https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662?t=HdHF...
https://x.com/realcamtem/status/1880026604472266800
https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115
Moment of the breakup:
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-Centaur
- "The astronauts considered the Shuttle-Centaur missions to be riskiest Space Shuttle missions yet,[85] referring to Centaur as the "Death Star".[86]"
This is meant to be a human rated ship of course, how will you reduce this danger? I know this stuff is hard, but you can't just iterate and say starship 57 has had 3 flights without leaks, we got it now. Since I have no expertise here, I can imagine all kinds of unlikely workarounds like holding the gas under lower pressure with humans on board or something to reduce the risk.
This can work. Fundamental structural components of airliners just can’t fail without killing everyone, and high reliability is achieved with careful design, manufacturing, testing, and inspection. I’m not sure if a gigantic non-leaky tank is harder to pull off that way, but they might have to regardless.
We’re going to have to accept that space travel is going to be inherently dangerous for the foreseeable future. Starship is in a good position to improve this, because it should fly frequently (more opportunities to discover and fix problems) and the non-manned variant is very similar to the manned variant (you can discover many problems without killing people). But there are inherent limitations. There’s just not as much capacity for redundancy. The engines have to be clustered so fratricide or common failure modes are going to me more likely. Losing all the engines is guaranteed death on Starship, versus a good chance to survive in an airliner.
All other practical considerations aside, I think this alone sinks any possibility of using Starship for Earth-to-Earth travel as has been proposed by SpaceX.
For example, if system A has a failure probability of 10%, if A is redundant with another A', the combined failure probability is 1%.
That of course presumes that A and A' are not connected.
The response to this was to make sure repairs are carried out correctly so the structure doesn’t fail, not to somehow make two redundant bulkheads or two skins.
(b) is true and should make it substantially safer than other launch systems. But given how narrow the margins are for something going wrong (zero ability to land safely with all engines dead, for example) it’s still going to be pretty dangerous compared to more mundane forms of travel.
A future starship could plausibly be the first rocket to fly to space unmanned, return, and then fly humans to space!
Next engine revision (Raptor 3) should help, as it is much simplified and quite less likely to leak or get damaged during flight.
However if you see the stream you can see one of the tanks rapidly emptied before loss of signal
It seems this was not survivable regardless of fire or not
We know nothing, but the test having good data on what went wrong is a great starting point.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
> we had an oxygen/fuel leak
If that's correct, then you can't just remove air. The only option would be to cool things down so it stops burning.
Also water would make it hotter, given this is liquid oxygen.
And you can have fires where both fuel and oxidiser are solid: thermite reactions.
"Fire point" seems to be more of a factor for conventional fire concerns, albeit I'm judging a phrase I've not heard before by a stub-sized Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_point
How does Halon works?
19 people have died in the 391 crewed space missions humans have done so far. The risk of dying is very high. Starship is unlikely to change that, although the commoditization of space flight could have reduce the risk simply by making problems easier to spot because there's more flights.
SpaceX also has a simplification streak: the Raptor engines being the canonical example. Lower complexity generally means less unexpected failure modes.
Not necessarily. Your engine which used to have 200 sensors perhaps now only has 8. But you now don't know when temperatures were close to melting point in a specific part of the engine. When something goes wrong, you are less likely to identify the precise cause because you have less data.
Many of those sensors are not to enable the rocket to fly at all, but merely for later data analysis to know if anything was close to failure.
In yesterdays launch, if the engines had more sensors musk probably wouldn't have said "an oxygen/fuel leak", but would have been able to say "Engine #7 had an oxygen leak at the inlet pipe, as shown by the loud whistling noise detected by engine #7's microphone array"
I truly wish more software engineers thought this way. I see a lot of mentality in software where people are even impressed by complexity, like "wow what a complex system!" like it's a good thing. It's not. It's a sign that no effort has been put into understanding the problem domain conceptually, or that no discipline has been followed around reducing the number of systems or restraint over adding new ones.
I've seen incredibly good software engineers join teams and have net negative lines of code contributed for some time.
If we ever encountered, say, an alien race millions of years ahead of us on this kind of technology curve, I think one of the things that would strike us would be the simplicity of their technology. It would be like everything is a direct response and fit to the laws of physics with nothing extraneous. Their software -- assuming they still use computers as we understand them -- would be functional bliss that directly represented the problem domain, with every state a pure function of previous state.
We might get to this kind of software eventually. This is still a young field. Simplicity, being harder than complexity, often takes time and iteration to achieve. Often there's a complexity bloat followed by a shake out, then repeat, over many cycles.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I love that this is also a model of reality. Everything is made of differential equations.
Early aviation was extremely dangerous. Now a plane is among the safest places to be.
My tests keep failing until I fix all of my code, then we deploy to production. If code fails in production than that's a problem.
We could say that rockets are not code. A test run of a Spaceship surely cost much more than a test run of any software on my laptop but tests are still tests. They are very likely to fail and there are things to learn from their failures.
How would you test a rocket?
You’ll catch issues along the way, but you can’t catch all of them before a full launch test. That’s why there are launch tests.
Real tests do all of this at once with no option to escape reality.
Again, one thing is automating thorough software tests, another one is testing physical stuff.
Integration tests are the next where multiple units are combined.
Then there is staging.
Test a rocket by launching it.
Honestly I thought they would be live testing fuel exchange in orbit by now. Seems pretty far from it sadly.
What makes these launches “non-production” tests is that they are not carrying any valuable payload. Blowing up rockets like this is exactly what gives the company it’s advantage over competitors who try to anticipate everything during design stages.
It's true that other rocket companies are treating launches as production, but SpaceX has always been doing "hardware-rich" testing.
It is more like an "all or nothing" process.
They already implemented a whole host of changes to the vehicles after the first test back in 2023. There's a list of corrective actions here.
According to this website their current success rate is 99,18%. That's a good number I guess? Considering other companies did not even land their stages for years.
https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/07/31/ula-vs-spacex/#:~:text=....
There's an order of magnitude difference between them. If they were cars, it'd be like comparing the smallest car you can think of vs one of the biggest tanks ever made.
I'd say that only the 7th mission was legitimately a failure, because there was some rerouting of flights outside the exclusion zone. The other six missions were successful tests since nothing other than the rocket itself was affected.
That would be like comparing a 1-y.o.'s ability to run to a 10-y.o.'s. Of course the younger kid doesn't yet control their legs, but that doesn't mean it's going to stumble and fall forever.
Without Spacex, the typical cohort of gov contractors would have been happy bleeding NASA dry with one time use rockets that have 10x the launch cost and carry 1/4 the cargo.
Isn’t SpaceX the largest launch provider in the world and for the U.S. government?
Many times than the rest of the U.S. space industry combined.
Falcon 9 has had plenty of "ROI" but it wasn't really federally funded. Let's not get carried away though about "more than the entire US space industry combined," though.
But that still means it’s not just taxpayer money, it’s mostly theirs. They’ve been raising equity rounds this whole time.
In my experience in corporate america you communicate efficiency by proclaiming a checklist of things to do - plausible, but not necessarily accurate things - and then let engineers figure it out.
Nobody cares of the original checklist as long as the problem gets resolved. It's weird but it seems very hard to utter statement "I don't have specific answers but we have very capable engineers, I'm sure they will figure it out". It's always better to say (from the top of your head) "To resolve A, we will do X,Y and Z!". Then when A get's resolved, everyone praises the effort. Then when they query what actually was done it's "well we found out in fact what were amiss were I, J K".
As seen from a plane in the air with the break up right in front of it:
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
The RUD was in orbit over 146 kilometers up and >13,000 mph. I'm sure using the FlightAware tracking data someone will work out the actual distance and altitude delta between that plane and the Starship 7 orbital debris. I suspect it was many dozens of miles away and probably still nearly orbital in altitude (~100km).
Spectacular light show though...
It would have been impossible for the pilot to know if that debris was shortly in front of them and at co-altitude or extremely far in front of them and at a significantly higher altitude.
In this case it was almost certainly the latter. But the uncertainty alone was enough to warrant diverting.
> Stupid comment.
Aim higher on HN.
> Stupid comment
got me. There's literally an HN rule about this: [0]
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I feel like the world would be a better place if people would tone down the ad-hominem in their day-to-day discourse just a little bit.
