Ariane 6 maiden launch live broadcast.

[wraper]

About APU and it's failure at 11 minutes.

[Stray Electron]

If SpaceX do succeed with Starship, it's hard to see what market this rocket will have in a few years.  But maybe I'm missing something.

This allows Europe to launch anything they want into space.
Cost is secondary consideration.

Congratulations on the successful launch.

  Nails it. European Nationalism will ensure that it will get plenty of usage by the EU countries even if it's cost 3x as much.  This is about the EU trying to form an economic union (and a space program) that can compete with US industry in general and in this case, specifically with the US space program.

  Russia, China and Japan are also attempting to get into the space business.  (Iran and North Korea just want to get into the weapons business.)


   You do realize don't you, that a LOT of the computers, electronics and TE and TE techniques that are discussed on this forum were developed in the US for the 1960s Space Race don't you?  I'm sure that Europe would like to Kickstart their own high tech industries in the same way that the US did in the 1950s and 1960s with the Space Race. 

   They say that competition is a good thing so we'll see how this plays out over the next 30+ years. 

[coppercone2]

I think there is also a quality concern here, I am pretty sure alot of Europeans are... concerned about space-x as a company

i.e. https://www.businessinsider.com/former-spacex-employees-lawsuit-elon-musk-execs-spanking-video-2024-6

its kind of like do we trust animal house for space defense & security

what it makes me think is "is a reasonable complaint or request going to be taken seriously by that kind of company during a dire situation?"

then there is a concern about self destructs and disabling access to infrastructure based on the opinions of a single individual or possibly a board of his friends, that are in another country, across the ocean.. .with only the slow feed back process from congress to correct it. i.e. redeployment of satellites after ASAT attack


I don't think it will push computer technology forward too much anymore, but there is something to be said about having cheaper reliable power electronics and stuff like that based on knowledge from research for rockets. Right now treez is an example of european expertise in economic power supplies, I think they can maybe do better.


The whole idea of basically trusting your ENTIRE access to a area needed for defense with a single foreign private company is nuts. At best you could try to get the pentagon as a intermediary to make it into some kind of enforceable contract, but wow that does NOT go down well at all in a politically turbulent country. Its a bit like relying on mercenaries, they said a big reason why the roman empire fell was reliance on mercenary forces for defense reasons. In this case its like relying on mercenary transport ships. The only example that comes to mind is CHOAM from the dune books lol, no big power yet has contracted out their entire navy (which I think is similar to satellites since they have persistent objects away from your country that seem to go in big circles endlessly). Even Japan demanded its own boats. They don't have too big a army but they still got plenty of boats. On a singular level , its like having your own car vs having to take the bus or taxi, its ridiculous. In this case its like having to charter a bus from germany to drive to france to pick up the weather man to get to work.


In the early days of sail, countries were also feverish about having their own boats if they had any access to water at all.

[brucehoult]

Damn ... Falcon 9 upper stage just had the single engine explode when trying to re-ignite an hour after launch to circularise the orbit. The booster worked normally and landed safely on the drone ship.

Unusual ice buildup was visible during the initial engine burn. Something may have been leaking.

The Starlink satellites were deployed into an elliptical orbit with the apogee at the desired altitude but very low (but not in the atmosphere) perigee. They might or might not be able to circularise their own orbit, but even even if they can they will have a shorter than normal lifetime because of using up a lot of their propellent doing that.

[wraper]

^Reflective foil looks unusually puffed up. Considering excessive ice build up should be oxygen leaking somewhere inside. Some oxygen ice is normal but not anywhere this much.

[brucehoult]

Something starts to happen by mission time 3:50 but it gets dramatic at 4:06.

https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1gqGvNkwZPgGB

[iMo]

[Sal Ammoniac]

Perhaps it's time to start a new thread to discuss the Falcon 9 engine failure...

[brucehoult]

If there was a space&rockets or even aerospace sub-board (like "Cooking" and "Tea") then I might agree with you.

But there's not, the only other recentish similar post are a 737 Max one that's been going since January and Tianlong-3 accidental launch a couple of weeks ago..

And this post veered into comparison of Ariane and SpaceX capacity and price and reliability within 2 or 3 hours, four days before the Falcon 9 upper stage failure. So it was basically already on topic in this thread before it even happened.

[coppercone2]

there is something to be said about the one use rocket particularly for human use. I feel like the materials are not advanced enough yet to really give me confidence its going to work more then once, and the engineering controls are not fool proof.

It seems that with every manned accident, its the boosters that act up, not the shuttle. Space-x reuses the part that gets the hell beat out of it by really intense fire, vibrations and strain. I think its OK for low value sats (which is what they seem to be on) though so long it maintains a positive score.

