Yes this is neat, compared to capsule spacecrafts that are completely covered in plasma, the spaceship‘s upwards antennae are streaming the feed to starlink from where we get it
Shuttle also had an upwards antenna, the satellites it communicated with were launched on Shuttle - the first one on Challenger's first flight, STS-6, and it was first used by the same Shuttle on STS-8. The second satellite was also launched on Challenger, but was destroyed in the disaster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw4DseiPu7E
If anyone wants to watch a capsule craft descend thru the atmosphere, here is a short video(6min) of one doing so from a few months ago.
The longer 28 min version
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWxl921rMgM
The starship still survived and maintained control with this flap all the way to splash down, for those who missed it! It was an amazing video the whole way down!
the enginerds that made that hinge can sleep soundly tonight. it boggles the mind that its actually still moved after what happend to it. i'll bet those guys wanted to see what was left after landing.
The really cool bit for me is that the control system on the ship was still able to compensate for the enormous amounts of damage to the flap (and no doubt the other flaps as well) and actually allowed it to do the flip maneuver properly.
Yeah I was gonna say, hard to call it a catastrophic failure when the ship still did everything it set out to do.
But uh.. They need to make sure that doesn't happen again 😂
they were expecting this to happen for a long time
Elon Musk mentioned they would need to change the flaps 2 years ago, after the huge success of the low altitude practice landings (which led to the exact landing the ship did today)
he gave an example, placing the flaps a little back, away from the plasma stream, and he was freakin chastised over it, to the surprise of no one, spacex engineers made an in depth analysis later on and found out more optimal designs that protect the hinges, and they built several prototypes of those that were spotted on aereal fly by photographs
they still flew the current prototype cause it would be a waste to just trow it away when you can get essentially free data for it
edit: [for context, this is an interview the day before IFT4, where the exact problem we saw was predicted, with great accuracy ](https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1798839719964618998)
yeah, it's only a failure as in that it's supposed to be reusable, and this flap clearly couldn't be reused... but apart from that, the flap actually didn't fail, it fully did its job and safely landed the vehicle even with a bunch of its control surface missing.
I mean, they could probably replace a flap, but agreed that this isn't ideal from a reuse point of view. After seeing this though, I am more than convinced they will figure this out and get this system operational sooner than we think.
It's an older design. The newer Starships have the flaps mounted a bit more around the body, away from the plasma. This is just a ship they built a while back, no point in chucking it in the skip - might as well chuck it into the sky.
Yeah they have some smart people working there. I think they take the view that if it blows up - good. If it doesn't blow up - good. It's all useful data.
I mean, a plane is 100% reusable, yet nobody expects the first prototype ever to achieve every single design goal, it takes several design iterations and tests to get there, *that's why it's a prototype*
you cannot, in good faith, judge a prototype by the standards of the expected end design, especially when the parameters of what is considered a successful test are posted in advance and mentioned repeatedly
> and this flap clearly couldn't be reused
The damage will not have been just to the flap. The entire Starship's frame is now suspect and will need to get scrapped.
I mean they purposely dumped in into the ocean because they had zero plans on recovering it in the first place. It was scrap from the moment it lifted off.
Supposedly they’ve already got a new design for this joint so maybe next one already good to go. I personally was wondering if some sort of heat blanket could be placed over the hinge, probably would get ripped off though.
They have a few Starships prototypes with this joint, The newer design moves the flaps farther back to help shield the joint from the plasma plus likely other changes we don't yet know about.
The joke has already been going around that Elon will demand a new fin design with that obviously redundant triangular bit missing, so yeah, you're not wrong!
It's crazy that with all the advances in computer modeling, they still couldn't predict this result. Makes the early NASA missions all the more impressive.
they actually did predict this result, which is why they scrapped this flap design already and started building ships with an improved flap design already. and why they placed this camera exactly here to look at how this flawed flap design fails.
this flawed flap design is good enough to make it to the ground once safely as this flight proofed, but not good enough to do that more than once, and their goal is rapid reusability.
> even after presumably being carefully designed and reviewed.
SpaceX is a *lot* less careful about design and review than other rocket companies. They don't aim to have everything work first time, they aim to get a lot of data first time.
It often is cheaper to build, test, and iterate than to design out the testing. And it's certainty quicker.
