“Starship Flight 3 hardware should be ready to fly in 3 to 4 weeks.” Musk on X, Nov 19 2023
It’s nice to at least see the ship back on pad B :)
“Starship Flight 3 hardware should be ready to fly in 3 to 4 weeks.” Musk on X, Nov 19 2023
It’s nice to at least see the ship back on pad B :)
I very much doubt that either the booster stage or the orbiter stage detonated as a result of a failsafe mechanism.
The booster was streaming out fuel after the flip maneuver, likely indicating a rupture from the flip of at least one tank, or in the fuel lines.
Then 1/3 of the engines do not relight, and many basically catastrophically erupt and destroy themselves.
By this point there are fuel leaks everywhere, and within moments the entire thing explodes spectacularly.
If an abort system had been successfully engaged following the engines ripping themselves apart, it should have disengaged the fuel to the engines, turned off fuel pumps and closed off fuel lines… precisely to prevent the massive explosion that occured.
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The orbiter exploded on camera, and SpaceX did not even report they had lost contact with it until minutes later.
They probably did not trigger an abort system minutes after they lost contact with the craft… you know, after it already exploded.
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Whoever wrote this article is just reporting what SpaceX told them and apparently has done no due diligence or investigation, and/or knows nothing about rockets.
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SpaceX will be going bankrupt soon.
Musk already said this would happen last year, in a leaked email to employees, if they didnt make their Starlink launch schedule. I am pretty sure they didnt, and SpaceX was just passed over for a massive government grant.
Which Musk should be fine with, because he is in favor of ending all government subsidies.
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I would not be surprised if Starship 3 either fails to launch, or does not get very far before enough engines fail to fuck up any planned mission.
Musk and SpaceX have been reporting lots of quality control issues producing the new version of the Raptor engines, and they dont have many reliable ones lying around.
A catastrophic failure of at least one raptor engine they are already having huge issues with seems likely
There’s a reason that the SpaceX reddit used to have a policy of not linking to space.com articles. They’re badly written more often than not.
The article may be a bit out of date. Last week, Kathy Lueders confirmed that the AFTS were activated.
He’s made similar hyperbolic statements before. I think SpaceX is in a reasonably safe financial position for now. They’ve scooped up the majority of the (western) launch market, F9 reuse is working well, and they announced that Starlink turned a profit earlier this year.
Have they? Reliability seemed much better on IFT-2 than IFT-1, and I don’t see any reason this trend wouldn’t hold for IFT-3.
I dont believe Kathy Lueders. SpaceX staff in general and Musk in particular have a long track record of making ludicrous promises and failing to deliver on them, as well as many statements about proposed systems or features that are more or less obviously physically or economically impossible if you do some basic research on what they would entail.
A great example of this is the idea of using point to point rockets to replace aircraft flights. Two obvious reasons this is a ludicrous idea is that 1) rockets take a lot longer to refuel than aircraft and 2) they take a lot longer to safely prepare (ie check over and refurb) to be flown again.
And besides, none of that alleviates what I already outlined: the booster cannot have exploded like that if the story is as simple as the abort system engaged. At best, that would mean the abort system was poorly designed or malfunctioned, because it /should/ have prevented, not caused, the massive explosion that was seen.
Re Starlink, you stopped my quote before the part that mentions this was an internal company email sent by Musk to other SpaceX employees.
It seems you agree with me though that when talking to the public Musk often says grandiose hyperbolic nonsense.
Re the Raptor reliability, yes. You are misinformed.
Look, I dont know how to break this to you but Elon is a egomaniac lying scam artist who has basically failed to deliver on the vast majority of promises he has made over the course of a decade.