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SpaceX Has Finally Figured Out Why Starship Exploded, And The Reason Is Utterly Embarrassing
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Title: SpaceX Has Finally Figured Out Why Starship Exploded, And The Reason Is Utterly Embarrassing
These points are really silly. Two engines exploded causing the ship to tumble. I'm not sure what they think additional communications redundancy would help with at that point.
And how do you indefiy a fuel leak on the ground that hasn't happened yet? It was caused by vibrations at a resonant frequency that is only reached at a certain fuel level?
Who said that? That's really silly. And isn't that payload with full reusability?
Space is hard, it's literally rocket science. The embarrassing thing is it failed in the same way twice. But finding these resonance issues that only pop up in specific fuel states, makes sense it's hard to pin down. I think they'll need to characterize their vib spectrum as fuel burns down, then analyze the harmonics of the hardware and make sure they don't couple. It isn't easy, but they should be able to.
Edit: thanks for the summary, I just disagree with the article.
Also starship hasn't started its operational lifespan. These are test articles still. They should absolutely be treating them with respect and due diligence since they are launching, but this is just highly public testing on a reusable rocket. Success not guaranteed and that's why they aren't flying real payloads (even of their own).
Also, pretty sure Apollo 1 was a great example of Saturn rockets not being flawless.
What does Apollo 1 have to do with the reliability of the Saturn rockets