Starship's flight paths are carefully calculated by SpaceX and the FAA to achieve this exact outcome. In the event of a RUD near orbit, little to no debris will survive reentry. Any that does survive won't reach the surface (or aircraft in flight) until it is far out into the Atlantic Ocean away from land, people, flight paths and shipping lanes. For Starship launches the FAA temporarily closes a large amount of space in the Gulf of Mexico to air and ship traffic because that's where Starship is low and slow enough for debris to be a threat to aircraft. These planes were flying in the Caribbean, where there was no FAA NOTAM closing their airspace because by the time Starship is over the Caribbean, it's in orbit. If there's a RUD over the Caribbean it's already too high and going too fast for debris to be a threat to aircraft or people anywhere near the Carribean. The only "threat" in the Caribbean today was from anyone being distracted by the pretty light show in orbit far above them (that looked deceptively close from some angles).
(Not wishing to ask the obvious, and depending on the size of the pieces) debris at 100km altitude pretty much always ends up being debris falling through 10km ... right?
> The locals here are pissed in Turks and Cacos. Huge dabris rained down everywhere
It's from the pilot at the reddit link above.
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
It would be extremely unlikely due to the laws of physics, last time I checked they were still in effect.
In that scenario, debris from 100km will survive to pass through 10km. The point is: if the mass becomes debris >143km high traveling at >13,000 mph over the Caribbean - it doesn't pass through 10km anywhere near the Caribbean. Even though the friction causing tempered metal to glow white hot is slowing it, the trajectory is ballistic so by the time it slows enough to get that low (10km) it's hundreds or thousands of miles East from where the explosion happened (and where that airplane was).
It's weird because given these orbital velocities and altitudes, our intuitions about up and down aren't very useful. Starship exploded in orbit over the Caribbean, so planes in the Caribbean were safe from falling debris. If it was Mir instead of Starship, planes hundreds or thousands miles to the East of the Caribbean would be at elevated risk. My high school astronomy teacher once said something like "Rockets don't go up to reach orbit. They go sideways. And they keep going sideways faster and faster until they're going so fast, up and down don't matter anymore." While that's hardly a scientific summary, it does give a sense of the dynamics. You'll recall that Mir was intentionally de-orbited so it would land in a desolate part of the Indian Ocean. So, did they blow it up right over the Indian Ocean? Nope. To crash it in the Indian Ocean, given the altitude and speed, they "blew it up" on the other side of Earth, like maybe over Chicago (I actually don't recall where the de-orbit began, but had to be very far away).
Appreciate that, the question would be, do we know that there won't be any aircraft at the right (wrong) altitude in that area(?!)
With aircraft regularly travelling thousands of miles, would be interesting to know whether route choices are made to avoid being "under"* the track of a rocket's launch?
There's apparently another video of the debris, this one appears to show very clearly that the debris is "going sideways"* rather than coming vertically down https://x.com/kristinafitzsi/status/1880032746032230515?s=61
* apologies for the poor phrasing :)
They know there's little to no risk to aircraft or people hundreds or thousands of miles to the East of a Starship RUD in orbit because they know exactly what's inside Starship and how it's built. They model how it will break up when traveling at these insane speeds and how the metal masses will melt and burn up during re-entry. They actually test this stuff in blast furnaces. It's a statistical model so it's theoretically possible a few small bits could make it to the ground on rare occasion, so we can't say debris will never happen - but there's been a lot of history and testing and the experts are confident it's extremely safe.
The case of the MIR space station was very different than a Starship. MIR was built a long time ago by the Soviet Union and they used a big, heavily shielded power plant. That lead shielding was really the part that had a significant risk of not burning up fully on re-entry. Starship, Starlink satellites and other modern spacecraft are now usually designed to burn up on reentry. However, there are still some things in orbit and things we'll need to put in orbit in the future that won't entirely burn up on reentry. There will always be a very small risk of an accidental uncontrolled reentry causing a threat. However, these risks are vanishingly small both because we design these spacecraft with redundant systems and fail-safes and because Earth is mostly uninhabited oceans, much of our landmasses are unpopulated or sparely populated, even in the unlikely event one of the few spacecraft with a large mass that won't entirely burn up has failed and is de-orbiting out of control, we can still blow it up - and timing that at the right moment will still put it down in a safe place (like it did with MIR). There's no such thing as absolute 100% perfect safety. But you're far, far more likely to die from a great white shark attack than be injured by satellite debris.
More to the point, a huge number of meteorites hit Earth every year and it's estimated over 17,000 survive to hit the surface. There are a bunch listed right now on eBay. Do you know anyone injured by any of the 17,000 space rocks that crashed into our planet this year or any airliners hit by one?
Don't the heat tiles at least make it through? And possibly large hunks of metal like the thrust frame and engines.
I dove deep enough to a get sense that these questions have been extremely well-studied and not just by 2020s FAA and SpaceX but going back to the Shuttle and Apollo eras. The body of peer-reviewed engineering studies seemed exhaustive - and not just NASA-centric, the Europeans and Soviets did their own studies too.
Your question is reasonable and occurred to me as well. Components engineered to withstand the enormous heat and pressure of orbital re-entry should be more likely to survive a RUD scenario and subsequent re-entry burn for longer. From what I recall reading, this fits into a safety profile required to ensure very, very low risk because even if a tiny percentage of mass occasionally survives to reach the surface, the actual risk that surviving mass presents is a combination of its quantity, mass, piece size, velocity and, most importantly, where any final surviving bits reach the surface.
I recall seeing a diagram dividing the Boca orbital launch trajectory into windows, like: right around the launch pad, out over the gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, Atlantic, Africa, Indian ocean, and so on. The entire path until it's out over empty Atlantic ocean has minimal land, people and stuff under it. The gulf of Mexico is by far the highest risk because the rocket is still relatively low and slow. A RUD there could potentially be a lot of stuff coming down. There's not a lot out there in the gulf, just a few ships and planes but the FAA closes a huge area because, while the statistical risk is very low in an absolute sense, it's still too high to take chances.
For later windows, they don't close the corridor underneath to plane and ship traffic because the rocket's much greater speed and altitude later in the flight allows more precisely modeling where the debris field will come down. There was another diagram showing a statistical model of a debris field impact zone as an elongated oval with color-coded concentric rings dividing the debris mass into classes. The outermost ring is the debris that breaks up into smaller, lighter pieces. It's the widest and longest but it's the stuff that's much lower risk because it's smaller and slower.
The smallest concentric ring in the middle is where the small amount of heavier pieces most likely to survive will come down, if any do survive. As you'd expect, that innermost ring is shifted toward the far end of the oval and is a much smaller area. The headline I took away was that there's a very small amount of higher mass debris that both A) is less likely to break up into tiny, lower mass pieces, and B) is less likely to completely burn up. This is the higher-risk mass and, due to its mass, it tends to stay on trajectory, go fastest, farthest and not spread out much. In short, the statistical model showed a very high probability of any higher risk stuff which survives coming down in a surprisingly tiny area. The overall safety model is based on a combination of factors working together so it meets the safety requirements in each window of the flight for each class of mass. The carefully chosen launch location, spacecraft design, component materials, flight path and a bunch of other factors all work together to put the small amount of higher risk stuff down somewhere that fits the safety profile of very, very low risk to people and property. Disclaimer: I've probably got some details wrong and left some things out but this is the sense I got from what I learned. I came away feeling that the safety work done on space launches is comprehensive, diligent and based on a long history of robust, peer-reviewed science backed up by detailed engineering tests as well as real-world data from decades of launches, RUDs and de-orbits.
A fun side story: a few months ago I was at the Hacker's Conference and Scott Manley ("Everyday Astronaut" on YouTube) was attending as he often does. He brought along some interesting space artifacts just to set out on a table for casual show and tell. I was able to pick up and examine a Starship heat tile that was fished out of the gulf of Mexico. It was surprisingly light weight. Sort of like a thick wall piece from a styrofoam picnic cooler. It had a very thin hard shell on one side. This shell was clearly very brittle as it had already been broken up and I was holding an index card-sized shattered piece that weighed maybe a couple ounces. This was clearly not something that was going to maintain structural integrity post-RUD. Once it wasn't packed tightly together into a smooth aerodynamic surface, it's gonna shred into tiny pieces. And that seemed by design - which apparently worked as intended because even without a RUD, at the low and slow speeds over the gulf and near the launch pad it did shatter into small, light pieces - assisted only by the rocket tipping over into the water followed by the relatively mild explosion of the remaining propellant (mild compared to an unimaginably violent orbital RUD, that is). Holding it I remembered the debris field oval diagram and thought, "this is smaller, slower, safer stuff in the outer zones."
https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/1i3na4a/...
So even if those claims are true, just finding a little debris doesn't invalidate the safety model or indicate there was ever unacceptable risk. The real question is if any debris from a higher risk class fell in a place the safety model didn't predict and why. That would certainly be notable and worth incorporating into future safety models.
