SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground SpaceX has made excellent progress with its Starship rocket. The stainless steel vehicle can now explode before even leaving the Earth. The latest setback happened just before a planned static fire this morning. The rocket was fueled ahead of a test firing of its Raptor engines, but abruptly exploded. The explosion occurred …
"In fairness, the bang was big enough to have sent some bits in the right direction for a touchdown on Mars. "
So, taking a page from Operation Plumbbob -->
According to Musk's lawyers no reasonable person would consider a Musk tweet to be a source of factual information. Let's suspend disbelief for a minute and take a look at what Musk statements would actually look like.
There is a pretty pork chop plot here. To pick a launch date from Earth select a blue area in the top half of the picture. There is an opportunity in late 2025 but even if that were possible it would arrive at about the same time as a launch near the end of 2026 which is at least not complete fantasy. Follow the diagonal line down to find the arrival date for the earliest possible unmanned test mission: second half of 2027. That just misses an opportunity to return home (pale blue patch in the lower half of the picture). The next opportunity to return is mid 2028. That gives the robots a year to set up and operate the propellant factory needed to fuel up for the return journey. If that works first time (it won't) the robots will get to Earth (follow a diagonal line upwards) in the second half of 2029.
If there are humans brave enough to follow the robots on the next window then that could be late 2027 but the journey time is so long they might as well wait until the end of 2028 and see what progress the robots made. The most optimistic timeline possible would put the robots launching from Mars before humans launch from Earth. That would make the return journey untested. It is almost possible to test return before launching humans: a second robot team launches about the same time as the first, loops around Mars without landing and goes straight back to Earth. The timings are tight but it might just about work with no payload.
Humans launching in late 2028 should expect that the return journey will not be possible in the 2030 window and make plans accordingly.
"How big and heavy is this propellant factory? Has one been made and tested on earth?"
Very big and very heavy. It will also need an enormous amount of machinery that They® aren't making on Mars currently. The most obvious place to site a test installation would be in Boca Chica. Earth isn't Mars, but the inputs are water and CO2 which the Earth has and Mars..... maybe. Besides making the propellant components, they will need to be stored until needed, at extremely low temperatures. If the works get a puncture and propellants leak, that's the crew missing their return launch window if they don't catch it fast enough and have the ability to effect repairs.
Huge and minimal.
Converting CO2 and water to methane and oxygen has been done at laboratory scale on Earth. The big reasons that no-one has tried it at industrial scale are that it costs power and natural gas is cheap. Given a big chunk of money it could be done on Earth. On Mars, CO2 is at a very low pressure and carries lots of dust that would clock up the pump required to get it to a useful pressure. That is probably solvable with trial and error but it is why I am certain attempt 1 by robots will fail.
On Mars, water is ice under some soil. Digging on Mars by thoroughly mass restricted robots has not gone well. Brute force engineering might be sufficient to solve the problem or might get clogged up with dust. I saw an interesting experiment in Antarctica to get water from ice in a way that could work on Mars. Start with a hole in the ice and put a cap on top to hold in pressure. Pump in hot water and use the pressure of the hot water to pump out cold water. With a little care, the ice melts to make a spherical hole that grows downwards. The surrounding ice contains the melt water and pressure. The cold water can be used to cool a nuclear reactor that supplies the hot water. It worked on Earth. There isn't an obvious reason why it cannot be made to work on Mars. As a bonus the spherical hole can be used as a radiation shielded habitat.
"It worked on Earth. There isn't an obvious reason why it cannot be made to work on Mars."
