Anonymous Sources: Starship Needs a Major Rebuild After Two Consecutive Failures (behindtheblack.com) 68
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Behind The Black: According to information at this tweet from anonymous sources, parts of Starship will likely require a major redesign due to the spacecraft's break-up shortly after stage separation on its last two test flights. These are the key take-aways, most of which focus on the redesign of the first version of Starship (V1) to create the V2 that flew unsuccessfully on those flights:
- Hot separation also aggravates the situation in the compartment.
- Not related to the flames from the Super Heavy during the booster turn.
- This is a fundamental miscalculation in the design of the Starship V2 and the engine section.
- The fuel lines, wiring for the engines and the power unit will be urgently redone.
- The fate of S35 and S36 is still unclear. Either revision or scrap.
- For the next ships, some processes may be paused in production until a decision on the design is made.
- The team was rushed with fixes for S34, hence the nervous start. There was no need to rush.
- The fixes will take much longer than 4-6 weeks.
- Comprehensive ground testing with long-term fire tests is needed. [emphasis mine]
It must be emphasized that this information comes from leaks from anonymous sources, and could be significantly incorrect. It does however fit the circumstances, and suggests that the next test flight will not occur in April but will be delayed for an unknown period beyond.
- Hot separation also aggravates the situation in the compartment.
- Not related to the flames from the Super Heavy during the booster turn.
- This is a fundamental miscalculation in the design of the Starship V2 and the engine section.
- The fuel lines, wiring for the engines and the power unit will be urgently redone.
- The fate of S35 and S36 is still unclear. Either revision or scrap.
- For the next ships, some processes may be paused in production until a decision on the design is made.
- The team was rushed with fixes for S34, hence the nervous start. There was no need to rush.
- The fixes will take much longer than 4-6 weeks.
- Comprehensive ground testing with long-term fire tests is needed. [emphasis mine]
It must be emphasized that this information comes from leaks from anonymous sources, and could be significantly incorrect. It does however fit the circumstances, and suggests that the next test flight will not occur in April but will be delayed for an unknown period beyond.
Musk'll Fix It! (Score:5, Funny)
Rocket Man aka Real Tony Stark (tm) will build it out impreg...er, impervious nanotech once he rids America of DEI
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:5, Insightful)
Musk is too busy making up imaginary savings of money cancelling contracts which have already been disbursed... that's more than a full time job. He has no time to run hid companies, nor any apparent inclination to do so - he's already got his billions.
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:4, Informative)
Musk is too busy making up imaginary savings of money cancelling contracts which have already been disbursed... that's more than a full time job. He has no time to run hid companies, nor any apparent inclination to do so - he's already got his billions.
I think the more important factor may be Musk's obvious grandiosity. His clear mental illness and its fallout may have been quietly infecting SpaceX and its culture over a period of years.
I find it hard to believe that the guy who has made such a disastrous and destructive foray into politics, and who in three months has caused a 50% drop in Tesla's share price, hasn't also damaged SpaceX along the way to where he finds himself now. Just yesterday he said "As a function of the great policies of President Trump and his administration, and as an act of faith in America, Tesla is going to double vehicle output in the United States within the next two years".
Say what? The US is almost certainly headed for a serious recession - one in which Musk will have played a clear role. People and governments the world over have boycotted Tesla. They're even protesting at and outright trashing Tesla dealerships and charging stations [arstechnica.com]. And the company is desperate enough to have engaged in full-scale fraud against the Canadian government [driving.ca]. Yet he's going to double Tesla production? WTF?
I think Musk is suffering from mental illness and is clearly disconnected from reality - even if I don't take his chainsaw-waving and his cute-but-deadly DOGE shenanigans into account. With leadership like this, what are the chances that Elon's madness hasn't had a serious negative effect on SpaceX?
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Elmo found a government he could own rather than a company. Just yesterday he got the Bunko Artist in Cheap to promote Tesla's tat on the White House lawn, as if the swoon in the stock price had anything to do with not enough advertising.
And Elmo paid with that bit of advert by promising to spend $100 million on la Presidenta's PACs. la Presidenta accepted money from Beelzebub long ago in return for his soul. It turns out Beelz drives a hard bargain and that la Presidenta's soul wasn't worth as much as he t
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Do we still have a SEC, or have they destroyed that? Because his claim that he's going to build twice as many vehicles while they have vehicles stacking up unsold is probably legally actionable... if legal action is still possible.
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If he totally destroys NASA than people will buy his rockets whether they explode or not!
NASA is SpaceX's biggest customer, after Starlink, numbskull!
