Comment by terramex a day ago
Looks like second stage broke up over Caribbean, videos of the debris (as seen from ground):
https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662?t=HdHF...
https://x.com/realcamtem/status/1880026604472266800
https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115
Moment of the breakup:
Reminds me of one of NASA's reckless ideas, abandoned after Challenger in 1986, to put a liquid hydrogen stage inside the cargo bay of the Shuttle orbiter [0]. That would have likely leaked inside that confined volume, and could plausibly have exploded in a similar way as Starship.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-Centaur
- "The astronauts considered the Shuttle-Centaur missions to be riskiest Space Shuttle missions yet,[85] referring to Centaur as the "Death Star".[86]"
I wonder if it's related to the loose panel flapping about at the left of the screen here: https://youtu.be/qzWMEegqbLs?si=aUlI6zfkH3bZCmVm&t=111
This sounds like one of those "and also" things. I'd say you add fire suppression AND ALSO try more to reduce leaks. It's got to be really difficult to build huge massive tanks that hold oxygen and other gases under pressure (liquid methane too will have some vapor of course). Are leaks inherently going to happen?
This is meant to be a human rated ship of course, how will you reduce this danger? I know this stuff is hard, but you can't just iterate and say starship 57 has had 3 flights without leaks, we got it now. Since I have no expertise here, I can imagine all kinds of unlikely workarounds like holding the gas under lower pressure with humans on board or something to reduce the risk.
This might be one of those components where it just needs to be built without problems, and improved safety means fixing individual design and manufacturing flaws as you find them, until you’ve hopefully got them all.
This can work. Fundamental structural components of airliners just can’t fail without killing everyone, and high reliability is achieved with careful design, manufacturing, testing, and inspection. I’m not sure if a gigantic non-leaky tank is harder to pull off that way, but they might have to regardless.
We’re going to have to accept that space travel is going to be inherently dangerous for the foreseeable future. Starship is in a good position to improve this, because it should fly frequently (more opportunities to discover and fix problems) and the non-manned variant is very similar to the manned variant (you can discover many problems without killing people). But there are inherent limitations. There’s just not as much capacity for redundancy. The engines have to be clustered so fratricide or common failure modes are going to me more likely. Losing all the engines is guaranteed death on Starship, versus a good chance to survive in an airliner.
All other practical considerations aside, I think this alone sinks any possibility of using Starship for Earth-to-Earth travel as has been proposed by SpaceX.
High reliability of airliners is achieved by having redundancy of all critical parts. The idea is no single failure can cause a crash.
For example, if system A has a failure probability of 10%, if A is redundant with another A', the combined failure probability is 1%.
That of course presumes that A and A' are not connected.
Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis had the main fuel tank directly in front of him. This was in spite of his primal fear of being burned alive. In some airplanes you sit on the fuel tank.
I don’t think (a) is true. The Shuttle flew with people on its maiden voyage, but that’s the only one I can think of.
(b) is true and should make it substantially safer than other launch systems. But given how narrow the margins are for something going wrong (zero ability to land safely with all engines dead, for example) it’s still going to be pretty dangerous compared to more mundane forms of travel.
Most rockets flew test flights before sticking people inside the same model, but most rockets are also single use and so each stack is fundamentally new.
A future starship could plausibly be the first rocket to fly to space unmanned, return, and then fly humans to space!
I'm not sure there's fire suppression effective enough for this type of leak (especially given rocket constraints)
What is a long term solution for this? Is there something more than "build tanks that don't leak"? I'm sure spaceX has top design and materials experts, now what ;-).
That's interesting
However if you see the stream you can see one of the tanks rapidly emptied before loss of signal
It seems this was not survivable regardless of fire or not
It might not even be about fire suppression. Oxygen and different gases can pool oddly in different types of gravity. If oxygen was leaking, it may be as simple as making sure a vacuum de-gases a chamber before going full throttle.
We know nothing, but the test having good data on what went wrong is a great starting point.
