Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/29/watch-spacex-prototype-starsh.html
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Yay space.
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You made my heart skip a beat thinking that the one in Florida had a mishap on the eve of the human rated launch. Thankfully the writeup cleared that up.
Blowing up your early prototypes is a tried and true constant in rocket development.
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Still not the kind of thing you’d want to see on the news the day before you are slated to be one of the first human passengers aboard the company’s other line of rockets.
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“I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts—all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.” John Glenn; God speed, you.
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Indeed, it seemed a weirdly celebratory headline for a story about the death of two astronauts. I’m glad to see it was simply misleading rather than insane.
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True, but also to be fair, the Starship prototype uses an entirely different engine, which is what was being tested, and the Falcon has a pretty enviable reliability record at this point.
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“That was… not nominal.”
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holy crap!
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well said
Are we sure the Starship blew up, and not an external tank? I thought the actual Starship prototype was the silver thing on the left…
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The Starship prototype is the tall silver tower in the center-right of the frame that starts dumping gas (unclear right now if it was O2 or methane) about halfway through the video. There’s another video in the Twitter thread that shows it performing a static fire of the Raptor engine at the base. The structure on the left is likely a holding tank for liquid fuel.
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There’s a line in John D. Clark’s Ignition! that goes something like “Rocketry is always just one hard start away from pyrotechnics.”
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Dear SpaceX Boca Chica,
I know your siblings over at the cape are getting all of the attention right now, and I completely get that this is part of the Starship design process. But since the general population does not get that, could you please just not blow anything up for a few days until Crewed Falcon is safely docked?
-k, thanks, bye
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Is it OK?
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Yikes! That won’t buff out.
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:
You actually do want pyrotechnics in rocketry… but only in the part of the engine where you want it to happen. 
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That’s what we used to call “a non-scheduled energic disassembly event.” I kind of like “not nominal” better.
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Yeah I think I read that phrase in Jim Lovell’s Lost Moon. Or “rapid unplanned disassembly” (RUD).
See also:
A friend who worked as a consultant for NASA would say to me “off-nominal” in a dry, deadpan way, and the more detached he sounded, usually the worse the situation was.
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