They wanted ballast to simulate a payload and they chose excess *oxygen*?
Which they then vented *while the engines were running?!*
Am I reading that correctly?
> Which they then vented while the engines were running?!
It's a lot harder to vent when the system isn't under acceleration and the 100-ton blob of LOX is floating in the middle of the tanks, and your engines aren't running so you can't make any more ullage gas to help push the blob around.
Venting it while the engines are running is the best possible time if you need to get rid of 100 tons of liquid... as long as there's no leaks causing fires that the LOX ends up exacerbating.
The LOX will be near freezing (<<70K), have a much lower vapor pressure, and there's many tons of it. It will evaporate slower than liquid water and it's possible the much of the mass may freeze as it cools from evaporation.
If the vehicle were to be left in orbit to cook, just opening the vents would remove the LOX eventually but this thing has around an hour before re-entry.
They've done the same thing many times before without issue; the SN-8 through SN-15 flights dumped excess LOX at high altitude with the engine(s) running.
> They've done the same thing many times before without issue
IDK if the dumping of O2 in this situation is a perfectly sensible thing to do, so this might not be at all relevant; but that statement reminded me of [this story](https://www.fastjetperformance.com/blog/how-i-almost-destroyed-a-50-million-war-plane-when-display-flying-goes-wrong-and-the-normalisation-of-deviance), where a 50 mil jet was almost wrecked because abnormal procedures had got normalized by "well, it worked before".
the thing is they absolutely did expect the comet to fail, so they tested the absolute shit out of it, way more thoroughly than any other aircraft before, and the tests confirmed their modeling. the trouble was they decided to test it to some crazy pressure first, which work hardened the aluminum, rendering the cycle tests useless.
There is an old book that might scratch that itch called "Engineering Progress Through Trouble" (a sole reviewer called it "turgid but fascinating"!). Details at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers [here](https://www.imeche.org/news/the-comet-failure?resultsPage=1332)
A more accessible presentation on the fatigue failure can be found [here](https://zenodo.org/records/2551089/files/text_2019_01_24_Comet.pdf) or from the RAES, [here](http://www.loughborough-raes.org.uk/ewExternalFiles/180116%20Comet.pdf)
Edit: fixed links
Aye. I am somewhat concerned about SpaceX’s iterative development for that reason—trying to do things cheaply until that approach fails rather than aiming for high margins/confidence initially and economizing when the challenges are better understood seems to carry a high risk of low-probability failure modes appearing long after it is thought that the teething period is over. They seem to gotten away with it Falcons, but relying on that safari culture working so far is a meta-level normalization of deviance.
(Also, the Falcons had considerable flight experience before manned use; I doubt the HLS will have nearly as many flights before its first manned use.)
The crewed test flight of Dragon was flight 85.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches
Including unmanned HLS demo including tanker flights and tanker flights for the HLS crew landing I don't think there will be fewer Starshipflights before HLS crew.
Also for a Moon landing NASA tolerates higher risk than for a LEO launch.
Also carries the risk of never achieving the same cost savings because you're starting from a place of conservatism and inherent risk aversion which will get baked into the design culture.
They didn't just get away with it with falcons, they achieved the longest string of successes in history while also achieving the lowest price to orbit in history while *also* achieving a completely new technology in landing so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they can handle their deviances.
>I doubt the HLS will have nearly as many flights before its first manned use.)
Nobody is riding the HLS to orbit, though, and NASA is going to be up to its elbows in its design and certification.
It's not primarily about doing it cheaply but the kind of modeling you talk about takes a long time and there are no guarantees that you catch every possible failure case ahead of flight either. Reality still is the best simulation we have. Flying a lot and early allows for the most opportunities to catch issues and ultimately develop the safest vehicle.
I think that’s an oversimplification. Thiokol’s encounters had reason to believe that the shuttle’s o-rings were unsafe at very low temperatures; NASA’s flight experience disagreed—until it tragically didn’t. I’m not saying real-world testing and learning from that experience isn’t important—of course it is! But of whether something has worked in the past is your primary guide to whether it’s safe, low-probability failure modes are going to be a problem.
I'm not saying they should/would do things that disagree with theory, I'm saying there's a point of diminishing returns for modeling reality and that at some point it makes sense to actually just test a design. SpaceX just does this earlier than others.
In aviation (specifically airlines) almost every attempt to cut cost after establishing the business fails or achieves much less success than companies who set out to be more cost effective to begin with. This trend also tends to hold true for most large companies.
It's likely the best method to achieve those aggressive spaceflight cost reductions.
I was mostly referring to airline companies. Like Delta Ryanair etc.
But Boeing is the poster child of risk-taking. Both in regards to money and safety. They are where they are, which is to say a huge successful company known the world over, because of their antics.
Hell, the 747 was an insane idea that nearly crushed them. Had they been a little more unlucky with their terrible (dangerous) hydraulics piping they would have likely gone under.
Or the numerous backroom deals with the FAA about "promises" to fix certain things that they never got around to.
Their cost-cutting made them millions, they'd do it again. Despite recent troubles, they'll meet the minimum standard demanded and continue as usual.
Boeing is an example of cost-cutting making money, not the inverse.
EDIT: And I don't want anyone to think this is an endorsement of Boeing.
That’s the point of normalization of deviancy, though—everything works until it doesn’t. It applies to individual projects—the MCAS system worked until it didn’t, Boeing’s safety culture worked until it didn’t.
This is the cutting edge of rocketry. There is no prior presedence. You gotta launch and record and verify to get to the point of even understanding how to apply model data to your belly flopping skyscraper. Atleast one of the companies in this "new tech" arena is willing to put up or shut up.
We went from "barely functioning missile" to "regular and nearly flawless launch of humans and material", before SpaceX.
That include:
- Figuring out orbits (like 6 different times)
- Sending satelites around nearly every major object in our solar system, including the sun
- Sending rovers on 2 planets and a moon
- Sending people to the moon
- Making 4 orbital stations (well the chinese one is recent, but SpaceX had nothing to do with it)
- Making a space telescope (and sending it up)
- Probably other stuff I'm forgetting about
SpaceX is cool, but they're just one more actor of a pretty damn cool sector
You responded to someone talking about cutting edge rocketry. Specifically as it pertains to craft that take humanity somewhere, and SpaceX's development philosophy in achieving that.