Replying to this comment so people can see the incredible video of the breakup taken from a diverting aircraft:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
If you can displace the oxidizer/air remaining in the volume why not.
The initial tweet says:
> we had an oxygen/fuel leak
If that's correct, then you can't just remove air. The only option would be to cool things down so it stops burning.
just increased venting to keep any vapor concentrations of fuel and oxidiser below that capable of igniting, even simple baffling could suffice as the leaks may be trasitory and flowing out of blowoff valves, so possibly a known risk. Space x is also forgoeing much of the full system vibriatory tests, done on traditiinal 1 shot launches, and failure in presurised systems due to unknown resonance is common. Big question is did it just blow up, or did the automated abort, take it out, likely the latter or there would be a hold on the next launch.
Would be unpleasant if there was crew. Of course this thing is pretty far from human eating.
Would be unpleasant if there was crew.
19 people have died in the 391 crewed space missions humans have done so far. The risk of dying is very high. Starship is unlikely to change that, although the commoditization of space flight could have reduce the risk simply by making problems easier to spot because there's more flights.
The higher frequency of launches seems likely to have a big impact on reliability. It's no different than deploying once per day vs once per month. The more you do it, the more edge cases you hit and the more reliable you can make it.
SpaceX also has a simplification streak: the Raptor engines being the canonical example. Lower complexity generally means less unexpected failure modes.
Modern space ships are very likely to change that, as designs mature and improve.
Early aviation was extremely dangerous. Now a plane is among the safest places to be.
Test flights.
My tests keep failing until I fix all of my code, then we deploy to production. If code fails in production than that's a problem.
We could say that rockets are not code. A test run of a Spaceship surely cost much more than a test run of any software on my laptop but tests are still tests. They are very likely to fail and there are things to learn from their failures.
Running a code test doesn't require firing a rocket.
How would you test a rocket?
He just means MORE checking for leaks.
They already implemented a whole host of changes to the vehicles after the first test back in 2023. There's a list of corrective actions here.
Even NASA years into their existence has suffered catastrophic fatal failures. Even with the best and most knowledgeable experts working on it we are ultimately still in the infancy of space flight. Just like airlines every incident we try and understand the cause and prevent it from happening again. Lastly what they are doing is incredibly difficult with probably thousands of things that could go wrong. I think they are doing an amazing job and hope one day, even if I miss it, that space flight becomes acceptable to all who wish to go to space.
Can you name a space company with less failures? Also I think it is unfair to even compare SpaceX to anything else, because of the insane amount of starts / tests combined unparalleled creativity.
According to this website their current success rate is 99,18%. That's a good number I guess? Considering other companies did not even land their stages for years.
https://spaceinsider.tech/2024/07/31/ula-vs-spacex/#:~:text=....
It says right there in your source that that figure refers to Falcon in particular. For comparison, Starship's current track record is 3/7 launch failures (+1 landing failure).
There's an order of magnitude difference between them. If they were cars, it'd be like comparing the smallest car you can think of vs one of the biggest tanks ever made.
It's just taxpayer money they're blowing up, so it doesn't really matter.
They're blowing up their own money, unless you still count it as being the taxpayer's after the government pays them for launch services.
It sounds like he's talking to investors and not to general public.
In my experience in corporate america you communicate efficiency by proclaiming a checklist of things to do - plausible, but not necessarily accurate things - and then let engineers figure it out.
Nobody cares of the original checklist as long as the problem gets resolved. It's weird but it seems very hard to utter statement "I don't have specific answers but we have very capable engineers, I'm sure they will figure it out". It's always better to say (from the top of your head) "To resolve A, we will do X,Y and Z!". Then when A get's resolved, everyone praises the effort. Then when they query what actually was done it's "well we found out in fact what were amiss were I, J K".