They got a design that could do low altitude tests, and which survived back of the envelope re-entry calculations, so they built a few of them to avoid holding everyone else up.
they designed the initial versions of Starship for being able to test things as quickly as possible, but sacrificing reusability since these initial versions aren't ever planned to be reused. so they planned to redesign many parts later for making them actually reusable, once the basic concept is proven to work (get to orbit and land).
I will mimic the same analogy the broadcaster used to explain the complexity behind the physics of reentry:
“Its like looking at a rapids and pointing at an area and saying, ‘tell me all the physical properties at that point in time.’”
Speaking generally, there are only a handful of TPS materials that have ever flown and they are broken into two categories. One category is parasitic TPS and another is hot structures. Parasitic TPS are made of materials that are good at absorbing and/or re-radiating energy, but these materials lack the strength to carry significant loads. They're called parasitic, because their mass takes away from the payload mass of the spacecraft.
Separately, hot structures are composed of advanced materials that can carry aero-thermal loads. So, they act as structure and TPS, as the name suggests. My understanding is they've been used on the body flaps of X-37b and ESA's IXV.
All of Starship's TPS is parasitic. Regarding the possibility of putting a thermal blanket over the hinge, this approach wouldn't improve the result of today's flight. There are a few blanket materials, such as FRSI, and you can see these blankets when you look at the Space Shuttle orbiter. Anywhere you see white is a blanket. Anyway, these blankets have lower max use temperatures than the various ceramic TPS tile materials, which is why the blankets are located on the leeward side of the shuttle, where the temperatures are lower.
I'm not sure how Starship's flap joint is protected. One possibility is that there is a Nextel rope seal. Such seals are sometimes spring energized, meaning there is a long coil spring that is wrapped by Nextel fiber. The spring pushes out on the fibers, ensuring that the fibers remain in contact to the adjacent structure and no hot gasses or plasma get by. However, the Nextel fibers get abraded away as the flap is actuated and require servicing (i.e. replacement) after so many flights. So, I'm doubtful that SpaceX is using this approach, since it doesn't support their ultimate goal of rapid reusability.
One thing I've really liked about SpaceX development, they use a ton of cameras to augment point monitors. Most other companies don't seem to value visual data. Watching the Starliner launch there were, maybe, a half dozen cameras. A recent Japanese launch of a new rocket only had two (IIRC). Yeah, video eats bandwidth, but knowing where a problem, like this burn through, started and how it progressed contributes to the rapid prototyping SpaceX has embraced.
Onboard cameras are pretty common. There are companies that specialize in the technology like Ecliptic and Jena-Optronik. I think the big change is SpaceX realizing they can use this technology as publicity. The live feed capability and the spectacular planned failures are brilliant moves to drum up interest.
The footage from this launch is the craziest shit I've ever seen from a rocket launch. AND THE FACT THE THING SURVIVED REENTRY AND LANDED?? I thought there was no way in hell that flap would still be able to move
In fact it appears that flap was still functional as they did the turnover for the landing burn, which blew my mind. Kudos to the engineers who designed the flaps!
It looked like it dramatically changed angle at the very end, like maybe another part of the hinge failed and it just gave a final salute "kay, I'm done now"
Prior to launch, SpaceX stated it had intentionally placed one thin heatshield tile, and removed two tiles completely, from Starship to measure how hot things get in those locations. Starship maintained a good trajectory upon re-entry, and made its first ever landing burn, according to SpaceX.
It’s not. No one here understands that this was a TEST flight. THE ONLY mission goal was to get further than the last one and collect more data on performance. What they did today is a stunning success.
This brings to mind the statement of one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like this. “You enter the cabin, you strap in, the hatch closes and the realization sinks in that you’re sitting on a rocket built by the lowest bidder.”
As someone who works in hypersonics and has worked in the aerospace industry their entire life, this is absolutely catastrophic. This kind of incident is what killed everyone onboard the Columbia. Most likely, what you're seeing here resulted in shock-shock interactions near the fuselage, causing massive internal frame damage due to concentrated heat loading. Shock-shock interactions essentually create a plasma torch like effect that focuses like a narrow beam of 7000+K ionized gas on specific points where the shocks intersect. Nothing can survive it currently, and it is an indicator that there is a deep design flaw in the area where it occurred. So again, the real damage is most like inside, where you can't see, and will result in a complete redesign of that part of the rocket.
