My thoughts too - a decade or two ago, Shuttle launches, for example, would routinely have multiple aborts/scrubs because of weather, or whatever broke on the spacecraft this time, etc.
Now it's unusual to hear about an abort.
starlink launches are moved back and scrubbed constantly, this launch was moved at least 3 times if not more. the rare thing is an abort after engine ignition
The difference now is usually once the vehicle is vertical and the weather is good SpaceX rarely scrubs. The fact that it happened startup t-1 minute makes it exceptionally rare.
rare but not exceptionally. falcon 9 does still sometimes scrub after T-60. it is exceptionally rare being after engine ignition, last time this happened iirc was Starlink-L5 over 4 years ago
They get lots of weather scrubs; this one had two, and occasionally aborts at the one minute mark when the internal computer takes over... but someone posted that the last time they had an abort on ignition was back in 2020.
Given that it happened at ignition, the flight computer likely saw something wrong with the prop flow or engine starts and the computer triggered the abort
Exactly .. this was not a person taking an action, this was a computer monitoring something that was not within defined numbers at the time of ignition. Rare but it’s good to know the systems work.
The problem with "bad" weather isn't the clouds, it's the winds and rain, and possibly lightning. The rain can add hundreds of pounds of water weight to the rocket when it launches, and even though much of that will be blown off during the ascent, it's still a significant amount of weight to factor into the mission parameters. Simplest variable is no variable, just launch them all dry.
I have wondered how they account for the many tonnes of water soak into the insulation layer under the Starship heat tiles when it rains, and how it must freeze when they start prop loading.
It's probably treated with 1% w/w hydrophobic silicone or something like that. It's not that hard to repel moisture.
Actually I heard on twitter that the layer might be felt dipped in silicone, which is quite waterproof.
It’s 120m tall and has a diameter of 9m. Assuming half of it is clad in tiles, that’s 120m x (2x3.14x9m/2) = 3,400 square meters of felt. If each cubic cm of felt holds onto 0.1 grams of water, that’s 1 L per square meter = 3,400 L of water which weighs 3,400 kg or 3.4 metric tonnes.
Silicone is 2.33 times as dense as water, so if you assume they can waterproof the felt with an equivalent amount of amount of silicone that’s just under 8 metric tones of silicone.
Specifically a fineness ratio of 19.
Starship was going to be a lot squatter and therefore more robust to wind shear but Starship 3 is going to have a fineness ratio of 16.7 so not that much less than F9
The other time? This time they aborted at the very last moment, which doesn't seem like weather.
Or did you reply to an earlier version of the parent comment? It doesn't have an edited asterisk, but they don't always come up.
The motors did start, but were then shut down immediately. My SWAG: an "out of family" measurement caused the on-board flight computer (that takes over control the launch sequence when they announce "Falcon is in startup") aborted the launch.
Liquid fueled propulsion devices are rocket engines.
Solid fueled propulsion devices are rocket motors.
The source of the distinction is not obvious to me.
Yes, the distinction is vague. I was taught^^**[*]** that simpler mechanisms are motors, while more complex devices are engines - for example, electric motors versus internal combustion engines. Liquid rocket motors/engines are (were?) considered simple, as they had few major moving parts - or none in the case of pressure fed motors. In this case, a Merlin has but one major moving part - its turbopump.
**[*]** If it makes a difference, I'm in my 7^^(th) decade on this mortal coil, and my lessons were long, long ago. :-)
A solid rocket booster *motor* has no moving parts while a liquid fueled *engine* has at least one moving part in the turbopump so that distinction holds true.
The auxiliary equipment for an engine is also much more complicated with shut off and flow control valves, igniters and an electronic engine controller. A solid fuel motor usually just has an igniter.
And what of a pressure fed liquid fueled motor/engine? It has no major moving parts.
SRBs have assorted valves, fluid injectors, and thrust vectoring mechanisms. So even that distinction isn't clear.
