Second of Aborting Its First 'Catch' Landing (spacenews.com) 72

Posted by EditorDavid from the second-chances dept.
SpaceNews reports: SpaceX's Super Heavy booster came within a second of aborting a "catch" landing attempt on the latest Starship test flight, according to audio posted online, apparently inadvertently, by Elon Musk... In the audio, one person, not identified, described an issue with the Super Heavy landing burn where a "misconfigured" parameter meant that spin pressure, presuming in the Raptor engines in the booster, did not increase as expected. "We were one second away from that tripping and telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower," that person said. That scenario would "erroneously tell a healthy rocket to not try that catch...."

The people on the audio note that there had been discussions of delaying the Flight 5 launch to provide additional time to check those parameters. "We were scared about the fact that we had 100 aborts that were not super-trivial," one person said... Another issue discussed in the audio... was a cover on a chine, a vertical structure on the booster, that came off as the vehicle went transonic during its descent. A SpaceX official said in the audio that having chine cover come off was something that they were worried about before launch... The person also started to discuss an issue with the engine plume during the landing burn, but the video stops at that point.

The discussions appeared to involve planning for the next Starship test flight, Flight 6. SpaceX is moving ahead with preparations for the flight, moving the next Super Heavy booster to the launch site for testing. "Flight 6 is coming up soon!" Musk posted early Oct. 25.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
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SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy Booster Came Within 1 Second of Aborting Its First 'Catch' Landing More

SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy Booster Came Within 1 Second of Aborting Its First 'Catch' Landing

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  • It's nice... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @11:46AM (#64897765) Homepage

    ...to hear some internal details. What SpaceX gas achieved, and is achieving, is revolutionizing access to space.

    Musk can have whatever politics he wants - we (all of humanity) owe him a massive debt for his vision - and it was his vision - that has led to these achievements.

    • Re: It's nice... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by haxor.dk ( 463614 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @11:56AM (#64897785) Homepage

      I'd say it's more a case of honor to Gwynne Shotwell who's the COO of SX:

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]

      • Shotwell deserves a ton of credit for running SpaceX day to day. I frequently bring her name up in SpaceX conversations because it's obvious the company would not be where it's at without her.

        But afaik Elon is and has been the "vision guy" and driving force behind the insane "it can't be done" stuff.

      • Re: It's nice... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @01:00PM (#64897917) Homepage
        Musk had the original vision of reusability, and rapid iteration. Gwynne Shotwell has done an outstanding job of realizing that vision.

        • Musk had the original vision of reusability, and rapid iteration. Gwynne Shotwell has done an outstanding job of realizing that vision.

          That's like saying Steve Jobs had the original vision of personal computers, Woz just realized it. It's not even wrong...
          This particular "vision" is the same total bullshit we deal with in the software industry. Get it done fast and cheap and blow things up, bluster your way through all the fuckups and act like it was all part of the plan. It doesn't take a big brain to see why that works, and doesn't.

          The vision of getting to space as cheaply as possible with reusable vehicles and boosters is not something

    • Re:It's nice... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @12:01PM (#64897791) Journal

      Musk can have whatever politics he wants - we (all of humanity) owe him a massive debt for his vision - and it was his vision - that has led to these achievements.

      I'll grant you, that overall, Musk's visions for SpaceX and Tesla have changed the world for the better. (Setting aside internal issues in these companies.) Starlink is also a good thing, as long as it doesn't ruin ground-based astronomy. Twitter? Yeah, not so much.

      Let's not forget that the success of these companies depends on many brilliant employees, not just Musk's vision.

      As for his politics, of course he has a right to say what he thinks, but I'm not happy with what he says, or that he has such a gigantic megaphone. It's a stain on his legacy IMHO.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        You know what ruined ground-based astronomy? The atmosphere.

        • You know what ruined ground-based astronomy? The atmosphere.

          Hardly. The atmosphere is a hindrance (thermal shimmer, and its opacity to certain light-wavelengths) but just look at all the ground-based astronomy that got done before the space age, and that continues today.

