SpaceX Starship SN4 just blew up in Texas

[OnlinePoker]

They had just completed a Static Fire test and it looked successful. Then a massive venting of something came out of the bottom and when it hit the methane flare stack, ignited in a massive fireball. I'm sure videos of the actual explosion will be out shortly but here is the stream I was watching and you'll have to scroll to find the explosion.

[Shiv]

1. Dangit

Well no one ever said this space stuff was easy. Doing it in a new way doubly not. How many does that put Starship up to now?

[OnlinePoker]

2. That was their 4th iteration

The first was just a mock up, though with no tests being done. Another one collapsed because of a poorly designed test (they filled the top tank and not the bottom and it just collapsed with the weight).

[Shiv]

5. Good thing

the private-public partnership model has changed to having the manufacturer eat the costs and not taxpayer dollars, I suppose. The kind of resources that need to be put into really getting further out there and doing bigger projects has become such a difficult sale after the Apollo excitement waned. I never would've imagined growing up we would go nine years without a program to put astronauts up on our own.

[LunaSea]

11. Yeah, but....

without NASA contracts and the initial COTS funding, there would be no Spacex.
And several original COTS-seeded launcher programs folded within a few months of
receiving awards. Don't think we are not collectively paying for it.

[Shiv]

24. Oh yeah

We intend to benefit from it so we sure are, I just meant the costs of spectacular looking but necessary to get past failures that often get used to justify budget cuts to the public with previous programs.

It might be a bit of a perception shell game but the amount we under-fund all science and space science in particular gives me some hopes about the new division of visible risks. Might just be a step between where we were and a much better approach but short of a massive upswing in public support for research and development spending NASA's gotta protect it's dollars and timetables every ethical way they can.

Don't get me started on partially scrapping efforts for Lunar Gateway just to get a mission done by an arbitrary bragging rights 2024 date. Shortsightedness vs long-term goals.

edit: I think I was meaning they eat the costs, we buy the value. Which does mean some of them don't reach financial viability, I suppose

[lagomorph777]

21. That thing is cursed.

Multiple failures.

But that's the space biz. They'll sort it out.

[Massacure]

38. I wouldn't call it cursed

when trying something new and cutting edge, failure is that needs to be expected and embraced. The key is to learn from it.

[lagomorph777]

46. Yeah - "difficult" would have been a better choice of word.

In software development, we say "fail early and often."

[spanone]

3. Holy Shit

[SoonerPride]

4. Damn

[marlakay]

6. Isthis the one they were sending to space tomorrow? Nt

[cbdo2007]

7. No, that is a Falcon 9 and is in Florida

[marlakay]

8. Okay, thanks....nt

[OnlinePoker]

10. This is Musk's plan for a fully reusable Mars capable rocket

What we just saw blow up was what will be the second stage (minus the nose cone). On lift off, the main thrust section of the full rocket will have twice the thrust of a Saturn 5.

[ThoughtCriminal]

9. That was "Not Nominal"

[hunter]

12. Elon Musk does nothing for me.

There is no place for "natural" humans beyond Lower Earth Orbit.

The rest of the solar system and beyond belongs to our intellectual offspring, creatures who can walk on the surface of the Moon, Mars, or Pluto naked. Creatures who can fling themselves into the atmosphere of Saturn knowing fully well that they are likely to die, their backup personas stored safely away for reincarnation on the surface of Titan.

Oh, and by the way, if someone gave me a Tesla automobile I'd give it away like a hot potato to someone who cared. Automobile culture sucks.

[PTWB]

42. What a strange viewpoint..

[renate]

13. Well, of course it did. It's 2020

I'm surprised it wasn't engulfed by murder hornets.

[Celerity]

14. +100000

[pwb]

15. So far 2020 hasn't been great has it?

[Blue_true]

29. To say that it has sucked would not be a strong enough description.

It sucks even more, knowing that I won't be around to ring in the year 2222.

[lunatica]

18. I know what you mean and am beginning to get whiplash.

Trump has opened the gates of hell and unleashed evil on the world.

[Blue_true]

30. He is the anti-Christ. All we need now is for the Four Riders of the Apocalypse to show up. nt

[Paladin]

20. Dark congrats. You nailed it. (nt)

[whistler162]

27. Just locusts!

[uponit7771]

31. +1

[Baclava]

16. sigh, chemical rockets, no wonder the aliens laugh at us and openly taunt our fighter planes

[Blue_true]

32. Yeah. I have thought about that.

They are likely doubling over in laughter at how little we know about the Universe and beyond.

[C_U_L8R]

17. The commentators are awesome

Totally geeking out

[Best_man23]

19. Just remember, our first steps to get to the Moon the first time were not all perfect

[hunter]

23. I grew up among those people.

My grandfather made bits of exotic metal that carried men to the moon and back. Some of those bits of metal are in the Smithsonian and outer space.

Nevertheless I'm not a fan of "manned" space exploration beyond LEO.

My wife and I once enjoyed an early date at JPL hanging out with Galileo and some extremely uncomfortable ex significant others.

