Starship Flight 8 DISCUSSION : Starbase TX : 6 March 2025 (23:30 UTC)

[Lee Jay]

Four outright failures in eight flights.  Two seemingly repetitive failures in a row.  This looks more and more to me like a failed program.  At this point such programs are usually terminated, or at the very least the management structure is turned over and the engineering is reassessed during a long stand down, which doubles or triples the program cost.

 - Ed Kyle

 Yeah, you’ve been saying this forever about everything to do with any kind of reuse. It really seems sometimes like you wish everything was back to the good (lame) old days when the entire planet launched like 22 satellites a year.

It’s only failed if you give up. It no doubt needs lots of work still but there is nothing so far showing the concept is impossible.

Falcon 1 flight 4 delivered a payload to orbit.
Falcon 9 flight 1 delivered a payload to orbit.
Here we are, 15 boosters, 34 ships and test articles, countless hundreds of engines, and 8 full stack flights, with no payload delivered to orbit.

This program was first announced in 2010.  It's starting to look like a fully expendable design would waste less hardware than this fully reusable design.

[Herb Schaltegger]

It amuses me when people express alarm that a rocket exploded over the ocean after public notice was issued as a warning to everyone in the world that a rocket might explode over the ocean.

And caused air travel disruptions with not-insignificant economic effects. For the second time in a row. Hate to break it to folks, but Jet-A and avgas ain’t free, nor is all the wasted flight time, flight disruptions and crew shuffling likely caused as aircrew members individually exceed their legal time before mandatory rest.

[SpaceLizard]

Four outright failures in eight flights.  Two seemingly repetitive failures in a row.  This looks more and more to me like a failed program.  At this point such programs are usually terminated, or at the very least the management structure is turned over and the engineering is reassessed during a long stand down, which doubles or triples the program cost.

 - Ed Kyle

 Yeah, you’ve been saying this forever about everything to do with any kind of reuse. It really seems sometimes like you wish everything was back to the good (lame) old days when the entire planet launched like 22 satellites a year.

It’s only failed if you give up. It no doubt needs lots of work still but there is nothing so far showing the concept is impossible.

Falcon 1 flight 4 delivered a payload to orbit.
Falcon 9 flight 1 delivered a payload to orbit.
Here we are, 15 boosters, 34 ships and test articles, countless hundreds of engines, and 8 full stack flights, with no payload delivered to orbit.

This program was first announced in 2010.  It's starting to look like a fully expendable design would waste less hardware than this fully reusable design.

Isn't this comparison also unfair since Falcon's upper stage was small enough that it didn't have nearly as stringent de-orbit assurance requirements; which allowed a barely functional and non-de-orbit-able upper stage to deploy a payload with minimal licensing or regulatory interest? Starship requires a much higher degree of assured functionality before full orbit, so it reasonably requires more dodgy test flights before payload deployment. Or do I have that wrong?

[sstli2]

There's a reasonable middle ground between the doomers who say "cancel the program" and the believers who say "this is no big deal".

It's an ambitious program. It was never going to be the case that all the goals (partial reusability, full reusability, rapid reusability, heavy lift payloads, orbital refueling, human spaceflight capability, deep space capability, Mars colonies, etc.) were going to be achieved in "Elon time".

These test flights show that there are no shortcuts. There is no speed-running a rocket development program; you don't land a booster and then skip right to landing on Mars. It will be a long and arduous process to identify and rectify issues with the architecture, prove out its capabilities, and refine its reliability.

These test flights also show an enormous amount of potential. Major milestones have been achieved and more to come by the end of this year. It may be a few more years yet, many more test flights, and a couple more setbacks, before Starship reaches its promise. That's just how it goes.

No need for hasty conclusions one way or another.

[ChrisC]

Video of post RUD debris is posted on FB page:  “Bahamas, land and sea” page. Video taken from Staniel Cay

It's the first time we've seen him here in a long time, so I just wanted to point it out: Retired Downrange is in Turks and Caicos, how perfect is that?!

[Vultur]

Four outright failures in eight flights.  Two seemingly repetitive failures in a row.  This looks more and more to me like a failed program.  At this point such programs are usually terminated, or at the very least the management structure is turned over and the engineering is reassessed during a long stand down, which doubles or triples the program cost.
 - Ed Kyle

That's why SpaceX isn't publicly traded and they're not going to tripple their program cost.  It's cheaper to keep flying, especially if they can start re-flying boosters.   They have caught every booster that they intended to catch (GSE divert doesn't count against the vehicle).  So 3-3 on booster catches, the biggest rocket ever flown and all that hardware to inspect.  How is that a failed program?
I've been on failed programs.  Two years in design reviews that were too scared to build one prototype.

