How the SN10 starship successfully landed, then exploded
As the saying goes, “the third times is the charm”, and that was very much true for
SpaceX. Two spectacular flights which had two different kind of spectacular crash landings.
The third time was almost the charm. The Starship SN 10, is a huge next-generation spacecraft that
Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive officer of SpaceX, dreams to send to mars. As SpaceX sent
this another starship prototype flying high above the Texas coast on Wednesday, it successfully
completed the ascension into the sky and this time returned to the ground and landed in one piece,
but minutes later it exploded due to a possible methane leak. But regardless of this explosion it
was a great success for the private space company. With this success we are one step closer to mars.
Elon musk's company is churning out starship test vehicles in Boca Chica, Texas at the company's
test facility and very recently they began testing the launch and landing capabilities
in daring flights. The big stainless steel SN10 launched from Boca Chica at 6:15 pm EST,
rose 6.2 miles into the sky and the came back to earth for a smooth touchdown 6 minutes and
20 seconds after lift-off. Today in this video we take a look at the major changes that happened in
starship SN10 with respective to SN8 and SN9, and why it exploded minutes after the landing?
So, make sure to watch the video till the end to know the significance of starship SN10 for us and
our future of becoming interplanetary species. But know why is Starship so Important? Imagine
a rocket that could launch and land 1,000 times a year. Sounds unbelievable? Well,
that’s what SpaceX is working on- The Starship. Its lifting capacity of 100,000 kilograms
is more than any rocket currently in operation, and the whole system is designed to be reusable
for frequent trips to space. It will launch atop a large booster called Super Heavy.
Super Heavy will be the backbone of getting Starship and its crew on a journey to another
world. The ultimate goal of starship is to launch up to 100 people at a time per flight.
Before Sn10, its predecessors SN 8 failed to stick to the landing but they give valuable data to the
company to make amends in the future which the company did. Before discussing what happened
to the Starship SN10, we will first discuss the major design changes that SpaceX implemented in
this starship. By this time, you might have known how SpaceX works. They basically keep testing
these prototypes and during each and every test they gather a huge amount of valuable data.
They can then analyse the data and make necessary hardware and software changes
in the future prototypes. So naturally SN10 is kind of an evolved version of Sn8 and SN9.
SN8 was expected to have 33% probability of completing all the mission objectives but Sn8 did
far better from that. Sn9 also suffered a major landing failure. But what's important here is that
both of these landing failures were unique and failure is the most expected outcome in these test
flights. Though SN8 and Sn9 didn’t land they did show us two different scenarios of what might go
wrong while landing in the future. These failures contribute a lot to the program's success,
for example, because of the failure of starship Sn8 SpaceX realised the problem of maintaining
adequate pressure in the header tanks and so they made some design changes made added a
helium header tank in Sn9, but this time Sn9 had a completely different cause of landing failure.
They realised that relighting two raptor engines can also lead to failure as raptors are not fully
matured yet and are still in the development phase. SpaceX realised that they can eliminate
this by reigniting all the three raptor engines during the starship flip maneuver.
So, SpaceX performed a mid-air static fire, giving the rocket flight computer a few seconds to
analyse the performance of the raptor engines and down slip to the two of the healthiest raptors.
Starship Sn10 was the first high-altitude prototype to perform 3 raptor engine flip burn.
The second major change in the starship SN10 was the installation of a flight termination system
(FTS). It was installed as a safety measure in the vent that starship loses control
and stress passed a certain point outside its approved trajectory, the FTS would explode
triggering a vehicle breakup. However, looking at the historical data the starship prototypes have
done pretty good job at sticking to their planned trajectory so there is a very low probability
that a flight termination system would be triggered but it's better to be safe than sorry.
As the sun set over the test site in Boca Chica, Texas, on 3rd March, 2020, the latest prototype
Sn10 lifted off, its stainless stell exterior soaring high up in the sky, ascending over an
altitude of over six miles. It was the second launch attempt of the day. Three hours earlier,
the lift-off of SN10 was aborted with just fractions of seconds left in the countdown.
