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From AIAA’s “Daily Launch” for 29 October 2024:
NASA Finds Root Cause Of Orion Heat Shield Charring
Irene Klotz October 28, 2024
The heat shield for NASA's Artemis II Orion spacecraft was installed in June 2023 at Kennedy Space Center.
Credit: Cory Huston/NASA
NASA says it has determined why its Orion spacecraft returned from its 25-day Artemis I flight test around the Moon with unexpected charring in its heat shield.
Agency officials, however, declined to release its findings, pending ongoing internal discussions about next steps.
The finding was disclosed at two industry meetings on Oct. 28, with NASA’s Lori Glaze, acting deputy associate administrator for Explorations Systems Development Mission Directorate, speaking at NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, and Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy associate administrator for the Moon to Mars office, later addressing a question at the opening session of the American Astronautical Society’s 2024 von Braun Space Exploration Symposium.
“We have gotten to a root cause,” Hawkins said. “We are having conversations within the agency to make sure that we have a good understanding of not only what’s going on with the heat shield, but also next steps and how that actually applies to the course that we take for Artemis II.
“We’ll be in a position to be able to share where we are with that hopefully before the end of the year,” Hawkins said.
Among the issues uncovered by the Nov. 16-Dec. 11 Artemis I flight test was unanticipated charring of the Orion capsule’s ablative Avcoat heat shield material. The 16.5-ft.-dia. shield was designed to protect the spacecraft during atmospheric reentry speeds of up to about 25,000 mph and temperatures of nearly 5,000F.
Sensors in the Artemis I Orion capsule showed thermal conditions still met crew safety constraints during atmospheric reentry, but the heat shield’s performance did not match preflight thermal and mechanical computer models.
NASA in January delayed the follow-on crewed Artemis II mission to September 2025 from November 2024 in part to better understand the issue with the Orion heat shield.
Glaze said engineers have demonstrated and replicated the heat shield charring with tests at the Arc Jet Complex at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “We’re assessing what is the appropriate approach for Artemis II regarding the heat shield,” she said, noting that construction of the shield is complete.
Additional testing is underway, she added. “We expect that to be done by the end of November, and then we anticipate discussions with the administrator, who will make the final decision on how to proceed.”
Artemis II is planned to be a 10-day mission during which four astronauts—three from NASA and one from the Canadian Space Agency—fly around the Moon in an Orion capsule and return to Earth. That is to be followed about one year later by Artemis III, which features a landing on the south pole of the Moon.
My take on it:
The article indicates they went back into an arc jet tunnel and supposedly duplicated the effects they saw on Artemis-1. I suspect (opinion only) they angled the test articles to accentuate the effect of fluid shear forces across the little test article, and found the char layer shears off the virgin underneath too easily without the hex, for the flow conditions on an Orion heatshield shape.
Since they have declined to release those details, instead discussing what to do next, as the article indicates, I also suspect (again only my opinion) that this is risky enough for the Artemis-II crew to put them in a quandary. Do they change the heat shield to something better (costing a bundle of time and money), or do they go ahead and risk the crew? If they change it, what do they change it to?
I worked up what I consider to be the answers to those questions in a letter I sent to NASA Administrator Nelson some months ago. He never saw it, or they’d already know what to do. All I got as a reply was a rejection form letter for my “unsolicited proposal” to NASA. That was inappropriate on their part, because the letter explicitly said it was not a proposal to “do” anything for NASA, it was merely a sharing of knowledge and ideas.
Bureaucracy quite often shoots itself in the foot stumbling over its own Byzantine rules and procedures. The bigger they are, the worse this effect.
GW
Update 30 Oct '24: Today's AIAA "Daily Launch carries a similar Space.com story that says the same things, but includes photos of the erratic cratering damage to the Artemis-I heat shield. I tentatively conclude NASA management is desperate for their engineers to OK flying manned with the bad heat shield anyway. The engineers are trying correlate about how much cratering they get because there is no hex reinforcing the char in their Avcoat tiles. If it is not too bad in effect, and not too variable, they will OK flying manned as-is. That's what all the months of arc jet testing are all about. The problem is the variability. It will prove extreme, I predict. And NASA management will NOT like that outcome!
The jet from one Raptor engine hits the hot staging ring dead-on at a speed of multiple km/s (somewhere around 3.5). All 6 "Starship" Raptors were used for hot staging.