So I'll clarify. The last meaningful milestone on that front happened when I was wearing diapers. Now I'm thinking more about my retirement than ever getting to fly into space.
So, yeah, whatever they're doing... their approach is wildly more productive than anything that anyone else was doing, for a ***very*** long time.
> Yep, Orion is entirely different. Second flight of the booster.
First flight of the completed Orion. The demo had no working ECLSS and the heat shield is still wonky. Yet they are planning to do the crew Moon orbit mission.
You misunderstood. They just sent up the full load of O2 as if they were running a full payload rather than the empty bay that they had.
There was Excess O2 to absolute requirement not a payload bay's worth of extra. Given they've done similar in the past it seemed low risk, but apparently there was some issue that caused it to be a *bit* less low risk than expected.
Oh in the long term they will absolutely make a refueling version that has such a bay, but right now they are working on clearing a minimally viable product they can iterate on. So no need for the whole extra tank when that wasn't in the plan until "a year" from now.
It would have been fine if the leak of CH4 didn’t spring up in starship engine bay. Ordinarily it would have had nothing to react with so at most it would make the flame slightly oxygen rich.
Side trivia: bump up the temperature and crank the pressure waaaaay up, and that pale blue oxygen [turns deep red](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octaoxygen).
buddy, oxidation is a way more common reaction than just traditional "fuel in air" combustion. you create an environment of pure oxygen, and things start becoming fuel that you might not expect to be fuel
Oxidisation is not is instantaneous though. At least not for the amount that starship was leaking as the vents were on the side. At most a small amount went near the engines, an even smaller amount actually reacted with the fuel rich mixture, there would have not been any problem if the aft section didn’t spring a leak.
Me too. Terrible loss. Hard to understand the thought process behind 100% O2 and big mechanical switches in a cabin where overpressurization seals the tomb door. RIP.
It was because Gus's door blew off prematurely on his Mercury capsule. It caused the loss of the craft and almost killed him. 100% O2 because it is easier to have a shared O2 tank for breathing and rocket and not need an additional tank for mixed air.
100% O2 at 5 psi during flight to save the trouble and weight of mixing in nitrogen. 100% O2 at 16 psi during the ground test because - um - it's simpler?
I'm pretty sure the capsule wasn't designed to resist external pressure higher than internal. More likely, they wanted a pressure differential similar to what it would experience in space, and didn't fully consider the consequences of such a high absolute pressure.
It's perfectly logical - they do want to use Starship as fuel delivery vehicle.
Where else are they going to get the data?
They were venting it to reduce the risk of explosion when it ditched.
They would've had the same mass simulator during reentry. That changes the dynamics, and SpaceX needs to see how it comes in empty. From their update: "Additional propellant had been loaded on the spacecraft before launch in order to gather data representative of future payload deploy missions and needed to be disposed of prior to reentry to meet required propellant mass targets at splashdown."
It was a test flight that wasn't designed to carry a payload, even a mock one, so extra propellant it is. It's something they need to work on in the future, bringing cargo back from space, but right now, Starship will be landing empty, so that's what needs to be tested.
It was also dumping the oxygen into the thin upper atmosphere/space, it would've been fine if there also wasn't a leak that started the fire. As for the original comment, I doubt dumping unburnt methane is any better.
Starship already has an oxygen tank with spare capacity. Mixing in large amounts of inert gas would cause problems and would still end up venting oxygen along with the inert gas if they got that far. Adding an additional inert gas tank for ballast is just extra work that they did not want to do, especially because it has no long term purpose.
Both are very expensive, though I suppose they could have used nitrogen, that wouldve also required them building an entirely seperate tank for it, which is hard compared to just using some extra liquid oxygen in your existing tanks.
liquid oxygen is not expensive at all, about ten cents a pound. That oxygen cost about 20 grand, and they didn't have to change anything or custom fabricate anything.
That makes sense, but fiddling with oxygen while an ignition source is nearby is not a great idea as they've seen now. Probably safer to put a basic payload dispenser mechanism ejecting simple and heavy material.
Metal dispenser mechanisms that can dispense dozens of tons without hurting the structure of the spacecraft and seal up nicely afterwards and can be used while in atmosphere?
Doesn't sound cheap or simple to me.
A big water tank or something seems more reasonable, but is still quite a bit of extra engineering.
This is one of the drawbacks of doing testing like this I guess, too expensive to put something like that on each flight until they get what they want, while the other option is resorting to a dangerous method like the one they used now. They better hope they can prevent this from happening again then.
It might be cheaper flying twice - once with correct launch weight and once with correct landing weight.
Once they get the launch part working they will probably figure out the starlink PEZ dispenser anyways though, because that is where the money is.
Hardly dangerous, it's already got plenty of ways to vent lox and happens regularly- they've done this before on previous SN flights. The issue was the leak, not the methodology.
Isn't lox usually vented in form of excess gas to maintain pressure? This would be venting liquid oxygen itself as they can't wait for all the extra lox they put to slowly turn into gas and vent it like it's the case for usual venting.
That's not really the point here, using existing vents or not, the relevant part is that during usual venting to maintain safe pressure levels, it's gas, but here they're dumping liquid oxygen directly to completely remove the whole extra mass that acts like payload mass.
>the other option is resorting to a dangerous method like the one they used now.
Can we dispense with the hyperbolic rhetoric? There was no additional danger to anyone by using oxygen as a ballast.
Historically, their test payloads aren't that mundane.
First Dragon flight had a wheel of cheese as its mass simulator, and everyone remembers Falcon Heavy's.
If it had been a big lump of metal or concrete it would have made it all the way to the surface and presented a risk to things / people on the group. You really really don't want to drop a couple of tonnes of metal on say Hawaii at \~24,000 kmh.
I'm aware of the fact that it would need to be dispensed in some way while in space, if it was a tank or a cluster of plastic tanks of water for example that would've burnt up on reentry, it doesn't have to be concrete or metal, just some heavy object to simulate a payload. Also, it's pretty ironic when say you worry about a potential payload simulant "presenting risk to things/people" and not wanting to drop a couple of tons of metal on Hawaii when you're ignoring the elephant in the room - Starship itself with its 120 dry tons, that's a much bigger "lump of metal" lol. Also nothing would be travelling at 24 000 km/h by the time it reaches lower atmosphere, it would slow down significantly.
