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SpaceX Starship Mk. 1 fails during cryogenic loading test
SpaceX's first full-scale Starship prototype – [Mark 1 (Mk. 1)] – has experienced a major failure at its Boca Chica test site in southern Texas. The failure occurred late in the afternoon on Wednesday, midway through a test of the vehicle's propellant tanks.
The Mk. 1 Starship – which was shown off to the world in September as part of SpaceX's and Elon Musk's presentation of the design changes to the Starship system was to fly the first 20 km test flight of the program in the coming weeks.
The main event of today, the Mk. 1 Starship's first cryogenic loading test, involved filling the methane and oxygen tanks with a cryogenic liquid.
During the test, the top bulkhead of the vehicle ruptured and was ejected away from the site, followed by a large cloud of vapors and cryogenic liquid from the tank.
There will be no attempt to salvage Starship Mk1, with focus instead shifting to Mk3 (in Texas) and Mk2 (in Florida):
Minutes after the anomaly was broadcast on several unofficial livestreams of SpaceX's Boca Chica facilities, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk acknowledged Starship Mk1's failure in a tweet, telegraphing a general lack of worry. Of note, Musk indicated that Mk1 was valuable mainly as a manufacturing pathfinder, entirely believable but also partially contradicting his September 2019 presentation, in which he pretty clearly stated that Mk1 would soon be launched to ~20 km to demonstrate Starship's exotic new skydiver landing strategy.
Musk says that instead of repairing Starship Mk1, SpaceX's Boca Chica team will move directly to Starship Mk3, a significantly more advanced design that has benefitted from the numerous lessons learned from building and flying Starhopper and fabricating Starship Mk1. The first Starship Mk3 ring appears to have already been prepared, but SpaceX's South Texas focus has clearly been almost entirely on preparing Starship Mk1 for wet dress rehearsal, static fire, and flight tests. After today's failure, it sounds like Mk1 will most likely be retired early and replaced as soon as possible by Mk3.
Above all else, the most important takeaway from today's Starship Mk1 anomaly is that the vehicle was a very early prototype and SpaceX likely wants to have vehicle failures occur on the ground or in-flight. As long as no humans are at risk, pushing Starship to failure (or suffering unplanned failures like today's) can only serve to benefit and improve the vehicle's design, especially when the failed hardware can be recovered intact (ish) and carefully analyzed.
Video of the rupture is available on NASASpaceFlight's forums. Start with this forum post and continue down the page for other pictures and videos.
Previously: SpaceX Provides Update on Starship with Assembled Prototype as the Backdrop
Related: The SpaceX Starship Pushback: NASA Administrator's Scolding and More
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 21 2019, @11:14AM (3 children)
They are going to be launching Starship dozens if not hundreds of times to orbit before sending humans in one.
They already have experience working on life support with Crew Dragon, with one successful orbital test (sans humans). Starship's version will be more complicated, but it's probably easier to make it work than these pressurized tanks which they seem to have so much trouble with. And the environment of space is typically not as difficult to deal with as re-entry into Earth's atmosphere, a known killer of astronauts.
6 months to Mars is often quoted but probably a worst case scenario. In-orbit refueling can give it more delta-v. They can probably cut trip time to 2-3 months. They might have to do something special to get it down to 30 days. Nuclear propulsion? Less travel time means less supplies needed, less cancer risk, etc.
Your idea to send elderly volunteers is probably worthwhile. But it's too far into the 2020s/2030s to matter right now. It remains to be seen how the whole thing would be organized (and there could be multiple independent private, commercial, and government efforts to send people to Mars). Starship's low-Earth orbit capabilities will be revolutionary even if nobody is sent to Mars. Also, the official line is that anybody who goes to Mars could get a ride back. And if you help build the Mars methane factory, you can die knowing that going to Mars doesn't need to be a commitment for the fickle youngsters who will follow in your footsteps and shit on your grave (to fertilize crops).
We should consider sending only women to Mars [slate.com]. Elderly women, to use your idea.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 22 2019, @03:19AM (2 children)
And one of the nice thing about life support systems, is that you can actually test them pretty thoroughly on the ground. Microgravity and radiation throw some extra wrenches into the mix, but at this point they're things that we understand pretty well and can mostly solve in the design phase.
I wonder how fast you could get going if you had a cluster of several Starships in orbit, all fully fueled, operated "Falcon Super-Heavy" style as a multistage rocket launching to Mars. You might even be able to get the Starships that disconnect as they're exhausted to Mars on a more leisurely path - I'm sure they'd come in handy for something.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 22 2019, @04:37AM (1 child)
I don't know if they will ever start bolting them together like Falcon Heavy. What has been mentioned is widening Starship, possibly making it comparable in capabilities to ITS:
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-elon-musk-starship-the-next-generation/ [teslarati.com]
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/08/spacex-super-heavy-starship-2-0-will-be-8-times-bigger-than-super-heavy-starship.html [nextbigfuture.com]
Note that there is no confirmation that the height would change as the illustrations assume, just the width. It could look fatter like Starhopper. It might happen in the 2030s, or it might just live and die as a tweeted idea.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 22 2019, @03:16PM
The next-gen rocket is impressive - but I'm not sure it'd actually be called for any time soon. You need a big rocket to lift big payloads into orbit, and it's going to take a long while before Starship is maxed out.
For interplanetary passenger flights though you may well want something much bigger - and there's no need for aerodynamics or high thrust, just lots of fuel. It seems to me that in that environment, Star-Tankers(?) would make for excellent "tugboats", or even just autonomous fuel tanks - let them keep a separate "pusher plate" fueled rather than trying to coordinate thrust from multiple Tankers.
Hmm, or perhaps the easiest route - I bet a SuperHeavy (1st stage) pushing just a nose cone rather than a Starship could make it to orbit on its own. Equip it for orbital refueling and with as few engines as possible (to cut down of cost and dead weight), and you've got two Starships worth of fuel capacity in a platform already designed to push a Starship. It probably couldn't survive reentry, but you might be able to park it in orbit for re-use as an interplanetary pusher, or just as a fuel depot.