** The Official Space Flight Thread - The Space Station and Beyond **

By the way, if you guys want to know another wild piece of data - Starship didn't lift off at full thrust, the engines were only generating 75% thrust at lift off. But I'd imagine when it's carrying 150tons of cargo then it would need more thrust and that would have damaged the pad even more
 
I forgot Practical Engineering did a video on launch pad design. I can’t see the FAA giving SpaceX another licence until they are satisfied this won’t happen again and the surrounding area won’t be covered in sand and debris.

This looks bad on the “chief engineer” who was the one who insisted on no flame diverter.

 
Colonel_Klinck said:
I forgot Practical Engineering did a video on launch pad design. I can’t see the FAA giving SpaceX another licence until they are satisfied this won’t happen again and the surrounding area won’t be covered in sand and debris.

This looks bad on the “chief engineer” who was the one who insisted on no flame diverter.

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Here are the water cooled plates that are supposed to stop the concrete from blowing up

But someone at SpaceX made the decision to launch without it because they thought the pad could handle 1 launch without it - if it was Musk nothing will happen but if an engineer made that decision he is sooo gonna get fired

 
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jpaul said:
article on earlier starship debris field - 700 acres ... 1500lb actuator Another Starship explosion would be bad news for nearby park managers
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I thought a quote from Elon was interesting in that article

If we do launch, I would consider anything that does not result in the destruction of the launch mount itself, the launch pad […] I would consider that to be a win,” he said.
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So by his own metric it doesn't seem this launch was a success then.
 
Chuk_Chuk said:
So are we going to ignore the fact that it was actually scheduled for 4/17, and was literally counting down before a problem occured?
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If you think it was ever really likely to lift off on the 17th. I have my doubts. Tim from Everyday Astronaut was also pretty doubtful during the stream that day about the chances of it going up.

Chuk_Chuk said:
As for the second tweet, slight fudging of what Elon actually said and appears to be making up stories on what he thinks happened in the meeting room at SpaceX.
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Maybe.
 
The launch reminded me a lot of the N1 back in the day. Almost down to the trial and error approach of the Soviet Union which was the complete opposite to NASA.

That thing really struggled to get off the ground because of the engines shutting down. I guess that is why it made a mess of the launch pad?
 
I was listening to the commentary and they think at about +30 seconds there is a flare on the engine which they think was the Hydraulic Power Unit blowing. Hence leading to a loss of engine gimbal hydraulics and also the stage release was hydraulically powered. From booster 9 onwards I believe they are getting rid of Hydraulics altogether and using electric motors.
 
adam cool dude said:
That thing really struggled to get off the ground because of the engines shutting down. I guess that is why it made a mess of the launch pad?
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It used 75% thrust which explains the slow lift-off but also that was supposed to reduce the amount of damage the pad should have taken, guess the maths were off :eek:

I've been around bomb craters a few times and my initial "finger in the wind SWAG" was the pad crater is about the same size as one caused by a 2000lb bomb, which is extremely bad from an engineering stand-point.
 
Crews and public can now enter the area to pickup their stuff

NSF inspecting their stuff









NSF did a walk around, they say the immediate area around the complex looks like Mars

Look at those dents in the fuel tanks

They found some of the pieces of concrete, they made craters in the ground




 
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