Gee, maybe all those regulations and requirements are useful.
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SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell worked at The Aerospace Corp. before going to SpaceX. Can you imagine the number of actions those bastards would have given us to answer had this been a Titan or Delta thing? I canāt.
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Thank you for your hard, hard work and integrity
Thatās why we landed on the moon (and everything else)
hard, hard work and even more integrity.
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Just one hundreds of thousands over the years. I may have made a couple good decisions, but I was lucky enough to be with some great teams of people.
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Yeah well, isnāt it amazing there are so many people like you in the world?
Thatās my biggest challenge today: seeing so many people who opt for disparaging, uninspired and redundant neggativity.
But if even a small percent are fudging numbers or acting in ways which are not unified, relable and legitimate then, well, the rocket is meant to explode.
Itās dreamlike that so many people could provide each part to absolute specs and production ratios without inefficiency, error, and outright fraud.
Integrity.
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Quality is conformance to specs and requirements. Not āgoodnessā
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Kind of an ironic last name isnāt it ? Shotwell ?
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Hereās a really good review video by a guy named Scott Manley. Iāve watched several videos of his over the years and heās pretty solid.
A few things that stuck out to me from this:
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The amount of debris, and heavy debris at that, thrown into the air is astounding. You can clearly see it around lift off. Itās likely four engines were knocked out from that.
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The engine losses affected the trajectory enough that they were late getting to the Max Q, that is maximum dynamic pressure from moving through the air, point.
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The structure was probably compromised as thereās a leaked photo showing it was bent. The game was over by then, though.
He makes a comment late warning people who might be tempted not to go diving for the wreck, referring to ITAR. For those who donāt know what that is, it means this rocket and its technology are subject to US laws governing International Traffic and Arms Regulations. In short: donāt give this stuff to the Russians or Chinese even though itās not classified.
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Itās basically what I said in this post, so yes.
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Starship 2 may be a while from launching at Boca Chicaā¦or anywhere for that matter. Given the smoldering mess left in the wake of the launch, it may require an entirely new launchpad design to get it off the ground safely.
Controlled explosions are funny that way.
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I get it, even though like almost everyone I donāt know what those are. 
Theyāre explained in both the stories I have linked and the one you linked. I donāt know what to tell you beyond those and their names are pretty clear.
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Donāt take my light-hearted comments as complaints. Iām satisfied simply with your statement that those things were important and were fouled up.
Fascinating insights into Musk and his way of pushing innovation:
At Least It Didnāt Blow Up On The Pad - AVweb
Musk has had a pattern of sorts in saying his rockets are likely to blow up. Iāve always wondered if this is honestly reflective of a culture that moves at the speed of heat with high risk tolerance and minimal testing or just spin against the inevitable failures.
I was watching Miles OāBrien on PBS last night who seemed a little puzzled at why all those SpaceX people were cheering and cheered even louder when the booster went awry and blew up.
Sounds like nobody will get fired. Hopefully they spend their bonus money wisely.
(More broadly, isnāt this the kind of āperformanceā people accuse the government of? Not sure Musk is the best example of free enterprise.)
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Iām sure most of you are familiar with this current event. How might it relate to this thread? Hang in there for a while.
Ten or eleven years ago I got a cold call at work from Stockton Rush, the CEO of OceanGate and, by some reports, the operator/pilot of the missing submarine. He was in the midst of developing submersibles, although the business model he told us about wasnāt about deep water tourism. He wanted to talk to us about making a graphite/epoxy hull for the subs he was developing. He and a small team came to visit us and talk about options. We had some recommendations for alternatives as we thought there were some concerns about how they wanted to do it, but also said if that was the design they wanted we could do that. A couple of months later they let us know that theyād decided to have Boeingās research group south of Seattle do the work using an entirely different approach, one that we could have done as well, but whatever. It seemed like a long shot for us in the first place and we hadnāt spent a lot of money chasing it, so we just moved on.
About a year after I retired I got a call one day from a guy Iād met that ran a design & analysis shop in North Carolina. He said he was now working with OceanGate, and that they were thinking the way to get the vessel certified could be to comply to NASAās composite structure & composite pressure vessel specs. As I had spent a lot of quality time with those specs and trying to see how weād comply with rockets they thought I might be good to have on the team. Iād just signed a consulting contract with Northrop Grumman, but I didnāt see a problem with doing both yet disclosed the relationship and said weād have to be cautious about conflicts of interest. That was the last I heard from them.
Iām seeing in some reporting on this that there is not recognized certification for this submersible. That gave me the willies. First, Iām sure glad my fingers arenāt anywhere near this event because I just donāt want that kind of stress, but secondly, how could you not have to prove this is safe to some level of reliability to someone in the world? You wouldnāt do that with an airplane or a rocket.
Which, finally, brings me to why I think this is related to SpaceXās launch issues. Whereās the line , if there is one, where these sorts of extremely high risk ventures should just stay in regulated, government lanes and not be just marketed through private enterprise? While apparently OceanGateās liability waiver forms were significant, do we really think these hyper-rich folks on board grasped the risks? How about the expense the US Coast Guard/taxpayer now gets to fund to try to rescue these people? (I actually think theyāre already toast, which makes me sad because Rush was an interesting and pretty nice guy - even inviting me if I were ever in Seattle to drop in and take a submarine ride.) The design that OceanGate approached us with had some inherent issues if you wanted to use graphite/epoxy, but based on what I saw on a CBS News report yesterday thatās what they went with anyway. Elon Musk just tells his launch pad designers not to bother with a flame trench in spite of 70 years worth of rocket launch history that says you should have one, and he damages his own rocket and buries a neighboring community in sand. Are either of these approaches really a way to advance technology and accessibility to environments that, as Wally Schirra once said, are trying to kill you?
Food for thought.
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As has been said before, there is a reason the hammers cost $500 when dealing with a customer that requires safety specs and regulations.
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āā¦factors like bad weather and mechanical issues mean the submersible vessels rarely make it to the Titanic, despite the expensive price tag. This season has seen zero successful divesā¦ā
$250K, each?
Iām glad I donāt have to deal with the twin maladies of wealth and boredom.
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OceanGate has just released a statement acknowledging that everyone on the Titan has been lost. A debris field indicating catastrophic failure has been found about 500m from the wreck of the Titanic
I was sort of hoping that the loss wouldnāt be due to a structural failure, just because I know that topic and the use of the materials they were using was something we were concerned about when they approached ATK for the work, but it sure sounds like thatās a prime suspect. The good news, if there is some, is it was over fast for them.
RIP, folks.
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I suspected catastrophic failure since they had several ways to release the ballasts (literally rock the submersible, push air into them, or after 24 hours they were designed to drop automatically). Very sad and could have been avoidable - lots of safety measures, testing, etc. not done. Pressure vessels should be pressure tested.
Also of interest is the search area was two size the times of Connecticut. Yet, found pretty much right next to the Titanic. Wondering if they were able to see it or if the failure was before and they just dropped nearby.
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