SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now SpaceX's latest attempt to fly its Starship has again ended in a rapid unscheduled disassembly. The Thursday mission, the eighth flight of the vehicle NASA has contracted to use for 2027 demo of a crewed Moon landing, aimed to nail an hour-long transatmospheric journey to the Indian Ocean that the previous launch could not …
"Oh what irony it would be if SpaceX’s boss Elon Musk needs to renegotiation the company’s NASA contract to reflect increased costs, given his side hustle as leader of the public-expenditure-slashing Department of Government Efficiency."
SpaceX need parts that are imported from from places that will have tariffs imposed, eg, Europe.
So NASA will eventually have to foot the bill, one way or another. On the up side, the Unelected VP can blame high costs of unamerican stuff as the reason the US will be unable to colonize Mars.
see:
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-tariffs-elon-musk-companies-2025130
Blackmail and backstabbing are great strategies to loose friends and customers.
'A More Resilient Europe'—As The US Threatens To Restrict Starlink, The EU Rolls Out Its Own $11B Space Program To Rival Musk
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-resilient-europe-us-threatens-223046967.html
"This $11 billion satellite project is intended to compete with Elon Musk's Starlink and make Europe less dependent on other countries for digital communication. This comes at a time when the United States is reportedly threatening to cut off Ukraine's access to Starlink unless it agrees to a minerals deal."
The title says it all:
Trump says he’ll buy a Tesla to support Elon Musk, whose companies are struggling
Musk retweeted someone who suggested Mexican telecom billionaire Carlos Slim has drug connections, and Slim cancelled a $7 billion contract with SpaceX and will remove them from consideration for $22 billion of upcoming contracts. He said he will go to China and Europe instead. FAFO FTW!
So Musk's ketamine fueled craziness is costing him billions even outside of the "I will never consider a Tesla because Musk is a nazi" that is cratering Tesla sales in the US and Europe.
Here's hoping he loses everything. I know that's impossible for someone worth hundreds of billions, but if he fell down to being worth just "billions" or even "tens of billions" he will feel like he's gone bankrupt and it will be beautiful to see. And Trump would probably distance himself from Musk just because he wouldn't want his taint of failure to be alongside him everywhere he goes. And that would cost Musk's wealth to drop even further because a lot of Tesla's stock price is based on him getting super favorable treatment for stuff like deploying self driving taxis plus favorable treatment for SpaceX, but if he's out of the Trump buddy club then that stock boost disappears.
Musk lives on loans using his shares as collateral, to ensure he doesn't pay any tax. If the banks decide those shares aren't worth anything then they'll call in the debts. That will force him to sell off other shares, which will reduce their value and thus other loans get called in.
With luck, the resultant spiral would leave him with merely a couple of million, at which point he'll be bankrupt within a month because he's got absolutely no idea how to budget.
I think Tesla would have drop by another 60-70% before he is really squeezed. Its clearly not worth anything like that much on its fundamentals, it is basically a "hope and dream" stock for people betting on robotaxis. I'm hoping he's forced to announce a delay in their planning summer deployment in Austin - that would really tank the stock and make me a lot of money (I bought $10K worth of $300 July puts around the new year, basically betting that the post-election Tesla gains were unsustainable and Musk would wear out his welcome in the White House, last I checked that investment is now worth about $35K)
"(I bought $10K worth of $300 July puts around the new year, basically betting that the post-election Tesla gains were unsustainable and Musk would wear out his welcome in the White House, last I checked that investment is now worth about $35K)"
It's risky to take either side of a bet on Tesla as it rarely moves on fundamentals. When it does, the numbers are skewed again in a week. Our family trust takes the path of The Great God Om in his tortoise form. Slow, steady and dividends, baby. No overnight millionaires likely in our family, but there's steak in the fridge for making some pies and a nice roast for Sunday dinner.
"Musk lives on loans using his shares as collateral, to ensure he doesn't pay any tax. "
I don't see why that argument keeps being passed around. Loans must be repaid, so at some point money that's been earned from somewhere must get used to pay the loans back.
The game is usually about borrowing money, which can be cheap, and use it to earn more money while keeping one's own money held in reserve. The cheap cost of money comes down to having enough of your own and some serious collateral that a low interest rate can be negotiated. If you wait until you really need a pile of cash to keep the doors open or to move fast on an opportunity, the bankers are far less accommodating.
"So NASA will eventually have to foot the bill, one way or another."