In the absence of solid confirmation, I'm going to stick with the model and the basic physics. If the debris is just the expected stuff, I'm sure SpaceX regrets littering the beaches and should definitely pay for some crews to pick that stuff up and trash it.
"When I'm good... I'm very good. But when I'm bad... I'm even better." :-)
Combined with another tower catch, that's two spectacular shows for the price of one. Hopefully the onboard diagnostic telemetry immediately prior to the RUD is enough to identify the root cause so it can be corrected.
Lost it over the years but I used to have a photo of about 20 vans of people parked on our property doing the search for debris. Don't think they found any on our land but there was a 3 ft chunk about 5 miles down the road.
The space-shuttle could not fly to the orbit automatically. It had to have people on board, and the first flight, IIRC, came close to a disaster.
https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lfvhpgmqqc2...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM
It seems like the flights should have been planned around it so no diversion would be needed.
If my understanding is correct, it seems sensible at least in a hand-wavy way: you have a few places where things are more likely to come down either unplanned or planned (immediately around the launch site and at the planned deorbit area), but then you have a wide swath of the world where, in a relatively localized area, you -might- have something come down with some warning that it will (just because the time it takes to get from altitude to where aircraft are). You close the priority areas, but you don't close the less likely areas pro-actively, but only do so reactively, it seems you'd achieve a balance between aircraft safety and air service disruptions.
map: https://github.com/kla-s/Space/blob/main/Map_NOTMAR_NOTAM_Sp... description: https://github.com/kla-s/Space/tree/main
Lets hope this is the year of Linux desktop and i didn't violate any licenses or made big errors ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE
It's ATC audio captured during the event.
As far as I understand airline pilots have a high level of authority and diverting probably was the right call depending on the lag between seeing it and knowing what it was or if there was a risk of debris reaching them. They wouldn't necessarily know how high it got or what that means for debris.
I think it's an absolutely reasonable choice to just say comfortably divert rather than try to linger in hopes of it not lasting too long and possibly ending up diverting anyway... but on minimums.
If anything planes much further downrange (thousands of km) should be diverted, not immediately under the re-entry point.
Do you have a better explanation why they are doing donuts over the pacific at the time of reentry, then were diverted?
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/ABX3133
https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N121BZ/history/20250...
Other planes were also caught up in the chaos but SJU was at capacity apparently
Why do you think it is pointless?
If I am a pilot and the tower says "debris seen heading east of Bahamas", I probably wont want to keep flying towards that direction.
Yeah, it is probably low risk, but I dont have a super computer or detailed map of the Starship debris field or entry zone.
That tower catch. That _had_ to be a new version of Kerbal, right? The physics looked good, but there's no way that was real...
It would just be sent back to ILM marked "Good effort, but too obviously fake. Rework to be more realistic and resubmit."
Such an unbelievable moment. And I also think an indicator of how much better society could be if we focused more on doing amazing things. The comments on YouTube are just filled with hope optimism and general awesomeness. FWIW that link goes straight to the moneyshot - it's always so much better if you watch it all the way through. It's an amazing broadcast.
With the Apollo moon landings in recent memory, I'd read those sci-fi books late at night with a flashlight under the covers of my bed and then fall asleep thinking about how "I'll still be alive 50 years from now. I'll get to actually live in the world of the future. Maybe I'll even work in space." And by the time I graduated from high school it was already becoming clear things were going much to slow for me to even see humans colonizing Mars. And that was reality until about a decade ago.
So, yeah. Watching the live video of the first successful Starship orbital launch with my teenage daughter... I got a little choked up, which surprised me. Felt like discovering a very old dream that's been buried too long. And somehow the damn thing's still alive. Or maybe I just got something in my eye. Anyway, I know it's too late for me to ever work off-planet. But maybe not for my kid... so, the dream lives on. It just had to skip a generation.
SpaceX brought our childhood dreams back. But more importantly, SpaceX is bringing our naive childhood expectations to fruitation.
There are lots of vertical-landing rockets ... in science fiction, and only before Sputnik in 1957. Once actual space programs came about and lots of engineers understood just how difficult landing a rocket is compared to launching it, they all went away. Fictional vehicles became more and more complex to make them "realistic" (that is, consistent with real spacecraft on the news), or just didn't bother with the details at all and went to quasi-magic technologies like in Star Wars and Star Trek.
SpaceX is taking us to the future by going with something from the past.
The Falcon 9 puts humans into orbit then turns around and lands not far from the launch tower. It's then brought in for maintenance and a few weeks later launching again - some of them have done 20 flights.
"My god, Bones, what have I done?"
Let's hope no debris came down on anyone or anything apart from open water.
Does international space law allow for this?
Only used once, when the Soviets dropped a nuclear reactor on Canada.
> States (countries) bear international responsibility for all space objects that are launched within their territory. This means that regardless of who launches the space object, if it was launched from State A's territory, or from State A's facility, or if State A caused the launch to happen, then State A is fully liable for damages that result from that space object.
https://drs.faa.gov/browse/excelExternalWindow/DRSDOCID17389...
But yea, seems appropriate to update it or if that is going to be the process, write it in stone.
I suppose Trump could advocate that Congress pass a new liability regime more favorable to SpaceX speciically or private launchers generally, though.
Nonetheless, recently NASA won the lottery when part of some batteries they jettisoned from the ISS ended up crashing through a house in Florida. [1] Oddly enough there are treaties on this, but only from an international perspective - landing on your own country was not covered! But I'm certain NASA will obviously make it right, as would SpaceX. If they didn't, then surely the family could easily sue as well.
[1] - https://www.space.com/space-debris-florida-family-nasa-lawsu...
https://www.whoi.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Abbreviated-...
Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.
Canadians: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.
Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.
Canadians: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.
Americans: This is the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the United States' Atlantic fleet. We are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers and numerous support vessels. I demand that YOU change your course 15 degrees north, that's one five degrees north, or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this ship.
Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_and_naval_vessel_ur...
Not necessarily. Steam is obliged to give way to sail, even when the sailing ship is much smaller.
Both sailing and power driven vessels need to give ways to (among other things) “vessel restricted in her ability to maneuver”. And an aircraft carrier launching or recovering aircraft is considered to be restricted in her ability to maneuver (quite rightfully so, it is hard enough to land on them without the ship swerving left and right).
So that means that a mighty aircraft carrier needs to (at least according to the regulations) dodge tiny sailing ships, but once they start launching or recovering aircraft it is the responsibility of the sailing ship to avoid them.
Source: Rule 18 of the ColRegs (The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea 1972)
And if the Starship is not under power yet falling and using the flaperons for control, is that considered "under sail" for purposes of right of way?
But for real, i think the simple answer is that debris falling from space is outside of the scope of the ColRegs. Simply speaking they come too fast so you can’t maneuver your vessel out of their way, and unless you are a warship you don’t have the tools to even know where exactly they will hit. If you try to run you might even put yourself in their path. After all from the most unlucky position they would be just bright stationary spots on the sky getting ever so slightly bigger. Until they start to get bigger faster and faster. (Constant bearing and decreasing range being the hallmarks of an impending colision.)
https://jabberwocking.com/did-elon-musk-really-have-to-study...
At those speeds, temps and pressures exploding into tiny pieces isn't just easy - it's the default. NOT exploding is much harder!
Edit: Reminds me of "The Eye" from star wars Andor
today!
I’m curious because I was on a flight to Puerto Rico from Florida at 3pm ET they diverted our flight. They didn’t really give us many details but said the “landing strips were closed”. Our friends on a slightly early flight diverted to ST Thomas. We were going to divert to a nearby airport in Puerto Rico (we were going to land in Aguadilla instead of San Juan) so I feel like these diversions wouldn’t be related but the timing seems pretty odd.
Side note: annoying that twitter/X requires login. I'd have sworn Elon said he was removing that requirement to login to view tweets (I think he discussed it with George Hotz).
Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=49m30s
Elon:
> This is insane. You shouldn't need a twitter account at all unless you need to write something
George:
> Why did you put the pop up back?
Elon:
> We should not be prohibiting read-only scroll
So there seems to be agreement that twitter shouldn't require an account to read (view) posts. The Twitter Space is from 23 Dec 2022 so perhaps things changed since.
Instagram lets me view the video without login (I have to click the 'X' in the top-right of annoying popup, but I can watch it without logging in).
>Commercial flights are turning around to avoid potential debris.
EDIT: at these speeds, over 20000km/h, the falling debris will travel a very long way before coming down. For satellite re-entry, the usual estimated ground contact point is something like 8000km+ downrange [1]. There is little chance debris would come anywhere near commercial flight altitude in the area around where the videos were made.
Apparently the planned splashdown was in the Indian Ocean near Australia, but this being an uncontrolled re-entry it could be far off from that, in either direction.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457652...
