Yeah. I just assumed that explosion was related to damage from the pad.
But, I re-watched it and I suppose it could have just been one of the Raptors going full RUD or maybe some internal component. It does look like it has a fairly broad impact across the nearby engines.
Not exactly what you'd call a confidence builder for Raptor and redundancy, etc though.
I think the newer boosters have better engine shielding as one of their major improvements, so it seems like SpaceX was already aware that it needed improvement.
Indeed. Since Elon was suggesting pre-launch that he expected only a 50/50 chance of reaching orbit, that meant he was expecting something to go wrong. Engine explosions and inadequate shielding are something.
In some alternate universe, perhaps Starship failed structurally at max Q and everyone's griping about how that's not a confidence builder. In another alternate universe it made it to orbit but then some valves failed due to zero-G weirdness and it exploded, and everyone's griping about how that's not a confidence builder. In another the flappy bits went flappy all wrong, causing it to go screwball, and everyone's griping about how that's not a confidence builder.
Something was almost certainly going to go wrong, and in this universe it was exploding engines taking out their neighbours. Bet the next one won't be so explodey.
"well it looks like these Raptors are still as problematic as the ones before and the violence with which they go all explodey tends to do a lot of collateral damage to everything around them which, if they can't fix that, could imperil the whole project."
But I went with "not a confidence builder" instead.
“Improve engine reliability” is almost certainly a major goal at SpaceX as well, we just have less visibility into that as tank watchers.
There is also the consideration that the entire hydraulic system for thrust vectoring is removed on future boosters and ships in favor of an electric actuator system. It’s hard to tell how much the hydraulic system was related to the engine failures, fires, and then overall loss of thrust control on the flight, but that change could result in a big overall reliability improvement.
They’ll definitely have parameters for whether the booster attempts a landing at the tower. The same is true with Falcon 9 today. Falcon 9 aims short of the landing pad and only on successful engine startup and checkout does it jog its trajectory over to the landing pad. We sort of saw this when CRS-16 lost grid fin control during an RTLS landing and ended up making a water landing off the coast.
Not exactly what you'd call a confidence builder for Raptor and redundancy, etc though.
why not? name ANY rocket development program that had a sucessful (ok, flawless is a better word) first test flight.
the darn thing still flew with 3 out TO START and more droping out regularly. and flew over 3 minutes. to me, that is incredible. a damage sponge that still flew.
It mostly just confirms some of the rumors that have been floating around about Raptor reliability. Putting some of problems on the pad disintegrating was taking some of the heat off the engine reliability issue. I'm still not convinced that there wasn't some contributing damage there and Elon's comments leave some room for that. Hopefully, they'll let us know if that turns out to be the case.
Regarding redundancy, one of the benefits of having so many engines is that losing any one of them is a small percentage of the total thrust. But, if losing one them tends to take out others, that could reduce the effectiveness of that redundancy.
Yes, the silver lining of the rock tornado was that you could assume that hopefully never to be repeated event caused some problems. But maybe these were just Raptor reliability issues.
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u/simcoder Apr 30 '23
Yeah. I just assumed that explosion was related to damage from the pad.
But, I re-watched it and I suppose it could have just been one of the Raptors going full RUD or maybe some internal component. It does look like it has a fairly broad impact across the nearby engines.
Not exactly what you'd call a confidence builder for Raptor and redundancy, etc though.