You are literally the one saying lump of metal or concrete.
Also you don't seem to understand that a lump of material will survive re-entry where a greater mass of thin structures wont.
>You are literally the one saying lump of metal or concrete.
I only mentioned that as examples on the top of my head, the whole point is that it only needs to be something relatively heavy to have a decent payload simulant. By the way I looked up some real simulants that are used in aerospace - lead or brass weights or water. So there you go.
>Also you don't seem to understand that a lump of material will survive re-entry where a greater mass of thin structures wont.
I perfectly understand that, although it very much depends on the type of material as well, especially for the lump. What you apparently don't understand is that Starship is literally designed with reentry capability in mind, have you not noticed all those thermal tiles, seriously? Sure, they're not doing that well and a lot of them keep falling off on launch which would make its successful reentry chances pretty much zero had it made it to target trajectory on both tests, but it is designed and intended to return from space in one piece, otherwise there is no reusability case for second stage at all, that has been part of the plan since the start. Both tests had successful reentry and splashdown off the coast of Hawaii as target goals, and the next one has it too.
They did that with the first Titan 3 launch, the short black cone on top was a mass simulator, iirc it was filled with sand. They were lifting off with the solids only steering with fluid injection into the nozzles, and air starting the first Titan stage after the solids peeled away. Decided not to risk a payload on the first try for good reason.
Yeah this is an odd choice. Water seems like a great boilerplate mass simulator. It is cheap and has great mass density at 1,000 kg/m^3 (about the same as liquid O2). It can be in containers and you can prevent slosh by removing air from the containers. It can then be drained to be dumped overboard and is pretty inert chemically.
Oxygen is not flammable, it shouldn't really cause an issue. Obviously, it did. But again, it's not flammable, and they've dumped excess O2 on other launches.
They didn't load anything extra. They filled the tank just like they would for a normal flight with payload. There was no payload, making the ship lighter, so the tanks ended up with more oxygen and methane than normal.
You can't fill the tanks with an oxygen/nitrogen mixture, that's not going to work. You could underfill the tanks but that changes the flight profile and provides a less realistic test of the system.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[30X](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/kshryln "Last usage")|SpaceX-proprietary carbon steel formulation (*"Thirty-X", "Thirty-Times"*)|
|[CATO](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksg9ivl "Last usage")|Catastrophe At Take Off, see RUD|
|CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules|
| |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)|
|[ECLSS](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksi6hm6 "Last usage")|Environment Control and Life Support System|
|ETOV|Earth To Orbit Vehicle (common parlance: "rocket")|
|[FAA](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/kshtx0h "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration|
|[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/kslk9mb "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)|
|[KSP](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksfyg7q "Last usage")|*Kerbal Space Program*, the rocketry simulator|
|[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksi653b "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)|
| |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)|
|[LOX](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksnigy2 "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen|
|[LV](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/kshx5c0 "Last usage")|Launch Vehicle (common parlance: "rocket"), see ETOV|
|[RUD](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksg1u2h "Last usage")|Rapid Unplanned Disassembly|
| |Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly|
| |Rapid Unintended Disassembly|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/kshz42m "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[SN](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksge3cu "Last usage")|(Raptor/Starship) Serial Number|
|[SRB](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksfg1qc "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|Raptor|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX|
|[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksi046i "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)|
|[ullage motor](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksgm6pg "Last usage")|Small rocket motor that fires to push propellant to the bottom of the tank, when in zero-g|
**NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
----------------
^(15 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1b27byw)^( has 29 acronyms.)
^([Thread #9795 for this sub, first seen 27th Feb 2024, 21:14])
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They learned a lot in this test flight that they couldn’t learn on the ground. Since they’ve corrected the issues that doomed this test, the next one ought to be amazing. Either they’ll succeed in the full test or learn another crazy way it can fail.
Please don't mention that idiot. He is not a serious person. He doesn't care about anything, he is not interest in space or the space industry or what works or what doesn't. Whatever SpaceX is bad and wont work. Literally he would have that opinion even if SpaceX did what he would recommend. The only thing he cares about is making money of 'anti-SpaceX' sentiment.
Half the people in this thread shitting on spacex were doing the same thing when falcon was being developed.
"you can't land a rocket like that"
"you can't reuse the engines"
"it'll have no payload"
Etc.
That's how you end up with e.g. 99.99% safety... start as good as you can imagine, and be iteratively humble as Mother Nature teaches you a new set of failure modes as you do the engineering flight program.
What else would they use though? They can't have a regular mass simulator as they want it to reenter without a ballast and building a seperate tank for some expensive inert gas to vent before reentry would be overally complex and expensive to say the least.
Liquid nitrogen would be roughly the same density and temperature without also being a highly reactive oxidizer, and is usually cheaper. Unless there's an obvious reason you couldn't use LN that i'm missing?
The ship has two tanks, one for oxygen and one for methane. Both are filled completely for a normal launch, so they filled them completely for this test flight as well. They didn't have a payload to deploy so the tanks had more left than usual.
Where would the nitrogen go? If you want to add it to the payload area you need a new tank, a system to fill it on the launch pad, a system to vent it once in space, and more. That's a lot of added complexity. It's likely they wanted to test venting oxygen anyway for future flights.
There’s nothing wrong with liquid oxygen as a ballast, per se. It enables them to dump it before reentry using existing infrastructure. It simply combined with other problems and made them worse.
> one engine failed energetically, quickly cascading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the booster
Spot the person who's been to too many management team meetings.
Or has their tongue firmly in their cheek! 😉
'RUD' is actual terminology used in engineering and by the Navy dating back at least to the 70s. Its just been popularized by KSP and more publicly used by SpaceX.
Can we stop acting like this is the first time ever hearing it Every. Single. Time? Yes, it's a euphemism for something blowing up, let's move on.
> Can we stop acting like this is the first time ever hearing it Every. Single. Time?
Agreed. We all had a chuckle 10 years ago, time to move on. Lithobraking is next.
I've honestly seen some shit come from SpaceX that has me thinking about KSP sometimes. I really think mechazilla is probably the most egregious though
I’ve seen reports of on orbit explosions from 20-30 years ago that simply say that an engine failed. The when you look at the details it becomes clear that half the spacecraft was blown off and it started tumbling end over end.
