.50calBMG

I know it's been said before, but this is why I love this forum. Where else do you get to casually ask questions that detailed and then get answers from the literal people working on the spacecraft? @IonStorm, thank you again for being as open with us as you are, you are freaking awesome!

Industry standard 10 years ago was 1-2 engines per stage, then throw the whole thing away, and only launch once every few months. Now, industry standard is to copy Falcon 9. You can't innovate by following standards. What will "industry standard" look like in another 10 years? We've all said this before, standards don't matter, and the guys leading the world in rocketry probably have a good idea what they're doing.

That "poor chief engineer" must be the same reason they are: 1 utterly dominating the world launch market with a vehicle that "true experts" said would be impossible for years right up until it worked, 2 developing the world's first fully reusable rocket with a meaningful payload far faster and for a fraction of the cost of any other program, 3 putting into service the world's first LEO communications network, 4 the only American company that can send astronauts to orbit and actually bring them home. [snip] We get that you don't like him, but you cannot reasonably expect someone who has had this much impact and caused more than one paradigm shift in spaceflight to actually be incompetent.

Ninth flight and fourth landing

Can't remember who it was that made that list of all the engines for Exo a while back, but I think after this we can add one confirmed catastrophic failure to it.

... I really hate to say it, but that did actually did look like an engine failure on the ship...

I don't know guys, there was a bit of a glow after shutdown. I guess another raptor exploded after leaking again. It's clearly obvious.

As for building a test stand for testing that many engines at once, I'b bet buying the land, paying the contractors to clear the land, then building a test stand strong enough to hold up against something with THREE TIMES THE THRUST OF A SATURN V (in the early prototype aka smallest version, no less) for minutes on end, multiple times, will be much more expensive than actually just launching the rocket. The concrete or steel alone just to build that stand probably costs as much if not more than just building the rocket. Then you have to pay for all the licenses to make that much noise for that long, just to get data on how that cluster of engines behaves for maybe the first 5 seconds of a roughly 7 minute flight, and no data on how it behaves with the change in atmospheric pressure, temperature, speed, G forces... Why wouldn't you just fly at that point? That test makes no sense. The only way a static test like that makes sense is doing what SpaceX already does, the short static tests before launch that last 5-10 seconds. After that time, the rocket isn't sitting still anymore, so why bother running the engines longer in an environment that is A: already understood and B: not relevant to any actual flight?

To my knowledge (which I would consider above average), no other rocket has actually been built up and tested like that aside from Falcon 9. Falcon Heavy didn't, but that's a bit of a stretch all things considered. Before you say SLS did, no, they didn't have the boosters on it. Same with shuttle, Saturn V, Titan, Saturn I, any of the Soyuz family, etc. Literally the only rocket that I know of that was given a full duration burn while on the ground in flight configuration was Falcon 9, and I'm sure you can find that video on YouTube. As for Raptor reliability, flight one used the Raptor 1, which in fairness kinda sucked, but it was more just to prove that the idea worked, and is still the first engine of its kind to be flown even with its teething troubles. Nobody says Raptor 1 was the final evolution, it was literally the starting point, which is why it's been replaced. Follow how Merlin evolved, and Raptor 1 was the Merlin 1A. Right now, we are phasing out Raptor 2 (Merlin 1C) and moving to Raptor 3 (Merlin 1D). There have been three versions of Merlin 1D, and now Merlin 1D++ is probably the most reliable rocket engine ever flown. As it currently stands, there have been over a hundred Raptor 2s lit and relit in flight, and only a small percentage of those have failed to relight, which is in all probability not a fault of the engine, more likely fuel slosh, clogged filters, GSE faults, yadda yadda. Raptor isn't perfect, but it's certainly not bad considering how new it still is, and it has plenty of room to grow if you base it off Merlin's history.

They are, Raptor 314. That said, those are still Raptor 2s, and they are about to be replaced by Raptor 3s, and the new Raptors are arguably a new engine with how much different they are from the 2s, so not really much to gain there. Keep trying though

Or maybe it's the liquid oxygen/methane that they flow through the engines to thermally condition them that comes out of the engine bells... The famously flammable oxygen/methane that then gets compressed and superheated in the skirt when the booster comes back at near hypersonic speeds. And the flame that came up the side of the booster during the landing burn was definitely a leak. It couldn't possibly be that it came from the liquid methane vent for the QD on the bottom of the booster where they vent the pressurized flammable gases from... Seriously, you might as well point to an LNG flare stack and say that methane is just leaky and impossible to use.

We're back to fuel leaks again, and here I thought that had been proven not to be the case after the last 2 flights showed no indication of it. If you listen to the video, the engineer says they misconfigured the startup on the engines, not that it was a fuel leak. Also, with the chine cover, the engineer literally says in the video that it was aero forces, not a fire, and there are no scorch marks on the clearly visible copv and internal structure of the chine. You can't just say fuel leak every time something goes off nominal, especially when the people with all of the data say it's something entirely different. Raptor reliability is being proven before our very eyes, both on the test stands and during the flights, and they still haven't shown us any real footage of the further improved Raptor 3s putting in work either. As for the legs, do you really think having to restructure the booster to withstand further compression forces on landing rather than some tension, and that legs tough enough to survive a plasma sheath seconds before supporting a few hundred tons of booster will be lighter than a set of pins?

Well, I guess a certain someone can drop the argument that the engines aren't reliable enough. Not a single engine out on any of the burns. That out of the way, I didn't expect them to get the landing on the first try, but I couldn't be happier I was wrong. What and incredible thing to see.

I seem to remember the press making a big deal about starliner being rated for 45 days of spaceflight during the first two delays "extensions", but aren't we coming up on something like double that pretty soon? Was that 45 days of free flight or spaceflight in general?

So someone who repeatedly uses incorrect data is pushing an article that uses incorrect data... Hm...