          Now, add a bunch of satellites streaking across the sky (when they're illuminated) and you have a distraction. Kind of like someone yelling out random numbers while you're trying to add up figures without a calculator.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

            "Random" numbers that are completely predictable, sure. Satellite reflections are annoying, but they're easy to remove and only affect observations within a certain time after sunset and before sunrise. Artificial lighting is way worse because it diffuses and lights up the whole atmosphere.

            There's an observatory near me that formerly hosted one of the largest telescopes in the world but it's a tourist attraction now because the city grew up around it. Most of the scientific astronomy has been chased away to

            • Predictable if you can keep track of the many thousands of satellites up there, but point taken. Perhaps "manageable" is a better way to put it: you can "dodge" the satellite tracks in real-time as they pass across a field of view, but it's still an unwelcome hassle.

              And you're right about light pollution affecting (and eventually ruining) several legacy telescope installations. I haven't worked in the field, but I remember the days of mercury-based streetlights causing unwanted spikes in stellar spectra.

              Tha

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by hdyoung ( 5182939 )
        Musk is the best industrial businessman of his generation. Hands down, by a mile. Nobody alive even comes close. You have to go back to Henry Ford to find a comparable guy. He earned his fortune legitimately.

        Musk is also awful when it comes to internet companies. He shredded a LOT of corporate value when he took over twitter.

        And his toxic politics are probably gonna be the thing that ends his run as a reputable public figure. He should have stayed out of presidential politics. If Trump loses, Musk

      • Re:It's nice... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @01:09PM (#64897933) Homepage

        It's a stain on his legacy IMHO.

        Approximately half of the US population disagrees with you on that. I'm not in the US, but I find it a genuine shame that US politics has become so divisive. It ought to be possible to hold a different political viewpoint, without that being regarded as a "stain".

        • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          It's the extremity of the thing. Bush Jr. won by a tiny margin, but Gore supporters didn't call Bush supporters stains. Reagan beat Carter by a huge margin, Bush Sr. thoroughly defeated Mondale but it was still possible to have a political conversation where the participants were on opposite sides of the fence.

          That's because Reagan, both Bushes, Carter, Mondale, etc weren't pussy grabbing teen girl perving multiple felons. Even Clinton. He couldn't keep it in his pants, but at least he waited until the woma

        • It ought to be possible to hold a different political viewpoint, without that being regarded as a "stain".

          I agree that they shouldn't have elected a fascist felon as their party leader.

          • Mussolini is spinning in his grave with how much leftist are shitting on his legacy by calling any American politician fascists. You guys have no clue what Fascism is.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Eloking ( 877834 )

        Let's not forget that the success of these companies depends on many brilliant employees, not just Musk's vision.

        I don't believe anyone here (or anyone at all) even remotely believes that Elon Musk created Tesla or SpaceX alone or could create those companies with a bunch of terrible employees.

        However, Tesla and SpaceX would not have succeeded without Elon Musk and I don't think anyone in those two companies was more important than him. Baglino? Straubel? Mueller? Yeah, maybe the company would have not succeeded without them either but we're still nowhere close to the importance of Musk.

        Don't get me wrong, I hate Trum

    • The first catch was brilliant. I would love to see Catch 22.
  • They shocked even themselves, and everyone else in their industry was even more stunned.

  • Is human override not possible? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @12:20PM (#64897815)

    I understand that for most things with a rocket, especially one that's trying to land on its own tail on a target with almost no margin for error, decisions have to be made by computer because no human could be fast enough.

    But if you have a reading that is slowly climbing towards an issue... isn't there enough time for the experts who are most certainly holding their breath at mission control to determine if the control algorithm is on the threshold of making a mistake and make a real-time adjustment?

    At the cost of a rocket and the price tag of the entire development system, I'd have a computer for each block of critical decision-making code already up on a screen with someone monitoring it and nice big 'override - FORCE OK', 'override - FORCE FAIL' buttons and maybe sliders to adjust inputs you know aren't right.

    • Re:Is human override not possible? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @12:39PM (#64897869)

      Human override is only advisable for 1201 program alarms.

      • Worked for Apollo, but I'd say that specific class is actually NOT a suitable target for human override in this situation.

        It takes time to reboot a system, and when you are tail-landing a rocket I don't know exactly how many decisions per second you're making, but I'd bet that it is not a small number and any gap in processing would increase the odds of a failure dramatically.