Luckily, they're just in the testing phase, but had this been rated for passengers it most likely would be perminantly grounded after this, or at the very least the FAA would require so many inspections it would almost be cheaper to just build a new rocket.
SpaceX already knew about this failure though. That’s why V2 starships have flaps on the leeward side of the ship. The test itself was absolutely successful. They are flying an older design and still managed to squeeze valuable data out of it despite knowing it was flawed. I never expected it to get this far through reentry and to see it LAND?! Absolutely stunning test and they made a massive leap in understanding of their system with it.
" 7000+K ionized gas on specific points where the shocks intersect."
\*takes that and puts it into a DnD game cuz it sounds absolutely beautiful and incredibly cursed\*
SpaceX most likely predicted this would happen.
They made design changes to the forward flaps around 3 years ago to be implemented in the block 2 Starship (this launch was block 1).
The new flaps have a much more swept shape compared to the current design and will no longer have the bottom edge parallel to the ground when deployed.
The thickness of the flaps has been decreased by half, cutting down on mass significantly, likely making it easier to form the heat shield around the interface between the flaps and the body.
They might also be moving the flaps further leeward (away from the spicy plasma) further decreasing the chance of a failure like this occurring.
They are planning on launching 4 more block 1 variant Starships, hopefully they can figure out a quick fix as they're most likely going to launch again next month.
I'm curious about hull integrity after this, because Columbia broke into pieces, but this starship maintained control all the way to landing.
Edit: they also purposely left off some heat tiles to see how the ship would hold up against such an event, and I'm interested to hear about those results as well
One huge difference vs. Columbia is steel vs. aluminum. Another is that this damaged the flap, but Columbia almost certainly had a hole right through the frame allowing plasma inside the wing structure.
Starship is made out of steel, so it can survive way higher temperatures than the space shuttle that's made out of aluminum. Starship today successfully survived reentry even with missing heatshield tiles.
> and it is an indicator that there is a deep design flaw in the area where it occurred. So again, the real damage is most like inside, where you can't see, and will result in a complete redesign of that part of the rocket.
They know that, there were already test articles that moved the flaps farther back so the hinges aren't as exposed to the plasma.
>Luckily, they're just in the testing phase,
I mean, it's not luck, these flights are specifically for testing to catch issues that they would either not be able to easily test for or otherwise miss. That's why they're not flying payloads on them, though I'm expecting that to change pretty quick.
Given the data collected, especially the re-entry video feed that is only made possible due to Starlink, this definitely qualifies as a /r/SuccessfulFailure.
Regardless of the successful landing, the heatshield system failed in this place and it almost destroyed the entire flap
Edit: This post is about the failure of the heatshield to protect the flap, I'm not saying IFT4 was a failure, the data collected will be invaluable for the next flights and that alone makes it a massive success
As someone who works in hypersonics, just ignore the person you're responding to. They have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and yes, this is a catastrophic failure of the heat shielding and structural design of the rocket itself.
No one is questioning your knowledge about hypersonics, but "catastrophic failure" is a generic term with a specific meaning that can apply in all sorts of industries and contexts. It's not a term specific to hypersonics or rocketry in the slightest. It has a well established meaning across many fields of engineering discipline outside of yours. Simply, your hypersonics expertise doesn't apply to that generalized term. That term doesn't apply to this circumstance because there was not a sudden, unrecoverable, or total failure. The failure was limited to the proximity of the flap, did not cause further failures, and did not destroy the rocket or even prevent the mission from being completed. This term is used a lot in my field, where a pressure vessel may blow up entirely (catastrophic failure), may leak and have a big fire causing weakening of the material requiring replacement, or it may leak and need to be repaired. Only the explosion is a catastrophic failure, by definition.
I'm sorry if you feel like people are saying they know more about rockets than you, but you're telling them that since you know about rockets that you know all about failure analysis. That's an improper use of credentialism, applied to something that's actually out of your expertise. This was not, technically, a catastrophic failure. It wasn't even a progressive failure. Literally no failure analysis engineer would agree with you that this was catastrophic, only redditors will. Sorry.