I hate flying. I'd hate travel into space even more. (My wife would leap at any opportunity to visit a space station.)

A trivial bit of computer code I wrote may have made it into outer space and the undersea cable universe but I gave up that glory when I jumped out of my girlfriend's moving car in Berkeley.

She sent all my crap back to me, dirty socks and all, in a box without a note.

[Shiv]

25. Is that because..

of a Van Allen belt thing or for some other reason?

I rarely will see or hear something about how deeper space exploration with manned missions is unreasonable, but I haven't really seen it delved into in depth. And a lot of the rest of the people talking about the science seem to overlook the issue. I'd really like to have a better understanding what the serious reservations are about.

I'd hate to think even a massive effort wouldn't be able to eventually overcome such obstacles, leaving us stuck one worldwide catastrophe away from extinction for an already interminably indefinite period. You know, for no particular reason...

[hunter]

28. Humans are very fragile.

Even Antarctica, a place with water and air, poses severe challenges for us.

If humanity has a future it belongs to our intellectual offspring.

If we are kind to them maybe they'll decide to keep us around.

[Shiv]

35. Thanks

But the timeframe I am imagining solving this problem accounts for shifts from Da Vinci to the Wright Brothers, from bell jar diving to Mariana's trench exploration... Not in my lifetime is to be expected.

[Blue_true]

34. Mars presents several challenges.

The Van Allen Radiation Belt is just one of them. We can figure out a lot about it by sending robots there, which we have done twice.

A bigger issue with sending humans there is the time window that exists to extract them if something goes wrong and they have to be extracted. Until we have spacecraft that travel faster than the Earth revolves around the Sun, that Mars time window will be a major drawback.

The third issue is Mars has virtually no atmosphere, there is nothing to attenuate the rays of the Sun, as happens on Earth. The movie with Morgan Freeman as President and a crew landing on an asteroid that was headed for the Earth illustrated the issue with humans on Mars' surface somewhat. Asteroids have no to very tiny atmospheres, so solar rays hitting their surface is like them being hit with the flames of a furnace.

I actually think that Mars is fools gold, but unfortunately, it is the only semi interesting celestial body that our current and near term technologies have a prayer of allowing us to reach. Earth-like planets in other star systems would offer much better payback, if we could figure out how to reach them - but with our current technology and even ones that most Space Scientist envision, not nearly enough energy could be put on the rocket to reach an Earth-like planet several light-years away from us - basically we would need to know something that we currently don't know, like the existence of an undiscovered force, along with how to control the action of gravity on an object, within that object.

[Shiv]

36. That's largely what I thought,

But at a certain scale of massive engineering in LEO, over decades or centuries, the number of way-stations and artificial protective envelops even with no orders of magnitude in speed increases, ah, I just envision things on too grand a scale maybe.

I largely look at mars more for the two small moons and a possible low-g environment when further out from the 1G of Earth. Medical based reasons, like recovery hospitals. The resources in the middle and outer system will eventually draw entrepreneurs, one way or another, and at some point remote operations will need nearby oversight.

Plus, it's there.

I think again even with our slow speeds, life extension, suspension through lower activity, oxygen and diet, and large generation ships, have been mathematically demonstrated to show even a moderately advance civilization could colonize a large section of a spiral arm in several hundred thousand years.

Just gotta get that first foothold that can survive a single planet extinction event, even if it is LEO, Lunar or Martian.

Before I get too weedy, protecting what we have is obviously a higher priority, given the engineering and dedicated effort we don't have the time for to get to any of those goals. But once you dodge a handful of extinction bullets, good idea to develop a back-up plan between the next ones, no?

[Blue_true]

37. Earth is moving at around 67,000 mph, if I remember correctly, Mars is moving at around 54,000 mph,

I forget the Mars number because I really don't have that much interest in Space exploration for the purposes that it is now done. The challenge of putting up way-stations between Mars and Earth is a monumental challenge, some of those way stations would either have to revolve around the Sun and stay in sync with Earth's and Mars' orbits, or orbit one of the two planets - the only alternative to that is also daunting, having spacecraft way-stations that can out-race Earth.

The issue that I touched on relative to leaving our star system to go to another is that to make that feasible, a spacecraft would need to approach the speed of light, that requires a gigantic amount of energy given our current and even longterm envisioned rocketry. The fact is, Musk simply won't be able to soup-up a rocket enough to visit the closest Earth-like planet in another star system. If he tries that, I really don't know what an explosion would do, maybe wipe out a good part of terrestrial Earth? Again, to do meaningful space exploration and have people survive in Space in a way that they can be easily reached if they run into trouble requires technology that no one, as far as I know, has envisioned, it requires an understanding of the forces of the Universe that we don't seem remotely close to having.

Some people here really get moist in the front of their shorts when talking about what Musk is doing. I think what he is doing, while complicated, is pretty weak. He is using old rocket technology and jacking it up, we will need far better than that to have a real chance of mastering deep space, of even putting a telescope up to operate in inter-stellar Space (something that would interest me).