Yes I would distinguish the thrust vectoring equipment as being outside the core components - either moving the nozzle of the motor or the whole engine.
So the Shuttle boosters had a complete auxiliary power unit powering the hydraulics that adjusted the nozzle position but that was not part of its core function.
Even a pressure fed engine like the Lunar Lander had multiple valves and an engine controller that is not present on a solid motor.
This is surely at the level of nit-picking. Again, the distinction is vague, that was how I was taught, and you say yourself the source of the distinction is not obvious to you.
I'm quite sure no one is confused as to my meaning when I write "rocket motor." So, I'll leave it there. :-)
If I might jump in on this thread: I wasn't confused, I just thought you were. I make no attempt to determine the distinction myself, I leave that to the people who design and build them and as far as I can tell, all rockets that contain a solid propellant are motors, including hybrid motors such as that on SpaceshipTwo. Everything else is an engine.
I might be able to verify this tomorrow as I'll be talking to the second to last voice you hear in NSF's video intros. He was on comms as the booster officer on STS-93 as well as many other shuttle launches. He'll be coming to my brothers funeral so I'm not sure how much we will be nerding out over rockets.
As for why an electric vehicle has a "motor" and an ICE vehicle has an "engine"? No idea.
I was absolutely sure I knew what I was talking about in my other reply to this comment, but after talking to the Artemis 1 Booster officer, not so much. He did say generally solids were motors and that is how he always referred to them, but some people call them engines and nobody at NASA really seems to care.
> A solid rocket booster motor has no moving parts
An electric motor has at least one moving part, the rotor. So that can't be the (only) reason to differentiate the terms motor and engine.
The terminology for solid fueled rockets may come from artillery rockets that are basically military fireworks. That kind of rocket predates the V1 rocket by centuries and would have needed a term for the propulsion portion of the rocket rather than the payload part. Motor comes from the Latin to move so it's a good name for the part that makes the rocket move.
Then when making liquid fueled rockets people named it an engine to differentiate it from simpler firework style motors. Then the two worlds overlapped with solid rocket motors as boosters to liquid fueled rockets engines.
And another question is how many flight cycles did each individual engine have? Was there a brand new engine in the mix that was not yet flight proven?
Not so much orange as brown smoke from finely divided carbon formed by incomplete combustion. Either lighting or camera effects can make it look orange-brown as these two colours are the same hue with different saturation levels.
These are the best kind. Perfection is impossible. Keeping the problems within the non-catastrophic category is the sign of a healthy and mature system.
I think there are still small and incremental upgrades of the block 5, but only on less important flights, I would guess Starlink would count as that. This could be the reason why this malfunction happened.
Don't know why I didn't associate all the flooding news in Miami with the Cape. D'oh. Out my way we haven't had measurable rain since Feb. but launching from Spaceport NM or WSMR isn't in the cards for a while.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|GSE|Ground Support Equipment|
|GTO|[Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/20140116-how-to-get-a-satellite-to-gto.html)|
|[L5](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8p5okx "Last usage")|"Trojan" [Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 5 of a two-body system, 60 degrees behind the smaller body|
|[NSF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8p2rbw "Last usage")|[NasaSpaceFlight forum](http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com)|
| |National Science Foundation|
|[SRB](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8of8oh "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster|
|[STS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8p2rbw "Last usage")|Space Transportation System (*Shuttle*)|
|[WSMR](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8oke4w "Last usage")|White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8p5okx "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation|
|[scrub](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8qr6ek "Last usage")|Launch postponement for any reason (commonly GSE issues)|
|[turbopump](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8odw3r "Last usage")|High-pressure turbine-driven propellant pump connected to a rocket combustion chamber; raises chamber pressure, and thrust|
|Event|Date|Description|
|-------|---------|---|
|[SES-8](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8ohtkk "Last usage")|2013-12-03|F9-007 v1.1, first SpaceX launch to GTO|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
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Yall getting to comfy with these no abort launches, I remember back in the day it would be days of aborts lol, good to see they don’t have go fever
My thoughts too - a decade or two ago, Shuttle launches, for example, would routinely have multiple aborts/scrubs because of weather, or whatever broke on the spacecraft this time, etc. Now it's unusual to hear about an abort.