Where does NASA get its money? Just wondering, is it all taxes or do they have large contributions from commercial work? This space stuff is very expensive and a bit like nuclear fusion; there should be a return one day, but when?
This is our weather report: today pieces of space debris will fall on the Turks and Caicos Islands. An armoured umbrella is recommended.
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Unless your name is Elon Musk or Donald J Trump. Then, contracts are what they say they are on any day and might change tomorrow.
Don't bank on getting paid for work done by either. They have form when it comes to stiffing contractors.
Oh, and don't even bother trying to quote for work if your surname happens to be 'Gay' as in Tyson Gay, the sprinter. DOGE has in its infinite wisdom decided that every reference to the word 'Gay' must be eliminated even if it is someone's legal name or even the name of the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
The USA is rapidly becoming a 4th world nation.
They have form when it comes to stiffing contractors.
I always had the impression that Space Karen's often peculiar if not bizarre antics were channeling L.Ron who had developed stiffing creditors to a fine art, I believe.
Gay' must be eliminated even if it is someone's legal name
So Me and My Girl isn't likely to see a revival in Trumpisstan the number The Lambeth Walk in particular? ;)
"decided that every reference to the word 'Gay' must be eliminated even if it is someone's legal name"
A girl in my high school class was named Gayle and commonly called "Gay". I'm pretty sure she's married with kids or has been. It's hard to keep track.
There loads of literature that used the word in it's classical meaning of happy/care-free. I wonder if Heinlein is being banned from libraries for a sentient space ship named Gay Deceiver. RAH has used the words in several books that I can recall. So have many of the so-called literary greats. I don't hold with revising past works to suit modern times. It's important to know how words and phrases were used in the past to comprehend society at the time.
"That's not how contracts work."
In theory, yes, absolutely correct. In practice with governments, .... you remember that line from Darth Vader "I've altered the terms. Pray I don't alter them further"? If you expect to live for another few decades, you could sue. Even then it's a coin flip on the court telling you that you "don't have standing" to bring the case.
"Little Donny Dumb gets his tame rubber-stamp Congress to pay for it?"
Congress hasn't been rubber stamping things. The Don is putting out unilateral proclamations. I'm hoping to see the glacially slow Congress do something about it. After the summer recess, of course. Once they've agree on how big a pay rise they'll vote for themselves.
Blowing up Starships is relatively cheap. This one was intended to blow up. The problem for SpaceX is it blew up before testing the heat shield. Starship HLS is a tiny firm fixed price contract compared to the money lost to Musk's rapid fire government policy.
From what I read, they didn't focus particularly on fixing the root cause (the leaks) but tried to make it such that if the leaks happened again it wouldn't cause an explosion.
That worked guys, well done :slowclap:
This is a vehicle that's intended to carry people, do better. Don't start going down the Tesla route of bodging stuff...
Wouldn't the root cause be euphemistically-phrased "harmonic response" (harmonic oscillations)?
Those can be easy, semi-easy, or hard to fix. SpaceX doesn't want to spend the time+money on a redesign+remanufacturing.
Anyone who's seen a motorcycle rider have a "tank-slapper" knows how quickly things can go bad once the oscillations start.
"melodic response' - shook shat itself to bits while humming a little tune, tiddley pom."
One of the "hums" of The Bear of Little Brains† seems apropos
"And the cuckoo isn't cooing,
But he's cucking and he's ooing,
And a Pooh is simply poohing
Like a bird."
† arguably a towering intellect in Trumpisstan.
Sorry, yes the root root cause was the harmonic response, which caused leaks, the leaks caused overpressure, and the overpressure caused fire and explosion.
So my crude understanding is that they did the rocketeering equivalent of sticking some duct tape over the bits that had leaked to reduce the likelihood of a leak, and put something in place to vent the overpressure to reduce the chance of fire and explosion. Clearly neither worked.
So they need to stop the leaks, and they need to stop it by sorting out the harmonic response, not bodging round the edges.
Being old I remember the Apollo mission astronauts mentioning what became known as the pogo effect - I think that was the effect of a small change in fuel feed rate being amplified into a shift in position of the whole rocket.
Am I right in thinking this harmonic response is some part of the spacecraft resonating with some component of the general vibration from the engines? Damping the resonance so the response is just flat sounds a sensible move to me. I suppose that would need redesign of assemblies in various parts of the spacecraft?
Indeed, the POGO effect is nothing new. Oscillation and vibration issues caused a lot of fun and games with the Soviet N-1 rocket also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)
At least the SpaceX rocket didn't drop straight back down onto the landing site, unlike the 2nd N-1 launch.