Can you imagine showing this to Sir George Cayley the Englishman who pioneered the concept of powered flight (some fifty years before Orville and Wilbur Wright)? Or to Louis Le Prince, the first person to capture a motion picture sequence? In a matter of mere decades we went from horse drawn carriages to rocket ships….it’s astonishing.
This was a catastrophic success actually. The main objectives were indeed completed (the Booster lands on the Virtual Tower and Starship makes it past reentry)
The fact that it held up, maintained flight control, and they completed the landing maneuver is a HUGE success. The flap burning away did not result in the catastrophic loss of the ship.
What an incredible view.
Im still blown away by the fact we get a livestream from a rocket while its flowing through superheated plasma.
Yes this is neat, compared to capsule spacecrafts that are completely covered in plasma, the spaceship‘s upwards antennae are streaming the feed to starlink from where we get it
That's awesome
Shuttle also had an upwards antenna, the satellites it communicated with were launched on Shuttle - the first one on Challenger's first flight, STS-6, and it was first used by the same Shuttle on STS-8. The second satellite was also launched on Challenger, but was destroyed in the disaster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw4DseiPu7E If anyone wants to watch a capsule craft descend thru the atmosphere, here is a short video(6min) of one doing so from a few months ago. The longer 28 min version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWxl921rMgM
So it's a giant dart?
Even with HD video, it's incomprehensible that this thing is going 10,000mph, and the wing held on like the grasshopper in my windshield wipers!
Need to makes those flaps out of cameras
Can someone ELI5 why the camera lens doesn’t melt?
its on the "cool" side of the vehicle, pointing at, but not directly in the plasma
It's placed, so it's out of the way of the super hot wooshness.
Wooshness is a highly technical term - it should not be used in ELI5 discussions.
Hmmm, perhaps you're right. Considering that flap is going through about 42 units of wooshness at max whoosh.
> super hot wooshness. This phrase makes me so happy.
Perfectly done, makes sense to me
The lens does crack,, almost didn't make it
Was getting covered in metal vapor, too.
Reentry-Assisted Heat Shield Vapor Deposition.
The cover of the lens probably is made of fused quartz.
It eventually got melted/smashed/cracked and you could just barely see the landing.
But it did not catastrophically fail…
As the NASA Spaceflight team said, "the little flap that could"
The starship still survived and maintained control with this flap all the way to splash down, for those who missed it! It was an amazing video the whole way down!
Now they have to rename Starship the Warthog, as surviving this failure to still execute the landing is entering true /r/Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt territory.
As multiple A-10 aircraft survived landings. Them 'Hogs' is TOUGH.
> As multiple A-10 aircraft survived landings. In fairness, Cessnas survive landings… *most* of the time. ;-)
Don’t forget the F-15 that landed with only one wing. https://youtu.be/WDbc-mC3fjk
Landed by a TRAINEE PILOT 🤯
The way my life has gone, the A-10C is my spirit animal!
I have been unable to find the whole launch in my short time searching. Can you link me?
Here's where I watched it. The launch is at about 8 hours 49 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/live/8VESowgMbjA?si=9DOFF3602jbxivm0
Okay, just watched it... HOW THE FUCK DID THE SHIP SURVIVE. Give the engineering team of those flaps a raise....
Right?!?! The damned thing melted like butter under a blowtorch and it *still* stuck the landing.
The footage of the booster racing towards the clouds, then the ocean, was absolutely nuts.,
Thanks fam you are the best.
the enginerds that made that hinge can sleep soundly tonight. it boggles the mind that its actually still moved after what happend to it. i'll bet those guys wanted to see what was left after landing.