    • Re:Is human override not possible? (Score:4, Informative)

      by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Sunday October 27, 2024 @12:42PM (#64897875) Journal

      Eh... I think the attitude is more like devops automation. If it blows up, it blows up, fix it in the next iteration. Don't release to production until everything is running reliably, and test the boundaries to figure out what the failure modes are.

      The moment you start relying on humans in the loop, you're creating a dependency that may not be reproducible, and certainly is not scalable. Crazy as it sounds, they want to launch over a dozen of these monsters a day.

      https://www.forbes.com/sites/k... [forbes.com]

      "âoeStarship is the first design of a rocket that is actually capable of making life multi-planetary,â Musk said from his Starbase launch center, as he sketched out a two-decade timeline for flying one million inter-world migrants to the Red Planet as it is terraformed.

      That will require 10,000 flights of Starship, he says, with fleets set to leave Earth orbit every 26 months, as the Hohmann transfer window opens for optimum flights to the reddish orb, which revolves along the outer boundary of the solar systemâ(TM)s habitable zone."

      Ignoring propellant boil off, because I don't know if 10,000 includes boil off or not, let's assume every month they launch 10k/26 or 384 launches. Assuming 30 days in a month, that's 12.8 launches per day.

      I think they were fully expecting to lose this one, so keeping the booster (mostly) intact was a giant bonus for teardown. But I don't think it would be worth it to specifically save the booster and invalidate the live test of the automated systems by dynamically changing abort values on the fly.

      Maybe I'm wrong, and they decide to add that as a manual (in case of emergency, break glass) corrective step next time. But you never know, trying to change live values during the landing could have triggered a different problem...

      • I look at it like this - once you have determined that you have a human-correctable issue that will cause a total failure if not corrected... you already have your telemetry. Avoiding the failure might mean MORE data, not less.

        Certainly whatever the human did would inform how the next test was run.

        But yes, I'm just an Internet armchair quarterback; if the engineers think this is best, they're the ones getting paid to design the rockets and testing regimen because they're the one with the training and exper

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      I think it's technically possible, but I doubt anyone really wants to be the guy who pressed the big red button and blew up the rocket. If it turns out you made the wrong decision, you've probably ended your career... and even if it turns out you made the right decision, you'll always have people wondering if things would have worked out better if you hadn't pressed the button, so you'll always have a big asterisk following you around.

      • >I doubt anyone really wants to be the guy who pressed the big red button and blew up the rocket.

        Funny thing is, THAT override button typically exists. Russia apparently doesn't equip their rockets with a self destruct, which seems pretty stereotypically Russian, but so far as I'm aware all the other major rocket-launching nations of the planet do.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      They watched Galaxy Quest. All self destruct countdowns have to run down to one second.

  • Good engineers give voice to their doubts and don't run away from failures in their designs. I hear a lot of healthy discussion in this recording. It's what I aspire to as an engineer: honesty, humility, and an eagerness to learn.

    It is of course hilarious that it's in the background as Elon plays a videogame. (Oh, and remember that Elon is just s figurehead with no real involvement in the engineering side of any of his companies, according to the muskophobe troll army ....)

  • More importantly, how'd Musk fair in Diablo IV, while that was happening?
    ‘Yikes’: While gaming, Musk inadvertently broadcasts ‘scary’ near-abort of Starship booster landing [techcrunch.com]

  • I'm sure that Elon encouraged Shotwell to accelerate by pushing limits, heavy sensing & documenting and learning multiple "things" from each test/flight.

    They have done a great job of showing how fast you can proceed in design, trials and production, if you carefully push the limits.

    I'm proud that Space X has achieved it here in the US and demonstrated how to succeed, again. We need more of this. Others are also working rather secretly, without being "in public" like Anduril and others, so I know the l

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    lets not forget about the unexpected 500ms extra reentry burn for crew9 that caused the returning booster to go outside planned reentry into airspace that was not cleared... almost grounding Europa clipper launch

  • He ... almost didn't do, what nobody else has done! Except, of course, he did do it ...
  • Do you have any evidence for this? Sounds like a standard post launch/landing debriefing. Losts of ifs/buts and maybes.

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