If you assume H2O and not "water". A lot of Mars is contaminated by various salts, particularly Perchlorate salts. That's not the sort of stuff you want going into the input of your processing plant. So, you have to process the water into H2O first. This is provided you can find a concentrated source of water (ice). There is water on Mars, but it's all sky aireology until somebody drills a well and finds a reasonable source and works out the optimum way to collect it. There's ideas and some of them sound pretty reasonable, but what happens if the conditions change slightly? Then there is the C02 to sort out. The atmosphere is mainly CO2, but it's very thin. A way has to be found to collect and process what's there and turn that "air" into CO2 to feed the input port of the machine. As claimed, there's been some small scale work done, but not bulk operations and no designs that can be chopped into modules and shipped to Mars and could be put together by a few astronauts that have just spent 9 months getting weak and losing bone mass in zero G. They'll have plenty to do just doing all of the things required to survive. If all they can do is work like mad to stay alive and make enough fuel to come back, why go at all? There would need to be time to do science and at least a tiny bit of exploration.
So you've just sent a nuclear reactor to Mars in order to process deep seams of solid ice which nobody has yet found in order to supply a laboratory process which nobody has successfully run at scale and for which the other feedstock is contaminated?
Put down the pipe, Elon.
Since any human launched to Mars in 2028 will be dead of radiation sickness within a year, the return trip's timing probably isn't critical. On the upside, and are lighter than people and don't need to breathe.
What is it about Musk's fans that leads them to talk airily about returning whole humans from Mars soon when not even a gramme of rock has been brought back and when NASA's final proposal said it would take until 2040 and cost $11bn? Ok, NASA is expensive and inefficient, but four years from now?
"The googlification of SpaceX is eventually inevitable and inexorable if the competition disappears"
An interesting factoid the Pressure-Fed Astronaut handed out was that the Atlas V is the only US rocket certified to carry RTG powered payloads. Vulcan is supposed to be working towards that since the Atlas V is EOL. Electron is doing fine and can be more cost-efficient for small payloads to certain orbits. SpaceX only has two rockets and the F9 Heavy doesn't get much work. The next iteration of Starship will have video of it on fire while being transported from the hanger to the test site (when rebuilt) if the evolution continues in the same direction as it has been lately.
Takes a LOT of radiation to give someone radiation sickness. Even more to kill them. They might not be very well but DNA has stunning proof-reading and correction built right in. I’d peg psychological issues as by far the biggest threat on a manned mission. After all, is someone who sets out knowing it’s almost certainly a one-way trip actually the best person for the job?
"Takes a LOT of radiation to give someone radiation sickness. Even more to kill them. They might not be very well but DNA has stunning proof-reading and correction built right in. I’d peg psychological issues as by far the biggest threat on a manned mission."
Radiation is a funny thing. While radiation from Plutonium might kill you, the metal itself is highly toxic, so if you ingest any, that will kill you first. Radiation can trigger other things that are latent in humans and that's amplified by a suppressed immune system caused by extended time in weightlessness.
People that don't feel well are often grumpy and there's no getting away from anybody on a spacecraft. This could be a real problem is Elon wants to cram people in as tightly as he has talked about. There will need to be a substantial mass allowance for meds. I expect that after a while, those meds will wind up being a major component of the water system, so that might save some weight through recycling. Water treatment plants on Earth have issues with all of the prescription drugs that doctor's prescribe, never mind the self-prescribed ones.
Not a fan. Years ago I wanted the guy in prison for securities fraud but my opinion of him has plummeted since then.
Space enthusiasts have a wide range of ability understanding of the problems on colonising Mars. You have not presented a new problem. Solutions have been under investigation for decades. If you want to be taken seriously show you have looked at the proposed solutions.
NASA and congress's preferred contractors worked hard to get the price up to $11B and it would take them until 2040 to allocate and spend that much money. They achieved that impressive feat in part by proposing new specialised hardware to return a single batch of samples. The other side is to keep the mass budget so restricted that millions has to be spent shaving every gramme off the hardware.
A realistic program would need hardware that can also earn lots of money elsewhere. Launching satellite internet constellations shows promise. Starship has already cost a hefty chunk of NASA's $11B funded by a mixture of Falcon launched Starlink and Musk's real skill: talking bullshit to investors. Falcon has already caused satellite operators to save money but not focusing on trimming off every possible gramme. Starship is intended put an end to the costs of excessive mass optimisation.