That ring manufacturing process he has is IMO scary. I think you would need a giant pilger machine to make a really durable one. But even then, I feel like metal is god damn weird. Really it should be 100% forged after forming too, because the skin should be less susceptible to cracks.

No one likes a non-forged axe. But the stresses on these rockets are enormous.


And if you did have said pilger and it worked good, it would pretty much make sense just to smelt the thing and reform it because its well automated

That might be a good use for mars too, build a nuclear reactor there and form rocket tubes in a giant ass plant.


As for the reusable heat shields, I too am really dubious after restoring this old kiln. These old bricks are totally fucking unpredictable. It could spall when its compacted, or it can crack in half. Who the fuck knows why! The "foam" process of the fire resistant material is shady, I think it needs to be all engineered micro lattice structure, you can't trust random bubbles for too long. Of course thats my opinion, its going to turn out that material might totally suck balls and you need the randomness of the forming process to make it half decent lol. Well I will give it one thing, I still think high heat ceramics are less unnerving then glassy structures, now those are just unpredictable

[brucehoult]

there is something to be said about the one use rocket particularly for human use.

I dunno. Would you want to a passenger on a new 737 Max that had never been test-flown? I wouldn't.

I'd rather be on the 2nd or 3rd or 5th flight of something where there were already a dozen of the same design that had each made 15 to 20 flights, with zero failures. That's the current situation with Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters.

Note that it was the use-once part of Falcon 9 that failed. Even then it was a completely survivable failure. It deployed the satellites and they might yet be usable. It seems it's not a matter of available fuel and dV but whether the thrust over a complete orbit will be greater than atmospheric drag at the perigee and they can get a net raising of the perigee at all. Ideally, of course, you want to add all the dV instantaneously (or at least over 5 or 10 minutes) at one or more apogees, not thrusting all the way around..

If the upper stage had more than one (smaller?) engine then there might well have been full mission success.

Maybe it's a bit different for things coming back from orbital speed, or higher.  Falcon 9 boosters only hit ~6500 km/h, Superheavy 5750 and 5500 km/h on tests 3 and 4 respectively. That's only 4% to 5% of the energy of orbital speed, so no big problem to deal with. The slower Superheavy isn't even bothering with an entry burn before hitting the atmosphere.

There have been 6 Crew Dragon 2 built. The first prototype had a successful Demo-1 flight, but was accidentally destroyed in a ground test of the abort thrusters a few weeks later.  The second one was retired after a successful Flight Abort Test. It might well be that it's always sensible to retire them after a launch abort (hopefully after they save the crew!). That should be very unusual.

The remaining 4 built are all still in service, with a total of 13 crewed flights between them, including the one currently docked to ISS on its 5th flight.

There are also 3 cargo Dragon 2s, which have done 10 flights between them (4, 4, and 2)

I feel like the materials are not advanced enough yet to really give me confidence its going to work more then once, and the engineering controls are not fool proof.

Dragon seems to be adequately proven. Starship is certainly still an open question.

I'm sure they can protect it adequately, it's just a question of how much weight they have to add, and how much maintenance between flights.

SpaceX just seems to like to approach the optimum from the "let's prove we didn't do enough" side, not from the "build it like a brick outhouse and then see how much we can safely trim off later" side.

[coppercone2]

I have seen many more used things break then new things break unless their not tested properly when it comes to structural stuff. I never thought to myself this weld is getting better with age, just due to what they are.

For precision systems sure, you get to the 'correct' point. But structural stuff? No way.


You trust a old aluminum ladder over a new one? Or things like heavy hooks, beat up bolts, used up steel cable and older wiring.. I rarely have more confidence in them. It feels like a space rocket is chock full of those things. Especially brittle stuff

I think there is a error that develops because people used to build things so much better that you end up thinking age made it better but I think the manufacturing quality of those things degraded to such a point that they are just orders of magnitude inferior.


Granted, they only expect 10 uses out of it.. but the stress conditions those objects undergo are like the worst there are.

I think the data set that is relevant to space travel proportional to the amount of total data there is about general materials science knowledge used terrestrially is still very small and it might not be wise to use methodologies even vaguely similar to terrestrial conditions in order to assert objects durability.

Total number of rocket launches humans made is like 50000. For something like cars or planes, you have orders of magnitude more data gathered within the same time period. A car manufacturer has 1.7 billion cars to date to learn from and make judgements based on. 50K is jack shit compared to this, but I think they are using the same methodology as cars. And with cars you can study all of them, the majority of rockets are burned by the atmosphere save for some debris. And relevant to heavy rockets, I bet that number is under 5000.


and despite all of this, it still seems like its super easy to make a shitty unreliable car, even though you can test all the components and their under massively better conditions (but built with similar cost engineering practices as space x)

[coppice]

I have seen many more used things break then new things break unless their not tested properly when it comes to structural stuff. I never thought to myself this weld is getting better with age, just due to what they are.

