this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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As much as I'd like to see another attempt... Good on the FAA.
That launch was dangerous. Huge chunks of concrete were projected up to 6.5 miles away from the launch site.
They either significantly miscalculated the expected damage to the launch pad, or knew and did it anyway. Both are pretty bad.
"Huge chunks" were not projected 6.5 miles away, that's ridiculous. Pulverized concrete, aka dust, got thrown that far away.
I was curious about that 6.5 mile claim, and you are correct - while large chunks were thrown thousands of feet away, the plume of concrete dust expanded 6.5 miles away.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-04-26/spacex-starship-explosion-blasted-concrete-up-to-6-5-miles-away
Knowing him, Musk is behind all the safety flaws of the last launch. The engineers were probably very aware of the issues, but Musk told them to go ahead because obviously he knows better.
And it's pissing me off because Starship itself is an innovative new idea but he's gonna end up driving it into the ground before it even has its first real mission. I've been waiting 35 years for somebody to attempt to go to Mars since I was 5, and I'd like to still see at least ONE human landing before I die.
Republicans have traditionally been the party of "regulation doesn't work, elect me and I can prove it to you".
Maybe Musk is just taking the logical counter-part to this "regulation doesn't work, put me in charge of a heavily regulated company and I can prove it to you".
He also drove it to be created in the first place.
Musk is a complete asshole - I have to mention this in every comment where I say something even remotely positive about Musk or the downvote brigade is even bigger than it otherwise will be - but his "just try this new thing and see what happens" approach to engineering is the secret sauce that has made SpaceX into the behemoth pushing spaceflight where it is today. Sure, it means they screw up a lot. But otherwise they'd be just another Blue Origin.
Truish. I would say his money is the secret sauce. He can throw enough of it at something to actually see it through to testing. Him being a space guy is a miracle. He could have easily skipped SpaceX and gone straight to dicking around with social media platforms.
They knew it would happen. The engineering here is well established and has been for decades. Musk even tweeted that not having a flame diverter “might be a mistake”. Willful negligence.
Pretty sure it was intentional. I can't find it now but there was a decision by Elno to not add the water systems to the launch pad which would have prevented the pad from being destroyed. They knew it would get damaged so decided not to mitigate the problem.
Indeed. They were planning to rip out and replace the pad anyway, and believed that they'd at least get one launch out of the existing one, so they saw no reason to delay. If they'd waited for the new pad to be installed they would only just be gearing up for their first test flight right now. They've had four months to refine the rocket's design based on the data they got from the first test launch.
They misjudged the robustness of the original launch pad, but only somewhat. IMO the much more serious misjudgement was their flight termination system, they blew holes in the ship's tanks when it started tumbling out of control and it took something like 40 seconds for the ship to finally disintegrate after that. That was a situation where they underestimated the robustness of their systems. The new flight termination system is much more powerful.
I mean, one of the main proximate causes of the failure to achieve orbit was that the concrete rebounded into the engines because Musk thought they could get away with not using blast mitigation