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Void,
I never accused anyone of anything, nor so much as implied anything.
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GW,
With all of your education and knowledge, which you assert is so lacking in Elon Musk, why is it that Elon Musk created a multi-billion dollar rocket company instead of you?
What stopped you from creating GW Aerospace Corporation to show that silly non-PhD Elon Musk how it should be done?
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Never mind then, bad connection.
Done
Done.
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The initial testing of the stage on the platform was done at just 50% of engine rating and that the throttle up was the cause of the concrete breaking up. This is due to the concrete not being able to take the temperature and force of the powerful engines. During the video of the launch a piece of that concrete flew up to the starships staging area and it was not small.
I did see videos of the 40 seconds to the destruct occurred elsewhere as well.
When you have money to throw at a problem you can get away with it for a while but once the money is gone and so will start of the hard times. You need good management not engineering to make choices that when explained by the engineers correctly will produce the end results that are desired. Sometimes the choice is made to see if you can prove who is right in the degree of information and you learn who to trust after that.
As far as the FAA goes not wanting to be present has been an issue from the start and that probably means they do not have the engineering skill set to argue the points and are relying on the sight of the results rather than being able to compute the future.
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GW,
Musk admits he is the one who ordered this launch without a cooled flame deflector. This is entirely on him. I checked his credentials: he has only Bachelor-level degrees in economics and physics. He is very most definitely NOT an engineer, despite being officially listed as SpaceX's "chief engineer" in addition to being its CEO. What that really suggests is that he is in violation of the Texas engineering practice act for calling himself "chief engineer" when he he is NO engineer, and that he is certainly unqualified to have made the decision to launch this thing without a proper flame deflector.
TEXAS ENGINEERING AND LAND SURVEYING PRACTICE ACTS AND RULES CONCERNING PRACTICE AND LICENSURE
§137.3 OTHER USE OF TERM “ENGINEER”
(5) Pursuant to §1001.066(2) of the Act, a person employed by a business entity whose products or services consist of space vehicles, services or technology required by the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA) may use the terms "engineer" or "engineering" in the person's job title or personnel classification if the person only uses the designation in association with the products and services related to NASA.
As near as I can tell, NASA is contracting with (paying money to, for services rendered) Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) for Starship Super Heavy development, in support of NASA's planned lunar landings under their Artemis program. Since SpaceX was the only company that NASA awarded a contract to for their Artemis program's lunar lander, and they're using NASA funding to do it, it'd be pretty difficult to argue that SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy vehicle is not required by NASA to land on the moon.
May I ask what is the basis for your conclusion that Elon Musk is in violation of the Texas Engineering Practices Act?
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Kbd512:
I did not know the specifics of the NASA exception. There is a similar exception for defense contractors to the government.
Yes, NASA is funding Spacex for a version of Starship to use at the moon under Artemis. No, SpaceX has more customers than just NASA. A strict reading of the exception says Musk can represent himself as "engineer" to NASA, but not those other (nongovernmental) customers.
But that argument misses the point! He made a bad decision, in full view of the public, and has admitted to it. Given the lack of training to support decisions of that type, the real question is why did he do the deciding, when his company has the staff that is far better trained and experienced to make that kind of decision than he is? Were they afraid to tell him "no, bad idea"? I suspect that is exactly the case.
There is an autocratic corporate culture at SpaceX, like so many others, which effectively values the power structure and the money it creates for those at the top, more than making the right decisions in an ethical or public safety sense.
The bigger they are, the more likely this characterization is likely to be true. We've seen it countless times before. It is precisely why there have to be regulations and regulating agencies, to police away bad behavior as best they can. And the bad behavior nearly always traces to the top of the power structure. Almost always!
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2023-05-02 08:19:42)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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All that being said, I hope Musk goes offsite to mess with Twitter some more. That would leave Shotwell and the engineers alone, so they can fix the launch pad and install the flame diverter.
And as I said before somewhere else, they can test and verify the effectiveness of the flame diverter and revised launch pad and stand by doing a static firing of the Superheavy engines, something they already do anyway. That revised setup needs verification before they fly again. The debris pattern they actually had for the test launch violated the terms of their filed impact statement, and by far. Staying within those bounds was the basis for the issued license to fly.