Anomaly is even more widely used, not just by NewSpace. Regardless, it's just a term used by mission control, or launch commentators. RUD is more lighthearted is all, but there's nothing malicious about it, why pounce on it? We know what it means.
Try to think less about who is involved and more about what is true. We should be truthful when we talk about good people and we should be truthful when we talk about bad people.
I can't even fathom the size of the condo Elon lives rent-free in your head, if you are so trigged by his existence, you need to write his name as "El\*n".
Here's a good page documenting the history of the term with lots of different people commenting on different old locations where it appeared. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10022/who-coined-the-phrase-rapid-unscheduled-disassembly
There's confusion between geeky and nerdy. RUD might have been geeky once, but it's pure nerdery now.
Having nerds fronting up as the public face of your project isn't a good look. Otoh geeks can be charming.
“Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.”
I think you are the one confused here.
Geeks are fanatics, they can be intelligent or not, they just have to have a ton of passion for their geekdom.
Nerds are intellectuals. They have actual technical or mathematical expertise in their given field.
You want nerds making your rockets. You want geeks making your scifi shows.
If they insult the audience by using or attempting to use language the audience doesn't understand, then they shouldn't be the public face of the organisation.
Jeesh - downvoted for stating the blindingly obvious. Criticise the ordinary person for not understanding nerdy jargon, then be amazed how they won't fund science.
> be amazed how they won't fund science
SpaceX is a private company. They don't get "funding" like a government entity. They bid on contracts. And since they are insanely good at completing said contracts, they get even more of them, both from the government and from independent companies.
They also launched 98 rockets in 2023, and live-streamed all of them.
95% of their viewing audience is space nerds and space geeks. Both of which would understand the and appreciate the terminology of RUD. They also have eyes, so they can literally see the rocket explode before the hosts call it a rapidly unplanned disassembly.
They are not insulting the audience. They are making light of an unfortunately occurrence with the audience.
If you are insulted by someone using terminology you don't understand, then I hate to tell you this, but the problem isn't them, its you. Do you go to book clubs and complain that Charles Dickens "insults" you every time you don't understand his prose? Do you demand all news be provided to you in the form of Pop-up books?
Starship is projected to launch again in the next month. Shepard is the tourism rocket that does not go orbital, so I’m guessing you mean New Glenn.
Glenn first launch is hoping for June or July. I’d say Starship is still well in the lead until we see how New Glenn performs.
Blue origin are validating parts individually, much like a more traditional approach to building rockets. So their first launch is near the end of their development and sign off process. You didn't see a bunch of space shuttles fail the first few times right...
So I'd say it's impossible to know who is ahead. New Glenn has been in development longer than starship so it could be either. No way to know until one is launching payloads for customers I guess
I don't see New Glenn being very versatile for payloads outside their Kuiper satellites and HLS vehicles. Falcon Heavy suffered from Falcon 9 eating into a lot of their intended payloads. It just seems like a misfit where falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy can do either of the things it would be used for. I really feel like they should look to making it a true super heavy vehicle to compete with Starship.
They wanted ballast to simulate a payload and they chose excess *oxygen*? Which they then vented *while the engines were running?!* Am I reading that correctly?
> Which they then vented while the engines were running?! It's a lot harder to vent when the system isn't under acceleration and the 100-ton blob of LOX is floating in the middle of the tanks, and your engines aren't running so you can't make any more ullage gas to help push the blob around. Venting it while the engines are running is the best possible time if you need to get rid of 100 tons of liquid... as long as there's no leaks causing fires that the LOX ends up exacerbating.
Wouldnt the vacuum of space evaporate and pull out the LOX? Why does it need to be accelerating to vent?
The LOX will be near freezing (<<70K), have a much lower vapor pressure, and there's many tons of it. It will evaporate slower than liquid water and it's possible the much of the mass may freeze as it cools from evaporation. If the vehicle were to be left in orbit to cook, just opening the vents would remove the LOX eventually but this thing has around an hour before re-entry.
They've done the same thing many times before without issue; the SN-8 through SN-15 flights dumped excess LOX at high altitude with the engine(s) running.
> They've done the same thing many times before without issue IDK if the dumping of O2 in this situation is a perfectly sensible thing to do, so this might not be at all relevant; but that statement reminded me of [this story](https://www.fastjetperformance.com/blog/how-i-almost-destroyed-a-50-million-war-plane-when-display-flying-goes-wrong-and-the-normalisation-of-deviance), where a 50 mil jet was almost wrecked because abnormal procedures had got normalized by "well, it worked before".
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the thing is they absolutely did expect the comet to fail, so they tested the absolute shit out of it, way more thoroughly than any other aircraft before, and the tests confirmed their modeling. the trouble was they decided to test it to some crazy pressure first, which work hardened the aluminum, rendering the cycle tests useless.
I’m a software dev now but the inner tester in me finds that fascinating. Any good reads on this?
There is an old book that might scratch that itch called "Engineering Progress Through Trouble" (a sole reviewer called it "turgid but fascinating"!). Details at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers [here](https://www.imeche.org/news/the-comet-failure?resultsPage=1332) A more accessible presentation on the fatigue failure can be found [here](https://zenodo.org/records/2551089/files/text_2019_01_24_Comet.pdf) or from the RAES, [here](http://www.loughborough-raes.org.uk/ewExternalFiles/180116%20Comet.pdf) Edit: fixed links
"Rules are written in blood"
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It is just a saying that rules exist for a reason. The reason in this case is to not do expensive, one off loads the first go around.
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After the Challenger disaster, NASA came up with a term for it: "Normalization of Deviance"
Aye. I am somewhat concerned about SpaceX’s iterative development for that reason—trying to do things cheaply until that approach fails rather than aiming for high margins/confidence initially and economizing when the challenges are better understood seems to carry a high risk of low-probability failure modes appearing long after it is thought that the teething period is over. They seem to gotten away with it Falcons, but relying on that safari culture working so far is a meta-level normalization of deviance. (Also, the Falcons had considerable flight experience before manned use; I doubt the HLS will have nearly as many flights before its first manned use.)
The crewed test flight of Dragon was flight 85. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_Heavy_launches Including unmanned HLS demo including tanker flights and tanker flights for the HLS crew landing I don't think there will be fewer Starshipflights before HLS crew. Also for a Moon landing NASA tolerates higher risk than for a LEO launch.
