At least this wasn’t a tragedy like the Challenger space shuttle blowing up in 1986 and killing the entire crew, and then in 2003 the Columbia doing the exact same thing. This was an unmanned flight, many thanks for that.
It is somewhat intriguing here, the understatement with which this event was greeted.
Not sure what the nomenclature is about. If a patient would die on the table, during an operation, what would that be called? A “change of plans?” A “patient deciding to leave the body, rapidly and unannounced?”
As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 20, 2023
Yes, it did decide to disassemble itself and quite rapidly. But we have learned something here, class. In the future, when you see something explode, now you know to call that a “rapid, unannounced disassembly.”
If you missed it, here’s what happened.
One more setback in a field which is full of them. We dream of a multi-planetary life. Someday that will be mankind’s destiny and we’ll look back on these early beginnings and chuckle.
Marvin strikes again
Engineers have long had a proclivity for creating stoic reading/sounding terms for things including catastrophic events – like a rocket blowing up. Think about some famous plane crash that was all over the news during your lifetime, and then go and read the NTSB report and you’ll see nothing but bland descriptions of what went down. “Rapid Decompression” for example which is actually the plane cracking open somewhere with a large enough hole/opening that the air gets sucked out in a few seconds or less. In reality most crashes are the result in what’s called an “Event Cascade” which in reality means a quick series of systems failing – faster than the flight crew can deal with them. Or put more bluntly like us regular folks talk “sh!t going wrong so fast they can’t keep up with it and crash.”
Medicine too has its ways of making stuff seem less drastic. I had a high school acquaintance and teammate die last week. His death certificate has the term “Cardiac Arrest” but us regular folks say “Heart Attack.” Medicine if filled with this kind of talk. So are many other fields. You went to law school. Think about all the legal terminology for things that are in plain language awful to even hear about, much less experience!
Some of this does have a practical purpose in that it allows for consistency in tracking events and comparing data on similar things over time. Yet some of it is simply pretentiousness.
I’m not surprised this rocket blew up. For all the fault I can find with Musk he’s serious about this stuff and has a ton of great engineers working on it. He also knows enough that stuff like this is to be expected. It’s not the first failure his Space X has experienced and it won’t be the last. When in the leadup to the launch he said not to expect things to go smoothly, that something bad could go wrong and in fact the odds were against a completely successful flight test I for one knew he wasn’t proverbially hedging his bets. He knew quite well that with such a complex system a full-up test attempting orbital speeds was a larger challenge than most folks realize. Frankly, well before the rocket blew up the controllers knew, and anyone watching footage SHOULD have known the flight was almost certainly doomed. If you didn’t catch it the first time watch again, specifically those shots from under/behind as the rocket was really starting to gain serious altitude and speed. Not just one, but multiple engines weren’t working. Worse, they were on the outer portion of the engine configuration. It was only a matter of time before the rocket assembly’s flight became unstable and when that happens rockets blow up.
Despite the end result Space X DID get a lot of good, useful data. Telemetry being what it is they will be able to run down every single thing that went wrong and almost certainly both why AND how to fix it for future flights. Such is flight test whether we are talking planes/jets or rockets. Yes, computer modeling makes the odds much better when it comes time to send something airborne but in the end sometimes you get to a point where you have to just launch/take off and see what happens because computers can’t account for everything. Emperical data is still part of the mix.
Tesla engineers seem to have mastered the art of bullsh1t.
Few companies have gotten away with making as many failed promises as that cluster f4ck of idiots.
Sorry, but you should take a long look at NASA’s history, going back even to the last couple of years of its precursor NACA. The development of missiles in general for that matter but especially long range ballistic ones into orbital launch vehicles that could carry satelites, which in turn were adapted into rockets that could carry spacecraft instead. The Saturn rockets that would carry out the Apollo missions and those HUGE engines were the first U.S. designs specifically for manned space travel from top to bottom. ALL of them had catastrophic failures along the way, both in static tests when strapped to the ground and in launch attempts. Like the jet engines that were re-engineered into giant rocket engines for those ballistic and orbital rockets all had lots of failure along the way but were made reliable in the end. And don’t kid yourself. The USSR had the same stuff going on and the only difference is that Eisenhower decreed from the beginning we’d do our testing with the public looking on.
The movie The Right Stuff sucked mega wads in most respects but in one sequence they showed a string of failures that illustrate the point well. Perhaps the most embarrasing of all was the “popped cork” fiasco where all sorts of dignitaries were flown into the Cape to witness a test of the Atlas system with an unmanned spacecraft. A proof that we were close to orbital flight. It was done up in style and the countdown which had been hyped to the max reached zero and the engines ignited. For a couple of seconds then the rocket seemed to decide it didn’t want to launch after all and settled in place without lifting so much as a foot. BUT, the escape tower on top of the capsule fired, flying up a few thousand feet and descending by parachute like a party favor! But my point is that failures, even pretty spectacular ones like rockets blowing up mid-air are nothing new.
Right now Musk’s Space X is way the hell ahead of the other private entities trying to recreate the cabilities of the space program we had when I was growing up. I have a LOT of problems with the guy but on this particular endeavor he’s gotten a helluva lot more right than wrong. Finally, even with a malfunction of some engines not igniting (or shutting down seconds into the flight) they had way over two minutes of good flight with the onboard computers being able to correct (for a while) the issue. As I said, it was pretty certain before then the flight wasn’t going to make it to orbit and would either blow up on its own or have to be command destructed by ground controllers but they got a LOT of good data they can build on for future test flights of the system. Which I might add is even more ambitious than the Saturn rockets and Apollo Command & Service (and Lunar) modules that took us to the moon landings. (Oh, and lest we forget as reliable as the Service Module was for Apollo a tiny defect caused an explosion well into the flight, and it was perhaps the most extraordianry improvised feat of engineering ever accomplished that got those guys back home.)
I recall a joke going round in the early days of NASA. A kid was staring a new school in the Cape and the teacher asked if he knew his numbers: “Sure miss – 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 – oh F***K – that one didn’t work either”
Yes, well space x wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without the benefit of ALL of the Saturn 5 engineering data. When is musk going to reimburse the American tax payer for all of that knowledge that WE paid for?
When those who make pharmaceuticals, medical devices, diagnostic stuff etc. reimburse the taxpayers for the work that far more often than not was pioneered by the NIH and taken over by the private sector. That’s just one example of an industry taking work that was originally financed by the govt./taxpayers that have produced profits for private individuals and entities. Oh, that includes the very medium on which we are communicating. Miniaturized electronics, reliable high-speed computers that instead of taking up entire rooms can fit into a smartphone FAR more powerful than the ground and onboard computers that navigated our astronauts to the moon and back combined and even the internet (created by the DOD with major work done by DARPA as an internal DOD communications network) were created/funded by taxpayers. I’ll keep saying it. I can’t stand Musk for a lot of reasons but his focus when it comes to advancing our space exploration capabilities is something he’s done pretty well. And don’t forget. From the get-go NASA was a GIANT contracting agency – the actual hardware and the software that ran it was made in the private sector with NASA overseeing it all. And the current model of private industry taking the lead on development was NASA’s doing.
He won’t. Much of the research performed by NASA/feds leads to a LOT of innovation out in the private sector-has for literally decades.
I don’t know if this was a factor, but I believe they are using lighter material for their rockets and such.
It’s really simple. The onboard AI decided to commit suicide rather than help Musk’s reputation.