Each such plume shocks against the hot staging ring surface, with a stagnation point effective temperature pretty much equal to the chamber temperature, which is in turn pretty close to 5500-6000 F. Even if any kind of steel, this ring material is a white hot molten puddle at a material temperature of only 2900 F. How long do you think it can withstand such treatment? A second? Two? Not much more.
Why would ANYONE be surprised that there is severe engine plume erosion damage on this hot staging ring structure? Even with greatly-divergent plume streamline distribution at staging altitude (nearly 90 deg off axis)? The bulk of the mass flow is still more-or-less axially-directed.
The hot staging ring is simply and quite fundamentally a sacrificial part, just like an ablative heat shield. As I have said before, space flight is far more difficult than atmospheric flight. The technology solutions are just NOT going to be similar! To expect otherwise is both naive, and just plain wrong. The experiences of 7 decades in space flights proves that beyond any shadow of a doubt.
GW
(1) it would be heavy
(2) what kind of piston ring seals would you use for cryogenics?
GW
3 seconds of propellant left for Apollo 11 sounds about right. I know it was a small single handful of seconds.
The choice faced by Armstrong and Aldrin was absolutely-certain death from trying to land in a field of closely-spaced house-sized boulders (where the computer was taking them), or risking certain death if the propellant ran out before they could land (taking manual control). They were pretty much past the abort-back-to-orbit point. They chose the manual landing, and got away with it. Barely.
GW
I think you are also looking at NTO and at least a couple of the hydrazines: MMH and UDMH (which the Russians have been using).
I would not complicate valve designs by trying to accommodate spin differentials. It's going to be tough enough doing this reliably in zero-gee and vacuum as it is. The tanker or receiving ship can dock to the facility supply tank, which undocks from the facility, and the docked pair pull away to a safe distance from the facility. There they spin up locked together as a single unit for the transfer, rifle bullet spin mode. Once done, de-spin the docked pair, redock the tank to the facility, and undock from that tank.
That technology path is the smallest departure from technologies we already have in-hand. All you need to add is alternate peripheral sump drains for a spinning tank, and some larger-thrust roll attitude thrusters for the spin-up and spin-down.
You just need a little bit of radial gee from the spin to settle the propellant in the spinning tank, and you just take your time to allow that low gee to do its work. The time to fall through a radius at that low gee level is a "time constant". About 3 or maybe 4 time constants, and everything should be settled enough to get a pump suction.
Doing it with spin ullage instead of translation ullage decouples the entire process from affecting the orbit at all.
Why not just keep it that simple?
As for "Starship" tankers or receiving craft that use translation ullage, you can do that, too, but you have to undo the resulting changes to the orbit to return the tank to the facility. It's just a bit more attitude thruster propellant. My plan can accommodate both ullage approaches. You just get exactly what you pay for!
GW
From AIAA’s “Daily Launch” for Monday 28 October 2024:
SPACENEWS
Starship Super Heavy booster came within one second of aborting first “catch” landing
SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster came within a second of aborting a “catch” landing attempt on the latest Starship test flight, according to audio posted online,...
My take on it:
Following the link and reading the whole story, it says exactly what has already been posted on the forums. My point: this is now “official”, being published in an industry trade journal.
GW
From AIAA’s “Daily Launch” for Monday 28 October 2024:
WALL STREET JOURNAL
Boeing Explores Sale of Space Business
Boeing helped put the first men on the moon. Now it wants to get out of the space race. The beleaguered company is exploring a sale of its storied NASA business, including the troubled Starliner space vehicle and operations that support the International Space Station, according to people familiar with the matter.
My take on it:
Here officially starts the beginning of the end for Starliner. NASA needs to switch its attention and help get Dreamchaser flying.
If Boeing leaves the space business entirely, one has to wonder about ULA, which is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. ULA supposedly is independent of either company, but one has to wonder.
GW
Spacecraft are not airplanes. Space is far harder than flying. You have to do both "right", but that "right" is quite unlikely to be exactly the same.
GW
It makes more sense to go to Mars (or the moon, or anywhere else out there) from Earth orbit than directly from the surface, because you can wait in orbit until the trajectory geometry is "just right". Apollo did that going to the moon. They relit the S-IVB stage in LEO to escape onto the lunar trajectory.