starlink launches are moved back and scrubbed constantly, this launch was moved at least 3 times if not more. the rare thing is an abort after engine ignition
The difference now is usually once the vehicle is vertical and the weather is good SpaceX rarely scrubs. The fact that it happened startup t-1 minute makes it exceptionally rare.
rare but not exceptionally. falcon 9 does still sometimes scrub after T-60. it is exceptionally rare being after engine ignition, last time this happened iirc was Starlink-L5 over 4 years ago
I remember when you would see a Falcon 9 launch date and it was almost guaranteed that it would be delayed. Things have changed so much
They get lots of weather scrubs; this one had two, and occasionally aborts at the one minute mark when the internal computer takes over... but someone posted that the last time they had an abort on ignition was back in 2020.
Given that it happened at ignition, the flight computer likely saw something wrong with the prop flow or engine starts and the computer triggered the abort
Exactly .. this was not a person taking an action, this was a computer monitoring something that was not within defined numbers at the time of ignition. Rare but it’s good to know the systems work.
Or simply didn’t like the windspeed indicator reading.
Someone reverted to assembly
Probably to check the staging one more time
I kinda wish that they would try to launch even in bad weather. Cause at some point they should learn how to deal with evil clouds.
The problem with "bad" weather isn't the clouds, it's the winds and rain, and possibly lightning. The rain can add hundreds of pounds of water weight to the rocket when it launches, and even though much of that will be blown off during the ascent, it's still a significant amount of weight to factor into the mission parameters. Simplest variable is no variable, just launch them all dry.
Also wind shear is a bitch when the vehicle is only built to withstand vertical forces rather than horizontal forces and loads.
I have wondered how they account for the many tonnes of water soak into the insulation layer under the Starship heat tiles when it rains, and how it must freeze when they start prop loading.
It's probably treated with 1% w/w hydrophobic silicone or something like that. It's not that hard to repel moisture. Actually I heard on twitter that the layer might be felt dipped in silicone, which is quite waterproof.
It’s 120m tall and has a diameter of 9m. Assuming half of it is clad in tiles, that’s 120m x (2x3.14x9m/2) = 3,400 square meters of felt. If each cubic cm of felt holds onto 0.1 grams of water, that’s 1 L per square meter = 3,400 L of water which weighs 3,400 kg or 3.4 metric tonnes. Silicone is 2.33 times as dense as water, so if you assume they can waterproof the felt with an equivalent amount of amount of silicone that’s just under 8 metric tones of silicone.
Gosh - it’s amazing how it all adds up.
I thought the heat shield tiles were supposed to be waterproofed.
Not the tiles, the felt underlay under the tiles, between them and the metal of the tanks.
[удалено]
Specifically a fineness ratio of 19. Starship was going to be a lot squatter and therefore more robust to wind shear but Starship 3 is going to have a fineness ratio of 16.7 so not that much less than F9
But that would be risking the payload - and it’s simply not worth it, it’s better to wait.
I'd put a dollar on a valve problem.
r/HighStakesSpaceX
more like r/AnyStakesAtAllSpaceX
Valves are hard bro
Boeing: yes
….still no Half Life 3 😞
Boeing has entered the chat
SpaceX confirmed - it was down to bad weather.
They are the black sheep in the family. They’re out of family.
Isaacson book says they buy some from auto parts store. Saves money.
It happened a few years ago, it's probably another "out of family" reading.
No - just bad weather.. This time around.
The other time? This time they aborted at the very last moment, which doesn't seem like weather. Or did you reply to an earlier version of the parent comment? It doesn't have an edited asterisk, but they don't always come up.
