Revision to title: It's well gone by now. Debris has probably crashed into the ocean by now.
SECTION 1
People in the Turks and Caicos, watch the skies. If you guys can find ANY photos or footage of the debris, post it here asap. I'll comb through comments every 5 minutes to check for new footage or photos of the incident. I'll resume tomorrow, I'm tuckered out. Reddit won't let me space out the finds so I'll need to manually split the post out more.
SECTION 2
WE FOUND THE CAUSE. ONE OF THE RVACS BLEW UP DUE TO SOME DAMAGE.
https://x.com/jackywacky_3/status/1897796181478027470
Right now my educated guess is maybe one of the RVac bell's coolant lines failed and stopped cooling a specific part of the engine which became extremely hot. I'm thinking that the interaction between the cold coolant liquid and the extremely hot engine bell caused a chain reaction, which lead to the whole engine going kaput.
SECTION 3: FOUND FOOTAGE.
Vid found by switch8000, shows the explosion from Boynton Beach, FL.
https://x.com/briancjackson/status/1897795245531881931
Vid found by levraimonamibob, FROM THE WATER, one of the best videos as of now
https://kick.com/wvagabond/clips/clip_01JNPXETMPHAN0Y6DXJZ4XH7V6
SEVERAL views found by u/trib_
2nd view: https://x.com/GeneDoctorB/status/1897796417634046212
3rd view: https://x.com/jwmuk/status/1897797542307344801
4th view: https://x.com/Artyio3o/status/1897798204738916500
5th view: https://x.com/DanielEpico_/status/1897798580041048064
6th view: https://x.com/SeeClickFlash/status/1897796382221910338
7th view: https://x.com/GeneDoctorB/status/1897799896465306104
Found one from GeneDoctor on X. This one's really intense.
Starship's Ship 34 may have just been lost
byu/riceman090 inspace
38 Comments
Yep. Engines failed, asymmetric thrust, started tumbling.
Booster landing was different as well, more off to the side as if the chops had to really compensate for the booster location being off. Not sure if that part was intentional at the time of posting this comment.
E: booster boost back had 2 engines out and I believe landing had 1 engine out.
I’m in an uber leaving fll, saw an explosion in the sky
Booster catch pretty much becoming near routine now is a great milestone. Not many will be talking about it and focusing on the ship. Which is pretty notable on it’s own. Starship V2 did make a *little* bit of progress compared to Flight 7. We all know it’s pretty much a brand new vehicle. We are going through the flight 1-3 days again with it and I know they’ll have it running as it should soon enough. Excellent work everyone at SpaceX. Can’t wait for Flight 9 in 1 1/2 months or so.
Gonna be some crazy footage again with reentry of the debris
Is there video of this? I just turned on the livestream as it was ending.
Looks like their changes between Block 1 and Block 2 of starship have not gone to plan in regards to the survivability of the vessel. Seems like they may have taken several steps back.
Reckon it will be Turks and Caicos again? Actually looking at it, failure seems to have happened at an almost identical point, so you might be right.
There’s video on twitter now, it blew up over Boynton Beach, Florida.
[https://x.com/briancjackson/status/1897795245531881931](https://x.com/briancjackson/status/1897795245531881931)
First: it’s funny how two deja vu type incidents plagued two space missions on the same day (see: IM-2).
Second, this probably warrants a longer grounding and more careful examination by SpaceX. It’s not like them to have a consistent failure mode like this, especially not during launch (landing’s obviously a whole different beast). Now, I’m not saying they can’t do what they always do (break fast, learn fast), but when you get a by-and-large repeat of your past flight, that warrants some extra consideration.
Going backwards every launch, sounds like karma has caught up to the ketamine monster
I believe these kick streamers caught live footage of debris while on a boat in the golf of mexico
[https://kick.com/wvagabond/clips/clip_01JNPXETMPHAN0Y6DXJZ4XH7V6](https://kick.com/wvagabond/clips/clip_01JNPXETMPHAN0Y6DXJZ4XH7V6)
impressive scene
No problem at all. FAA (spacex) will say they know what happened to Swastiship, and give them a licence to launch again next week.
Edit: Reminder that spacex has already scammed nasa out of $2.5B that was only supposed to be paid when they meet milestones for HLS. They haven’t met any milestones. The part that is supposed to take astronauts and leave orbit is still blowing up.
When does it get removed from Artemis? It’s clearly not going to work on NASAs timeline if at all… The alternative lander with blue origin seems like the best choice and its not even tested yet… what a mess
Lost my enthusiasm for this thanks to the moron that is Elon.
Lost all 3 spacecraft on the clips mission (lunar trailblazer, astroforge Odin, and Intuitive machines lander today). Now Starship does even worse than last mission.
NASA’s strategy of moving from primes to startups would seem to be suspect…
It seems the Ship2 design is flawed. The ship made it like what 10 seconds further than last time? Ship1 did the flight profile even under deliberately harder circumstances. This is a huge step backwards for them. This is bad
I’m quite confident in Starship eventually becoming successful but two ship failures back to back is NOT good.
Got to hand it to SpaceX. They make the hard, never before done part look easy and the somewhat more straightforward part of getting a second stage into space incredibly hard.