Four years is obviously impossible. It may come as a shock to you but many people are aware that one of the few things less believable that a Musk tweet is a Musk tweet promising something will be done by a certain date. Politicians are unable to look more than four years into the future. Investors are even more short sighted. Space enthusiasts have waited over 50 years for a return to the Moon.
Space enthusiasts have a wide range of ability understanding of the problems on colonising Mars.
As your postings in the area amply demonstrate.
You have not presented a new problem. Solutions have been under investigation for decades.
Translation: Nobody knows how to solve this.
to the contrary. Multiple possible options exist in reports written by various aerospace contractors.
But no one has put the serious money on the table to have them built. Musk knows nothing goes tills something goes and until they get to and back from Earth orbit that is a complete waste of time opening up those reports and starting to reverse engineer what's in them.
But the Mars atmosphere is a major PITA,. It's pressure is 1/140 of Earth sea level, and there's a fair bit of dust in it as others have noted.
BTW convection continues as long as the pressure is above about 10miliTorr, or 10micrometres of Hg. So Mars has about 500x the atmosphere to continue convection, making it dammed cold on the surface at night, as well as having very little radiation shielding due to both a very thin atmosphere and no real magnetic field. On Mars you'd need to be under 3m of soil to get the rad shielding enjoyed by people waling around on the Earth's surface.
"Translation: Nobody knows how to solve this."
Certainly, nobody has a 'proven' solution for many of the problems. Nor do they have a good approach to getting that proof.
I'd be curious to hear about anybody solving the Nitrogen problem. On Earth, we humans mostly breathe Nitrogen. Our bodies use the bit of Oxygen that's mixed in, but air is mostly Nitrogen. A pure Oxygen environment is dangerous. The fire on Apollo 1 was due to NASA trying to get away with doing that. The partial pressure of Oxygen needed is only 5.5psi (sorry for the units). That made it so much easier to build the capsule and it was much less mass to take with them. It's highly useful for air to be a mostly a non-reactive gas (under most conditions).
For an off-planet installation, recovering O2 from CO2 will be needed with some manufactured O2 to make up for losses.
If one looks at life on Earth, plants are a outsourced part of us and it takes a lot of them per human. The system is so interdependent that it's not entirely understood. We can make an abbreviated environment to take with us for short trips, but we will need much more research and long term studies to find out how to do that long term.
"What is it about Musk's fans that leads them to talk airily about returning whole humans from Mars soon when not even a gramme of rock has been brought back"
Elon and SpaceX haven't even shown any work on proposed rocket interiors, life support, sanitation, ISRU, etc. One would think that if they were even at the CGI rendering stage, Elon would be showing off images of some sort and claiming performance specs for yet undesigned systems.
I did all of my homework and learned all sorts of things, but my papers fell into the shredder so I can't prove anything.
Since any human launched to Mars in 2028 will be dead of radiation sickness within a year
Rounding up to 2mSv per day during flight in an unshielded spacecraft and 2mSv per day on the surface of Mars in an unshielded spacecraft, you'd get 730mSv in a year (73 rem, if you prefer). At 1Sv, you have a 5.5% chance of developing cancer in your remaining decades of life, assuming the disputed linear no-threshold model is used. Generally, serious radiation sickness develops around 500 rem / 5 Sv if the dose is received in a short period.
Shielding is rather straightforward. On the Martian surface, a few meters of regolith will screen out those cosmic rays. Around 40cm of hydrogen-rich materials like water, plastic, liquid methane, or feces would significantly cut the radiation dose during the flight.
"It is not getting to Mars that is the issue..."
It's not even getting beyond earth orbit that's the issue, heck, even getting it up into space in the first place without it going all wrong seems to be starship's stumbling block.
Space is hard, maybe just too hard for starship.