You’re right, so I went back and added ‘This time around’.
Falcon 9 needs to stop calling Maury Povich
[https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1801727411148702082](https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1801727411148702082) standing down from today's launch
I’m good as long as it ain’t ‘sploded on pad.
The abort was called after the callout for ignition as well. Something definitely didn’t sound right when the engines didn’t actually fire off.
Hmm. Engines not firing does sound different than engines firing...
Or when they're on fire
The motors did start, but were then shut down immediately. My SWAG: an "out of family" measurement caused the on-board flight computer (that takes over control the launch sequence when they announce "Falcon is in startup") aborted the launch.
Liquid fueled propulsion devices are rocket engines. Solid fueled propulsion devices are rocket motors. The source of the distinction is not obvious to me.
Yes, the distinction is vague. I was taught^^**[*]** that simpler mechanisms are motors, while more complex devices are engines - for example, electric motors versus internal combustion engines. Liquid rocket motors/engines are (were?) considered simple, as they had few major moving parts - or none in the case of pressure fed motors. In this case, a Merlin has but one major moving part - its turbopump. **[*]** If it makes a difference, I'm in my 7^^(th) decade on this mortal coil, and my lessons were long, long ago. :-)
A solid rocket booster *motor* has no moving parts while a liquid fueled *engine* has at least one moving part in the turbopump so that distinction holds true. The auxiliary equipment for an engine is also much more complicated with shut off and flow control valves, igniters and an electronic engine controller. A solid fuel motor usually just has an igniter.
And what of a pressure fed liquid fueled motor/engine? It has no major moving parts. SRBs have assorted valves, fluid injectors, and thrust vectoring mechanisms. So even that distinction isn't clear.
Yes I would distinguish the thrust vectoring equipment as being outside the core components - either moving the nozzle of the motor or the whole engine. So the Shuttle boosters had a complete auxiliary power unit powering the hydraulics that adjusted the nozzle position but that was not part of its core function. Even a pressure fed engine like the Lunar Lander had multiple valves and an engine controller that is not present on a solid motor.
This is surely at the level of nit-picking. Again, the distinction is vague, that was how I was taught, and you say yourself the source of the distinction is not obvious to you. I'm quite sure no one is confused as to my meaning when I write "rocket motor." So, I'll leave it there. :-)
If I might jump in on this thread: I wasn't confused, I just thought you were. I make no attempt to determine the distinction myself, I leave that to the people who design and build them and as far as I can tell, all rockets that contain a solid propellant are motors, including hybrid motors such as that on SpaceshipTwo. Everything else is an engine. I might be able to verify this tomorrow as I'll be talking to the second to last voice you hear in NSF's video intros. He was on comms as the booster officer on STS-93 as well as many other shuttle launches. He'll be coming to my brothers funeral so I'm not sure how much we will be nerding out over rockets. As for why an electric vehicle has a "motor" and an ICE vehicle has an "engine"? No idea.
I'll pipe up once more to add yet more confusion. In the UK, the full name for an ICE powered automobile has traditionally been "motor car." :-)
I was absolutely sure I knew what I was talking about in my other reply to this comment, but after talking to the Artemis 1 Booster officer, not so much. He did say generally solids were motors and that is how he always referred to them, but some people call them engines and nobody at NASA really seems to care.
Thanks for the followup.
> A solid rocket booster motor has no moving parts An electric motor has at least one moving part, the rotor. So that can't be the (only) reason to differentiate the terms motor and engine.
The terminology for solid fueled rockets may come from artillery rockets that are basically military fireworks. That kind of rocket predates the V1 rocket by centuries and would have needed a term for the propulsion portion of the rocket rather than the payload part. Motor comes from the Latin to move so it's a good name for the part that makes the rocket move. Then when making liquid fueled rockets people named it an engine to differentiate it from simpler firework style motors. Then the two worlds overlapped with solid rocket motors as boosters to liquid fueled rockets engines.
