Starship Launch and Explosion // New Horizons in Danger // Sun Tornado

That's awesome, love seeing the new images from JWST and would love to know more about the brand new way to find exo-planets. StarShip not so historical launch. Will have to wait another day for its launch not to be the science experiment. I agree with above statement that a large part of the failure was stage zero and may have been damage to rockets themselves. I would love to see advancement in stage zero with a dynamic Magnetic torch diverter made up of huge Tesla coils as a Magnetic field can control heat and sound. But I fear Elon will only use age old static tech, no new advancement as even his rocket landing tech was done through NASA grants and contest,not on his own experiments. Even StarShip is just scaling up the same rockets and not (pun intended ) breaking new ground? He had a chance with Hyperloop , but he gave up on it, as it required lots of new undiscovered tech.

So, I was there and it was epic, spectacular to say the least, when the worlds most powerful rocket left the pad the sight was so intensely profound. I was 5.8 nautical from the pad, the sound didn’t hit us until the rocket was well clear of the tower. I ranged it at 6.2 nautical miles, I measured it at 98 decibels! That being said, over the course of my career and lifetime I have heard many large industrial machines and processes, the sound I heard was not what I expected from the most powerful rocket ever made, I was expecting like, a squadron of F-15s taking of at once etc, what I heard was more like the time I cut the muffler off my one cylinder mini bike, just louder 😳 that’s when I knew something was wrong😂😅

LONG, but all the info I gathered about Starship on launch day. Confirming photos, and videos are coming out today. @David E O'Dell nailed the critical factor. Read on for details. Scott Manley summed it up well. I spent my day yesterday neck deep in the Starship postmortem. There were *massive* chunks of concrete thrown all around the launch area, including back up at the bottom of the booster. It appears that the engine troubles began right away, with 3 engines going out, as a result and cascaded during flight . As it rises it's possible to see additional engines flame out. @Labpadre @MarcusHouse (watch his new new vid for this) discuss that the hydraulic pressure units (HPUs), that gimbal the inner 13 engines, thereby steering the booster, failed in flight as well. It's logical, as the the bulk of that system is just outside the engine bay at the lower part of Super Heavy. That has been a problematic part of the system, even being tweaked between the scrub and launch, fortunately Booster 9 will replace them with electric control units. This system failure probably resulted the loss of attitude control at the end resulting in the loops the booster took before finally being destroyed by the flight termination system. There was no separation at the designated time, probably due to the stack not achieving the proper altitude due to approx. 6-8 engine failures. It's (amazingly!) possible to see the concrete flying on the official SpaceX launch live stream on YouTube (https://youtu.be/-1wcilQ58hI?t=2695) . Pause the video just before the launch at about time index of 44:55, change the settings .25x speed, ensure max resolution, ideally 4K on you device and zoom in if you can. Restart the video and you can see the concrete flying nearly to the top of the booster, which is 230 feet tall, not counting the height of the launch mount, before the stack clears the tower, approx 45:10-45:15. The largest pieces are to the left of the rocket, first to the left and then center. I’d suggest watching the whole vid this way to see subsequent anomalies more clearly. Seeing the boosters from below is fascinating. As it rises it's possible to see additional engines flame out, and fires burning around the inner engine ring. The shock wave and/or concrete harmed the bottom of the booster. In response to Scott Manley on Twitter, Elon admitted they need a flame diverter. I believe they need a Saturn V/Shuttle/Artemis/etc. style flame trench with water-based sound suppression. What they have and were building seem to fall way short. A trench on sand at the water level is a big undertaking! The area under the pad is utterly destroyed and the one image I saw of the inner launch mount showed significant damage, meaning it may need a rebuild. The outer door on the launch table showed it was missing. That’s a heavy metal door and probably means an overpressure event in the ring probably sent it on a ballistic trajectory near the pad. It’s amazing the OLT wasn’t shredded by internal explosions. All the LH4 and O2 valves and other protection devices they have to protect from fires and explosions saved the tank farm from complete loss. @CSIStarbase has some cool deep dives on the tower, the protection of the tower/farm, and more. One tank was nailed by a massive concrete block. It looks like a squeezed beer can. It was a water tank and I think it was empty due to other issues. One way or another, ‘a few months’ for the next launch is optimistic - even by Elon standards. But she flew, achieved MaxQ, didn’t destroy the tower or the farm, stayed structurally sound despite a (1080 degree) turns and lots of engineering data collected. Without the Stage Zero she made have completed the entire mission. Always look on the bright side of life, badum, badum, … badum, badum, badum… Sorry for the length, but once I got into this I couldn’t stop. :) Hope it helps.

Diffraction spikes from a distant galaxy. Does the JWST have a neutral density filter? It could be useful.

The real Question is how long till they get the launchpad Fixed LOL This is Elon were talking about oh course he will get it fixed on everything that didnt work today.

We'll be getting answers soon. Just imagine if we had to wait for the magazine or newspaper before we got answers. We're so spoiled :). Yeah for big rocket adventures!