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:4, Insightful)
What is this DEI that you're talking about?
Donald, Erik and Ivanka grafting from pop's presidency?
It is, indeed, a huge problem, but which "leftie" is "pretending" it isn't?
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is we have ample evidence that global warming is a problem. Do you have ample evidence of DEI being a problem? I mean something other than "bad thing happened while a black person was in charge"?
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Yes, we could tell that you were an idiot without you having to supply an explicit label.
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Bad things happen when your hiring decisions are done according to box ticking, rather than competence.
Bad things happen, when you force companies to hire from "special groups" to reach certain quotas from a biased pool (e.g. engineers), destroying the achievements of those that are part of that special group and got there because they are *good*, rather than *special*.
Bad things happen when you take a mckinsey report and read it backwards. Successful companies are more diverse because successful companies
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An interesting thesis.
Care to substantiate it with something concrete, starting with definite evidence that hiring decisions are indeed influenced by "box ticking" instead of competence in a major way?
Be specific.
Thanks.
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Oh, I have a good set of them.
- I worked for a company that required leadership positions to be covered by 40% of women. Setting aside that this is discrimination (you should not require gender as a matter of decision in promotion to positions), the result is that to match the requirement (imposed by ESG scores) they just promoted whoever passed by that had the right chromosomes, regardless of their actual qualifications or the fact that they were, indeed, leading someone else.
- at the same company, we were
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:4, Interesting)
Far worse things happen when you hire based on nepotism and whatever the hell criteria Musk used to staff DOGE.
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This seems to be a common misunderstanding about DEI. It's not supposed to be hiring people because of their skin colour, it's looking at how more qualified candidates from those groups can be attracted to the job, and what barriers they face that others do not.
Employers are typically not hiring based solely on ability anyway. They will have a budget that limits the maximum they can pay, and for many jobs they just need someone qualified and able to do the work, not someone hugely over-qualified or some kin
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Solving those barriers is not the role of companies. Solving those barriers is the role of the State and of education.
If america has a vicious "putting people into boxes" problem, maybe they should start solving that problem by providing universal education, not dump the massive imbalance onto companies and then blame them for not taking care of the issue.
Besides, it would actually helped if america also stopped with this racial class bollocks. You are all americans. They constantly remind people that these
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What if the companies and their hiring people are the problem?
As for boxes... Well, looking at how some minorities are treated, and how different it is to other groups, I think clearly there is a need to group people based on the common factors.
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The stated goal of DEI is to increase profits. For cost-conscious employers, DEI is implemented by hiring workers from vastly different backgrounds and life experiences. This diminishes commonality and makes it much tougher to unionize. This is also why Amazon often tries to encourage workers to not talk amongst themselves, and discourages social events. This makes for a dysfunctional workplace, low wages, and high staff turnover.
Costs can be further reduced by not experienced workers, and not valuing
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Far worse things happen when you hire based on nepotism and whatever the hell criteria Musk used to staff DOGE.
He's got all the finest teenagers that racism can buy. He couldn't find adults with little enough context to do what he says.
Re: Musk'll Fix It! (Score:1)
I can tell you've never worked in a position of seniority in a large company in your life. The halls of real decision making is basically like Narnia to you.
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Successful companies are more diverse because successful companies are big and can afford to hire globally. Success leads to diversity in the workforce. Not the other way around.
Yeah, I always thought that claim was (darkly) funny.
It's like saying "money causes wealth! We'll just give people money!" (which I guess they also do/claim, so ...)
DEI is not Affirmative Action (Score:4, Interesting)
This is just another right-wing strawman like child-indoctrinating drag shows, cat-eating Haitians, post-birth abortions, and lib's coming for your guns. It's all boogeyman BS used to scare people into action.
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Bad things happen when your hiring decisions are done according to box ticking, rather than competence.
There's quite a lot of implicit assumptions to unpack there.
You're presupposing that the opposite of DEI is hiring by competence. This is not true. The opposite of DEI is hiring people who look and sound like those making the hiring decisions.
DEI is about hiring the most competent people not the other way around. This means finding talent from a broader pool than just your mates. This means having intervie
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Do you have ample evidence of DEI being a problem?
Yes. Subversion of science [newdiscourses.com] and education [newdiscourses.com].
Re: Musk'll Fix It! (Score:2)
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Lefties pretending DEI isn't a problem == Righties pretending global warming isn't a problem.
Even if you cast DEI as deadly - and I can see arguments on both sides - there's no fucking way it represents an existential threat to our civilization. Global warming DOES represent such a threat.
