LSLGuy answered in far more detail than I could have, so I’ll just add one point. The worst-case scenario here is that the nascent aircraft types end up in the same death spiral that general aviation has been in since forever. It’s just nuts that they’re still talking about how to phase out leaded avgas and that part of getting a license is learning when and where to use carburetor heat and how to cope with a failed magneto.
The reasons are fairly obvious. Because certification is expensive, the technology moves slowly. Because the tech moves slowly, the planes are expensive and hard to fly. Because of that, the market is small, and people hold onto old planes forever. And because the market is small, certification is expensive.
You need to lower the costs of certification to avoid the spiral. That doesn’t mean necessarily mean sacrificing safety, just allowing new ways of determining safety that are more in line with the characteristics of the new tech.
The 737 Max fiasco has probably put hope of that happening back a decade.
One could probably argue that the desire to keep things apparently the same caused more problems than it helped. But for different reasons.
A problem I face in my current job is that sign-off for many improvements is done by people who are in the job for a period of time on a defined promotion progression, and there is no up-side for approving anything with a whiff of risk. Approving something that turns out to be great adds nothing to their CV, but approving something that turns out badly will impact their CV. You can guess how that turns out.
Yes, that example exactly argues for a different system. The 737 MAX owes its entire existence to the fact that getting a whole new type certificate is way more expensive that getting an amendment for an old one, not to mention pilot training. You may well be right, but only because the wrong lesson will be taken (though LSLGuy’s posts give me some confidence that the right people at least understand the nature of the problem).
Only because the Falcon 9 launches have become so common to be barely worth reporting on. They just launched their 29th mission of the year. That’s over one per week! All with successful booster landings, of course (one of them on its 13th mission).
Ahh. Well, those aren’t nearly as common. However, there were two back in April; one a NASA mission and the other private (but still to the ISS). NASA ISS missions are about every 6 months. Maybe less when Boeing’s Starliner is up and running. Private missions are more irregular.
It will be quite some time before Starship is qualified for crew. In fact I suspect the first crewed launch from a surface will be from the moon. Launches from Earth are much more challenging; plus they offer the opportunity for an escape. Starship will not have an escape system and will depend on its inherent reliability. Since an escape system is useless on the moon, the risk doesn’t compound any. But on Earth it has to do better than the Falcon 9, and it will take some time to demonstrate that.
So–they were doing startup sequencing on all 33 engines at once, and (speculating slightly), the sheer volume of excess unburned propellant caused a more energetic fireball than expected (and maybe a detonation where they didn’t expect one). I think some fireball was expected, just not at this level.
Hopefully the first look is representative and there isn’t major damage.
I’m not saying that this is what actually happened here, but there would be some sense in doing a test that included a deliberate induced failure in one engine, precisely to see what effect that has on the other engines. Especially in a system like this, where the design intent is safety through redundancy, where it’s supposed to be OK if one engine fails, because the others can pick up the slack (but that only works if engine failures are independent events, and one failure doesn’t cause other failures).
Agree wholeheartedly with everything you’ve said here.
The “lesson” of MAX that’s being taken by the Feds is indeed unhelpful. Of course Boeing arguably tried to drive a truck through the eye of a regulatory needle and got caught doing so. Had they not done so, they’d not be up Shit Creek right now. The meta problem was why it was so advantageous to try to fit the truck through the eye rather than doing something more engineering straightforward and, in effect, more intellectually honest.
As to “the right people understand the nature of the problem”, I’d say that the commerce-boosters amongst the government (often well-oiled Congresscritters) understand that somebody is going to build a gigantic worldwide AAM industry according to either US, EU, or Chinese design standards. And it’s going to happen fast, with significant first-mover advantages.
They know the FAA can either prevent the US industry from even getting started or the FAA can lead the whole world in ways that let the nascent US industry occupy the pole position in the early going. The US industry and their Wall Street backers / gamblers desperately want Door #2 here.
Whether the rest of Congress can square the circle of that vs. the “Get tough and conservative to avoid future MAX fiascos”, and whether the FAA which generally has feet of clay can move smartly as ordered (if ordered) are very much open questions here in 2022. There’s lots to play for and smart money is lining up on both sides of the chance right now.
Trying to wrap up this E-VTOL / AAM hijack, and tie it back into the thread topic …
The US’ regulation of commercial spaceflight (AKA “SpaceX”) isn’t quite as ham-handed and backwards looking as it might be at worst, but it deserves to be a lot more responsive than it is. It’s trying, but not succeeding nearly as much as business might hope. But the problem is not simply bureaucratic inertia and careerist concerns as @Francis_Vaughan mentioned in his post I quoted at the top of this one. Although that is an unhelpful factor, the problem is much more systemic in the accumulated weight of societal expectations and the tangled thicket of laws, regulations, and policies generated therefrom.
We live in an era where the frontier of science & tech moves faster than ever before in the history of humanity. At a time when our societies have spent the last 75 years consolidating a very safe and incremental approach that emphasizes doing no harm to existing anything. It’s all got to be safe for kids and the elderly or it’s prohibited. And there’s very little free physical space where you can create a mess without wrecking someone’s view, groundwater, etc.