Had they not gone with the separate LM, and lunar orbit rendezvous, it would have taken 2 Saturn-5 launches for one Apollo mission to go to the moon: one a tanker to refuel the other for orbital departure. That's because landing the Apollo capsule with a huge "service module" directly onto the moon made the Apollo cluster way larger and heavier, far beyond the capability of a single Saturn-5.
Now, if you try to make your lunar or planetary vehicle reusable, you have to recover it. You can avoid the extra weight and enormous design complications of entry if you recover in Earth orbit, rather than directly on the surface. Once you do it that way, you are looking at refilling and re-flying your vehicle again and again, from Earth orbit.
Propellant for refills has to be shipped up to that orbit. The easiest one to reach from the surface is low circular Earth orbit, at relatively low inclination. The others have delta-vee requirements that are 30-40% higher, very near direct escape. And THAT is why elliptic capture and departure make sense, but only with a recoverable and reusable "tug" to get you from low circular into the elliptic capture departure orbit. Now you have two reusable vehicles flying only in space: the lunar or planetary transport, and the departure/arrival tug. You will need some sort of tanker to keep them refilled in low Earth orbit.
You're going to need a facility in low Earth orbit where you accumulate and store the propellants (a propellant depot), and a facility where you can assemble your large lunar and planetary transports. There is simply no reason at all why these two functions cannot be just one big facility. You'll pay a lot to build it, but going elsewhere will always be horribly expensive, unless you build it. You get what you pay for!
There's one other critical aspect of going this route: your lunar and planetary transports are designed only for flying in space, not landing. Otherwise they are too heavy and too badly design-compromised to function adequately as transports. That means when they get to their destinations (moon, Mars, elsewhere), they go into orbit. You will need some sort of dedicated-design lander when you get there. THAT is the lesson to be learned from our experience with Apollo lunar orbit rendezvous.
Basically, you cannot afford the weights unless you do it this way. Chemical propulsion, even nuclear thermal, is inadequate to do it any other way. THAT is the lesson to be learned from the experiences accumulated since the dawn of the Space Age with Sputnik 1 in 1957. Why fight that?
"Starship/Superheavy" is first and foremost the big transport from Earth's surface to low orbit. Its upper stage "Starship" just happens to be big enough to mis-use and refill on-orbit to go elsewhere, something that is justifiable only if you have no other vehicle designs ready. But those other vehicle designs would be far more efficient at going elsewhere, once they exist.
Chicken-and-egg. You use what you have ready at hand. But you switch when you get better stuff available. And you WILL have to have that better stuff to attempt any large permanent settlements anywhere else outside Earth orbit. It's simply too expensive any other way.
GW
I honestly don't know the answers you seek. Anybody who claims to "see" leaking methane has something new. It may be a while before that clam can be trusted.
GW
To tell you the truth, I dunno.
I'd be very leery of deliberately setting fires where there could be a fuel gas leak, but that's just the fire protection engineering experience talking.
What we do with hydrogen welding gas is just do the plumbing "right" so that it does not leak. Standard gas bottles are typically loaded to 2200 psig. All the plumbing has to be good for more than that. And avoid risk of hydrogen embrittlement. At least methane does not have the embrittlement risk.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever handled methane at 4400+ psig before. I'm unsurprised that there are problems.
GW
The Merlin engines that power all the Falcons are LOX-kerosene engines. It is the Raptors that power Starship/Superheavy that are LOX-methane engines.
Methane leaks very easily, almost like hydrogen. It also ignites very easily, almost like hydrogen. Handling it is quite different from handling kerosene. You have to handle it about as carefully as you do hydrogen. It's a lot worse about leaking and fires than propane.
GW
I don't have enough for a book yet, for sure.
But I did do a Mars mission plan based out of LMO that visited multiple sites in the one mission. This was my Mars 2016 plan. The landers I recently sized supersede those landers. But the baton-spin crew orbit-to-orbit transport is about the same. I would use elliptic departure and capture for it at Earth. And sending landers and propellant ahead to LMO is the same issue it was in 2016.
