The first test fire of a SpaceX Raptor full-flow staged combustion, methane rocket engine in September 2016. Emissions from this engine, as it is part of the company’s testing of launch vehicles in Texas, are one of the aspects that the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) will evaluate based on its environmental assessment. Image Credit: SpaceX / Flickr and Elon Musk / Twitter
The CEO and engineer of Space Exploration Technology Corp. (SpaceX) Mr. Elon Musk took to Twitter to vent his frustration after his company failed to land a prototype of its next-generation Starship crew and cargo launch platform on Tuesday. The failure resulted from one of the Raptor full flow, staged methane rocket engines failing to re-ignite when it attempted to land. As a result, the vehicle had insufficient thrust to counteract gravity and, unlike a previous test, crashed in a tilted position.
Musk Allows SpaceX Engineers “ Too Dumb ” To Implement A Fix To Prevent Starship SN9 From Crashing
The executive’s comments came as a surprise, given that he had stated a few days ago that he would be leaving Twitter for a while. This announcement came after Mr. Musk joined the conversation about the meteoric rise of GameStop Corp. stock. after a Reddit forum took issue with venture capitalists betting against the stock through short selling. He then joined the popular trading application RobinHood’s chief Vlad Tenev in a discussion of the whole affair on the audio chat social networking application Clubhouse, where he asked Mr Tenev why the latter’s application had stopped trading stocks as things heated up between the Redditors and the short sellers.
Strangely, the many tweets that followed his announcement to leave came from a Twitter web application. Musk generally posts through the platform’s iPhone application and this discrepancy has led some to question whether the posts are authentic, or if the manager’s account has been compromised. So far, although he has made other tweets that have pushed the price of cryptocurrency Dogecoin to new heights, the tweets have yet to be removed; suggesting that it was indeed Musk who posted them.
We were too stupid
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2021
When Robert Woodhead founder and manager of entertainment company AnimEigo asked him why SpaceX didn’t restart all three Raptor engines during the landing attempt and then decided which engine to turn off, Musk’s answer was quite simple. In what could be understood as sarcasm or an admission of failure, the executive replied simply: “We were too stupid. ” What is clear is that the CEO whose company became the first to successfully land rocket boosters from the first stage after being near bankruptcy is getting frustrated with a lack of development progress on a platform that he intends to turn humanity into one. multi-planetary kind.
Woodhead took Musk’s response well, reminding him that the Falcon 9 took three tries before it managed to reenter the rocket’s first stage. Compared to the Falcon in size and scope, Starship is orders of magnitude larger, and the prototypes SpaceX is currently testing represent the top or second stage of the platform. Should the company complete development of Starship, a process that Musk hopes will be partially completed by 2022, it will be the first in history to develop a platform whose upper stage can land through its engines and refuel after take off.
SpaceX tested the Starship SN9 prototype earlier this week, after which the company confirmed that failure to re-ignite the Raptor engine was the cause of the latest crash. The previous test, in which the SN8 prototype was destroyed, failed because the fuel did not flow to any of the engines during landing, causing the copper components to melt due to the oxidant. A rocket engine uses combustion fuel and oxidant to generate thrust, and for the Raptor, both are first ignited in pre-burners before mixing in the primary combustion chamber.