It’s allowed to not work perfectly. It’s the second flight. That’s what testing is for. You actually want things to go wrong in testing so you get the most data to work on.
This is footage of the first test of what is now the most reliable ballistic missile in the US inventory. The test doesn’t indicate the end product.
SpaceX has a very different development strategy when compared to others such as NASA. Fail fast. Learn fast. Will hopefully deliver them the results they are after sooner.
For sure.and quite possible that they were expecting this outcome. Just noting that the poster was making assumptions too.
I think he means that the amount of heat shield tiles that shook loose off the weld lines and fell off on launch looks better in the knowledge that they didn’t do suction cup tests on every heat shield tile on Starship 25 like they did on Starship 28. i.e. It would look a lot worse if they had thoroughly checked them but that many fell off anyway. I don’t know why they didn’t do stringent tests beforehand. The flight plan was for Starship to go to orbit then re-enter the atmosphere and make an ocean splash-down North of Hawaii. (That is a ‘non-recoverable’ splash down too - vehicle would of been lost either way) Well Starship made it to space^
so on re-entry the loss of those tiles would of probably made its re-entry non-optimal anyway.
As for the Flight Termination System (FTS), I am still unsure if it is Manual or Automatic.
The r/SpaceXLounge subreddit has some info that it is Automatic but also has a manual over-ride.
Here are the explosives being brought in to charge the FTS system
Personally I’d try and make sure the manufacturing process was good on the tiles. I assume bonded, so consistent application, and correct cure temperature and time stuff. You shouldn’t actually have to test every tile on these early prototypes, but even if you don’t, your processes should be good.
^The Beatles did it better on the Abbey Road cover.
Fail fast / learn fast is just buzz words though. It actually doesn’t mean anything.
The changes SpaceX made from the 1st to 2nd flight test say otherwise at this early stage prior to full findings being released.
From what we have been told they introduced a number of changes from their learnings from the 1st launch as shown by the water to protect the launch pad from damage, internal anti fire suppression which helped protect the 33 engines on the main rocket up to separation, hot ignition ring and no doubt other changes that seem to be successful, or at the very least improvements.
Look through SpaceX’s last 20 years of development and achievements using this method and tell me it hasn’t been successful.
This methodology have allowed spacex to achieve lower cost point and higher reliability to date when compared to others in ISS resupply and satellite launch.
Even NASA knew there was a better and cheaper way than the way they did things and have contracted spacex to achieve a lot of their space aims.
Elon is a twat but spacex is an amazing success and will only continue to be so.
I didn’t say they weren’t successful. But fixing things that went wrong. That’s just a thing everyone does . It’s not some SpaceX special sauce.
Aerospace development programs are a case of continually evolving design, at pace, and balancing all of the compromises required while still producing a product that mostly does what you want it to do
NASA would have made design changes in the 2 years after a failed launch and turned around a new design. That’s the reality. Sure NASA has some issues, with a big part of that being the US government funding cycles, but they also have amazing engineers. So does SpaceX. The critical thing for both NASA and SpaceX is for the management to stay out of the engineers ways.
So yes. Fail Fast/Learn Fast are absolutely buzz words. But you know, they are more exciting to put on a brochure than the 5000 word chart that the engineers would like to explain to you.
Not sure if serious, but that is not an “offset”. Tesla does not harvest CO2 from the atmosphere. It only provides vehicles that do not burn fossil fuels.
“fail fast” I believe first came from the Pharma industry - better to fail a drug in preclinical screens than in Phase 3 trials when a billion $ has been invested in it.
I forgot my Sarcastica font. But it could be thought of in this way. A carbon offset may be affected by not just by carbon capture but also by balancing GHG emissions with reductions in other areas.
SpaceX is a lot less risk adverse than NASA and sure doesn’t care as much about things blowing up.
SpaceX blew up so many prototype Starships that when they managed to land one I was so happy I bought this dumb coffee cup lol.
Depends on what part of NASA and NASAs history you’re talking about.
I feel like NASA have blown up heaps more things than SpaceX over the journey.
Tbh I don’t know why there’s a perception that SpaceX is “different”. What they do is really interesting, and they’ve done some things differently. But there are a bunch of companies who are all trying to innovate in the area. It’s great that they have helped rekindle interest in space and space travel, but they’re not alone out there.
Starship Flight Failure Analysis IFT2
Unless the electricity in the batteries comes from coal fired power stations or diesel generators of course, which in the majority of cases, does. So certainly no “off-set” happening in Australia & lots of other countries
There was a time when petrol for cars was delivered by horse and cart. Clearly the rollout of the automobile was doomed to fail because the infrastructure hadn’t been fully built yet.
Yes, currently EVs are charged off coal. But coal is on the way out, with 3GW of solar coming online over the next 12 months and a substantial pipeline of wind and solar projects flowing onwards.
EVs will likely become critical to the renewable grid. Able to absorb cheap daytime electricity during the day, providing a flexible demand for solar and wind generation peaks. There’s momentum to get EVs to export energy at night from their batteries. Owners could get paid to sell a % of stored power to the grid, which at scale will be an enormous benefit for grid stability and capping peak electricity pricing.
Interesting. I’d be interested to know this guy’s credentials, because he seems to be diagnosing the issue and drawing an incredibly simple solution from a long way away. I’d question whether the SpaceX team would even know the failure modes completely at this point, let along be able to come up with a simple solution.
Warning course language
