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SpaceX Has Finally Figured Out Why Starship Exploded, And The Reason Is Utterly Embarrassing
(www.planetearthandbeyond.co)
this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2025
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Yeah, that’s not very typical. I’d like to make that point.
You mean, for the shaking to cause an explosion? #tffo
Well there are a lot of these Starships exploding all the time, and very seldom does anything like this happen. I just don’t want people thinking that Elon has enough humility to feel embarrassed.
I was hoping the answer was "because musk wasn't inside" and the next one he needed to be in, but sure, it's built like a cyber truck is pretty embarrassing also
Oh wow, absolutely embarrassing! Even a 5 year old would know to check for vibrations in the fuel lines 🤦
It's not rocket scie- oh, nvm
But also, fuel leaks are really common with rockets, and we know how to prevent them from happening. The fuels rockets use can escape through the tiniest of faults, and the complex fuel systems they use have numerous potential points of failure. As such, it is standard practice to find these potential leaks with intensive pre-flight checks to identify and solve these issues before they escalate into a catastrophe.
It's pretty standard practice apparently, it IS embarrassing.
standard practice to find these potential leaks with intensive pre-flight checks to identify and solve these issues before they escalate into a catastrophe.
Except these particular leaks are due to vibration modes (on the newly designed vacuum jacketed fuel lines) that seem to be only present at high g's towards the end of the burn.
After the first ship to use these new lines blew up, SpaceX made some changes and conducted a minute-long test firing on the ground of the second ship. A minute of the rocket going through various thrust levels on the ground is plenty of time to pick up issues if it was going to be visible on the ground.
Presumably it looked ok, so they launched it, and the second one blew up. They probably added more sensors on those lines, because they seem to be pretty sure that vibration modes are the issue on those lines now.
Yes, you could model this, and no doubt they did to some extent, but nothing beats testing in real life unfortunately.
A minute long test sounds awfully short for something that will cost millions if it fails.
Testing in real life when failure is so expensive is less than ideal, any controlled closed environment is better if it means you avoid failure. The very next paragraph from the one I quoted mentions how another rocket spent weeks in testing this specific matter and was delayed because they found the issue.
I'm paraphrasing what i read some NASA dude said about spaceX, but basically, if they failed as much as spaceX did they would be out of their jobs yesterday. Also, you know who takes the cost of these failures right? It's the US government through all the expensive spaceX contracts and tax breaks they sign. Each blown rocket makes the contract renewal more expensive.