SpaceX Starship Failed Again

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I am expecting a clean SpaceX Starship test flight 8.

UPDATE: I was wrong. Starship had self destruct activated as SpaceX lost center engine and Starship started tumbling.

There was a scrub a few days ago and there were some minor issues yesterday and there was the explosion of the upper stage on Starship Test Flight 7. We are an hour or so away from the scheduled launch of test flight 8.

20 minutes in the countdown (3:10PM PST for the 3:30 PST, 5:30 CST)

I think SpaceX has gotten things in hand.

I predict:
Another good booster catch. [YES]
A good Starship flight with the successful release of four dummy versions of the Starlink version 3 satellites. [NO FAILED]
A mostly or all good simulated Starship upper stage hover and catch simulation in the ocean. [NO FAILED]

This will then setup a Starship upper stage possible catch attempt for flight 9.
The simulated Starship upper stage hover and catch simulation not only has to perform the hover but the engines cannot damage themselves or the other parts of the rocket.
Hovering and then have a controlled drop into the ocean like it was being caught will be fine. But they need to have no sensors or cameras showing flames causing issues which would make an actual launch tower catch dangerous.

I think the simulated hover happens and happened on test flight 6. I don’t know if it is done cleanly enough with re-entry and the other activities to “totally stick the landing”.

A picture of the twin launch towers.

10 thoughts on “SpaceX Starship Failed Again”

  1. Well, I think that SpaceX is being judged by their own standard … which is incredibly, almost magically high. No company or country is within 10 years of SpaceX wrt rocketry. Prior to the Apr ’23 launch, who would have bet that both the Booster & Starship would be caught w/o 2 failures. How about 3? I wouldn’t.
    Will Elon succeed this year? I’ll take that bet.

  2. Elon has to focus. Really.

    All the politicking and DOGE-ing besides of creating him enemies, is only distracting him from the lifelong goal he says to pursue.

    Enable Starship and drop the good lackey act.

  3. Since the Trump/Musk government was elected, the pesky FAA was gutted. Planes have since started dropping out of US skies, and Starship tests success has started going backwards. Just saying what I see…

    • A) Post Hoc fallacy
      B) It’s not even “Post.” Planes fell out of the sky at far above normal rates throughout the entire Biden presidency
      C) Worse yet, it was the Biden DOJ who failed to attempt any kind of investigation into the Boeing whistleblower (likely) assassination
      D) You should A, B, See yourself to some TDS treatment

    • It would probably be more accurate to say that Trump taking office didn’t magically stop airplane accidents from happening, since they’re not actually happening any more frequently now than before.

      • The only difference is that Trump blames airplane accidents on hiring anyone who isn’t a white male, without any evidence.

        • I wouldn’t say “without evidence”, but certainly without conclusive evidence.

          According to somebody I’ve heard from with first hand information, FAA under staffing is a result of their reluctance to hire white males, combined with a shortage of everybody else; They’re not hiring unqualified people, but they can’t hire as many people as they should hire because they insist on demographics that don’t remotely match the qualified candidate pool.

        • No. Simply that meritocracy is the proper selection criteria, not skin color.
          You know, like the NBA.

  4. would not have expected that the catch portion of this setup would be the aspect that space x nails right away .. that said hoepfully they figure out whats causing these issues but overall starship flight 8 seemed a little messy from the start so will be good to see some real answers about whats going wrong .. iterative progress requires failures so not unexpected but overall this flight seems worse than what they have been delivering so hopefully where the misdirection occurred is found asap

    • I think they were actually pretty confident about the catch part, with cause: They’ve been retropropulsively landing Falcon boosters for years now, and they have very detailed information about how precise the landings were. Remember, when you see a Falcon booster landing off center on the barge, it’s probably the barge that’s off position, not the booster.

      And the Starship booster, being larger, is less effected by outside forces, and so probably easier to control than the Falcon boosters.

      Here’s the Starship interstage ring: https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/F31cK_SWwAAjJmA.jpg Maybe 2/3 open space. Maybe.

      Here’s a Russian interstage ring for hot staging: https://nextbigfuture.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/2023/07/Screen-Shot-2023-07-02-at-6.44.33-AM-768×463.jpg More like 80% open space, and nice large openings, too.

      I can’t help but notice that the Russian one is considerably more open in construction; It would hardly obstruct gas flow at all.

      I have a sneaking suspicion that they subconsciously let their desire that the interstage look like the rest of the rocket cause them to skimp on the gas flow. Perhaps they should try a longer interstage, with the more open pipe lattice design. And maybe light off the center engines after separation.

      After all, the most likely thing going on here is the exhaust gasses and their turbulence somehow damaging the engines or something else in the engine bay during the hot staging.

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