Airspace is big, but I wouldn't want to fly a Jet with hundreds of people near it either.
I imagine aviation radar towers would only have the most limited data as the event unfolded.
It’s not about the calculated risks, but the uncertainty around if they have the right information in the first place. Sure it may have broken up at 145km miles, but what if someone messed up and it actually was 14.5km etc.
OP wrote "km miles", which would create an incident.
SpaceX uses metric system for that exact reason, because in the past, on Mars, accident happened because of imperial measures.
They don't ground flights because the pilot might load 2,000 litres of fuel instead of 20,000 litres. They don't take evasive action in case the other plane is travelling at 5,000 knots instead of 500 knots. They don't insist on a 30-km runway because the runway published as 3 km might only be 300 metres.
They don’t have that level of certainty around what altitude a rocket exploded, or other one off event.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6hIXB62bUE ATC was being extremely cautious and diverting planes over quite a large area for quite some time to avoid the risk of debris hitting airplanes.
Without air resistance, falling 145 km takes 172 seconds, which would result in the debris falling 956 km east of the explosion point if it were moving horizontal to the ground to begin with. With air resistance, it is substantially shorter as everything is decelerating proportional to the velocity cubed. If we approximate the terminal velocity of the debris as 500 km/h, to a first order approximation it would travel approximately 79 km east. The distance from West Caicos island to Grand Turk island is 138 km, for reference.
Satellites are moving much faster and at much higher altitude. Starship was not in orbit.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-17/spacex-launch-to-go-a...
Sometimes this is counterproductive to the goal of HN.
I made a rash comment (not a very bad one, but I introduced politics for no reason), very quickly regretted it, but you were faster.
Now many people will read this idiotic exchange instead of doing something more productive.
Staging happens closer to the Texas coast and I don't believe you'd have line of sight to it from the Bahamas.
Also, if a pressurized tank is reentering, that means the FTS failed to detonate.
https://x.com/jp_ouellette/status/1880029255813459973
It's beautiful. Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
Or slightly wrong. An FTS is programmed to be conservative. Particularly on unmanned flights. Doubly particularly on reëntry. Triply so on experiments bits.
It depends on the Air Force.
To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew.
Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.
i guess you didn't follow the falcon 9 failures right? here's two minutes of failures https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ
and guess what? they finally got it right and now falcon 9 is not only extremely reliable but quite cheap for everyone.
NASA (with the shuttle and saturn V) had a completely different idea on rocket development (and blue origin seems to follow their mindset), which is fine. but to say that this is "failure fetish" when spacex has an amazing track record is just hating for the sake of hating.
i would recommend, if you have the time, the book liftoff, by eric berger https://www.amazon.com/Liftoff-Desperate-Early-Launched-Spac... -- it was the book that opened my eyes to why spacex works like they do.
That is ... so obviously and blatantly untrue. That is like saying that an old wooden biplane from 1917 is not different from Boeing 777.
Starship IS an impressive achievement while they speed up development process with real-world hard data
New Glenn IS an impressive achievement while taking their time to develop a vehicle that reached the orbit on first time
Per wiki on Apollo
> Landing humans on the Moon by the end of 1969 required the most sudden burst of technological creativity, and the largest commitment of resources ($25 billion; $182 billion in 2023 US dollars)[22] ever made by any nation in peacetime. At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities.[23]
Different budget, different number of people working on this stuff and different mindset. Actually the Apollo program was also iterative and it paid off.
SpaceX has all of the Apollo program's work to build on, and computers that could do all the computing work that the Apollo program ever made, in total, in probably a few minutes.
Consider that even reusable self-landings boosters were being worked on in the 90s, before funding was cut off. And for expandable rockets, virtually all rockets designed and launched in the last few decades have successfully accomplished their first ever flight, launching some kind of payload to orbit.
That doesn't resonate as true to me.
The first Ariane 5 flight blew up [0]. That Europe's current heavy-lift workhorse with 112 successful launches (including JWST), but the first one blew up.
The first PSLV blew up [1]. That's India's current workhorse with 58 successes, but flight #1 was not successful. Their GSLV did not reach its correct orbit on its first flight either [2], though it didn't blow up.
The first Delta IV Heavy did not blow up, but it failed to reach its correct orbit [3]. That was US' largest launch vehicle for most of the 21st century.
The first Long March 5 failed to reach its correct orbit, and the second one blew up [4]. That's China's current heavy-lift launch vehicle, since 2016.
South Korea's first orbital rocket RUD'd both its first flights, in 2009 and 2010 [5].
Japan's newest orbital rocket was launched in 2023, and that blew up [6].
Rocket Labs' Electron has a current >90% success rate, but the first one blew up [7].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5#Launch_history
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PSLV_launches#Statisti...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GSLV_launches#Statisti...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy#Launch_history
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_5
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naro-1#Launch_history
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H3_(rocket)#Launch_history
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Lab_Electron#Launch_sta...
Still, many of these are more successful than Starship:
The first GSLV was still able to deploy a satellite, just in a lower orbit than intended.
The first Delta IV had the same problem, satellite deployed, but in a lower orbit than planned.
The first Long March 5 is classed as a full success on Wikipedia, I couldn't find info there about a failure (the second one did blow up).
The Rocket Labs' Electron did get destroyed. However it was later found that nothing at all was wrong with the vehicle, it was a failure in the ground software, and an identical vehicle successfully carried out its mission 7 months later.
In contrast, the first two Starships blew up completely due to engine issues, and no Starship has deployed even a test payload of some kind to orbit. In fact, until today, none even carried a payload of any kind, they have all been flying empty.
Your definition of success doesn't leave room for anomalies. Your mindset seems to be "if you try and it's doesn't turn out perfectly, it's a failure" -- which results in spending tons of time and money iterating behind closed doors (or even worse, trying to model/calculate the whole thing without many test runs), and only unveiling the result when it's "perfect". This approach costs more time and money, and more embarrassment if/when the product fails in public. It also doesn't build a culture of learning a lot from anomalies.
Meanwhile, SpaceX doesn't care about iterating, testing, and failing in public. So they skip all the costly effort of trying too hard not to fail, setting expectations that they get it right the first time, and not learning as much from anomalies.
Anomalies, properly understood, are opportunities to learn and improve -- and never something to be ashamed of. The only true "failures" are to give up because it's too hard, to stop learning from the data that anomalies provide, or to never try in the first place because you're too afraid of anomalies.
The Wikipedia entry describes it as "suboptimal but workable initial orbit", which I interpret as a partial failure (coming from a military entity that's universally opaque about its failings). They're not inclined for language like "partial failure" that we get out of transparent countries—contrast that first Delta IV-H, which also reached a "workable" orbit—just not the intended one.
- "However it was later found that nothing at all was wrong with the vehicle, it was a failure in the ground software, and an identical vehicle successfully carried out its mission 7 months later."
Also true of the Ariane 5 explosion: that was a software bug (unhandled integer overflow) in the flight control unit. The important part isn't whether it's hardware or software, but whether they got it right or not, before launch.
They have explicitly and publicly chosen to rapidly iterate without spending billions to make sure the first try goes well - it's simply different culture. The first Starship wasn't even something you could actually call a rocket, it was a water tower with a bunch of rocket engines.
They wanted data about the engines and got them - mission 100% accomplished, that's not a failure in any way except for media shock value because "wow such boom". Come on, you call yourself an engineer? Do you not try your software or hardware before 100% completion? You don't have CI with integration and e2e tests? There's no other way to do this cheaply and quickly, you have to try.
Call me when any other company achieves what Falcon9 did, then we can discuss issues of SpaceX engineering culture and how others are better. But they are not, few test flights are not interesting, what's interesting is that they are 10 years ahead of everybody else and offer by far the cheapest and by orders of magnitude most reliable orbital lift service.
Others should stop waiting 10 years before the first flight and accept some risk, the world would be much better by now.
Apollo program directors would advocate to start a nuclear war with ussr if they could get hands on that kind of tech.
But also NASA landed two SUVs on mars first try, using skycrane, Full remote. they developed and built mars helicopter/drone (rip). First try. But spaceX gets the glory because... break things??
(Which of course is only possible if you have the Founding Father with a few billion $$ just laying around)
SpaceX gets credit and rightly so because they have achieved things which no national space agency nor private company has ever done before, and done it faster and at a lower budget than anyone has done before.
Every other national space agency and private company had both infinitely more money, time, and engineers than SpaceX did (when founded) yet they were making zero progress on reusable rockets, cheap super heavy lift capacity to orbit, and America had no way of taking their own astronauts to the space station!
