r/spaceporn • u/Busy_Yesterday9455 • 1d ago
Related Content SpaceX SUCCESSFULLY concludes its Flight 10
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u/FloridaGatorMan 1d ago
By all accounts a successful flight and definitely progress. With that said the lean and explosion at the end was some real looney tunes shit.
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u/FG910 1d ago
Directed by Michael Bay
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u/NSASpyVan 1d ago
I couldn't find a Giphy of Devestator scrambling up the pyramid, a jingle-janglin' as he goes, so enjoy baby megatron snacking, instead.
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u/TehNubCake9 1d ago
I can't understate enough just how much i love that people are using "loony tunes" as a euphemism more, recently.
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u/whitesammy 1d ago
All accounts? I'm in no way a SpaceX hater, but that was just short of a miracle that it managed a controlled splashdown after surviving an explosion at 100km.
Objectively recounting the mission:
On launch the stack had rotation that had to be addressed with a pretty significant correction but wasn't preemptively terminated and it didn't explode.
An engine during boost back failed on the booster but it wasn't preemptively terminated and it didn't explode.
Almost every test launch of the simulated satellites made contact with the bay door but the mechanism didn't jam, all of them cleared starship, and the doors were able to close.
Starship suffered an unplanned explosive event that did sizeable damage to the skirt and an aileron that caused an undoubtedly larger amount of damage and stress testing than was planned by removing tiles or replacing them with alternative materials.
Really, the success is in the most basic sense; The rocket went up and the parts mostly came back down where they were supposed to and mission control/onboard protocols were able to trigger the self destructs as soon as they had confirmed splashdown.
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u/el_tatu 1d ago
Could you elaborate on that first point?
Surviving one engine out on the booster is far from a miracle at this point.
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u/Nosnibor1020 1d ago
While yes, lots of luck here, also good to see the extremes and what did survive or was successful. This is what you want. You have to learn from mistakes or issues. You don't want the first time for something like this to happen when you have crew or passengers on board.
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u/Head_Excitement_9837 1d ago
The way it is worded almost sounds like they where trying see what happens when certain things failed or explode
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u/tyrome123 1d ago
During reentry, yes
This ship was fitted with various different test heat tiles in weird spots and areas with no tiles at all just to see what would happen and if they absolutely need to protect those areas since more shield = more weight
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u/tyrome123 1d ago
almost every test launch of the simulated satellites made contact with the door
You should see how the falcon 9 starlink and most other ride shares do it, they basically just explode the bus and send everything everywhere, including alot of bumping around and so they build the star links to take that beating
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u/RepresentativeYak772 1d ago
Keep in mind that Elon's vision to "colonize" Mars is to send literally THOUSANDS of these things, constantly launching every 20 minutes or so (this includes the refuelling ships). Does anyone think this is actually desirable or achievable?
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u/FloridaGatorMan 1d ago
I was just being diplomatic. I felt like if I didn't add that then I would get downvoted. I actually didn't really know what happened and was basing it totally on the fact that there was any progress.
Truth is if my job wasn't collapsing my mental health I would have paid more attention and probably been the one to post a comment like yours.
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u/Call_Me_Lids 1d ago
I’m almost positive, like 99.9999% sure I heard someone call out “Flight termination system has been terminated” during the coast phase and I never heard anyone say they reenabled them. I think the ship just exploded because it fell over. What little LOX and methane were in the fuel tanks mixed and went kabluey. Guess we will have to wait and hear from SpaceX. Unless you’ve already heard this. If you did can you provide me a link?
I’m also dieing to know what caused that explosion in the skirt while they were coasting. I totally wasn’t expecting that. And by the looks of the people doing the stream they weren’t either. LOL
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u/Huge_Resort441 1d ago
The fact that it survived re-entry with that much damage is a testament to just how over-engineered this thing is.
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u/QP873 1d ago
Normal rockets: as light as possible. Finely tuned to remove ANY unnecessary weight. Look at them wrong and they fall apart.
