The Everyday Astronaut coverage stayed with the long lens tracking shot all the way and shows the events leading up to the loss of control. I have cued to shortly before liftoff. Tim Dodd is obviously not of the “curb your enthusiasm" school of reportage. If you look closely at the inset at the upper right, you can see the windows and blinds shaking when the noise arrives from the launch pad. This observation point is 8 km from the launch pad.
At 2:04:26 you can clearly see the bright plume appear from around the 4 o’clock position on the outer engine ring. At 2:04:40 you can begin to see the rocket veer off course and begin flying in circles until the flight termination system (FTS) brings an end to the festivities at 2:06:30.
At 2:13:20 the dust cloud from the launch begins to pass overhead and the “concrete/sand rain” begins to fall at their location.
This is five years old, but still a classic: “You Will Not Go to Space Today”. Research and words by Scott Manley. Music, melody, and performance by Skye Manley.
I missed the launch since I tuned out when they announced the countdown would proceed to the 10 second mark as a test run through and then abort to another day. Obviously, they re-evaluated. When I watched one of the re-runs, knowing what was coming, soon after it cleared the tower, in the view I saw, the base of the booster seemed to oscillate rather violently.
Now, at the same time there was also a cylindrical disturbance of the airflow surrounding the booster. I, thus, had both impressions - the booster was vibrating and/or it was merely the varying refraction caused by the disturbed airflow creating an illusion of vibration. Anybody else see this?
If you watch the SpaceX coverage (in the main post) with drone shots of the liftoff, there doesn’t appear to be anything I’d call an oscillation, violent or not, around liftoff. I suspect what you’re seeing is vibration of ground-based cameras based upon the incident sound waves and/or atmospheric refraction due to shock waves caused by the exhaust plume. When you hear the characteristic “crackling” of rocket exhaust, that’s because the sound pressure level is so high the air is rarefied to vacuum between pressure pulses. That imparts tremendous vibration on anything exposed to the sound. You can see this in the shakiness of images of a Falcon 9 launch, and this was many times louder than that.
Most of the other coverage of the launch used ground-based cameras in which the moment of liftoff was obscured by the large cloud of dust and debris thrown up by the engine plume and you could only see the rocket after it emerged. In the SpaceX video, they cut to a ground based tracking camera about 25 seconds after liftoff, and you can see the camera start to shake around 00:30 when the shock waves from the engines reach the camera location. At that moment, there is what looks like a debris shedding event at the base of the booster; I have no idea what that may be, and I haven’t seen anybody else mention it.
Everything is close together at the Boca Chica launch site mainly because the site is relatively compact and SpaceX does not have the unlimited funds or freedom to exploit federal lands that NASA had when laying out Launch Complex 39 in Florida. After the all-engine static fire of Booster 7 on 2023-02-09, SpaceX built a concrete berm with an angled reinforced concrete deflector wall between the orbital launch mount and tank farm, presumably to protect the latter from debris they expected from a launch based upon the static fire experience. But that berm would protect only against projectiles launched on near-horizontal trajectories, not those lofted on the kind of ballistic trajectories we’ve seen in the videos posted earlier about debris.
This debris event is going to raise even more questions about the Starship launch tower being built at Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center, in close proximity to the pad used for Crew Dragon launches and, at present, the only pad configured to launch Falcon Heavy for national security missions. There had already been worries about the consequences of a Starship launch pad explosion, but if debris of this magnitude is the consequence of a normal launch, it will be a serious problem.
SpaceX appears to be developing a water deluge system to mitigate debris shedding, but we’ll have to see what that system looks like and how well it performs. Note that Launch Complex 39 was sized for a Really Bad Day with a Saturn V booster, while Starship/Super Heavy is around twice that size.
We can’t see if all of the outer ring engines were firing at this moment, but it looks to me like one of the inner ring, steerable engines was already down at this point.
Here is what the engine status display looked like at the first time it appeared after launch.
