SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy Booster Came Within 1 Second of Aborting Its First 'Catch' Landing (spacenews.com) 40
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.
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.
It's nice... (Score:1, Interesting)
...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:5, Insightful)
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]
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But afaik Elon is and has been the "vision guy" and driving force behind the insane "it can't be done" stuff.
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Re:It's nice... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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"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
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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
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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
His panel fitting would tend to disagree (Score:2, Troll)
Tesla made literally all of its money first off of a massive carbon credit scheme that allowed other car manufacturers to continue producing gas guzzlers and now off of a $7,500 credit that's applied at the point of sale when you buy a car. If you take those away there is no Tesla. That's not a brilliant businessman that's somebody who spotted a government program and
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You act like Tesla was the only EV company, and SpaceX was the only space company. Apparently nobody else knew about government contracts and RFPs, that’s the premise of your argument?
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He's never going to be broke because the 1% have solidarity and they take care of their own. And Elon musk is very much one of them.
But unless Donald Trump wins the election and swings government contracts to Elon musk despite the security risks while also increasing subsidies to Tesla then He's going to fade into the background. The
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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: It's nice... (Score:1)
Are electric cars consumerism?
I disagree (Score:2, Troll)
All the really cool shit SpaceX i
Catch 22 (Score:2)
Benefits of bleeding-edge GNC. (Score:2)
So they dodged a software-error bullet (Score:2)
Other missions have not been as lucky. [wikipedia.org]
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Is human override not possible? (Score:2)
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
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Human override is only advisable for 1201 program alarms.
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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.
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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]
"âo
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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
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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.
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>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.
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They watched Galaxy Quest. All self destruct countdowns have to run down to one second.
Fail faster! (Score:2)
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
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>Good engineers give voice to their doubts and don't run away from failures in their designs.
Like good scientists - they want good results and have to be willing to acknowledge errors and unwanted outcomes so they can try to overcome them.
"Failure is always an option." - Adam Savage (though as an entertainer... Adam dicks around and often causes failures that were easily avoidable)
>remember that Elon is just s figurehead with no real involvement in the engineering side of any of his companies
He has e
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He has enthusiasm for certain ideas, and wealth to promote them into reality.
If wealth was all it took, Boeing would have trounced SpaceX. Hell, Bezos would have trounced SpaceX too. You're confusing cause and effect: Elon is wealthy because he executed some exceptional ideas, repeatedly and in the face of an army of obstructionist naysayers, not the other way around.
Conflating Putin and Trump is just stupid, and so is the "fascist" label applied to Trump according to left-leaning political science professors who have written about the subject. Unless of course you use "fascist"
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voting Green again
no need, you've already told us you're a knuckle dragging trumpist enabler
Ya, but ... (Score:1)
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]
Pushing to Learn Fast with Minimum Tests (Score:2)
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
grounded crew9 anomaly +500ms (Score:1)
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
Oh noes! (Score:1)