"I think that was the effect of a small change in fuel feed rate being amplified into a shift in position of the whole rocket."
Yes, the mass of fuel traveling down to the pumps has a lot of momentum. Akin to "water hammer" but it can get positive feedback loops when the throttles try to compensate. One approach is to make sure there's plenty of hysteresis in the control loop.
"Usually a leak causes lower pressure. "
I had a mechanic tell me the AC system on my car was leaking and, at the same time, overpressure/overfilled. Since it hadn't been serviced for at least a year, I spotted the story line and took the car elsewhere. A flush and refill made it blow cold again.
"Wouldn't the root cause be euphemistically-phrased "harmonic response" (harmonic oscillations)?"
There's a video by Smarter Everyday where Destin is on the pad with ULA chief Tory Bruno the day before the first Vulcan launch. They touched on the topic as well as screech coming from the flame front if you've ever noticed that rocket engines can sound like they're peeling out when they fire up. Worth a watch.
Yes, this was a bodge. The long term fix is to switch to Raptor 3 which has fewer places to leak. Raptor 3 is not ready and SpaceX really wants make progress on the heat shield in the mean time. Re-routing a bunch of aircraft around falling debris does not cost SpaceX money so IFT8 makes a kind* of sense.
* selfish, irresponsible, ...
There is no evidence released that says the cause of the incident was an engine failure - changing an engine is a red herring.
The issue (harmonic response) caused failure of the fuel system somewhere - downcomer joints, engine manifolds, even tank structure itself and leakage into the attic. The problem is that they may have cured the apparent issue (as demonstrated during the extended static fire) but if the fuel itself acts as a dampener (eg for the main downcomer) then the fuel level may mitigate the problem until it reaches a critical level or be in a certain attitude.
The only way they could even try to stimulate this issue in testing is a full tank test firing, but on a test stand this may not demonstrate the issue (see comments about pogo earlier) - for a start the dynamic forces are different and the vehicle attitude is wrong ... So, unless the fault is a result of minimisation which can be found, or a basic design flaw with the triple downcomer pipe structure (which I believe was used in the last flight and this) the only way to test it is to fly it ...
"The problem is that they may have cured the apparent issue (as demonstrated during the extended static fire)"
The test may have shown up a problem they thought they had but not been adequate for the actual problem. It might be stresses from moving the whole thing around on-site and the static fire just primed the failure mode which may not have happened had they not conducted the test. What they might need to do is an extended and heavily instrumented test based on flight data and then take the whole thing to bits and examine every part very carefully.
It didn't, but it did get them other data. There were more changes here than just the heat shield.
They're getting pretty good at catching boosters, which is good to see - and will stand them in good stead when they try to catch a ship as well.
The early failure absolutely limited the data they could gather, but it didn't mean they gathered none.
Leaked images appear to show a completely missing Rvac nozzle.
"They're getting pretty good at catching boosters, which is good to see"
I don't see why. It's moving the catch point from landing legs to landing "armpits". They land the F9 all the time with very good accuracy and might even have to vary the aiming point so they don't just drill a hole through the concrete. Catching further up on a couple of pins removes the mass of the landing gear, but it requires more things to work precisely for it to be successful. If they catch a booster and there's damage to the site, they will have to ditch the upper stage. If they were to crash the booster on a landing pad, there could be enough time for the fires to go out and tractors brought in to drag the wreckage out of the way so the upper stage can be landed. Having two towers is ok, but if they crash a booster into the very close tank farm, the whole site is offline and the upper stage is toast since they won't have that long of a window to bring it back down due to propellant boil-off.
SpaceX really needs a reusable Starship to support their Starlink program. The world doesn't really need a 100t+ launch vehicle very badly. When one is needed, it's for a very specific mission so a generic vehicle is fraught with compromise.
"The long term fix is to switch to Raptor 3 which has fewer places to leak. "
The downside is it being really hard to inspect a 3D printed engine/investment cast. If a modification is needed, the whole engine and possible a whole run becomes scrap. This system is supposed to be reusable so being able to quickly inspect the engines and do any refurbishment is key or the engines need to go back to the shop for a complete tear down and comprehensive scan.
