Newest Starship booster is significantly damaged during testing early Friday

SpaceX had big plans for the upgraded Starship vehicle that failed on Friday morning.

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[Nethyman]

Blue Origin may have to play a greater role in the Artemis program if arbitrary deadlines are still required. Starship still seems the way to go for the long term though.
Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and try all over again.....and Spacex do.

 

[blackhawk887]

That will buff right out...

 

[Wickwick]

It certainly looks like an implosion. And the last time we saw one of those it was a GSE problem.

Edit: See page 2. Images from the back side show tearing along the tank that is certainly not consistent with an implosion.

 

[EricBerger]

With the slow build-out of their new launch facility, this vehicle had nowhere to go even if it passed initial testing.

I would not characterize the build-out as slow, but yes this vehicle was not launching any time soon. However the company was talking about a January launch attempt, so it was not super far in the distance either.

 

[Juvba Fnakix]

Blue Origin may have to play a greater role in the Artemis program if arbitrary deadlines are still required. Starship still seems the way to go for the long term though.
Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and try all over again.....and Spacex do.

I am very pleased to see Blue starting to make real progress. I have not seen evidence they could have an HLS ready for Artemis III before SpaceX.

 

[MLMichael]

Setback, yes, but it probably won't delay the next launch more than a few weeks. Look for Flight 12 in February, or March at the latest.

 

[GreenEnvy]

With the slow build-out of their new launch facility, this vehicle had nowhere to go even if it passed initial testing.

The new new launch mount is mostly done construction, at least all the major pieces. There's probably still plumbing work to do inside, but they've already been doing water deluge tests. The only major component left to be installed on the new tower is the ship quick disconnect, but that wouldn't be needed for booster testing.

Hopefully this was a process issue, rather than a design issue, that will be a lot quicker to resolve.

 

[l8gravely]

This smells to me like a process problem, more like they re-used the old loading process and something went wrong. If with the bigger volume, they pulled more vacuum as the liquid loading condensed onto the (probably liquid notrogen at this stage) and the tank was at the limit and just buckled inward. That would do it.

Or it oculd be something completely different. I wasn't there.

 

[Speaking from Europe...]

Good. The more problems they have and fix the better here on earth than 200,000 miles away.

 

[Proesterchen]

I would not characterize the build-out as slow, but yes this vehicle was not launching any time soon.

I personally expected first testing to occur about 18 months after start of major construction, so Aug/Sep 2025. I believe the January launch attempt had become unattainable before this latest mishap.

 

[WillSeed]

They are not currently hardware rich, B19 hasn't even started stacking yet, but they have the ability to ramp up.

 

[Proesterchen]

Good. The more problems they have and fix the better here on earth than 200,000 miles away.

This being a booster, it doesn't even go 200 km away from terra firma.

 

[Wickwick]

It's interesting how slow the "fast iteration" process has been to make progress. Compare that with Blue Origin, which was considered laughably far behind just a few years ago, having effectively duplicated SpaceX's effort with only two carefully planned launches.

IDK if this is a commentary on Elon keeping his white nationalism to himself (and perhaps a warning to Bezos to do the same) or an observation that "fools rush in" but either way, much of the blather about the superiority of private space has been shorn away the lack of huge (relative scale to project) government capital to fund development.

Yes, New Glenn has effectively duplicated SpaceX's efforts from 10 years ago.

 

[Wickwick]

Wow - I slept longer than I thought because the first Starship booster landing was in 2024. I could've sworn it was only 2025. Thank god you were here before I went out and bought nVidia stock.

What part of Starship's flight profile was duplicated by New Glenn? I don't recall seeing the second stage execute a controlled splashdown.

 

[BemusedPenguin]

Good. Fuck Elon and everything he touches.

 

[Puupshusi]

Good. Nazi rockets are bad.

 

[EvolvedMonkey]

I can’t help wonder if there an underlying cultural issue that has crept in here that wasn’t present before: normalisation of a threshold of risk, less internal peer reviews on engineering or procedural changes, something like that. The sort of behavioural thing that gets missed day to day but more obvious in hindsight. And which leads to the one step forward, one back, one sidestep to left progress of Starship.

 

[coopster]

Version 2 keeps blowing up, they said, "just wait for version 3!"

Wait until you hear about version 4! It will be, like 70 times better than version 3. How do you measure that, dude just take my word for it.

 

[Cthel]

This smells to me like a process problem, more like they re-used the old loading process and something went wrong. If with the bigger volume, they pulled more vacuum as the liquid loading condensed onto the (probably liquid notrogen at this stage) and the tank was at the limit and just buckled inward. That would do it.

Or it oculd be something completely different. I wasn't there.

Is there a reason not to equip the tanks with vacuum relief valves? As a pressure-stabilised strucure, is there a situation where the pressure inside the tank should be expected to be lower than ambient?