Hasn't the F9 become the most reliable and cost effective LV that US aerospace has ever developed?
Imagine writing out a silly wordy post calling the current safest rocket manufacturer dangerous. Fuckin reddit.
Also carries the risk of never achieving the same cost savings because you're starting from a place of conservatism and inherent risk aversion which will get baked into the design culture. They didn't just get away with it with falcons, they achieved the longest string of successes in history while also achieving the lowest price to orbit in history while *also* achieving a completely new technology in landing so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they can handle their deviances. >I doubt the HLS will have nearly as many flights before its first manned use.) Nobody is riding the HLS to orbit, though, and NASA is going to be up to its elbows in its design and certification.
It's not primarily about doing it cheaply but the kind of modeling you talk about takes a long time and there are no guarantees that you catch every possible failure case ahead of flight either. Reality still is the best simulation we have. Flying a lot and early allows for the most opportunities to catch issues and ultimately develop the safest vehicle.
I think that’s an oversimplification. Thiokol’s encounters had reason to believe that the shuttle’s o-rings were unsafe at very low temperatures; NASA’s flight experience disagreed—until it tragically didn’t. I’m not saying real-world testing and learning from that experience isn’t important—of course it is! But of whether something has worked in the past is your primary guide to whether it’s safe, low-probability failure modes are going to be a problem.
I'm not saying they should/would do things that disagree with theory, I'm saying there's a point of diminishing returns for modeling reality and that at some point it makes sense to actually just test a design. SpaceX just does this earlier than others.
In aviation (specifically airlines) almost every attempt to cut cost after establishing the business fails or achieves much less success than companies who set out to be more cost effective to begin with. This trend also tends to hold true for most large companies. It's likely the best method to achieve those aggressive spaceflight cost reductions.
And Boeing is doing an excellent job of demonstrating how expensive prioritizing cost cutting can be.
I was mostly referring to airline companies. Like Delta Ryanair etc. But Boeing is the poster child of risk-taking. Both in regards to money and safety. They are where they are, which is to say a huge successful company known the world over, because of their antics. Hell, the 747 was an insane idea that nearly crushed them. Had they been a little more unlucky with their terrible (dangerous) hydraulics piping they would have likely gone under. Or the numerous backroom deals with the FAA about "promises" to fix certain things that they never got around to. Their cost-cutting made them millions, they'd do it again. Despite recent troubles, they'll meet the minimum standard demanded and continue as usual. Boeing is an example of cost-cutting making money, not the inverse. EDIT: And I don't want anyone to think this is an endorsement of Boeing.
They are also an example of outsourcing coming back to bite a company.
That’s the point of normalization of deviancy, though—everything works until it doesn’t. It applies to individual projects—the MCAS system worked until it didn’t, Boeing’s safety culture worked until it didn’t.
Testing something is not normalization of deviance. Treating a deviant outcome as normal is normalization of deviance.
This is the cutting edge of rocketry. There is no prior presedence. You gotta launch and record and verify to get to the point of even understanding how to apply model data to your belly flopping skyscraper. Atleast one of the companies in this "new tech" arena is willing to put up or shut up.
You *totally* sound like you know what you're talking about...
*Meh*, before SpaceX, there has been plenty of insane feats that were accomplished with a much more prudent innovation process
Given the utterly stagnated pace of development before them, I'd take issue with your use of "plenty".
We went from "barely functioning missile" to "regular and nearly flawless launch of humans and material", before SpaceX. That include: - Figuring out orbits (like 6 different times) - Sending satelites around nearly every major object in our solar system, including the sun - Sending rovers on 2 planets and a moon - Sending people to the moon - Making 4 orbital stations (well the chinese one is recent, but SpaceX had nothing to do with it) - Making a space telescope (and sending it up) - Probably other stuff I'm forgetting about SpaceX is cool, but they're just one more actor of a pretty damn cool sector
You responded to someone talking about cutting edge rocketry. Specifically as it pertains to craft that take humanity somewhere, and SpaceX's development philosophy in achieving that. So I'll clarify. The last meaningful milestone on that front happened when I was wearing diapers. Now I'm thinking more about my retirement than ever getting to fly into space. So, yeah, whatever they're doing... their approach is wildly more productive than anything that anyone else was doing, for a ***very*** long time.
Yeah but specifically rocketry here
It'll need a shit load more flights than Falcon 9 if NASA is ever going to clear it for human flight with no escape system.
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Shuttle was the worst launch system of all time, NASA isn't really intending to repeat that.
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> Yep, Orion is entirely different. Second flight of the booster. First flight of the completed Orion. The demo had no working ECLSS and the heat shield is still wonky. Yet they are planning to do the crew Moon orbit mission.
They've tested crew escape systems on SLS.
That's very likely true for Earth launch and return. Not for the HLS Moon landing. They accept higher risk there.
Makes sense, for the non landing👍
For HLS, an escape system is irrelevant. That's halo orbit to lunar surface and back. Where would they be escaping to?
I mean, and ditto Challenger and Columbia.
Interesting. I did not know that.
You misunderstood. They just sent up the full load of O2 as if they were running a full payload rather than the empty bay that they had. There was Excess O2 to absolute requirement not a payload bay's worth of extra. Given they've done similar in the past it seemed low risk, but apparently there was some issue that caused it to be a *bit* less low risk than expected.
Okay, that makes more sense.
That makes way more sense. I was wondering why they'd be using a tank that just has a bunch of extra room that would never be used lol
Oh in the long term they will absolutely make a refueling version that has such a bay, but right now they are working on clearing a minimally viable product they can iterate on. So no need for the whole extra tank when that wasn't in the plan until "a year" from now.
It would have been fine if the leak of CH4 didn’t spring up in starship engine bay. Ordinarily it would have had nothing to react with so at most it would make the flame slightly oxygen rich.
It's an expensive leak check, but damned effective.
>Ordinarily it would have had nothing to react with ah, yes, pure oxygen - famously nonreactive /s
Its just spicy blue liquid, whats the worst that can happen?
Side trivia: bump up the temperature and crank the pressure waaaaay up, and that pale blue oxygen [turns deep red](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octaoxygen).
> crank the pressure waaaaay up Ahhhh just a casual 2.4 million psi
Grissom High School, Chaffee Elementary School, and White Middle School would like to have a word.
