Back in the day, if a gigantic rocket pulverized its launch mount during liftoff and then failed in flight due to a stage separation issue, it would take months if not longer to assess the problems, rebuild and refly.
Today’s industry juggernaut, SpaceX, operates at a different pace. “Safe failure and rapid learning are often the fastest path to successful development,” William Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president for build and flight reliability, told legislators during an Oct. 18 hearing on U.S. commercial human spaceflight.
What brought Gerstenmaier—along with colleagues from Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and space industry consultancies—before the Senate subcommittee on space and science was what the executives consider a pressing issue to ensure the U.S. maintains strong leadership in commercial and human spaceflight: creating more efficient regulatory processes.
“We’re at this inflection point where you’re seeing a higher cadence of flight, more frequent flights and diverse vehicles,” Virgin Galactic’s Sirisha Bandla, vice president for government affairs and research, told legislators. “It is natural to have the regulatory agency grow as well and be provided with the adequate amount of resources and expertise to keep up with that pace.”
For example, SpaceX says it has been ready since mid--September for the second integrated Starship-Super Heavy flight test. The vehicle’s debut flight on April 20, which lasted less than 4 min., inadvertently excavated a 25-ft.-deep crater beneath the launch mount and exposed design issues with the vehicle’s stage separation and automated flight termination systems.
SpaceX reinforced and upgraded the Starship--Super Heavy launchpad at Boca Chica Beach, Texas, which now includes a water-cooled steel flame deflector. It also switched to a hot-stage separation system for better Starship performance and unveiled a new electronic thrust vector control system for operation of the 33 methane-burning Raptor engines that power the Starship’s Super Heavy first stage.
Six weeks later, SpaceX was still awaiting authorization from the FAA to resume Starship flight tests. The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) oversees launch activities by U.S. companies.
“It’s a shame when our hardware is ready to fly and we’re not able to fly because of regulations and rereviews,” Gerstenmaier said. “The pace of our flight test should not be governed by the regulation. We need to be safe, we need to protect the environment—we don’t dismiss those—but we need to fly at the fastest pace that we can do hardware development.
“The 33 engines, the staging is all new technology,” he added. “We need to test that soon, learn what’s wrong, fix it and go fly again. We cannot be held up by regulations.”
NASA has contracted with SpaceX for a variant of the Starship to shuttle astronauts to and from lunar orbit and the surface of the Moon as part of the Artemis III and IV missions—the first two U.S. crewed landings on the Moon since the 1969-72 Apollo missions.
SpaceX, among others, wants Congress to modernize how the AST licenses companies for space launch and reentry. They also urge legislators to provide more financial and other resources to the FAA, especially since the agency’s workload will continue to soar. SpaceX, which completed its 80th orbital launch of the year on Nov. 7, is aiming to fly its Falcon fleet 12 times per month in 2024—144 flights in the year—not including Starship flights.
“AST is struggling to fulfill its responsibilities today,” Gerstenmaier noted in a written statement to Congress. “AST’s workload over the next 12-24 months could result in the grounding of U.S. space launch capability if action is not taken immediately.
“At all phases of development and operation, SpaceX takes every precaution to ensure public safety,” he added. “But we will take programmatic risk during testing to advance technology. Public risk and programmatic risk are not the same and are not in conflict. We are responsible for programmatic risk. AST is responsible for ensuring that our efforts to protect public safety are verified and appropriate.”
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Despite this level of skill, the first flight of the stacked Starship and Booster was an epic engineering fail. I'm guessing that it was hubris that caused them to go with a flat concrete launch pad and eschew the tried and true approach of a water cooled flame trench. This is despite the concrete pad being damaged during each flight of the early Starship test flights with the response to use different concrete or putting steel plates down and not perform a review on the approach even though the booster will be firing 11x more engines (each with more thrust) than the Starship test flights.
I know it will go against the grain to suggest that the regulatory hurdles the FAA and FWS are putting them through is appropriate but the test launch really was a disaster. Not only did the self-destruct mechanism fail but the 25 foot deep pit the rocket dug threw chunks of concrete up to 6.5 miles away and caused a wildfire. I would have thought that there would have been enough analysis done to ensure that this wouldn't have happened.
I'm all for rapid testing but this isn't the same as testing a smartphone app where the code can be run in a sandbox, prevented from harming other apps or the operation of the phone.
If you're going to play with something that can do as much damage as a small nuclear bomb and then show that you're not doing all your homework then the grown ups (FAA and FWS) need to step in.