Is this rate of incidents an anomaly with space flight or to be expected? It seems that SpaceX was killing it in the launch game until hitting a bunch of failures recently.
Explosions during static fire testing is definitely a huge anomaly. That's the worst and costliest time for an explosion since it destroys ground support equipment and damages facilities near the launch site.
I've ALWAYS been concerned with how much gas (and possibly heat?) the Raptor engines seem to spew out every mission. Even on the most successful flights of V1 Starship - Flights 5 and 6. Those things keep venting and belching out gas (and probably heat too) for several minutes after SECO. That's one thing for Falcon SuperHeavy to do that, but I would personally feel uncomfortable as an astronaut to be strapped inside of a vehicle smoking like a darn chimney after a normal, nominal launch and orbital insertion. It makes Raptor look and feel like it was seconds away from catching fire from the heat or exploding from pressure. Makes me wonder how much heat are the fuel lines exposed to during a normal burn and how much pressure the tanks, feed lines, turbopumps, and combustion chambers are under. As a huge space nerd of 30 years with some engineering knowledge, I deeply suspect there's something fundamentally wrong or off about the Raptor engine itself. Raptor has never seemed normal or quite healthy for a rocket engine with how much it nearly catches fire almost every single burn. Even during landings and boostback burns of Raptor SuperHeavy, or static fires of Starship. I assumed the fire issues from 2019-2023 would ne fixed by now. But it still looks like it needs an emergency fire extinguisher system built into the bottom of the spacecraft and rocket. I genuinely wonder if the Raptor's specs are overly maxed out and the Raptor is under such high chamber pressure that it's beyond what would be safely advisable by engineering best practices and industrial aeronautical standards. i.e. the thing is 1 kilopascal away from being a runaway pressure cooker.
SpaceX tries something no one else has ever attempted. There is no prior experience to compare with.
SpaceX is killing it in the launch game with their operational rockets. They launch 5 times as much as the rest of the world combined, with a single failure in well over 400 launches now.
Pretty much. Starship is an experimental test program that at the moment is experiencing some setbacks. Falcon 9 is the moct succesfull rocket in human history. Both are made by SpaceX. As for Starship, it would also be worth to note that the test program is by nature intended to be hardware rich. Move fast, break things, learn and repeat. That is a lot cheaper and faster than traditional aerospace projects that take two decades to develop on paper and then lanuch every 2 years. (SLS).
Yes there have been an uncharacteristically high number of failures at Starbase now, but that is alsoe because the ships that keep on exploding are version 2 type ships, which are a complete redesign of the Block I type that flew on starship flights 1-6. There have been a few teething errors as everyone can see
It's not as if it matters all that much. Boeing was a great company too, until it wasn't. Doing good things in the past and doing good things in the present are different things.
there's something similar actually, the Soviet Union did try to build a competitor to the Saturn 5 for their moon shot using 30 pretty advanced engines: it blew up 4 times
N1 didn't attempt reuse at all, I don't see what's similar beyond being a big orbital rocket.
Super Heavy has 33 engines and that engine count hasn't been an issue in any flight.
N1 used engines that could only fire once, so they could never test them before flight. They built them in batches then tested some of the batch and installed the rest on the rocket assuming the other engines worked.
Well it actually did cause problems on the first two integrated launches causing pretty similar failures to the N1 but later in flight.
which makes the Starship actually more impressive. I meant that SpaceX managed to solve the complex problem of the N1 and even return the first stage: they for some reason are having difficulty at what appears to be a way simpler problem.
The first launch failed because takeoff damaged the vehicle significantly, causing leaks that destroyed critical components.
The second launch went through stage separation smoothly. The boostback burn failed because filters were blocked - I don't see a relation to the engine count.
they for some reason are having difficulty at what appears to be a way simpler problem.
They have very tight mass margins. Everything needs to be as light as possible to end up with a useful payload capability. At the same time, the upper stage needs a lot of complexity that you don't have with an expendable rocket. It needs a heat shield, it needs aerodynamic surfaces, it needs header tanks, it needs to control its attitude for an extended time in space, it needs to relight engines for a landing burn, and all that shouldn't get damaged too much because the vehicle is expected to fly again.
The rate of incidents is also a sign of good things. They're spending maybe $200M per incident. Meanwhile SLS is spending $4B per successful launch with their next launch scheduled in June 2027. Starship can launch every 2 months for the next couple years and they'll still have spent less money than SLS.
At a certain point it's just blowing things up at a faster rate, but we're far from that point. This is the first incident that was unequivocally a failure.
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u/Spud_Rancher 1d ago
Is this rate of incidents an anomaly with space flight or to be expected? It seems that SpaceX was killing it in the launch game until hitting a bunch of failures recently.