[terramex]

Looks like second stage broke up over Caribbean, videos of the debris (as seen from ground):

https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662?t=HdHF...

https://x.com/realcamtem/status/1880026604472266800

https://x.com/adavenport354/status/1880026262254809115

Moment of the breakup:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE52_hVSeQz/

[dpifke]

Preliminary indication is that we had an oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity.

Apart from obviously double-checking for leaks, we will add fire suppression to that volume and probably increase vent area. Nothing so far suggests pushing next launch past next month.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1880060983734858130

[perihelions]

Reminds me of one of NASA's reckless ideas, abandoned after Challenger in 1986, to put a liquid hydrogen stage inside the cargo bay of the Shuttle orbiter [0]. That would have likely leaked inside that confined volume, and could plausibly have exploded in a similar way as Starship.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle-Centaur

- "The astronauts considered the Shuttle-Centaur missions to be riskiest Space Shuttle missions yet,[85] referring to Centaur as the "Death Star".[86]"

[raverbashing]

I'm not sure there's fire suppression effective enough for this type of leak (especially given rocket constraints)

[anentropic]

I wonder if it's related to the loose panel flapping about at the left of the screen here: https://youtu.be/qzWMEegqbLs?si=aUlI6zfkH3bZCmVm&t=111

[Alive-in-2025]

This sounds like one of those "and also" things. I'd say you add fire suppression AND ALSO try more to reduce leaks. It's got to be really difficult to build huge massive tanks that hold oxygen and other gases under pressure (liquid methane too will have some vapor of course). Are leaks inherently going to happen?

This is meant to be a human rated ship of course, how will you reduce this danger? I know this stuff is hard, but you can't just iterate and say starship 57 has had 3 flights without leaks, we got it now. Since I have no expertise here, I can imagine all kinds of unlikely workarounds like holding the gas under lower pressure with humans on board or something to reduce the risk.

[api]

Would be unpleasant if there was crew. Of course this thing is pretty far from human eating.

[throw0101a]

> (as seen from ground)

As seen from a plane in the air with the break up right in front of it:

https://old.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...

[mrandish]

While the video post does mention "Right in front of us", and it may have appeared that way to the pilots, it wasn't. Gauging relative distance and altitude between aircraft in flight can be notoriously deceptive even to experts, especially in the case of intensely bright, massive, unfamiliar objects at very high speed and great distance.

The RUD was in orbit over 146 kilometers up and >13,000 mph. I'm sure using the FlightAware tracking data someone will work out the actual distance and altitude delta between that plane and the Starship 7 orbital debris. I suspect it was many dozens of miles away and probably still nearly orbital in altitude (~100km).

Spectacular light show though...

[varjag]

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion

[IAmGraydon]

That is absolutely insane. Honestly, I would probably assume a MIRV given the current environment.

[Cu3PO42]

What a strangely beautiful sight. While I was excited to see ship land, I'm also happy I get to see videos of this!

[mrandish]

Yes, both spectacular and beautiful. I guess Starship can now say what the legendary comedy actress (and sex symbol) of early cinema Mae West said:

"When I'm good... I'm very good. But when I'm bad... I'm even better." :-)

Combined with another tower catch, that's two spectacular shows for the price of one. Hopefully the onboard diagnostic telemetry immediately prior to the RUD is enough to identify the root cause so it can be corrected.

[Molitor5901]

I felt.. bad watching that breakup, it reminded me of Columbia.

[afavour]

As long as the debris has no effect wherever it lands, I agree with you

[ijidak]

Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.

[TMWNN]

>What a strangely beautiful sight.

"My god, Bones, what have I done?"

[badgersnake]

It’s a pretty expensive way to make fireworks.

[dotancohen]

Excitement guaranteed

[olex]

Inadvertently perfect timing for this footage. Glowing and backlit by the setting sun, against clear and already darkening evening sky... couldn't plan the shot any better if you tried.

Let's hope no debris came down on anyone or anything apart from open water.

[andrewinardeer]

I take it if SpaceX debris hit and destroyed a boat the owner can claim damages from SpaceX?

Does international space law allow for this?

[9cb14c1ec0]

Given that the engine telemetry shown on the broadcast showed the engines going out one by one over a period of some seconds, I could easily imagine some sort of catastrophic failure on a single engine that cascaded.

[s1artibartfast]

It could be many things, plumbing to the engines, tank leak, ect. You could see fire on the control flap actuators, so the ship interior was engulfed in fire at the same time the first engine was out.

[idlewords]

There's a flickering flame briefly visible on the flap hinge of the second stage in the last footage it sent down.

[s1artibartfast]

Most Sci-Fi real footage I have ever seen.

Edit: Reminds me of "The Eye" from star wars Andor

https://youtu.be/9lrr0CWHDGA?t=43

[JumpCrisscross]

Wow. It reminds me of the comet scene from Andor. I wonder if suborbital pyrotechnics will become a thing one day.

[ralusek]

> one day

today!

[dylan604]

Watching those videos, my hand naturally looks for the roller ball from too much time playing missile command

[echoangle]

Probably one of the most expensive fireworks (but probably still cheaper than the first Ariane 5 launch), but it looks very cool.

[m4rtink]

I think the N1 test flights are also a contender. I still remember something about kerosene raining for 15 minutes after the explosion.

