Another SpaceX Starship prototype broke up over the Indian Ocean on Tuesday, capping the latest bumpy test flight for the rocket central to billionaire Elon Musk’s dream of colonising Mars.
The biggest and most powerful launch vehicle ever built lifted off at 6.36pm local time from the company’s facility near a southern Texas village that earlier this month voted to become a city also named Starbase.
The first signs of trouble emerged when the first-stage Super Heavy booster blew up instead of executing its planned splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.
A live feed then showed the upper-stage spaceship failing to open its doors to deploy a payload of Starlink satellite “simulators”.
60% of the time, it works every time.
I’m sure they’d kill for it to work that reliably. It hasn’t been successful yet.
How much more resources are we going to sink into this shit design philosophy? The damn thing can’t even get to the moon without at least a dozen LEO refuels.
I don’t think you fully understand the problem of Lunar or Mars colonization, why they made the decision on their strategy, and what the purpose of this testing phase is.
For that launch, they were testing booster orientation strategy for re-entry, craft response to missing heat tiles in certain locations, and the deployment mechanism for satellite launches. The failures mean more than the successes because you learn more in failure.
Are you expecting them to do things that have never been done before and have flawless tests? The Apollo and Gemini program had tons of failures and 6 deaths. Starship has had a ton of failures(most caused by pushing limits just to see what happens) and 0 deaths.
I get it, Elon is bad so fuck everything he touches, but there are teams of brilliant people who are actually doing the work at SpaceX and they are doing great.
The problem I have with the Starship concept is the fact that it is designed to carry the landing fuel onboard because it cannot land any other way. If it could glide down rather than thruster down, then maybe it wouldn’t need to test the limits of physics.
Alternatively, if the thrusters are required for Mars and Lunar landing and take off, why not make an orbital dock and deploy the Starships there instead? It just seems like Space-X chose the flashiest and least efficient way to tackle the problem.
You are totally spot on. In trying to make starship doing everything, it turns out to do nothing particularly well. Sending up this much mass for so many of these failed tests is a total waste, and could’ve been better spent on an orbital dock.
SpaceX is doomed to fail because they’re barred from considering any planning or design that isn’t centered on ‘make Elon the first man on Mars.’ building the docks and infrastructure would extend the timeline into Elon’s old age, so they’re not acceptable for consideration.
Apollo and Gemini? This is a clown show by NASA standards. Please tell the class how many times it took Mercury to not blow up.
The kicker is that NASA did it all for the first time. Musk has the benefit of all that experience, he’s just too full of himself to use it. I mean really, skipping the deluge system isn’t a “lesson learned”, it’s a fucking embarassment.
Promising the moon eventually, and nothing much now, isn’t how you run an engineering shop, it’s how you run a VC scam.
LoL. It’s giving cybertruck owner energy.
Your lack of understanding how the design flaws for Starship make a lunar mission more difficult than it needs to be (if even possible), let alone how those problems will multiply for a Mars mission, shows it is you who doesn’t understand the problem.
Yes, missions crafted to fit the vision of an incompetent self-aggrandizing ketamine addict are fair game for significant doubt.