If in such a static test they bring several of the engines up to full thrust for several seconds during such a test, that should be enough to see if the plume still gets through the steel-and-water, and causes the undesirable excavation. It might not require all 33 engines to do that (SpaceX's engineers would know more about that than I do). Although I would think eventually they need to demo all 33 at full thrust for maybe 5-10 seconds.
GW
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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GW,
With all of your education and knowledge, which you assert is so lacking in Elon Musk, why is it that Elon Musk created a multi-billion dollar rocket company instead of you?
What stopped you from creating GW Aerospace Corporation to show that silly non-PhD Elon Musk how it should be done?
That was a little uncalled for. The decision to not use a flame diverter was made years ago. Elon overruled SpaceX engineers who wanted to include one. This was a cost decision not based on engineering.
To add a flame diverter trench would indeed be expensive. The reason is the closeness of the water table means you would have to raise the launchpad to insert the flame trench below it. Then that means you have to also raise the launch tower. So you would have to dismantle it section by section. Then you would place an additional section below it. Finally, you restack the original sections atop the new section.
You can understand why Musk would not want to pay for that. But it’s needed then it has to be done.
The same is true for building a separate ALL engine, FULL thrust, FULL flight duration static test stand. It will be expensive, but it’s needed and must be done.
There is an alternative approach without those two additional expensive developments. They could launch from an ocean platform 20 miles off-shore as originally intended planned. That way SpaceX could launch and destroy as many copies of the SH/SS they want, like was done for the N-1.
Bob Clark
Old Space rule of acquisition (with a nod to Star Trek - the Next Generation):
“Anything worth doing is worth doing for a billion dollars.”
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GW,
What we've plainly established is that neither you nor I are lawyers. Being a PhD in aerospace engineering doesn't confer legal expertise. You can assert that it does, but no trier of fact / court of law will lend any weight to your opinion, nor my opinion, because neither of us hold Doctorates of Jurisprudence, nor do we practice law. Asserting that a crime has been committed is all well and good, but if you truly believe that then you'd take whatever you think you have to the Texas Attorney General for prosecution.
You seem to believe that Elon Musk's decisions are made in a vacuum with no input from the standing army of aerospace engineers who work at SpaceX, or that they're incorrect because he doesn't have your expertise or he didn't make the exact same decisions that you would've made. He didn't make the exact same decisions I would've made, either, but I'm not him. Anyway, that belief seems to be at odds with what his employees have said about how decisions are made. Nobody there seems particularly shy about walking right up to him and saying what they think.
The only way to ensure that all decisions are made in accordance with your expertise and beliefs, is for you to start your own aerospace engineering company and to design your own super heavy lift launch vehicle. Doing that requires great risk and effort on your part. You're no longer a spectator. You're in the arena.
No doubt there will be some other expert out there who Monday morning quarterbacks your decisions as well, asserting that you're incompetent or authoritarian or otherwise making terrible decisions. I'll say the same things to that person as well. Go build your own launch services company from the ground-up, then see if you have any time left to sit around and pick apart the mistakes of those who have done what you have not.
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RGClark,
There's one and only one way to ensure that all decisions are made in accordance with your expertise / wishes / beliefs. You already know what that is. Maybe you could team up with GW if you're of like-mind.
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That was a little uncalled for.
Yes it was called for. Garry was a little too harsh. SpaceX is Elon's company, and building a system to transport people to Mars is his passion. If you try to take Elon out of it, that will kill the project.
Elon built a several successful companies; he doesn't need an MBA. A lot of people with MBAs think they know everything, but end up obsessing over trivialities that are not core to the business. Whatever the business may be. Any large successful business needs someone who knows how to get things done, not waste time and resources over academic crap that has nothing to do with the business. Elon has proven he can run multiple large successful businesses.
Flame diverter: several of us here have said it's necessary. I argued it's necessary due to NASA experience with the Saturn 1 and Saturn 1B rockets at launch complex 34. That was 1961 so 6 decades ago. Turns out Elon knew of the need, SpaceX was building a steel flame diverter with water cooling, and parts were delivered to the launch site. But it wasn't ready yet. In order to launch as soon as possible, he thought that using Fondag concrete would protect the launch pad long enough for just one single launch. That's the most heat-resistant concrete available. Turns out he was wrong.
I suspect Gwynne Shotwell knew a flame diverter was necessary, but she has to obey Elon's orders to keep her job. She has a bachelor degree in mechanical engineering, and a master degree in applied mathematics. She took Chrysler's management training program. She worked as an engineer in automotive, then started her aerospace engineering career in 1988. She worked on STS-39. Worked on thermal analysis. Both space systems engineering and project management. She knows her stuff.
