The announcer was just relaying the report of the engine status at liftoff, he wasn’t making his own estimate. Maybe their definition of nominal is as broad as what they call success. There will be a lot to sort out in any case.
No one in their right mind could watch that and think hey maybe I should get in that and fly! Embarrassing that we are what a decade into this and still hoping to hit 1960s level competence.
Tax the rich, refund NASA and lfg.
lots of silly geese out there don’t really process that huge leaps in science and technology are hard and iterative or how test programs work for this stuff. only difference is this program is happening in public view, which is pretty neat imo.
and of course nobody is going to “get in that and fly” until the test program has completed and all the necessary and relevant safety demonstrations have been done. but, that launch would have been easily survivable with an abort system which it’ll need (and need to be tested) before the first test pilots give it a ride.
- 3 astronauts were burned alive during the Apollo 1 test in 1967.
- The contract with NASA to develop Starship for Artemis is only 2 years old!
3 Likes
Some interesting bits in the first 5-6 minutes here.
2 Likes
Some spectacular views.
1 Like
My takeaway is Musk already lives on a different world than I do.
One 
tidbit is that the AFTS apparently triggered 40 seconds before the rocket actually blew up, which is pretty alarming. Probably an easy fix, but a much bigger concern than nuking the launch pad.
The running theory on the SpaceX subreddits is the FTS worked and punched holes in the tanks but the booster was strong enough that it took that extra 40 seconds for the structure to fail. Like you said it should be easy to fix (moar explosives!!) but maybe they’ll do some testing and blow up some tanks on the ground.
The purpose of the FTS is to render the rocket engines “nonpropulsive”, not necessarily to blow them to bits or whatever. From what I’ve seen the explosive charges were initiated and punched through the case into the propellant tanks but the holes weren’t big enough to quickly depressurize the tanks.
From pictures, they appear to use small shaped charges. Maybe conical shaped charges. A single one of these would make a pretty small hole but maybe they have multiple charges in the square package you can see in the pics, idk. The total weight of explosive is not that much. They might be able to just add a second set of what they’re using or go to linear charges to open bigger holes.
Testing and qualifying a change is not trivial. My guess is it would have taken months on STS but idk about these newfangled space companies.
Pretty good background on flight termination. Does not address Starship system.
1 Like
Testing is underway for the water cooled steel plate “showerhead” system to go under the orbital launch mount to avoid flinging concrete all over the place on the next Starship orbital launch attempt, it seems to be working as planned.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1659599720761950208
pretty much how cartoons envisioned it
If they had high confidence in this approach, they should have installed it on the pad before the last launch. Elon saying it wouldn’t have been ready in time, but after blasting away the concrete pad, oh, we can have this new system ready for a launch in a month or two, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why not play it safe in the first place? There’s no guarantee now that the government will allow a quick turnaround. I wouldn’t.
He wanted to launch on 4/20