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Yuuge Rocket Blew Up; All Systems Goooooo!
The second launch of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship went very well right up until both parts exploded. Which is fine, as the major testables occurred nicely, albeit “with issues,” as people say. The whole assembly took off with every engine firing all the way until the innovative MECO, which in this case stands for “Most Engines Cut-Off,” as the enormous booster kept a couple of engines firing even as the Starship on top of it released the clamps and fired its own engines at full power, propelling itself away from the booster and “blowing” the booster back.
Liftoff of Starship! pic.twitter.com/qXnGXXZP5k
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 18, 2023
“Innovation” in rockets typically starts as a series of loud booms over several years. From there, the booster was supposed to turn around, come back, and land gently on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and then sink, not to be recovered. Instead, the booster turned around (suspiciously quickly to my eyes), and oriented itself apparently correctly, but clearly had issues, including what looked like a major leak (think of a slow explosion out one side), then blew itself up. Or perhaps it was commanded to blow up.
Recall that on the first launch, which did not even attempt “hot staging,” the stages failed to separate, the whole thing cartwheeled, and then crucially failed to blow itself up for an agonizing minute or so. Imagine being the folks in the command center earlier this year as your giant dying rocket spins out of control, heading back to Earth somewhere, and you’re all mashing your self-destruct buttons, but the thing perversely remains in one piece. Harrowing. Finally, it did like a good rocket and blew itself to confetti, but everybody from Musk to the FAA was not impressed. Well, problem solved, and on today’s launch, the booster blew itself up in a timely manner. Who’s a good rocket?
So the second stage, the “Starship” that looks like an idiot’s idea for a cheap space opera paperback illustration, cranked away from the scene, adding more altitude and velocity. This went on until it got to something like 145-149 kilometers altitude, if I recall, and then odd signs appeared. Something spread out and then stopped, it looked normal again for a short while, then something major let go, and the thing obviously self-destructed. Who’s a good Starship?
This is all still in the research phase — hoped-for burnback and landing of the cartoonishly large booster were, uh, “not observed.” Same for the hoped-for high-energy re-entry, maneuver, and landing of the Starship at a point some hundreds of miles north of Hawaii. I believe just based on the timeline that the whole thing played out once more entirely above the Gulf of Mexico, so it never even got out over the Atlantic proper.
Yet this was a huge success. Once again, private industry has launched the world’s largest, most powerful, and arguably most ambitious rocket in the history of man, and in its second time flying, it broke new ground in the things that went right. Live reports said that the trajectory and speed for both components were nominal, meaning “according to plan,” right up until they weren’t.
The scene was breathtaking in its beauty. Sunrise on the (fetid, bug-infested, swampy wasteland) southern Texas coast, with a gentle onshore breeze. The massive rocket stood at its launch station, filled with far sub-zero liquid oxygen and fuel, chilling the air around it to such a degree that a downdraft circulated about the vehicle, creating a local patch of fog slowly trailing hundreds of yards downwind.
Aerial and ground shots captured this magnificent work of technology and its interaction with a picturesque location in vibrant colors, microscopic detail, and stark contrasts. The plain-old drone footage is already art quality. I hope they make a million bucks selling pictures of this rocket that blew up minutes after the photos were taken. Just stunning.
Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting second integrated flight test of Starship!
Starship successfully lifted off under the power of all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy Booster and made it through stage separation pic.twitter.com/JnCvLAJXPi
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 18, 2023
And brave. This is the onset of a new gilded age for spaceflight. These are the good old days. I called my son in Japan and we watched this live together on Elon Musk’s Twitter (alright, just this once “X”) video streaming. But that’s another story.
Standing at 120 meters, a fully stacked Starship is not only the world’s most powerful launch vehicle but also the tallest. In more technical terms of measurement, Starship is about one Mechagodzilla in height pic.twitter.com/TZaArGNTya
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 18, 2023
What a raucous time to be alive. There are terrible threats and horrors sufficient to the day. If you needed something to pick yourself up from the carnage and human filth, you could do worse than to lift your eyes, if not to Heaven, then to a nice proxy that is a little bit lower, a little more fallible (boom!), and which portends if not a blissful eternity, well, a beautiful and productive future for our kids and their friends.
