The Big Story is the Big Rocket

I'm sure everyone has heard by now that SpaceX launched the booster7/ship24 combination today, for the first test flight of the combination of a Starship and Super Heavy booster.  The combination didn't get quite as far as the so-called "successful failure" of the Relativity Space Terran 1 flight last month.  Terran 1 had a successful first stage and a second stage that didn't ignite properly.  The B7/S24 ship never got to the point of stage separation and trying to light the second stage.  Instead, the Flight Termination System detonated and blew the vehicle apart, after it should have dropped the first stage and gone on to the upper stage.  

Still, I'm inclined to call this one a successful failure, too.  The "Space 2.0" companies, notably led by SpaceX, are characterized by being "hardware rich" - that is, build lots of hardware, test important changes frequently, understand the failure, learn from it, and build more hardware.  The truth is, B7/S24 was fairly far behind the next candidate for flying, which I've heard is to be Booster 9 and Ship 26.  

Comments, photos, and speculations are flying at an enormous rate.  I have a tendency to think, like pretty much every breaking news story we see on the media, some of the first reports are going to be wrong.  Still, there are things we can see ourselves.  In the comments to yesterday's post, an anonymous commenter posted a link to a decent video from the Wall Street Journal.  During ascent, around Max Q, the camera is looking right up the skirt of B7.  It's clear there are six engines that are no longer firing.  I've added red rings about where those engines are. 

You can watch the video here, I need to add, though, that different videos and different photos show different numbers of engines out at different times in the mission.  The video has representation of the engine view showing which engines are out at the lower left of the screen.  If you watch carefully, you'll see that the representation has some engines turn off and then back on.  I don't know if that's really happening.  

Fellow blogger BillB posts a picture from NASA Spaceflight showing eight engines out. 

In the long topic on NASA Spaceflight.com, I took a photo posted by SpaceX and did some processing on it to get a better look at the engines. 

To me, the pattern of engines that aren't working in this picture is the same as the WSJ video showed, above.

A major question is how much damage has "Stage Zero", the ground infrastructure, suffered.  Lab Padre tweeted this picture of the Orbital Launch Mount, showing the concrete and sand under the mount was blasted out.  Lab calls this "Crater McCraterface".   I did some photo editing to increase the contrast. 

There are also Tweets that show damage to the large storage tanks SpaceX has close to the OLM.  Major construction here could seriously impact the ability to resume testing with another booster/ship combination quickly.  Major construction to improve their water deluge system has been underway, and if they're lucky, a lot of that concrete would have had to have been removed anyway.  

At this point, it looks like the engines failing are a fundamental problem.  Raptor engine problems aren't new, and part of the reason for the Raptor 2 engines is to help alleviate that.  I don't know what engines were on B7; if they were all up to the latest and greatest versions.  That doesn't mean there aren't more problems or bigger problems in the Starship and Super Heavy portions of the vehicle.

There's going to be a lot of conversation about today's flight as analysis proceeds and I expect the story to change.  Learning is part of the fun.

EDIT TO ADD, 4/21/23 @ 4:45 ET: 

This photo posted today to the NASA Spaceflight discussion.

This is the base of the Orbital Launch Mount (OLM) showing how the concrete was blasted of the rebar that it was cast over.  There's some water visible near (in front of) the leg on our left.  It also blasted the cover off that leg - sheet steel, I think.