The upside is that once the engine is completely dialed in that it can be easier to crank them out if they can be QC'd properly. I've been through this and another compromise is that, so far, it's not easier to use different metals. Copper for the combustion chamber gives really good thermal conductivity and higher operating temperatures, but it's heavy. Aluminum has reduced thermal conductivity and temp tolerance compared to copper, but it's much much lighter. The universe was poorly designed so there isn't a one-size-fits-all material for rocket engines that has the melting temp of Nickel, the heat conduction of diamond and the density of Beryllium. If there was, it would be impossible to use with additive processes (Murphy, et al).
"From what I read, they didn't focus particularly on fixing the root cause (the leaks) but tried to make it such that if the leaks happened again it wouldn't cause an explosion."
The leaks causing a fire is an issue, but it would be more probable that something let go causing engines to flame out which led to tumbling, which led to more bad things. There was a call out on Flight 8 of "FTS Safe(d)" that seemed to indicate that the Flight Termination System has previously been turned off. That makes sense since one wouldn't want it going off on accident. It also tells whoever might have the Big Red Button on their screen that it's a manual thing at that stage of flight. If it was activated, it took far too long. At the very least, it would have made sense to shut the whole thing down if they wanted time to clear the islands before blowing it up.
Turbo pumps are notoriously twitchy and ice forming in the cryo tanks has been a concern. It has been pointed out on the control room feed that there was an explosion in the engine bay just prior to loss of signal that an operator was reviewing. Too bad the engine bay view wasn't on the live feed when that happened. It wouldn't be a stretch to believe that plumbing came unplumbed which caused engines to starve and go out and a good mix finally came together and went off bang. If they blame it on V2 of the Raptor, any claim of V3 being better has yet to be substantiated. The V2's are coming out of test approved for flight so they can't be complete shit.
Some of the six motors stopped and the thrust must have become too far off centre line and caused the thing to start rotating. Seems very similar to the last flight. Guessing causing extreme vibration or oscillation breaking stuff in the back, something that can only be really tested by flying at 15000 km/h in near vacuum.
The engines cut out because they self-dismantled.
In the video there's a very visible burn-through on the engine bell that ceased first. It basically blowtorched itself in half, along with the three smaller engines in the middle.
Why did it do that?
A broken pipe would reduce flow to the engine as the liquid is going elsewhere, and they're cooled by their own propellant so reduced flow reduces cooling.
The most probable cause is that it's exactly the same fault as before - the pipes vibrated themselves to bits.
Looks like this may have been down to a Raptor vacuum nozzle failure - have a look at ~47 minutes into the Space X stream and you can see an orange glow round what appears to be a slot cut into the end of the Raptor vacuum at the bottom left of the screen. There are reports that this engine can be seen exploding on a screen in the background on the control centre video feeds, but I've not been able to verify that yet.
It is possible that this engine was damaged during the extended static fire that was used to verify that the plumbing and engine profile changes had fixed the harmonic issues. Testing vacuum engines at sea level is hard as flow separation within the expansion nozzle can cause the nozzle to fail - this is mitigated this by putting a supporting ring round the end when test firing, but that doesn't elliminate all of the stresses.
It would be bad luck if it turns out that testing to prove that a fix is valid caused the vehicle to be lost.
Edited to add:
That engine was the first one to show as shut down on the telemetry feed. It appears as if its failure then took out the centre three engines (not quite all at the same time). Loss of control was inevitable once they were out as they are the only ones that have the thrust vector control that's needed for steering, and the two remaining vacuum engines would have been producing a significant turning moment due to unsymmetrical thrust.
Looks like this may have been down to a Raptor vacuum nozzle failure - have a look at ~47 minutes into the Space X stream and you can see an orange glow round what appears to be a slot cut into the end of the Raptor vacuum at the bottom left of the screen. There are reports that this engine can be seen exploding on a screen in the background on the control centre video feeds, but I've not been able to verify that yet.
I was watching the NSF feed and they spotted that, and reckoned it was a burn through on that nozzle. But they also reckoned there may have been a fire given there was some possible flame visible around the camera looking at the engines. That feed was cut pretty abruptly just before the UED and Starship developing a bad attitude. Apparently the previous flight turned into more physics than expected due to a fire in the 'attic' between the bottom of the fuel tank and the engines.
I can't help but wonder if the hot staging is maybe a lil too violent. There were some good images of the flame jetting out around the staging ring before stage seperation, so how much of that force & fire ends up being directed up into Starship's engine bay.
"but Jellied Eel has raised the bar another notch"
MPTE doesn't really roll off the tongue, and it's RUDE (Rapid Unexpected Disassembly Event), BTW. The term has been in use far longer than Elon has been alive. Anecdotally, it's from "Well, that was rude" and a backronym created from that.
