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cover of episode SpaceX Starship Had massive design flaws

SpaceX Starship Had massive design flaws

2025/1/23
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Will Walden: 我从SpaceX内部人士处获得了一些关于星舰过去飞行测试中出现的问题的信息。这些问题可能导致严重后果,但幸运的是,由于系统自身的补偿机制,最终没有酿成大祸。 首先,在星舰与超重型助推器分离期间,连接点的意外谐波振动导致分离延迟了三秒钟。这迫使飞行电脑调整了飞行轨迹以进行补偿。这说明即使系统出现故障,SpaceX的应急系统也能有效工作,保障飞行安全。 其次,甲烷集管压力出现异常,导致发动机推力短暂不稳定。飞行电脑通过调整发动机混合比维持稳定燃烧,但效率降低了约4%。这在运送货物时可能是一个严重问题,因为效率降低可能会影响最终轨道。 此外,星舰的隔热罩一直存在问题。多次飞行中,隔热瓦出现过热等问题,虽然仍在安全范围内,但需要调整再入角度。未来,这可能会导致星舰无法在目标地点着陆,甚至可能造成安全事故,例如坠落到人口密集区。 第四,超重型助推器上的一个格栅舵出现50毫秒的液压响应时间延迟,导致下降过程中空气动力学控制不对称。飞行电脑通过更积极地调整其余格栅舵的位置进行了补偿。这体现了SpaceX在设计中考虑了冗余性,即使一个格栅舵出现故障,其他格栅舵也能弥补。 最后,星舰的高带宽通信系统由于再入过程中等离子场周围的意外电离,出现间歇性锁相误差,导致数据传输速率降低了约60%,持续时间约45秒。虽然关键遥测数据未受影响,但这可能会导致错过重要的数据,影响后续飞行的改进。

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Restrictions apply. See terms at sportsbook.fanduel.com. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My name is Will Walden. I'm your host. And today we're going to be talking about SpaceX's Starship, but not only the flight and the landing and the explosion of IFT7, but some things that went on behind the scenes at SpaceX.

Some insiders have tipped me off to a few things that have happened with Starship in the past. Now, whether that's IFT1 through IFT7, I can't tell you this because this person needs to be hidden. They weren't supposed to tell anybody this, but they told me this. So some of the things that have happened to Starship during the flights that could have gone horribly wrong, but I

luckily they didn't in these circumstances for some of this stuff. So I have to be very vague here because I'm kind of protecting somebody. This is an insider that's telling me things that have gone wrong with some starships. Okay. So, you

you know, there's a booster on Starship. There's a giant booster. It's about 250 feet tall and the ship itself is about 150-ish feet tall. So the whole thing is about 400 feet tall. The booster is the part at the bottom, if you're not familiar. And the top part is called Starship. So in between there, there is, what is it called? There's a stage in between there too. In the stage in between there, the...

It's a hot staging. So when the booster and the top stage separate, this part kind of takes all the energy from the top stage when it kicks off and it pushes it to the side and the hot staging ring flies off into the abyss. But the booster would come back and land eventually in one of these flights, but I can't tell you which one this is for. I mean, this isn't the one that actually landed. So I'll let you speculate all you want.

So there's a thing and I'm looking over here because this is where my information is here. During the separation of the Starship from a super heavy booster, unexpected harmonic vibrations developed in the interstage connection points. So everything's moving around, everything's shaking. It's a very violent place between the booster and the ship at all times during the flight.

Now, the oscillations caused a three second delay in a clean separation. So if you go back and you watch some of this footage and I can't show you the footage, but if you watch some of the footage, you'll see there might be a little bit of a delay and they might not even show it on the camera. I've looked through a lot of the footage here and I couldn't find the exact time that they were talking about.

There was a three-second delay between the clean separation, which forced the flight computer to adjust the vehicle's trajectory just enough to compensate for the altered flight path. So what this is telling us is that all systems, even if they go awry, the systems that are in place to fix these things

They're there and they work. So that was number one of about I think I have five things here. Yeah, five things that they sent me. And these are for past launches. Like I said before, I can't tell you which one it is because you might be able to track it to who this person is.

