Tens of thousands of Tesla owners have had the suspension or steering of their vehicles — even in practically brand new ones — fail in recent years. Newly obtained documents show how Tesla engineers internally called these incidents “flaws” and “failures.”
Nonetheless, some of the documents suggest technicians were told to tell consumers that these failures weren’t due to faulty parts, but the result of drivers “abusing” their vehicles, which highlights the EV maker and its CEO Elon Musk’s infamous way of handling customer complaints.
Mhm, knows more about manufacturing than anyone alive on Earth.
I guess it’ll be fun/sad to watch StarShip 3 either detonate on the launch pad or before it passes the Karman Line.
Rockets are harder than cars, so hopefully this means Elon is too stupid to contribute anything but haughty goals while the actual engineers make sure we don’t blow up any astronauts.
He did ask them to make the rocket pointy so it looks like the rocket in Sacha Baron Cohen’s “The Dictator”.
And they complied.
The term is “R.U.D.” - Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly.
Detonate is actually more precise, implying an explosion that accelerates at or faster than the speed of sound, often causing a visible blast wave in air that is humid and dense enough as the pressure wave compresses the air and squeezes it into visible semi cloud like formations momentarily.
RUD is a general term that can cover any number of events which cause a craft to generally lose structural integrity in a small amount of time.
For example, a craft could hit max q either at a non optimal angle, or due to structural integrity flaws, more or less violently tear itself apart.
Or, a craft could enter the atmosphere at a non optimal angle, or at too extreme a velocity, and be ripped apart, again, violently and quickly. This is generally referred to as ‘Burning Up’.
Or a craft could have a parachute or landing system related problem and impact the ground at such speeds it disassembles itself. Jokingly referred to as ‘lithobraking’.
Or, a craft could have an accidental triggering of some kind of abort system that results in the craft tearing itself apart.
Or, at any point while airborne, a problem with either the integrity of a fuel tank or the fuel pumps and plumbing could cause a rupture, which could then cause the craft to crumple, deform, and then rip itself apart /without/ the loose fuel igniting, or perhaps /with/ the loose fuel igniting, which may merely conflagrate or detonate depending on other factors.
While many of these more specific chains of events have more specific terms to describe them… they are /all/ Rapid Unplanned Disassemblies.
All that that term means is for some reason your craft went from being more or less one piece to more or less a large number of pieces very quickly.
For example the Challenger disaster was a RUD. But not a detonation. Detonation is more specific and I used the term for a reason.
Do they really call a spacecraft airborne?
Starship’s ITF-2 launch already got well above the Karman line.
Well, the booster exploded below the Karman line (EDIT: Yep, 90km max alt. and detonation, Karman line is 100km), and the orbiter blew up or tore itself apart above the Karman line.
And no, the orbiter did not self destruct as part of some kind of intentional action or design by SpaceX.
It was seen on camera disintegrating before SpaceX even realized they had lost contact with it.
They probably did not engage a self destruct system on the orbiter while they were still claiming it was at a nominal trajectory when they hadnt even realized it had already disintegrated, taking multiple minutes to even realize they’d lost contact with it as pieces of it were already burning and tumbling in the upper atmosphere.
My prediction for 3 is that again at least part of the craft will blow up below the Karman line.
The full static test fires they recently did damaged the craft because the test stand wasn’t designed for that the amount of force, nor for the duration they’re currently testing with it, and because for some baffling reason they are not using a flame trench or proper diversion channels.
My guess is that, combined with the defects and flaws seen from the first two launches, these full power static fire tests will have damaged the craft more than they are able to repair properly in time to follow Musk’s recklessly fast launch timetable, and the whole thing will blow up or have significant trajectory problems from multiple non catastrophic engine failures before the hot staging, and/or when the booster tries to do the belly flop maneuver, the fuel tank(s) or lines will rupture as happened last time, and if the abort system engages properly it’ll then basically fall to the ground, or if it doesn’t, it’ll detonate spectacularly in midair again.
The booster was never intended to go above the Karman line. Calling that a “failure” is ludicrous.
Also, the orbiter was destroyed by its flight termination package triggering, which is the very definition of an intentional action. The reason it triggered was apparently an oxygen leak that led to the upper stage running out of oxidizer just a few seconds short of achieving orbit, which wasn’t according to the flight plan, but this was a test flight so the plan was always “see what happens and fix whatever problems come to light” so that’s still not exactly a failure. They got farther than they did on IFT-1.
You are perhaps more used to the NASA way of “testing”, which is to exhaustively perfect the rocket before it ever launches and then expect everything to go smoothly during a single shakedown flight before payloads start going up with flight #2. That’s not how SpaceX does things.
Given that the booster is never going to cross the Karman line (booster separation happens at 64km), and that the intention is to deliberately ditch the booster in the ocean rather than recover it, you’ve got quite a conservative prediction there. I honestly can’t think of any possible way that this wouldn’t happen.