Every analysis of reliability says you are wrong. Reliability for something well designed almost always follows a bathtub curve. However much up front testing you do before delivery there is always some amount of early failures in real world use, due to manufacturing issues. If the product is well designed this will soon settle to a very low level of failures, as the early failures gets shaken out. Then you have happy times until something starts to wear, and the failure rate goes up again. Usually the failures rise fairly slowly, leading to the classic bath tub shaped failure curve, and sometimes they rise quite fast. The Japanese used to be masters at getting the long low failure period really clean, and having many things reach wear out at a similar time. So, their final phase was often a steep upward slope, after a period of very high customer satisfaction. You don't see that effect as strongly these days.

[coppercone2]

I heard of it. I had to deal with it because of medical people. They wanted burn in for certain things. Maybe it made sense for a voltage reference but they never once saw something fail within the first 3 days, it was mandated but even the CTO thought it was BS.

After a properly engineered thing passed the manufacturing tests, the way it seemed to work is that problems might show up in 6 months to a year. 3 day intensive burn in never caught a single fail for YEARS.

I think it applies to SOME engineering things. We just saw high stress shit that we know is gonna possibly start to show problems in a long while.

There was literary no data for this that if it survived for X amount of time it was better and the main problem was some kinda ceramic like shit running near the strain point. It was basically better new, period.

They had no idea about what specifics can cause what problems, it was just policy that did nothing that was taken from some unrelated system. I think its mad common. The people that understand the specific problem are like "lol wut" when you get some kind of wear-in crap.



I trust things that are machined poorly more when they survive a "burn in" which means that parts grind themselves to the correct dimensions without breaking. Because I know there its basically not made right and the final manufacturing step is to basically let the fuckign thing lap, grind and burnish itself into spec. The first few hours of operation of like a cheap gear box or something is similar to pottery not cracking during final firing lol. But thats not some magic indicator of reliability, its more like "oh, it finally managed to grind that burr and misalignment off the shaft hole and run smooth without vibrating to death". I call it incomplete.

[coppice]

After a properly engineered thing passed the manufacturing tests, the way it seemed to work is that problems might show up in 6 months to a year. 3 day intensive burn in never caught a single fail for YEARS.

Even mass market consumer products like TVs get a 48 hour burn in, with some temperature cycling and shaking, at the factory before they are shipped these days. It doesn't pick up every bad soldered joint and loose part, but it picks up enough to really bring down warranty claims. If you have a lot of problems showing up after months you may have a poor design with real weaknesses. Of course, it can take a

[coppercone2]

not if its good to begin with and they just want a extra requirement & ignore your reliability data for whatever internal reasons. They were very confident it would improve things, it just made more work for no reason IMO

 I think it helps if your manufacturing is half assed but literarly this program was running for years and it aint find a single thing. It was like considered a 100% drain of company resources to maintain that "burn in" program for that customer requirement. There was 0 failures (they were all caught by normal testing/calibration procedures on the bench for a hour or so) that the burn in weeded out, and not a single equipment was swapped or whatever according to the data.

Maybe it would show something if you tightened a specification to weed something out, but they were more then happy with the spec.

Its a reason why small companies sometimes find big companies to be insane.

They paid extra but it basically lead to more people being hired to do nothing/occupy space and IMO had a bad effect on company culture, I always wished they out sourced that to someone that is isolated by the mail man, so they can have a little place where people just plug it in and do nothing with it and we don't know who they are or how little they work lol. It got lumped into the calibration department and their supposed to be smart people but it was just a bunch of extension cord plugging.


If there was a problem with that thing, it was when a customer wanted something more demanding, and it always required a re-design, not any kind of screening. it seemed that it either worked or needed a redesign for some extra demanding application.

For this particular thing, it was

[coppice]

not if its good to begin with and they just want a extra requirement & ignore your reliability data for whatever internal reasons. They were very confident it would improve things, it just made more work for no reason IMO

 I think it helps if your manufacturing is half assed but literarly this program was running for years and it aint find a single thing. It was like considered a 100% drain of company resources to maintain that "burn in" program for that customer requirement. There was 0 failures (they were all caught by normal testing/calibration procedures on the bench for a hour or so) that the burn in weeded out, and not a single equipment was swapped or whatever according to the data.

Maybe it would show something if you tightened a specification to weed something out, but they were more then happy with the spec.

Its a reason why small companies sometimes find big companies to be insane.

