6 thoughts on “Starhopper”

1. The slow burning orange fire surprised me. For some reason I thought a liquid methane fire wouldn’t remotely resemble burning kerosene.

   1. Could be contaminates it picked up along the way, or orange due to partial or lower temperature combustion. From first hand experience I know acetylene burns yellow until mixed thoroughly with oxygen to get that intensely hot blue flame.

2. FWIW the flare isn’t burning blue either.

3. Yeah I’ve been fighting fake new stories on FB today that exclaim Starhopper “…went up in flames”. Yeah, so what? It’s made out of stainless steel. No big deal. Obviously they never wrote about or witnessed a Delta IV heavy launch either.

4. When you turn up natural gas burners really high, or if they aren’t getting sufficient oxygen in the mix, you can get incomplete combustion and a yellow flame, so I guess it’s the same effect.

   If they’d suffered a simultaneous LOX spill they should have had much better combustion.

   1. Don’t know if you get email’ed updates to ancient threads, but you finally got your pretty blue flame plus a shock diamond in the latest Starhopper ‘hop’ test that went to 65 feet and translated horizontally. Elon tweeted a link here:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaBMqs1z9cc

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