this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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The rocket that's supposed to go to Mars is Starship.
I'm no expert, but apparently the design is very controversial, with some saying it's an extremely risky design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
Pennomi:
Please, no need for that:
Firstly, I admit it’s wrong to be so rude, and you’re right to call me out on that.
As you said, Starship is far from proven. It can almost certainly get to orbit in its current state but who even knows if reusability (and propellant transfer) will pan out.
I’m simply sick of people projecting their hatred of Musk on to all the engineers. They assume that because they dislike the man that he must be stupid, and that because he must be stupid, everything he owns must also be stupid. It shows a tribalistic, shallow understanding of the engineering process, when we should instead all be cheering for every success in spaceflight.
No it can't, they've tried twice where it failed very shortly after takeoff. The last attempt was only a month ago, pretty much like some people expected pre launch, because that would be very hard to avoid the way it's designed. Also Musk himself acknowledged it was high risk, with a good chance it wouldn't make it. NASA would NEVER have launched with a high probability of failure, the way the Starship program has been going, it would be very unlikely to be allowed to continue. Musk justified the launch with the value of the telemetry in case of failure. Problem is that they lost contact 8 minutes before it visibly exploded in the sky. So they got no valuable telemetry either!!!
That's not what I see, it seems like Musk has become increasingly irate, and he is calling the shots. The engineers are AFAIK almost never blamed.
You clearly know very little about the history of SpaceX, they run a hardware rich development program and this kind of failure is normal for the first few flights. It’s simply a matter of iterating until it works consistently.
Seriously, look up their process - Falcon 1 failed 3/5 times, and Falcon 9 recovery attempts didn’t succeed until the 8th test. Starship’s suborbital landing tests failed 4 times before they succeeded.
Having a couple launch failures is normal at this phase of development, for SpaceX anyway.
Funny how you claim I know little, when you just claimed Starship is basically ready, when all it can do is a few minutes before it blows up, it can't even leave the atmosphere yet.
One stupid comment more and I block you.
I mean, let’s crunch the numbers: the final velocity was 24,124 km/hr and LEO orbital speed is about 28,000 km/hr. Contrary to what you claim, it did in fact leave the atmosphere at an altitude of ~148km. That means that this iteration of Starship was 86% of the way to its destination. It made it through max q and stage separation, which are generally considered the most dangerous parts of flight.
Yeah, they were damn close.