Actually Plenty of people would like to go to Mars, for a while.
The problem is finding reasons for them to stay once they get there.
It's the distinction between a holiday resort and a settlement.*
*I don't use the words Colony or Colonists (or technically "Colonials"). The Worlds Richest African American might have no problems with such language, but a lot of his former countrymen would.
A couple of decades after growing up with a copy of the Hitchhikers in my school bag I walked around Camden and was delighted to see that a local estate agent was actually called Hotblack Desiato!
more OT, what is the US going to do now SpaceX is getting as reliable as Boeing at putting hardware into orbit?
"Well, given that the objective is a crewed return mission to Mars"
As the US taxpayers have given SpaceX close to $3bn thus far for a lunar lander, that should be the objective. A giant Pez dispenser to be able to litter LEO with Starlink sats seems to be business case #2 with Mars (no ROI) as a vague maybe.
All is not lost! Maybe good old British skills can help to put it back together again:
"Archaeologists have pieced together thousands of fragments of 2,000-year-old wall plaster to reveal remarkable frescoes that decorated a luxurious Roman villa.
The shattered plaster was discovered in 2021 at a site in central London that's being redeveloped, but it's taken until now to reconstruct this colossal jigsaw puzzle.
The frescoes are from at least 20 walls of the building, with beautifully painted details of musical instruments, birds, flowers and fruit."
From:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y5w1ldz8do
Smiley Face icon, 'coz we need some good news once in a while.
"OK, this repid unscheduled disassembly nonsense is getting rather old."
The proper old term is "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly Event" or "R.U.D.E."
This one requires my standby of B.U.G., Blowed Up Good. Had it been a full stack, it would have been a B.U.R.G., Blowed Up Real Good.
This is turning into the Red Green Space Program.
Yet another thing he took a name from but hasn't actually read. Unless you think he approves of the Culture, where people can transition gender at will and it's considered unusual to not try it at least once.
(The FAIL is his, of course, not yours.)
Like fsck he is! Mr Leonard of Quirm was a true genius and a brilliant engineer (if a tad naive). I'll admit that his creativity didn't extend to the naming of his creations, but at least those where descriptive and accurate.
Maybe you were thinking of Bloody Stupid Johnson?
"Maybe you were thinking of Bloody Stupid Johnson?"
Leonard's naming skills combined with B.S. Johnson's engineering talent.
To be fair, Mr Johnson was able to make Pi = 3. The problem was in doing so other problems cropped up starting with the demise of the Post. Pretty blue light, though. Many of his inventions were quite clever, just not suited for the intended purpose.
Commenting on what some chatbot said in error is really a new low in journalistic reporting, guys.
Stop it. If it was vaguely entertaining or funny, it might be relevant, but "seeing what Grok says" about a story is literally the bottom of the barrel in preference to actually writing another line or two.
"The test was only a short(ish) static fire"
There was some discussion that they may be going for a full length static fire, I think, but I was only partially listening to the commentary.
But imagine if this had happened next week, on top of a fully fuelled full stack. It would be right up there with eccentrica gallumbits, as far as bangs go.
In a way, Space X are lucky. I imagine the test site is a mess, which will seriously delay testing of new ships, but it will be much easier to repair and replace that than one, maybe even two launch mounts / towers + infrastructure. They may even take the opportunity to install any changes/ upgrades needed for block 3 now, rather than later.
And I'm sure they will learn something from the incident, no matter what the cause. It's a pain in the arse, and it's going to delay them, but it's not the end of the world. If anything, it just highlights the need for redundancy - plans for a second test facility are likely already in motion.
...and there's yer problem. Static, or more fully static electricity is often the cause of sparks unless proper precautions are taken. Clearly they forgot the earth strap and the static decided to go mobile and jump the shark gap, causing the explosion. As London Underground are wont to say, Mind The Gap!
