Starship Flight Test...1st Attempt.

I did wonder about this. There was a lot of dust kicked up at the launch - far more than I've seen at launches by other organisations.

Is there anything on whether this is likely to have caused the rapid unscheduled disassembly?

 

IMHO, there will be multiple faults found. But the hardest will be what is under 33 engines.

If I remember correctly, Saturn used a split, flame trench:

Source: Moonport, CH11-7

Bob Wilson

 

I'm still catching up from a couple weeks of being too busy with real life to follow much news or online activity, so missed any actual updates.

But based on old time rocket launches, I believe the immediate direct cause of this rapid unscheduled disassembly was a human, sitting at a mission control work station marked "Range Safety Officer", pushing a big red button marked "Self Destruct", igniting some linear demolition charges that ripped open the fuel tanks. Or some modern equivalent thereof.

The human-initiated disassembly would have been triggered because the scheduled disassembly of the lower rocket stage from the upper stage, did not happen as planned. The flip or tumbling we observed was intended for just the lower stage as part of its return and recovery operation. The upper stage / payload portion should have detached moments earlier, to go on its merry way.

As for why the scheduled disassembly (stage separation) did not occur, that will be a focus of the failure analysis. Normally a number of explosive bolts holding the stages together should have detonated on command. It seems to me to be unlikely that dust and grit kicked up by lack of a proper launchpad exhaust trench would have jammed the stages together, but the analysis team will certainly consider that, along with many other possibilities.

I seem to remember that a relatively modern Russian launch of a replacement crew to ISS, including an American astronaut, suffered a partial stage separation failure. Maybe one of those explosive bolts didn't work, or something like that. The second stage engines did ignite with enough force to blow the first stage completely off, but the troubles were still bad enough to abort the mission and initiate the crew escape system, yanking the capsule off and out of the path of the remaining rocket / bomb, to parachute down early. They all survived.

 

Yikes ... what kind of g forces could you be in for if that didn't happen, and the first stage hung around as some kind of unintended thrust vectoring device?

 

I'd guess the 'flight' g forces here would be less than normal launch g's, due to the retained mass, though the sideways component would be a problem. The escape tower yanking the crew capsule off the vehicle stack would produce higher g's.

'Explosion' g's are another matter, but I'm not certain those would be large either. E.g. in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the big fireball wasn't a true explosion, but rather just a fireball of fuel spilled when the tank broke open, and was mostly behind the crew. I think their greatest g forces were from the aerodynamics of flying sideways at supersonic speed, causing additional shuttle breakup.

 

Estimates for next flight test range from 6 weeks to 6 months. If they can't make the launching pad calm enough in that small plot of land, Then what? I suppose that barge launching will eventually become necessary for high-tempo Starship launches. Maybe this will come sooner not later.

 

Starship has two goals - humans persistently on Mars, and exploration of solar system. First presents difficulties not here discussed. Second sends me to

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-anchem-061020-125416

There I see that robotic exploration has been limited to small devices. When Starship's youthful explosions end, but before people can be sent to Mars, it could send heavy robotic probes to all Sun's planets, and do much more science. I am sure 'they' have plans for that. It seems an important goal to understand things in this solar system. It seems a lesser goal (sorry) to put humans on Mars which is not likely to be humans' good plan for backup survival.

So let there be fluff, but see that doing big science across solar system is Starship thing.

 

I'm most interested in seeing an automated boring machine and power system. Before humans show up, there needs to be habitable tunnels with air, water, and local food production. Then the explorers and pioneers can show up.

Bob Wilson

 

sounds like a boring place to live

 

The Marines taught me that when your survival is on the line, problems become much more interesting.
Bob Wilson