SpaceX launched its Starship SN8 prototype today and flew it to 40,000 feet. It appeared to be a successful test. Elon Musk had given a 1 in 3 chance of the rocket landing in one piece, and the odds worked against him. This was an uncrewed mission so nobody was harmed.
JUST IN – @SpaceX's giant Starship almost had a good landing.pic.twitter.com/bvVn16UZNK
— Disclose.tv 🚨 (@disclosetv) December 9, 2020
SN8 is meant to replace SpaceX’s falcon. An engine cut out two minutes into the flight. The ship continued its ascent. However it lost a second engine after three minutes. And the third (and final engine) at 4 minutes 30 seconds. Engines came back on approach to the ground. Flames engulfed it on impact.
Fuel header tank pressure was low during landing burn, causing touchdown velocity to be high & RUD, but we got all the data we needed! Congrats SpaceX team hell yeah!!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2020
According to SpaceX, “With a test such as this, success is not measured by completion of specific objectives but rather how much we can learn, which will inform and improve the probability of success in the future as SpaceX rapidly advances development of Starship.” That’s what companies always say when they fail. It’s also true.
CNN called it a mostly peaceful landing.
@Rob
Looks like the Trump Presidency. Trouble from the start and a disaster at the end.
The good news is that Mr. Musk and his team know what went wrong and hopefully how to fix it. As Americans, we now know where our democracy is most vulnerable to demagogues like our sitting President who clearly desires to subvert the vote and will take felonious acts to try to negate the votes of millions of people.
Congratulations, Mr. Musk. Like you, I moved out of the socialistic state of California years ago.
Relax WileyDog, it was just a joke. Don’t let your TV get you so worked up.
@Gary – SN8 just stands for Serial Number 8. These aren’t meant to be a replacement for the Falcon 9 at all; they will be used atop the future Falcon Heavy as a second (reusable) stage. There are also no current firm plans to put people in these at takeoff, as they’re not even sure they want Falcon Heavy to be human-rated for safety (it’s a very, very expensive process, and they already have Falcon 9 rated for it). Finally, the difference between nearly every other company saying this and SpaceX saying this is that SpaceX has *always* intended to have failures. In fact, they want LOTS of failures in rapid succession so that they can quickly iterate their design into a success. A small cadre of other companies do this in general, but currently none in the space rocket industry. It’s a nice juxtaposition with Old Space companies like Boeing, which simulate designs to death, but hardly test in the real-world, and end up costing literally orders of magnitude more to develop.
All that said, I appreciate you writing about this, Gary! 🙂 Super interesting stuff! Might I suggest a review of SpaceX’s financials for your next piece?
Bit of a clickbait headline, don’t you think?
They nailed about 90% of what they wanted to do, on their very first try, on building a machine to go back and forth to MARS.
A better headline would have been ‘SpaceX achieves very valuable first test’
But… maybe it wouldn’t get the clicks…
Yeah this was very successful. The crash at end stemmed from theoretically minor issues not major ones. Regarding @jamesb2147 above. Final Starship is intended as a replacement for most Falcon jobs at some point. The launch field is analogous to the 747 Jumbo Jet revolution. Starship on paper will have a massive payload, with very efficient engines, cheaper fuel and extremely reusable components, making it much more economical to launch. Eventually orbital refueling tanker Starships will allow the second stage to place orbital products anywhere in orbit or well beyond orbit and still return to earth for reuse. SN8 is a prototype for the Starship second stage to test reentry maneuvering, control surfaces, tank design / fuel feeding and the sea level raptor engines. The final Starship will sit atop a Starship booster not a Falcon Heavy. It’s key to understand that the these full flow engines with full gasification of components it uses are something of a holy grail in rocketry. So incredibly difficult to engineer with turbo pump complexity that to my knowledge no one has successfully built and flown one higher than a short hop. Until now. It’s incredibly ballsy. The Space Shuttle RS-25 engines were a massively expensive and complicated (H2 fuel and a fancy fuel rich design) way to get a lot of the benefits SpaceX is looking for with full flow staged combustion without having to actually build it. SpaceX and Musk have set out to catch the big fish here and not take the safe path.
SN8 didn’t “lose” *ANY* engines on the ascent, those cutouts were part of the test. You got that part wrong Gary. The only part of the test that didn’t perform as hoped was a low-pressure condition on the CH4 header tank at the end, which caused SN8 to lose thrust after raptor re-ignition and the flip maneuver had already occurred. It was thus only these final seconds of the test – when the raptors began burning oxygen-rich, turning them into a torch that melted the copper in the combustion chamber – that didn’t turn out great.
Five more seconds of nominal thrust would have landed SN8. The engines performed flawlesly. (The fuel pressurization system, not so much…)
I stockpiled 1.2 million Virgin Atlantic miles when Amex was shutting down accounts last year and my high volume MS and self referrals were worrying me.
Virgin had a 30% transfer bonus at the time and as many of you know one of the most relaxed expiration policies out there.
I have plenty more transferable points, and all the miles I could need for any future flights anyway.
I took a gamble that at some point in the years ahead Virgin Galactic will take me to sub orbit! Pretty big gamble, but I had to burn them. I felt keeping them was a bigger gamble.
Virgin has probably the most high value backup options and they have great award charts for my favorite places to go just in case it doesn’t work out.
They are already allowing people with 2 million butt in seat virgin miles to go on a wait list for a seat to space and there was a 30% transfer bonus from Amex at the time so I figured I’d go with the calculated gamble with tons of backup outs.
The price tag for a seat is $250,000, so its the only way I’m ever going and it would be great value for something I’ve always dreamed of. Even if it’s only sub orbit.
Curious what you guys think?
PS FWIW, Amex never did shut me down, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a big possibility.
The engines were supposed to cut out on the ascent. That was the point of the test – a controlled ascent.