[cubefox]

More views:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-S8CK6LgnD4

https://x.com/DavidCaroe/status/1880036195985682710

[Medox]

Even more:

https://x.com/jp_ouellette/status/1880029255813459973

https://x.com/Sitting_Analyst/status/1880033972748709995

https://x.com/nickpags45/status/1880028951885816056

[RecycledEle]

I think this was the first test of StarShip v2. I'd be surprised if everything worked after they redesigned the whole StarShip. That would be like refactoring Microsoft Windows by hand-typing new code and expecting it to run without errors on the first try.

[krick]

I'm not worried about the Starship itself, but it looks kinda dangerous. Is it?

[dmix]

It's very likely it exploded on purpose by SpaceX after it wasn't showing good data (aka Flight Termination System). Specifically over water.

[r0m4n0]

Does anyone know the timing of when the breakup actually occurred?

I’m curious because I was on a flight to Puerto Rico from Florida at 3pm ET they diverted our flight. They didn’t really give us many details but said the “landing strips were closed”. Our friends on a slightly early flight diverted to ST Thomas. We were going to divert to a nearby airport in Puerto Rico (we were going to land in Aguadilla instead of San Juan) so I feel like these diversions wouldn’t be related but the timing seems pretty odd.

[espeed]

Depending on the precise launch time (4:36/4:37 PM CST) "Ship exploded at ≈T+00:08:26": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_flight_test_7

[TechTechTech]

Where will this debris land? Can it impact airplane routes?

[mh-]

https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1880032865209184354

>Commercial flights are turning around to avoid potential debris.

[s1artibartfast]

east of Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Draw a line from Boca Chia to Turks and keep going

[kylebenzle]

HN comments is just reading strangers steam of consciousness now?

[llm_trw]

Is there a video you don't need to log in to view?

[nomilk]

The fourth one (instagram) doesn't require login.

Side note: annoying that twitter/X requires login. I'd have sworn Elon said he was removing that requirement to login to view tweets (I think he discussed it with George Hotz).

Found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkNkSQ42jg4&t=49m30s

Elon:

> This is insane. You shouldn't need a twitter account at all unless you need to write something

George:

> Why did you put the pop up back?

Elon:

> We should not be prohibiting read-only scroll

So there seems to be agreement that twitter shouldn't require an account to read (view) posts. The Twitter Space is from 23 Dec 2022 so perhaps things changed since.

[mgerdts]

https://mastodon.social/@BNONews/113840549980938951

[hrldcpr]

for the record I was able to watch without logging in, on Firefox Linux

[teractiveodular]

The last one is stage separation, not an explosion. You can clearly see the "exploded" rocket continuing to fly afterwards.

[olex]

Separation is much closer to the launch pad in Texas, the booster barely makes it downrange at all before turning around. This being filmed from the Bahamas with this much lateral velocity, gotta be the Ship breaking up. Likely the FTS triggered after enough engines failed that it couldn't make orbit / planned trajectory.

[s1artibartfast]

I dont think so. I think it is the breakup, with a large mass visible. most of the material will continue on until it parabolically renters and burns up in a visible manner

[Polizeiposaune]

No, if that was taken from the Bahamas, that's an explosion connected to the loss of the 2nd stage.

Staging happens closer to the Texas coast and I don't believe you'd have line of sight to it from the Bahamas.

[walrus01]

That's for sure not stage separation, that's an explosion from the FTS rupturing the ship tanks.

[anothertroll456]

Nope. That's definitely an explosion (source: I'm in the rocket business). However it may not be an explosion of the whole stage. Probably of the engine section.

[hinkley]

It’s crazy how fast that ship is moving and how big the explosion was that it looks like something much, much lower in the air went boom. It was transitting the sky faster than a commercial aircraft does. So it gives an impression more like a private aircraft breaking up at 5-10k feet.

[ijidak]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE54iL7xbZL/?igsh=dTNtZ2Q4aHl...

It's beautiful. Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie.

[hinkley]

Cue Aerosmith song.

[oceanadventures]

I have a boat and want to pick up floating heat tiles in the ocean, do you think we can find the parts by Puerto Rico?

[pinoy420]

No

[raincole]

Does anyone know where the debris landed? In the ocean? Or just burnt out in the atmosphere?

[tjpnz]

Wasn't going fast enough to fully burn up. There'll be small pieces of debris scattered over quite a large area.

[inglor_cz]

Looks like work of the Flight Termination System. Something measurable had to go very wrong.

[olex]

While the telemetry was still going, you could see Ship engines going out one by one. Earlier when there was video there was what looked like flames visible inside one of the flap hinges, definitely shouldn't be there on ascent. Presumably something failed internally and caused the Ship to shut down before reaching target trajectory, at which point either FTS or the failure itself caused it to blow up, as seen on the Insta reel.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Something measurable had to go very wrong

Or slightly wrong. An FTS is programmed to be conservative. Particularly on unmanned flights. Doubly particularly on reëntry. Triply so on experiments bits.

[enragedcacti]

It wasn't FTS, it just blew up: https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1880033318936199643

[oceanadventures]

Where can I find the heat tiles? Will they be landing near Puerto Rico?

[rkagerer]

What a show

[tsimionescu]

Another failure, another few months of figuring out why this isn't working and can't stick to its flight path. They caused chaos for many commercial planes, so they'll definitely need some full reports to the FTA to know what they're doing about this, why the debris is falling over flight paths, and so on.