That can be true while their reputation keep tarnishing at the same time. At some point those immunity from the outside are gonna be considered a bad thing

SpaceX is still the #1 launch provider in the world, by a major margin, even if Starship blows up a bunch more times. As long as that remains true -- and New Glenn or Vulcan's flight rate would have to really ramp up fast to change it - I don't think a tarnished reputation matters much, especially outside the circles that actually can make a difference to the program (federal agency leadership etc).

Two similar failures in a row looks bad, but IDK how much "looks bad" matters in a case like this.

Test vehicles blow up. Question is, did they learn something useful or was it a waste of time, effort , and money?

[Alvian@IDN]

Four outright failures in eight flights.  Two seemingly repetitive failures in a row.  This looks more and more to me like a failed program.  At this point such programs are usually terminated, or at the very least the management structure is turned over and the engineering is reassessed during a long stand down, which doubles or triples the program cost.
 - Ed Kyle

That's why SpaceX isn't publicly traded and they're not going to tripple their program cost.  It's cheaper to keep flying, especially if they can start re-flying boosters.   They have caught every booster that they intended to catch (GSE divert doesn't count against the vehicle).  So 3-3 on booster catches, the biggest rocket ever flown and all that hardware to inspect.  How is that a failed program?
I've been on failed programs.  Two years in design reviews that were too scared to build one prototype.

That can be true while their reputation keep tarnishing at the same time. At some point those immunity from the outside are gonna be considered a bad thing

SpaceX is still the #1 launch provider in the world, by a major margin, even if Starship blows up a bunch more times.

Two similar failures in a row looks bad, but IDK how much "looks bad" matters in a case like this

Looks bad here means not just from the casual "I don't follow" public but also most likely from some of the serious outside engineers in the industry too. Falcon's yet another recovery failure doesn't help the case

[Exastro]

After some mulling over the loss of the Flight 8 ship, I'm starting to believe the reason it failed was that the root cause of the Flight 7 failure was not correctly diagnosed.  So a bunch of improvements were made that will probably improve Starship's reliability over the long run, but the flaw that caused the loss of both S33 and S34 lost was missed.

If that's the case, they're going to have to do a deeper dive into the data to get it figured out.  But once they do, we should see a string of successful flights.

We'll see.

[meekGee]

Four outright failures in eight flights.  Two seemingly repetitive failures in a row.  This looks more and more to me like a failed program.  At this point such programs are usually terminated, or at the very least the management structure is turned over and the engineering is reassessed during a long stand down, which doubles or triples the program cost.

 - Ed Kyle

 Yeah, you’ve been saying this forever about everything to do with any kind of reuse. It really seems sometimes like you wish everything was back to the good (lame) old days when the entire planet launched like 22 satellites a year.

It’s only failed if you give up. It no doubt needs lots of work still but there is nothing so far showing the concept is impossible.

Falcon 1 flight 4 delivered a payload to orbit.
Falcon 9 flight 1 delivered a payload to orbit.
Here we are, 15 boosters, 34 ships and test articles, countless hundreds of engines, and 8 full stack flights, with no payload delivered to orbit.

This program was first announced in 2010.  It's starting to look like a fully expendable design would waste less hardware than this fully reusable design.

Baloney.  You're counting test articles now?

This was test flight #8 of the complete system, which unlike F1 or F9, is an unprecedented system in terms of capabilities.

Flights #3,4,5,6 reached practical orbit, and if this was an up-only system, we'd be done already.  #5 and #6 additionally went a long way towards ship EDL.
Flight #7,8 had issues with the new version of ship, while cementing Superheavy's return capability.

That's all there is to it.  What's with the doom and gloom?  Y'all just enjoying the wailing and flailing?

Here, look here for a summary:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starship_launches
Maybe it'll make you feel better.

[Brigantine]

I wonder how much the visuals of the nozzle "hotspot" and "flames" can be explained by the position of the sun just out of camera frame. Reflections, backlighting and nitrogen from the purge system.

an expendable S2, clamshell fairings, and (ideally) negotiations for Centaur V integration as S3.

I'm not sure that reusability aspects of the design had anything to do with these past two failures.

No - but with the reusability parts deleted, v1's mass to orbit would no longer be negligible. And it does seem that these failures are connected to the v2 upgrades.

Still, I'm sure they'll get v2 working after a handful more R&D flights

Is ship 35 supposed to have v2 or v3 Raptors ??