> (as seen from ground)
As seen from a plane in the air with the break up right in front of it:
https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
While the video post does mention "Right in front of us", and it may have appeared that way to the pilots, it wasn't. Gauging relative distance and altitude between aircraft in flight can be notoriously deceptive even to experts, especially in the case of intensely bright, massive, unfamiliar objects at very high speed and great distance.
The RUD was in orbit over 146 kilometers up and >13,000 mph. I'm sure using the FlightAware tracking data someone will work out the actual distance and altitude delta between that plane and the Starship 7 orbital debris. I suspect it was many dozens of miles away and probably still nearly orbital in altitude (~100km).
Spectacular light show though...
Stupid comment. Several flights had to be diverted because of the break-up, and anyone in flight at that time would be rightly concerned about barely-visible high-speed shrapnel showering a much larger area than where the visible debris are - especially when you are responsible for keeping your hundreds of passengers safe in a very unexpected situation with no rehearsed procedure to follow.
Nobody is saying it wasn’t prudent to divert.
It would have been impossible for the pilot to know if that debris was shortly in front of them and at co-altitude or extremely far in front of them and at a significantly higher altitude.
In this case it was almost certainly the latter. But the uncertainty alone was enough to warrant diverting.
> Stupid comment.
Aim higher on HN.
Ok, this:
> Stupid comment
got me. There's literally an HN rule about this: [0]
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
I feel like the world would be a better place if people would tone down the ad-hominem in their day-to-day discourse just a little bit.
That is absolutely insane. Honestly, I would probably assume a MIRV given the current environment.
What a strangely beautiful sight. While I was excited to see ship land, I'm also happy I get to see videos of this!
Yes, both spectacular and beautiful. I guess Starship can now say what the legendary comedy actress (and sex symbol) of early cinema Mae West said:
"When I'm good... I'm very good. But when I'm bad... I'm even better." :-)
Combined with another tower catch, that's two spectacular shows for the price of one. Hopefully the onboard diagnostic telemetry immediately prior to the RUD is enough to identify the root cause so it can be corrected.
I felt.. bad watching that breakup, it reminded me of Columbia.
Which coincidentally launched 22 years ago today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-107
I remember being woken up by the thunder from Columbia.
Lost it over the years but I used to have a photo of about 20 vans of people parked on our property doing the search for debris. Don't think they found any on our land but there was a 3 ft chunk about 5 miles down the road.
OTOH I remembered Columbia too and I felt good knowing that Starship is being tested thoroughly without jeopardizing the crew.
The space-shuttle could not fly to the orbit automatically. It had to have people on board, and the first flight, IIRC, came close to a disaster.
Meta-commentary is annoying (yes, I realize the irony.)
As long as the debris has no effect wherever it lands, I agree with you
A lot of flights seem to be diverting to avoid it...
https://bsky.app/profile/flightradar24.com/post/3lfvhpgmqqc2...
Does SpaceX bother with NOTAM for its launches?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOTAM
It seems like the flights should have been planned around it so no diversion would be needed.
Understandable, but an over reaction. Any debris not burning up is falling down after minutes.
The number of SpaceX video clips that I know are "actual things really happening" which still activate the involuntary "Sci-Fi / CGI effect" neurons in my brain is remarkable.
Yeah. I know that feeling.
That tower catch. That _had_ to be a new version of Kerbal, right? The physics looked good, but there's no way that was real...
Inadvertently perfect timing for this footage. Glowing and backlit by the setting sun, against clear and already darkening evening sky... couldn't plan the shot any better if you tried.
Let's hope no debris came down on anyone or anything apart from open water.
I take it if SpaceX debris hit and destroyed a boat the owner can claim damages from SpaceX?
Does international space law allow for this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Liability_Convention
Only used once, when the Soviets dropped a nuclear reactor on Canada.
> States (countries) bear international responsibility for all space objects that are launched within their territory. This means that regardless of who launches the space object, if it was launched from State A's territory, or from State A's facility, or if State A caused the launch to happen, then State A is fully liable for damages that result from that space object.
But don't forget about a local government in Australia fining NASA $400 for littering after debris from Skylab re-entry landed there.
