Starship stays on Earth. As far as it is not yet known: it could be a few months, or much more. There Federal Aviation Administrationthe US agency that regulates atmospheric and space flight, has launched an investigation into the April 20 launchwhich ended with a bang over the gulf of Mexico, opened as a result of debris hitting surrounding properties.
The knot to solve does not concern so much the explosion, which was widely taken into account, but the rain of debris and the cloud of particulate matter, dust raised by the most powerful rocket built so far, with damage and consequences also to the inhabited center which is ten kilometers away. The launch pad lacked facilities necessary for withstand and absorb so much power, that of 33 Raptor engines all firing together. Structures that there was no time to build. But Musk wanted to launch the same.
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What happened during the launch
At 8.33 in the morning, at Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, the Super Heavy fires its engines and leaves the launch tower and immediately a thick and dense cloud rises. The most experienced eyes, looking at the pad, already had noticed the absence of two details, which are not really details. First of all, the so-called deluge (the Sound Suppression System), i.e. the powerful jets of water that have the purpose of dampening the sound waves: these can damage engines and the entire rocket, up to destroying it. Once seen from below, emerged from the blanket, not all 33 engines seemed to be running, there were at least 3 voids among the incandescent mouths of the others, who then became five and then seven or maybe even eight.
And then the hole and the trenches for the flames and gases. These too are practically present in all launch pads of medium to large carriers. They serve to vent the power of the engines by lowering the ground level, so that the flames do not attack the ground or the platform too closely and this is not exactly what we saw at Starbase. While the pits on the sides carry the exhaust fumes away. Super Heavy and Starship were instead sitting on a stand that, especially in hindsight, did not seem suitable. Many have gone to fish a tweet from Musk from 2020: “We wish we didn’t have a flame diverter in Boca. But it could turn out to be a mistake.” It was. Nor can we exclude that the vibrations themselves and the debris raised damaged some of the engines or the entire structure of the carrier, which then led to the explosion.
The cloud and the destruction
While at Starbase and across the world everyone was throwing their arms in the air for greet the lift off of the rocket to the Moon, within that blanket that was expanding with the air of inevitability happened the apocalypse. Ask to Scott Schilke, an expert photographer of space launches, who hadn’t come to terms with the destructive fury that would have knocked out four of his action cameras. Enough to appeal to GoPro to help a loyal customer.
O a Jack Beyer, NasaSpaceFlight photographer, who had parked his car as a support for a whole set of cameras and tripods a few hundred meters from the pad. And he only found wreckage. The videos shot and published on the Net taken from those rooms, on the other hand, testify that a kind of tornado had been unleashed, flying everywhere what, it was later known, were fragments of concrete, as well as stones and earth. They are pieces of the launch pad, chewed up by the power of 33 engines and spat out far away, and of its base, in place of which there is now a crater. A drone shot from above also shows the nearby beach. If you look closely you can see, among the waves, a hail of bullets falling into the water. All of this had not been foreseen.
Not even the inhabitants of Port Isabel, the town closest to Starbase, they expected that the cloud released by the launch could cause damage and discomfort up to their homes and shops, which are 8-10 kilometers away as the crow flies. Instead, as reported by CNBC, the investigation by the Federal Flight Agency it was “activated due to debris entering adjacent properties”. It is mainly particulate matter, the cloud made of soil, sand and dust, raised in the first seconds of launch and deposited on the surrounding area (it is not due to the exhaust gases). According to CNBC, residents of Port Isabel also complained of broken windows and vibrations due to the explosion of the rocket, which occurred about 4 minutes after takeoff, as well as the veil of dust on homes and schools. The task of the FAA will be to establish together with SpaceX the cause of these anomalies. And force SpaceX to fix it.
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Second the program plan accepted by the FAA, which concerns the launch of Starship and Super Heavy, the maximum affected area had to be equal to about 700 acres, over 280 hectares. It turned out to be, on balance, much larger, affecting the town several kilometers away. Even environmentalists have expressed concern about the consequences of this violence on the territory, especially on fauna. According to as reported by local journalists, that around Boca Chica would in fact be a nesting area for migratory birds. And a fire would have broken out immediately after launch. All events under investigation by the FAA, some of which could perhaps have been avoided with a suitable infrastructure, perhaps by waiting a little longer.
In another tweet, hours after the fireworks over the Texas sky, Musk chirped that “3 months ago, we started building a huge water-cooled steel plate to fit under the launch pad. It was not ready in time and we mistakenly assumed, based on static fire data, that Fondag (the concrete platform, ed) would pass the first launch. It looks like we may be ready to launch again in 1 to 2 months.” This will depend on the FAA investigation, but many are convinced that it will take much, much longer. Up to a year. Musk will therefore need to arm himself with patience, the one that, on balance, he has not had so far.