Thank you, Elon Musk. Who’s a good billionaire?
Published in General
SECO is usually Second Engine Cut Off – as in the second stage…
From what I’ve been hearing – and what I think – is that when the first stage did the flip over for the return burn – it caused voids to form in the fuel lines when the fuels sloshed around in the fuel tank… This caused the turbo pumps to fail (explode) and start fires… I also think that the fuel sloshing around may have ruptured fuel lines or even the fuel tank… Causing the stage to buckle under the stress of the return maneuver.
Makes sense to me too. Scott Manley pointed out that the speed readout from telemetry showed that with Starship blarting the booster away, it probably did decelerate sharply enough to get some pronounced sloshing going on. And (says Manley) it could be that even a phased shutdown of many of those engines could still have caused a “water hammer”, destroying or deranging valves.
Separate issue Manley points out — the tiles aren’t faring well on Starship.
Loved his commentary.
He also mentioned if you look at the telemetry, there is a sudden drop in the O2 supply on stage 2
Yup. This guy interrogates the pixels.
I did catch the something leak (bloom at that altitude) in real-time, but certainly not the fuel guage indicating the scale of Montezuma’s orbital revenge.
Carol, they have radar now, so they won’t run into those nasty “space icebergs”.
Definitely software!
But even when software “explodes” it doesn’t (usually) rain down debris.
You may want to keep a distance from my software launches.
My fragile sense of self and ego maintenance forces me to say that I knew that
Ok, sorry. I missed your joke.
For some of us, having something blow up is the whole point.
Yeah. Exactly.
By the way, I just had a free version of The Pentagon Wars pop up on YT!
There is no space tourism business. The space business is about sending government payloads up.
There will be.
And it’s not just government payloads either. That might not even be the largest profit center any more. There’s communications satellites and more.
Eventually. There have been a few tourists that have gone to space. I think at a cost of $70 million or so…
I was hoping that someday, that there would be a space lottery. So that more middle class ish people could get a chance to go… And in the mean time – the lottery revenue could be used for engineering and construction costs…
That is not a business. There are less than 100 people that will ever squander $70 million for a ride into space. Getting the government to spend $50 billion on a satellite internet system is a business model.
Somebody posted this on Reddit:
“$13 per kilogram? That’d be revolutionary if that’s true. I know not to underestimate Elon but I’ll believe that when I see it. If the average person weighs 62 kg, it’d be just $806 to transport just their body weight alone, not including other factors of course, but that’s still really cheap for space flight. Looks like we could be looking at space tourism real soon.”
In other words, even if Musk is off by a factor of 100, that $806 becomes $80,600, easily within the reach of the upper middle class.
Yeh, who wouldn’t want to go into space rather than just another NR cruise?
Thats fine if you’re sending a corpse to space. But the weights of the Air, Water and food you need to stay alive – along with the equipment to maintain the pressure temperature is quite profound. When factored against the weight of the astronaut.
The smallest vehicle ever used to launch a man (person, but lets face it, they were all men) was the Mercury capsules… Weighing in at 2500 lbs… Flight conditions, would not be acceptable to most tourists…
That $806 becomes $14 300.
That’s just the price of the transport, it’s the oxygen that’s sky high.
Oxygen … sky high …
The price of $1000/pound is a one-way price. It is a very small group of people that will pay a million dollars for a one-way trip to LEO.
It will get cheaper.
Space Tourism will be a thing someday
At least not while they’re still alive.
Administrative State employees and congressional staffers could all be required to set up a GoFundMe page to raise the necessary funds for a ticket.
There have been people who’ve paid to have some of their ashes taken into space for “burial.”
The weight of the oxygen consumed (converted to carbon dioxide) by an average person in a day seems to be a small fraction of one’s body weight, if the various calculators I found online are correct. Even if carbon dioxide is not recycled back into oxygen, which it generally is. (N.B.: It’s wise to assume Elon Musk has already done all the necessary calculations.)