The Orion Arm section that we are in is estimated to by 500 Parsecs thick, that is an almost unfathomable distance, but is a pipsqueak distance relative to the length of the Orion Arm, which itself is a tiny arm in our Galaxy. We are believed to be right in the middle of that thickness. Transversing 250 Parsecs in either direction is no small feat, that is why I don't think that we will be remotely close to doing that in even 1,000 years without a major breakthrough in understanding of the forces of the Universe. Are there beings out there that have mastered what we don't know? Maybe, but my guess is, if that was the case, we would be about as interesting to them as a colony of bugs would be to us.

[misanthrope]

39. I think what Musk is doing

Last edited Sat May 30, 2020, 01:04 AM - Edit history (1)

is gratifying his megalomaniacal tendencies. His goals are objectively foolish at this point when technology and resources should be devoted to ensuring our sustainable survival on the only planet we know can support us: Earth. Day by day, month by month, year by year, we are moving closer to destroying the ecosphere for ourselves and myriad other species. We are creating an extinction-level event and people like Musk are concerned with material wealth and chasing things which are millennia beyond our current technology.

At our current rate, we are going to be so worried about the crash of civilization within a century that the idea of going to a neighboring planet will be seen as the madness it is in these circumstances.

[crickets]

40. +1

[Blue_true]

41. Good observations.

But there are things that all of us can do to help with climate change and help other species. We can sponsor the planting of a native nut or fruit tree in a state forest or national forest, the tree will eventually provide food to some animals in the forest, some of which, or their offspring, will become food for their predators in the forest - all the while the tree will be cleaning out CO compounds from the air, in net.

We can go to city and county council meeting and push officials to plant native plants and shrubs on government property and road boundaries. There are plants that not only clean CO compounds from the air 24 hours per day, but also clean volatile organic compounds (VOCs) like gas fumes, petrochemical fumes, from the air 24 hours per day.

I view Musk as a publicity hungry jackass. But for us to say that a person like him need to do more to save this planet overlooks our own roles and our own actions and decisions that are impacting the planet. For example, I take two baths each day, which seems wasteful, except for one caveat, my two baths combined use less that one fifth the water that a person taking a shower under a low flow shower head would use for one bath. Just imagine if everyone bathed like I do, there would be less of a need for water reservoirs and water reclamation ponds, the land now used for those purposes could be made into forestland and land that contain other air cleaning plant species, helping negate the rise of CO and organic compounds in the air.

But I can do more and I am trying, for example, even as a single person, I generate 2-3 gallons of trash each day - most of that trash is not in reclaimable packaging. So I have two challenges, as I look at my choices. First, keep changing my personal decision-making to source more packaging that can be reclaimed or recycled. Second, as an engineer and businessperson, help develop new technologies to product biodegradable and/or compostable materials that stand up to the demands of our single-use culture.

I don't disagree with you about Musk, in total agreement there, with the exception that people like him have any more of an obligation to fight climate change than we have.

[Shiv]

43. On this we totally agree

I did reign myself in at the end there and mention protecting what we have being a higher priority. As much as I want to get to space it'll take so many centuries to achieve a fraction of what I'm interested in, surviving until then is essential.

I personally look at Musk as, hmm, I think the word I'm looking for is a Dink. He's a useful fulfillment officer for NASA and is probably more trouble than he's worth when it comes right down to it, but some of his engineers might be alright.

To be fair, there is quite a bit of useful information and projects NASA research pursues in the arena of climate research and observation.

If inspiring people and reminding them that science *works* and collective endeavor *works*, those can't be bad things.

It shouldn't take that and it might ultimately be a distraction, especially being tainted by, well, you get the idea.

Oh, also, I think a comparison of Musk and Ford, given some of his... I'll politely call them beliefs - yet role in taking the developing auto industry into a cheaper more available form that later companies actually made the leaps and bounds with, informs my opinion of the man.


Edited to add: Based on my Aunt's chuckle when we watched the launch, I'm gonna say dink was the word I was looking for.

[misanthrope]

44. As long as you understand it is the aim of this administration

and many in their political camp to push crewed exploration at the expense of climate research. They want to make NASA's climate research go away and will use these endeavors to distract the public.

[Shiv]

45. That's the kind of thing I meant by it being tainted, actually.

I just was refraining from directly mentioning him by name because I am so just

A He who should not be named moniker would be too cool and undeserved (big LotR and Potter fan!)

Sorry, trying to avoid talking about them more often than I have to and when it isn't the direct subject of what I'm going on about with someone. No worries

If they aren't in office more than the ... 230 odd days left, don't suppose they'll get much mileage out of that, hopefully.

[backscatter712]

47. Yep. The rocket that blew up was an early prototype of SpaceX's Starship.

Obviously, they've still got a lot of bugs to work out. But yes, these kinds of things happen in rocket development.

Nobody was hurt, that's the important part. Live and learn.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

22. .

[Dem4Life1102]

26. Poor Elan is having a bad week

[csziggy]

33. NASA Spaceflight video