Gwynne put Kathy Lueders in charge of Starship. Like the rest of SpaceX senior management she knows that Elon must be guided or better yet distracted and not listened to. There are two bits you are not getting. Musk calling himself chief engineer is a lie for investors dumb enough to think that is a good idea. Musk provides funding at the expense of his personality. He is not making any engineering decisions.
The other bit is that a re-usable rocket is extremely difficult. Raptor 1 was by far the most performant engine around is not enough for Starship. Raptor 2 is has some more performance but effectively required a redesign of Starship that cancelled out much of what they had working on the first generation test articles. Its only real use is for making heat shield concept test equipment but so far has not achieved that.
Raptor 3 is much more ambitious. More performance and designed to not require the protective skirt which is heavy and covered in bodges to suppress fires from raptor 2s leaking propellant into the skirt. I am really not expecting much from Starship until Raptor 3 starts working reliably. Last I looked, some R3s did not explode when tested at McGregor and they might be ready for a launch next year. Until then SpaceX will continue to add temporary work-arounds to R2 based ships in the hope of actually testing a heat shield.
There will be more explosions for everyone to enjoy.
"There will be more explosions for everyone to enjoy."
Elon has come right out and said things about the Raptor engine that should have investors shying away from giving him more money. They are running them on the edge of what might be possible (not much margin) and the intention is to have a rapidly reusable system that hangs itself back on the rack to be refueled to go again right away. Gwynne has be touting passenger rocket travel that would need to be massively high margin to be viable, so she's not that bright or is required to repeat the lines Elon has handed to here with a smile on her face and oodles of confidence.
Run anything on the ragged edge and expect a higher failure rate. Dragsters and Funny Cars get a complete rebuild after every race. Pushing a V8 to give you 2,000hp doesn't lead to long life. For Le Mans, there has to be a balance between performance and reliability. You can't win if you don't finish.
You are right about the higher risk of engine failure, but you've forgotten about redundancy: a dragster has just one engine and if it fails that's game over, whereas the heavy booster has 33 engines and can still make it to space with one or more engine failures, maybe as many as 3 depending on circumstances. Plus, reliability will improve with more design iterations, especially as they gain knowledge from examining returned used engines.
"whereas the heavy booster has 33 engines and can still make it to space with one or more engine failures, maybe as many as 3 depending on circumstances. "
Depends on which engines fail. The center three do the steering on both halves. Lose those and it can be game over. Lose one vacuum Raptor on Starship (upper stage) and there can be too little control authority from the gimbaling engines to counter the asymmetric thrust. They still haven't show a fully outfitted prototype achieving orbit or handed out the detailed telemetry so maybe they can take real payload to orbit or maybe not, with no failed engines.
Examining used engines can be useful, but not complete assurance. Elon has said the Raptors are being run on the edge of their capability so all you'd find from one that came back without failing might be wear you didn't anticipate. Either that or little bits and pieces. It was rare for us to find a definitive cause of failure when I worked in aerospace as there weren't that many times we had a engine fail that didn't leave us with a box of metal scrap. It was only the times when things were a wee bit melty where we could find a proximate cause.
You'd have to think that his descent into right wing politics starting with the purchase of Twitter and culminating in a nazi salute at the inauguration of a president he bought and paid for might have been a bit too much for some of SpaceX's engineers. If someone at the top leaves its impossible to hide that fact. But if more than a few critical someones in the lower ranks leave does anyone think that SpaceX would publicize that fact?
I don't think we can blame Elon's management for this because Gwen's done a great job of keeping him away from the engineers doing the actual engineering in the past and wouldn't have changed that policy. But Elon's personality and antics outside the company will have had an influence on some of the engineers in a way she can't control. Even those who haven't got to the point of actually leaving (i.e. if they moved their whole family to SpaceX's company town it it would be a hard decision indeed) they may still be working there but in a disillusioned state where they are no longer willing to put in the long hours, treating it as more of a 9 to 5 until the right opportunity for them to bolt comes along.
