Starship bloopers: Watch Elon Musk's Mars ferry prototype explode on the pad during liquid nitrogen test Video footage has emerged of SpaceX's Starship prototype dramatically blowing up on the pad. The Starship SN1 prototype was undergoing pressure testing at the Musketeers' factory at Boca Chica in Texas, USA, by filling its tanks with liquid nitrogen. The base of the rocket appears to have ruptured, sending the structure …
Thing has always looked like a cheap chinese buttplug mould (well used). Anyone watching the stream of the 'work' going on last few weeks will have noticed nothing but a bunch of dudes just milling about randomly while 'stuff' was supposedly happening.. Whole thing is about as convincing as a kid's TV show.
I will bow to your superior experience of buttplugs.
Judging by price and progress, Boeing is far better at getting a bunch of dudes to just mill about randomly while 'stuff' is supposedly happening. I missed their SLS launch scheduled for September 2018. Perhaps it was not convincing enough to appear even on kid's TV show.
You do realise that SpaceX is a privately held company, and thus has no need to impress potential stockholders?
Unless you are (a) an engineer, (b) have been watching the feed for the full working day, each day, and (c) have access to feeds from inside the rocket then how do you know what progress is being made and who is doing what?
"bunch of dudes just milling about randomly while 'stuff' was supposedly happening"
uh, you don't do much engineering, do yah?
if you ever HAVE,. you would know that it very often consists of a bunch of egghead types standing around discussing beer or baseball [in lieu of work, while thinking about the problem to solve], and occasionally coming up with a stoke of brilliance.
Last such meeting I got inspired, sketched something, handed it to the manager, who then [along with a couple of others] implemented it. And I was just sitting nearby at the time (working on something else).
So yeah cardboard+tape prototypes, hacked together cables, re-purposed "things", all typical. And the "milling about randomly" is a regular part of that, too.
It wasn't planned, but it can't have been too unexpected either. They were using a new welding scheme and had already noticed they'd set it up wrong. Fault corrected for SN 2. This SN 1 was going to be pressure-tested but they were never going to attach Raptor engines to it.
That's ok... it's why we test. Me, as a test guy, am not surprised. SpaceX's mantra of build, test, rebuild, test is great! Yes, maybe a bit more costly for development, but the results speak for themselves. Where's Boeing's competitive booster? NGC's? Lockheed's?
Yeah, testing can lead to spectacular finishes, but this is no failure; lessons were learned.
He missed the trick, then.
"That. Uh. That was totally supposed to happen. Totally. Planned test to destruction. Success!"
There's very good precedent. NASA did it with SLS.
https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/nasa-engineers-break-sls-test-tank-on-purpose-to-test-extreme-limits.html
There's a new Youtube documentary about how rockets are built, and I must admit I was so engrossed I watched all of it (also because my browser somehow filters out the ads).
Yeah, the risk of an earth shattering kaboom is ever present. Less so now, but it never quite goes away.
Not to mention that with film cameras you can always ditch the film with the images still latent and undeveloped.
For PFY’s in the ancient times cameras were filled with rolls of film doped with silver iodide and other things if it was colour. The exposed film then had to be ‘developed’ using chemicals in a ‘darkroom’. Then it would be ‘fixed’ to stop the process before being ‘washed’ in clean water and then dried.
I have done this for black and white film. Mostly film which had been in electron microscope cameras under vacuum while I took montages of the whole cross section of a certain mouse muscle. After developing the film was printed on 8X10 paper which could be used under a red light in the ‘darkroom’ so you could see what you were doing. We were lucky we had a print processor. You put the exposed paper in one end and it spat out a dry print at the other end.
These then had to be trimmed of the white border before I assembled the montage which could be 7’ across. Clear tape across the front reinforced with masking tape on the back. Often I had to take those down into the scope room and resolve ambiguous profiles. One montage was one data point. 6 were usually required for each point or bar or a graph.
The ever obligatory link: Ignition, An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants. By John D. Clark
The answer is probably quite a lot. But most of them on test stands and research equipment. Tests with the full rocket (or large equipment) was usually filmed right from the get go. Even the teams at Peenemunde seem to have made a lot of video of their (failed) launches.
This post has been deleted by its author
combining muriatic acid and aluminium foil into a 2 liter bottle, capping it tightly and running away after putting it down makes for a nice loud boom, and a cloud of vapor you probably shouldn't breathe.
I had an.... interesting teacher in sunday school. The boom occurred right in the middle of the sermon as well, which added to the hilarity factor.
SpaceX is looking for the exact safety design limits for their cryogenic tanks. The title of this article is Moronic. No one has ever design a rocket fuel tank system like this before; There are no Engineering Standards to go by. If they blow up a few they will never know for sure exactly how hard they can push them. This isn't a joke, this is real world science and engineering at it's best. Elon knew this one was most likely going to fail and they had already changed the welding procedures on SN2.
... and when the operating specs are written down for later maintenance staff, the 'max allowed' pressure should be reduced a wee bit, in order to allow for some headroom.
"An engineer is always a wee bit conservative, at least on paper." - M. Scott
SpaceX is looking for the exact safety design limits for their cryogenic tanks. No one has ever design a rocket fuel tank system like this before; There are no Engineering Standards to go by. If they blow up a few they will never know for sure exactly how hard they can push them. This isn't a joke, this is real world science and engineering at it's best. Elon knew this one was most likely going to fail and they had already changed the welding procedures on SN2.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