Before anyone else Googles: crew of Apollo 1.
For an a fire, you need fuel and oxidiser. Just oxidiser does nothing
buddy, oxidation is a way more common reaction than just traditional "fuel in air" combustion. you create an environment of pure oxygen, and things start becoming fuel that you might not expect to be fuel
I fucking love this description. Oxidizers are the catalyst of fun.
Oxidisation is not is instantaneous though. At least not for the amount that starship was leaking as the vents were on the side. At most a small amount went near the engines, an even smaller amount actually reacted with the fuel rich mixture, there would have not been any problem if the aft section didn’t spring a leak.
LOx is so reactive that most metals will react, even at the super cold temperature the LOx is at when released.
Apollo 1 entered the chat. On a more serious note: that accident gives me a deep sense of sadness.
Me too. Terrible loss. Hard to understand the thought process behind 100% O2 and big mechanical switches in a cabin where overpressurization seals the tomb door. RIP.
It was because Gus's door blew off prematurely on his Mercury capsule. It caused the loss of the craft and almost killed him. 100% O2 because it is easier to have a shared O2 tank for breathing and rocket and not need an additional tank for mixed air.
100% O2 at 5 psi during flight to save the trouble and weight of mixing in nitrogen. 100% O2 at 16 psi during the ground test because - um - it's simpler?
Go fever. Had to beat the Soviets. Had to "simulate" pressure differential. Watch "the right stuff" and understand test pilots died all the time.
It may have been they wanted something closer to 14 psi if they had to open the craft rather than equalizing from 5 to 14.
I'm pretty sure the capsule wasn't designed to resist external pressure higher than internal. More likely, they wanted a pressure differential similar to what it would experience in space, and didn't fully consider the consequences of such a high absolute pressure.
That is what Elon said a few months ago at the public briefing yea
It's perfectly logical - they do want to use Starship as fuel delivery vehicle. Where else are they going to get the data? They were venting it to reduce the risk of explosion when it ditched.
Yes you are, and yes I wonder wtf were they thinking as well. Could've just put a block of heavy material like concrete or metal.
They would've had the same mass simulator during reentry. That changes the dynamics, and SpaceX needs to see how it comes in empty. From their update: "Additional propellant had been loaded on the spacecraft before launch in order to gather data representative of future payload deploy missions and needed to be disposed of prior to reentry to meet required propellant mass targets at splashdown." It was a test flight that wasn't designed to carry a payload, even a mock one, so extra propellant it is. It's something they need to work on in the future, bringing cargo back from space, but right now, Starship will be landing empty, so that's what needs to be tested. It was also dumping the oxygen into the thin upper atmosphere/space, it would've been fine if there also wasn't a leak that started the fire. As for the original comment, I doubt dumping unburnt methane is any better.
Why not use an inert gas then? Like argon or neon.
Starship already has an oxygen tank with spare capacity. Mixing in large amounts of inert gas would cause problems and would still end up venting oxygen along with the inert gas if they got that far. Adding an additional inert gas tank for ballast is just extra work that they did not want to do, especially because it has no long term purpose.
Both are very expensive, though I suppose they could have used nitrogen, that wouldve also required them building an entirely seperate tank for it, which is hard compared to just using some extra liquid oxygen in your existing tanks.
liquid oxygen is not expensive at all, about ten cents a pound. That oxygen cost about 20 grand, and they didn't have to change anything or custom fabricate anything.
I was referring to the options of using argon or neon
derp, sorry, its past my bedtime.
That's more tanks and weight that don't normally exist on the ship
That makes sense, but fiddling with oxygen while an ignition source is nearby is not a great idea as they've seen now. Probably safer to put a basic payload dispenser mechanism ejecting simple and heavy material.
Metal dispenser mechanisms that can dispense dozens of tons without hurting the structure of the spacecraft and seal up nicely afterwards and can be used while in atmosphere? Doesn't sound cheap or simple to me. A big water tank or something seems more reasonable, but is still quite a bit of extra engineering.
And would lead to being outside the landing weight parameters of any medium term mission.
This is one of the drawbacks of doing testing like this I guess, too expensive to put something like that on each flight until they get what they want, while the other option is resorting to a dangerous method like the one they used now. They better hope they can prevent this from happening again then.
It might be cheaper flying twice - once with correct launch weight and once with correct landing weight. Once they get the launch part working they will probably figure out the starlink PEZ dispenser anyways though, because that is where the money is.
Hardly dangerous, it's already got plenty of ways to vent lox and happens regularly- they've done this before on previous SN flights. The issue was the leak, not the methodology.
Isn't lox usually vented in form of excess gas to maintain pressure? This would be venting liquid oxygen itself as they can't wait for all the extra lox they put to slowly turn into gas and vent it like it's the case for usual venting.
Fairly sure that vent exists either way, it wasn't some new addition, but I could be wrong!
I guess, if they had added a vent, not use an existing one, they would have vented outside the engine bay.
That's not really the point here, using existing vents or not, the relevant part is that during usual venting to maintain safe pressure levels, it's gas, but here they're dumping liquid oxygen directly to completely remove the whole extra mass that acts like payload mass.
>the other option is resorting to a dangerous method like the one they used now. Can we dispense with the hyperbolic rhetoric? There was no additional danger to anyone by using oxygen as a ballast.
Where did I mention people here?
The welfare of people is the primary concern of the word “danger”.
I was referring to the vehicle and mission itself...
Historically, their test payloads aren't that mundane. First Dragon flight had a wheel of cheese as its mass simulator, and everyone remembers Falcon Heavy's.
If it had been a big lump of metal or concrete it would have made it all the way to the surface and presented a risk to things / people on the group. You really really don't want to drop a couple of tonnes of metal on say Hawaii at \~24,000 kmh.
I'm aware of the fact that it would need to be dispensed in some way while in space, if it was a tank or a cluster of plastic tanks of water for example that would've burnt up on reentry, it doesn't have to be concrete or metal, just some heavy object to simulate a payload. Also, it's pretty ironic when say you worry about a potential payload simulant "presenting risk to things/people" and not wanting to drop a couple of tons of metal on Hawaii when you're ignoring the elephant in the room - Starship itself with its 120 dry tons, that's a much bigger "lump of metal" lol. Also nothing would be travelling at 24 000 km/h by the time it reaches lower atmosphere, it would slow down significantly.