The problem with any of this is the same as it was for Von Braun circa 1940: how do you assemble large things in Earth orbit? He did not know as much then as we do know today, about surviving long missions in space, and he knew nothing about the Van Allen radiation belts (discovered in 1958 by Explorer-1). But his basic orbit-to-orbit mission plan is still sound today. We just need to lower it from his 1000 mile altitudes, to about 200 mile altitudes, to stay out of the Van Allen belts. Especially the South Atlantic Anomaly. And, because of the Van Allen belts, we CANNOT send crew by electric propulsion (at least as we currently understand it).
Musk's Starship configured for Mars with "real" landing legs is much more appropriate to the settlement phase, when there are hard landing pads at Mars, and return propellant can be manufactured in quantity on Mars. Neither is true of the experimental base phase, and neither is true almost by definition in the exploration phase. Building hard pads and experimenting with propellant manufacture is PRECISELY what gets done in the experimental base phase, along with a lot of other life-support-related stuff.
Exploration answers the question "what all is there, and where exactly is it?". Experimental bases exist to figure out exactly how to live off the land, something NOT done during exploration. And until you answer all the issues from the experimental base phase, there is no ethical point to trying to start a settlement. PERIOD!
Why is this difficult to grasp? I've presented this before! At a Mars Society convention! To an audience who agreed with me!
GW
I saw in the news that the Boeing-built satellite Intelsat 33e blew up on orbit, generating space debris of significant concern. This is a "bus" that Boeing has been building and launching since the 1990's. It exists in multiple forms, depending upon how it is rigged with equipment installations.
Intelsat 33e was the latest form of this basic satellite "bus". It is the high-power form, referring to on-board electric generation equipment, and to radio frequency transmission power. This form is recent, and involves much larger solar panels, and the unique installation of bipropellant attitude thrusters, which earlier forms did not have.
Boeing bought the bipropellant thrusters from Moog Isp, but I rather doubt they bought the propellant tanks, plumbing, and control valves from Moog. These would be pretty much the same NTO-MMH hypergolic pressure-fed thrusters as were such a problem on Starliner. Not the thrusters themselves, the propellant supply and plumbing!
Does anybody else see a possible connection here?
This bipropellant pressure-fed thruster technology is well over 6 decades old. It has been quite reliable for about 5 of those 6 decades, once the material selection and equipment design requirements were established long ago. But if you go with cheaper substandard stuff, you have the very same problems experienced long ago when this stuff first came out.
My point: you either do it "right" and succeed, or you do it cheap, and fail. Starliner and Intelsat 33e both post-date the current Boeing corporate regime. The one that ditched quality (and complying with the FAR's) in favor of maximal shareholder value.
Anybody else see a correlation here?
GW
Put chute on it and let it hit as flat as you can manage.
But I do not see why that would be desirable. The ring is damaged by hot, high-speed gas erosion. That is both inherent and fatal for its function.
Of what use would it be to recover such a thing, other than experimental evaluation? They pulled it off the bottom of the Gulf to do the experimental evaluation.
GW
I checked, it's OK.
These go with the other two slide sets I recently sent you: slides+notes for exploration vs experimental bases vs actual settlements, and slides+notes for unmanned direct cargo 1-way, delivering almost 40 tons. The single most important key to this approach is wanting to visit multiple sites in the 1 mission: that forces you to base out of LMO, not the surface! That is where I differ with most other mission plans. My approach is older. But it gets more done more quickly, and would actually be cheaper.
That leaves a whole lot yet to look at, such as an orbit-to-orbit transport for crews, and how to send landers and propellant ahead to LMO to support the landings and the return. But, implied by all of this (or most any other plan) is the need for a combined propellant depot and shipyard assembly facility in LEO.
As you can see, I learned the Korolev lesson of just build the bigger rocket. It worked for him.
GW
I'm sitting here wondering why this trip is taking 6 years 1-way?
A simple Hohmann min energy transfer ellipse has a 1-way travel time of 2.9 years at worst case for longest time, which is half the period of the ellipse. The shortest time goes with the highest velocity "far" from the Earth of some 39.14 km/s with respect to the sun.
Earth averages around 29.77 km/s with respect to the sun (max 30.27, min 29.28), subtracting that gets you a figure for the velocity "far" from the Earth that you need to achieve with respect to the Earth: about 9.37 km/s, give or take a small snit.
