Starship's flight 7 has failed

This flight test was much anticipated, by many, including yours truly. That may be why I had some trouble keeping the picture on. Lots of viewers. It seemed like a problem at the source, as I moved from site to site looking for a good connection.

Anyway, there was another good catch of the booster, and all seemed well from what I could see of it. Then, all of a sudden, there's nothing from the second stage.

Further review shows a loss of an engine shortly after the catch, about 7:40 into the flight. A couple others followed about 20 seconds later, then the signal was lost.

After scanning the webs for information about what happened, I found several videos showing an explosion and a Columbia shuttle type debris field flying over the Turks and Caicos islands. That's way out in the Atlantic near Puerto Rico ( I think). Final readouts, as I recall, showed an altitude of 140 km, and maybe velocity of around 21k kmh. Therefore, not all that close to orbital velocity. Engines may have started underperforming well before. Scheduled engine shutoff wasn't that far ahead in the schedule.

So it does seem to be fully confirmed and all that it was a failure, but the reasons are not clear. This one may be hard to figure. The review showed what looked like a nominal flight, then a sudden loss of engines and explosion.

What this means is anybody's guess. Mine is that there will be a backlash of some kind to Musk. It would be a shame to see it get played all out of proportion to what actually happened, but it wouldn't surprise me if that happens.





8:08 PM:

Ellie in Space channel has some good video to consider. It kinda looks like fuel sloshing could be an issue after an engine goes out. The fuel indicates move around a lot. Sloshing is a problem, I suspect. Also, engine failures are an issue, especially after this many flights. If an engine out is going to do this much, then it may indicate a difficult fix. A bit early to say, though.









10:16 PM:

Something occurred to me. If the only engine left running is a non-gimbaling engine, should that have been an automatic abort? If so, then how does the flight software handle an obvious non-recoverable situation?

If you turn down the sound and just play the video over and over at where I've "jipped" it ( joined in progress), you will notice that one final engine was still on just before the signal was lost ( and presumable RUD)-- this wasn't a flight that was viable any longer, yet the engine was still on.

I am wondering if the ship could have been brought down in a more controlled fashion, as opposed to having it blow up way up in the sky like that. Maybe an engine shutoff, and the attitude control and flaps could have guided it down in a belly flop mode as if it were doing a soft landing. Maybe even an engine start attempt near the surface of the ocean, if the RUD was avoided. Just wondering if that were possible in this instance.