It’s coupling a decidedly post-pioneer lazy fat comfortable late-middle-aged and highly dense and interconnected prosperous society to a buccaneering pioneering science/tech bucking bronco. Somebody is sure to end up frustrated.
I think it’s a given Starship will get to orbit this year. However, I think a more interesting question will be, what if Starship (not Booster) is not ever rapidly reusable? Meaning, a huge risk for the program is being able to have a the vehicle re-enter the atmosphere, land gracefully, and have a turn-around launch time much quicker than today’s Falcon 9 booster. That is something that hasn’t been accomplished before and I feel like that will be more of a key to success than getting to orbit.
Having said that, if they can pump out Starships as cheap as they claim, and Raptor engines as cheap as they claim, it may not even matter. It could essentially serve as an F9 w/ greater payload capacity.
Yeah, I largely agree with that. I don’t think they’ll have any trouble with the Super Heavy booster. They already know how to land boosters, and they can apply all the lessons they learned with Falcon 9. It should be easy to repeat that success with a new design.
The Starship is the risky one. The tiles in particular seem like a challenge. It’s not yet clear to me how they’re going to avoid the costly inspection and refurbishment that the Shuttle required. They seem to have the same issues with the tiles and their attachment being fragile.
I hope it proves robust enough to handle the loss of individual tiles–not impossible, given the heat resistance of stainless. But on the other hand, losing one tile might cause an entire row to unzip, if enough airflow gets under them. I just don’t have a good feel for the dynamics here.
I find it unlikely that SpaceX will give up, but it’s possible they’ll have to completely rework their thermal protection; something that could take years. In the meantime, you may be right that they’ll just depend on low production costs. It certain seems like they can pump them out pretty cheaply, even now.
Well, here we are in December and no news. Nothing new on the spacex site, as far as I can see?
Looks as if one of two things (or both) has happened. One, Musk has lost momentum on the project, distracting himself with things like Twitter. Or two, they have indeed run into a very nasty technical showstopper which is sending them back to the drawing board?
If it weren’t for the fact that Spacex did succeed with Falcon, I’d be getting ready to write starship off as the latest in a long line of private space ventures that never went anywhere. Remember Roton, anyone?
Nope, the Roton Rocket, a weird helicopter/rocket hybrid.
As for Starship, it’s progressing nicely. They had a 14-engine static fire a couple of weeks ago, and another 11-engine burn last week. They have stacked Starship on the booster, filled both with cryo fuels, de-tanked and de-stacked them.
It was inevitable that the pace of testing would slow down as they approached orbit, because the rocket is getting more complex and the price of failure has gone way up so they are being more careful. If Starship blows up on the pad, it’d probably be at least billion dollar loss, given that it would likely destroy the tower and maybe the tank farm and other equipment along with 40 Raptor engines and the rocket itself.
Musk has said that they are being ultra-careful with testing before the orbital launch attempt for this reason.
I’d say there’s a 50% chance they go for a launch in December. It’s not vaporware or a hare-brained idea like some other rocket concepts. Everyone expects this to,work - eventually. NASA has bet the farm on it. There’s no Artemis without Starship at this point.
I’d bet my life savings that Starship isn’t going to launch this year. My guess is that the road closure restrictions along with launch tower growing pains is probably why. But it seems like production has ramped up lately so when we do see one fly there will be another ready waiting for its turn.
The 14-engine test a couple weeks ago that Sam mentioned:
And the other one, just a few days ago, fewer engines but longer duration, and with a full oxygen load:
Most likely this last one was testing the autogenous pressurization system–that is, using gaseous oxygen to pressurize the oxygen tank, and gaseous methane to pressurize the methane tank. Both tests were seemingly totally successful.
It does seem like they’re moving a bit more slowly, but I’d mostly chalk this up to how just about any large project has a period of fixing seemingly endless mundane issues at the end, where it looks like not much real progress is made, but is necessary to have a functional product.
I agree that they are accepting less risk on this first flight than they originally would have, seemingly because they moved so much complexity to “stage 0” (i.e. the launch stand and tower) and they can’t afford to lose that. I wonder if they slightly regret increasing the complexity there so much–but they may not have had a choice.
This IS a quick turnaround, let it fail and learn approach. It’s just that the definition of ‘quick’ changes when you go from a prototype that’s little more than a tin can with an engine at the bottom to a full-fledged space system with a booster, a second stage rocket with heat shield, 40 engines and a gigantic, complex launch tower that catches rockets.
The ‘Waterfall’ approach looks more like SLS, in which a decade or so is spent on design before anything flies, and the first thing to fly is the completed, moon-worthy rocket.
I have no idea what requirements went into the decision-making around the location of the tank farm. Without other evidence, I assume it was located optimally based on their requirements.
That’s laughable. Starship is Musk’s biggest project and it enables Starlink and is required for Artemis. But it may be that Starship’s engineers and technicians are working problems and Musk isn’t currently needed there for day-to-day supervision.
Plus, Musk has an uncanny ability to multitask. A couple of days ago he gave a well-prepared presentation on the latest developments at Neuralink. He is also very good at knowing when to delegate. SpaceX just introduced a whole new initiative for using Starlink in military applications for tye U.S. government, and Musk probably had very little to do with that.