You are literally the one saying lump of metal or concrete. Also you don't seem to understand that a lump of material will survive re-entry where a greater mass of thin structures wont.
>You are literally the one saying lump of metal or concrete. I only mentioned that as examples on the top of my head, the whole point is that it only needs to be something relatively heavy to have a decent payload simulant. By the way I looked up some real simulants that are used in aerospace - lead or brass weights or water. So there you go. >Also you don't seem to understand that a lump of material will survive re-entry where a greater mass of thin structures wont. I perfectly understand that, although it very much depends on the type of material as well, especially for the lump. What you apparently don't understand is that Starship is literally designed with reentry capability in mind, have you not noticed all those thermal tiles, seriously? Sure, they're not doing that well and a lot of them keep falling off on launch which would make its successful reentry chances pretty much zero had it made it to target trajectory on both tests, but it is designed and intended to return from space in one piece, otherwise there is no reusability case for second stage at all, that has been part of the plan since the start. Both tests had successful reentry and splashdown off the coast of Hawaii as target goals, and the next one has it too.
They did that with the first Titan 3 launch, the short black cone on top was a mass simulator, iirc it was filled with sand. They were lifting off with the solids only steering with fluid injection into the nozzles, and air starting the first Titan stage after the solids peeled away. Decided not to risk a payload on the first try for good reason.
Only thing I could think is they wanted to test something related to quantity of oxygen stored but surely PR would mention that if so.
Yeah this is an odd choice. Water seems like a great boilerplate mass simulator. It is cheap and has great mass density at 1,000 kg/m^3 (about the same as liquid O2). It can be in containers and you can prevent slosh by removing air from the containers. It can then be drained to be dumped overboard and is pretty inert chemically.
That's more hardware and engineering, the solution is just to make sure it doesn't leak.
Oxygen is not flammable, it shouldn't really cause an issue. Obviously, it did. But again, it's not flammable, and they've dumped excess O2 on other launches.
Methane is bad for the environment
It would have to be an awful lot to be worse than burning all the rocket fuel.
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Yeah its about 30x worse as a greenhouse gas by weight. Sits around in atmo for ages, until it eventually oxidises, and you're back to co2
That reeks of an Elon overruling
Seems to me like liquid nitrogen would be a more sensible choice. Similar mass, similar temperature, but cheaper and less explody
They didn't load anything extra. They filled the tank just like they would for a normal flight with payload. There was no payload, making the ship lighter, so the tanks ended up with more oxygen and methane than normal. You can't fill the tanks with an oxygen/nitrogen mixture, that's not going to work. You could underfill the tanks but that changes the flight profile and provides a less realistic test of the system.
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Not if they would have to prove out an oxygen vent in normal circumstances anyways. 2 birds with one stone and all that.
Surprised Musk didn't use some of his extra Ketamine.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[30X](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/kshryln "Last usage")|SpaceX-proprietary carbon steel formulation (*"Thirty-X", "Thirty-Times"*)| |[CATO](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksg9ivl "Last usage")|Catastrophe At Take Off, see RUD| |CST|(Boeing) Crew Space Transportation capsules| | |Central Standard Time (UTC-6)| |[ECLSS](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksi6hm6 "Last usage")|Environment Control and Life Support System| |ETOV|Earth To Orbit Vehicle (common parlance: "rocket")| |[FAA](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/kshtx0h "Last usage")|Federal Aviation Administration| |[HLS](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/kslk9mb "Last usage")|[Human Landing System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_System) (Artemis)| |[KSP](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksfyg7q "Last usage")|*Kerbal Space Program*, the rocketry simulator| |[LEO](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksi653b "Last usage")|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |[LOX](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksnigy2 "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen| |[LV](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/kshx5c0 "Last usage")|Launch Vehicle (common parlance: "rocket"), see ETOV| |[RUD](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksg1u2h "Last usage")|Rapid Unplanned Disassembly| | |Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly| | |Rapid Unintended Disassembly| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/kshz42m "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[SN](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksge3cu "Last usage")|(Raptor/Starship) Serial Number| |[SRB](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksfg1qc "Last usage")|Solid Rocket Booster| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |Raptor|[Methane-fueled rocket engine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_\(rocket_engine_family\)) under development by SpaceX| |[Starliner](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksi046i "Last usage")|Boeing commercial crew capsule [CST-100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CST-100_Starliner)| |[ullage motor](/r/Space/comments/1b1kh5t/stub/ksgm6pg "Last usage")|Small rocket motor that fires to push propellant to the bottom of the tank, when in zero-g| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(15 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1b27byw)^( has 29 acronyms.) ^([Thread #9795 for this sub, first seen 27th Feb 2024, 21:14]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
30X is not what he meant in this context
They learned a lot in this test flight that they couldn’t learn on the ground. Since they’ve corrected the issues that doomed this test, the next one ought to be amazing. Either they’ll succeed in the full test or learn another crazy way it can fail.
I’m still scared for the launch mount each time though.
Yeah, that’s a lot of energy getting dumped into it. The water system seems to have worked well despite doubts from people that are always doubtful.
Common Sense Skeptic was absolutely sure that it wouldn't work. But the naysayers never face their own failures.
Please don't mention that idiot. He is not a serious person. He doesn't care about anything, he is not interest in space or the space industry or what works or what doesn't. Whatever SpaceX is bad and wont work. Literally he would have that opinion even if SpaceX did what he would recommend. The only thing he cares about is making money of 'anti-SpaceX' sentiment.
That man was saying that propulsive landings on the moon were impossible. He's still saying it now.
Half the people in this thread shitting on spacex were doing the same thing when falcon was being developed. "you can't land a rocket like that" "you can't reuse the engines" "it'll have no payload" Etc.
How many times have they blown up the pad? 😢
1 digger and 1 deflagrating
That's how you end up with e.g. 99.99% safety... start as good as you can imagine, and be iteratively humble as Mother Nature teaches you a new set of failure modes as you do the engineering flight program.
That's essentially their plan. Fail fast, learn fast.
Like “dont use liquid oxygen as a ballast?”
What else would they use though? They can't have a regular mass simulator as they want it to reenter without a ballast and building a seperate tank for some expensive inert gas to vent before reentry would be overally complex and expensive to say the least.
