Starship Flight 7 RUD

Starship S33 Explosion and Re-Entry after Anomaly | RUD Starship S33 Flight 7
SpaceXtudio

I don't know why anyone uses the acronym RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly). Why don't they just say it dun blowd up? Either someone was either trying to be clever when they coined the term, or they were lost in acronym land and everything had to have an acronym, so they coined this one.

SpaceX launched their big booster with a Starship on top this week. The booster returned to the launch site and was caught by the outstretched arms of Mechazilla. The Starship itself did not fare so well, exploding on the way up to orbit and giving us this light show.

The Silicon Graybeard has a longer post.

Putting one of these rockets together costs about $100 million. Space Launch Systems, Boeing's baby is supposed to cost $2 billion per launch.

Rockets Always Blow Up

Koyaanisqatsi - Ending Scene (Best Quality)
RikkiiZ

Cool rocket footage with cool music.

From Wikipedia article:

Koyaanisqatsi is a 1982 American non-narrative documentary film directed and produced by Godfrey Reggio, featuring music composed by Philip Glass and cinematography by Ron Fricke. The film consists primarily of slow motion and time-lapse footage (some of it in reverse) of cities and many natural landscapes across the United States. The visual tone poem contains neither dialogue nor a vocalized narration: its tone is set by the juxtaposition of images and music. Reggio explained the lack of dialogue by stating "it's not for lack of love of the language that these films have no words. It's because, from my point of view, our language is in a state of vast humiliation. It no longer describes the world in which we live." In the Hopi language, the word koyaanisqatsi means "life out of balance".

Is that a Saturn 5 rocket taking off? Yes and no. 22over7aintpi explains in a comment:

In case you were wondering there are two rockets featured in this sequence. The first is a Saturn V on the launch pad, the second is the first Atlas-Centaur Missile launched on May 8, 1962. No one was hurt in that explosion and clues to why it exploded are a flapping liquid nitrogen line by the vernier engine and the venting liquid hydrogen some seconds into flight. The failure was determined to be caused by an insulation panel that ripped off the Centaur during ascent, resulting in a surge in tank pressure when the LH2 overheated. Beginning at T+44 seconds, the pneumatic system responded by venting propellant to reduce pressure levels, but eventually, they exceeded the LH2 tank's structural strength. At T+54 seconds, the Centaur experienced total structural breakup and loss of telemetry, the LOX tank rupturing and producing an explosion as it mixed with the hydrogen cloud. Two seconds later, flying debris ruptured the Atlas's LOX tank followed by complete destruction of the launch vehicle. The panel had been meant to jettison at 49 miles (80 km) up when the air was thinner, but the mechanism holding it in place was designed inadequately, leading to premature separation. The insulation panels had already been suspected during Centaur development of being a potential problem area, and the possibility of an LH2 tank rupture was considered as a failure scenario. Testing was suspended while efforts were made to correct the Centaur's design flaws.

Title from The Right Stuff.

As for the quotes at the end, sounds kind of like my theory of dragons:

I prefer to think the dragon legends come down to us from a previous civilization that had mechanized, flying war machines like the A-10 Warthog. After that civilization collapsed and the art of heavier-than-air aircraft was lost, how would you explain something like an A-10 to your kids? "There were fire breathing monsters that flew through the air and destroyed everything in their path". That's how.

I like Graham Hancock, the guy who's always postulating the existence of an advanced human civilization a zillion years ago, except I just now had a thought. What if this advanced civilization actually created humans from the biological material at hand (like all the existing plants and animals)? Created us as an experiment, and when the experiment started to get out of hand, they bailed out. Kind of like the archetypal mad scientist in horror movies. He brews up some mystical stew in a large pot and it reacts too well, starts bubbling over and eventually expands to take over his lab, the building and the town. Yeah, at this point the mad scientist bails out and I suspect a similar scenario prompted our createors to bail out as well. 

It is doubtful we would ever find any evidence of such a civilization on account of the ice age glaciers that ground everything to dust. And if we ever did find any evidence, I doubt whether we would recognize it, much less understand it.

Russian Missile Fired at Ukraine

Here are a couple of video of warheads from a big Russian rocket impacting in Ukraine. Some people think the missile was an ICBM, other people say no, it's just a big rocket. But the first video says it's a MIRV - Multiple, Independent targeted Re-entry Vehicles. Watching the video, it looks like there are like six groups each containing maybe six elements. Groups are spaced about one second apart. An American ATACMS missile travels about 1 kilometer per second, and ICBM travels at like 7 kilometers per second. I don't understand how either one could deliver multiple blows at one second intervals. I think I'm missing something.

BREAKING:

New video shows a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) striking Ukraine.

The video shows reentry vehicles from its MIRV hitting the city of Dnipro.

It’s the first time in history that an ICBM is used in war. pic.twitter.com/o198cJXvXm

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 21, 2024

This footage captures a major attack unfolding in Ukraine, with Zelensky claiming it was caused by an ICBM—missiles designed to deliver nuclear or conventional warheads and nearly impossible to intercept.