Musk (hate him or love him) founded a company from nothing which has exceeded the capabilities of nasa and the us government, the European space agency, and the russian space agency, as well as ULA, Boeing, Lockheed etc.
They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused. They have the most cost effective rocket ever made for taking loads to orbit. They have reused rockets up to 20 times! They have build the most powerful rocket ever built which is fully reusable. They have built the most efficient and powerful rocket engines ever built before. And they have done it all incredibly quickly starting from nothing.
Oh and they also built a massive internet constellation providing fast and cheap satellite internet to the whole world, saving countless lives and also helping stimulate economies across the world as well as enabling more remote work etc.
So much of what they have done was considered impossible or not economical or not practical or so difficult other countries or companies didn’t even TRY.
So yes. Given their success it’s worth trying to understand their development methodology, which is iterate fast and fail lots and learn lots. Given how much they’ve kicked the shit out of the SLS program in capability and budget and also how they’ve crushed Blue Origin (which started earlier with more budget) who both operate in a more old fashioned way, I would certainly say it’s important to acknowledge they may be doing something right!
They also don't have any fully reusable rockets today, and Starship is still probably a year or more from being production-ready. It remains to be seen how reusable Starship will actually be, how long it will take to refurbish and get ready for spaceflight, and how many reentries it can actually take. And it still remains to be seen how much Starship will actually gain from being fully reusable, by the way - landing a rocket costs lots of extra fuel, so it's not a no-brainer that a fully reusable rocket would have a much better cost/kg-to-orbit than a non reusable one. Especially for anything higher than LEO, Starship can't actually carry enough fuel, so it depends on expensive additional launches to refuel in orbit - a maneoveur that will probably take another year or more to finalize, and that greatly increases the cost of a Starship mission beyond LEO.
Finally, Starlink is nice, but it's extremely expensive for most users outside very rich areas of the world, and has in no way had the impact you are claiming. Laying out cable internet is FAR cheaper than satellite internet can ever be, especially in rural areas, so beyond cases where cables and even wireless are completely impossible (ocean, war-torn areas), it doesn't and won't ever have any major impact. I'm also very curious where you got the idea that it "saved countless lives".
10 years ago people were talking that landing rockets is impossible. Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.
As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.
Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition
> ULA was awarded a DoD contract in December 2013 to provide 36 rocket cores for up to 28 launches. The award drew protest from SpaceX, which said the cost of ULA's launches were approximately US$460 million each and proposed a price of US$90 million to provide similar launches.[16] In response, Gass said ULA's average launch price was US$225 million, with future launches as low as US$100 million.
I suspect SpaceX margins are very high and they can fund the starship development. Margins/prices may change as BO reaches reusability.
Maybe some. Others had been working on this in the 90s already. Not to mention Spaceshuttle, which achieved these milestones (with a vastly different design) in production.
> Then whether they can be reused. Then whether there is any economical gain doing so.
Reuse is currently partial. The economic advantages have largely failed to materialize, at least to the extent that they were promised.
> Btw ULA reasonable launch price of today is because of SpaceX competition
Why compare to ULA? Look at Ariane 6, or Soyuz-2 - they have similar numbers to Falcon 9. Falcon 9 is 22 800 kg to LEO for $70M. Ariane 6 is 21 500 kg to LEO for $115M. Soyuz-2 is 8600kg to LEO for $35-48M (so about $92-129M for a Falcon 9's worth of cargo). More expensive, but not by some huge margin.
> As for starlink - they have explosive revenue growth. Alot of businesses want one. Planes, ships, trains, military, rural areas, they are actually profiting from the operations and not loosing money and I still have to read comments like that.
This is a completely different take than the previous comment. Sure, it's successful in the developped world in certain industries. This is nothing like "saving countless lives" or "helping stimulate economies across the world", which is what I was responding to.
>More expensive, but not by some huge margin.
Obviously no matter what it costs them, they are going to price themselves slightly under the going rate to fill their launch manifest. Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.
Reuse is cheaper... the fact that you can even begin to contemplate that makes no sense. They lose the upstage with only one engine and they even recover the fairing. The combined cost for RP-1 and LOX is approximately $300,000–$500,000. Relative to total launch cost the fuel cost makes up a tiny fraction (~0.5–1%), which is about $67 million for a Falcon 9 commercial launch.
Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.
The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10, where the next nearest competitor is the Proton-M by Khrunichev at 4300. Which puts them in a completely different league of the space shuttles Cost Per kg to LEO of $18,000 to $54,000.
I'm using the only public information about this that we have. The Ariane 6 and Soyuz-2 numbers are also prices and not costs, by the way. We don't know how much Russia or the ESA actually spend per launch, we only know what they are asking others to pay for it.
> Also, they get to CHARGE THIS ~20 TIMES PER VEHICLE.
Don't forget refurbishment costs and fuel costs and R&D amortization.
> Also with your calculations you conveniently leave of the super heavy which has a ~$1,500KG per dolar with a ~$97 million price tag carrying ~63,800 kg. Which is a 1/10th of the cost of KG to LEO than their competitors.
You mean Falcon Heavy here (SuperHeavy is the first stage of Starship, it doesn't carry payload). I left Falcon Heavy out for two reasons.
First and most importantly, it is very rarely used in comparison to Falcon 9 (it was only flown twice in 2024, for example). SpaceX themselves are not using it for their Starlink sattelites, even though that should be the perfect use case for it.
Second, it was never flown with anything close to the nominal payload, at least according to Wikipedia. The highest payload ever flown was ~10k kg to GTO, where it's supposed to support up to 26 700 kg. Note also that the 63 800 kg figure is for an expendable Falcon Heavy - if you want to recover it, it's less than 50 000 kg. Also, the price per launch seems highly optimistic, given that launches in 2024 were actually $152M and $178M, each flying with ~5000 kg, giving a MUCH worse number than what we were looking at.
> The loss of the upper stage is around $10–15 million. This includes the engine, structure, and integration. So by saving that in starship and boosting the payload to 150k KG you get a KG/LEO of 10
These numbers are very likely pure fantasy. Starship development got $3B just from NASA, that you seem to not amortize in any way. If you just look at the costs of the actual rocket construction itself plus fuel, without R&D, the numbers go WAY down for many other rockets as well (including Falcon 9).
So, like, if you found a 50%-off sale on a car, you're telling me you wouldn't test drive it because it's not a very good deal?
What color is the sky in your world?
Consider that Russia was charging less per seat to the ISS in 2007, back when they ahd to compete with the Shuttle, then SpaceX is charging NASA today. And not a little less - almost half ($25M in 2007 dollars, $38M in today's dollars, vs SpaceX charging $55M today).
Does this mean that the Soyuz was much cheaper than Falcon 9? Probably not, it just means that there is so much margin on both sides that we can't estimate much.
The space shuttle did this over 40 years ago. You can argue SpaceX have the first economical one 40 years later, but the second stage isn't reusable. Once they get starship working they might have it.
Their finances aren't public but there is some stuff to go on where we can say Falcon is probably economical despite not recovering the second stage.
This TED talk from Gwynne Shotwell says they will have reuse of starship so dialed in that in 3 years (from now) they will be competitive with commercial airliners and be operating for consumers in production:
https://www.ted.com/talks/gwynne_shotwell_spacex_s_plan_to_f...
To be safe enough for that I would have expected thousands of flawless flights by now. They said in 2020 it was still on track for 2028 but the Dear Moon project was canceled since that last update.
Are you not considering the fact that the huge external tank and the two SRBs were destroyed every time? Not to mention the insane costs of refurbishing each space shuttle, not the mention the insanely bad safety of the shuttle and the 14 astronauts who died in it!
Space shuttle, while cool, was really, really bad design, bad safety, and totally uneconomical. It was definitely cooler than Soyuz, but Soyuz was cheaper and more safe.
There's a reason the US abandoned space shuttle and had to beg the Russians to use Soyuz to send their astronauts to the space station.
Why should we care what you think if you can't get something that basic right?
Calling Space Shuttle to what SpaceX have done really is like comparing chalk and cheese.
Space shuttle cost (inflation adjusted) about 700M per launch(!!). Compared to Falcon 9 (10-20M). Superheavy and starship will start costing maybe 100M and rapidly decrease to maybe 10-20M also, but with more than double the carrying capacity of shuttle as well as in generally being far more capable.
What you claimed was: "They have the first rocket ever made which can take payloads to orbit and then be reused." That was known as the space shuttle.
The ~$40 million tank was expendable so you are right it wasn't full reuse either. Starship jettisons parts too, I believe the hot staging ring? And the Falcon series throws away the whole upper stage.
Falson 9 is a one piece rocket, as is Superheavy.
