Naive question: I obviously expect there to be flames from the engines, but there were flames on the lower sides for quite a while after the catch – is that expected?
It is common for Starship prototypes to have uncontrolled fires, but it is obviously not a good thing.
For example, prototype number 10 exploded 8 minutes after landing [1] because of a seemingly insignificant fire at the bottom.
After today's flight there was a long lasting fire in the engine section, with occasional flaming pieces of plumbing raining down from the rocket. Examining the aftermath should help SpaceX to understand what improvements need to be made to prevent this from happening.
This highlights another thing I love about watching SpaceX's unprecedented rate of progress. They're managing the complex balance of risk, learning, time and budget extremely well. I'm not an expert in the relevant domains but even I've noticed and appreciated that the typical SpaceX development test always manages to get big chunks of new data, while still having some notable things not quite working.
It's an object lesson in rapid engineering development. If everything goes perfectly in a development test, it's a sign you're not moving fast enough (meaning not taking enough risk per increment to maximize learning). As valuable as Falcon, Starlink and Starship are, the biggest near-term value of SpaceX may be providing such a clear demonstration of well-executed "fail fast, learn fast" engineering that even politicians and bureaucrats can understand it.
Maybe the flare on the side started as purposeful. But there was also a fire inside, between the engines, with flaming pieces of some pipes or cables raining down from the rocket. You can see one example of this just after this timestamp: https://youtu.be/YC87WmFN_As?t=12928
If not an intended vent, probably some methane leak. Given that they have the first stage intact, they will know exactly what happened very soon. Yet another advantage of having the rocket returned instead of sinking it in the ocean.
It does look like venting, but on the Everyday Astronaut video feed it also looked like a COPV inside one of the strakes looked like it exploded as well.
It looked to me like the fire was on the fuel intake valves and if you watch carefully that area was scoured by the nozzle output when it was first slowing down so it probably blew through the shutoff valves or something
Isn’t this a forum of hackers caring about the news? Everyone seems excited here and that excitement naturally leads into curiosity for many who identify as hackers.
There’s a bunch of people crapping on you who clearly haven’t been through a flight test campaigns.
100% with you. The teams I’ve worked with would be celebrating and trying to figure out what’s burning at the same time. And especially trying to figure out if there’s anything that they need to do to collect evidence for that investigation (eg zooming the remote PTZ cameras in on specific areas or things like that)
Just to be clear, I never suggest that the teams actually working on this wouldn't look into it. I was talking about people who were watching and were happy.
They have mission goals which were achieved (booster was caught). Goals that they didn't think they could do (Starship being within the buoys). While there was flames and those could be dangerous you judge the mission based on the planned outcomes but they will try to eliminate the anomalies to improve the next mission while still achieving the goals.
The thing is that no one is judging the mission based on this imperfection. It's just intellectual curiosity, which is a good thing. The comments that are getting down voted are all assuming some negative motive that just isn't present.
