Elon Musk just reacted to Starship 6 engines firing, TPS damaged and made Grass fire at Starbase
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SpaceX fired up the engines of its space-bound Starship prototype Thursday afternoon (Sept. 8) in a dramatic test that also set some of the surrounding landscape ablaze.
All six of the Raptor engines on SpaceX’s Ship 24 vehicle blazed briefly Thursday at 5:30 p.m. EDT at Starbase, the company’s South Texas facility.
This appears to be a successful test, SpaceX then announced: “Ship 24 completes 6-engine static fire test at Starbase”.
This “static fire” test marked another step toward launch for Ship 24, which is slated to conduct the Starship program’s first-ever orbital test flight in the coming months.
TAlthough the static fire lasted just a few seconds, however, immediately after, a grass fire broke out immediately afterward and is still burning on the sSouth side of TX-HWY4. It is believed that plastic and other materials ejected from the launch pad are the sources of ignition.
The local fire department was out as a safety precaution. Honestly, look at this picture, the fire is not very easy to fight without local support.
In addition, many heat tiles on the ship have been falling down due to the immense vibration produced during the static fire.
A Twitter named Zack Golden on Twitter saidcounted:” Almost 30 damaged or missing tiles on Ship 24 after a sixan six engine static fire test that lasted for 8 seconds!”
In reply to this, Elon Musk tweeted:” Yup, there’s a reason we do static fires! Much better to break things on the ground than en route to orbit.”
Thermal protection tiles are key to a spacecraft surviving reentry. During reentry, a spacecraft will gain a massive amount of heat, converting the velocity of the vehicle to heat through friction with the air. There are a few ways to deal with that heat. An ablative heat shield will heat up and burn away, carrying away the energy. The problem with ablative heat shields is that they burn up, and need to be replaced – that doesn’t work if you want to re-launch a spacecraft within an hour of landing, as SpaceX eventually does with Starship. In order to (eventually) allow quick reusability, Starship instead uses ceramic thermal protection tiles to insulate the spacecraft from the heat of reentry. The tiles, like those of the Space Shuttle, are extremely lightweight and fragile.
Each Starship has roughly 25,000 thermal protection tiles, and production of these tiles is not quick. SpaceX makes use of a heat shield “bakery” in Cocoa Beach, FloridaFlorid, anda and will begin producing tiles in Starbase. The current tiles and attachment system seem prone to cracking and falling off, which won’t work if Starship 24, and future Starships, are to survive reentry.
Elon Musk just reacted to Starship 6 engines firing, TPS damaged and made Grass fire at Starbase
