CatastrophicFailure

Came across this: Looks like they’re fabbing panels for the bigger VAB. Closer view:

“With a side of flies.” So, no review of sinking your teeth into a nice, juicy tomato hornworm? It’s just like green pudding.

@cubinator in a few years: Or maybe he’ll end up an interplanetary Gordon Ramsay, “this cricket’s so raw it’s still chirping!” do remember to brush your teeth...

Not one but TWO SpaceX rockets rising on the pads at once. Ok, ones been risen this whole time, but still...

well, it successfully failed. Also, there’s this: So one way or the other they’re forging ahead. And also, this:

I’m just gonna leave this here... ...apparently this was actually studied...

And that would be an average, too. I would expect rapid-fire flights every eight hours, or something like that, when they’re building up fuel for a lunar or mars trip. What’s it need, like a dozen tankers in fairly short order? Outside that it could be a more reasonable “launch every few days.”

Mostly paid for by someone else, or in pursuit of something else (like Starlink). Even if it takes several years, just by its MO for existing, SSSH could hit a number like that far sooner than anything else on the books. As you’ve said yourself, if they can make it work it will be nothing short of paradigm changing.

Well, if they’re ever going to do P2P, Starship will have to have a TWR greater than 1. IIRC in normal operation Starship would only use the vacuum engines during ascent, the sea level engines would be used for landing.

And why not? It works in KSP...

IIRC, Musk said a while back that Starship would have enough thrust itself to abort from Superheavy off the pad, they’d just light the vacuum Raptors, too. There would be a loss of efficiency but that’s not really a concern at that point. I assume the design is such that the engines could tolerate the underexpansion, at least for a time. This would happen in a fraction of a second, too. Seems to be two different trains running here, RE: aborts and safety. Are we talking astronaut-level safety or Joe Schmoe-level safety? I believe the LOCV risk for Dragon 2 is said to be 1:270. It’s worth mentioning that Starship as a system could simply demonstrate this level of safety by flying/returning 270 times in a row without incident. This would be a long pole for any other rocket, but SS could possibly do this within a single year. Add in a decade or so of operations, and you could possibly see 1:thousands reliability demonstrated before passenger ops become a thing.

As a wise man once said: Check. Yo. Staging. Also don’t go drilling random holes in important bits...

Don’t you mean the service module? The same thing happened on the next flight too.

It appears there really shall be a rise of the un-poofed. @Just Jim poke... pokepoke...

Up to a point. Eventually there has to be some acceptance of an “acceptable” probability of failure. In a small plane like a Cessna, for example, if the elevator gets stuck, you’re pretty much boned, and there are examples of such failures happening, yet the design hasn’t changed much. Now, for examples on the airliner side, you’ve got Alaska 261, where the jackscrew controlling the tailplane (elevator trim) failed, leading to a catastrophic loss of control. There was no contingency for this, since it just “wasn’t supposed to happen” with proper maintenance. Then there’s American 587, the plane that crashed just after 9/11 when the vertical fin broke off. That’s just “not supposed to happen,” and there is no contingency if it does. And the infamous United 232, where an engine failure just so led to a complete loss of hydraulic control despite three redundant systems. The fact that 181 people survived at all is a bona-fide miracle, no air crew since has even made to the airport in the simulator with similar failures. Anyways, point is, sooner or later, a system has to be just “good enough.” We don’t generally build airplanes with contingencies if a major piece just falls off, because it’s extremely rare. Wasn’t so in the early days of aviation, until they learned how to git gud at not having important bits fall off. One very simple way to give Starship some redundancy is simply to use split control surfaces like most airliners already do. You don’t have just four flapperons, you have eight, four pairs moving in tandem, but to the layman watching from a distance it’s just four. With sufficient redundancies in the motion systems (direct electric actuation works in that favor here, it’s much simpler than hydraulics), I think it’s quite reasonable that Starship reaches that level of “good enough” to operate without traditional abort systems. Having that high flight rate to reveal the bugs so they can be squished is central to that. Factoid: the Space Shuttle used the same jackscrew system as the MD-80. NASA was actually involved in improving it after the crash.

I do. It’s gasoline powered tho... Also, how am I the first to post this?

They seem to have backed away from the vacuum thing in the short term, tho it can be argued, if they’re going to launch passengers into vacuum, zooming them through one doesn’t sound that far fetched. Hyperloop can still be faster and more efficient than boats over a few km even without the vacuum.

This application is taylor-made for it, really. Boats need (LOTS of) maintenance, are subject to weather troubles, expensive to fuel/crew/operate, etc. High-speed tunnel transport seems much better here, all else being equal, and fear easier to justify than intercity. IIRC it's under budget, too.

Well, since you mention it, KSP2’s interstellar expansion and colony focus does naturally lend itself to further the story... tho at the way things are going, @KSK could take another seven years and still beat it to release.

Apparently they do, indeed... need a bigger boat...

closeup of the poof. Question now is, do they move on, or shall this tank be...un-poofed... pokes @Just Jim with a stick

Then again, I suppose seeing an SSN fall from that height would be pretty spectacular too... for entirely different reasons...

Eh, small beans. I'm waiting for that inevitable catastrophic failure when a full-sized SSSN (not to be confused with SSN) bellyflops into the ocean from 20 klicks.

Slightly better view of the leak here...