I don't know about that (too early for v3?), but Ship 35 v3 raptors is what Booster v3 is supposed to have 

a string of successful flights

If they ever keep the goalposts in the same place long enough for a string of success. Elon would see that as a sign they're not being ambitious enough and need to push the limits more. (which is kinda how we got v2 in the first place)

[Vultur]

Four outright failures in eight flights.  Two seemingly repetitive failures in a row.  This looks more and more to me like a failed program.  At this point such programs are usually terminated, or at the very least the management structure is turned over and the engineering is reassessed during a long stand down, which doubles or triples the program cost.
 - Ed Kyle

That's why SpaceX isn't publicly traded and they're not going to tripple their program cost.  It's cheaper to keep flying, especially if they can start re-flying boosters.   They have caught every booster that they intended to catch (GSE divert doesn't count against the vehicle).  So 3-3 on booster catches, the biggest rocket ever flown and all that hardware to inspect.  How is that a failed program?
I've been on failed programs.  Two years in design reviews that were too scared to build one prototype.

That can be true while their reputation keep tarnishing at the same time. At some point those immunity from the outside are gonna be considered a bad thing

SpaceX is still the #1 launch provider in the world, by a major margin, even if Starship blows up a bunch more times.

Two similar failures in a row looks bad, but IDK how much "looks bad" matters in a case like this

Looks bad here means not just from the casual "I don't follow" public but also most likely from some of the serious outside engineers in the industry too. Falcon's yet another recovery failure doesn't help the case

But does the opinion of outside engineers affect the success of the program in any way? I'd think only if it gets to the point where SpaceX is losing launch contracts (which would require competitors to reaallllly ramp their flight rates) or SpaceX has trouble hiring talent (seems even less likely).

if Musk, Shotwell, etc. want to keep it going, and the FAA will license it, the program will continue.

And NASA is still kinda depending on it for HLS...

[Vultur]

That's all there is to it.  What's with the doom and gloom?  Y'all just enjoying the wailing and flailing?

I think it just looks bad because the v2 Ships have done worse than the last two v1s, and the failure was at least externally similar-looking for both.

But I don't think there is a fundamental or unfixable flaw in the program.

[Vettedrmr]

One of the things that's always impressed with SpaceX was how they didn't fail the same way twice.  This isn't necessarily the same root cause as flight 7, but flight 8's ship behavior is similar enough that, IMO, they missed on their analysis of flight 7's failure.  AFAIK this is the first time it's happened to SpaceX in a very long time, maybe ever.

[Lee Jay]

Four outright failures in eight flights.  Two seemingly repetitive failures in a row.  This looks more and more to me like a failed program.  At this point such programs are usually terminated, or at the very least the management structure is turned over and the engineering is reassessed during a long stand down, which doubles or triples the program cost.

 - Ed Kyle

 Yeah, you’ve been saying this forever about everything to do with any kind of reuse. It really seems sometimes like you wish everything was back to the good (lame) old days when the entire planet launched like 22 satellites a year.

It’s only failed if you give up. It no doubt needs lots of work still but there is nothing so far showing the concept is impossible.

Falcon 1 flight 4 delivered a payload to orbit.
Falcon 9 flight 1 delivered a payload to orbit.
Here we are, 15 boosters, 34 ships and test articles, countless hundreds of engines, and 8 full stack flights, with no payload delivered to orbit.

This program was first announced in 2010.  It's starting to look like a fully expendable design would waste less hardware than this fully reusable design.

Baloney.  You're counting test articles now?

This was test flight #8 of the complete system

I said that.

, which unlike F1 or F9, is an unprecedented system in terms of capabilities.

Capabilities that have yet to materialze.

Flights #3,4,5,6 reached practical orbit,

With no payload.

and if this was an up-only system, we'd be done already.  #5 and #6 additionally went a long way towards ship EDL.
Flight #7,8 had issues with the new version of ship, while cementing Superheavy's return capability.

That's all there is to it.  What's with the doom and gloom?

This is a horribly wasteful and pointless program.  It only exists because Musk wants to die on Mars.

[deleted]

[sdsds]

San Juan ATC
Interesting timestamps
10.48
11.50
14.30
17.30
20.50
21.33
23.45
24.30

Starts to get interesting as early as 10:25. "DRA due to a rocket launch." (Debris Response Area)

Hold for "niner zero minutes...."

21:27 - "if you guys do declare an emergency for minimum fuel...."

Seems like more than an inconvenience.

[Exastro]

Four outright failures in eight flights.  Two seemingly repetitive failures in a row.  This looks more and more to me like a failed program. 

Speaking as an outsider, I don't see four outright failures in eight flights, but maybe that's because my expectations are different.

