SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX’s Starship rocket system reached several milestones in its second test flight before the rocket booster and spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico.
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They’ve been pretty transparent about their expectations for these early test flights, and today’s achievements match those expectations. For example, they didn’t bother securing all the thermal tiles because they didn’t really expect to survive re-entry.
The rocket didn’t go to LEO. This was intentional, because they knew that this flight was unlikely to survive and they’re as concerned about space debris as you are. All the debris either burned up or fell into the ocean.
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But isn’t the key aspect here “orbit”? I get that the FTS would lengthen the trajectory of some of the debris, but would it be enough to create a stable orbit? The original trajectory was going to splashdown near Hawaii.
I certainly agree that there are lots of environmental downsides to space exploration that are increasingly overlooked, I’m just not sure that there’s anything extra egregious about this flight.
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Yeah, the concrete storm wasn’t great last time. They did have some engineering reasons to believe it would work for a single launch, but it seems like there was more subsurface damage to the concrete than they realized. As far as I know the only property that was significantly damaged was related to the company, but I’m sure there were some smaller residential insurance claims for the dust.
Part of the reason Saturday’s launch was delayed was so that more environmental assessments could be performed. A few weeks ago there some government scientists taking samples at the launch site for a baseline measurement to compare against in the future, and the entire project was reviewed by environmental regulators. So, those agencies were very involved in approving the launch license and SpaceX can’t just do whatever the owner wants them to. I guess my point is that it’s not strictly PR-speak, there really are qualified people making these decisions. But I agree that it’s not great to have the facility in the middle of a sensitive wetland, and no doubt there was backdoor politicking. I wish SpaceX would do more to offset the harm they cause, but I still think the StarShip project does more good than harm.
I know you’re just trying to be negative, I assume because of Musk (I hate him too). You’re not being accurate, on purpose or otherwise it doesn’t matter. It didn’t even reach orbit. How did it blow up in Low Earth Orbit?
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It’s about velocity, not altitude. The pieces from the explosion would need to get a fairly dramatic dv addition prograde to end up near orbital. The explosion seems pretty undirected, so the force will be spread in all directions, so most of the force won’t be prograde. Even still, it can’t be orbital. It’d need some other force added later on its trajectory or it eventually had to pass through the same altitude that the explosion happened, which is in-atmosphere and will cause fairly quick decay. There is no risk of Kessler syndrome. It could potentially have posed a risk to some very low satellites, but we’d already have seen that happen by now if it were going to.
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