SpaceX Starship blows its top at Boca Chica

[TexasTowelie]

Source: McAllen Monitor

SpaceX’s Starship MK-1 prototype appears to have suffered a serious failure during testing at the company’s Boca Chica Beach facility Wednesday afternoon.

A livestream of the test shows the top of the Starship shooting off and smoke or gas billowing out of the vehicle at 3:27 p.m.

The video also shows the top of the Spaceship flipping high into the air before crashing to the ground near the test site.

Speaking to reporters in September, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk stated that he hoped for the Starship to reach orbit within half a year.



Read more: https://www.themonitor.com/2019/11/20/spacex-starship-blows-top-boca-chica/

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[iluvtennis]

1. Aww no. Rinse and repeat. Go Space X.

[Demonaut]

2. uhhhh....

that model will never fly humans

[SKKY]

3. This, as I understand it, is a very early beta article...

...obviously still much work to be done.

[hatrack]

4. Actually, it IS rocket science . . .

Youch.

[gibraltar72]

5. Coincidently

A long time friend called and said her son had just been recruited and was going to work at SpaceX.

[TexasTowelie]

6. I hope that he wasn't recruited for their astronaut training program. nt

[mbusby]

7. Back....

...to the drawing board.

[JohnnyRingo]

8. Good thing Musk never decided to be a Bond villain

He could make Dr No look like a two bit street hoodlum.

[Bearware]

9. That is Starship Mark 1 PROTOTYPE - they had no plans to fly people on it EVER or reach orbit

I suspect it had more to do with seeing what was involved in putting a first one together so they could learn how to better manufacture the following versions Mark 2 and Mark 3 which are now also being built. This is a revolutionary approach when it comes to building large rockets.

What's amazing is how Musk turned on-a-dime from using carbon-fiber when his engineers showed that stainless steel was far cheaper and much stronger at the needed temperatures. Virtually every other sizable company making rockets would have had too much management/political inertia to change or even listen to the engineers and would find out decades later they had made a massive mistake. More likely they would never have attempted it at all.

People get all worried when SpaceX fails to meet outrageous self-imposed deadlines which Musk deliberately uses as a way to challenge his people to do far more than they think they can. People were also assuming SpaceX was going to die when booster after booster failed to successfully land (which is what was happening to everybody's boosters). By continuing to push, they now routinely land boosters except when the required orbit makes it impossible.

SpaceX is literally building a universal spaceship that will be the backbone of exploring inter-planetary space for many decades or until someone copies what they have done. Inexpensive reuse, refueling, non-traditional fuel, non-traditional structures, new high efficiency engines and heat shields are having a tremendous impact on safety, cost and capability. In the next few years SpaceX will be able to launch far more payloads than all the rest of rocket companies on earth.

If I was going into space, SpaceX would be my first choice for at least the next few decades.

PS. Even though they are cluttering up low Earth orbit with their Internet satellite array , in the long run SpaceX is probably what we need to cleanup all the space junk before we lose access to space because of Kessler Syndrome.