Using about 10.9 km/s Earth escape velocity at the altitude of LEO, we can estimate the required "near" velocity with respect to the Earth, which is the actual speed needed at end of burn to get onto that transfer ellipse about the sun. That figures as about 14.4 km/s. You figure that as the square root of the sum of needed speed-squared plus escape speed-squared. It's a conserved mechanical energy thing.
If one departs from LEO in order to get the right timing and angle geometries, LEO speed is close to 7.8 km/s. The difference is your delta-vee required to depart from orbit onto the interplanetary trajectory: 6.6 km/s. If a LOX-LH2 departure stage, the stage mass ratio is about 4.47, or about 78 or 79% propellant mass fraction, which is quite doable. At ~5% stage inert fraction, that leaves about 16 or 17% stage payload mass fraction (nice and generous!), which would be the mass of the probe. Big probe is a big stage, that's the rub. Probe+stage ignition mass is the payload you have to orbit with your launch rocket.
Online, I found a mass figure for the Europa Clipper probe: 3.241 metric tons. The probe plus loaded stage should be 3.241 mt/0.165 (for 16.5% payload fraction), = ~ 19.6 metric tons. Falcon-9 can orbit that, certainly Falcon-Heavy can. Even Atlas-5 could, with all the SRB's installed. So why are we spending 6 years to get there when we could do it in 3? Of course, that online mass figure could be wrong. Stage+probe mass would scale in proportion to probe mass. Regardless, Falcon-Heavy is supposedly capable of sending 63 tons to orbit, although not reusably.
Sounds to me like they're using too small a launch rocket, for the size of the probe and its required departure stage. They have to do gravity assists to get onto the right trajectory with too small a rocket. Gravity assist maneuvers cost you years of flight time. The Sergei P. Korolev solution to this dilemma was just to build a bigger rocket, which is where the workhorse R-7 (that everybody calls a Soyuz) came from, more than 60 years ago.
BTW, SpaceX is attempting EXACTLY that "Korolev bigger rocket solution" with its Starship/Superheavy. That orbit transport function is really what the big rocket is all about. You actually have to misuse it to fly to Mars in it. It's big enough to do that, though.
GW
TH: I tried the link in post 1930 once again, this time from my same laptop, and got different results. I saw no ads, it went straight into the "Great SpaceX" video. I saw the ring recovery several seconds in, and unlike the commentator, would not call that an "intact" part. It had jet blast erosion, and was distorted dimensionally, probably from impact into the sea. Pretty much to be expected, considering its function and its disposition.
What I got before was all ads that could not be skipped, of length 3 to 6 minutes each, and no content at all (which is what I was complaining about, Kbd512). What I got this time was content with no ads! THAT was completely surprising! I watched it through, and was surprised and pleased to learn they might well try to fly Flight 6 sometime in November.
I suspect that youtube recognized me, and had kept count of how many ads I had seen in prior attempts, which was 4. Other than that possibility, yo no sabe.
As for Bob's strange baby elephant video, would that possibly be related to the phrase "elephant in the room"?
GW
In post 428, I checked both links. They both lead to the presentation notes file. I could not see the slide set.
GW
I do not use Microsoft Edge if I can help it. We both use Google Chrome. That is what I was using.
But, the all-ads behavior on youtube for Oldfart's link is quite repeatable! It persists even now! I do not know anything about any other links to that youtube video. It shows a text title indicating recovery of the staging ring. But all it actually shows me is ads that I cannot avoid in any way. One after another.
My personal opinion: Microsoft sold good software before Windows. Software since has not been worth a shit. Especially Windows itself. There has never been a stable version of Windows. DOS was stable!
My other personal opinion: youtube has decided to show ads instead of content. At least, that's what my experiences ALL DAY TODAY show me! Why should I not believe what my experiences today have told me, in NO UNCERTAIN TERMS!
Money talks too loudly, in our politics, and even on the internet! This ALL-COMMERCIALS CRAP has to stop! Make it illegal, I say! Make it easy to prove, and make the penalty VERY severe! Like death penalty felony!
GW
I'm afraid my bad experience with that link is repeatable.
GW
I have basically two space station articles posted on "exrocketman". One is an on-orbit propellant depot titled "A Concept for an On-Orbit Propellant Depot", dated 1 February 2022. The other is a concept for an on-orbit repair and assembly facility, titled "On-Orbit Repair and Assembly Facility", dated 11 February 2014.