If I were a Musk I’d be paying people to post stuff like this and then I would say let’s replace the 16th Amendment with a flat tax on net assets Beyond Homestead bankruptcy protection coupled with replacing the welfare state with an unconditional citizens income.
Musk would be far wealthier and guys like Bezos far less wealthy since they depend critically on network effect monopolies which have a higher liquidation value since anyone can make money with a network effect monopoly.
Indeed that change in policy would not only separate the men from the boys, its timing is perfect now that everybody is freaking out about AI and “jerbz”. It would make the simulation maximally entertaining to watch people like Elizabeth Warren implode.
This comment says that the flame trench was abandoned because of environmental paperwork. The comment contains a link to a PDF that is now only on archive.org:
I vaguely recall something about this being due to the shallow water table, but its pretty hard to believe the trench construction and regulatory hurdles couldn’t have been overcome during the 3 year lag before first test flight. Then again, Musk was pretty aggressive about pushing for that first tranche of test data so I can see why he’d risk what we have now witnessed: An environmental outcome worse than the EPA bureaucrats would have imagined: Spewing a hundred tons of concrete debris all over the wetlands. At least Musk got his data!
That said, I’ve never seen any satisfactory explanation for why Musk didn’t just build Truax’s Sea Dragon and be done with the whole mess – not just “stage 0” but also the Starship tile problem, which IIRC Truax said he would solve by rotisserie rotating the steel reentry vehicle. Maybe I misunderstood him but that’s what I recall him saying would solve the reentry problem without tiles.
Interesting comment from Blair Ivey further down that thread:
“It appears from the SpaceX feed that Starship failed to separate at the designated time, and as fuel burned off in SuperHeavy, the center-of-gravity moved forward along the thrust axis until the stack became uncontrollable.”
Lots of analysis will have to be done before the way forward becomes clear.
A brief search for arguments against the Sea Dragon as compared to the Superheavy yielded little in the way of direct comparisons and much in the way of Dunning Kruger regarding the Sea Dragon. One of the more precious Dunning Kruger moments was when an “authority” declared the turbo pump of the Saturn V to be an extremely difficult problem even at far lower flow rates than the Sea Dragon’s fuel flow rates. Truly impressive DK performance given that the Sea Dragon is pressure fed hence has the “optimal turbo pump” being NONE.
Anyway, one argument was that the acoustic assault on sea life would kill everything in the Gulf of Mexico. So I went looking for anything on that topic in the literature and found this study, with this introduction to the dynamics section:
In all, I can see why Musk might have avoided the Sea Dragon:
The environmentalists would have been preemptively all up in his business since we just don’t know what the environmental impact would be given the absence of adequate scientific models and validation thereof that should have started in the early '60s.
When you consider the hoops SpaceX was made to jump through by the environmentalists as part of the FAA licensing process (detailed in the post here on 2022-06-13, “FAA Releases SpaceX Starbase Programmatic Environmental Assessment, Finds ‘No Significant Impact’ ”), one can scarcely imagine how they would have reacted to a proposal to launch Sea Dragon from the Gulf. I’m thinking something like the closing scene of Kingsman.
Also, according to the Wikipedia page on Sea Dragon, “Payload costs, in 1963, were estimated to be between $59 to $600 per kg (roughly $500 to $5,060 per kg in 2020 dollars. TRW (Space Technology Laboratories, Inc.) conducted a program review and validated the design and its expected costs.” Now, that’s a pretty wide range for a cost estimate, but Elon’s goal for Starship is much more ambitious: “Musk has predicted that a Starship orbital launch will eventually cost US$ 1 million (or US$ 10 per kilogram.” Even if he is low by a factor of ten, that’s still one fifth the lowest estimate for Sea Dragon.
Here is Scott Manley’s analysis of the Orbital Test Flight. Note, in particular, the slow motion blow-up of liftoff, where large chunks of concrete can be seen flying to a substantial fraction of the height of the rocket. That makes it plausible that the first three engine failures might have been due to impacts from debris.