Most things put into space are designed to burn upon uncontrolled descent through orbit. And then the overwhelming majority of Earth is water and even on land the overwhelming majority of land is either completely uninhabited or sparsely inhabited. And then even if against all odds somehow something doesn't burn up in the atmosphere, and somehow lands in a densely populated area - the odds of hitting a spot with somebody or something relevant on it is still quite low. The overall odds of actually hitting somewhere really bad are just astronomically low.
Nonetheless, recently NASA won the lottery when part of some batteries they jettisoned from the ISS ended up crashing through a house in Florida. [1] Oddly enough there are treaties on this, but only from an international perspective - landing on your own country was not covered! But I'm certain NASA will obviously make it right, as would SpaceX. If they didn't, then surely the family could easily sue as well.
[1] - https://www.space.com/space-debris-florida-family-nasa-lawsu...
Rules of the water says smaller ship yields right of way to bigger ship. Sounds like you screwed up if your yacht got hit by a bigger ship. Of course that applies when the vessels are not tied up. If a big ship his a docked boat, that's an entirely different scenario
Musk said that part of the launch licensing was a requirement to estimate the potential damage to whales in the ocean. He said that the odds turned out to be so low that in his opinion if a whale gets hit it had it coming.
https://jabberwocking.com/did-elon-musk-really-have-to-study...
Given that the engine telemetry shown on the broadcast showed the engines going out one by one over a period of some seconds, I could easily imagine some sort of catastrophic failure on a single engine that cascaded.
It could be many things, plumbing to the engines, tank leak, ect. You could see fire on the control flap actuators, so the ship interior was engulfed in fire at the same time the first engine was out.
Given the huge spread of the debris, it must have been a decent sized boom, no? I mean that's got to be 10's of miles wide in this video.
Yeah, most likely engine bay fire taking out systems one by one. Would be interesting to compare the telemetry cutoff with the video of explosion if possible. That could indicate if the fire even triggered an explosion, flight termination being activated or just reentry heating making the tanks explode.
Who knows where it started, but the fire was definitely in the payload bay in front of the header tanks if seen through the flap actuators during ascent, after speration at ~7:45 min
The single instance of a fire that could be seen in the stream was in the hinge area of a bottom flap.
I noticed that the CH4 tank level was much lower than the O2 tank level. That suggests a leak.
Or FOD in the LOx supply lines. The methane would keep following, even with the turbopump shut down, until the valve closes. And the methane turbopump might actually keep running with reduced supply oxygen - Raptors have two turbopumps.
Most Sci-Fi real footage I have ever seen.
Edit: Reminds me of "The Eye" from star wars Andor
Wow. It reminds me of the comet scene from Andor. I wonder if suborbital pyrotechnics will become a thing one day.
Does anyone know the timing of when the breakup actually occurred?
I’m curious because I was on a flight to Puerto Rico from Florida at 3pm ET they diverted our flight. They didn’t really give us many details but said the “landing strips were closed”. Our friends on a slightly early flight diverted to ST Thomas. We were going to divert to a nearby airport in Puerto Rico (we were going to land in Aguadilla instead of San Juan) so I feel like these diversions wouldn’t be related but the timing seems pretty odd.
Depending on the precise launch time (4:36/4:37 PM CST) "Ship exploded at ≈T+00:08:26": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_7
The fourth one (instagram) doesn't require login.
Side note: annoying that twitter/X requires login. I'd have sworn Elon said he was removing that requirement to login to view tweets (I think he discussed it with George Hotz).
Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=49m30s
Elon:
> This is insane. You shouldn't need a twitter account at all unless you need to write something
George:
> Why did you put the pop up back?
Elon:
> We should not be prohibiting read-only scroll
So there seems to be agreement that twitter shouldn't require an account to read (view) posts. The Twitter Space is from 23 Dec 2022 so perhaps things changed since.
It's not just you, they've been inconsistent about letting you see tweets.
