Elon Musk reveals cause of Starship explosion, discusses giant rocket's future (video)

[Admin]

SpaceX's giant Starship Mars rocket blew up about eight minutes into its second-ever test flight last fall because the launch team vented its liquid oxygen, Elon Musk said.

Elon Musk reveals cause of Starship explosion, discusses giant rocket's future (video) : Read more

 

[DrRaviSharma]

January 17 2024

Second Starship failure reason and explanation by Musk is not correct.

Additional Cryogens happened on all Apollo Saturn Rockets and SIVB stages and were used for additional trajectories and vented safely especially after separation.

Thus fact that STARSHIP second flight had extra Cryogenics is no excuse.

They should include this as a normal safety measure to controllably vent.


There is one more argument for controlling additional cryogenics safely, namely there will be variable Lunar Landing and cislunar trajectory consumptions of cryogenics in all future flights of Starships. This should be handled like the famous safety Motto of Apollo.

I guess we do not or do not need to learn from past!

For example, we used this extra fuel to impact the Moon using SIVB stage to read ALSEP seismometers deployed on Moon (LEM) by previous missions of Apollo 11 and beyond.
Flight trajectory managers need not vent cryogenics prematurely and use predetermined options to manage spare cryogenic inventories.

Thanks.

Ravi
(Dr. Ravi Sharma, Ph.D. USA)
NASA Apollo Achievement Award
ISRO Distinguished Service Awards
Former MTS NASA HQ MSEB Apollo
Former Scientific Secretary ISRO HQ
Ontolog Board of Trustees
Particle and Space Physics
Senior Enterprise Architect

SAE Fuel Cell Tech Committee voting member for 20 years.

 

[DrRaviSharma]

Further
We are all anxious for vision of Elon and performance of Starship to be synchronous. Hence his team must also live the same vision and prepare for the following type of next steps
Examples:

• Rendezvous with variety of platforms, not only SpaceX family orbiting platforms, Orions' or ISS but with NASA Lunar Gateways, future space tourism platforms, etc.
• Prove reliability of pre human lunar landing from Gateway multiple attempts to determine success rates before descending actual humans.
• Practice ingress-egress into various NASA, EU and other docking and transfers to be qualified for Lunar human landing capability with life support during lunar descent ascent orbits and at lunar surface..
• more later... BUT STARSHIP IS THE FUTURE LUNAR EXCURSION MODULE FOR ARTEMIS AS WAS LEM DURING APOLLO.

• OUR BEST WISHES TO NASA AND SPACEX FOR THIS Pathbreaking step and Elon's Vision.

Ravi
(Dr. Ravi Sharma, Ph.D. USA)
NASA Apollo Achievement Award
ISRO Distinguished Service Awards
Former MTS NASA HQ MSEB Apollo
Former Scientific Secretary ISRO HQ
Ontolog Board of Trustees
Particle and Space Physics
Senior Enterprise Architect
SAE Fuel Cell Tech Committee voting member for 20 years.