12 ms·

Very first flight of a brand new engine type (Raptor 3) with totally reworked heatshielding/plumbing/sensors/control systems/etc.

by Zee2 4mo ago

ajross 4mo ago
Which is true, but at the same time: this is Starship Flight 12. The whole point of Starship is that it's a reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance. And in particular it's supposed to be different than the other reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance, which turned out to be sort of a boondoggle. Yet, they've now hand-built and destroyed twelve of these things across multiple redesigns, and it still hasn't completed its design mission once. In fact basically every launch has unexpected major failures. As poor as its safety record ultimately ended up being, the shuttle launched successfully on its very first try. And we only had to hand-build five of them. And lost two, sure, which is still a lot less than twelve. Yes yes, I understand that iterative design has merits and that the ability to rapidly prototype and try things in the stratosphere allows for less conservative tolerances and better ultimate performance. But does it really take 13+ tries?! At what point to we start wondering if we have another boondoggle on our hands?
- redox99 4mo ago
  If you can afford it, I'm sure anyone developing a rocket would prefer to do it this iterative way. I don't really understand the complain.
  - ajross 4mo ago
    The point was more that there is a point where (to borrow the software terminology) "iterative design" becomes "death march". Trying a few times in the early days and being willing to throw stuff out and start over is a powerful tool. I think blowing up a handful of rockets is a fine idea. But at some point you have to ask yourself if it will ever work? Why are we on a another engine redesign? Why is this the third iteration of the second stage? How many more? And what number is that point? Six? Nine? I'm thinking thirteen may be getting into the danger zone.
    - redox99 4mo ago
      v3 is the first version that was made with the intention of being used for actual payload delivery. The versions before were about testing and proof of concept.
    - simondotau 4mo ago
      So what if they blow up literally 100 rockets, if they can eventually perfect it faster and more cheaply than the traditional approach, recently typified by SLS. SpaceX have already proven that the iterative approach works with Falcon 9, literally the most successful rocket program ever. SpaceX have also proven that this specific Super Heavy/Starship rocket design isn’t a dead end. Criticising them for failing to succeed in the future is a valid but uninteresting opinion.
      - imtringued 4mo ago
        The point is that by the 100th test flight, your competitor has already proven the first version of their design to the point of being retired by the second version that has a 55% higher payload capacity and had a history of dozens of moon landings and is busy manufacturing solar panels on the lunar surface using lunar regolith, thanks to the orbital infrastructure for lunar transit that they've painstakingly built over several initial launches is paying off. Meanwhile SpaceX having proven that the iterative development cycle works by first building a successful rocket and accepting customer payloads as soon as possible and then upgrading the rocket as they flew, fell behind because they decided to abandon their origin and instead try to delay success as much as possible which is antithetical to their origin and the success of the launch vehicle. In their hubris, they doubled down on failure, excusing it at every opportunity, while pretending that this is how Falcon 9 succeeded, which is simply not true. You cannot have a radically different development process and call it the same because you're the same company.
    - avmich 4mo ago
      In a somewhat similar situation Sergey Korolyov stopped his colleague in front of the Party officials asking a similar question and explained: "We are exploring terra incognita, this is the process of getting knowledge". He was sort of right - even though there were many specific engineering problems, and many of those were rather solvable, especially in hindsight, overall process was stepping into the unknown. Here we have a cutting edge rocket design - scale, sophistication of engines, design goals - and a commercial evaluation, which path would get to the intended success cheaper. NASA doesn't like public embarrassments, and, as Henry Spencer reminds us, when failure is not an option, the success could be quite costly. So NASA spends billions and many years for a fragile system. If the goal is an airline-like operations, the design should be thoroughly shaken up. It's known that no simulation, no static testing can equate the actual flights in the ability to get the data best describing what conditions the system will encounter in real use. And also, given the industrial scale of Starship production, each flight hardware costs way less than if we'd built them manually, in quantities justifying naming each unit separately. In Soviet Union, where rocket departments were part of artillery, the testing with actual launches seemed logical. In this case the approach to run a massive test flight program seems logical too, and we can't complain about the lack of progress - first Starship had way less capabilities and performed way worse. In USA we had more than 1000 tests for injector head for F-1 engine in Apollo program, and this number was justified at that time. Starship is way bigger - but the progress is also undeniable, and it would be odd to stop test flights now, when the 3rd iteration of design looks promising. So, while we can't pin a particular number of tests, I don't think we should worry yet. This year and the next one should be important for Starship program, given SpaceX commitments to help NASA Artemis. If we won't have orbital Starship then - we can come back to this question.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4mo ago