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Maybe I was too harsh and then again, maybe not. FAA is getting its feet held to fire because SpaceX violated the impact statement upon which their license to fly depended. That's what the lawsuit does.
FAA does not have a stake in whether Starship ever reaches orbit; that's NASA. All that really means is that SpaceX has to "do it right" from this point forward. If I were NASA, I'd be on Musk's case, too, for screwing this up so publicly, when I (NASA) needs a flying Starship so badly. But then, the NASA of today is very most definitely NOT the NASA of the Apollo years. So we will see what transpires.
That being said "doing it right" does not mean no more failures. They just need to make sure when failures happen, they have it contained within the bounds of their permit. I understand the "try it/break it/try again with a change" approach. It is quite valid. It is actually where NASA and its predecessor NACA got their start. It's also where USAF got its start with ballistic missiles, too.
And there's nothing wrong with that approach. It worked then, it works today. But, you just have to deal with the bad press you get from reporters and news agencies that don't understand, and you have to have the balls to tell the idiots (and there are many) in Congress to just shut up and do their jobs, and let you do yours.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2023-05-02 14:47:20)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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If this had been a cape Canaveral launch, let alone one from a military launch site you bet they would have done it with all the bells and whistles or there would have been no launch.
If it were not for other sources of income this might have kill the company as it nearly did with the first Falcon launches.
Not a surprise from the fall out Environmental groups sue FAA over SpaceX Starship rocket launch
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I can answer Kbd512's question:
"What stopped you from creating GW Aerospace Corporation to show that silly non-PhD Elon Musk how it should be done?"
At the time I was doing big things in aerospace defense, the Soviet Union failed, leading in about 3 years to a major contraction of the American aerospace defense industry. I had been managing the plan IR&D effort for the chief engineer, who did not want to mess with it. I did that for 5 or 6 years, and my investigators did astoundingly successful things, operating in my blast shadow as I shielded them from hostile corporate management. We made the dedicated corporate research center look like a bunch of incompetents, and being a production-only facility out in the sticks, we weren't supposed to be able to do any effective R&D. But we did!
Anyhow ugly corporate and DOD politics forced a plant closure, and we were the plant pre-ordained to close. That's a whole 'nother sordid little story, involving some serious illegalities. Suffice it to say: I was laid off in a time when 1.75 million other American aerospace engineers were also laid off, in a seriously-contracting industry. There were no jobs. We mostly all had to go find something else to do for a living.
You don't start yet another aerospace firm in a climate like that. And it has changed since then but not for the better. Idiotically, DOD has aided and abetted the consolidation of what was once a competitive and innovative industry into 3 sources, each a monopoly in its specialty area. DOD (and NASA) thus cut its own throat: costs went way up, and there is no incentive left for any of the 3 biggies to actually succeed in doing anything. They are mostly now gigantic useless hogs sucking at the public tit.
Boeing managed to take a successful B-737 design and turn it into a deathtrap, and was stupid enough to get caught doing it. They are decades behind schedule and dozens of $billions in the hole (from the public's point of view) on SLS.
Lockheed has been yammering for decades about an SR-72, but I have yet to see one fly. They are more than a decade behind schedule and multiple $billions over budget on the F-35. It is flying, but with crashes and restrictions and systems promised that still are not working yet.
Northrup Grumman is now the sole producer of large solid boosters left in the country. They are building the same thing today that powered the Shuttle off the pad 4 decades ago, except 5 segments instead of 4. And that took over a decade and $billions to "solve" (with extra mass) a longitudinal-mode instability that was not quite bad enough to blow up the motors, but was bad enough to shake any crews to death.
Why on God's green Earth would I want to jump into the middle of that cesspit, and try to start a new small company, without any cash resources and without much in the way of opportunities coming from a government totally in bed with these cesspit denizens?
So I didn't. I did something else for a living.
Musk had a pile of cash coming from inventing Paypal before anybody else had come up with that, and he did Paypal in an environment not sullied by giant corporate interests trying to stomp him flat.
