Clickbaiters are worse than Putin. Disgusting creatures.
Saving you a click:
SpaceX believes that vibrations caused a failure of a fuel line in the aft section of the upper stage (i.e., Starship, not its Super Heavy booster), leading to a fuel leak.
Yeah, that’s not very typical. I’d like to make that point.
I was hoping the answer was “because musk wasn’t inside” and the next one he needed to be in, but sure, it’s built like a cyber truck is pretty embarrassing also
Oh my god, how embarrassing.
Oh wow, absolutely embarrassing! Even a 5 year old would know to check for vibrations in the fuel lines 🤦
But also, fuel leaks are really common with rockets, and we know how to prevent them from happening. The fuels rockets use can escape through the tiniest of faults, and the complex fuel systems they use have numerous potential points of failure. As such, it is standard practice to find these potential leaks with intensive pre-flight checks to identify and solve these issues before they escalate into a catastrophe.
It’s pretty standard practice apparently, it IS embarrassing.
standard practice to find these potential leaks with intensive pre-flight checks to identify and solve these issues before they escalate into a catastrophe.
Except these particular leaks are due to vibration modes (on the newly designed vacuum jacketed fuel lines) that seem to be only present at high g’s towards the end of the burn.
After the first ship to use these new lines blew up, SpaceX made some changes and conducted a minute-long test firing on the ground of the second ship. A minute of the rocket going through various thrust levels on the ground is plenty of time to pick up issues if it was going to be visible on the ground.
Presumably it looked ok, so they launched it, and the second one blew up. They probably added more sensors on those lines, because they seem to be pretty sure that vibration modes are the issue on those lines now.
Yes, you could model this, and no doubt they did to some extent, but nothing beats testing in real life unfortunately.
It’s not rocket scie- oh, nvm
Well it isn’t brain surgery.
