Comment by terramex 6 months 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:
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.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE54iL7xbZL/?igsh=dTNtZ2Q4aHl...
It's beautiful. Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.
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?
Looks like work of the Flight Termination System. Something measurable had to go very wrong.
While the telemetry was still going, you could see Ship engines going out one by one. Earlier when there was video there was what looked like flames visible inside one of the flap hinges, definitely shouldn't be there on ascent. Presumably something failed internally and caused the Ship to shut down before reaching target trajectory, at which point either FTS or the failure itself caused it to blow up, as seen on the Insta reel.
On the NSF youtube channel they pointed out that at some point the methane indicator started decreasing much faster than the LOX indicator, which points to some sort of leak. It would explain why the engines started to shut down.
> Something measurable had to go very wrong
Or slightly wrong. An FTS is programmed to be conservative. Particularly on unmanned flights. Doubly particularly on reëntry. Triply so on experiments bits.
All of the exception handling was spent on the try/catch of the booster.
> Depends on the programmers I guess
It depends on the Air Force.
It wasn't FTS, it just blew up: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1880033318936199643
Imo if SpaceX thought it was possibly FTS they wouldn't say RUD. They still had telemetry for multiple seconds as it pitched wildly and engines failed, if FTS didn't trigger then it probably didn't at all.
Yeah I thought about that some more and at that altitude and speed the FTS is usually already deactivated.
Where can I find the heat tiles? Will they be landing near Puerto Rico?
Another failure, another few months of figuring out why this isn't working and can't stick to its flight path. They caused chaos for many commercial planes, so they'll definitely need some full reports to the FTA to know what they're doing about this, why the debris is falling over flight paths, and so on.
The last one is stage separation, not an explosion. You can clearly see the "exploded" rocket continuing to fly afterwards.