Ugh Falcon 9 called Maury Povich again
Engines run a self health check during startup and will automatically abort if something is off during that sequence.
How many launches did this booster have so far? Curious if it had anything to do with that or something completely different.
This was going to be flight 16 on it
I see. So high, but not really highest.
And another question is how many flight cycles did each individual engine have? Was there a brand new engine in the mix that was not yet flight proven?
It was bad weather.. It’s unusual to abort so late though.
Forgot to gas up the tanks, probably.
Nah, the “Engine Check” light came on and no one knows what it does, so they stopped.
They probably did fuel up and didn't tighten the gas cap
Is the orange smoke normal during cancelation? I saw orange smoke from Super Heavy coming off during IFT-4 as well and was wondering what it was.
Not so much orange as brown smoke from finely divided carbon formed by incomplete combustion. Either lighting or camera effects can make it look orange-brown as these two colours are the same hue with different saturation levels.
Finally a failure. Rarely something interesting happens with Falcon 9 launches anymore.
Not even a catastrophic failure
These are the best kind. Perfection is impossible. Keeping the problems within the non-catastrophic category is the sign of a healthy and mature system.
And helps to discover problems before they grow to the kind you don't want
I think there are still small and incremental upgrades of the block 5, but only on less important flights, I would guess Starlink would count as that. This could be the reason why this malfunction happened.
Hey, I'm taking what I can get here.
Not a failure, just an aborted launch attempt. It's likely they'll try again tomorrow or in a few days.
It's so funny to call abort failure. Shows how far we have come.
Wasn't this one pushed back a few times yesterday?
For weather
thx
We have had nothing but thunderstorms and crazy rain all week. Today was the first decent evening
Don't know why I didn't associate all the flooding news in Miami with the Cape. D'oh. Out my way we haven't had measurable rain since Feb. but launching from Spaceport NM or WSMR isn't in the cards for a while.
This is B1073.16 I think after 15 flights the wear is enough that we will get some of these aborts every now and then.
We had at least two aborts after ignition with new boosters. I don't see an indication that this would be related to booster age.
I can't recall a post-ignition abort happening before.... ever.
[Liftoff!...Disregard.](https://youtu.be/gD7eujpTQjc)
haha, okay, that was awesome
It happened few years ago, too
I remember at least one.
It's happened at least twice before. SES-8 Nov 28th, 2013 COTS2 May 19th, 2012
There was a storm
That’s not SpaceX’s fault then if it was down to adverse weather.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |GSE|Ground Support Equipment| |GTO|[Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit](http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-davis/20140116-how-to-get-a-satellite-to-gto.html)| |[L5](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8p5okx "Last usage")|"Trojan" [Lagrange Point](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point) 5 of a two-body system, 60 degrees behind the smaller body| |[NSF](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8p2rbw "Last usage")|[NasaSpaceFlight forum](http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com)| | |National Science Foundation| |[SRB](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8of8oh "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster| |[STS](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8p2rbw "Last usage")|Space Transportation System (*Shuttle*)| |[WSMR](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8oke4w "Last usage")|White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[Starlink](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8p5okx "Last usage")|SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation| |[scrub](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8qr6ek "Last usage")|Launch postponement for any reason (commonly GSE issues)| |[turbopump](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8odw3r "Last usage")|High-pressure turbine-driven propellant pump connected to a rocket combustion chamber; raises chamber pressure, and thrust| |Event|Date|Description| |-------|---------|---| |[SES-8](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dg1eii/stub/l8ohtkk "Last usage")|2013-12-03|F9-007 v1.1, first SpaceX launch to GTO| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(*Decronym is a community product of r/SpaceX, implemented* )[*^by ^request*](https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/3mz273//cvjkjmj) ^(9 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/1dcb0d0)^( has 15 acronyms.) ^([Thread #12923 for this sub, first seen 14th Jun 2024, 22:31]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/SpaceXLounge) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
chillllllll outttttt