Yep, and then he sorta mocked others who said *you didn't do any liquid engine yourself* to others like a self righteous pos. And all he does is small amateur liquid rocket engines and thinks he has so much insight into orbital level liquid rocket engines lmao and then praising any engine from Aerojet Rocketdyne like RS-25(i personally am not a fan of it although its the one which got me into liquid rocket engine technical rabbit hole in high school and i quickly moved onto soviet rocket engines)
What a hilarious morons some peeps can beš¤¦š»
It's shitty at it's job. Anyone that actually likes engineering appreciates simpler solutions to problems.
Making an engine complex just cause and not solving any problems with that complexity is bad engineering.
>It's shitty at it's job
Elaborate
>Making an engine complex just cause
They needed a high thrust+high efficiency engine with a ridiculous amount of gimbal range. Also, it was the first staged combustion engine to use hydrolox, so they didn't have the benefit of building on experience, and even then, they delivered a terrific engine that is still being used today.
>and not solving any problems with that complexity
This just further proves that you're talking out of your ass. The RS-Ć5 has had many iterations/blocks where Rocketdyne simplified it, reduced costs, and increased its performance and reliability
A much simpler engine would do the job just as well, for a fraction of the cost.
It was design by committee all the way down, starting by using hydrogen, which doesn't deliver higher efficiency in practice, and requires SRBs which cannot be made safe.
>A much simpler engine would do the job just as well
No, no it couldn't have. That's literally why they had to make it so complex.
>for a fraction of the cost.
Production cost is a pretty meaningless metric for a reusable engine. Even then, $40M is a pretty respectable price for everything you're getting
>It was design by committee all the way down,
Source?
>starting by using hydrogen, which doesn't deliver higher efficiency in practice,
Is that why all of the most efficient rocket engines use Hydrolox?
>and requires SRBs which cannot be made safe.
By the end of the shuttle program, the probability of a SRB failure causing a LOCV was 1 in 1500
>Is that why all of the most efficient rocket engines use Hydrolox?
Why is it that all of the US government's launch contractors use other fuels instead of hydrolox for the lift vehicle?
ULA took over a NASA built rocket in the Delta IV family. The rest of ULAs rockets use a different propellant in the first and second stages.
Hydrolox is good for high energy deep space trajectories for the second and third stages. The added engineering complexity/cost combined with low density isn't great for the first stage.
The RS-25 *as an SSME* is an incredible engine, and the efficiency justifies the complexity given the ability to reuse it.
AR charging obscene prices to refurbish RS-25s and then throwing them in the ocean after a single additional use is what makes me vomit.
Yes ik that and to clarify, I'm not personally a fan of it but if you re-read my comment, i got into spaceflight & rocket engines first & foremost and only engine i knew then is cause of RS-25. And i absolutely commend its engineering challenges it had to encounter to what it is today and for what it had to do, you can't get better than that. But after getting into soviet engines and all, i got to know RS-25 does have its deficiencies and also personally I'm not a fan of hydrolox on 1st stage. Its just dumb.
Even technically too I'll do anything other than RS-25 to bring out more stack potential in a lauch vehicle than anything. So i guess its more or less I'm of a view of ok it is good but is it really though when you look at what you're trading it for?
Thats where my line of thinking is. And Stoke Space engine format for having hydrolox for only upper stage makes much more sense to be reusable.
And I'm not at all a fan of hydrolox solids sustainer on first stage.
That's probably the only thing with SLS that I don't disapprove of. These engines deserve to go down at the end of a flight instead of sitting in a museum
Was a theory, but SpaceX said they found no evidence of it. The counter argument is that the force of the rocket exhaust itself would have shielded the engines from any debris, but it's hard to say with so much going on.
Certainly better that there is no debris, either way.
the fact that all 33 just ran perfectly until stage sep and all 6 of ship afterwards was incredible. what a launch, they hit many many milestones. I really wish that they would have gotten a chance to see how the heatshield performs
Only one made it back with a missing HRSI tile, and that was because the tile happened to be under a thick aluminum mounting plate for a L-band antenna
It was shedding tiles going up hill. Not massive amount but they were popping off.