Yet he still nearly went bankrupt with SpaceX over stage-separation failures with Falcon-1. Investments were drying up after 3 consecutive failures. He had to dip into some of that Paypal cash, and his staff had to talk to some of us old-timers (that he refused to hire) before they could learn how to separate stages successfully at supersonic speeds. That's what it took to teach his engineering staff that there is a whole lot more to flying launch vehicles than just having a rocket engine.
Credentials matter, but only some. Experience matters a whole lot more. I did my aerospace career on a BS and MS degrees in aerospace engineering, earned at a time when pocket calculators were only just beginning to replace slide rules. That's why I know how to hand-calculate so many things. (All the fancy computer codes that (seem) to do everything for you came later. There were very few of those things back then.) My PhD came much, much later, and only because academia likes its teachers to have terminal degrees.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2023-05-03 09:15:42)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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GW,
If there were 1.75 million aerospace engineers available, then the pool of qualified engineers to form a rocket company was enormous. For whatever reason, nothing advanced to the point of being an operational rocket until Elon Musk and SpaceX showed up. Whatever his numerous and varied failings might be, somehow the company he created and the people he employed actually did what numerous other companies and rocket designers attempted to do for decades before he came along. Did his company benefit from those past efforts and good ideas? That is undoubtedly the case. Knowledge is cumulative. Current state of technology takes nothing away from the fact that SpaceX actually did what so many others tried and failed to do, or never tried at all.
Outside of SpaceX, which other company or group of people have more experience with reusable rocket technology?
Which other company is routinely launching rockets with reusable boosters, to the point that booster recovery is simply expected to happen as a routine part of launch activities?
I would have preferred that all of our legacy rocket companies put their best foot forward and devised a cost-effective technology set allowing for routine and rapid reuse, regardless of what that technology set was. If we had fully and rapidly reusable solid rockets or hybrid rockets or nuclear rockets or what have you, that is less important to me than whether or not we can spend a handful of millions of dollars on the fuel, fly the vehicle to orbit, land it, and reuse it in a week or two.
For whatever reason, they did not do that. Some combination of management and engineering decisions made those other companies completely dysfunctional at providing launch services at reasonable costs. Everything they did, regardless of whether or not it was a good idea to improve reliability or any other desirable attributes, it drove up the costs to unsustainable levels. They had all the best experts, the entire defense industry's resource base to draw upon, and every conceivable technological advantage, but the end result was unworkable for the people paying for the launches (the general public or consumer base for the goods and services provided). Forgive me if I'm willing to grant SpaceX a little more latitude to experiment within, but I see no other efforts bearing measurable results to do what SpaceX is in the process of actually doing. Any other company could do this, but they're not.
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There was 1 company that tried to do reusable rockets: McDonnel-Douglas, with its DC-X. They've been gobbled up into Boeing, and their assets dispersed, along with the other McDonnel-Douglas assets. And the assets of so many others gobbled up.
The giant hog sucking at the public tit that is today's Boeing doesn't need such assets anymore. It gets fed whether it does anything or not. We've all seen it. (And the same sentiment applies to the other 2 big hogs sucking at the public tit: Lockheed-Martin and Northrup Grumman.
You have to understand, the aerospace industry consolidation was over 30 years ago. Those engineers laid off then (like me), had no place to go in that industry. And that was LONG before anybody anywhere decided to do anything new in the rocket business, like reusability. At the time that happed, LTV Aerospace was still an aircraft prime, and was still offering the Scout as a launcher.
I'm not the only one who was really good back then, there were many thousands of us who did really good for our companies. Take Scout as an example. I'm familiar with it, because I got to work a bit on it, about mid-life in its career and very early in mine. 4 solid stages, a simple bang-bang thruster attitude control rig (instead of trying to rig solids with heavy, expensive, and difficult-to-develop cant-able nozzles), one lost in 3 test flights, and no other flight failures for some 30 years! Not one! No one else has that good a track record in the launch industry. Period.
Scout was not reusable, but it was back then the cheapest way (by far!!!) to send smallish satellites up, plus it seemed utterly reliable, and that's why folks kept buying rides on it for 3 decades. Sounds kinda like what SpaceX has done a lot more recently with its Falcons, doesn't it? I've seen all this before. But it only happens in an industry with multiple competing sources for things. We DO NOT HAVE THAT anymore! We have 3 big monopoly suppliers for 80+% of everything the government buys.
