SpaceX launches another Starship rocket after back-to-back explosions, but it tumbles out of control
https://www.thecanadianpressnews.ca/science/spacex-launches-another-starship-rocket-after-back-to-back-explosions-but-it-tumbles-out-of/article_3cbeb633-e86d-5cf3-b984-e0fc52b6749c.html
17 Comments
Let’s be honest: it will takes years before we have a working orbital economy that relies on starship
I am honestly starting to be skeptical that this system works at all. They need to stop experimenting with failure and do a complete model to ensure this actually is recoverable in ideal situations. Seeing the internal damage during re-entry and the melting of the maneuvering canards at the joints makes me worry that this will never be astronaut rated. Getting it into orbit seems to generally work fine, but the recoverable part may not be possible. Maybe I am old enough to have fears of another Columbia disaster when I watch it melt each time.
When you lose a lot of good engineers, things start to happen. Just ask Boeing.
Couldn’t deploy the starlink simulators, couldn’t open the door, couldn’t return the booster softly in the water and they lost total control of their ship and couldn’t even reenter in the correct orientation
Total failure
Boeing had a rocket that worked and returned but Trump canceled it, nice work!
Congratulations on failing to reach the first milestone 9th time in a row.
The lie behind Starship is that it has anything at all to do with getting humans to the Moon or Mars.
The reality is that SpaceX needs something with the capacity of Starship in order to make Starlink satellite network work.
A full deployment of Starlink would be about 40,000 satellites.
On average, the service life of a Starlink satellite is about 5 years. Which means SpaceX needs an economical way of launching 8,000 satellites per year. Falcon can launch 24 at a time, which means they would need 334 launches a year. That’s way too many to be cost effective.
So the whole thing about developing Starship as a platform to get humans beyond LEO is just a pitch to get NASA to fund the development of their Starlink launcher.
source: [https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/heres-why-elon-musk-asked-his-spacex-employees-to-work-thanksgiving/](https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/heres-why-elon-musk-asked-his-spacex-employees-to-work-thanksgiving/)
As I was saying before, spacex needs to focus on a boring upper stage. Super heavy works fine. It has enough performance for a lunar landing. Just get a working launch system and use it for launching starlinks.
That’s a bit negative… ‘back to back explosions’.. starship made SECO for the first time which is a great milestone. They have also caught the booster three times now I believe. That’s an extraordinary achievement. The starship program is going extremely well. EDIT: those who down voted me don’t understand the starship program. Everything is going as expected. This is the new norm.
I still have hope this thing can work. Rocket explosions do happen a lot, and Falcon 9 went through a lot of iterations.
That being said, it’s horrifying we have to deal with musk and this. A choice between a nazi and no human spaceflight is no choice at all.
If this thing works it could revolutionize LEO.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|——-|———|—|
|BFR|Big Falcon Rocket (2018 rebiggened edition)|
| |Yes, the F stands for something else; no, you’re not the first to notice|
|[CRS](/r/Space/comments/1kxk85m/stub/mur55hg “Last usage”)|[Commercial Resupply Services contract with NASA](http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/launch/)|
|[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1kxk85m/stub/muqyyeq “Last usage”)|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1kxk85m/stub/murz9jf “Last usage”)|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[QA](/r/Space/comments/1kxk85m/stub/mupyqix “Last usage”)|Quality Assurance/Assessment|
|[SECO](/r/Space/comments/1kxk85m/stub/musf2bn “Last usage”)|Second-stage Engine Cut-Off|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1kxk85m/stub/mur2oxu “Last usage”)|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SSH](/r/Space/comments/1kxk85m/stub/mus2ovs “Last usage”)|Starship + SuperHeavy (see BFR)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|——-|———|—|
|[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/1kxk85m/stub/murrhbt “Last usage”)|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_engine_family)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1kxk85m/stub/mus9d76 “Last usage”)|SpaceX’s world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
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Hilarious really. No check that…the word I’m looking for is embarrassing.
Cue the Elon fanboys to claim this went exactly as planned 🙄
What is going on? I thought they’d basically perfected this
Starship is not a functional design. Progress is literally going backwards. Needs to be grounded for a long time and engineered properly. It is purely just lazy at this point. Elon Stan’s downvote me pls.
At last, a news story that got all of the important facts straight.
There’s a reason why the industry doesn’t typically build rockets out of Stainless Steel and I feel that is probably a core problem they are facing. In order to get sufficient payload capacity, the rocket has to scale up to absurdly large sizes but at the same time the added mass makes the landing portion much more extreme. With the same engines and a lighter hull material such as aluminum or carbon fiber, the spacecraft would be much simpler and smaller.
Everyone out here giving Katy Perry shit for going to space, meanwhile Elon can’t get it up anymore.