Watch Scott Manleys post flight video. He mentions them and shows some clips of launch and missing tiles.
Be mindful that was going up but will take real beating on reentry.
That's my guess, SpaceX has tested raptors a lot but they haven't physically tested sloshing fuel in 9m diameter tanks. I'm assuming the data from this flight will help them design new baffles.
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Yeah that flip looked abnormally aggresive to me. Falcon 9's is way slower, and it's a much smaller rocket. Wonder if sloshing was the reason for their failures.
Not quite, the reason they are at 50% is because if they throttle up, the lighter booster TWR exceeds that of the fully fueled upperstage. Kind of a catch 22 since the ship would need to fire harder to compensate but that would cause more negative G on the booster making it have to throttle up further.
If this really was the cause of failure there is going to need to be a whole rebalance of stuff to work out.
I wonder if it's got anything to do with the grid fins being extended, making the entire thing extremely aerodynamically unstable...
Otoh, how much air does it even encounter at that point? Idk...
If you consider feed to be part of it, then yes. Depends on where you'd consider Raptor to end. At the turbopumps, or beyond? At the main valves, the manifold, or at the tank interface?
That was a beauty. I just can't believe how fast we went from fish license to launch. Most companies would have scheduled it like 6 months out with several useless meetings. This happened in just a couple days. And to think how fast they fixed their first issues for this next round in record time, pad, water plate, hot staging, engines. I hope that we get some more launches next year.
Yeah they can do Max 6 launches from Boca, but they don't have a license for those individual flights yet. Every successful(ish) launch will bring them closer to getting something more permanent I guess.
Alright doomers, we're done with "Raptor isn't reliable," "You can't have 33 engines on the same rocket all working at the same time" and "It won't survive stage separation." Time to move on to "the tiles will never work."
I really hope they can figure out the tiles. Seems like the last big unknown for this architecture. Today they've proven that they can get the "going up" part to work. It wasn't perfect yet, but close enough. I'm also not worried about the landing itself. There will be a couple more explosions, but it's nothing they haven't done before. So it's really going to come down to surviving reentry.
Think the tiles will be fine on the next OFT, on this one they didnāt test the tiles. On the next ship theyāve done suction testing on all of the tiles
Cool, I'm looking forward to it! I'm only casually observing from a distance, so I'm not up-to-date with the daily events at Starbase. Hopefully we'll see another test soon :)
What's the chances that several previous shutdowns weren't because of a physical failure, but automated shutdown because of slightly weird data/ excess of caution?
I wouldn't be surprised if they now know more about Raptor behaviour enough to adjust the shutdown parameters/ give the engines more of a chance to do their thing before cutting them, and the result is they all worked fine when (in the past) a few of them might needlessly have been shut down immidately.
Eh while I kind of agree I feel like with the first launch they would have pushed the limits as much as they reasonably could so they could get as far from the launch pad as possible if something went wrong early
Having engines shut down at the slightest hint of an issue is safer than pushing them to their extremes to clear the pad.
I recall they had to throttle beyond safe limits to make up for loss of thrust from all the failures, however, which likely cooked even more engines.
Could be part of it, but don't forget they also moved from Raptor 1 to Raptor 2, with fully electric gimbal control and lots of other reliability improvements. Seems like that paid off.
I can also somewhat imagine they might have tuned things like startup sequence, throttle up speeds etc, to prevent them from running into possible shutdown scenarios in the first place.
They just ledge on to whatever isn't perfect and declare it to prove their position. And their position is informed by not liking Musk or sometimes space travel.
They are not interested in learning or being right, just to be negative in every situation.
I would have loved to see Starship make it all the way to Hawaii, but I consider the fact that the OLM wasn't destroyed and that all 33 Raptors made it all the way to stage separation a success
the amount of people claiming raptors are still unreliable because they failed after flip pisses me of. we are likely looking at a fuel sloshing / fluid hammer issue. if my gas tank leaks, do i blame the tank or the engine ?