This marks the first-ever deployment of an ICBM just days after Ukraine… pic.twitter.com/kaLwLIDFsd

— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) November 21, 2024

 

Accurate Missile Attack

An Israeli missile hits a building in Ghobeiry, Beirut. [Bilal Hussein/AP Photo]

Al Jazeera has the story and several more pictures of the missile on it's way to the target. You might think the missile is going to hit the roof, but it actually impacts the building a few stories above ground level.

I like this excerpt. Al Jazeera is usually all Israel-bad all the time.

The strike on Tuesday came roughly 40 minutes after an Israeli military spokesperson posted a warning in Arabic on social media, notifying people in and around a pair of buildings in the southern suburbs of the Lebanese capital that they should evacuate the area.

He did not explain why the buildings were being targeted, other than to say they were near “interests and facilities” associated with the Hezbollah group.

The warning prompted many people to flee the busy, densely populated neighbourhood, even as others, including a few journalists, kept watch. By the time of the attack, the building had been evacuated and there were no reports of casualties.

Minutes before the missile brought down the building, two smaller projectiles were fired at the roof in what Israel’s military often refers to as warning strikes, according to the AP journalists at the scene. It is a practice Israel has followed in strikes in the Gaza Strip.

Home Missile

Beach House Missile

Everybody should have one.

Cruise Missile Fly-by

Fishman Captures 2 Cruise Missles while in Caspian Sea
JustSayYourLines

Good day to be out on the water.

Caspian Sea

The Caspian Sea is about 700 miles north to south and roughly 200 miles across. This image is in the normal orientation, that is north is at the top and south is at the bottom. Going clockwise from the bottom it is bordered by Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, Kazakhastan and Turkmenistan. I don't know who's shooting at who, but I'll bet Azerbaijan is involved. That's where Baku, the oil town, is.

SpaceX

SpaceX upper stage anomaly

How is it that we even have pictures like this? We are walking way out on the edge and there ain't no net.

Aerojet

Abandoned Planet: Aerojet Everglades
Abandoned Planet

I remember reading something about this place a while back. This video doesn't have much, but it does give us a bit of the story. The part about the Apollo Program ($257 billion) costing more than the Manhattan Project ($2 billion) was a surprise. The price of gold during the Manhattan Project and at the beginning of the Apollo Program was $35 an ounce. By the end of the Apollo Program the price of gold had tripled, so the $257 billion amount is slightly inflated, but we can pretty safely say the Apollo Program cost roughly one hundred times as much as the Manhattan Project. All the stories about life on the home front during WW2 are all about rationing and shortages of everything. By contrast America was living the high life during the Apollo Program. Funny how a little injection of government spending  during WW2 jump started the economy to the point that we could shoot the moon and not even notice.

Abandoned Aerojet Dade Rocket Facility

We're way down at the tip of Florida.

Hercules Explosives

This abandoned shed may yet help end the world
CGP Grey

Slick little video that gives us a brief history of the Hercules company and their solid rocket motor test facility in Utah.

Blast from the Past

Hyperion: The Fully Reusable SSTO!
Hazegrayart

Hyperion was an idea from 1966. The video is a recent creation.

Golly gee, that looks familiar. A comment clued me in:

When Worlds Collide (1951)- Leaving earth
Razor Shark

I saw this movie when I was a kid and it made a huge impression on me. Didn't see it when it came out, that was the year I was born. Must have been a later release, maybe when the Apollo project was ramping up.

Grid Fins

Grid Fins on SpaceX Super Heavy Booster

I'm watching a video about the recent SpaceX rocket launch and this scene flashes on the screen for a couple of seconds. I'm posting it because it shows just how big the grid fins are. In pictures of the whole rocket the grid fins look pretty small and inconsequential. They are not.

Merlin Engine

SpaceX Merlin 1D engine

Starship - Successful Test Flight

Watch: SpaceX Starship Test Flight Ends in Explosion on Second Try | WSJ
The Wall Street Journal

Launched this morning at oh dark thirty West Coast time. I was awake so I watched it. Pretty great. Everything seemed to work fine going up, but things kind of fell apart on the way down. Near as I can tell the booster blew up all by itself and Starship was destroyed by command when they lost communication.

Still, the test did better than expected. (Not hard when you expect nothing. Tamp down your boundless enthusiasm with a healthy dose of 'I just know it's going to blow up on the launch pad', and then if it gets off the ground you can say 'wow, just look at that'!)

Starship Directional Control

Why did SpaceX keep Starship’s Grid Fins out on ascent?
Everyday Astronaut

The launch he's talking about happened last April. This video showed up while I was whiling away the afternoon watching YouTube Shorts, the greatest time sucker since the invention of tiddly winks. I like this video because it shows the grid fins in action, it shows how ginormous they are and there is also a clip of the central group of rocket motors swiveling on their gimbals. They used to use hydraulics to move them but they have since changed to electric actuators. No, not more Tesla motors.

