Confirmed by SpaceX, Starship is now planning for Monday, window opening at 4 PM Central. Same link, and you should be able to find coverage on that page starting about a half hour before launch.
Don't go to YouTube looking for it, there are no official SpaceX streams on YouTube - but lots of spam accounts that usually have "Elon" pushing some random crypto scam. Only go to a known channel on YouTube like NSF or Everyday Astronaut. I personally prefer the official feed as it's more factual and has less screaming.
Yeah, Elon would never push some rando crypto scam...
In reply to adam525i :
Not on an official SpaceX stream, no. He rarely appears there. SpaceX Elon is good Elon, the one we wish he was like the rest of the time.
But that's what makes it plausible and suckers people. Don't fall for it.
FYI, the Space Affairs channel does rebroadcast the legit SpaceX streams on YouTube. I knew there was one, I had to look it up.
https://www.youtube.com/@Space-Affairs
Another day, another launch.
Super heavy test launch today, 2:00 Pacific. About 1.5 hour from this post.
https://www.youtube.com/live/6Px_b5eSzsA?si=HCjukXNUzJ6QqEvy
The Blue Origin New Glen (BONG!) rocket was also recently had it's first launch. The booster failed to land, but otherwise it seemed to work. A strangely slowely accelerating rocket.
Anyone get to see the launch just now in person? What an incredibly impressive launch! Wow.
Some quick screen captures. The Starship might have blown up going into orbit? All coms lost.
Starship go boom, unfortunately we don't get to see it happen.
Seems one of the atmospheric engines shut down early and then more followed suit until the telemetry we could see paused. I'd guess that first engine blew, damaged at least one other and things cascaded downhill from there. Or something completely different happened!
Definitely unfortunate that the ship exploded. There's video of it reentering that's gorgeous. You could see the engines dropping out before the explosion.
https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662
Here's the actual explosion.
https://x.com/flyerxt/status/1880027458642350095?t=ytHanrGvjGLdPqQmLOtGzQ
Nice catch, though. And IIRC one of the engines on the booster was a reuse, so they'll get a chance to examine the first Raptor to make more than one flight.
Oh, that's really cool that people caught that! Things get hot at 20,000 km/h!
So Blue Origin/New Glenn got to orbit but failed to land the booster, while Starship did the opposite. A mixed day, I guess.
A friend in Turks & Caicos captured the aftermath!
Musk says Ship blew up because of a fuel leak behind the engine firewall. Vent couldn't get rid of pressure fast enough. Next launch possible in a month. Some folks got a neat impromptu fireworks show.
Given the fact the FAA had to close the debris response area (a pre planned move in the event of a failure), I suspect there will be an investigation before they can launch again. SpaceX is historically quite quick at these, but that'll likely be the limiting factor for the next launch date.
It will be interesting to see what can be recovered, if anything. The debris is likely strewn across a large area just north of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.
I doubt they'll recover anything - or if they'll even try. The bottom of the ocean is the traditional resting place for rockets, and it was high enough and fast enough that a lot of the individual pieces have probably burned up. Something will definitely make it to the surface but I think that's fairly deep water.
They likely don't need anything since those rockets are so heavily sensored and covered in cameras.
Collector wise, if they do find something, it would probably be heat tiles. Which do float. E.G.:
Personally, I think this is a bad failure. In the early days of Starship, they were pushing the limits and failures were expected. They're still doing that during reentry and the booster catch. But this happened during a proven stage of flight when we should have expected it to function properly like it has previously. Yes, it was a new generation of Ship with some plumbing changes, but this leak seems like the sort of thing that could have been detected in ground testing. Maybe a full duration static fire of the Ship would have caught it - they did that before flight 3. Or maybe SpaceX figures they have so many spare boosters and ships that it's easier to just yeet and see.
I think SpaceX will run through the investigation pretty quickly, they already have an idea of what happened. But should it have happened?
But I'm sure they "learned a lot" with that very untimely and expensive failure. They learned something Saturn launches never did, that's for sure.
All is awesome, if I get my terminology correct.
In reply to alfadriver :
Don't get salty. There are areas where you're pushing the boundaries and failure is a legitimate result, with lessons learned from the failure as you push beyond the known and tested. But there are also areas where you should have retired risk. That's the difference between this one and previous launches, it was during a period of flight that should have gone smoothly. They'll definitely learn something from it - you don't get to be the most reliable rocketry organization the world has ever seen without analyzing what goes wrong - but it's not an area they expected to be learning from. When I'm testing a car with engine modifications, failure is something that could happen and that's why we test. But if we have a brake failure during that test, that's a real problem.
Saturns had a few close calls - lightning strikes, pogoing problems, engine shutdowns. We got lucky a number of times during Apollo. Had there been crew on Apollo 6, they would have had a bad time of it.
This Starship was a pretty significant change from the previous one. It is referred to as a v2 Starship because of that.
I suspect they could be a lot more careful about changes if they wanted to save some money, but the way they are doing it, though expensive, seems to allow for very rapid iterations. They seem to be willing to test multiple new things at the same time, which of course brings up some potential unintended interaction issues (not that this is one of them).
I would guess the next Starship, which I think might be ready to go in a few weeks (they kind of have them lined up), is likely to get delayed if the issue is not a simple one.
I am going to go ahead and guess that bullet #2 had something to do with it (!):
Following is the list of improvements SpaceX made to the V2 Starship 33 for the Flight 7 test:
- Flight 7 Starship’s forward flaps have been reduced in size and shifted towards the vehicle tip and away from the heat shield, significantly reducing their exposure to reentry heating while simplifying the underlying mechanisms and protective tiling.
- Redesigned propulsion system, including a 25 percent increase in propellant volume
- A new fuel feedline system for the vehicle’s Raptor vacuum engines
- Redesigned vacuum jacketing of feedlines
- Improved propulsion avionics module controlling vehicle valves and reading sensors
- All of the above upgrades add additional vehicle performance and the ability to fly longer missions
- Improved new-generation thermal protection system (TPS) heat shield tiles
- A backup layer to protect from missing or damaged tiles
- Completely redesigned vehicle’s avionics (adding additional capability and redundancy for increasingly complex missions like propellant transfer and ship return to launch site)
- Avionics upgrades include a more powerful flight computer, integrated antennas that combine Starlink, GNSS, and backup RF communication functions into each unit, redesigned inertial navigation and star tracking sensors, integrated smart batteries and power units that distribute data, and 2.7MW of power across the ship to 24 high-voltage actuators, and an increase to more than 30 vehicle cameras giving engineers insight into hardware performance across the vehicle during flight.
- With Starlink, the vehicle is capable of streaming more than 120 Mbps of real-time high-definition video and telemetry in every phase of flight, providing invaluable engineering data to rapidly iterate across all systems.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Sorry, forgot that X is not to be faulted. Even when mistakes happen.
In reply to aircooled :
It may be faster if things go correctly. But when they don't.... then you get more expensive and slower.
In reply to alfadriver :
Ehhh, not necessarily slower. If they have another one in line, it's likely faster. Certainly the failure slows them down, but I don't think it's nearly as slow as if they had gone a far more cautious route. I mean, it's why they are doing it. I guess you can assume incompetence on their part, but that really hasn't be evident in anything else they have done.
This Starship was going to be sacrificed anyway (landed in water), so loosing is not nearly as disruptive if it was their only test vehicle.
In this case, they did not get the date for the heat tile tests they were doing, but likely got lots on the engine upgrades.
One question would be: Since they need to re-do the tile tests, how long does that take to setup on the next rocket? Even if this one was successful, they would still need to modify the next rocket / test.