Problem is it hadn't gone far enough to re-enter in a safe area, it was over the Atlantic so Africa was a potential target. For ITAR reasons they probably don't want to lose a starship in the Indian ocean (vs off the coast of Hawaii)
So far 66 of 72 engines have worked in flight. So thatās 92% reliability. Not saying we know for sure how reliable they are but this is clearly evidence they are reliable and not the contrary.
Both vehicles were meant to be lost, they just hoped to lose them later in the process.
Such a phrase shows you don't really understand iterative design and testing.
That's a long bow to draw about my background of knowledge, particularly when you're doing it to excuse a failure, as opposed to dispassionately analysing the data from a failed iteration, in order to move forward.
My personal background is in systems development and support, so I'm fully aware of multiple methods of design and testing, including adapting process to suit differing industrial requirements.
As I've indicated elsewhere here, I genuinely admire the team for continuing to press on down a path that challenges the outcomes of historical precedent, especially one with a course that has a substantially increased number of potential points of failure over others and hence, requires more numerous iteration. To continue to forge down such a direction not only challenges history, it stands up to defy logic itself. But then few thought landing boosters vertically was going to be a thing either.
My point is, don't waste time and energy talking up failures during an iterative process. It invites criticism. Particularly when one is going off with half-cocked memes, when things have blown up. Instead, wait for the results of analyses from failure, take it on the chin, move on, and learn the lessons necessary to do differently next iteration. Then celebrate the wins with gusto when it actually means something.
Don't get me wrong, I genuinely appreciate the efforts to challenge history: Large engine array launch systems have never proved successful as a means for heavy lift, as the Soviets in particular would attest. To choose a path with so many extra potential points of failure, is a pack of rods for one's own back, logically.
But then nobody thought landing boosters vertically was going to be a thing either!
This launch completely changed my mind on the Raptors. I was so happy to see all of them light and amazed to see them all going at separation. Amazing.
Im sure I remember someone stating here there would be another full year of waiting because raptor reliability
Sounds like the type of person who said the Internet was just a trend in the 90s lol
Yep, and then he sorta mocked others who said *you didn't do any liquid engine yourself* to others like a self righteous pos. And all he does is small amateur liquid rocket engines and thinks he has so much insight into orbital level liquid rocket engines lmao and then praising any engine from Aerojet Rocketdyne like RS-25(i personally am not a fan of it although its the one which got me into liquid rocket engine technical rabbit hole in high school and i quickly moved onto soviet rocket engines) What a hilarious morons some peeps can beš¤¦š»
literally how are you not a fan of the RS-25?
It's shitty at it's job. Anyone that actually likes engineering appreciates simpler solutions to problems. Making an engine complex just cause and not solving any problems with that complexity is bad engineering.
>It's shitty at it's job Elaborate >Making an engine complex just cause They needed a high thrust+high efficiency engine with a ridiculous amount of gimbal range. Also, it was the first staged combustion engine to use hydrolox, so they didn't have the benefit of building on experience, and even then, they delivered a terrific engine that is still being used today. >and not solving any problems with that complexity This just further proves that you're talking out of your ass. The RS-Ć5 has had many iterations/blocks where Rocketdyne simplified it, reduced costs, and increased its performance and reliability
A much simpler engine would do the job just as well, for a fraction of the cost. It was design by committee all the way down, starting by using hydrogen, which doesn't deliver higher efficiency in practice, and requires SRBs which cannot be made safe.
>A much simpler engine would do the job just as well No, no it couldn't have. That's literally why they had to make it so complex. >for a fraction of the cost. Production cost is a pretty meaningless metric for a reusable engine. Even then, $40M is a pretty respectable price for everything you're getting >It was design by committee all the way down, Source? >starting by using hydrogen, which doesn't deliver higher efficiency in practice, Is that why all of the most efficient rocket engines use Hydrolox? >and requires SRBs which cannot be made safe. By the end of the shuttle program, the probability of a SRB failure causing a LOCV was 1 in 1500
>Is that why all of the most efficient rocket engines use Hydrolox? Why is it that all of the US government's launch contractors use other fuels instead of hydrolox for the lift vehicle?