The Space Shuttle got to space with the help of other rockets, tank etc.
Such as?
The whole world combined VS SpaceX has less mass to orbit.
Either whole nations are not interested in that much mass to orbit or they don't have the capability. Or financial means/incentive to compete against that commercial entity.
But they do and at least in China they start to work on reusable rockets and ULA is for sale because they don't have one.
Cargo rockets is to elo is an old tech, a participation award for you and your convincing arguments (you and you ilk - producing numerous 'achievements' called 'etc. etc.').
Hmmm I wonder if there was a tech that recovered a spacecraft and tried to reuse it to cut costs... hmmm... no, nothing comes to mind
Also SpaceX is charging Nasa more than russians did when they had monopoly over space flights.
SpaceX is charging NASA less. Even Boeing is charging NASA less than Russia.
NASA lost a good number of probes in the process of getting the expertise to do that.
And likely quite a few test devices in building out the skycrane.
You cant be making shit up and equating a test to blowing up 7 rockets
Besides, you make it as if SpaceX couldn't learn from nasa mistakes, not to mention core team of SpaceX are ex-nasa already.
what kind of elon musk logic is that?
That’s 20 years of learning how to design and land things on mars. They wouldn’t have been able to build Curiosity without the past experiences. The Curiosity program itself started in 2002, just a couple years after the missions above.
What people say is that knowledge in the field is extremely hard to transfer, and easily lost. As an example, apparently we are completely unable to rebuild the Space Shuttle and Saturn rocket, even though technology is vastly more advanced today. Each vehicle really is a “program” including all its people and supply chain. This is also something SpaceX is trying to change by building actual production lines for their engines and bodies, not one-off builds.
So you are saying that Curiosity team had probably not learned anything from those 20 years old programs?
You are literally strengthening my point...
Do you not count the Saturn 1B rocket capsule that caught on fire on the pad and burnt the Apollo 1 astronauts alive?
What about Apollo 13?
> but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land
The "promise land" in this analogy is visible past the desert. What's not known is what route to get there.
In your tortured analogy, the people who "are really fetishizing iterative failure" are not doing that; they're fetishizing the fact that the person walking through this desert is trying, and if they hit a barrier, they iterate and try again until they reach the promise land. Along the way they are accomplishing what was once thought to be impossible.
Your supposed excellent programs killed people.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080120112115/http://www.hq.nas...
https://web.archive.org/web/20080227133401/http://www.hq.nas...
>Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure
Subassemblies that made up Saturn V went through several hundred (inflation adjusted) billion dollars' worth of iterative failure before the Apollo program was announced.
The only reason it WAS announced was all of the iterative failure that had been paying off.
The day JFK uttered "shall go to the moon in this deck-aid", the F-1 engine had already been exploding and failing for three years.
My memory is hazy, from a brown bag I went to at work 15 years ago, but they blew up around 50 F-1s before one worked right.
And while the Saturn isn't an upgraded Jupiter it is EXTREMELY closely related to Jupiter and Jupiter had a shit-ton of failures before they got it right, turned around, and used all of that knowledge to build Saturn.
Imagine Mercedes said it, or Intel or anyone. They would be a laughing stock.
I hadn’t thought about it before, but, especially during the Cold War, the US government had a big incentive to appear infallible that SpaceX doesn’t have. Are we sure there weren’t more tests in secret? USG also has access to huge tracts of land that is off limits, and rocket tests are easily ‘national security issue’ enough to justify being conducted in secret. Just a thought.
The GAO put out a report on this a few months ago, pointing out the failures of SpaceX here (including massive cost overruns) much more than the supposed cost overruns of SLS. Incidentally, after this GAO report came out, Elon Musk became very interested in being in charge of managing "government waste."
Orion is delayed due to a heat shield issue: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/artemis/nasa-identifies-cause-...
The first SLS launch was six years behind and massively over budget.
Lunar Gateway is almost certainly getting delayed.
None of these programs rely on SpaceX in any way thus far.
There is an issue with another dependency for Artemis 2 and 3, though - Starship is nowhere near where it needs to be.
Artemis II has no Starship dependency. It's entirely SLS/Orion.
Your own article agrees with me:
> Artemis 2 likely would've been delayed by a year or so, to late 2026, had a heat-shield replacement been required, NASA officials said today. But the mission team still needs more time than originally envisioned to get Orion up to crew-carrying speed, explaining the roughly six-month push.
> "The heat shield was installed in June 2023, and the root cause investigation took place in parallel to other assembly and testing activities to preserve as much schedule as possible."
And of course its completely ridiculous to blame a program that received 2 billion $ and only really started a few years ago, vs things like SLS Orion that have been going for decades and absorbed 50 billion $.
And I'm not so sure that they actually decreased price to launch all that much. First of all, it's definitely not "several orders of magnitude", the best numbers quoted are maybe half price or so for a Falcon 9 compared to another contemporary rocket. And by my understanding, the US government at least is paying about as much for Falcon 9 as it was for a Soyuz to bring an astronaut to the ISS, at least.
So, NASA today is paying Boeing more than the monopoly prices Russia charged (up to 2016 or so), and paying both of them more than Russia was charging back when they were competing with the Space Shuttle. And it's paying SpaceX about half of the top price it payed Russia per seat, still nowhere close to an order of magnitude in cost savings.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/astronaut-cost-per-soyuz-sea...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/boeing-sending-first-astrona...
How would I distinquish between the two, esp wrt rocketry?
An engineering achievement means excellence in designing a new vehicle, or updating an existing one, or inventing a new procedure, and finding the right tolerances that allow that to be replicated over and over without excess cost.
So using some wholly new process, like the continuous innovation involved in casting large parts, how would I separate ops and engr?
Forgive my ignorance. I'm just wondering how Ford's quality circles, or the Toyota Production System would work if ops and engr were treated aa separate silos.
Since we're kibitzing about rockets, I suppose the example above could have been ramping up production of Raptor engines to 1 per day (IIRC), while improving performance and reducing costs. If I wanted to emulate that process, using your methodology, where would I start?
The reusability is awesome, of course. More of that!
And also, still gotta get the basics right. Oxygen/fuel leaks aren't a great look (spoken as a not rocket scientist).
On the other hand every Russian N1 wasn’t.
Rocketry is hard. It’s seems proven that if you’re a government space agency it’s even harder.
This is irrelevant, as none of the flights included any plans to recover the Starship. The objective for each flight has been to dump the vehicle in the sea at the target zone.
But if you don't wander, you'll never find out. You gotta believe
That “first success” was actually on the back of a long series of related rockets with technology and engines inherited from a huge missile program. Those NASA eggheads didn’t start from zero on a shoestring budget and make things work on the first try! The Saturn V was just a stretched version of the Saturn series of rockets. These all cost hundreds of billions in today’s money to develop!
Second, they’re not “the same thing”. A single-use piece of technology has very different design constraints and engineering considerations as a reusable piece of technology.
A single-use weapon is a bomb. A reusable weapon is a sword. Just because you can shove a fuse into some explosives doesn’t mean you can forge a sword that won’t shatter on first use.
An equivalent example from space technology are explosive bolts. NASA uses them extensively, SpaceX never does… because they’re not reusable and not up-front testable. They’re expensive too. So instead they iterated (and iterated!) on vacuum-rated actuators that can serve the same role. This is a non-trivial exercise that resulted in a few RUDs. This is why NASA didn’t even try! It’s harder and not needed if reusability was a non-goal.
There were 16 taxi and flight tests with Enterprise before the launch in 1981 (Approach and Landing Tests - Enterprise) where the first 8 were uncrewed. Just saying there were prior test flights using it.
There was something like 4 years of testing before the proper launch.
The close-up camera right after was interesting, I thought it captured on the grid fins, but it looks like there are two small purpose-built knobs for that.
The times we live in!
https://youtu.be/gA6ppby3JC8?si=wY7TQsbR_wxoud75&t=70 (ten seconds from the timestamp)
IIRC they use regular off the shelf gopro cameras to mount on the ones going into space. Granted, the mount is ruggedized metal else the cameras wouldn't survive, lol [0].
I'm also reminded of NASA's cameras which were mounted on the mechanisms of an anti-air gun, great for slow and precise movements. I'm sure they still use that today but I couldn't find a good source. I did find an article about NASA's ruggedized cameras for use on spacecraft and the like though [1].
[0] https://www.quora.com/Was-the-GoPro-camera-modified-for-the-... [1] https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Redefining_the_Rugged_Video_Camera
It looks cool because of the angle and framing though, someone knew exactly what they were doing. Without the angle/framing, you can have all the resolution and framerates in the world, it still wouldn't look as cool. It's a cinematographic choice that made that shot.