When you have a workforce who truly and universally believe in the company, the leadership and what they're trying to achieve they can do great things. We've seen that many times throughout history. We've also seen many times what happens when a workforce no longer buys into that vision and leadership. Missteps and failures have a way of becoming contagious in such an environment, as even those who are still true believers see and feel that many of those around them aren't and it rubs off on them.
"But if more than a few critical someones in the lower ranks leave does anyone think that SpaceX would publicize that fact?"
Some do spot this happening with Tesla. They seem to go through many key people and Elon will fire anybody that questions his diktats. Look what happened to the Supercharger team during the last purge, the one division that is likely the most prone to success.
Unlike SpaceX, Tesla is publicly traded so it is harder to hide what is going on inside and there are shareholders to complain about the CEO's antics.
It is a terrible choice for Tesla's shareholders though. Musk is obviously depressing the value of the stock through his antics that have alienated the primary customer base for its cars. But the suspension of disbelief (to a level Steve Jobs could only have dreamed of) despite all his broken promises is the main reason the stock is about 10-20x higher than it should be based on fundamentals. So even if they had the votes to vote him out it would crash the stock worse than his nazi salutes ever could.
Many Tesla stockholders no longer care about sales of the car, it is all a moonshot bet on robotaxis, robots, and AI based on promises from a man who claimed full self driving nine years ago and still hasn't delivered. That's all that's holding the stock price up. If it becomes a car company again its value will crater and Musk will go bankrupt given how much he's personally leveraged on his shares. Some suggest that's why he had xAI buy X/Twitter at a hugely inflated price - the idea is that next step will be Tesla buying xAI at a similar hugely inflated price - that would mean he transfers much of his personal debt to Tesla shareholders!
"Musk is obviously depressing the value of the stock through his antics that have alienated the primary customer base for its cars."
The price of the stock is massively overshot. Elon's antics/promises/highly confident statements are skewing the real value of the company which would mean a lower, but more realistic, stock price.
So why not give credit to the engineers who actually did the work ?
Congratulations this is why America is going down the shithole. Pretending CEOs are gods, paying them billions while the real workers get shafted and paid next too nothing. THis is WHY and HOW America got Trump and Elon. Complete lack of honesty and balance which would have prevented all this mess and actually been a fair distribution based on merit instead of bullshit.
It's a different skillset.
Nobody is claiming that Gwynne has built a rocket. She's got people in place who can do that. She's got the funding in place so they can do it. She's got people in place to deal with all the regulatory stuff. She's kept Elon away from the engineer. All of that is remarkable in my opinion.
AC: Nobody is claiming that Gwynne has built a rocket.
cow:
Yes it a different skillset, but you completely overplay and over evaluate putting people in place compared to building rockets.
She can write as many emails as she likes but she isnt going to bullshit physics, and fix the problems that caused the last Starship to blow up.
The previous 3 StarShip V2 failures all seem to be related to the major changes to the downcomer assembly compared the V1 and it remains to be seen if the remaining V2 can be modified to sort this problem out. But I don't think we have anything like the information to know if this was a design issue over a commissioning issue. If as Scott Manly suggested it was a fluid hammer issue that could be entirely down to ground systems issue it is too early to know better.
" If as Scott Manly suggested it was a fluid hammer issue that could be entirely down to ground systems issue it is too early to know better."
He mentioned fluid hammer on the last static fire test, but goes on to show that it's highly likely that it was the line(s) coming down from the header tanks that let go and unzipped the airframe. Of course, he also says it wasn't a detonation so he's not up on definitions. Hear a boom, think detonation. If it was only a deflagration, it would have been a whooomf. With a detonation, there's often a deflagration. If photos are release of the test stand, I expect there will be evidence of shock damage.
