Starhopper Did Not Hop
Well it didn’t work (this time) but it would make for a pretty solid Mad Max sequel pic.twitter.com/ZML6UtgTqn
— Bobak Ferdowsi (@tweetsoutloud) July 25, 2019
Well it didn’t work (this time) but it would make for a pretty solid Mad Max sequel pic.twitter.com/ZML6UtgTqn
— Bobak Ferdowsi (@tweetsoutloud) July 25, 2019
An abort at T-0, followed by what looked like emergency venting.
It is just doing its job, moving the SpaceX engineers up the learning curve so they will be ready for the Starship. And kudos to them for doing this live and not hiding it on some remote test range.
That would be a huge hit at Burning Man!
Seriously, this is SpaceX doing what they do very well indeed, learning fast by doing. Vented methane with fire anywhere nearby is going to burn spectacularly. If the vehicle is still there when the flames fade, nothing detonated and it’s a good day. Apply lessons learned and on to the next test.
That is a lot of smoke from just one engine. It hard to imagine how much smoke 35 engines will make. The pollution from just one launch will be substantial enough that SpaceX might need to start considering environmental effects from Super Heavy launches.
Looks more like dust blasted loose from the concrete pad than smoke. It’s really hard to directly make smoke burning methane and oxygen – how often do you see smoke from a gas stove flame? (At least before food gets involved…) Burn CH4 with O2 and the primary results will be H20 and some CO2, along with a bit of shortlived unstable stuff like CO, HO, O that’ll quickly tend to become H2O or CO2. You’ll also tend to make some amount of nitrogen oxides from heating entrained air during the fraction of a launch you’re in the atmosphere – all rockets do that – at some extremely high traffic level that might become a problem, but before then someone will be building a beanstalk…
Last I heard, you don’t get a launch license for any big orbital booster without going through an environmental impact process.
The wording of their existing EIS includes vehicles up to a Falcon Heavy class and vehicles “smaller than Falcon 9.”
At 55 meters Starship is shorter than the 70 meter Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, and it has less thrust than Falcon Heavy. Less than a Falcon 9 too if using just the 3 engine center cluster.
Super Heavy is 63 meters tall, again shorter than F9/FH, and can fly with less than the full compliment of 37 engines (new info). Flying with just the center cluster of 7 it too would have less thrust than Falcon Heavy.
Further, they don’t need a whole new EIS. They can amend the current one, after a public comment period.
I happened to be vacationing down there this past week and stopped by for some sightseeing. I’m confident it was dust as Henry suggests.
From tonight’s hop
@elonmusk
Engine cam
https://twitter.com/elonmus…
I swing by about a month ago. That is why I think it’s probably sand being only a sand dune away from the beach.
That would mean, technically, that they are sandblasting their test stand and ground facilities. I know fires and exhaust from the rocket aren’t good for equipment either, but the equipment is designed for that. Abrasion from particles is a different sort of thing. Of course, that’s not a big deal if the equipment is cheap and easy to replace.
It’s now up to 37 engines on Super Heavy, depending on the required deltaV.
StarHopper hopped last night, and they’re targeting a 200m hop in a week or so. Can’t see much for the huge plume.
Hop at about 1:18
https://youtu.be/sWT1788sBFA
SpaceX now has the advantage of proven expertise in rocket development, with the ability to diagnose and solve problems rapidly so I tend to agree this is a minor setback.
Is it even a setback at all? Abort at T-0, which only tells us that the computers didn’t like something. Could be something as simple as an erroneous reading or sensor, easily solved and move on. Maybe a valve needs to be replaced. Only if it turns out to be something in the design that needs to be changed would I consider it any kind of a setback.
I wouldn’t even call it a setback if they had to change the design. It would be if it were a major redesign, but identifying minor flaws in a design is one of the things tests are for. You mentioned a bad sensor reading as a hypothetical possibility. If that was the problem, and they had to drop a capacitor into the circuit as a noise filter, so what? That’s a design change, but a very small one. SpaceX seems to prefer identifying those sorts of minor bugs and glitches in tests of the whole vehicle. NASA prefers extensive component level analysis and testing before putting the full system together.
The cause of the methane release is not obvious to me. Line rupture? Fuel tank leak? Normal venting? Overpresurization spike due to the abort shutdown? The Delta IV also releases some propellant at launch and occasionally a large fireball, without any apparent damage to the vehicle as little or no explosive pressure wave is generated.
According to a tweet from Musk. The propellants was colder than expected.
Guess that will cause the pressure limits be exceeded for the propellant flows going into the Raptor.
Since the propellant umbilicals are disconnected from the StarHopper for the test. The only way SpaceX can detanked is to vented the propellants overboard. With the methane being burn off to avoid methane pooling near the ground around the StarHopper.
I think they are thrusting the wrong way!
No negative comments? Hmmm. It is a failed test. I believe space is hard and so every failure is a consequence of that. However, I find it strange that there are only “silver lining” posts about Space X.
It went Pop!
It did not hop!
But did it flop?
I know not.
I do not like green runs and ham
No, it’s a launch abort, which is not a failure. A failure would be the hopper blew up. Launch abort after ignition is not unusual when dealing with new vehicles, it happened several times in Falcon 9’s early missions, every time SpaceX fixed the issue then launched successfully afterwards.
No, all due respect, but there’s something going on here that you really are failing to see. As evidenced by the fact that a day later they’ve spotted the problem, fixed it, and successfully flown.
What it is, is a completely different development paradigm from trad NASA’s “simulate and study for years before ever doing anything real-world lest it visibly break and end up on the evening news.”
Take a first stab FAST, see what breaks and fix it and try again FAST, repeat as needed. Because, what’s been missed by the sim-and-study-for-years-first model is that by far the quickest and most accurate sim for something as complex as a high-performance rocket is 1 to 1 scale analog…
It’s not a new approach with SpaceX, mind. It’s a very old approach. What’s new is, SpaceX’s repeated proof that this old way is far faster and cheaper than the hypercautious incrementalism NASA has drifted into in the generations since Apollo.
That’s a fairly narrow definition of a test. For aircraft flight tests, you can learn that, no, you really don’t want to fly that new aircraft design at a particular combination of speed and altitude. As long as you don’t seriously damage the aircraft in the process, that’s a successful flight test not a failure. People can do tests to discover unknown problems or to gain experience with the system. You’re thinking of a test as something exclusively intended to validate the design and procedures. That’s how NASA generally things of tests. But this is a SpaceX, not a NASA, rocket, and SpaceX doesn’t see it that way.
Yes, it did! Apparently this morning. Got up some, translated and landed. Set the grass on fire all around the pad! No damage to the Hopper. If all else fails, SpaceX can market this thing as a means of starting (un)controlled burns for unwanted grass and weeds! Apparently the first use of a full-flow staged combustion throttleable rocket engine! Higher test flights planned very soon! Go SpaceX!
Great News. This is the first test of a methane rocket I’ve ever seen.
I have read that Blue Origin is developing their own methane engine, for the New Glenn vehicle, to be shared with ULA’s Vulcan vehicle.
So many questions come to mind… how are they vectoring the engines? hydraulic actuators?