    The part that makes no sense to me is why they are going starship scale rather than falcon 9 scale. Had they done their prototyping on a rocket with 9 engines on the first stage and 1 on the second, they could have gotten to raptor 3 (and a falcon 9 replacement) while blowing up way fewer engines, launch complexes, etc. There's a reason Spacex started with the falcon 1 rather than the falcon 9. It's a lot cheaper to blow up fewer engines and smaller rockets while you're developing a new rocket engine.
    - s1artibartfast 4mo ago
      Time costs money as well. Im guessing the cost is irrelevant compared to a faster timeliness.
      - adgjlsfhk1 4mo ago
        part of my argument is that if your test platform is 1/4th the size, you get much faster iterations. the path they took meant that every test destroys 39 engines, a huge amount of rocket fuel, and all of their construction. A falcon 9 design (9+1) with raptor engines would let them already have a falcon heavy capacity vehicle because everything about a smaller scale vehicle is way easier
        s1artibartfast 4mo ago
        They already have a falcon heavy capacity vehicle - Falcon heavy. I guess I am confused about what you think they would get out of testing with a smaller platform. It seems like most of their focus is specifically figuring out how to make a large platform work. What do you think would translate?
        adgjlsfhk1 4mo ago
        I think that trying to make a large platform work with engines that aren't reliable and on a fuel system that you don't have experience with is a really dumb idea. The raptor engine is a pretty giant advance over the merlin engine and methane seems like a reasonable fuel, but testing of the engine has been consistently held back by issues they're running into due to scaling up the rocket so much. Starship has only had 12 test flights in 3 years (vs 50 launches since january for falcon 9). Had raptor testing taken place on a smaller vehicle it seems pretty likely that they already would have a falcon heavy replacement in service that could be launching real payload.
  - imtringued 4mo ago
    If I was developing a rocket, I would prefer making it work first and then iterating on it. SpaceX is iterating for the sake of a narrative. None of the development goals for Starship require reuse of the upper stages, that's a bonus that should happen after Starship started deploying Starlink satellites. There is no point in having dedicated reentry tests. Every test flight comes with a free reentry test included. Even if a company does iterative rocket development, it would never follow the SpaceX way of putting th most difficult but simultaneously unimportant objectives on the critical path at the expense of the essential objectives. The development program of Starship is basically ignoring every aspect of Falcon 9 development that made it the success people take for granted these days.
- p-e-w 4mo ago
  But all of those 12 launches happened in just 3 years, and cost a tiny fraction of other major spaceflight development programs. For reference, SLS has been in development for 5 times as long, and cost 15-20 times as much, as Starship, and they still haven’t landed people on the Moon, which has been one of the stated goals since the Constellation program in 2005. I don’t see how the number of failures matters if the end result still happens faster and cheaper than anything else.
  - bbatha 4mo ago
    Moreover the two lost shuttles included human lives. Better to blow stuff up with demo payloads now before sending up large contracted payloads or worse human beings!
    - p-e-w 4mo ago
      I couldn’t believe my ears when I first heard that the second ever flight of SLS was going to be crewed. It worked out in the end, but I can’t imagine being so confident in a new system, no matter how much money and brainpower has been spent to make it safe.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
    - ajross 4mo ago
      > Better to [...] That's undeniably true. Nonetheless "Better than the shuttle, which sucked" isn't the design goal. The question is not even just "is it better to blow up 12 Starships?", which would probably still be true. It's "Why isn't Starship working yet?" and the implied "Maybe Starship sucks too?!".
      - cwillu 4mo ago
        They failed far more than 12 landings before they started reliably landing boosters, and people made the same “maybe this is a dumb idea” comments back then too.