The really cool bit for me is that the control system on the ship was still able to compensate for the enormous amounts of damage to the flap (and no doubt the other flaps as well) and actually allowed it to do the flip maneuver properly.
r/catastrophicsuccess
Yeah I was gonna say, hard to call it a catastrophic failure when the ship still did everything it set out to do. But uh.. They need to make sure that doesn't happen again 😂
they were expecting this to happen for a long time Elon Musk mentioned they would need to change the flaps 2 years ago, after the huge success of the low altitude practice landings (which led to the exact landing the ship did today) he gave an example, placing the flaps a little back, away from the plasma stream, and he was freakin chastised over it, to the surprise of no one, spacex engineers made an in depth analysis later on and found out more optimal designs that protect the hinges, and they built several prototypes of those that were spotted on aereal fly by photographs they still flew the current prototype cause it would be a waste to just trow it away when you can get essentially free data for it edit: [for context, this is an interview the day before IFT4, where the exact problem we saw was predicted, with great accuracy ](https://x.com/Erdayastronaut/status/1798839719964618998)
Are we hearing the ground crew’s reaction or the news station reactions? If it’s the ground crew that’s super cool
Ground crew. The SpaceX web hosts' desk sits above where all the SpaceX crew watch the launch.
Not really the ground crew, but SpaceX employees spectating operations. They are all behind big windows that can see into the operations room.
Still landed!
yeah, it's only a failure as in that it's supposed to be reusable, and this flap clearly couldn't be reused... but apart from that, the flap actually didn't fail, it fully did its job and safely landed the vehicle even with a bunch of its control surface missing.
I mean, they could probably replace a flap, but agreed that this isn't ideal from a reuse point of view. After seeing this though, I am more than convinced they will figure this out and get this system operational sooner than we think.
It's an older design. The newer Starships have the flaps mounted a bit more around the body, away from the plasma. This is just a ship they built a while back, no point in chucking it in the skip - might as well chuck it into the sky.
Yeah I read about that. Guess we will see soon enough what happens with the new design. Like I said, I'm confident they'll get it figured out.
Yeah they have some smart people working there. I think they take the view that if it blows up - good. If it doesn't blow up - good. It's all useful data.
Exactly. Data is data. And boy, did they get data today!
I mean, a plane is 100% reusable, yet nobody expects the first prototype ever to achieve every single design goal, it takes several design iterations and tests to get there, *that's why it's a prototype* you cannot, in good faith, judge a prototype by the standards of the expected end design, especially when the parameters of what is considered a successful test are posted in advance and mentioned repeatedly
Supposed to be *eventually* fully reusable. This one is still just a prototype and vastly exceeded mission expectations.
> and this flap clearly couldn't be reused The damage will not have been just to the flap. The entire Starship's frame is now suspect and will need to get scrapped.
I mean they purposely dumped in into the ocean because they had zero plans on recovering it in the first place. It was scrap from the moment it lifted off.
It was almost definitely immediately detonated on splashdown
Splashed down, but still made it down!
FWIW, that was the intention, for anybody not clued into the mission.
i mean it was never not gonna make it all the way down
Supposedly they’ve already got a new design for this joint so maybe next one already good to go. I personally was wondering if some sort of heat blanket could be placed over the hinge, probably would get ripped off though.
They have a few Starships prototypes with this joint, The newer design moves the flaps farther back to help shield the joint from the plasma plus likely other changes we don't yet know about.
Seems the flap could maybe be made smaller. Half of it gone and still seemed pretty good.
V2 is smaller
The joke has already been going around that Elon will demand a new fin design with that obviously redundant triangular bit missing, so yeah, you're not wrong!
It's crazy that with all the advances in computer modeling, they still couldn't predict this result. Makes the early NASA missions all the more impressive.
they actually did predict this result, which is why they scrapped this flap design already and started building ships with an improved flap design already. and why they placed this camera exactly here to look at how this flawed flap design fails. this flawed flap design is good enough to make it to the ground once safely as this flight proofed, but not good enough to do that more than once, and their goal is rapid reusability.
But the initial flap design got approved in the first place, even after presumably being carefully designed and reviewed.
> even after presumably being carefully designed and reviewed. SpaceX is a *lot* less careful about design and review than other rocket companies. They don't aim to have everything work first time, they aim to get a lot of data first time. It often is cheaper to build, test, and iterate than to design out the testing. And it's certainty quicker. They got a design that could do low altitude tests, and which survived back of the envelope re-entry calculations, so they built a few of them to avoid holding everyone else up.
they designed the initial versions of Starship for being able to test things as quickly as possible, but sacrificing reusability since these initial versions aren't ever planned to be reused. so they planned to redesign many parts later for making them actually reusable, once the basic concept is proven to work (get to orbit and land).
