Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Space

Anonymous Sources: Starship Needs a Major Rebuild After Two Consecutive Failures (behindtheblack.com) 172

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.

Anonymous Sources: Starship Needs a Major Rebuild After Two Consecutive Failures

Comments Filter:
  • by haruchai ( 17472 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @03:15AM (#65227149)

    Rocket Man aka Real Tony Stark (tm) will build it out impreg...er, impervious nanotech once he rids America of DEI

    • Re: (Score:2, 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:5, Informative)

        by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @06:34AM (#65227341)

        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?

        • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

          by gtall ( 79522 )

          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

        • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

          by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

          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.

          • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

            Do we still have a SEC

            Don't you live in Saskatchewan, Canada? There has never been a SEC there...

            • Do we still have a SEC

              Don't you live in Saskatchewan, Canada?

              Where did you get that idea?

              • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

                You posted about living in Humboldt a few days ago and I know the place. I couldn't find any Humboldt in the USA but now I see there is a Humboldt County, in California, my mistake I guess.

                • I couldn't find any Humboldt in the USA but now I see there is a Humboldt County, in California, my mistake I guess.

                  Yes, that's the one I live in. There are also Humboldt counties in Iowa and Nevada.

        • Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @09:14AM (#65227545)

          Indeed. That Musk is mentally ill has been clear for quite a while. But what we have seen in the last few years is him getting a lot worse and obviously going for a complete breakdown with total detachment from reality, megalomania, paranoia, murderous/fascist tendencies and probably increased drug use.

          Well, ChatGPT says the long-term effects of Ketamine use does include bad decision making and paranoia:

          "Cognitive dysfunction: Chronic use may impair overall cognitive functions like attention, executive functioning (decision-making, planning), and processing speed."
          "Hallucinations and dissociation: Prolonged use can increase the frequency and intensity of hallucinations, dissociative experiences, and paranoia."

          That seems to fit well for Musk.

        • 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.

          What I don't understand is why he even cares about politics. Is he that annoyed about agency oversight, regulations and the occasional investigation into operations and products at X, SpaceX, Tesla, NeuraLink, etc... to blow $300M+ on Trump and then more on other Republicans when compliance and corrections would have been cheaper, and not used his own money? Is he that annoyed at his transgender daughter -- who has criticized him for not accepting her -- to go after these people and DEI? Noting that he

          • Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:4, Insightful)

            by lucifuge31337 ( 529072 ) <daryl@@@introspect...net> on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @10:22AM (#65227753) Homepage
            Narcissism amongt other mental illness. It's really that simple. Plenty of mentally ill people would act this exact same way if they had the means.
          • He's always been a megalomaniac asshole. And all oligarchs take umbrage at any government of their inferiors that would dare say "no" to them.

            But Musk went completely off the rails after he was stupid enough to say he'd buy Twitter for twice what it was worth in a legally-binding matter and was forced to go through with it. That was apparently when he ended up seeking approval on it... and he got it from the Incel losers, MRAs, Nazis and other similar creatures that inhabit that dark shithole corner of t
        • Say what? The US is almost certainly headed for a serious recession [...] Yet he's going to double Tesla production? WTF?

          I think Musk's plan is a big government bailout (or the equivalent payout via large no-bid government contracts); that could be the reward for financing the Trump campaign. If he's hoping for big money from taxpayers, he doesn't really care about buyer sentiment or recessions.

      • Think about it this way... If he totally destroys NASA than people will buy his rockets whether they explode or not!
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      But he has no time! All his great and superior skills are focused on dismantling, ah, I mean "improving" the US administration at this time! Obviously he has to finish the great job he is doing there first!

    • Or the money will run out.
  • Well (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @03:27AM (#65227163)
    Not sure if this is genuine, but whatever: Spacex rushed a fix, paid the price, now have to take a step back and redesign.
    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?
    • 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,

      • by Tailhook ( 98486 )

        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.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          You overlook that their owner went bonkers over the last few years. Now would be about the time that shows in the end-product, as such things come with quite a few years of latency. If that happens to be the root-cause, then they may not be able to fix this at all. Depends on who Elonia fired or insulted or marginalized and how much engineering skill and experience was lost that way.

          Obviously, it may be that they get all the problems fixed in a reasonable time, but I do not think so.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Not necessarily. If they rushed on orders from their great leader, then the problem may be a lot fundamental. And that list in the article seems to say they rushed a lot more than just one fix.

  • 3rd times the charm (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bigpat ( 158134 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @06:22AM (#65227323)

    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.

  • Thanks for the ... er, random anonymous tweet?

    (I guess there needs to be some pretext for the two-minute hate today?)

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      You look at is, then you check plausibility. Here it is high. I guess you did not do the second step.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @08:00AM (#65227423)

    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 and 5% CowboyNeal. Instead we have SpaceX repeatedly catching super-heavy boosters, landing smaller boosters almost daily, and the next generation of /. users complains the billionaire said he'd do it earlier so it was a failure. Do you even read yourselves?

    • Elon Musk would be the lord and savior of every slashdotter, if he was a liberal. Literally the only thing he could do that would please this crowd would be to self immolate.

    • I read this as:

      NASA is painfully slow at doing anything, but is broadly speaking successful when they eventually get around to doing it.

      SpaceX is super quick at making rapid changes and improvements, but has recently failed pretty badly.

      SpaceX may be finding that going a bit slower is actually more successful than going fast. Instead of making (say) 100 changes, make 10 and get the data from the full flight before you make 10 more. It costs more that way, but maybe it needs to cost more?

      As much as I'm enjoy

  • 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

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I am not so sure. "Move fast and break things" only works if you still get it, say, 80% right. For the last 20%, where uncertainty is high, data collection and experiments can help a lot and can accelerate things by a lot. But this sounds more like they are now getting 50% right (or less) and then that approach stops working.

  • I had to scroll down to 2/3 from the bottom to find a comment about Starship and on the way I found some horrific moderation. Take your politics elsewhere.
  • by 4wdloop ( 1031398 ) on Wednesday March 12, 2025 @11:02AM (#65227859)

    This is what happens when management, for whatever reasons stops listening to engineers.

  • When the boss's fortunes are down, and he wants a thing to boast about, whether it's President Ronnie Raygun or CEO Dilbert Stark telling you to launch, the correct answer is NO!

If I set here and stare at nothing long enough, people might think I'm an engineer working on something. -- S.R. McElroy

Working...