> But it could be better still, the camera setup in the clip still gets a lot of shaking from the blasts.
I'd love to hear ideas how you'd prevent the shaking. Forget gimbals or similar semi-pro setups as they wouldn't be nearly enough. What are you attaching it to, in your better setup? A drone would be blown away, and anything attached to the ground would likely start to shake regardless of your setup.
Plus maybe something they do with stability and frame-rate.
The plan is to catch the second stage the same way, and the starship in flight now is the first to have mockup pins to test the aerodynamics and see if they cause issues during reentry.
Its sad that Gerry Anderson never got to see this. It's like something from a Thunderbirds episode.
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1845444890764644694
Anyone has similar view of this landing?
Edit: distant view of flight 7 by the same person
During ascent I also noticed a panel near the front fins that seemed to be loose and flapping. Probably not related but who knows.
Edit: Here's a video of the aftermath. Strangely beautiful. https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662
I believe it's pretty hard to have a fire at that altitude. You need a leak of both methane and oxygen, and an ignition source.
I wonder if perhaps one of the engines split open and the exhaust wasn't going into the engine bell?
But up at 140km altitude, the pressure is so low that I don't think even pure oxygen would lead to combustion.
His lying doesn't change the incredible work by those engineers and other employees of SpaceX.
I’m saying this with confidence because it’s the established history of SpaceX critics. Everything from reusable rockets, space internet, full-flow staged combustion, etc.. has had its naysayers that all shut up and found something new to critique once SpaceX showed it was possible and even profitable.
At this stage you may as well just come out and say “I don’t like Elon”.
If not SpaceX, it would be all NASA. NASA lies about their budget all the time, with massive overruns. For example, the Artemis overrun exceeds the entire cost of Starship development so far [1].
[1] https://www.space.com/nasa-sls-megarocket-cost-delays-report
"Upgrades include a redesigned upper-stage propulsion system that can carry 25 per cent more propellant, along with slimmer, repositioned forward flaps to reduce exposure to heat during re-entry.
For the first time, Starship will deploy 10 Starlink simulators" [1].
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/01/heres-what-nasa-would-...
[1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/musks-starship-ready-...
If the person doing their on-screen graphics is reading this, I wonder if you have considered showing tank LOX/CH4 remaining as a log graph. I believe it decreases logrithmically when being used (well it would if you keep 'thrust' constant) so that would create a linear sweep to the 'fuel level' status.
No, second stage has 3 vacuum engines and 3 atmospheric engines, so they'll have to be able to throttle for the cutover.
They might, I'm not saying your wrong, I'm just saying that I cannot imagine how you would justify the added complexity of doing it that way.
Better fuel efficiency = more payload to orbit = plenty of justification for the extra complexity.
Admittedly gravity losses are more significant at the beginning when the booster/ship are ascending purely vertically than later in second stage flight which is mostly horizontal, but definitely still a factor.
All their systems and logging are running in UTC, why can't they just give launch times accordingly.
I hate having to convert from some time zone which I don't know by heart; with the additional risk of getting daylight savings or something wrong and missing the event.
I wonder how much of the second stage flight is autonomous and if they need to continually need to give it a go to continue, or if it aborts automatically after some time of lost telemetry. But maybe it already exploded anyways.
The AFTS has independent, hardened, validated inertial measurement systems.
In the Space Shuttle, given that it was human rated, the "Range Safety" system was completely manual. It was controlled by a pair of individuals and they manually made the call to send the ARM/FIRE sequence to the range safety detonators.
edit: the spacex stream just confirmed the loss.
But interesting that telemetry showed the failures starting a few seconds before loss of telemetry, the videos posted here show a massive explosion later on. So something was going wrong for some time before, and the explosion was only a consequence of that.
Or it was the FTS reacting to the engine failures.
https://www.youtube.com/@VideoFromSpace/streams
Or if you would like additional commentary and extra camera views, there are independent channels such as Everyday Astronaut, NASASpaceFlight, Spaceflight Now, etc.
cough cough
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatigue_(material)#de_Havillan...
The Space Industry to date has killed many fewer people than planes, trains, or automobiles.
Except as a proportion of passengers. In which case it's killed several of orders of magnitude more.
If you want to continue playing apples to oranges though, nobody has died on a spaceflight in the last twenty years. How many have died on airplanes in that timeframe?
[correction: there was one additional fatal flight in 2014 with the destruction of SpaceShipTwo. I would argue that one doesn't count, though, as it was more akin to a relatively mundane aircraft accident than anything else.]
Cars are small, and they still go up in flames routinely all on their own (for older cars, aged fuel lines rupturing is a top cause, for newer cars shit with the turbocharger), it just doesn't make more news than a line in the local advertisement rag because usually all it needs is five minutes work for a firefighter truck.
Trains had quite the deadly period until it was figured out how to deal with steam safely - and yet, in Germany we had the last explosion of a steam train in 1977, killing nine people [1].
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesselzerknall_in_Bitterfeld
Edit: ok, acceleration is meters per second per second, but my point stands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-SI_units_mentioned_in_the_...
But, a video stream meant for the public consumption is. SI are standardized for the context of calculations, not necessarily for human consumption, which happens to be why nobody gives the weather in degrees kelvin.
The blue origin launch this week used mph and feet of elevation, and I can definitively say that using modified SI is way way better than US customary
https://www.youtube.com/live/6Px_b5eSzsA
Aside from coding, this is my favorite use of multiple screens.
Great observation. I also do this. :-)
They started doing it when SpaceX was launching their first fuel tanks literally in the middle of nowhere, you can just sit on a side of the road a few hundred feet away and record (or even stream) everything from a basic Webcam. Eventually more and more people liked it and started contributing, then came branded T-Shirts, etc.
Now there's whole cottage industry in Boca with people spending weeks and months there, setting up and streaming from the cameras, they have trailers/control rooms, high quality equipment, daily and weekly updates, 24x7 streams, etc. NSF is a big player, Tim Dodd is another one, there's quite a few smaller players too.
NSF DOES seem to have some sort of agreement with SpaceX on streaming some of SpaceX's livestreams (ie when Ship goes out of visible range and SpaceX is the only place you can get video and of course telemetry). They didn't use to that until shortly after SpaceX streams moved to X (and immediately got replaced on YT by AI generated Elon peddling bitcoins).
The things real NASA produces are in the public domain and can be used for all purposes by anyone on earth, royalty-free, no copyright whatsoever.
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-14/chapter-V/part-1221
So you wouldn’t exactly get a copyright claim when abusing the NASA logo but it’s still illegal.
I couldn’t find anything about the NASA word itself though, just some articles reciting guidelines by NASA not to imply an endorsement by NASA. I don’t know how that’s enforced though.
You are allowed to basically reproduce the work without any worries whatsoever.
Those "independent streamers" provide live launch streams with multiple feeds using their own equipment and to top it off they have numerous very knowledgeable hosts for all their streams. At this point I suspect they are covering every US based launch from all the major players. Hell, today they broadcasted both the New Glenn and Starship launches less than 24h apart.
But yeah, let's get hung up on an organization name that originated as an Internet forum for discussing all things....... NASA!
Sure, you'll get better telemetry info and the onboard views from the ships that these companies launch in their streams, but the commentary is sub-par at best (they are always sounding so "corporate official" to me) and they just don't provide the best views for watching it live.
I love that these space flight companies have opened up their development process to let the public follow along, I just think they aren't as good at producing live streams as some of these channels that have taken off over the last 5+ years.
NSF is taken, too.
Bits might end up in africa on land somewhere...
I am not surprised that stage 2 failed because they were testing with a lot of the thermal tiles removed.
thought it was ice from the outside but now i'm curious
This is like complaining that your first attempt at new programming language paradigm resulted in a compiler that is slow and sometimes has internal errors!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OacVy8_nJi0
According to the comments, the footage in this scene is a Saturn V on a launchpad and then an Atlas-Centaur Missile.
If it actually exploded (either on its own or because the flight-termination system kicked in) most of it should burn up on reentry though.
[1] has the planned flight path, as well as the impact zones.
1: https://flightclub.io/result/3d?llId=c5566f6e-606e-4250-b8f4...
It is called the Flight Termination System and it is very common on non-manned flights now.
Rapid unscheduled disassembly!
