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Notes -
Musk posted about it last night:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130
But he's clearly identified a downstream problem there, not yet a root cause.
The booster landing again, in visibly better shape than test 5, was a win. The Starship explosion was grossly embarrassing (worst performance since test 2, and yeah it was a major version update but they obviously weren't expecting this level of new teething problems).
It was also a near-disaster: no reports of injuries, but (unconfirmed) reports of property damage from shrapnel, and aircraft having to do emergency diversions away from the hazard area, are not things that should ever be consequences of a launch failure.
And of course it must be investigated now. Starship is currently launching solely through a narrow keyhole between Cuba and Florida where any disasters can avoid the heaviest population densities, but there are still islands in the danger zone if, as just happened, a launch fails in an unrecoverable way at just the wrong time. More importantly in the medium term, SpaceX wants to start catching ships in addition to boosters, and for that to happen they first need to reenter, from the west, over land. If they can't credibly and correctly assure the safety of that plan, they'll be stuck at the same "partially reusable" design level as Falcon 9 (and hopefully New Glenn sooner or later), and the cost of that would that they're not recouping their multi-billion-dollar investment any time soon, and the harm it would do to flight cadence would make their Artemis plans much harder.
Is adding fire suppression for a rocket fuel leak realistic? It seems like if your rocket is leaking both fuel and oxygen into a compartment you will not be going to space today, and no amount of throwing towels and almond milk on it is going to fix that.
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...what? No- that's the standard precaution of a missile launch (or re-entry) failure. It's literally a 'something my fall through the air in this zipcode we already warned you about.' It's the physical consequence of things that are high up falling down, and the predictability of which is why airspace is routinely categorized with restrictions when missile tests and such are going on. Your 'emergency' diversion is just a standard precaution when different airspace needs overlap, same as how divergences of aircraft to specific airports (whether from mechanical or medical emergency) lead to redirections of aircraft intending to go there. This has literally been going on since the advent of space travel, where failures (and successes!) on the way up or back down leave bits to come back down.
Saying that shrapnel should not fall through airspace or onto property as a consequence of orbital transition failure (going up or down) is either a demand that there should be no failure, or else a demand of inversion of physics (such as that things should not fall due to gravity).
I admit to writing very loosely last night (rushing and not editing as I boarded a plane), but despite wincing at my "never" hyperbole I still could nearly bite this bullet:
Append "above a determined rate" and you get the typical FAA/NASA solution: achieve "no" failure by conservatively predicting failure risk and then not flying until your design has pushed that risk under that rate. This doesn't work well (see: Shuttle), and if overapplied this philosophy would be the death of SpaceX R&D ("If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough." - Musk), which is vastly more time- and cost-efficient and more successful than that of it's more hardware-efficient competitors, but selectively applying this philosophy to the cases where it's someone else taking the risks' downsides may not be crazy.
A more outside-the-box alternative would be having better failsafes than "activate hypersonic shotgun mode" for failure. This particular failure wasn't a "now you see the spacecraft, now you don't" thing like Challenger, it was a video-visible bay fire, followed much later by a grossly telemetry-visible propellant leak, slowly followed by gradual failures of one engine after another, all on a stage for which the ability to reenter in one piece and target a landing spot without propellant use is it's whole raison d'etre. Even without trying to make use of that, in this case simply cutting off propellant to delay the explosion could have pushed the debris field further east over empty ocean.
Maybe those are crazy solutions. But we live in a world run by voters full of crazy demands. The attitude of "what do you wanna do, basically quit spaceflight?", in a world where we haven't been back to the moon for half a century, shouldn't be considered as a final argument without always remembering that one man’s modus tollens is another man’s modus ponens. I'm a huge fan of spaceflight, and I'm a huge fan of SpaceX in part because so far they're the only ones in history to take spaceflight at scale seriously. But they've done so at the discretion of regulators who insist that they can be stopped in their tracks if they don't e.g. first get good psych test results from kidnapping a seal and playing it Spotify's Greatest Sonic Boom Hits. This is not a world in which "don't let chunks of your test flight fall on people" is an obviously evadable requirement.
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Yes, I think legally it has to be investigated anyway. Thank you for the link, apparently I am much further delayed in my news stream than I suspected.
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