Very first flight of a brand new engine type (Raptor 3) with totally reworked heatshielding/plumbing/sensors/control systems/etc.

by Zee2 4mo ago

Very first flight of a brand new engine type (Raptor 3) with totally reworked heatshielding/plumbing/sensors/control systems/etc.

ajross 4mo ago

Which is true, but at the same time: this is Starship Flight 12. The whole point of Starship is that it's a reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance. And in particular it's supposed to be different than the other reusable vehicle with easy turnaround and quick maintenance, which turned out to be sort of a boondoggle. Yet, they've now hand-built and destroyed twelve of these things across multiple redesigns, and it still hasn't completed its design mission once. In fact basically every launch has unexpected major failures. As poor as its safety record ultimately ended up being, the shuttle launched successfully on its very first try. And we only had to hand-build five of them. And lost two, sure, which is still a lot less than twelve. Yes yes, I understand that iterative design has merits and that the ability to rapidly prototype and try things in the stratosphere allows for less conservative tolerances and better ultimate performance. But does it really take 13+ tries?! At what point to we start wondering if we have another boondoggle on our hands?

redox99 4mo ago
If you can afford it, I'm sure anyone developing a rocket would prefer to do it this iterative way. I don't really understand the complain.
- ajross 4mo ago
  The point was more that there is a point where (to borrow the software terminology) "iterative design" becomes "death march". Trying a few times in the early days and being willing to throw stuff out and start over is a powerful tool. I think blowing up a handful of rockets is a fine idea. But at some point you have to ask yourself if it will ever work? Why are we on a another engine redesign? Why is this the third iteration of the second stage? How many more? And what number is that point? Six? Nine? I'm thinking thirteen may be getting into the danger zone.
  - redox99 4mo ago
    v3 is the first version that was made with the intention of being used for actual payload delivery. The versions before were about testing and proof of concept.
  - simondotau 4mo ago
    So what if they blow up literally 100 rockets, if they can eventually perfect it faster and more cheaply than the traditional approach, recently typified by SLS. SpaceX have already proven that the iterative approach works with Falcon 9, literally the most successful rocket program ever. SpaceX have also proven that this specific Super Heavy/Starship rocket design isn’t a dead end. Criticising them for failing to succeed in the future is a valid but uninteresting opinion.
    - imtringued 4mo ago
      The point is that by the 100th test flight, your competitor has already proven the first version of their design to the point of being retired by the second version that has a 55% higher payload capacity and had a history of dozens of moon landings and is busy manufacturing solar panels on the lunar surface using lunar regolith, thanks to the orbital infrastructure for lunar transit that they've painstakingly built over several initial launches is paying off. Meanwhile SpaceX having proven that the iterative development cycle works by first building a successful rocket and accepting customer payloads as soon as possible and then upgrading the rocket as they flew, fell behind because they decided to abandon their origin and instead try to delay success as much as possible which is antithetical to their origin and the success of the launch vehicle. In their hubris, they doubled down on failure, excusing it at every opportunity, while pretending that this is how Falcon 9 succeeded, which is simply not true. You cannot have a radically different development process and call it the same because you're the same company.
  - avmich 4mo ago
    In a somewhat similar situation Sergey Korolyov stopped his colleague in front of the Party officials asking a similar question and explained: "We are exploring terra incognita, this is the process of getting knowledge". He was sort of right - even though there were many specific engineering problems, and many of those were rather solvable, especially in hindsight, overall process was stepping into the unknown. Here we have a cutting edge rocket design - scale, sophistication of engines, design goals - and a commercial evaluation, which path would get to the intended success cheaper. NASA doesn't like public embarrassments, and, as Henry Spencer reminds us, when failure is not an option, the success could be quite costly. So NASA spends billions and many years for a fragile system. If the goal is an airline-like operations, the design should be thoroughly shaken up. It's known that no simulation, no static testing can equate the actual flights in the ability to get the data best describing what conditions the system will encounter in real use. And also, given the industrial scale of Starship production, each flight hardware costs way less than if we'd built them manually, in quantities justifying naming each unit separately. In Soviet Union, where rocket departments were part of