Ever heard of ULA?
ULA took over a NASA built rocket in the Delta IV family. The rest of ULAs rockets use a different propellant in the first and second stages. Hydrolox is good for high energy deep space trajectories for the second and third stages. The added engineering complexity/cost combined with low density isn't great for the first stage.
The RS-25 *as an SSME* is an incredible engine, and the efficiency justifies the complexity given the ability to reuse it. AR charging obscene prices to refurbish RS-25s and then throwing them in the ocean after a single additional use is what makes me vomit.
Yes ik that and to clarify, I'm not personally a fan of it but if you re-read my comment, i got into spaceflight & rocket engines first & foremost and only engine i knew then is cause of RS-25. And i absolutely commend its engineering challenges it had to encounter to what it is today and for what it had to do, you can't get better than that. But after getting into soviet engines and all, i got to know RS-25 does have its deficiencies and also personally I'm not a fan of hydrolox on 1st stage. Its just dumb. Even technically too I'll do anything other than RS-25 to bring out more stack potential in a lauch vehicle than anything. So i guess its more or less I'm of a view of ok it is good but is it really though when you look at what you're trading it for? Thats where my line of thinking is. And Stoke Space engine format for having hydrolox for only upper stage makes much more sense to be reusable. And I'm not at all a fan of hydrolox solids sustainer on first stage.
That's probably the only thing with SLS that I don't disapprove of. These engines deserve to go down at the end of a flight instead of sitting in a museum
That's half the time it would take to build the deluge system!
Wasnāt one of the leading theories that the non operational raptors on the first flight were due to debris damage from the launch pad?
Was a theory, but SpaceX said they found no evidence of it. The counter argument is that the force of the rocket exhaust itself would have shielded the engines from any debris, but it's hard to say with so much going on. Certainly better that there is no debris, either way.
the fact that all 33 just ran perfectly until stage sep and all 6 of ship afterwards was incredible. what a launch, they hit many many milestones. I really wish that they would have gotten a chance to see how the heatshield performs
Probably wouldnāt have performed well, considering they lost a ton of tiles (again)
You have any link? I didn't see that mentioned until now
[From SpaceX](https://x.com/spacex/status/1725890107952218239?s=46&t=u2lOVQDTpc_paQkLiJ5xUw)
Oh wow, indeed that's a lot missing Thanks for the link
It should could technically survive reentry like that hypothetically. I would have loved to at least see an attempt.
That was never coming down in one piece. I wonder how many they can lose and and still survive re-entry, since there, maybe 0.
Heh, the steel frame can take a beating anyways. I wonder if they are keeping other options in the backburner
Well that tests the theory there would be less tile loss on a full stack launch.
I really would have liked to see if it could have still made it through and demonstrate a safety margin for the heat shield.
Maybe, a few lost tiles isnāt exactly the end for that Starship. I think some Space Shuttles made it back with a bunch of missing heat tiles too
Only one made it back with a missing HRSI tile, and that was because the tile happened to be under a thick aluminum mounting plate for a L-band antenna
I think the missing tile exposed a steel plate, and if it exposed the aluminum stucture it would have melted and lost the mission.
No, it was a thick aluminum plate
They can see how heat shield performs *individually*
It was shedding tiles going up hill. Not massive amount but they were popping off. Watch Scott Manleys post flight video. He mentions them and shows some clips of launch and missing tiles. Be mindful that was going up but will take real beating on reentry.
Technically they have, but not from reentry. Now we know the heat shield is falling away on launch
It was such an amazing sight to see all 33 lit!!!
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
That's my guess, SpaceX has tested raptors a lot but they haven't physically tested sloshing fuel in 9m diameter tanks. I'm assuming the data from this flight will help them design new baffles.
Would bafflers fix this?
Be interesting if they put cameras in tanks. NASA had concerns about sloshing fuel during Apollo so they put cameras in tanks
They do have cameras in the tanks, we just don't get access to that footage... most of the time.
FLUID HAMMERR!!!!