When working with cryogenic liquids, it's very important to go through every mm to check for dead end sections. Trapped liquid will boil and blow things apart. It might have been that or a frozen relief valve (again). If relief valves cycle in Earth's atmosphere, they will collect ice which can block them. It's a solved problem, but if your mantra is that anything NASA has developed is automatically bad, you will have to learn many lessons on your own. Been there, got the embroided shirt.
No other spacecraft has ever blown up on the pad because it's all super safe and most people on TikTok think testing is boring, so last year and a complete waste of time.
I presume most of the commentards believe the pad area is empty when these tests happen simply because the siren is too loud...
"That little Honda rocket won’t be able to beat this."
mmmmmmm. Honda's rocket is a small scale test bed to develop skill with controls, navigation and operations. It's not a launch platform. My guess that if they didn't go overboard with custom hardware, it could have been built for around the $1mn mark. Elon has said that every Starship full stack test bed is $100mn in hardware and they have a production line going for them.
The American ones were !!!
Of course, they stopped being Nazis when they were 'convinced' to help the Americans !!!
Very apposite as there was a programme on TV about Von Braun and his american friends.
Particularly about his efforts to NOT be seen as a Nazi supporter and his somewhat sketchy record in WWII.
:)
1) He joined the Nazi party in order to be able to make rockets
2) He joined the German Army research at Peenemunde in order to be able to make rockets
3) He wasted huge amounts of German resources on a not very effective weapon. (see Tim Harford podcast etc)
Perhaps being allowed to make rockets by the US was repayment for 3.
Personally, I stick with Tom Lehrer's assessment....
I am aware of the position WVB holds in the US of A, BUT he did put some effort into sanitising his war history which was obviously quite successful.
Unfortunately, he was not able to 100% clean all traces from history.
Don't believe the glossy history of Rockets in the US of A, some/many of the people that were 'borrowed' from Germany had good reason to want to be in another country far far away from Germany.
Well hidden BUT still there if you look.
:)
... at ESA's Ariane program. Though of course US companies have trouble understanding that us primitive Europeans can sometimes do stuff better than the good ol' US of A.
ESA have been launching iterations of Ariane rockets for decades. Version 6 coming real soon.*
Their main advantage is they have a very good track record of, you know, not blowing up!
* There is some discussion about calling it the V6 because of a certain... sensitivity ... around rockets with that designation in these parts!
> Starship will never be successful to the Moon or Mars.
One of its problems is too many rocket engines, same as the Russians had with the N1 moon rocket - there are too many things to go wrong. They got it better with Soyuz of course but still the N1 had 20 rockets and StarShip has 33....time to dust off the Saturn V rockets engines!
"time to dust off the Saturn V rockets engines!"
The Soviets couldn't get really big rocket engines to behave and even the F1 was having issues that took time to solve. It was much easier to build lots of small engines there there were many more common machine tools (still very large) that could do the work over needing to build something not completely bespoke. A bigger engine can be more mass efficient than the equivalent thrust from many smaller ones. The trade-offs are many. What I see as most concerning is the number of propellant connections. Each of them with the possibility of leaking or breaking. With only 5 engines to feed, the plumbing can be more robust and still mass less than with 33 or more.
It's a pretty well-established dictum in engineering that if you need full performance you go for as few systems as possible and if you need some performance you go for as many systems as possible. That's why WW2 fighters were almost all single-engined (having two doubles the chances of failure and if one fails you're shot down in seconds) but bombers usually had four engines (you're vulnerable anyway but have a good chance of getting back on 3/4 or 1/2 power).
How many engines can a Starship afford to lose? If a single one has a 1/100 chance of failing during launch (figure pulled out of my arse) then the chance of all 37 making it to the end is 31%.
Its not quite that simple. As we have seen its not only engines that fail its many other parts. Its the weakest link, it only takes one to fail and the thing is toast.
Imagine hoping for not only one rocket to get into LEO, but dozens or hundreds which in turn provide fuel and more to others which must also be perfect on their trip to Mars, and then the Mars lander itself must be perfect on its landing.