I'm staying with BUG (Blowed Up Good) or BURG (Blowed Up Real Good). The last two $100mn Starship test flights have been the latter due to all of the pretty lights.
"I can't help but wonder if the hot staging is maybe a lil too violent."
To need to do the hot staging gives the impression that they are having to push every component of the system and don't have any margin. Once out of the atmosphere, Newton takes over and a body in motion stays in motion at a constant velocity in the same direction. If the booster pushes the upper stage away to disconnect and let it maneuver to come back. they Starship engines can start any time with no loss of momentum. With amateur rockets, we will hot stage to maintain acceleration as when the booster motor dies out, the rocket really starts decelerating so it makes sense to start further stages early depending on the flight profile desired.
"Testing vacuum engines at sea level is hard as flow separation within the expansion nozzle can cause the nozzle to fail - this is mitigated this by putting a supporting ring round the end when test firing, but that doesn't elliminate all of the stresses."
There are vacuum test chambers for rocket engines. I was able to tour one at the Air Force Research Lab at Edwards Air Force Base in California where they did a lot of the work on the F1 engines for the Saturn V rocket. We went up to Rocket Ridge as well and I got to stand on the stand where those engines were tested. No photos were permitted and the official photographer never got around to getting any to us. The bum. An amazing day.
The vacuum system builds up a whole bunch of steam and a rocket engine is run in a chamber that's "blown down" well below atmospheric pressure. Maybe there's information on how much of that can be done, but it's an impressively large facility.
They catch the boosters, people on the ground catch the debris.
Such a deal.
Meanwhile, I'll take this opportunity to repeat my observation that both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, for all their multitudinous faults, have taken flights in their contraptions, while Mr Musk, to the best of my knowledge, has not flown in his1.
What this might mean about his confidence in the vehicle is left as an exercise for the reader.
_____________________
1 Yes, I know there's a difference between Starship (oh, please, give me a break) and the workaday Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule, but my point still stands.
"1 Yes, I know there's a difference between Starship (oh, please, give me a break) and the workaday Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule, but my point still stands."
A few people have taken a two week working holidays on ISS. I had the pleasure of meeting Anousha Ansari and getting a couple of her books signed. Very lovely lady. Elon has more than enough wonga to not only make the trip, but bring a friend and have a backup capsule ready to launch, just in case. Jeff took his brother.
then the rocket equivalent seems to be "it's always resonance".
AFAICR the shaping of the Saturn-V nozzles with their very carefully designed baffles were the biggest challenge engineering wise.
The fact it's clearly not a settled science is telling.
Well if you will insist on making your rockets out of long thin tubes that aren't rigid enough
Britain will launch (*) the Dibner - a proper rocket made out of cast iron with buttresses
* - not up obviously, it's far too heavy. But if we ever need to launch a rocket down, we will be world leaders
"The other space news is that the Voyager spacecraft are still, just, working as they approach 50 years."
For all the grief that NASA gets, they do get an amazing number of things right. Long live the 90 sol MER rovers that lasted ages. Opportunity went 14 1/2 years. Spirit died much younger but still way past it's best-by date. Hubble is still hanging on.
They claim "harmonics" (vibrations?) did in the Starship, rupturing propellant lines and starting an explosion which knocked out the engines. I'm somewhat surprised this keeps happening since none of this seemed to be a problem on the first flights. The modifications they've made haven't had the desired effect. They're churning out so many Starships that the quality of workmanship may also be falling and contributing to the increased failure rate. I hope they can get this sorted soon.
IMHO this is a huge setback since they haven't made any progress during the last three flights. A lot of work has to be done before they can even attempt a trip to the Moon and an uncrewed landing. And 2030 is rapidly closing in. The Chinese seem to be on track for a crewed landing at that time and NASA (and U.S. Congress) are adamant the U.S. should beat them to it. If things don't improve quickly it may become a close call.
"I'm somewhat surprised this keeps happening since none of this seemed to be a problem on the first flights."
Well, the first flight went really badly, as expected. Lots of significant changes are being made with each flight. My take is they aren't putting the time and effort into getting things right before they commit to hardware. Virgin Galactic may be completely washed up at this point since they committed to the airframe design before getting the rocket motor all worked out and then tried like the dickens to get the motor to work in the space allocated and the parameters required. It would have been better to spend the time to get the motor all sorted and then finish details on the airframe. Sort of like the A-10 starting with the big bang stick and wrapping the plane around that while added lots of mounts to load on even more fun for every flight.