Where will this debris land? Can it impact airplane routes?
https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1880032865209184354
>Commercial flights are turning around to avoid potential debris.
That sounds... unlikely, to say the least. The ship blew up at 145km altitude over Turks and Caicos. Debris would fall thousands of kilometers to the east, if anything survives re-entry.
EDIT: at these speeds, over 20000km/h, the falling debris will travel a very long way before coming down. For satellite re-entry, the usual estimated ground contact point is something like 8000km+ downrange [1]. There is little chance debris would come anywhere near commercial flight altitude in the area around where the videos were made.
Apparently the planned splashdown was in the Indian Ocean near Australia, but this being an uncontrolled re-entry it could be far off from that, in either direction.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009457652...
Im not sure what part you are skeptical about. The debris videos filmed at Turks and Caicos are about 800km east of the explosion video in the Bahamas. They appear to be real. Still high but coming down fast.
Airspace is big, but I wouldn't want to fly a Jet with hundreds of people near it either.
I imagine aviation radar towers would only have the most limited data as the event unfolded.
Arlines are extremely cautious around these kinds of one off events.
It’s not about the calculated risks, but the uncertainty around if they have the right information in the first place. Sure it may have broken up at 145km miles, but what if someone messed up and it actually was 14.5km etc.
> at these speeds, over 20000km/h, the falling debris will travel a very long way before coming down.
Without air resistance, falling 145 km takes 172 seconds, which would result in the debris falling 956 km east of the explosion point if it were moving horizontal to the ground to begin with. With air resistance, it is substantially shorter as everything is decelerating proportional to the velocity cubed. If we approximate the terminal velocity of the debris as 500 km/h, to a first order approximation it would travel approximately 79 km east. The distance from West Caicos island to Grand Turk island is 138 km, for reference.
Satellites are moving much faster and at much higher altitude. Starship was not in orbit.
Certainly causing delays.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01-17/spacex-launch-to-go-a...
east of Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Draw a line from Boca Chia to Turks and keep going
HN comments is just reading strangers steam of consciousness now?
The last one is stage separation, not an explosion. You can clearly see the "exploded" rocket continuing to fly afterwards.
Separation is much closer to the launch pad in Texas, the booster barely makes it downrange at all before turning around. This being filmed from the Bahamas with this much lateral velocity, gotta be the Ship breaking up. Likely the FTS triggered after enough engines failed that it couldn't make orbit / planned trajectory.
I dont think so. I think it is the breakup, with a large mass visible. most of the material will continue on until it parabolically renters and burns up in a visible manner
No, if that was taken from the Bahamas, that's an explosion connected to the loss of the 2nd stage.
Staging happens closer to the Texas coast and I don't believe you'd have line of sight to it from the Bahamas.
If it was the FTS wouldn't the flight control systems send a message back to the ground saying "things are going sideways here, FTS Activated"
Maybe it did, or is it public that it didn't? A possible sequence (very typical in rocket failures) is: fire, engine failure(s), loss of control, rupture due to aero forces or FTS activation, explosion due to propellant mixture. Not all of these have to happen, but it's a typical progression. Before the days of AFTS the FTS activation would be pretty delayed.
This is over the Bahamas. Re-entry was much further east, near Turks and Caicos Islands.
Also, if a pressurized tank is reentering, that means the FTS failed to detonate.
Nope. That's definitely an explosion (source: I'm in the rocket business). However it may not be an explosion of the whole stage. Probably of the engine section.
Nevermind. It was probably the FTS like other people pointed out.
It’s crazy how fast that ship is moving and how big the explosion was that it looks like something much, much lower in the air went boom. It was transitting the sky faster than a commercial aircraft does. So it gives an impression more like a private aircraft breaking up at 5-10k feet.
I have a boat and want to pick up floating heat tiles in the ocean, do you think we can find the parts by Puerto Rico?
Where can I find the heat tiles? Will they be landing near Puerto Rico?
Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity.
Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130