WHat guarantee is there that the landing rockets will land and not blow up ?
The number of rockets is only the start of the SS problem.
Doing engineering in space to produce a tank that does not leak is going to be basically impossible. They will be building and launching tanks into space and hoping it works without the ability to manufacture and test on the ground. This is going to be an impossible task in terms of time required and cost because of the launch cost.
Then we have the problem of the constant change in SS itself. The tiles keeps changing. Sure they must or need to change but its basically a lottery. They have made no progress, they have tried many things and many have failed. I appreciate thats how rocket science works, but that doesnt change the fact they are no where nearer to actually accomplishing the simple task of landing on the Moon. Simple here is a label comparing the Moon and Mars. If you cant do the Moon today then tehres no way you can do Mars.
THey will never put anything on Mars except a suicide capsule. No base, just a prison, when the poor team there wishes they were in a Prison on earth because its paradise.
Maybe Elon should have a rethink. It might be better to spend all that money on fundamental research into propulsion systems not involving explosive liquids. So far he can't get there at all let alone send a man and get him back. Then if you want a colony on mars there's many tons of equipment needed. Even if you have raw materials there you'll need to discover, mine and build with tools. Until we get something like anti-gravity or space warps we are not going far from home and mars isn't even far in the scheme of space things.
Maybe it's just a cover to be able to hoist large weapon systems into earth orbit, that might explain the funding.
Elon doesnt want a Mars colony, he wants the American people to pay him to play with rocket pretending its about Mars.
Elons show and circus is working because you obviously cant tell. Elon doesnt care about his workers, what makes you think he cares about humanity and is doing the Mars thing because he cares ?
Starting to think that SpaceX's initial successes were down to everyone, every last one of them, working on the project, truly loving and believing and giving their all and caring passionately about it. Working for the future of all humanity with a completely altruistic mindset, believing in the science-fiction dream. That's how the very risky experiments bore fruit: superlative care and thoroughness.
Thinking now that even if only, say, 20% of them have a conscience, empathy, political awareness, kindness, even just that 20% working with a little less commitment, less care, less zeal, could be enough that every stretch mission will now fail, because there's something somewhere that no-one cared to cover.
If so, SpaceX needs to switch very much to a more NASA-like testing regime, not so many stretch goals, else every single new-design/mods launch will fail, and that'll be the end of the company. After all NASA were using government contractors with weasely pork-barrel management and bad risk practices - they needed to check and double check everything, and still faults reliably got through.
"Starting to think that SpaceX's initial successes were down to everyone, every last one of them, working on the project, truly loving and believing and giving their all and caring passionately about it."
That and employee #1, Tom Mueller. Rumor has it he left when Starship become a going concern as it was an Elon pet project and he knew right away it wasn't going to work.
Why stainless? What's the need to protect a rocket against rust? Any competent engineer will tell you that stainless steels in general have poorer properties relevant to pressure vessels than steels that have been specially designed for those purposes. But I guess the muskrat has (yet another) arbitrary fixation on "stainless" -- witness that "Chelsea tractor" of his, and, as in that case, he could have gone for a cheap grade.
"Why stainless?"
It almost makes sense if you squint a bit. There's good reasons why everybody else is using aluminum. ULA's Vulcan tank walls are made from 4 sections that are machined and friction stir welded together. The process done correctly leads to light and very strong tanks that, mechanically, are the same as one built as one piece. Fewer seams, fewer issues.
They've learned what the engineers already knew: the design parameters needed for Starship to do what musk promised can't work. The attempt to improve the lift to payload ratio by dropping weight in the vehicle makes it too unstable. Oh, and we learn that musk does not care how many US taxpayer dollars he immolates.
Perhaps musk should find a way to raise payloads into near earth orbit using the power of full self driving hype. That has sustained ridiculous "lift" in Tesla's valuation and musk's reputation.
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