Tsiolkovsky’all

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • SpaceX playing soccer with COPVs and then bolting them on the vehicle doesn’t feel like a more comforting answer but I agree it’s one I didn’t list. Not sure I understand why people would be rattling around inside the vehicle after a single engine test and then not re-running the single engine for a regression test.

    /shrug, still you’re right. Unreported damage post-installation would totally do this, it’s just not a root cause I’ve seen. Would speak to a breakdown in safety culture for my folks, not sure what the safety culture looks like on the Starship line.


  • Oh c’mon.

    Cannot possibly spin “blew up randomly during test prep” as a positive outcome. They probably don’t know how not to build that specific one unless they happened to instrument the faulty prop system components - they know that it failed but likely not why or how to fix it.

    All evidence points to Starship having a super-finicky MPS that fails on the regular… which probably means they’re chasing performance by removing mass from the MPS and tank structure… which means either this design doesn’t work (totally possible) or that the as-built performance falls short of what was promised.

    If you want to stan for Musk, I guess everyone has a type and I’m not going to shame you over it… but blowing up during test prep is not a good news story.


  • Maybe. Regardless, problem either in design or build.

    Designing under-reinforced tanks indicates that the design can’t make payload and they’re cutting too far into structure allocations to make up for it.

    Rupture could also be poor materials (sign of Boeing-style disregard for standards and safety) or a bad weld (same plus maybe training issues on the line). Means they’re running bad QA/QC protocols if the faulty material/construction made it to flight.

    Chasing performance at the cost of safety sounds right down Musk’s alley.



  • The reason I am generally skeptical of the technology is the same reason I’m not going to try to give you a definition.

    I’ve never seen it solve a problem or be proposed as a reasonable solution to a problem. What happens instead is that someone says “could we do BLOCKCHAIN for this, it’ll make it way more modern” and the subset of people that want to look really forward-leaning and cool say “YEAH”. If that subset of people is loud enough, a lot of money gets spent and a bunch of implementers have to figure out how to jam in something they can say is blockchainy… leading to a proliferation of definitions.

    The results have been universally more expensive applications with fewer helpful features. I don’t like “blockchain” because everything that touches it gets worse.





  • The Starship concept of operations requires 11 launches for each mission to the moon - one for the vehicle, another 10 to refuel it once it get into earth orbit. Each of these missions have to autonomously dock and perform a cryogenic fuel transfer.

    Nobody, and I mean nobody, has shown an operationally-viable in-space cryo transfer. Even doing it on Earth is a fussy thing - cryo transfer was behind two of the Artemis I scrubs, and NASA’s been doing it since Apollo.

    Getting one Starship into orbit is an interesting milestone but it’s a long way from what they promised the world they could do… and the clock is ticking.