artillery, the testing with actual launches seemed logical. In this case the approach to run a massive test flight program seems logical too, and we can't complain about the lack of progress - first Starship had way less capabilities and performed way worse. In USA we had more than 1000 tests for injector head for F-1 engine in Apollo program, and this number was justified at that time. Starship is way bigger - but the progress is also undeniable, and it would be odd to stop test flights now, when the 3rd iteration of design looks promising. So, while we can't pin a particular number of tests, I don't think we should worry yet. This year and the next one should be important for Starship program, given SpaceX commitments to help NASA Artemis. If we won't have orbital Starship then - we can come back to this question.
- adgjlsfhk1 4mo ago
  The part that makes no sense to me is why they are going starship scale rather than falcon 9 scale. Had they done their prototyping on a rocket with 9 engines on the first stage and 1 on the second, they could have gotten to raptor 3 (and a falcon 9 replacement) while blowing up way fewer engines, launch complexes, etc. There's a reason Spacex started with the falcon 1 rather than the falcon 9. It's a lot cheaper to blow up fewer engines and smaller rockets while you're developing a new rocket engine.
  - s1artibartfast 4mo ago
    Time costs money as well. Im guessing the cost is irrelevant compared to a faster timeliness.
    - adgjlsfhk1 4mo ago
      part of my argument is that if your test platform is 1/4th the size, you get much faster iterations. the path they took meant that every test destroys 39 engines, a huge amount of rocket fuel, and all of their construction. A falcon 9 design (9+1) with raptor engines would let them already have a falcon heavy capacity vehicle because everything about a smaller scale vehicle is way easier
      - s1artibartfast 4mo ago
        They already have a falcon heavy capacity vehicle - Falcon heavy. I guess I am confused about what you think they would get out of testing with a smaller platform. It seems like most of their focus is specifically figuring out how to make a large platform work. What do you think would translate?
        adgjlsfhk1 4mo ago
        I think that trying to make a large platform work with engines that aren't reliable and on a fuel system that you don't have experience with is a really dumb idea. The raptor engine is a pretty giant advance over the merlin engine and methane seems like a reasonable fuel, but testing of the engine has been consistently held back by issues they're running into due to scaling up the rocket so much. Starship has only had 12 test flights in 3 years (vs 50 launches since january for falcon 9). Had raptor testing taken place on a smaller vehicle it seems pretty likely that they already would have a falcon heavy replacement in service that could be launching real payload.
- imtringued 4mo ago
  If I was developing a rocket, I would prefer making it work first and then iterating on it. SpaceX is iterating for the sake of a narrative. None of the development goals for Starship require reuse of the upper stages, that's a bonus that should happen after Starship started deploying Starlink satellites. There is no point in having dedicated reentry tests. Every test flight comes with a free reentry test included. Even if a company does iterative rocket development, it would never follow the SpaceX way of putting th most difficult but simultaneously unimportant objectives on the critical path at the expense of the essential objectives. The development program of Starship is basically ignoring every aspect of Falcon 9 development that made it the success people take for granted these days.
p-e-w 4mo ago
But all of those 12 launches happened in just 3 years, and cost a tiny fraction of other major spaceflight development programs. For reference, SLS has been in development for 5 times as long, and cost 15-20 times as much, as Starship, and they still haven’t landed people on the Moon, which has been one of the stated goals since the Constellation program in 2005. I don’t see how the number of failures matters if the end result still happens faster and cheaper than anything else.
- bbatha 4mo ago
  Moreover the two lost shuttles included human lives. Better to blow stuff up with demo payloads now before sending up large contracted payloads or worse human beings!
  - p-e-w 4mo ago
    I couldn’t believe my ears when I first heard that the second ever flight of SLS was going to be crewed. It worked out in the end, but I can’t imagine being so confident in a new system, no matter how much money and brainpower has been spent to make it safe.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  - ajross 4mo ago
    > Better to [...] That's undeniably true. Nonetheless "Better than the shuttle, which sucked" isn't the design goal. The question is not even just "is it better to blow up 12 Starships?", which would probably still be true. It's "Why isn't Starship working yet?" and the implied "Maybe Starship sucks too?!".
    - cwillu 4mo ago
      They failed far more than 12 landings before they started reliably landing boosters, and people made the same “maybe this is a dumb idea” comments back then too.