The timing of the Flight 8 failure was similar to Flight 7 in January, which also featured several engine shutdowns and a loss of communications about eight and a half minutes after liftoff. However, SpaceX says the two failures had different causes.
“While the failure manifested at a similar point in the flight timeline as Starship’s seventh flight test, it is worth noting that the failures are distinctly different,” the company stated.
In the case of Flight 8, SpaceX said one of the center Raptor engines in Starship suffered a hardware failure, details of which the company did not disclose. That failure enabled “inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition” that caused the loss of the Raptor. Immediately thereafter, the other two center Raptor engines shut down, along with one of the three outer vacuum-optimized engines with larger nozzles. The vehicle then lost control authority.
The company said it made changes to the Raptors in the Starship upper stage, with “additional preload” on key joints and a new nitrogen purge system as well as improvements to the propellant drain system. A future version of Raptor in development will also have reliability improvements to address the problem seen on Flight 8.
On Flight 7 in January, SpaceX, said the vehicle suffered a harmonic response several times stronger than expected, creating additional stress on the vehicle’s propulsion system. That caused leaks that triggered a fire in the engine bay.
“The mitigations put in place after Starship’s seventh flight test to address harmonic response and flammability of the ship’s attic section worked as designed prior to the failure on Flight 8,” SpaceX said.
People think SpaceX is this big success but if you compare them to space travel in the 60's they really aren't.
Test flight 8 didn't make it to orbit.
In the 60's the Saturn 5 went into orbit on its first test flight.
On its 3rd test flight it took humans around the moon.
All of this with less computing power than some egg timers of today.
Saturn V was done with the resources of a nation behind it, because they had to beat the Soviets. That rocket also only went up, and was not reusable, with a tiny fraction of the Apollo mission hardware returning to Earth.
There was considerable computing power on the ground supporting the missions.
The biggest challenges of Apollo was they had to invent so many new technologies that didn't exist yet to solve problems, that's why they needed a nation.
The advances in computer science alone during that era is rediculous. (listen to the podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon, it's mind blowing)
Still they only used 74kb of Memory, that's smaller than most image files these days.
SpaceX have 55 years newer and proven tech to work with.
Apollo took humans around the moon on their 3rd test flight.
SpaceX is on flight 8 and haven't reached orbit yet.
I get they have other goals, but their goals seem easy in comparison, especially if you consider the tech we have now vs the 60's
Destin did a video on how flawed the starship is.
https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU
tl:dr you'd need 9 starships if not more to take a crew to the moon because its payload to orbit sucks.
I'd say their goals seem much harder in an absolute sense, but perhaps roughly the same in comparison to the technology level.
They really do seem to be trying to create a Mars colonisation ship. Capable of transporting large amounts of mass for less money than it costs to transport small amounts of mass with existing rockets.
My response to Destin is that Starship is clearly not optimal for another 'flags and footprints' mission to the Moon, but is such a paradigm shift that even if doing such a mission as a 'side project', it could still very easily be better than all the alternatives. And if, like me, you care more about a permanent presence on the Moon, the case for Starship becomes even stronger.