Or is comparing dev timelines for both a moot point because they are different classes of rockets
Starship has had 7 tests in the past 20 months. The first test barely got off the pad due to engine failures. The stages failed to separate, so it was blown up shortly after liftoff. The second test did separate, but the booster blew up shortly after stage separation and the ship blew up shortly before engine shutdown, raining debris across the Atlantic similar to today. The third test got to space, but the booster landing burn failed and the booster impacted the ocean at close to the speed of sound. The ship couldn't maintain orientation and burned up on reentry. The fourth test succeeded at all goals (soft booster splashdown and successful reentry, though the flap did burn through). The fifth test was a success (booster catch and soft ship splashdown, though again with some flap burnthrough). The sixth test aborted the booster landing due to antennas on the tower being damaged by the rocket exhaust at launch, but did splash down softly offshore. The ship also reentered and splashed down on target.
Today's ship failure is a setback, as it will likely take a few months for the FAA investigation to be completed. That said, SpaceX still seems likely to recover a ship intact this year, and at that point it will only be a matter of time before they can launch an order of magnitude more stuff into orbit than they can with the Falcon 9 fleet (and at much lower cost).
While NASA's SLS began in 2011 and successfully flew around the Moon in 2022.
Blue Origin's New Glenn also started development in 2012 and reached orbit on it's first flight with an actual payload.
When they say SpaceX is fast, what do they mean exactly?
Starship may not go 42 days before the next launch. SpaceX's Falcon 9 + Heavy has launched on average once every 12 days since 2010.
And while Starship was "in development" since 2012, that doesn't mean it was prioritized. The first prototypes were only made in 2018.
What a waste of time and resources.
As far as new stuff, they are trying to deploy some simulated satellites from the second stage and will try to relight one of the engines.
Edit: also, they are reflying one of the raptor engines that was on the previous flight (Engine 314, because pi).
First 10mins watching gets you to space with engine shutdown.
38mins after launch engine turns back on. 10mins after that reentry starts. 1:06 after launch is the landing.
I think that covers it.
Literally just lofted some satellites.
SpaceX is an extremely successful space launch company, and Falcon 9 is the best we've ever had. It's just Starship that seems to be going much worse.
Starship has already demonstrated several key things work - the new engines, catching the booster, and on-target intact reentry of the second stage, all for about as much money as a single SLS launch is projected to cost. (Thus far, they've only had one for $26B.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1VbZoYSyzA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMG8BbUjwRk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-uQNSxqQHY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYuUj777a0
One of them has the "Official Artist Channel" badge, and a handful of completely unrelated videos.
If you have a meaningful Youtube income, you need to spend some of your next Youtube check on say two Security Keys. If you like them, buy some more for everything else, but since Youtube is your income, step one lock Youtube with Security Keys.
Once that's required, errors of judgement possible through limited understanding or sleep deprivation cease to be a problem. Baby didn't sleep properly all week, some idiot screwed up your banking, and now Youtube keeps sending emails. You get another stupid Youtube email or at least you think so and either
1. You give Bad Guys your password and maybe OTP, so they steal the account and maybe in 5-10 days you and your fans can seize back control, meanwhile it's used to run scams
OR
2. Even sleep-deprived, confused and bewildered you will not post your physical Security Keys to Some Russian Guy's PO Box, Somewhere else, 12345. Your account remains in your hands because without that physical object they can't get in.
The most absurd example of all is the very recent case where Elon pretended to be a pro gamer and got caught. A streamer called Asmongold covered the topic on his stream, which triggered Elon to arbitrarily remove Asmongold's verified checkmark and remove his gaming badge. Considering the low stakes of this matter I find the actions ridiculous and don't trust Elon with having basically admin access to the platform at all.
I've also heard plenty of horror stories about the ruthless way the engineering in X is currently done, often carelessly breaking stuff. However I have to point out that the service is and has been far far more stable than the "haters" have predicted back when Elon took over and fired all those people.
Google/Alphabet just sucks and should be dissected.
> This marketing jargon speak for explosion is lulz
(Also a person who actively platforms outspoken neo-nazis runs the company that is launching them)
If you use GPS, you are inherently reliant on satellites, delivered with rockets.
Some of our resource shortages can be covered via resource acquisition in space.
Pushing the space frontier, is far more interesting and important, than mobile phone screen size, or fidelity.
It opens an entire new area to the sciences.
Also big explody tube warms the cockles of my heart.
It sometimes feels like it: everything blows-up and thread here is like "what a success", Second stage explodes - "beautiful" (while trash is falling into ocean).
Rockets are cool but it’s everyone’s planet, if this continues to make a huge mess, do us regular earth citizens have recourse?
More generally, getting the ship to work reusably seems like it will be a considerably greater challenge than reusing the boosters.
Actually I thought there would be less risk with the second stage changes, significant as they were, than the second catch. (Maybe there was less risk, of course, and the dice just didn't roll that way).
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
Wrong. Public funds are not paying for Starship development but for the HLS variant development, at significantly lower cost than the HLS lander from Blue Origin. Which likely still doesn't cover the entire funding even for Blue Origin. A lot is paid by those space companies themselves. A NASA developed lander (Altair from the Constellation program), would probably have cost around an order of magnitude more.
We have various interests in sending things to space, why not do it cheaply?
[0] Expanse, The.
Between this, AI (even in its current LLM form), and mounting evidence suggesting the entire solar system is teeming with at least microbial life, we are going to become an interplanetary species far sooner than many “skeptics” imagine.
We are just one more lander / sample mission / whatever away from having solid proof of life elsewhere in the solar system. That is gonna jumpstart all a huge race to get humans out into deep space to check it all out.
People worry about AI stealing their jobs… don’t worry. We need that stuff so humans can focus on the next phase of our history… becoming interplanetary. Your kids will be traveling to space and these (very overhyped, don’t get me wrong) LLM’s will be needed for all kinds of tasks.
It sounds crazy but I maintain it’s true and will happen sooner than you’d think.
I can 100% guarantee to you that the children of anyone born today will not travel to space in any significant number. There is nothing in space to travel to until we build extremely complex habitats, and that can't be done with manual human labor, it requires mostly automatic drones and maybe a handful of human controllers living in the ship that brought them there.
And building habitats that any significant amount of people (say, 1000) could actually live in will take a loooong amount of time and a huge amount of resources. And the question of "why would anyone waste time and resources on trying to live in conditions more inhospitable than anything the Earth can ever become, even with a major asteroid crashing into it in the middle of a nuclear war and a global pandemic?" will crop up long before more than one or two of these are finished.
Someone born today will have children living into the early 2100s. The first flight ever was a little more than a hundred years ago. Using your kind of logic, no one would have predicted most of the technology we take for granted today.
?
Hate to break it to you, but Space X isn't it. You can't have a CEO that is not aligned to the truth and reality to lead a company into something that is beneficial for humanity.
And on the other hand, it's also funny to see how "skeptics" (whatever that means in this case) dismiss or belittle achievements that were claimed to be impossible a few months or years ago (for example, the chopstick landing). It's like a never ending treadmill of
this is impossible->okay it happened, that's cool, but now xyz is impossible.
Plus, it seems normal to me that people care less about some sort of budget details or delays than really cool technical feats.
They regularly take human payloads, too. They’re the only American launcher currently able to do so.
"How can he be wrong when he is a genius and can land a rocket in two chopsticks?"
I’d love to see any other country or competitor catch a stainless steel rocket larger than the Statue of Liberty that was just cruising back to earth at sub orbital velocity. Everybody else is so far behind it’s not even funny.
Spacex is cool as shit. Screw the “skeptics” and haters. Some people have a complete lack of imagination.
when was your fully reusable full-flow staged combustion rocket engine scheduled flight, again?
And even if they don't. The upper stage is cheap enough that it can be expended and still be cheaper per flight than Falcon Heavy. So that tells me that the delays are on purpose. Their test flight planning is designed to maximize ego stroking.
SLS flew in 2022 around the moon. New Glenn just flew, reaching orbit with an actual payload.
Starship hasn't reached orbit, the best they did was send a banana to the Indian ocean.
Remind me again how SpaceX is the fast company?
ship looks to be lost. this was the main part, so it's almost complete failure.
It is possible they will have to add one more test launch to their schedule, delaying commercial operations because of that.
It is not a complete failure, but to me, it is more failure than success, even by SpaceX test flight standards.
Compared to the previous flight, that I consider a success, the booster catch was nice, but it is not the first, and they have plenty of tries left to perfect it, so it is not in the critical path.
the booster was the same, great, but not surprising.
So even if an engine bay fire burned the electronics and interrupted all coms (or FTS blew it up) they should already have a lot of data by that point showing how it went wrong.
SpaceX has a way of making the nearly impossible expected. We have forgotten quite quickly that booster catch is still a very experimental feature. Return to base on this flight wasn't routine yet.
BTW they first tested a redesigned version of Starship today.
Now the 'funniest' thing, this piece falls back where the ships are waiting. I hope it will miss this time too.