Starship: made of STEEL, repeatedly survived its own FTS, can fall through the sky with holes burning through its wings, basically an M4 Sherman with rocket engines.
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u/SaltyFace684 1d ago
Starship something in my aft section exploded, my aft flaps are on the brink of death, my tiles are gone, but i'm alive Space x. good, now fully deploy your flaps to purposefully stress the hell out of you body Starship:yes sir SpaceX Then successfully lands afterwards easy enough
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u/Existing_Tomorrow687 1d ago
SpaceX hits double digits and officially nominal. When launches get boring, the future gets exciting.
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u/AlcoholicJohnson 1d ago
100% genuine question please don't harrass me.
Can someone explain to me why this is successful? They've been landing/catching rockets on landing platforms prior to this. Why is landing in the ocean and blowing up successful?
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u/DiDgr8 1d ago
There were two water landings this flight. The one in the Gulf was testing an "engine out" scenario and they didn't want a bomb hitting the Chopsticks if it couldn't deal with "losing" one motor on the way down.
The one in the Indian Ocean was also an improvement because 1) it made it all the way there, and 2) it didn't start coming apart beforehand like any of the others that made it that far.
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u/AlcoholicJohnson 1d ago
OK I (mostly) got it, thanks. Think you provided enough that I can clear up any remaining confusion reading on my own
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u/hasslehawk 1d ago
it didn't start coming apart beforehand like any of the others that made it that far.
The explosion in the aft skirt and the burn-through and partial disintegration of at least one of the aft flaps would seem to disagree with that statement.
Granted, some of that may have been intentional / expected. They were flying with intentionally - missing heat shield tiles.
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u/RT-LAMP 1d ago edited 1d ago
Why is landing in the ocean and blowing up successful?
Because the prior ones have only been the boosters. The second stages have all burned up on re-entry. Every rocket before Falcon 9 involved the first stage crashing into the ocean (or Siberia or a rural Chinese village). Every rocket before this one involved the second stage (or external tank for the Shuttle) getting dumped in the ocean or sent flying off into space.
This test was meant to test if the booster could hover properly in a way that it could be caught even if one of the central engines failed. The booster is already an outdated prototype and they already tested catching so it's not worth saving at the risk of it damaging the launch/catch tower when doing this extreme test. The booster seems to have shown this.
The second stage was meant to test the satellite deployment mechanism, engine relight while in orbit, and test the heat shielding. In particular they were testing whether it works well enough that even if they make a very aggressive re-entry (more aggressive that it should ever have to do) the ship can survive and land. They want to have multiple tests of this under their belt (particularly ones where the ship not only survives re-entry and shows it can land but also manages to do that without parts of it melting off) before trying to put it all the way into orbit and then wait a day or two for everything to be lined up right for a catch it because if they couldn't re-ignite the engines in orbit then there'd be a 120t mass of stainless steel designed to survive re-entry landing somewhere. And if they were able to but it failed during re-entry it's re-entry path would have to involve it flying over populated regions of Mexico.
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u/fencethe900th 1d ago
The second stages have all burned up in re-entry.
Flight 4 made it down with huge amounts of damage, flight 5 made it down, and flight 6 had a beautiful daytime landing.
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u/QP873 1d ago
Let’s say you have a private pilots license, and you’ve flown small aircraft your whole life. Then you (somehow) go out and fly a F-35 and land it successfully. You tell someone “yo I just landed a jet!” They say “I thought you’d already landed planes before.”
First of all, big difference between the different birds. Falcon 9 is a crazy different technology compared to Starship and they fly totally differently.
Second of all, they HAVE landed Starship before, but Starship is still being developed. This was the first time they have flown a V2 ship to completion. (Falcon 9’s final form is Block 5)
Next, getting more landings in gives them more flight data. You wouldn’t want to fly a jet once and call it a day; each successful flight builds flight data and confidence in the system.
Finally, they did a lot of experimental things on this flight.