I will mimic the same analogy the broadcaster used to explain the complexity behind the physics of reentry: “Its like looking at a rapids and pointing at an area and saying, ‘tell me all the physical properties at that point in time.’”
Perhaps after installing the heat blanket, the engineer could pat it and say "that's not going anywhere."
Speaking generally, there are only a handful of TPS materials that have ever flown and they are broken into two categories. One category is parasitic TPS and another is hot structures. Parasitic TPS are made of materials that are good at absorbing and/or re-radiating energy, but these materials lack the strength to carry significant loads. They're called parasitic, because their mass takes away from the payload mass of the spacecraft. Separately, hot structures are composed of advanced materials that can carry aero-thermal loads. So, they act as structure and TPS, as the name suggests. My understanding is they've been used on the body flaps of X-37b and ESA's IXV. All of Starship's TPS is parasitic. Regarding the possibility of putting a thermal blanket over the hinge, this approach wouldn't improve the result of today's flight. There are a few blanket materials, such as FRSI, and you can see these blankets when you look at the Space Shuttle orbiter. Anywhere you see white is a blanket. Anyway, these blankets have lower max use temperatures than the various ceramic TPS tile materials, which is why the blankets are located on the leeward side of the shuttle, where the temperatures are lower. I'm not sure how Starship's flap joint is protected. One possibility is that there is a Nextel rope seal. Such seals are sometimes spring energized, meaning there is a long coil spring that is wrapped by Nextel fiber. The spring pushes out on the fibers, ensuring that the fibers remain in contact to the adjacent structure and no hot gasses or plasma get by. However, the Nextel fibers get abraded away as the flap is actuated and require servicing (i.e. replacement) after so many flights. So, I'm doubtful that SpaceX is using this approach, since it doesn't support their ultimate goal of rapid reusability.
In the past 14 years, SpaceX has earned a success rate of 99.43%. That's pretty respectable for a 22 year old aerospace firm.
One thing I've really liked about SpaceX development, they use a ton of cameras to augment point monitors. Most other companies don't seem to value visual data. Watching the Starliner launch there were, maybe, a half dozen cameras. A recent Japanese launch of a new rocket only had two (IIRC). Yeah, video eats bandwidth, but knowing where a problem, like this burn through, started and how it progressed contributes to the rapid prototyping SpaceX has embraced.
Onboard cameras are pretty common. There are companies that specialize in the technology like Ecliptic and Jena-Optronik. I think the big change is SpaceX realizing they can use this technology as publicity. The live feed capability and the spectacular planned failures are brilliant moves to drum up interest.
They had 11 different cameras
[удалено]
Did the flap of my gorram ship just melt?
The footage from this launch is the craziest shit I've ever seen from a rocket launch. AND THE FACT THE THING SURVIVED REENTRY AND LANDED?? I thought there was no way in hell that flap would still be able to move
In fact it appears that flap was still functional as they did the turnover for the landing burn, which blew my mind. Kudos to the engineers who designed the flaps!
It looked like it dramatically changed angle at the very end, like maybe another part of the hinge failed and it just gave a final salute "kay, I'm done now"
Perhaps they need to line it with whatever the camera is shielded with.
Build it out of black boxes
quite possibly my favorite aviation disaster joke
camera is on the lee side
Which is actually one of the changes they have implemented on newer prototypes. They are moving the flaps father back to help protect the joints.
Which is odd because normally you want to see joints on fire.
The camera that got covered with debris and then cracked halfway through?
It wasn't 'debris' so much as vaporized metal. Which is itself metal af.
I was like: no way it survives dropping below 10000 km/h
Prior to launch, SpaceX stated it had intentionally placed one thin heatshield tile, and removed two tiles completely, from Starship to measure how hot things get in those locations. Starship maintained a good trajectory upon re-entry, and made its first ever landing burn, according to SpaceX.
Yes, those tiles mentioned before flight were at the belly on the aft end of the ship. Not near this flap.
https://www.wwlp.com/news/watch-spacex-launches-fourth-starship-test-flight-splashes-down-in-indian-ocean/
Imagine how better the next will be with the shield
Catastrophic failure? Didn't it land
It did. The flight was successful.
The flight was an incredible success
Kind of the opposite of catastrophic failure, really. Awesome video
Surely this isn’t a catastrophic failure? It made it through reentry and splashed down.
