SpaceX Starship booster in flames after unexpected ignition Space fans bored of waiting for the James Webb Space Telescope briefing were treated to fireworks of a very different nature after SpaceX's latest Starship prototype suffered an explosive anomaly during testing. Super Heavy Booster 7 was on its orbital mount during the test, which was a step on the road to a static fire test. …
N1 was massively different in just about every possible way starting with money. Because of lack of budget the only way to test an N1 rocket was to try to launch it. SpaceX test each part and sub-assembly at each possible point in production until it they get it right so often that the chance of a test of failing becomes really small.
What went wrong was very clear. The first step in starting a Raptor engine is to blast high pressure gaseous oxygen into the oxygen turbine and high pressure gaseous methane into the methane turbine until the pumps spin up fast enough to pressurise the liquid oxygen and methane. For the outer ring of twenty engines the high pressure gasses are supplied by the launch table as these engines do not have to relight during flight. Someone thought it would be a good idea to test this on several (all?) engines at once without deliberately igniting the propellants as soon as possible. After they had time to build up into a really big cloud the propellants found an ignition source.
I believe that SpaceXs Falcon / Heavy line of rockets had a rapid unscheduled disassembly / failure to land correctly at multiple points during testing. That's what testing is for. Seeing that their Falcons have now been flying (and landing, and flying again) for a few years now, I'm pretty sure they can sort this out, too. An explosion isn't a setback, it's a (n expensive) lesson learnt.
And, much as it is 'not ideal', at least we get some fireworks to enjoy :)
"and the public road outside is closed by the police."
Not the police. SpaceX "security" closes the road. The problem is they are only allowed to do that a certain number of hours per month/year and have grossly exceeded that. They are only supposed to conduct operations during daylight hours, but ignore that restriction too.
For Elon to say that they won't be doing any spin testing again with 33 engines mounted shows he isn't an engineer. In the aerospace world, it's a given that you test as you fly. Yes, component testing is done but that had already been done at the MacGregor site and testing on the booster is to prove out the system as a whole. It wouldn't be a good idea to find out there are issues with 4800t of propellents loaded. Big badda boom.
I was under the impression that they were just flowing lox and had put liquid nitrogen in the fuel tank to keep from having too much of a temperature differential at the common bulkhead. But, something turned out to be a pretty good fuel and detonated real good. Did they load Methane? Did they get a static discharge when the big plume of one component flowed out and crashed to the ground? It will be interesting if any truth about the incident gets reported out. Elon and SpaceX are known for doing different testing than they announce, but given the gear spotted around the "integration tower", it doesn't seem like they prepped for an ignition burp.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