They pushed the reentry angle higher than usual, they tested their satellite deployment rack, they demonstrated maneuverability in space via relighting an engine, and they filled the heat shield with experimental tiles.
In the end, the learned a LOT on this flight and tested things they’d never done before.
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u/Bergasms 1d ago
Different rocket. Remember the early days of the F9 when it crashed into the ocean while testing landings? This is the same thing but for a new rocket.
So this is a test that it could land properly if it were at a landing pad after going through the atmosphere really fast.
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u/Drewnarr 1d ago
Because it survived all its tests to get that far. They weren't trying to recover these vehicles as the tests would risk damaging the launch infrastructure.
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u/Erki82 1d ago
They've been landing/catching boosters on landing platforms prior to this. Starship is orbital class rocket, like Space Shuttle/Dragon/Apollo/Orion/Soyuz/Shenzhou. Before Starship nobody would believed the Starship size rocket current flight profile is possible. Starship literally makes impossible a possible. Current Starship testing program is like car crashing to test car safety. Every test give valuable data to go forward. They will blow up tens and tens Starships.
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u/PiDicus_Rex 1d ago
Brilliant stuff.
Now collecting suggestions as to how mainstream media will stuff up the coverage, or call the splashdowns as failures due to the expected booms.
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u/allah_oh_almighty 1d ago
omfg for ONCE put your politics aside and celebrate humanity's progress
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u/graydonatvail 1d ago
"So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up."
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u/Odd_Engineering4327 1d ago
Bring back NASA you fucks.
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u/pgnshgn 1d ago
The NASA SLS rocket is over a decade behind schedule, $20 billion over budget, and isn't reusable
Beyond that though Starship will be an enormous benefit to NASA, allowing then to launch significantly larger payloads for significantly cheaper. More science for less money is a win win in my book
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u/fadeawaytogrey 1d ago
Wow. Pollute the ocean to make one man’s obsession to cover for his faulty “parts”. Capitalism is so “great”.
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u/Accomplished-Crab932 14h ago
As opposed to the industry standard of…
Dumping hardware and “polluting the ocean” anyway?
At least Starship is testing a system to eliminate the dumping process; something the rest of the world has been slow to attempt thus far.
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u/h2ohow 1d ago
Was that an unexpected explosion at the end?
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u/Bergasms 1d ago
Nope. Expected ending. If it didn't go boom and was floating they'd have had to get the Aussie air force or navy to go sink it anyway.
This mission did have an unintended explosion while it was doing reentry as they were overstressing parts of it, but it didn't affect the rockets ability to work.
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u/Naive_Carpenter7321 1d ago
If these things can take off and land on Earth, am I right they could go and land on the Moon or Mars with minor changes for the extra fuel? Or am I playing too much Kerbal? It must be getting cheaper to start sending payloads in preparation for human missions.
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u/No-Surprise9411 1d ago
Starship is a unique case where the inherent dry mass of the system makes it near impossible to climb out of LEO in a single launch mission. But the plan for Starship is to be refueled with tanker flights while in orbit, to allow much greater range once refueled, all the way to mars and Luna
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u/dec0y 1d ago
What was the goal here? Was this supposed to be a platform landing?
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u/RandoRedditerBoi 1d ago
No, it was to demonstrate a precise and soft landing, which it did. However afterwards it was intended to fall over and be destroyed
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u/Darkmatterrainbows 23h ago
Okay probably a dumb question, but was it supposed to explode like that?
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u/brogan_the_bro 22h ago
Successful flight and we still got a good ol boom at the end . What a great day 🥲
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u/Massive-Percentage19 22h ago
Awesomeness....... USA has NASA but with gov. restricted thinking, Elon Musk rolled his eyes and .......""""" BAM """"" !
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u/BooopDead 19h ago
Bazillion dollar company and ya can't afford a camera rig that can't pan left! lol
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u/Banana_Prudent 9h ago
I mean what’s a little fuel explosion and pollution in the name of progress?
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u/Duxk__ 1d ago
shout out to the buoy cam!