Fire destroys Starship on its seventh test flight, raining debris from space

The Federal Aviation Administration will likely require an investigation into the accident.

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[blackhawk887]

Reading through a few days of comments is truly enlightening. The mental gymnastics people will do to downplay this Charlie Foxtrot. "It's experimental" - "we caught the booster". Who cares? 7 test flights and still can't reach orbit. Let's be honest, this is an embarrassment. I proudly watched the first Falcon 9 launch many years ago, but SpaceX is dooming themselves with this boondoggle.

The first Falcon 9 launch stranded the upper stage and demo Dragon in orbit. It reentered randomly 3 weeks later. And the booster was lost. If SpaceX did the exact same thing with Starship, would you call it a success?

 

[wagnerrp]

An intact Shuttle would under some aborts reach across the Atlantic, but my understanding is that had it disintegrated before reaching a minimum ~160km orbit then the resulting debris could not.

Orbiter circularized orbit without the ET, and the ET was ditched into the Indian Ocean. You can't get to the Indian ocean without first crossing over Europe and the Middle East.

 

[fl4Ksh]

Absolutely, but having touched a shuttle tile: they are extremely lightweight. They're related to aerogels. Their terminal velocity will be so low that they're not going to damage anything on their own.

If one dropped from space and hit you directly on the head, you probably wouldn't even say ouch. Maybe if it hit you with a corner, it might leave a tiny bruise.

Shuttle tiles are not related to aerogels.

Those tiles are fabricated from ultrapure quartz (silicon dioxide) fibers about 1.5 microns in diameter (a human hair is 70 microns diameter). The fibers are mixed with super-distilled water and chopped up in an industrial-size Waring blender to produce a slurry. The slurry is poured into a porous mold to produce a tile precursor (similar to ceramic greenware) that is then fired in an air oven at 2400F for an hour or so. The result is a low-density (9 lb/ft^3, 144 kg/m^3), rigidized ceramic fiber tile that is 95% empty space.

Side note: My lab spent nearly three years (1969-71) developing and testing dozens of materials and processes for the Shuttle tiles during the conceptual design phase of NASA's Space Shuttle program.

 

[eyesoars]

Absolutely, but having touched a shuttle tile: they are extremely lightweight. They're related to aerogels. Their terminal velocity will be so low that they're not going to damage anything on their own.

If one dropped from space and hit you directly on the head, you probably wouldn't even say ouch. Maybe if it hit you with a corner, it might leave a tiny bruise.

But what would the consequences of ingesting one or more into an engine be? Probably not much, but ... this is science! One must know be sure!

 

[eyesoars]

Shuttle tiles are not related to aerogels.

Those tiles are fabricated from ultrapure quartz (silicon dioxide) fibers about 1.5 microns in diameter (a human hair is 70 microns diameter). The fibers are mixed with super-distilled water and chopped up in an industrial-size Waring blender to produce a slurry. The slurry is poured into a porous mold to produce a tile precursor (similar to ceramic greenware) that is then fired in an air oven at 2400F for an hour or so. The result is a low-density (9 lb/ft^3, 144 kg/m^3), rigidized ceramic fiber tile that is 95% empty space.

Side note: My lab spent nearly three years (1969-71) developing and testing dozens of materials and processes for the Shuttle tiles during the conceptual design phase of NASA's Space Shuttle program.

Shuttle tiles are not related to aerogels... as far as the fabrication process is concerned.

Aerogels are normally produced by solvent/solute methods rather than mechanical/thermal methods, and contain considerably more empty space than shuttle tiles. But they are both very low density ultraporous silicon dioxide.