There's a methane header tank pressure anomaly as well. Header tank maintaining pressure for the Raptor engine's methane supply experienced micro fluctuations, causing brief thrust instability. Flight computer constantly adjusted the engine mixture ratio to maintain stable combustion, reducing overall efficiency by about 4% for this one flight. So that again,

It means that there wasn't an explosion, nothing blew up during this time, during the methane header tank anomaly, but it did reduce overall efficiency by about 4%. And that could be a big deal if you're sending cargo for somebody else into orbit. And if that 4% keeps you away from the orbit that you need to go to,

or makes the Starship itself actually push harder and maybe not get you to the orbit that you need to get to because that 4% is a huge deal. Four out of 100 is a pretty big deal. It's not huge, but it's 4% nonetheless. And there's been problems throughout all of these flights with the heat shield of the Starship. We've seen these things blow up. We've seen them melt down. We've seen them burn to a crisp.

um there's been heat shield problems since day one with this thing and it's impossible to get this absolutely perfect because mind you this is about seven flights in at this point at the time of this video it's seven flights in so seven flights of an experimental rocket and they're still figuring out the heat shield tiles and it's okay it's still a

Still not a production vehicle yet. So they're still learning and they're still working on the heat shields. Now, before I go any further with this, I want to ask you if you're subscribed yet, because I've noticed when I look back at the stats that only like 10% of you are subscribed to the show when you watch the video. So that means about

90% of you just come for this one video. So if you could do me a favor and click the like and the subscribe button to help out the channel, I would really appreciate it because not only do you get my content, but you get content that's similar to this that will be in your feed. So let's go on to the next with the heat shield. So several tiles on the windward side of Starship

showed unexpected thermal gradient patterns during reentry, with localized hotspots reaching 1800 degrees Celsius instead of around 1500-ish, while still within safety margins, requires the vehicle to adjust its reentry angle by an additional 0.7 degrees. This could be a big deal in the future if SpaceX

Um, it was going to land these rockets that 0.7 degrees could mean that they might not be able to land the rocket back at star base or back at Kennedy space center because they're off target. So that could be a big deal in the future when SpaceX starship is trying to land now.

0.7 degrees could also, depending on where it is in the flight, could send it over land and over people and over a scary place if it does blow up, if it does have a RUD, a rapid unscheduled disassembly. And if that's the case, it could shatter, it could blow up, and it could just spray the whole area with molten steel.

Imagine that you're just hanging out with your friends in your backyard and you see the bright lights in the sky. You're like, oh, that's cool. But it's all shards of super hot, super sharp steel. That's kind of dangerous. And I don't know which flight this is for. Remind, I'm reminding you this now, but that did happen in a past flight of a starship.

Now let's go on to the grid fin actuator desynchronization. Now I'm going to go tell you this again. This is from an actual person that's very close to Starship's production. I want to let you know this. And one of the four grid fins on Super Heavy experienced a 50 millisecond lag.

And that doesn't seem to be a lot, right? But it's in its hydraulic response time, creating asymmetric aerodynamic control during descent. Booster's flight computer compensates by adjusting the remaining grid fins positions more aggressively. So that's one of the reasons why they have all those grid fins. If one is a failure, then the other ones can take up the slack. SpaceX thought of everything. It's redundancy, man. It...

was built like that on purpose. Not only is it for the drag and to maneuver the rocket and the booster back in, but also in case one fails, the other ones can pick up the slack. They thought of everything. Now, the last one we have here is the communication array phase lock error.

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flavor-packed recipes like parmesan herb-crusted salmon. You'll be filling your kitchen with the cozy aromas of a homemade meal in no time. So go ahead, try HelloFresh. It's homemade, made easy. Learn more at HelloFresh.com. High-bandwidth communication system experiences intermittent phase lock errors due to unexpected ionization in the plasma field around the vehicle during reentry.

So think of whatever starships were coming back in that were molten hot reduces data transmission rates to ground stations by about 60% for about 45 seconds. And that's through critical telemetry. Um, yeah, or though it says critical telemetry remains unaffected. So 45 seconds of data transmission had was missing during this flight.

So, it could be something where they miss a really important piece of data if they want to use this flight as a building block for the next flights. And they would just not have that data for the next ones. So, those are five things that no one's ever published before, no one's ever seen before.

The reason why I have these, and I'll tell you this, the reason why I have these is because I spent about a year down at Starbase and I know some people that are down in that area. That's all I got to say. So I'm going to say, so I'd be very honest.

Bland about everything. I can't tell you everything that's happening But I can tell you like because of these things and it hasn't shown really in SpaceX's starship launches and the re-entries that any of this has made a huge impact on the actual Flights other than maybe the heat shield that might have been a thing Red fin was fixed methane tank methane header tank pressure anomaly

That might have been a thing, but overall efficiency was down by 4%. It's a pretty big deal, eventually, but they might be able to fix that up. So I don't know if they fixed that up or what flight that was for. They didn't tell me which flight these were for, by the way, because they didn't want to be tracked back. So...

Let me know down in the comments what you think about this. Also, leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. Like I said before, 90% of you haven't subscribed yet. So hit the subscribe button, like the video, leave a comment down below, and also share this with your friends because we're growing this channel and it's going to be huge. I know it is. We're growing it organically and the audience that we have is really great. Also, we have a Discord. It's down below.

Thanks for watching, everybody. Take care of yourselves and each other, and I will see you in the next one.