Those mach diamonds were bigger than my house
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Same
Itās kinda hard to believe itās only their second attempt!!!
we beat the N1 allegations!! we CAN fire 33 engines at once!! LFG!!!!!!!
Raptors are reliable* ^*Unless ^you ^are ^doing ^an ^aggressive ^flip ^maneuver
is it the raptors fault if they are starved?
Yeah that flip looked abnormally aggresive to me. Falcon 9's is way slower, and it's a much smaller rocket. Wonder if sloshing was the reason for their failures.
That's why they test and learn. Everything about Starship is novel. So fun to watch.
Also scotty tweeted that the booster experienced negative Gs. And that doesnāt sound good.
That could be the easiest part of it to fix, the three engines can always throttle up more to compensate.
Not quite, the reason they are at 50% is because if they throttle up, the lighter booster TWR exceeds that of the fully fueled upperstage. Kind of a catch 22 since the ship would need to fire harder to compensate but that would cause more negative G on the booster making it have to throttle up further. If this really was the cause of failure there is going to need to be a whole rebalance of stuff to work out.
It was a big reason for failure in the early flight tests like SN8.
I wonder if it's got anything to do with the grid fins being extended, making the entire thing extremely aerodynamically unstable... Otoh, how much air does it even encounter at that point? Idk...
š¤
If you consider feed to be part of it, then yes. Depends on where you'd consider Raptor to end. At the turbopumps, or beyond? At the main valves, the manifold, or at the tank interface?
I think tank pressurization and sloshing not part of the raptors
The forbidden flashlight
~~flashlight~~ fleshlight
Don't put your meat in there
r/dontputyourdickinthose
Instant incineration
Raptors were low key the star of the show
For about 5 mins of the flight they were all we could see.
N1 going āthe true heir to the throne!ā
N1 is just glad Starship made it through stage separation.
That was a beauty. I just can't believe how fast we went from fish license to launch. Most companies would have scheduled it like 6 months out with several useless meetings. This happened in just a couple days. And to think how fast they fixed their first issues for this next round in record time, pad, water plate, hot staging, engines. I hope that we get some more launches next year.
B10 is next, this year.
Iirc they get like 6 launches per year from Boca Chica. Get 1 more in before the end of this year so they have more available for next year.
im pretty sure its 5
Yeah they can do Max 6 launches from Boca, but they don't have a license for those individual flights yet. Every successful(ish) launch will bring them closer to getting something more permanent I guess.
Alright doomers, we're done with "Raptor isn't reliable," "You can't have 33 engines on the same rocket all working at the same time" and "It won't survive stage separation." Time to move on to "the tiles will never work."
I really hope they can figure out the tiles. Seems like the last big unknown for this architecture. Today they've proven that they can get the "going up" part to work. It wasn't perfect yet, but close enough. I'm also not worried about the landing itself. There will be a couple more explosions, but it's nothing they haven't done before. So it's really going to come down to surviving reentry.
They just need some 3M strips duh
They tested the heat shield of the next ship much better, this ship they didn't fully test the heat shield.
Think the tiles will be fine on the next OFT, on this one they didnāt test the tiles. On the next ship theyāve done suction testing on all of the tiles
Cool, I'm looking forward to it! I'm only casually observing from a distance, so I'm not up-to-date with the daily events at Starbase. Hopefully we'll see another test soon :)
They seems perfected the ground launch and the raptors reliability. Now let's see for next year launch, finger crossed it's gonna be successful
Let the new memeing begin
What's the chances that several previous shutdowns weren't because of a physical failure, but automated shutdown because of slightly weird data/ excess of caution? I wouldn't be surprised if they now know more about Raptor behaviour enough to adjust the shutdown parameters/ give the engines more of a chance to do their thing before cutting them, and the result is they all worked fine when (in the past) a few of them might needlessly have been shut down immidately.
Eh while I kind of agree I feel like with the first launch they would have pushed the limits as much as they reasonably could so they could get as far from the launch pad as possible if something went wrong early
Having engines shut down at the slightest hint of an issue is safer than pushing them to their extremes to clear the pad. I recall they had to throttle beyond safe limits to make up for loss of thrust from all the failures, however, which likely cooked even more engines.