There is no LTV Aerospace any more. It got thrown out of the aircraft prime role about the time of the industry contraction in the early 90's, and has since been gobbled up into giant hog Lockheed-Martin, along with what was Convair/General Dynamics. All those assets that get gobbled up, get shed. The hog only cares to save the funded contract programs, for its own people. The people end up (mostly) having to find something else to do fore a living, just like I did.
Legacy rocket companies (plural) no longer exist. You should shed that misperception. Everything that ever was in liquid rocket engines and stages is now gobbled up and frittered away inside giant hog Boeing; plus the transport business. Everything that ever was in the solid rocket industry (both large and small motors) is now gobbled up and frittered away inside giant hog Northrup Grumman, along with what little remains of the bomber industry. The other giant hog Lockheed-Martin is who you must go to for fighter jets and space capsules.
Just how much more can I say to clarify what these monopolies really are and what they do? And just WHO is going to compete with them? Most of the new startups are going to fail (the deck is stacked against them the way the government is in bed with the hogs). Virgin Orbit already has failed, despite the cash that Richard Branson has.
By the way, I really am a fan of SpaceX and some of the other "new space" innovation companies. But I think Musk should quit micromanaging, and stick to doing those things he is actually competent to do (he may have to, once he finishes driving Twitter into the ground, a lot of his Paypal cash (4.4 $billion to be exact) will be gone. SpaceX would do even better, if he would behave better.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2023-05-03 11:20:59)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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GW,
I was hoping you were going to make a case for why our experts should be in charge, rather than explaining their failures to perform or to even try to perform. They all failed to produce anything better than what SpaceX has produced, whether directly because of or in spite of Elon Musk's non-expert influence. If Elon Musk's management style has produced results while other management styles produced nothing, then we seem to have a disconnect between what should have happened with him in charge and what actually happened.
You have to understand, the aerospace industry consolidation was over 30 years ago. Those engineers laid off then (like me), had no place to go in that industry. And that was LONG before anybody anywhere decided to do anything new in the rocket business, like reusability.
Elon Musk and SpaceX created their place in the industry by doing something that nobody else was trying to do. That really is the point, though, isn't it? Nobody else was even trying.
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Something just occurred to me. If SpaceX previously said the Starship launchpad would be located 20 miles off-shore because of the noise from sonic booms, wouldn’t the same issue apply to the residents of South Padre Island and Port Isabel only 5 to 6 miles away?
ELON MUSK: NOISY STARSHIP SPACEPORTS WILL BE 20 MILES OFFSHORE.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk … s-offshore
Bob Clark
Old Space rule of acquisition (with a nod to Star Trek - the Next Generation):
“Anything worth doing is worth doing for a billion dollars.”
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I suppose it depends upon what you mean by "our experts". The folks who actually know how to go and do things are very rarely ever the folks in charge at the top. Even my successes managing IR&D were at lower-middle level management.
What I have observed over 70+ years of life is that the very top managers of big outfits come from the ranks of "professional managers", and rarely any real technical experts. There are exceptions, but broadly, what I say is true.
What I have noticed about these "professional managers", with exceptions of course, is that broadly speaking they are almost invariably real assholes on a personal level, and quite arrogant, yet technically ignorant. I have interacted with several over my life, and off the top of my head, cannot name a one who was not an arrogant, ignorant asshole.
Well, on second thought, maybe one. Maybe two. But they both got turned out and replaced by corporate masters above them, all of which were arrogant, ignorant assholes, to the very last man. And which today are the reason why there is no longer a Hercules corporation. It just took half a century for the dead dinosaur to fall over.
THAT is the rot I have been trying to tell you about! It is almost everywhere around you! Yet so very few seem to see it.
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2023-05-03 13:13:42)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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The launch pad 20 miles off shore has come up several times in recent posts (notably those by RGClark).
SpaceNut .... if you can find the time, please see if you can find a depth of water 20 miles off Boca Chica. I found a variety of maps but either they were behind pay walls or they were not a good match.
My working theory is that a launch platform for Starship Heavy should be mounted on solid rock. Humans have plenty of experience building (I'm thinking of Staten Island) tall structures with pilings that reach down to bedrock far below the surface.
A launch platform built 20 miles off shore from Boca Chica would be accessible by barge from assembly buildings at Boca Chica.
(th)
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GW,
Saturn V flew. Space Shuttle flew. SLS flew. The difference seems to be how much it cost and how long it took to get to that point, regardless of management issues. If Elon Musk is as arrogant and ignorant as the rest of them, then it should've taken much longer and cost far more money for Starship to fly. Do you not see a logical disconnect here?