There is no reason why both functions could not be fulfilled by one big facility built in orbit. I would suggest a low-inclination circular orbit in the 300-500 km altitude range, and I would include orbit modification propulsion into the design from the very outset. I would also try to combine thermal insulation with meteor shielding and with radiation protection in my designs.
To find these quickly on my "exrocketman" site, go to http://exrocketman.blogspot.com, and use the archive fast access tool on the left side of the page. Click on the year, then click on the month, then click on the title, if the article is not top-of-list for that month. I have a catalogue article of all the technical stuff I have posted there, covering a wide variety of topics. That one is titled "List of Some Articles By Topic Area", dated 21 October 2021.
I try to keep the catalogue article updated, but there are no guarantees.
To see figures enlarged, click on a figure. There is an X-out option top right of the page showing enlarged figures. It takes you right back to where you were, before you clicked on a figure to enlarge them.
GW
All I saw from the youtube link in post 1930 was ad after ad that I could not skip or get away from. I saw no video about recovery of the hot stage ring. What gives?
As for post 1932, what does a video of a baby elephant in somebody's house have to do with the tale of dead bodies and wine-tasting? And what does dead bodies and wine-tasting have to with anything on these forums?
Jut asking.
GW
To assemble large things in orbit, there are two possibilities: (1) simply dock together modules that you can launch with your existing rockets, and/or (2) assemble components together "from scratch" in a sort of shipyard-in-space, which components can be launched up there by the rockets you have. (1) is how we built the ISS. We have never done much toward (2) at all.
But (2) is the only choice for creating really big vessels in orbit! You will have to join together pieces to create frames and stringers, and then attach plates to them. Rivets? Bolts? Welding? Whatever. Cargo containers full of such components have been envisioned for assembly into large structure on orbit, since about 1940. But we have never really done it, except on a very small scale, such as servicing components on the Hubble.
But, we're going to have to learn how to do such assembly in orbit, and we will need an orbital facility for that, in order to send crews to Mars and elsewhere, without a colossal expense at every mission. The colossal expense is inherent in building and operating the orbital shipyard, but not as a continuing thing with every mission. Going to Mars and elsewhere just cannot be done only capsules and LM's on a rocket, the way Apollo went to the moon. Radiation and microgravity diseases say that is just the wrong concept for long missions.
GW
Both the Starship and the Superheavy have vents for propellant boiloff gases. The less the cold gas thrusters are used, the more gases there are to vent. The vents for the oxygen are remote from the vents for methane, for obvious fire and explosion reasons. I do not know exactly where these are located on these vehicles.
The oxygen being vented will show as a white cloud of condensed atmospheric moisture, or not at all, but it doesn't "burn" with air. It can make other fires brighter and faster, or even to explode, and that's the danger of venting oxygen. That is why you site an oxygen vent remote from anything flammable.
The methane being vented is very easily ignited with the oxygen in the air, almost as easy as hydrogen. Where a plume of methane mixes into air, there is always a zone of flammable mixtures. Any little ignition source can ignite the plume boundary into flames. Venting methane can show up as a white cloud of condensed atmospheric moisture, or not at all, or as a bright burning plume.
I don't know if anybody else noticed, but as the Superheavy descended into rocket braking, the oncoming wind pressure erratically pushed incandescent rocket plume gases back up toward and sometimes alongside the bottom end of the booster. Incandescent gases are a definite ignition source. On the Superheavy, there would seem to be at least one methane vent on the side of the vehicle toward that bottom end. So the plume gases could easily ignite a methane-air fire on that venting plume boundary, moved erratically around by the turbulent wind up alongside the vehicle.
And that description is exactly what we saw, during and after the tower catch, so I think that was a plume of vented methane burning with air, which persisted after the catch until the methane was vented. They need a water spray on the tower to put out the burning of the vented methane plume, to avoid local overheat damage where that plume washes along the side of the vehicle. I rather doubt they had thought of that, but the odds seem high that water spray will be installed in the future.
Could that same thing have happened to Starship? Yes. It has to have methane and oxygen vents, too, and they must be located remote from each other. Could something else have been the source of the Starship fire at its ocean touchdown? Yes, of course. We won't know until they release that information, if they ever do. They are a bit close-mouthed when something either goes wrong, or if something they don't understand happened. Most outfits are.
GW