I was at the Kennedy Space Center in November, and some of the exhibits described the Saturn V as the most powerful rocket ever launched. One of the guides, told me that, with any luck, they’d need to revise those exhibits the next day; the first SLS launch was scheduled for that night.
I hope they didn’t spend a lot of money on those revisions.
nevermind. Misunderstood completely.
And they might argue that it’s better to find that out now than to build expensive infrastructure and then have to maintain it forever because you’ll never know if you really needed it. For instance, they might get away with a flame diverter and no water deluge. If they can, that saves them a whole lot on infrastructure and water transport. If they bult water deluge in from the start, they wouldn’t know if it was actually necessary but they’d be committed to extra costs for each flight.
"The best part is no part’ is a basic SpaceX mantra. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Look at the difference between Raptor V1 and Raptor V2, for example.
Sometimes the gamble doesn’t pay off, as appears to be the case here. Sometimes it does, like the switch from composities to stainless steel. Steel rockets build faster, are cheaper, handle high temps better, and from what we saw of the test flight, plenty strong. They don’t require expensive mandrels and very specialized training - Musk built Starship with a bunch of water tower welders.
When you are swinging for the fences, you’ll hit a lot of fouls. But if you’re always bunting, you’ll never hit a home run.
That’s basically the corollary to the no-part mantra: if you aren’t adding stuff back in about 10% of the time, you aren’t deleting enough. Not making mistakes is a bad sign, as it means you aren’t being aggressive enough elsewhere. Mistakes can be expensive, but they aren’t infinitely expensive. You can weigh the cost of mistakes vs. the more rapid progress you made when the bet paid off.
Was this outcome predictable? I dunno; I’m not privy to their internal analysis. But pointing out a bunch of armchair analysis, even prior to the launch, is not convincing. People, even experts, say a lot of stuff, much of it totally wrong. If you heeded all of the establishment knowledge, you’d never make any progress at all, including implementing reusability. Unless one has a magic means of differentiating “good” vs. “bad” establishment knowledge, you pretty much have to reevaluate things from scratch and make some mistakes along the way.
And as it happens, while this level of excavation was rather more than typical, some amount is by no means unheard of. STS-124 ejected flame trench parts all the way out to the water:
Unpeeled a significant portion of the flame trench lining:
And scattered huge chunks of brick/concrete all over the area:
So it happens. Big deal. We’re dealing with metric shitloads of energy here. And this was the double the previous shitload record.
Or better flamethrowers. Remember when Musk sold flamethrowers?
Their loss. What program couldn’t be made better with trained blue monkeys?
Not quite a flamethrower, but you can pre-order your own Starship torch! STARSHIP TORCH PRE-SALE – SpaceX Store
@Dr.Strangelove ref STS-124
That was the mission I mentioned awhile ago in one of these threads. Thanks for the pix.
@nate just above …
Tres cool. I want.
It’s a little big for a personal daily carry cigar lighter, but I would love to hang out at a cigar lounge that had a couple of those around for patron use. Just be damned careful where you point it.
Officer: Do you know why I pulled you over?
Driver: You aren’t going to believe this, but…
Btw, that thing was an old, clapped-out Caravan that they put there precisely because they knew it was inside the zone of potential blast damage, and they had special permission to put it there. They probably got way more value out of the footage of the thing getting clobbered than what it was worth in the first place.
Yeah, the guys claimed that just the batteries for their camera setup exceeded the Bluebook value of the van 
. They knew what they were doing. They got a few grand in “van replacement fund” donations just in the one stream I listened to.
Sure thing. Lots more pics in this thread. And a higher-res pic of the water splashing (and a bunch of other nice shots of the launch) about 1/3 down here.
Great cite. Very interesting and informative. Thank you.
Has SpaceX officially declared the cause of the failure yet?
You don’t see a difference between those photos and the crater in the one I posted? Just small tiny little bit of a difference maybe?
I get the move fast and break things mentality, but we’re talking about engineers that are presumably quite skilled at their craft. That launch pad wasn’t even in the right ball park. It was a little under engineered, it was missing practically everything that has been learnt about launch pad design since we started launching rockets.
I don’t think so, but a lot of speculation has been pointing to concrete hitting the rocket.
Surely you mean the cause of the success, since this was by all accounts a hugely successful test.
Awesomeness overload.
People are saying that Musk overruled his engineers on the launch pad design. I’ve not found any evidence of it definitively but it would be consistent with his general behavior. It does appear to have turned out to be a mistake. Who knows the Starship flight might have been more successful if it had been done from a properly constructed launch pad?
Musk has made a statement concerning the launch pad being obliterated. In another tweet he stated they thought the launch pad would survive one launch. He predicts they’ll be ready again in 1 to 2 months.