 

[Wickwick]

I can’t help wonder if there an underlying cultural issue that has crept in here that wasn’t present before: normalisation of a threshold of risk, less internal peer reviews on engineering or procedural changes, something like that. The sort of behavioural thing that gets missed day to day but more obvious in hindsight. And which leads to the one step forward, one back, one sidestep to left progress of Starship.

Probably yes and no.

Yes, I think SpaceX overlooks things because they don't spend enough time looking.

No, because I don't think that's new. That's how SpaceX has operated since at least as far back as Falcon 1 launches when the booster ran into the upper stage after separation.

One can easily look back at any failure and say "this wouldn't have happened if they had just looked at [insert cause here]." The issue is that you're looking at the failures. It's an easily identifiable subset of activities to focus on.

The real challenge would be to identify the failure ahead of the failure and predict the reason why a failure will happen - not might happen.

SpaceX accepts a certain level of failure on a small subset of operations such that the rest of their operations aren't slowed by predictive analysis. I'm not going to say where the right amount of tolerance of failure is. I will simply observe that the net production, launch, capacity, and number of rocket designs that have been executed since their founding is well beyond any of their peers.

 

[Wickwick]

Is there a reason not to equip the tanks with vacuum relief valves? As a pressure-stabilised strucure, is there a situation where the pressure inside the tank should be expected to be lower than ambient?

Well, this is flight hardware so you wouldn't want to add mass by adding such a valve to the booster itself. It has to be behind the quick disconnect panel. And everything from there back can become a vacuum.

Edit: However, proof testing is done without engines so there have to be seals there. I suppose one of those seals could be the type of relief valve you're describing. But that's only necessary the first time you're working through the GSE processes for a booster.

 

[julesverne]

Failing an ambient pressure test at this point in development is noteworthy. Scuttlebutt says payload projections have underwhelmed. And dry weight reductions are being desperately sought. Maybe B18 had a thinner hull. Thin hull, thin margin.

 

[Malmesbury]

I would not characterize the build-out as slow, but yes this vehicle was not launching any time soon. However the company was talking about a January launch attempt, so it was not super far in the distance either.

Is there anyone building orbital grade launch facilities faster?

 

[GreenEnvy]

Wow - I slept longer than I thought because the first Starship booster landing was in 2024. I could've sworn it was only 2025. Thank god you were here before I went out and bought nVidia stock.

I'm not intending to throw shade at Blue Origin, landing New Glenn is a massive achievement, but New Glenn operates like a larger version of Falcon 9. Falcon 9 had it's first landing 10 years ago, and has landed, and as of a week or so ago reflown, boosters over 500 times.

New Glenn is not similar to Starship, other than it's fuel type and that it's sort of close in size. Starship is a much, much, much more ambitious project. It's engines are the first of it's type ever to fly, it intends to reuse both the first and second stages, and it intends to be rapidly reusable (as in hours for the booster).

 

[marshals]

Wow - I slept longer than I thought because the first Starship booster landing was in 2024. I could've sworn it was only 2025. Thank god you were here before I went out and bought nVidia stock.

I expect @Wickwick was referencing the first Falcon 9 booster landing, which was 2015, ie, 10 years ago.

 

[GreenEnvy]

Wonder who is paying for this?

Well Starship is about 90% internally funded by SpaceX, using money from their Falcon 9 launches and Starlink. The government put in around 2.5 Billion for the moon human landing system, but that is for moon specific things. Even if some of that money is being used for general starship development, SpaceX has a fixed price contract, so they don't get any more money if they suffer setbacks or delays.

 

[nimelennar]

Excitement guaranteed!

Even in pressure tests!

 

[blackhawk887]

It certainly looks like an implosion. And the last time we saw one of those it was a GSE problem.

The whole lox tank blew out. Not an implosion, it failed under pressure. Could be a GSE issue, or they didn't have the margin they designed for.

 

[KjellRS]

(...) SpaceX accepts a certain level of failure on a small subset of operations such that the rest of their operations aren't slowed by predictive analysis. I'm not going to say where the right amount of tolerance of failure is. I will simply observe that the net production, launch, capacity, and number of rocket designs that have been executed since their founding is well beyond any of their peers.

I think the main reason it's hard to credibly claim that all these failures are representing progress for SpaceX is that they are heavily experimenting/iterating on both the launch side and landing side at the same time so every time they fail to reach orbit half the team gets nothing and they've probably lost a lot of rare/time-consuming test articles in the process.

For sure the rocket plumbing has to actually work but like getting things to orbit is something SpaceX has done 500+ times before so do they have to so on the bleeding edge when they could work on refueling and heat shields and going to the Moon? Like you say it's worked out eventually but right now their constant boundary pushing is also tripping them up quite a lot.

 

[michaeldavidson]

I am very pleased to see Blue starting to make real progress. I have not seen evidence they could have an HLS ready for Artemis III before SpaceX.

Per another Eric article, Blue Origin's first cargo lander has completed construction, and it has a mission planned soon to my knowledge. The proposals for the MK 1.5 lander that add a human element sound realistic to me within the timeline - if they REALLY nail the project - but they haven't shared a lot of evidence on social media.