Every change that Starship was deliberately exploded. If the engines had failed and they lost control, one of the jobs of the Range Safety Officer is to remotely detonate the vehicle - it's safer for smaller fragments to disperse than it is for a massive ship coming down in one place.
You can see in the Challenger videos for example (and it wasn't heavily publicised at the time) but the RSO remotely detonated the SRBs after the explosion.
I didn’t see it live but watching the subsequent video, I’m sure that a second or so after the engine shutdown and loss of attitude control, there was a callout “xyz (wasn’t entirely audible) is safe’ed’. Now the only thing I know of that could fit is FTS (Flight Termination System - ie self destruct). So assuming that ‘safe’ed’ means deactivated* then was the destruction of the vehicle not down to the FTS but simple dynamic stress?
* and, I’m making a massive assumption, I’m sure there are commutards on here far more knowledgable than me on this, so more than happy to be corrected.
Not clear why they'd safe it given the ship was tumbling at that point.
Scott Manley dropped a video about this and reckoned it was a callout, so staff pointing out that FTS was currently safe, and maybe it should be re-armed. He also speculated that it may have started breaking up due to the stress. It was interesting watching the fuel levels change as the ship tumbled, and there must be a fair amount of kinetic energy from that sloshing from one end of a tank to the other.
" It was interesting watching the fuel levels change as the ship tumbled"
That seems to demonstrate that there's some sort of fuel level sensor being used and not just a mathematical model driving the display. If that's always been the case, it brings into question whether they ever really did a propellant transfer from the header tank to the main tank.
It's hard to get reports out of it, I'm reading more and more that suggest it may have been auto-destructed once it sensed it was beyond flight limits. But from what I can tell, the last attempt self destructed:
https://www.spacex.com/updates/#flight-7-report
"Contact with Starship was lost prior to triggering any destruct rules for its Autonomous Flight Safety System, which was fully healthy when communication was lost. The vehicle was observed to break apart approximately three minutes after loss of contact during descent. Post-flight analysis indicates that the safety system did trigger autonomously, and breakup occurred within Flight Termination System expectations."
"If the engines had failed and they lost control, one of the jobs of the Range Safety Officer is to remotely detonate the vehicle"
And, the RSO should not need to get any approval to do that. It can be prudent in some instances to hold off on blowing it up, but shutting off the motors and letting it get clear of some islands first and then create a load of multi-colored rain. What to do when depends on the circumstances. One big lump might be preferred if the splash down point is away from everything rather than a wide area of smaller chunks.
I've stood by with a Big Red Button before. In our case, the rocket wouldn't be blown up, but a lot of valves would be immediately put into their default state which would cut pressure and vent tanks. We held planning meetings on where, when, who, how. For most flights, there would be two of us with kill-switches looking on from opposite sides. The flight director could also call out dropping the vehicle if he could see that control was lost and the rocket didn't do it automatically.
There were two "fences" for the landers I worked on. Breaching the first fence should have had the rocket land immediately and violating the second fence would kill the engine and vent the tanks. Humans were in the loop in case the software wasn't right. I can recall only one time where the first fence was violated and that was due to a programming error by the GN&C engineer and led to a new and mandatory flight profile checklist. The lander rose up 50cm and landed itself. Very not good.
Musk's Holy Grail talk with one of his litter after flight 8.
"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a rocket on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them.
It sank into the swamp.
So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp.
So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp.
The eight one blew up.
But the tenth one will stay up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest rocket in all of The United States of Apartheid".
According to WikiP referencing https://asn.flightsafety.org/wikibase/435032 the most recent airship crash was 25 September 2024 not exactly a disaster but there have been a few since 6 May 1937 Hindenburg Lakehurst. The last actual Zeppelin flight was 20 August 1939 and without incident. The remaining Zeppelins' aluminium was recycled for wartime aircraft construction.
I would dearly love to "rediscover" Cavorite just to rain on Musk's parade although the temptation just to paint bomb the prick with the stuff might be too great. ;)
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Building spaceships isn't easy, how many have NASA and the Soviets blown up while getting it figured out?
Look at all the Falcon 9s that blew up during development (SpaceX made it easy, it created a blooper reel!)
It's now our most reliable space craft.
They will get the Starship figured out, and Starship launches will be just as common... if not more so, than Falcon 9 launches.
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