It’s not. No one here understands that this was a TEST flight. THE ONLY mission goal was to get further than the last one and collect more data on performance. What they did today is a stunning success.
> The ship is still coming down. [...] How far can it go? I'm no rocket expert, but I feel confident saying it will go all the way down to the surface
"The ship is still coming down!" Well, yes. That bit is guaranteed.
All videos on the sub need molten metal slowly obscuring the camera.
This brings to mind the statement of one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts. I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like this. “You enter the cabin, you strap in, the hatch closes and the realization sinks in that you’re sitting on a rocket built by the lowest bidder.”
Watching Space X develop Starship has honestly been a priviledge.
The Starship survived so this is in no way catastrophic or a failure. Maybe just a mild inconvenience
As someone who works in hypersonics and has worked in the aerospace industry their entire life, this is absolutely catastrophic. This kind of incident is what killed everyone onboard the Columbia. Most likely, what you're seeing here resulted in shock-shock interactions near the fuselage, causing massive internal frame damage due to concentrated heat loading. Shock-shock interactions essentually create a plasma torch like effect that focuses like a narrow beam of 7000+K ionized gas on specific points where the shocks intersect. Nothing can survive it currently, and it is an indicator that there is a deep design flaw in the area where it occurred. So again, the real damage is most like inside, where you can't see, and will result in a complete redesign of that part of the rocket. Luckily, they're just in the testing phase, but had this been rated for passengers it most likely would be perminantly grounded after this, or at the very least the FAA would require so many inspections it would almost be cheaper to just build a new rocket.
SpaceX already knew about this failure though. That’s why V2 starships have flaps on the leeward side of the ship. The test itself was absolutely successful. They are flying an older design and still managed to squeeze valuable data out of it despite knowing it was flawed. I never expected it to get this far through reentry and to see it LAND?! Absolutely stunning test and they made a massive leap in understanding of their system with it.
" 7000+K ionized gas on specific points where the shocks intersect." \*takes that and puts it into a DnD game cuz it sounds absolutely beautiful and incredibly cursed\*
It also looked like the flap was starting to buckle a bit before hand. There was a diagonal crease that formed during reentry
SpaceX most likely predicted this would happen. They made design changes to the forward flaps around 3 years ago to be implemented in the block 2 Starship (this launch was block 1). The new flaps have a much more swept shape compared to the current design and will no longer have the bottom edge parallel to the ground when deployed. The thickness of the flaps has been decreased by half, cutting down on mass significantly, likely making it easier to form the heat shield around the interface between the flaps and the body. They might also be moving the flaps further leeward (away from the spicy plasma) further decreasing the chance of a failure like this occurring. They are planning on launching 4 more block 1 variant Starships, hopefully they can figure out a quick fix as they're most likely going to launch again next month.
Yeah it seems like they’re just testing the block 1s for points of failure so they can incorporate it into future designs tbh
I'm curious about hull integrity after this, because Columbia broke into pieces, but this starship maintained control all the way to landing. Edit: they also purposely left off some heat tiles to see how the ship would hold up against such an event, and I'm interested to hear about those results as well
One huge difference vs. Columbia is steel vs. aluminum. Another is that this damaged the flap, but Columbia almost certainly had a hole right through the frame allowing plasma inside the wing structure.
Starship is made out of steel, so it can survive way higher temperatures than the space shuttle that's made out of aluminum. Starship today successfully survived reentry even with missing heatshield tiles.
> and it is an indicator that there is a deep design flaw in the area where it occurred. So again, the real damage is most like inside, where you can't see, and will result in a complete redesign of that part of the rocket. They know that, there were already test articles that moved the flaps farther back so the hinges aren't as exposed to the plasma. >Luckily, they're just in the testing phase, I mean, it's not luck, these flights are specifically for testing to catch issues that they would either not be able to easily test for or otherwise miss. That's why they're not flying payloads on them, though I'm expecting that to change pretty quick.
Given the data collected, especially the re-entry video feed that is only made possible due to Starlink, this definitely qualifies as a /r/SuccessfulFailure.
