The story does not mention the crash when the co-pilot did something too soon.
Is this the first flight afterwards?
No. The accident happened in late 2014 and they were flying again in 2016. But not at any great rate, maybe 2x/year.
The biggest recent news was the inaugural volunteer passenger-carrying test flight in summer 2021 after COVID had receded. At which point they got in trouble with the Feds and have been working some regulatory issues and further upgrades to the vehicles ever since.
The whole thing has the look of a great idea had it been completed 15 years and umpteen million (?billion) dollars ago. And is now limping along under the sunk-cost fallacy.
Regardless of technical merit or lack thereof, this is not a great business idea and it shows.
This is a “show tourists weightlessness” plan, not a “launch a low orbit vehicle from a plane” plan?
Yes. Weightless tourists.
With no plans or ability to grow beyond that niche. It’s a really tall Ferris wheel.
So the FAA has shut down the starship. Spacex has the use of a launch site at Vandenburg on the West coast. Can they move starships and boosters from Texas?
I have no idea what you are claiming without both complete sentences and a cite.
The Feds are investigating the Starship mishap/destruction which is exactly what they would have done unless the mission had gone spotlessly as planned and hoped for.
As LSLGuy notes, anything short of 100% mission completion would have resulted in a grounding. It’s basically automatically defined as a mishap:
- Unplanned permanent loss of a launch or reentry vehicle during licensed activity or
permitted activity;
It doesn’t imply anything “bad” happened, but notes:
For example, an authorized activity may result in the complete loss of a
licensed or permitted vehicle in a remote and unpopulated area. Although the
loss may not have resulted in fatalities, serious injuries, or public property
damage on this occasion, it is important to find the root cause of the mishap.
Failure to identify the cause of the mishap and implement corrective actions
may endanger public safety during a future mission.
Which is all well and good. While the FAA still needs to complete their investigation, it seems for the time being that public safety was not threatened. It’s possible they’ll come to some other conclusion, but until that time it’s undetermined which corrective actions might be necessary, if any.
The new Vandenberg launch site is for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. I’m sure they’ll want to fly Starship out of there eventually, and that may play into their new lease of SLC-6, but for the time being it’s unrelated.
They are building new Starship facilities out of Florida, but I expect they’ll want to see a couple of smoother flights before allowing a launch.
Thanks, guys.
Falcon Heavy on the pad:
Notice anything? No landing legs and no grid fins. This is a fully-expendable launch. It’s a heavy bird going to GTO (geostationary transfer orbit).
Clearly, they still got a few launches out of the boosters, though. Supposedly these are a pretty early generation of the boosters and a bit harder to refurb than the newer ones. So not a bad option to make their last launch expendable.
ETA: Oh, it’s actually a direct-to-GEO launch. So even more delta-V required. It means the sat can get up and running immediately instead of waiting weeks for onboard thrusters to finish the job.
I did some googling in prepping my answer 4 posts up to @carnivorousplant just above that. In some headlines & blurbs that I did no follow up it was asserted that launch pad debris was found 6+ miles from the pad.
Assuming that is true, that’s quite something. For a chunk to carry that far it’d have to be fairly large to have a decent ballistic coefficient despite it’s craptacularly inefficient random debris shape.
I’m betting on 5-10lb minimum and that’s a hell of a lot of imparted velocity for it to fly 6+ miles even launched at an ideal elevation. Which, almost by definition, the most distant impacts had to have been. Not going to try to do the math, but I’m sure some thoughtful volcanologist someplace has a nice ballistic table for volcanic “bombs” of various makeup from basalt to pumice.
Aside:
My spellcheck does not like “vulcanologist” and prefers “volcanologist”. That sure looks f***ed up to me. Am I confused, is it confused, or have times and spellings changed?
Okay, this has to be the dumbest headline from a major paper I have ever seen:
The headline:
Aliens could contact Earth by 2029, according to scientists tracking a NASA probe that’s traveling through space 27 lightyears away
The subhead:
- Scientists believe aliens may have intercepted a signal sent to a probe in 2002
- If it was, aliens might have returned a signal that will reach Earth by 2029
A few notes on the accuracy of this headline:
- There is no NASA probe 27 light years away.
- NASA therefore isn’t tracking it.
- Scientists do not believe that aliens may have intercepted the signal.
- There is no evidence of aliens at all.
- Lightyears is not a word.
Other than that, it’s bang on.
(The short headline in the preview is different than the full one)
What the story is actually about is a study that looked at communications sent to various deep space missions in the past, to see if any close stars were in the path of those signals. They found a star which, if there were aliens listening, could respond to the signal by 2029 given the speed of light.
THAT’S IT. There were no new observations, no discoveries. Just some data analysis that provides maybe a slightly better place to look for aliens than others, assuming the star has a habitable zone woth planets in it.
Anyone who thinks it’s reasonable for a NASA probe to be 27 light years away is scientifically illiterate and has no business writing headlines for science articles.
The whole article is hot garbage, but the headline is the worst.
That sounded like tripe to me, and unsurprising given the extreme level of misreporting on the event. A chunk would have to be going at the better part of mach 1 to travel >6 miles.
As it happens, SpaceNews has an article that probably explains the confusion:
Specifically, these two quotes from the US Fish and Wildlife Service:
Impacts from the launch include numerous large concrete chunks, stainless steel sheets, metal and other objects hurled thousands of feet away
a plume cloud of pulverized concrete that deposited material up to 6.5 miles northwest of the pad site
So: large chunks traveled well under a mile. It was just concrete dust that went 6+ miles. And thankfully:
At this time, no dead birds or wildlife have been found on refuge-owned or managed lands
“Thousands” of feet for large chunks is also consistent with this video:
You can eyeball the speed/height of the debris. It’s not moving at a rate that would go miles. And the presenter mentions that the smaller pieces went close to a thousand feet up.
It’s the Daily Mail.
That’s all you need to know.
What causes this crackling audio effect?
Does the sound recorded by audio equipment match the experience of a listener on the ground?
One for FQ perhaps, though I bet it’s been asked.
I thought it was sound waves interfering with each other. This article says it is shock waves.
The crackling spund is basically distortion from clipping.
The air can handle only so much noise energy before it simply can’t modulate it, so the wave clips.
It’s similar to the distortion you hear if you drive sn amplifier into clipping by playing it too loud.
Thanks. So different if you are there with your own organic ears compared to a recording which will differ based on the recording equipment?
No, it’s not clipping in the recording, it’s clipping of the air itself. At some point, the pressure waves just become too strong to be modulated, so the wave just clips. It’s a physical phenomenon, not an artifact of the recording. Your ears hear the crackling as well.
Thanks - I really do need to go to a rocket launch one of these days!
Agree it sounded like tripe. And like the sort of sensationalism that might have have mistakenly fired up @carnivorousplant.
As to the crackling the last couple of folks have been discussing, you can hear a similar noise when an afterburning jet fighter takes off. The interaction between the much-supersonic speed of the exhaust plume and the more or less stationary atmosphere has lots of interesting physics going on.
See here for more:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022460X14000303
Which will also provide useful vocabulary for further Googling.