Point Defence in Space Combat

Point Defence in Space Combat
Spacedock

I usually post stuff I when I have something to say on the subject. I don't know if I've got anything to say about the subject here. We'll see, maybe something later. But right now I'm just kind of blown away. This guy is mixing Science Fiction space battles and real life, cutting-edge military weapons. If I heard him right, there is a chat group somewhere devoted to figuring out just what the next generation of weapons might be capable of. Such a discussion might be pointless, but then talking politics is equally pointless, but we still do it. And every once in a while a thought from one of these discussions might weasel its way out of the chat group, slither along the streets and avenues of society and into the ear of someone who can do something about it. I mean it has happened, hasn't it? Unfortunately, the one incident that pops into my head is one where the warning was not heeded. It was the idea of using an airliner to attack New York City. I read a story about that probably thirty years before it actually happened. 

Now that I think about it, I realize the guys in charge of airline security were probably thinking about it, but we never heard from them. All I heard about the airliners crashing into the Twin Towers was the idiotic "who'd-a-thunk-it?" Anybody who had a brain would-a-thunk it. But realizing you have a potential problem is only the first step. Next you need a solution. That's easy, you just dream up your perfect security apparatus. But now you have to sell it, and all the players have to agree on your solution. I'll bet that's what happened, nobody liked the idea of a perfect security apparatus so we did nothing. We worked on the honor system, and it worked for, what? 50 years?

I do wonder just what kind of airline security we should be using. Seems there ought to be a better way. Our current method of having a legion of TSA agents inspecting individual passengers is cumbersome and of dubious efficacy. One one hand it's annoying and time consuming, and number of actual terrorists they've stopped is near zero*. On the other hand, no airliners have been commandeered by terrorists lately.

* I have no idea how many terrorists the TSA has arrested. Of course, you can always fudge the numbers. If you were asking how many terrorists, to the nearest thousand, then anything less than 500 would round to zero. And that was the question you were asking, right? So I feel pretty safe about saying zero.

Back on the video. I really enjoy watching those test flights of maneuvering rockets. I'm gonna have to watch this again.

You Only Live Twice

You Only Live Twice (1967) Official Trailer - Sean Connery James Bond Movie HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

Bond goes to Japan to deal with Blofeld in his secret island hideout. That Blofeld must have been quite a guy. At the time the Russians and the Americans are struggling to put a two-man capsule into orbit, Blofeld has constucted a much larger and more capable spacecraft as well as a fully equipped missile launching facility in the center of a dormant volcano. We're not even going to mention that he has developed a spacecraft that can land vertically, nearly 50 years before Elon Musk managed that.

The Hypersonic Missile Vulnerability That NO ONE Talks About

I dunno, it kind of sounds like nobody has a hypersonic missile that can live up to its hype. At least not yet. 

I suppose that the compulsion to build ever more deadly weapons is ingrained in our society, our minds and our bodies right down to our bones. All driven by the fear that if the 'other guys' got an edge up on us we would be at their mercy, and being as 'they' are heathen, pagan, devil worshipers, we can't expect much in the way of mercy. Probably be put up on stage and dissected. Better to go out in a blaze of glory, am-I-right?

Of course, this compulsion is buried deep within our bones and after you have applied a nice thick layer of civilization over those bones, you might think we live in a civilized society. I am pretty sure we don't, but we like to pretend that we do, we like to pretend that if we all just got our shit together, we could all live in a civilized society. It's a nice dream and its our belief in that dream that allows us to have little bits of paradise scattered here and there around the world.

But our society is not really civilized. All that civilization that's been slathered on our bones is no kind of armor if reality decides to intrude, and it doesn't take much reality to break through that cream puff layer and reach the bones where the killer resides. Wake him up and see how civilized our society is.

Hypersonic

A Russian MiG-31K carrying a Kinzhal hypersonic cruise missile - Russian Defence Ministry/AFP

We've been hearing about hypersonic missiles for a while (years?) now, but it's always been tests or prototypes or designs or funding. This might be the first time I've seen a picture of an operational missile. Aljazeera has the story.

SpaceX Starship

The SpaceX Starship Full Wet Dress in Texas on Monday, December 23, 2022

The Silicon Greybeard has a post up about the SpaceX Starship. Nothing Earth shattering, I just like to keep tabs on Elon's pet project. They continue to march along, making incremental progress. The pace feels more like NASA in the 1960's when there was always a rocket launch / disaster in the news, not like the glacial pace that NASA has been taking since the end of Apollo.

Flying Crowbars

We tested the US Military’s secret space weapon
Veritasium
I first came across the idea of using heavy metal rods dropped from space as a weapon in Footfall, a science fiction novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. It sounded like a great idea, simple, inexpensive and devastatingly effective. Derek tries to demonstrate it but fails. He might have done better with some kind of guidance system and some steerable fins. However, while there might be cases where it could be useful, he goes on to explain that for any of the proposed uses, it's not going to be all that effective. I think the biggest objection is that pound for pound, nuclear weapons are much more devastating. An ICBM might carry a ten ton payload. That would be enough to launch one big tungsten rod or half a dozen nuclear weapons. And while you aren't going to get any radioactive fallout from a ten ton kinetic weapon, I'm not sure that argument will carry any weight when you are bent on destroying your enemy.