Positing any kind of equivalency between global warming and DEI is either dishonest or stupid, and possibly both.
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Sure but it's also much easier to solve. Imagine if the solution to climate change was as simple as one side admitting it was wrong.
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Imagine if the solution to climate change was as simple as one side admitting it was wrong.
There are a bunch of partial solutions that require little more than that and we can't even implement those because of all the dipshits who don't think one side was wrong. I call 'em dipshits because even 1800s science says they don't know shit.
Well (Score:2, Interesting)
Now we know the real reason why the president of the putin state in America is trying to dismantle NASA as well.
Read its lips: no more competition.
Normal engineering problems (Score:1)
Happens to the best of us, no biggy.
I do wonder why they didn't see this harmonic problem ( or whatever it actually is ) in the longer static fires or in their simulations?
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Yup. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes them to iterate until they arrive at an acceptable design that's safe enough for transportation of humans to space and back.
Best,
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SpaceX has been rapidly and successfully solving such problems for over 20 years now. They'll deal with this in a few months and it will work great. That's the whole point of these tests.
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Oh have they instead been "making guesses" and "getting lucky".
I have no idea what happened nor no inside track to anybody working for SpaceX but the first failure was completely understandable, the second which appears to be almost if not exactly the same issue, is "concerning" - In particular, if they knew they didn't und
Re: Normal engineering problems (Score:2)
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Ah, so it is almost like cutting corners during design and testing may hide serious problems, even major design issues until later in flight?
Who'd have thunk it?
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That's one way to do it. Whether it works or doesn't depends on the definition of "works".
The same as everything else, really.
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My very first job in the year 1968 of the common era was running simulations in mainframe Fortran of a re-entry test vehicle being developed in the California aerospace industry. This was the great-great-grandparent of the modes of development that SpaceX is engaged in now. I feel privileged to live in a time that in those days I Neve could have imagined.
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3rd times the charm (Score:4, Interesting)
The important thing to remember with Starship is that the last two flights incorporated an entirely new design.with multiple experiments. These were fundamentally new rockets largely unlike their largely successful prior versions. Rather than a tweak of a nearly successful version to fix a few things we saw major changes one or two of which unfortunately is causing some catastrophic problems. They never got this far, but even just the tile system included probably a hundred different experiments.
Unfortunately since they didn't get that far it is also possible some of those tile experiments will cause catastrophic failure on re-entry if they try them all again. The thing about experiments is you need to to survive long enough to get to them. Hopefully some of those experiments were more about manufacturing rather than survivability so they can down select the most promising alternatives next ship in production. Regardless, we are still seeing a lot of changes each flight and those changes have the potential to not work.
Um (Score:2)
Thanks for the ... er, random anonymous tweet?
(I guess there needs to be some pretext for the two-minute hate today?)
A Poll Twenty Years Ago (Score:1)
If twenty years ago someone posted a poll on /., a site where actual nerds and engineers used to populate, that in two decades you can have a choice of -
A) a billionaire throw his own money at reusable rockets and ships to get to Mars and back, and do it the right way of failing and re-engineering quicker and not spending three years to re-launch the next try like bloated NASA does
B) same-old NASA with billions of taxpayer dollars going into slow and incremental progress
C) CoyboyNeal
95% would have picked A
8 bit computers, slide rules and paper drawings... (Score:2)
Anonymous Sources: Starship Needs a Major Rebuild After Two Consecutive Failures
This completely vindicates my previous analysis that, given the advantages of modern high technology they enjoy, Musk and SpaceX should do better than a bunch of Nasa the Kosmicheskaya programma SSSR and Ariane engineers did half a century ago working only with 8/16 bit computers, slide rules and paper drawings.
If only Musk would have stayed in his lane. (Score:2)
Musk is making himself a future target of any administration to follow with his current moves in government. The calls to redesign Starship ground-up were there from the first launch thar resulted in rapid unscheduled disassembly, and will continue to come. But the more Musk acts like a spoiled brat within the federal government, the more credence those calls will get, and the "move fast and break things" space company will get clamped down on and told to do things "the right way," meaning, the way things h
Did Elonia mess with the design or what? (Score:2)
I mean, if he applies his great and impressive skills in cost reduction to Starship, this outcome would be not surprising at all but rather fully expected. The effects of his financial skills were just obvious a bit sooner here than in other places where he applies them.
Well, to be fair, he ruined Twitter pretty fast. And on the plus-side, Twitter can simply be scrapped at some point. Repairing what he currently does to the US administration may take 30-50 years (that is if it is possible at all) and I gues