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No, I do not see a disconnect!
Yeah Saturn-5 flew, but almost not, two times. By the grace of God, it didn't blow up or crash those 2 times. But ONLY by the grace of God. It was that close!
Yeah, Shuttle flew, but it did kill 2 crews. And for EXACTLY the same mismanagement reasons that I have been criticizing. So also did Apollo 1 kill its crew, and again because of shitty management.
Yeah, SLS flew. They're 1 for 1. No real track record yet. But the EM-1 version of Orion's heat shield on SLS's 1st flight eroded way too much. They had changed it to save money over what already had actually worked pretty well in Orion's first flight EFT-1. Making changes that hurt to save money (or schedule time), in spite of historical technical experiences that say do NOT do that. That ought to sound painfully familiar, it being the cause of both Shuttle crew losses and the Apollo-1 crew loss.
Starship/Superheavy might have happened even faster, and maybe more effectively, if Musk really were a better manager. He is not.
He really, really needs to concentrate on what he does best, and leave the rest to Shotwell and her staff. What I fear about him is that he may not actually know or understand what it is that he does best, and what he does that actually hurts.
So many others really do not know, either. Or understand. I've seen it all before, many, many times. It's actually boring it is so familiar.
By now you should have some clue that I really hold in extreme low esteem what so many "professional managers" seem to think is the right way to run a company. I KNOW better! I know what works, I've done it! I know some others who have done it, too! And a whole bunch of others who screwed it all up. Making those mistakes has serious consequences for a whole lot of other folks, which the screw-up managers never seem to suffer. And THAT is why I detest them so!
GW
Last edited by GW Johnson (2023-05-03 16:14:00)
GW Johnson
McGregor, Texas
"There is nothing as expensive as a dead crew, especially one dead from a bad management decision"
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Now we have more information coming in.
Elon Musk says they received anomalous sensor readings from 3 engines very shortly after liftoff, so the rocket's software chose to shut them down because they were not required. The rocket only required 30 engines to fly, so it flew with only 30 engines. It was already off the pad at that point, so it had to keep going. At T+27, something exploded and took out the heat shield around engines 17, 18, 19, 20. At T+62, additional damage is visible around engine 30. At T+85 communication is lost with engine 6 TVC and shortly thereafter TVC is completely lost. They never made it to the point where the second stage was supposed to separate, which is why the second stage never separated. The booster was obviously catastrophically damaged at that point, but since it never made it to its velocity target prior to stage separation, no command was issued for stage separation. He considers the failure of the FTS the most serious defect that requires re-testing / re-qualification, prior to re-flight.
Their video evidence from the launch tower does not show significant damage to the heat shield or engines as the rocket was leaving the tower. He admits that the "rock tornado" as he called it may have caused some unseen / unknown damage that was not apparent from all of their video evidence, but it seems unlikely at this point. He further states that they "babied" the engines by starting them individually and slowly ramping them up to full power, which is why it took so long for the rocket to leave the pad. They will not be doing that during the second flight.
They did in fact conduct a booster test burn to see if the "Fondag" concrete would hold, prior to launch. One theory is that the load on the concrete was so great that the sand underneath it gave way, the concrete cracked, and then the rocket started throwing chunks of foundation everywhere. The concrete was only intended to be used during the first flight as a stop-gap measure until the sound suppression / water deluge system could be installed on the pad.
He further states that each engine was somewhat customized because they iterated the engine design, meaning not all of them were built precisely the same, but that the engines on the next booster are all built the same way and are more robust than the ones which flew during the first test flight. The engine heat shields / debris shields on the second booster are also more robust, because they were built into the rocket, rather than retrofitted to it as an after-thought. In the first Starship, the hydraulic TVC control was a single point of failure capable of taking out TVC for multiple engines. In the upcoming booster, TVC is individual to each engine using electro-hydraulic actuators, so a failure of one TVC actuator cannot affect multiple engines.
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GW,
Starship/Superheavy might have happened even faster, and maybe more effectively, if Musk really were a better manager. He is not.
Since nobody better than Elon Musk came along, I guess we'll never know.
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more videos including Elon stating it was sabotaged
The raptors use fuel to cool the bell and if the rock storm damage them it would cause a shut down as they are too hot to stay going.
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