"Oh what irony it would be if SpaceX’s boss Elon Musk needs to renegotiation the company’s NASA contract to reflect increased costs, given his side hustle as leader of the public-expenditure-slashing Department of Government Efficiency."

SpaceX need parts that are imported from from places that will have tariffs imposed, eg, Europe.

So NASA will eventually have to foot the bill, one way or another. On the up side, the Unelected VP can blame high costs of unamerican stuff as the reason the US will be unable to colonize Mars.

see:

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-tariffs-elon-musk-companies-2025130

"So NASA will eventually have to foot the bill, one way or another."

Starlink customers?? And there will be a lot more of those, so one more lost prototype isn't a big deal in the long term.

This is our weather report: [1]today pieces of space debris will fall on the Turks and Caicos Islands . An armoured umbrella is recommended.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacex-launches-eighth-starship-test-eyeing-ships-mock-satellite-deployment-2025-03-06/

Now Musk has got the fast-track FAA he wanted SpaceX can iterate through rockets even faster but economics will end up slowing them down.

I'm going to bet this is why we won't see those big beautiful steel tariffs announced for the 12th of March.

With Tesla sales tanking worldwide, he can always recycle the unsold Muskmobiles, I suppose. And with his shares taking a nosedive as well (and most of his wealth depending on that) he may have to.

He does have form for sending his cars into space

How long before he is overtaken in the wealth tables by the top Canadian and Mexican multi-billionaires?

I thought the correct name for them was "swasticars"?

Why would things slow down as long as NASA keep footing the bill and Little Donny Dumb gets his tame rubber-stamp Congress to pay for it?

NASA aren't footing the bill. It's a fixed-cost contract. They're not boeing.

One little Executive Order later...

That's not how contracts work.

Have you been following the news lately? That's exactly how contracts or any form of agreement works when you're Elonald.

Blowing up Starships is relatively cheap. This one was intended to blow up. The problem for SpaceX is it blew up before testing the heat shield. Starship HLS is a tiny firm fixed price contract compared to the money lost to Musk's rapid fire government policy.

From what I read, they didn't focus particularly on fixing the root cause (the leaks) but tried to make it such that if the leaks happened again it wouldn't cause an explosion.

That worked guys, well done :slowclap:

This is a vehicle that's intended to carry people, do better. Don't start going down the Tesla route of bodging stuff...

Wouldn't the root cause be euphemistically-phrased "harmonic response" (harmonic oscillations)?

Those can be easy, semi-easy, or hard to fix. SpaceX doesn't want to spend the time+money on a redesign+remanufacturing.

Anyone who's seen a motorcycle rider have a "tank-slapper" knows how quickly things can go bad once the oscillations start.

'harmonic response' - means shook itself to bits, right?

'melodic response' - shook itself to bits while humming a little tune, tiddley pom.

Sorry, yes the root root cause was the harmonic response, which caused leaks, the leaks caused overpressure, and the overpressure caused fire and explosion.

So my crude understanding is that they did the rocketeering equivalent of sticking some duct tape over the bits that had leaked to reduce the likelihood of a leak, and put something in place to vent the overpressure to reduce the chance of fire and explosion. Clearly neither worked.

So they need to stop the leaks, and they need to stop it by sorting out the harmonic response, not bodging round the edges.

Being old I remember the Apollo mission astronauts mentioning what became known as the pogo effect - I think that was the effect of a small change in fuel feed rate being amplified into a shift in position of the whole rocket.

Am I right in thinking this harmonic response is some part of the spacecraft resonating with some component of the general vibration from the engines? Damping the resonance so the response is just flat sounds a sensible move to me. I suppose that would need redesign of assemblies in various parts of the spacecraft?

Indeed, the POGO effect is nothing new. Oscillation and vibration issues caused a lot of fun and games with the Soviet N-1 rocket also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)

At least the SpaceX rocket didn't drop straight back down onto the landing site, unlike the 2nd N-1 launch.

"At least the SpaceX rocket didn't drop straight back down onto the landing site, unlike the 2nd N-1 launch."

Plenty of time yet, especially now all the regulators and pesky H&S peeps have been fired or are running scared.

The made changes to the fuelling system in addition to increasing venting and having fire suppression. I am guessing still not enough.

Yes, this was a bodge. The long term fix is to switch to Raptor 3 which has fewer places to leak. Raptor 3 is not ready and SpaceX really wants make progress on the heat shield in the mean time. Re-routing a bunch of aircraft around falling debris does not cost SpaceX money so IFT8 makes a kind* of sense.

* selfish, irresponsible, ...

Some of the six motors stopped and the thrust must have become too far off centre line and caused the thing to start rotating. Seems very similar to the last flight. Guessing causing extreme vibration or oscillation breaking stuff in the back, something that can only be really tested by flying at 15000 km/h in near vacuum.

The guy’s a fraud.

Working for a bigger fraud.

SpaceX feed seemed to show what looked like a fuel leak by the centre engines of the ship.

Looks like this may have been down to a Raptor vacuum nozzle failure - have a look at ~47 minutes into the Space X stream and you can see an orange glow round what appears to be a slot cut into the end of the Raptor vacuum at the bottom left of the screen. There are reports that this engine can be seen exploding on a screen in the background on the control centre video feeds, but I've not been able to verify that yet.

It is possible that this engine was damaged during the extended static fire that was used to verify that the plumbing and engine profile changes had fixed the harmonic issues. Testing vacuum engines at sea level is hard as flow separation within the expansion nozzle can cause the nozzle to fail - this is mitigated this by putting a supporting ring round the end when test firing, but that doesn't elliminate all of the stresses.

It would be bad luck if it turns out that testing to prove that a fix is valid caused the vehicle to be lost.

Edited to add:

That engine was the first one to show as shut down on the telemetry feed. It appears as if its failure then took out the centre three engines (not quite all at the same time). Loss of control was inevitable once they were out as they are the only ones that have the thrust vector control that's needed for steering, and the two remaining vacuum engines would have been producing a significant turning moment due to unsymmetrical thrust.

Looks like this may have been down to a Raptor vacuum nozzle failure - have a look at ~47 minutes into the Space X stream and you can see an orange glow round what appears to be a slot cut into the end of the Raptor vacuum at the bottom left of the screen. There are reports that this engine can be seen exploding on a screen in the background on the control centre video feeds, but I've not been able to verify that yet.

I was watching the NSF feed and they spotted that, and reckoned it was a burn through on that nozzle. But they also reckoned there may have been a fire given there was some possible flame visible around the camera looking at the engines. That feed was cut pretty abruptly just before the UED and Starship developing a bad attitude. Apparently the previous flight turned into more physics than expected due to a fire in the 'attic' between the bottom of the fuel tank and the engines.

I can't help but wonder if the hot staging is maybe a lil too violent. There were some good images of the flame jetting out around the staging ring before stage seperation, so how much of that force & fire ends up being directed up into Starship's engine bay.

"more physics than expected"

I had thought "RUD" was the best ever term for a spacecraft explosion, but Jellied Eel has raised the bar another notch. Well done, have a beer!

Musk's big rockets are disintegrating at the same rate as his Tesla sales...

I think the proper conjugation is "Xat"

It's friday, i'll take my coat.