Apparently Elon said yesterday in Twitter spaces, that the pad damage is not that bad. Things went better than expected. FTS needs work. Water cooled plate will be installed. He says 6-8 weeks until next flight. 4-5 flights this year. 80% chance of orbit this year.

Even after applying Pi factor to predictions, still not bad.

Give it time....Elon needs to talk with Mike.

Elon said 40+ seconds from FTS activation to destruction.
This fits with the 8K tracking video where you can see two new plumes appear on the rocket when FTS was activated.

I think the starship FTS needs a bigger bang.

My two theories are:

1)FTS was mounted on the tank dome. It only pierced one side of the dome venting that tanks and not causing mixing. Needs a bigger bang to breach both domes...


2)FTS breached the tank dome, but the initial He presurant stratified to the top of the LOX tank making the gas mixture at the breaching hole non-explosive.

If it was #1 its a starship specific issue, if its #2 this could call the F9 FTS system into question as well... (I believe its the same system).


One of the other things that Elon said was that they lost gimbal control at 85 seconds (my guess is probably out of Hydraulic fluid)

There's not enough hydraulic fluid in the rocket to make an appreciable change in the plume color. The Super Heavy reportedly uses 74 gallons of hydraulic fluid, and that's tiny compared to the flow of everything else in the plume.

Has SpaceX confirmed the HPU failed? The rocket remained under control for ~2 minutes after this which means engines were being gimballed correctly, so they had hydraulic pressure and didn't lose all the fluid early.

The event shortly after on the other side also caused an engine to change mixture severely and aslo resulted in parts shedding. That means valves or pumps are breaking, and really only pumps have enough energy to fail dramatically.


For 2+ minutes, things were in control, things went out of control when the flight schedule got past stage separation and didn't.

Mike C.

Elon need to talk with the FAA.

His assessment is a technical one, what repairs can he make in a certain time, not a political one, what approvals he can get for the next flight.

His lack of care on this flight just bought him more oversight than he wants.

Mike C.

Falcon 9 FTS in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu5Ydz34oVc&t=110s

Looks like a definite bang before parts came off.

Mike C.

He also said 3 engines weren’t started due to whatever issue and they had no evidence of FOD from the rock tornado.

The loss of TVC was a game changer.

Reviewing the video, there is no apparent loss of control at that point.

It takes until about 2 minutes before you see any real change in attitude.

Mike C.

Reviewing the video, there is no apparent loss of control at that point.

It takes until about 2 minutes before you see any real change in attitude.

Mike C.

Meh....the nice folks at Commercial Space know this. They are ex-rocketeers. I know a few of them. I've worked with them in industry.

Anyone who's done this kinda stuff knows that this was a demonstration flight....It was commonly done years ago. It will be fixed....and there will be more flights. Some will fail....but they will demonstrate reliability growth....and the system will improve.
Elon need to talk with the FAA.

His assessment is a technical one, what repairs can he make in a certain time, not a political one, what approvals he can get for the next flight.

His lack of care on this flight just bought him more oversight than he wants.

Mike C.

3 of the engines didn't fire up as the system deemed them not healthy. 30 was the minimum for liftoff, so it lifted off at the minimum. Lean on liftoff was not intentional. They then lost others and lost the gimbals system.

No evidence "Rock tornado" did damage to the heat shields or engines. Rock tornado wasn't expected based on static fire, and they would not have flown if he had known.

Minimal damage to OLM components.

Engines on booster 9 (next up) has significant improvements from booster 7 (the one that flew).

Will liftoff faster.

Flame trench or water cooled plates would both work, but they are going the plate route.

The upper stage didn't attempt separation.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/iJ93kFiyPdc[/youtube]

One, the static fire was 50% throttle. That tells me they felt it was risky to try 100% so they were concerned about pad integrity from the start.

Two, they were already building a heat shield for the pad, started 3 months ago, so they knew pad damage was an issue before they launched.

Three, there is enough launch experience and knowledge in the industry to know, positively, they needed something on the pad to protect it. This "oh, we didn't realize it would break" excuse is lame. Their prior actions, low throttle static test and already building improvements, tells us otherwise.

Somehow this heat shield which was started 3 months ago will now be ready in 6 weeks. They could have accelerated it and used it on this flight.


Why not? Was there anything to be gained by NOT doing it?

That would have been more informative than the pad destruction.

Seems like they should have a button which causes first stage to shutdown and initiate the separation sequence so they can at least try firing the second stage and see what happens. Once they lost first stage control, push the button and see what happens.

The metric here is the amount learned per dollar/time, and that was negative for the pad, but would have been positive for the second stage separation.

Mike C.

Interesting that their launch control software allows it to leave the pad with 3 engines not running?

Did he say what caused the loss of TVC?