From memory: 
Flight 1 had "clear the tower" and "gather data" as its main success criteria, and did those things
Flight 2 nearly made its target orbit
Flight 3 got there but lost attitude control while coasting
Flight 4 got past that point, survived reentry, and performed the first soft-touchdown
Flight 5 repeated that with more stress on the heat shield and did the first booster catch
Flight 6 pushed the ship harder during reentry but didn't attempt the booster catch because of GSE damage at launch
Flight 7 was the first test of the V2 ship design. It caught the booster but lost the ship during its ascent burn, maybe like Flight 2 did
Flight 8 repeated Flight 7 almost exactly, except the booster seemed to come back cleaner

The principal goal of all these flights is gathering data that enable progress for the next flight. By that standard, I'd say the only real  failure was Flight 7, since it failed to correctly inform the engineering changes needed for Flight 8.  Every other flight was followed by one that showed clear progress toward an operational system.

[Ludus]

Four outright failures in eight flights.  Two seemingly repetitive failures in a row.  This looks more and more to me like a failed program.  At this point such programs are usually terminated, or at the very least the management structure is turned over and the engineering is reassessed during a long stand down, which doubles or triples the program cost.
 - Ed Kyle

That's why SpaceX isn't publicly traded and they're not going to tripple their program cost.  It's cheaper to keep flying, especially if they can start re-flying boosters.   They have caught every booster that they intended to catch (GSE divert doesn't count against the vehicle).  So 3-3 on booster catches, the biggest rocket ever flown and all that hardware to inspect.  How is that a failed program?
I've been on failed programs.  Two years in design reviews that were too scared to build one prototype.

That can be true while their reputation keep tarnishing at the same time. At some point those immunity from the outside are gonna be considered a bad thing

SpaceX is still the #1 launch provider in the world, by a major margin, even if Starship blows up a bunch more times.

Two similar failures in a row looks bad, but IDK how much "looks bad" matters in a case like this

Looks bad here means not just from the casual "I don't follow" public but also most likely from some of the serious outside engineers in the industry too. Falcon's yet another recovery failure doesn't help the case

But does the opinion of outside engineers affect the success of the program in any way? I'd think only if it gets to the point where SpaceX is losing launch contracts (which would require competitors to reaallllly ramp their flight rates) or SpaceX has trouble hiring talent (seems even less likely).

if Musk, Shotwell, etc. want to keep it going, and the FAA will license it, the program will continue.

And NASA is still kinda depending on it for HLS...

SpaceX will launch about 90% of the mass humanity puts in Space in 2025, the other 10% is everybody else including US rivals, the Russians, the Chinese, the EU, Japan, India. That’s without Starship. SpaceX is counting on Starship to rapidly launch tens of thousands of V3 Starlink sats to increase Constellation capacity by orders of magnitude. They effectively don’t care anymore as a commercial matter whether they get any satellite business or NASA business for it or even use it for Mars. As a business plan they will iterate until Starship is operational just for V3 Starlink.

[edkyle99]

[...]  Two seemingly repetitive failures in a row.  This looks more and more to me like a failed program.  [...]
 - Ed Kyle

Yeah, two identical upper stage failures in a row means a program is doomed.  For example, look what happened to Centaurs AC-70 and -71 in 1991-2.  They barely eked out another 33 years of use after that.

I've previously compared Starship program to the early Atlas Centaur program, which had failures in five of its first seven flights.  NASA "fixed" Atlas Centaur, but program costs rose from $59 million to $350 million(!).  Even then the thing had a stubbornly high failure rate (in the end only 8 out of 10 succeeded until yet more money was spent to create the Atlas 2 series).  The two "Atlas 1" (Atlas G Centaur D1AR) series failures weren't really remarkable at the time in that respect.  So if Starship is the new Atlas Centaur, who is going to conjure the $60 billion to make it work?

 - Ed Kyle

[Exastro]

This is a horribly wasteful and pointless program.  It only exists because Musk wants to die on Mars.

I can't agree with this claim.  Starship needs to pay for its development through its value for things other than Mars. Being able to launch 20x the Starlink bandwidth per flight compared to F9 with the latest greatest optimized V2 Mini design justifies its development cost many times over, if the calculations on some earlier threads have any relation to reality. 

Who here really believes that the most successful launch organization in the world can't figure out how to get an upper stage to work reliably?  This negativity reminds me of the assertions that Starship's attitude control system was fundamentally broken and would need to be replaced by hot-gas or cold N₂ thrusters following Flight 3... have we forgotten so quickly how wrong that turned out to be after the addition of features to keep ice from clogging the lines was followed by a rock-stable Flight 4 ship?

[ZachS09]

I saw a few folks on the NSF chat claiming that the hot-staging may have played a part in the anomaly.

But that shouldn’t be the case since the anomaly took place more than five minutes after hot-staging.

By that logic the loss of space shuttle Columbia during reentry must not have been caused by the foam strike during launch, which occurred much more than 5 minutes earlier.

You didn’t have to use the Columbia disaster to counter “my logic”. It was a blind thought when making the post, and I didn’t fully think it through.

Let’s just assume hot-staging contributed to the anomaly for now. Forget about the time gap.