It's hard to take any of these breathless articles seriously when they say, "Exploded SpaceX rocket devastated a town..." and the like. It's obvious the people writing the article either don't know what they're talking about or they're intentionally being disengenuous for clicks. The controlled explosion of the SpaceX rocket did not devastate or hurt anything. It happened far offshore at 30k foot up.
The "damage" is almost exclusively to and from the concrete pad being blown apart by the rocket plume into fast moving chunks and dust. The chunks did not devastate any of the town. The wildlife reserve was similarly not devastated. The worst "damage" to non-SpaceX property was the spread of concrete bits and sand.
Starship is intended to span uses ranging from putting huge amounts of stuff, like 40,000 Starlink satellites, each weighing 5X what the first gen satellites weigh, into orbit, and it will go to the Moon and it will ship supplies and people for a Mars colony.
And Elon wants it fast. That means anything that would require tearing down and replacing the launch mount is off the table. So, next up is the water cooled steel wedge. You are right that relative to space explorations budgets, a flame trench and a deluge system are small potatoes. But it feels like they are tangled up in sunk costs and a desire to find the fastest solutions.
This is a classic project management decision: You discover an expensive to fix issue late in the game. Do you:
a) Pick a cheap quick but possibly insufficient solution, or
b) Pick a reliable solution that costs so much more time that stuff downstream of your project (Artemis 3 in this case) can't use the results of your project anymore
If the quicker fix doesn't, then you are really screwed. You didn't start the slow expensive fix, you have less money, and you may be out of time.
They are unlikely to launch Starship from Mars with a flame diverter or water suppression system, so determining what they can "get away with" with Raptor is relevant. But obviously 33 of them is different than 6.
I think it's a little annoying how avoidable it was though.
Aside: by chance I happened to be in the area so headed down and saw the launch. That was a trip.
A guy I chatted with told me we were 5 miles from the launch. He said that 10 miles is the typical viewing distance for the Florida launches. NASA apparently, he said, has an observing facility that is 3.5 miles from the Florida tower but you pay dearly for a seat.
With that as context, I confess that I was expecting something a little more chest-pounding from the launch. Perhaps 3.5 miles packs that extra punch.
The slowness with which it climbed also surprised me. Watching it rise, kind of hanging in the air it seemed to struggle. It seemed suddenly to me that large rockets were "not meant to be", were an affront to gravity or something.
We saw several of these flashes in the thrust that apparently were engines going out (blowing up?). At the time I thought maybe the fuel was being pumped unevenly — some kind of pogo-ing. When nothing blew up though I assumed that perhaps at various angles the flame from the motors might just look brighter — perhaps momentarily unobstructed by exhaust.
As it disappeared into the sky above the final thing that struck me was how long you could continue to hear the thing — like a Harley or something still thundering long after you've lost sight of it.
If it blew up while we were there, I didn't know it. Odd flashes and booms had suddenly become something I just came to expect from a large rocket launch. We were frankly more interested in getting off South Padre before the whole crowd slowed traffic to a crawl.
If you watch an old Saturn V launch video, they have the same slowness at liftoff. Really gives a sense of of how gigantic the thing is. You've stuck rockets onto the bottom of a skyscraper and are trying to loft it into the air.
It didn't just seem to struggle. Some of the YouTubers covering SpaceX calculated the acceleration curves. It was substantially under max power, in part due to failed engines.
Isn’t life already multiplanetary? There’s no way we are the only planet with the only life. Seems like we are just destroying vans for no reason. Also seems like we are destroying this planet for no reason.
The lesson of attempting a Mars colony will likely be "life is a planetary system." and we will find out just how ill suited we are to being stripped of our environment for more than a few months at a time.
Readit News
The "damage" is almost exclusively to and from the concrete pad being blown apart by the rocket plume into fast moving chunks and dust. The chunks did not devastate any of the town. The wildlife reserve was similarly not devastated. The worst "damage" to non-SpaceX property was the spread of concrete bits and sand.
I have plenty of complaints about him but the non stop articles have just become comical at this point.
From someone who knows nothing about this stuff, these seem like very simple things to solve given the vast complexity of the rest of the system.
And they also don't seem like massively expensive investments.
> In a tweet from October 2020, Musk wrote "Aspiring to have no flame diverter in Boca, but this could turn out to be a mistake."
Why? What is the aspiration for?
And Elon wants it fast. That means anything that would require tearing down and replacing the launch mount is off the table. So, next up is the water cooled steel wedge. You are right that relative to space explorations budgets, a flame trench and a deluge system are small potatoes. But it feels like they are tangled up in sunk costs and a desire to find the fastest solutions.
a) Pick a cheap quick but possibly insufficient solution, or
b) Pick a reliable solution that costs so much more time that stuff downstream of your project (Artemis 3 in this case) can't use the results of your project anymore
If the quicker fix doesn't, then you are really screwed. You didn't start the slow expensive fix, you have less money, and you may be out of time.
So, like F5 tornado or cat5 eyewall landing? Or a richter 9 earthquake? Or a nuke exploding?
Dead Comment
Aside: by chance I happened to be in the area so headed down and saw the launch. That was a trip.
A guy I chatted with told me we were 5 miles from the launch. He said that 10 miles is the typical viewing distance for the Florida launches. NASA apparently, he said, has an observing facility that is 3.5 miles from the Florida tower but you pay dearly for a seat.
With that as context, I confess that I was expecting something a little more chest-pounding from the launch. Perhaps 3.5 miles packs that extra punch.
The slowness with which it climbed also surprised me. Watching it rise, kind of hanging in the air it seemed to struggle. It seemed suddenly to me that large rockets were "not meant to be", were an affront to gravity or something.
We saw several of these flashes in the thrust that apparently were engines going out (blowing up?). At the time I thought maybe the fuel was being pumped unevenly — some kind of pogo-ing. When nothing blew up though I assumed that perhaps at various angles the flame from the motors might just look brighter — perhaps momentarily unobstructed by exhaust.
As it disappeared into the sky above the final thing that struck me was how long you could continue to hear the thing — like a Harley or something still thundering long after you've lost sight of it.
If it blew up while we were there, I didn't know it. Odd flashes and booms had suddenly become something I just came to expect from a large rocket launch. We were frankly more interested in getting off South Padre before the whole crowd slowed traffic to a crawl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enB2QL9Ulus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGLfs376wXE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnMM1lObp0Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enB2QL9Ulus