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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
SpaceX's Starship Can Launch 400 Starlink Satellites at Once
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by choose another one on Thursday November 21 2019, @01:31PM (3 children)
> No problem, time for the next generation, which will be So Much Better!™
Falcon (1 variant) blew up on first three launches (not ground tests, actual launches).
First few booster landings also failed or blew up.
Now, Falcons go up fine, they come down fine, they go up again, and so on until it's ******* boring.
Meanwhile Boeing and co. continue flushing money (way more than falcon) down the toilet seat so SLS will be "right first flight", if that ever happens.
End of the day, the question is would you rather fly on something built by Musk or something built by the company that brought you the 737-Maximum-Lawndart. Not that easy a call now is it?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 21 2019, @01:41PM (2 children)
At one point, there was even talk of sending astronauts on the very first SLS flight [space.com]. But now the plan is muuuch safer with crew on the second flight instead.
It's totally safe because it reuses some Space Shuttle parts. It's like it has been flown dozens of times already with no incident.
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(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday November 21 2019, @08:46PM (1 child)
Yep, launching with crew on the first flight - who would do such a crazy thing? It's not like the very first Space Shuttle launch was crewed. Oh wait, yes it was - it had a crew of two and circled the Earth 36 times before landing without serious incident.
Now I'm a fan of SpaceX's iterative design philosophy - you couldn't have gotten me onto that first Space Shuttle launch. Nothing is perfect and I'd just as soon fly on a system that's been repeatedly tested as a unified system to find the unexpected problems.
However, the "do it right the first time" philosophy also has a proven track record. It seems to be far slower and more expensive, but for an organization that depends on political support for funding... maybe it's the only strategy that really makes sense. One rocket blows up, and suddenly the purse strings are being cinched closed because nobody wants to be on record throwing good money after bad. And if your organization is already operating on "this *can't* be allowed to fail" mentality, putting a few human lives on the line too is no big deal. We spend far more human lives on far less noble goals on a regular basis.
That said - if you don't actually have a good reason to put people on board for the first test flight, it's probably not a great idea, as it will amplify the backlash in case of a fatal problem. But at ~$2 billion per launch you'd better have some sort of payload worth launching - otherwise it makes for an extremely expensive test flight.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 21 2019, @09:36PM
Things that make sense when your launcher costs $2 billion per flight instead of $2 million.
Yeah, guess things are quite different in that regime.
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