SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.

  • Buffaloaf@lemmy.world
    725·
    11 months ago

    I really wish they’d stop putting Musk’s name on things like this. He didn’t design the engines, he didn’t plan the flight path, he did nothing but throw a bunch of money at a company because he’s obsessed with Mars.

        • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          102·
          11 months ago

          Falcon 9 is the most reliable rocket in the world and it used to explode like this too. It’ll be 5-10 years of successful unmanned flights before anyone rides on this rocket.

          • Neato@kbin.social
            411·
            11 months ago

            Was NASA exploding rockets this frequently when they pioneered all of this decades ago? It only took NASA 8 years to go from first entering space to landing on the moon. SpaceX is nowhere close to that and they’ve been launching rockets for 17 years.

              • Neato@kbin.social
                35·
                11 months ago

                Damn you clearly know nothing about technological development. Elon stands on the shoulders of all those who gave their lives in the past. He benefits from all the safety regulations.

                And still with all of that. The tens of billions of dollars the government hands out to him. And more than twice the time of the Space Race he had accomplished so little. How many successful rockets did NASA develop in that time? A lot more than SpaceX.

            • QuinceDaPence@kbin.social
              11·
              11 months ago

              Different design processes and NASA has to appease Congress who likes to cut funding if a rocket blows up.

              But the Design-build-test-break-redesign-etc process that SpaceX uses is cheaper, quicker, and gives more data.

    • FlowVoid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      11 months ago

      Blame the poster. The CNN article itself doesn’t have Musk in the headline and barely mentions him at all (there is one quote near the end).

    • dustyData@lemmy.worldEnglish
      71·
      11 months ago

      … throw a bunch of money at a company because he~~’s obsessed with Mars.~~ wanted to justify sending money to some arm dealer Russian friends.

    • Marbles@discuss.tchncs.de
      328·
      11 months ago

      This just false. Sure, he did not do everything alone but he has a huge hand in engineering concepts and design decisions. Lots of hate and complete misunderstanding how spaceship, spaceX and Musk work in this thread.

      • soloner@lemmy.world
        7·
        11 months ago

        The dude prefers reviewing source code on paper.

        Anyone who writes code knows that is not a practical way to review.

        Maybe in his time he got book smart about some physics/rocket concepts. That’s the least I would expect anyway. But that doesn’t mean he really has any expertise to offer to the product.

          • vind@lemmy.world
            71·
            11 months ago

            He doesn’t do shit. All of that is just him saying buzzwords he learnt from the actual engineers so he’d look smart.

    • MumboJumbo@lemmy.world
      213·
      11 months ago

      Actually kinda really successful 👍 All 33 engines were firing, the hot staging was successful. On both the first and second stages, it looks like the automatic FTS (flight termination system) was triggered. That would happen if it veered too far off of it’s approved flight path (don’t need it coming down over a populated region.) The only thing that didn’t happen that I was hopeful for was atmospheric re-entry - we really need to see how that heat shield works in practice.

  • dumdum666@kbin.social
    51·
    11 months ago

    It weirds me out how many people want to get a brain implant done by a company of this guy

  • iterable@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    11 months ago

    I wonder what the simulation showed was going to happen compared to the actual flight. Would give you a real metric of progress.

    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      11 months ago

      If the simulation showed a problem, they could have fixed it before launch. I’m guessing they don’t have a enough data to make a super high fidelity integrated model for all phases of fight, so they’d break down the sections individually. But integration always brings extra challenges.

      • iterable@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        11 months ago

        So they don’t have a physicist on staff? Or several? We have known the math for rocket science for some time. What data is it they need? When even NASA in the sixties has simulators.

        • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          11 months ago

          I’m sure they have tons. But we don’t know the full thermo areo dynamics at hypersonic speeds and complex geometries, especially their effect on unconventional control surfaces across huge temperature and speed ranges. Some military companies have even bought flights on electron to get high altitude hypersonic velocity data on how the air behaves in that regime.

  • brothershamus@kbin.social
    11·
    11 months ago

    Look, I really want to like SpaceX and enjoy all their successes and so on.

    But it’s just not. going. to. happen. And they know why. This isn’t complicated.

  • murmur@lemm.ee
    55·
    11 months ago

    He certainly didn’t have to be all anti-Semitic to deflect attention from this failure. It’s telling.

  • pan_troglodytes@programming.devEnglish
    01·
    11 months ago

    eh… it looks like hot-staging still has some bugs to work out, but the 2nd stage worked just fine (and since that’s the part that matters, the end fate of the first stage is irrelevant)

    good test all in all