Business, Space, Technology and Society

Flight 8 Report

27 Comments

With approval for another flight as early as next week, SpaceX has released a report on what happened on the last two flights, and what they’ve done to prevent a repeat of either.

[Tuesday-morning update]

For those with X, Elon is about to talk about getting multi-planetary, as a prelude to this afternoon’s launch attempt. For the Xless, just go to SpaceX.com.

[Update a few minutes later]

It just changed the start time from 1015 PDT to 1800. So after the flight, instead of before?

27 thoughts on “Flight 8 Report”

  1. Engine go bang! Well there’s always Raptor 3 with no flanges and even fewer bolts! Looks really neat and clean from what I have seen. Welds are definitely better than screwing around.

    I remember my Dad being extremely skeptical when the new farm machinery started showing up with sealed bearings. Esp. the combine. After two years he was a true believer! 🙂

  2. The conflict between welding and bolting is an old one. Bolting if you plan on frequent repairs, otherwise… I love sealed bearings, so long as QC is up to snuff. Greasing and replacing wheel bearings on cars and trucks is not among my favorite memories.

    1. Nor removing the threshing cylinder on a combine due to shaft wear thanks to a failed bearing. (on yeah been there and done that). Most combines are axial flow now. You’d need a hoist to remove it.

  3. Interesting reading. This report neither explicitly confirms nor explicitly denies Zack Golden’s pogo hypothesis but pogo is certainly known to be very rough on bolted rocket engine joints. Not sure Zack has a knockout for this round, but I’d certainly give it to him on points.

    There have been some indications that B18 could be the first V3 Super Heavy with 35 Raptor 3s and an integral hot-stage ring. If so, then the plan is probably to get one or two launches out of each of B15, B16 and B17 with the second flights terminating in the drink as is apparently the plan for B14 on IFT-9.

    The current Block 2 Starship units can, one hopes, serve to pioneer a few needed operational advances by simply torqueing certain Raptor 2/2.5 bolts to higher specs. But Raptor 3-powered Starships certainly need to be introduced ASAP, preferably before year’s end. Artemis awaits. Golden Dome awaits. Mars awaits.

    2. We need to change the “Golden Dome” name because the city famous for golden domes is Moscow.

      Since the system is supposed to protect Canada, too, and was originally called “Iron Dome”, I’m pushing for “Iron Igloo”, since igloos are a dome and that’s how those Canadians live up there.

    3. I have heard mention that the new launch mount is not compatible with B12, B15-B17 Super Heavies. So by the end of the year, we’ll see an all-new stack – stage 0, stage 1, and stage 2.

      Zack Golden did say that his analysis was largely based on flight 7, which was the harmonic resonance. So he was very close on his pogo speculation.

    4. Interesting reading. This report neither explicitly confirms nor explicitly denies Zack Golden’s pogo hypothesis but pogo is certainly known to be very rough on bolted rocket engine joints. Not sure Zack has a knockout for this round, but I’d certainly give it to him on points.

      Zack gave his thoughts about that in the NSF Flame Trench stream the other day. I think he’s right that SpaceX is leaving some relevant information out of their explanation… That doesn’t mean the Starship team is *lying*, or that Golden’s theory doesn’t stand some revision, but what happened seems to have been even more complicated than the official statement suggests, and for various reasons they are choosing not to share all of that at this time.

  6. Um, let me see, two unmanned test flights, Apollo 8 that performed a lunar orbital insertion, Apollo 10 that was a dress rehearsal and Apollo 11, the first moon landing?

    (ducks)

      1. That, and all Saturn V had to do was to deliver 50,000kg to trans-lunar injection, reliably.

        That’s it. That’s all it had to do. Not so easy to do in the 1960’s (as the Soviets found out!), but it was a simple, straightforward mission.

        Starship is being asked to deliver a whole lot more than that to TLI, and do it as a fully and rapidly reusable architecture, at scale. And its lunar variant has to actually land on that moon. And stay there for weeks. And take off again.

        1. I was 17 when Apollo 4 flew, and was gob smacked by the successful all-up launch. I think I already knew the Four-Neins story. SLS did the same, but it really highlights the contemporary cost of “getting it right on the first try.” And even then, that doesn’t always work, as witness Orion and Starliner.

          1. I was 17 when Apollo 4 flew, and was gob smacked by the successful all-up launch.

            They didn’t realize they had an unresolved pogo problem, but….yeah, that Apollo 4 flight was a very remarkable achievement by NASA’s Apollo team. They accomplished so much that had never been done before on such a tight timeline. It’s still a marvel to me that they did it.

    2. Different development models. NASA could not afford to look like they didn’t know what they were doing to the common folks.

  7. Flight 9. Well, they got data. Wondering what caused Starship stability problems in vacuum? RCS problems? Blown seal venting pressurized gas? Pez door didn’t open either. Oh well. Onto Flight 10. The reality is no flight is a bad flight at this stage of the program. There is a lot of work ahead.

    1. SuperHeavy’s re-entry profile should also yield good data for help in determining limits.

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