After weeks of trying, SpaceX on Wednesday finally succeeded in landing its Mars Starship booster. But five minutes after touchdown—possibly due to a methane leak—the rocket exploded in a spectacular ball of fire on the Boca Chica, Texas, recovery pad.
A fiery ball of flames an complete loss of the vehicle at a precise point on the planet is only “near perfect” if we were talking about an ICBM. Since this ai about manned space flight then this is called a disaster.
Near perfect?
Three of the six landing legs flopped around during descent, it bounced hard on landing and stood like the tower of Pisa with flames at the bottom.
Then.
BOOOM…
If thats near perfect for the Musk fans…
‘Near’ doesn’t count.
As in ‘near the runway’ on contact with earth, and ‘nearly cleared the mountain’ as with most CFIT accidents. Both usually fatal.
Tweaking software at the last minute is experimentation/prototype work, not for flight near other people nor with people on board.
What’s being missed here… especially by this community… is really more interesting than the landing difficulties. All three of these flights have successfully demonstrated using areo surfaces to glide this massive booster back to a precise spot on the surface. That was the major unknown for Spacex in this test program.
They will get the landing issue sorted. No aerospace on the planet has more experience in landing orbital boosters… in fact they are the only company doing so. The Falcon series has over 70 landings and are flying reused boosters more than new. The Starship is a different beast, but they’ll get it. They crashed a bunch of Falcons perfecting those systems.
Had it landed on the failed landing legs and “not” exploded, would it have been referred to as a “near disastrous” landing? How many times have we heard sports announcers say the gymnast or figure skater nearly “stuck” the landing? It’s no different here. SN10 nearly “stuck” the landing. I’d give it an 8.5 out of 10! Previous landings were in the 6.5-7.0 range.
While we sit, lamenting of the passing of lighted airways, four-course radio ranges, loran; and bemoan the use of GPS and heaven forbid, the dreaded iPad…
Meantime, Musk and his team are making regular trips, some manned, to the ISS. And in his spare time, perfecting spot landings with a vehicle with ever changing CG and the complexity the Wright brothers never dreamed of.
Let’s whip out the whiz wheel and slide rule and we’ll show him what aviating is all about.
Shockingly, Arthur F. comes in without all of the information. Again.
We do believe that it blew up, BTW. But we know it was successful, as well. You can have both, ya know. (You don’t know, I know). You can be pro-troops, and anti-war. You can be pro-choice, and anti-abortion. You can be a curmudgeon seeing only trees, in a vast forest.
What’s the point of tossing out snarky comments about “Musk fans”? I’m not a fan of him personally but I can’t help but be excited about what SpaceX is doing. And I find it hilarious that these same comments were coming in when SpaceX was trying and mostly failing to land their Falcon 9 boosters. Now they’ve nailed it and it’s almost routine.
And apparently we’ve collectively forgotten that this is just how it’s done, as far back as the 60s when NASAs work to modify the Atlas rocket into a spacecraft booster resulted in numerous, often spectacular, launch failures. Those too were well-publicized by the media, giving the impression that our rockets always blew up during launch. I seem to recall that they successfully worked through it and did things like sending John Glen up into orbit.
Richard… what NASA program are you referring? Shuttle? Only marginally reusable… tank was thrown away… SRB’s only saved the steel casings and main engines went through a complete rebuild each flight.
SpaceX’s Falcon is operationally reusable and has been for years now. They rarely loose a booster anymore. (@ in the last 30 or so recoveries). The Falcon mission last weekend used a booster already flown and recovered eight times. Now it will fly a ninth time.
NASA has historically thrown away every launch booster they operated. Redstone, Atlas, Titan, Saturn. Even their new perpetually developing SLS heavy lift system will be single use. Millions thrown into the Atlantic after each flight.
“What’s being missed here… especially by this community… is really more interesting than the landing difficulties”. Actually jonmark this “community” is made up of more than a couple of regular Musk naysayers whose naysaying is not worth dignifying with replies. Most of us are not missing the fact that SpaceX is “hardware rich” (credit Paul B) and is using its hardware to gather priceless data and learning from it.
Have to disagree with the initial post, I’m almost positive this wasn’t a manned spaceflight, so doubtful it constitutes a “disaster”. Sometimes during development and test things don’t go right, and I’m fairly certain that is why they do development & test rather than building a single final product and launching it cold with a full crew on board. But of course that’s just my opinion.