More tax payer money wasted. Elon should doge himself
SpaceX reminds me of a driver coming up through the formula series. Looks really good and creates a lot of hype in F3 and F2 but as soon as they get to F1 they’re just in the wall all the time.
Another pathetic failure of the ~~objectivist~~ *Private* space program.
Capitalists can’t explore, they can only exploit.
So SpaceX did find a possible root cause and made mitigations on Starship from the anomaly on Flight 7 (https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-8, https://www.spacex.com/updates/#flight-7-report) but had a very similar failure today – engines going out near the end of the burn, before losing control.
This might imply either;
The mitigations weren’t enough,
Or there’s more than 1 root cause.
There may also be a design flaw in V2, so they’ll have to do more than mitigations to fix it, perhaps delaying to make way for V3 upgrades as well while they’re at it, but that holds the risk of encountering a different flaw that ends a mission prematurely.
I suppose they have the booster more or less figured out. 2 catches in a row, 3 catches out of 4 attempts (one tower side issue), and to think people were doomering that it would be the hardest part of the test flights.
[removed]
Ever since Musk went full maga there has been a series of failures. Coincidence?
Thunderfoot how far are you into the new video edit?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|——-|———|—|
|[AFSS](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mgg7byh “Last usage”)|Automated Flight Safety System|
|[F1](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mgfd123 “Last usage”)|Rocketdyne-developed rocket engine used for Saturn V|
| |SpaceX Falcon 1 (obsolete small-lift vehicle)|
|[FAA](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mggses2 “Last usage”)|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mgg2t10 “Last usage”)|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[IM](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mggf06n “Last usage”)|Initial Mass deliverable to a given orbit, without accounting for fuel|
|[ITS](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mgflsaj “Last usage”)|Interplanetary Transport System (2016 oversized edition) (see MCT)|
| |[Integrated Truss Structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Truss_Structure)|
|[KSP](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mgfmwuc “Last usage”)|*Kerbal Space Program*, the rocketry simulator|
|MCT|Mars Colonial Transporter (see ITS)|
|[RUD](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mgflgvj “Last usage”)|Rapid Unplanned Disassembly|
| |Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly|
| |Rapid Unintended Disassembly|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mggho8k “Last usage”)|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SSME](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mggeipf “Last usage”)|[Space Shuttle Main Engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_main_engine)|
|Jargon|Definition|
|——-|———|—|
|[Raptor](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mggeipf “Last usage”)|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_engine_family)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Starlink](/r/Space/comments/1j59r45/stub/mggape4 “Last usage”)|SpaceX’s world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
Decronym is now also available on Lemmy! Requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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To all the naysayers; SpaceX is trying to do something that has never been done before, create a rapidly reusable rocket. Space Shuttle was the closest NASA came and it wasn’t really all that reusable. It had to have depot level maintenance after every flight and the big orange tank was always thrown away. SpaceX is trying to make a ship that can be landed, refueled and relaunched with minimal maintenance. Who cares if they loose a few prototypes along the way? Remember when they were trying to get the belly flop maneuver to work? How many prototypes did they blow up before they succeeded? Or Falcon9? How many boosters blew up before one finally stuck the landing? They have a proven track record of doing the impossible. I’m pretty sure they’ll succeed at this as well.
Good. I hope they all blow up tbh, as long as it takes money out of Musk’s dirty hands and nobody gets hurt, of course.
10 years ago they were doing this exact same thing with falcon 9 and now its the best
Hope 10 years later starship becomes the best
How long is the spaceflight community willing to continue pretending the program is not in trouble ? It’s flight 8, Starship should not be still blowing up on the way to orbit because of engine failures. Launching is supposed to be the easy part compared to upper stage landings, refueling, etc..
I would say the HLS contract is also in deep trouble, but apparently Elon’s plan for getting out of that is to take over and cancel Artemis, and pretend the hardware that is finished/working was the issue.
I appreciate what SpaceX has done for spaceflight, and I was excited for the Starship program to do well, but the Musk variable has put me off completely.
Success for SpaceX means more power for that megalomaniac, and I can’t get behind that.☹️
Space X is massively funded by the federal government. How many more billions are we going to keep sinking into exploding rockets to be told so trivially they instantly know the cause of the failure. Well if the failures are so obvious why haven’t they been improved to this point. What a joke. Not to mention the debris (litter) these are sending into the ocean. Space X should pay massive fines for this. All for the sake to go to Mars? Who the hell wants to do that? I’d be cool with Elon taking a solo flight there though
It’s okay that Starship isn’t going to be how we go to Mars.
Its ok they will jerk off over catching the booster as usual
Shame. Getting out of orbit is such a trail and error thing. To do
Did you retrace your steps? I mean, how far could it have gone? It’s not a set of car keys
Damn, I know people criticize the SLS because of its cost but at least it got Orion around the Moon on its first try.
I hope Starship eventually does eventually become reliable but I’m afraid one of these days debris may fall over a populated area.
How many times is this shitpile gonna explode?
You know, I used to dog on SLS, but that congressional pork welfare program made it to space on the first try.