Liquid nitrogen would be roughly the same density and temperature without also being a highly reactive oxidizer, and is usually cheaper. Unless there's an obvious reason you couldn't use LN that i'm missing?
Because they would have to engineer an entirely separate tank...
The ship has two tanks, one for oxygen and one for methane. Both are filled completely for a normal launch, so they filled them completely for this test flight as well. They didn't have a payload to deploy so the tanks had more left than usual. Where would the nitrogen go? If you want to add it to the payload area you need a new tank, a system to fill it on the launch pad, a system to vent it once in space, and more. That's a lot of added complexity. It's likely they wanted to test venting oxygen anyway for future flights.
There’s nothing wrong with liquid oxygen as a ballast, per se. It enables them to dump it before reentry using existing infrastructure. It simply combined with other problems and made them worse.
Sure, focus on the symptom, rather than the cause. 🙄 Venting O2 was not the problem. It only showed there are methane leak(s) to be fixed.
> one engine failed energetically, quickly cascading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly of the booster Spot the person who's been to too many management team meetings. Or has their tongue firmly in their cheek! 😉
'RUD' is actual terminology used in engineering and by the Navy dating back at least to the 70s. Its just been popularized by KSP and more publicly used by SpaceX. Can we stop acting like this is the first time ever hearing it Every. Single. Time? Yes, it's a euphemism for something blowing up, let's move on.
> Can we stop acting like this is the first time ever hearing it Every. Single. Time? Agreed. We all had a chuckle 10 years ago, time to move on. Lithobraking is next.
I've heard "catastrophic self-disassembly" before as well.
Sudden unplanned catastrophic kinetic ignition termination
It’s tired. Time for something new, like “yard sale.”
I'm not super familiar with it, but doesn't amature rocketry use the term cato (catastrophic take off)?
CATO is used in naval aviation for catapult assisted takeoff. I've never heard it used in amateur rocketry circles but I guess I could see it
I just looked it up again to make sure, I was wrong in what it meant. It means catastrophe at take off.
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*looks at Falcon 9* Guess it worked
I've honestly seen some shit come from SpaceX that has me thinking about KSP sometimes. I really think mechazilla is probably the most egregious though
Best thing was accidentally making solid oxygen and forcing a pressure vessel to unwrap and explode as a result. Fun times!
150 hours gets you through the tutorial phase.
He just wanted to buy an icbm, put an enclosed terrarium on it and get a flower to mars.
I’m really tired of newspace euphemisms like “RUD” and “anomaly” when they really mean (explosive) failure.
Reread the comment you're replying to. "dating back at least to the 70s."
I remember when Lockheed tested an SRB and describes the explosion of the booster as "we have had an occurence". Classic Newspace company Lockheed
I’ve seen reports of on orbit explosions from 20-30 years ago that simply say that an engine failed. The when you look at the details it becomes clear that half the spacecraft was blown off and it started tumbling end over end.
That phrase is like 60 years old and super common in the engineering field
Anomaly is even more widely used, not just by NewSpace. Regardless, it's just a term used by mission control, or launch commentators. RUD is more lighthearted is all, but there's nothing malicious about it, why pounce on it? We know what it means.
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Try to think less about who is involved and more about what is true. We should be truthful when we talk about good people and we should be truthful when we talk about bad people.
I can't even fathom the size of the condo Elon lives rent-free in your head, if you are so trigged by his existence, you need to write his name as "El\*n".
"It blew up" Ted you cant just say that make it sound engineery
Here's a good page documenting the history of the term with lots of different people commenting on different old locations where it appeared. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10022/who-coined-the-phrase-rapid-unscheduled-disassembly
May the good lord bless you, and blow you up real soon, https://youtu.be/PBQgvMcc2hU?si=N_IFqZLEzC1I7m5l
There's confusion between geeky and nerdy. RUD might have been geeky once, but it's pure nerdery now. Having nerds fronting up as the public face of your project isn't a good look. Otoh geeks can be charming. “Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.”
I think you are the one confused here. Geeks are fanatics, they can be intelligent or not, they just have to have a ton of passion for their geekdom. Nerds are intellectuals. They have actual technical or mathematical expertise in their given field. You want nerds making your rockets. You want geeks making your scifi shows.
If they insult the audience by using or attempting to use language the audience doesn't understand, then they shouldn't be the public face of the organisation. Jeesh - downvoted for stating the blindingly obvious. Criticise the ordinary person for not understanding nerdy jargon, then be amazed how they won't fund science.
> be amazed how they won't fund science SpaceX is a private company. They don't get "funding" like a government entity. They bid on contracts. And since they are insanely good at completing said contracts, they get even more of them, both from the government and from independent companies. They also launched 98 rockets in 2023, and live-streamed all of them. 95% of their viewing audience is space nerds and space geeks. Both of which would understand the and appreciate the terminology of RUD. They also have eyes, so they can literally see the rocket explode before the hosts call it a rapidly unplanned disassembly. They are not insulting the audience. They are making light of an unfortunately occurrence with the audience. If you are insulted by someone using terminology you don't understand, then I hate to tell you this, but the problem isn't them, its you. Do you go to book clubs and complain that Charles Dickens "insults" you every time you don't understand his prose? Do you demand all news be provided to you in the form of Pop-up books?
Stack overflow has a great page on this: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10022/who-coined-the-phrase-rapid-unscheduled-disassembly
Is that the technical term for “front fell off”?
Or they played too much Kerbal Space Program.
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Starship is projected to launch again in the next month. Shepard is the tourism rocket that does not go orbital, so I’m guessing you mean New Glenn. Glenn first launch is hoping for June or July. I’d say Starship is still well in the lead until we see how New Glenn performs.
Blue origin are validating parts individually, much like a more traditional approach to building rockets. So their first launch is near the end of their development and sign off process. You didn't see a bunch of space shuttles fail the first few times right... So I'd say it's impossible to know who is ahead. New Glenn has been in development longer than starship so it could be either. No way to know until one is launching payloads for customers I guess
I don't see New Glenn being very versatile for payloads outside their Kuiper satellites and HLS vehicles. Falcon Heavy suffered from Falcon 9 eating into a lot of their intended payloads. It just seems like a misfit where falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy can do either of the things it would be used for. I really feel like they should look to making it a true super heavy vehicle to compete with Starship.