Day: April 23, 2023

Thursday, April 20^th saw SpaceX attempt the first orbital flight test of their Starship / Super Heavy launch vehicle combination. As most reading this article likely already know, things did not go entirely well with the vehicle’s flight termination system (FLS) being used to destroy it just under  four minutes into its ascent.

The flight was always going to be a risk; the Starship / Super Heavy programme has been an extraordinary public display of a rapid development cycle (some might say too rapid), with little in the way of comprehensive systems and integration testing to match that of the likes of NASA. In addition, and ahead of the launch attempt, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell went on record as stating the launch wasn’t a “focus” for the company; that lay in upping the production rate for starship vehicles and boosters – a rather surprising statement, all things considered, and one I’ll return to later.

Launch came at 13:33 UTC, after some two hours of propellant loading on both vehicles, and proceeded per the notes below:

T -00:02: 33		Engine ignition and hold on the Orbital Launch Mount (OLM) as trust builds.
T +00:04		Launch clamps release, and vehicle commences ascent, most likely with the failure of three Raptors, two forming a pair on the outer ring of engines, one within the steerable inner ring.
T +00:11		Ship 24 clears the launch tower.
T +00:15		Booster 7 clears the launch tower, first confirmation of three engine failures / shut-downs.
T +00:19		Vehicle exhibits diagonal vertical movement, potentially due to the off-centre thrust resulting from the failure of the two outer ring motors.
T +00:28		Visible flashes in exhaust plume followed by debris departing the base of the vehicle at high speed – thought to be one of the hydraulic pressure units (HPUs), used to gimbal the inner ring of Raptor motors and steer the vehicle.
T +00:40		Loss of 4th Raptor, the third for the outer ring.
T +01:01		Loss of 5th Raptor, the fourth for the outer ring, as vehicle enters Max-Q.
T+01:30		Vehicle exits Max-Q.
T +02:00		Vehicle starts to exhibit off-nominal exhaust plume.
T +02:23		In a split-screen view, vehicle is seen to start slewing in flight at the point it is expected to rotate, re-stabilise and allow the separation of Ship 24 from Booster 7.
T +02:46		Vehicle is clearly spinning / tumbling.
T +03:09		Ship 24 appears to start venting propellants (or possibly a reaction / attitude control thrusters firing).
T +03:12		Venting (or thruster exhaust plumes) visible on both Ship 24 and upper portion of Booster 7.
T +03:25		Vehicle now clearly caught in a flat spin, venting / thruster plumes still visible from the booster’s upper section and from Ship 24.
T +03:58		Flight termination system (FTS) automatically triggered. Vehicle is destroyed.

While the data is still being assessed, the most probable cause for the loss of vehicle is a combination of the loss of at least one of the HPUs and the loss (or partial loss) of two of the inner gimbaling motors, coupled with the off-centre thrust generated by the failure of two pairs of motors located in the same hemisphere of the outer ring of 20 engines leaving the vehicle unable to sufficiently compensate for the biased thrust, resulting in the start of the spin / tumble, which continued beyond the point of recovery, triggering the FTS.

Following the launch, social media was swamped with hails of the launch being either a “success” or a “failure” – with the former being based on statements by SpaceX that if the stack cleared the tower it would be a “successful flight”; hardly the highest of bars to clear for a vehicle intended to be “rapidly reusable”, and the latter based on the fact that the vehicle had to be destroyed – also hardly a fair assessment: rocket can fail – as evidenced earlier in the month by the loss of the smaller Terran-1 rocket on its maiden launch.

Certainly, there was a lot of valuable data gathered on the performance of the Raptor engines – although not all of this was good. From images gathered, it appears a total of 8 Raptors failed either fully (6) or partially (2). That’s a potential loss of 25% of thrust; not something you’d want to see on a payload carrying mission. On the other hand, however, the uncontrolled spin / tumble showed the starship / booster combination was fully capable of passing through Max-Q and showed remarkable resilience in withstanding any break-up prior to the FTS being triggered.

In particular, the test proved – as many looking at the launch site objectively had long noted (including myself) – the Orbital Launch Mount (OLM), the so-called “stage zero” of the system, was far from up to snuff if it is to support multiple launches, thanks to the lack of any provisioning of a water deluge system or flame deflectors.

Both of these are essential elements within any high-thrust rocket launch system. Flame deflectors do pretty much what their name implies: deflect the heat and flame of engine exhausts away from the launch complex infrastructure and launch vehicle, working in concert with the water deluge system. This delivers hundreds of thousands of litres of water across the launch pad and under it, to both absorb sound to prevent it being reflected back up onto the vehicle as damage-inducing pressure waves, and to absorb the raw heat of the engine exhausts through flash vaporisation – seen as the white clouds of “smoke” erupting from the pads during SLS and former space shuttle launches.

Continue reading “Space Sunday: Starship orbital flight test” →