SpaceX's Starship explodes in space, again raining debris over Caribbean
SpaceX's Starship explodes in space, again raining debris over Caribbean
SpaceX lost contact with its Starship rocket in space on Thursday during the company's eighth test mission, dooming a satellite deployment demonstration in the company's second consecutive Starship failure this year.
Summary
SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft exploded in space minutes after launching from Texas, marking the second consecutive failure this year.
The rocket spun uncontrollably before breaking apart, with debris seen over Florida and the Bahamas. The cause remains unclear, though multiple engines shut down before contact was lost.
The failure raises concerns about setbacks in Elon Musk’s Mars rocket program. The FAA temporarily halted flights at major Florida airports due to falling debris.
A similar Starship failure in January scattered wreckage over the Caribbean.
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“The cause remains unclear” lmao
As if everyone on the livestream couldn’t see the fire in the engine bay, the exact problem that blew up the last rocket too.
Obviously the fire suppression failed again and it caused an energetic failure in one or more engines, flinging Starship into a rapid spin. It held on for, I dunno, 30 seconds to a minute, until they sent the kill command.
One of the inner engines had a visible outgassing pointing to structural failure in the engine itself. This was followed briefly by an engine explosion. No reasonable fire suppression system can handle an event this size. The best way to address this is detecting it early and running an emergency shutdown of the valves on the supply lines.
Surely shutting down failed engines is part of the fire suppression plan, no?
"Why didn't I think of that?!"
-SpaceX
I’m sure they did. I doubt they had enough time to make the correct changes since the launch cadence is too high.
The cause is Elon incompetence., edit : his incompetence in ideas and scheduling pressure.
Ive had passing experience with Musks leadership. They make top down demands, like "I dont care, I want a demo of this tomorrow". To get to that demo you cut every imagineable corner and show them a potempkin product the next day that is insanely fragile. And then they make a similar demand the next day, and the next. Then later on they ask why the product sucks.
Ship the demo!
that's giving him too much credit. he's just an ideas guy.
I don’t think he’s terribly involved at SpaceX these days. Other than causing schedule pressure… which certainly may have caused this failure by not giving the engineers proper time to research and fix the issue from the previous launch.