They paid extra but it basically lead to more people being hired to do nothing/occupy space and IMO had a bad effect on company culture, I always wished they out sourced that to someone that is isolated by the mail man, so they can have a little place where people just plug it in and do nothing with it and we don't know who they are or how little they work lol


If there was a problem with that thing, it was when a customer wanted something more demanding, and it always required a re-design, not any kind of screening. it seemed that it either worked or needed a redesign for some extra demanding application.

How many units were you making? Try a reasonable production line making 10k to 50k units per day, and see how many early failures a good burn in program picks up. People don't do this for no reason on products with thin margins. It takes a lot of space to have 10s of thousands of units in burn in at any one time. Especially when you are the other side of the world from most of your customers these practices make a big difference.

[coppercone2]

They wanted it for small amounts in the several hundreds per month. (ie. batch of 100 taken from the usual several thousand)

IMO the volume for aerospace heavy rockets is rather similar or even much smaller

Honestly the extra crap around having to do the burn in test IMO made it more likely to get damaged in the factory too. It just lead to scheduling problems, weird shift requirements (unplug it on a weekend type stuff) that you know can just cause a problem because its so irregular. And god forbid sales made a quoting mistake for a dead line, suddenly things needed to get rush to ensure burn in is completed on time. Management was not good, but that was not something that can be changed.

[wraper]

IMO the volume for aerospace heavy rockets is rather similar or even much smaller

Also they have thousands of times more parts than your thingy running in extreme stress conditions. A tiniest defect can blow up a whole rocket.

[brucehoult]

SpaceX says each pass through perigee is removing 5+ km of altitude from the Starlink satellites' apogee. So it's not going to take many orbits for the apogee to drop into the upper reaches of the atmosphere too, and then it'll be all drag, all the time, and a rapid spiral into burning up at that point.

[tszaboo]

After a properly engineered thing passed the manufacturing tests, the way it seemed to work is that problems might show up in 6 months to a year. 3 day intensive burn in never caught a single fail for YEARS.

Even mass market consumer products like TVs get a 48 hour burn in, with some temperature cycling and shaking, at the factory before they are shipped these days. It doesn't pick up every bad soldered joint and loose part, but it picks up enough to really bring down warranty claims. If you have a lot of problems showing up after months you may have a poor design with real weaknesses. Of course, it can take a

That definitely didn't happened at the factory I was interning at. TV was turned on only while it was on the production line, showing test images maybe for a total of 2 minutes. They had pallets that had electronic pick-up on the bottom, and sent some code on the IR to set it to test mode.

[coppercone2]

the other thing that burn in does is that unscrupulous people can degrade the normal QC because "burn in will catch it". It might not because its not being monitored as well, your just assuming time will do the work for you.

lots of hunching and figuring can go into justifying that wise decision

I would say over load testing is much better. A proofing test, if its at all possible.

For something as simple as a loose wire, it often can work just peachy for a long time until you bump it, or it gets some serious current. It will run forever at nominal conditions without a stimulus of some sort (or 2 years of thermal expansion and contraction if it survives the postal service). But if you catch that sucker smouldering, it can be tightened and good forever.

[coppice]

After a properly engineered thing passed the manufacturing tests, the way it seemed to work is that problems might show up in 6 months to a year. 3 day intensive burn in never caught a single fail for YEARS.

Even mass market consumer products like TVs get a 48 hour burn in, with some temperature cycling and shaking, at the factory before they are shipped these days. It doesn't pick up every bad soldered joint and loose part, but it picks up enough to really bring down warranty claims. If you have a lot of problems showing up after months you may have a poor design with real weaknesses. Of course, it can take a

That definitely didn't happened at the factory I was interning at. TV was turned on only while it was on the production line, showing test images maybe for a total of 2 minutes. They had pallets that had electronic pick-up on the bottom, and sent some code on the IR to set it to test mode.

I've been to a few TV plants in the UK and China. They've all done some form of burn-in. Some more thorough that others, but they did it.

[coppercone2]

is that not mostly specific to the display being a very peculiar component that is known to really have problems because of its extreme I/O count and rather shoddy interconnects ?

Its not often you come across a optical ASIC that has a surface area in square meters. Its like a QFP from hell that has to make connections to all those pixels.

[coppice]

For something as simple as a loose wire, it often can work just peachy for a long time until you bump it, or it gets some serious current. It will run forever at nominal conditions without a stimulus of some sort (or 2 years of thermal expansion and contraction if it survives the postal service). But if you catch that sucker smouldering, it can be tightened and good forever.

People running sane burn in programs include some form of shock, from whacking with rubber mallets to vibrating the product in patterns. They usually ensure the burn in includes at least some temperature variation as well. However, some people think production testing is about cosseting a product, so the flaws don't show up. Fire them.