The engines were ignited and ready to lift-off, but then were shut off when the computer on board
detected much thrust from one of the engines. Elon musk updated us about this development on twitter
and also stated that SpaceX would be tweaking the flight software’s thrust limit and also recycle
the propellant for another shot at launch. The engineers then realised the problem was
not significant, adjusted the software and tried again. Earlier the starship was rolled out to the
launch pad on 28th January. Starship Sn10 lifted off just five weeks later, the fastest factor to
launch flow yet. The speed of the turnaround was made possible thanks to a comparatively
very smooth launch campaign passing the cryogenic proof and static fire tests in just few attempts.
SN10 attempted the launch for the second time, the three raptor engines ignited again, and this time
they stayed on. The rocket then rose into the Texas sky for the targeted altitude.
The ascent of starship sn10 was very similar to its predecessors sn8 and sn9 flying under the
power of three raptor engines. At around T plus 15 seconds of the ascent, the starship switched back
to the two raptor engines for the remaining phase of ascent. At around 8 kilometres of altitude the
starship shifted its control to a single raptor engine as it neared the apogee of 10 kilometres,
and quite unsurprisingly once at its highest point the prototype shut down the last remaining raptor
engine and successfully completed the belly flop maneuver switching the controls to the
aerodynamic surfaces of the rocket. Except for the last few seconds, the starship SN10
did nothing new in its flight. Just like its predecessors the prototype had a stable ascent
did a successful belly flop maneuver and also had a control descent under its aerodynamic surfaces.
The only thing that was different in this test flight was the landing approach.
As discussed earlier, instead of relighting two engines for the flip maneuver descent the starship
was going to re-light all the three raptor engines this was going to be followed by switching back to
two of the healthiest raptors before ultimately going down to a single raptor or touchdown and
to everyone's delight SN10 performed the landing burn just as planned SN 10 relighted all the three
raptor engines switched to two raptor engines and ultimately went down to a single raptor Engine
before a successful touchdown. And there we have it, SN10 the first full-scale starship prototype
to successfully complete the high-altitude flight test. But if you were someone who was
looking at this for the first time can tell that something's wrong here there are some
questions that arises here, first of all where are the landing legs and why is starship looking
like the leaning tower of boca Chica and then why is there a fire next to the prototype all
the suspicious ingredients collectively form the recipe of what is called you guessed it right,
a rapid unscheduled disassembly just a few minutes after SpaceX's live stream ended. Starship SN10
the decide to follow the path of its predecessors and just exploded. So, what went wrong with the
starship? When we take a closer look at the final few seconds of the landing phase of sn10
it becomes pretty evident that the landing was not smooth you can clearly see that sn10 bounced
after touchdown and as far as we now bouncing is something that rockets don't like to do this
bounce clearly indicated that sn10 did not have a soft landing the hard landing also explains why we
cannot see the landing legs because the landing legs were not there they just could not absorb
the force of hard landing but this still does not explain the explosion. But honestly there is no
clear reason as to what caused the explosion. The explosion happened after several minutes
and not immediately one of the possible reasons could be the flight termination system as SN10 was
leaning towards one side the flight termination system could have triggered the explosion
but when you take a closer look at the explosion it is clear that the point of explosion was at the
bottom of the rocket and the flight termination system is not there. So, this possibility
is not on the cards anymore so there remains only one possible explanation according to us,
as you can see there was a propellant leak just before the explosion so we can say that the bounce
may have caused some sort of structural damage to SN10 leading to a propellant leak which ultimately
caught fire resulting in the explosion of SN10. But nonetheless, Starship has demonstrated that
the new landing approach works and now SpaceX just need to find a solution for the landing legs, even
though it was not a soft-landing sentence still is the first starship prototype to successfully
complete the complex high altitude flight test. SpaceX is developing starship to get people and
payloads to the moon, mars and other distant destinations, and to fly any other missions
the company requires. The final Starship will be brawny enough to get itself off the moon and Mars,
but it will need Super Heavy's help to get off our much more massive Earth. After launching Starship
to Earth orbit, the huge booster will come back down to Earth for a vertical landing, as Falcon
9 and Falcon Heavy first stages already do. Next up we have Starship SN11 almost ready and we’ll
be seeing another starship flight very soon and we really hope it will have a complete success.
What do you think about the Starship SN10 flight test? How much closer are we to going to mars? Do
you think it was a success and why? And how will it affect our future in spaceflight?
Do let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comment section below.
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