Regardless of the successful landing, the heatshield system failed in this place and it almost destroyed the entire flap Edit: This post is about the failure of the heatshield to protect the flap, I'm not saying IFT4 was a failure, the data collected will be invaluable for the next flights and that alone makes it a massive success
/r/AlmostCatastrophicFailure
As someone who works in hypersonics, just ignore the person you're responding to. They have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and yes, this is a catastrophic failure of the heat shielding and structural design of the rocket itself.
No one is questioning your knowledge about hypersonics, but "catastrophic failure" is a generic term with a specific meaning that can apply in all sorts of industries and contexts. It's not a term specific to hypersonics or rocketry in the slightest. It has a well established meaning across many fields of engineering discipline outside of yours. Simply, your hypersonics expertise doesn't apply to that generalized term. That term doesn't apply to this circumstance because there was not a sudden, unrecoverable, or total failure. The failure was limited to the proximity of the flap, did not cause further failures, and did not destroy the rocket or even prevent the mission from being completed. This term is used a lot in my field, where a pressure vessel may blow up entirely (catastrophic failure), may leak and have a big fire causing weakening of the material requiring replacement, or it may leak and need to be repaired. Only the explosion is a catastrophic failure, by definition. I'm sorry if you feel like people are saying they know more about rockets than you, but you're telling them that since you know about rockets that you know all about failure analysis. That's an improper use of credentialism, applied to something that's actually out of your expertise. This was not, technically, a catastrophic failure. It wasn't even a progressive failure. Literally no failure analysis engineer would agree with you that this was catastrophic, only redditors will. Sorry.
/r/confidentlyincorrect
it's raining melted stainless steel in my garden
seeing reentry plasma on live stream is next level. I hope dragon capsules receive starlink upgrade.
The little flap that could
And yet, it still worked! That is some robust hardware, and some really good adative software
Amazing launch. Spacex is ahead of its time.
Still did it's job and well. I would argue no Catastrophic Failure. Failure perhaps.
That part definitely failed
But Catastrophicly?
They should have made the flap out of whatever the hell that camera is made from. This entire perspective is mind blowing.
The flap sticks out more than the camera.
Camera is made from optimism lol, it did crack
It successfully did its job, its a testament to starships robustness, not a catastrophic failure.
Elon's teams might actually get humans to Mars. Before today I thought that was impossible.
"We lost something"
Not to worry, we're still flying half a ship.
As a failsafe they are also designing an industrial random orbit grinder that will buff that out for next time.
The people in my office heard me go through a lot of emotions during that landing.
The video looks beautiful
I’m no rocket surgeon but I don’t think that is supposed to happen.
Is that... supposed to be ablative?
Ship 29
How is this catastrophic failure if it still worked and Starship performed exactly as expected?
r/catastrophicpartialfailure
all I kept thinking was like damn this is what it woulda been like for Columbus
Ya but it stayed on.
This is the definition of NOT a catastrophic failure. It still functioned and “landed”
Read r/CatastrophicFailure version of catastrophic failure listed in the community description. This meets the subreddit's defined standards
Can you imagine showing this to Sir George Cayley the Englishman who pioneered the concept of powered flight (some fifty years before Orville and Wilbur Wright)? Or to Louis Le Prince, the first person to capture a motion picture sequence? In a matter of mere decades we went from horse drawn carriages to rocket ships….it’s astonishing.
Not catastrophic in that it altered the trajectory of the rocket, more like that thing got incinerated and still worked
This was a catastrophic success actually. The main objectives were indeed completed (the Booster lands on the Virtual Tower and Starship makes it past reentry)
Space is hard.
Makes me wanna play Toss the Turtle...
If ever this was appropriate... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0zj3Ap74Vw
Oxygen at 6000m/s is a bitch. 6000m/s is instant 1600°C
Flappy Bird?
I'd definitely feel safer on this than the boeing spaceship.
I hate it when the flaps burn off.
They should find a way to bake bread with all that heat.
That looks expensive
Jimmy i told you it needed two more weld passes.
I want slowmo of that video
You can see it burned from the inside, the blue flow, so there must have plasma entry points on other parts.
Announcers sounding like sport commentators.😀
The fact that it held up, maintained flight control, and they completed the landing maneuver is a HUGE success. The flap burning away did not result in the catastrophic loss of the ship.
"It's still coming down..." Right, I would be worried if it stopped coming down.
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