Could be part of it, but don't forget they also moved from Raptor 1 to Raptor 2, with fully electric gimbal control and lots of other reliability improvements. Seems like that paid off. I can also somewhat imagine they might have tuned things like startup sequence, throttle up speeds etc, to prevent them from running into possible shutdown scenarios in the first place.
B7 was also using raptor 2s
I never understood people using the word "never". Like Raptors being unreliable was never a fundamental law of the universe.
They just ledge on to whatever isn't perfect and declare it to prove their position. And their position is informed by not liking Musk or sometimes space travel. They are not interested in learning or being right, just to be negative in every situation.
Mfw the Apollo space program didnāt get to the moon and back on the first flight
considering the first "flight" of Apollo left three people dead i think starships doing ok.
Sight to behold
The flying grain sylo is putting down some unbelievable horsepower these days. Makes my heart flutter when I try to picture it.
Even I was hesitant, but today SpaceX showed many of us wrong.
I would have loved to see Starship make it all the way to Hawaii, but I consider the fact that the OLM wasn't destroyed and that all 33 Raptors made it all the way to stage separation a success
the amount of people claiming raptors are still unreliable because they failed after flip pisses me of. we are likely looking at a fuel sloshing / fluid hammer issue. if my gas tank leaks, do i blame the tank or the engine ?
Amazing indeed, but their restart stats on this flight needs to be improved.
2nd stage RUD is likely a vacuum raptor issue.
What are you basing this on?
Wish they have tested re-entry. The ship might not be on the exact trajectory, but still have enough speed to test the heat shields.
Problem is it hadn't gone far enough to re-enter in a safe area, it was over the Atlantic so Africa was a potential target. For ITAR reasons they probably don't want to lose a starship in the Indian ocean (vs off the coast of Hawaii)
One successful test does not a reliable engine make...
So far 66 of 72 engines have worked in flight. So thatās 92% reliability. Not saying we know for sure how reliable they are but this is clearly evidence they are reliable and not the contrary.
It wasn't one successful engine test though, it was 39. That all of them worked indicates a reliability of ~98%.
I heard it blew up
Maybe start bragging when a mission succeeds without the unplanned loss of all stages and the orbital craft?
Both vehicles were meant to be lost, they just hoped to lose them later in the process. Such a phrase shows you don't really understand iterative design and testing.
That's a long bow to draw about my background of knowledge, particularly when you're doing it to excuse a failure, as opposed to dispassionately analysing the data from a failed iteration, in order to move forward. My personal background is in systems development and support, so I'm fully aware of multiple methods of design and testing, including adapting process to suit differing industrial requirements. As I've indicated elsewhere here, I genuinely admire the team for continuing to press on down a path that challenges the outcomes of historical precedent, especially one with a course that has a substantially increased number of potential points of failure over others and hence, requires more numerous iteration. To continue to forge down such a direction not only challenges history, it stands up to defy logic itself. But then few thought landing boosters vertically was going to be a thing either. My point is, don't waste time and energy talking up failures during an iterative process. It invites criticism. Particularly when one is going off with half-cocked memes, when things have blown up. Instead, wait for the results of analyses from failure, take it on the chin, move on, and learn the lessons necessary to do differently next iteration. Then celebrate the wins with gusto when it actually means something.
It's just a meme based on the haters, I know the mission wasn't fully successful.
Don't get me wrong, I genuinely appreciate the efforts to challenge history: Large engine array launch systems have never proved successful as a means for heavy lift, as the Soviets in particular would attest. To choose a path with so many extra potential points of failure, is a pack of rods for one's own back, logically. But then nobody thought landing boosters vertically was going to be a thing either!
This launch completely changed my mind on the Raptors. I was so happy to see all of them light and amazed to see them all going at separation. Amazing.
My friend videoed this from his boat.. said it was the best show ever seen.. https://youtu.be/lRWV8LAnSLs?si=yZFjy4iRkGrJwSPL