Comment by raverbashing
1 day ago
I'm not sure there's fire suppression effective enough for this type of leak (especially given rocket constraints)
1 day ago
I'm not sure there's fire suppression effective enough for this type of leak (especially given rocket constraints)
Aerospace fire suppression is generally Halon, which would purge the cavity with inert gas.
Actually the Super Heavy (first stage) already uses heavy CO2 based fire suppression. Hopefully not that necessary in the long term, but should make it possible to get on with the testing in the short term.
What is a long term solution for this? Is there something more than "build tanks that don't leak"? I'm sure spaceX has top design and materials experts, now what ;-).
I think its likely not the tanks but rather the plumbing to engines and the engines themselves leaking (sense lines, etc).
Next engine revision (Raptor 3) should help, as it is much simplified and quite less likely to leak or get damaged during flight.
That's interesting
However if you see the stream you can see one of the tanks rapidly emptied before loss of signal
It seems this was not survivable regardless of fire or not
It might not even be about fire suppression. Oxygen and different gases can pool oddly in different types of gravity. If oxygen was leaking, it may be as simple as making sure a vacuum de-gases a chamber before going full throttle.
We know nothing, but the test having good data on what went wrong is a great starting point.
Replying to this comment so people can see the incredible video of the breakup taken from a diverting aircraft:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aviation/comments/1i34dki/starship_...
If you can displace the oxidizer/air remaining in the volume why not.
The initial tweet says:
> we had an oxygen/fuel leak
If that's correct, then you can't just remove air. The only option would be to cool things down so it stops burning.
If it was really an oxygen/fuel mix burning I don't think you can do much of anything to stop that.
8 replies →
just increased venting to keep any vapor concentrations of fuel and oxidiser below that capable of igniting, even simple baffling could suffice as the leaks may be trasitory and flowing out of blowoff valves, so possibly a known risk. Space x is also forgoeing much of the full system vibriatory tests, done on traditiinal 1 shot launches, and failure in presurised systems due to unknown resonance is common. Big question is did it just blow up, or did the automated abort, take it out, likely the latter or there would be a hold on the next launch.
There’s no way that was anything but the automated abort — it was a comprehensive instantaneous rapid event. Or I guess I’d say, however it started, the automated abort kicked in and worked.