How The Spacex SN10 Starship Successfully Landed, Then Exploded

As the saying goes, “the third times is the charm”, and that was very much true for SpaceX. Two spectacular flights which had two different kind of spectacular crash landings. The third time was almost the charm. The Starship SN 10, is a huge next-generation spacecraft that Elon Musk, the founder and chief executive officer of SpaceX, dreams to send to mars.
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As SpaceX sent this another starship prototype flying high above the Texas coast on Wednesday, it successfully completed the ascension into the sky and this time returned to the ground and landed in one piece, but minutes later it exploded due to a possible methane leak. But regardless of this explosion it was a great success for the private space company. With this success we are one step closer to mars. Elon musk's company is churning out starship test vehicles in Boca Chica, Texas at the company's test facility and very recently they began testing the launch and landing capabilities in daring flights. The big stainless steel SN10 launched from Boca Chica at 6:15 pm EST, rose 6.2 miles into the sky and the came back to earth for a smooth touchdown 6 minutes and 20 seconds after lift-off. Today in this video we take a look at the major changes that happened in starship SN10 with respective to SN8 and SN9, and why it exploded minutes after the landing? So, make sure to watch the video till the end to know the significance of starship SN10 for us and our future of becoming interplanetary species.
But know why is Starship so Important? Imagine a rocket that could launch and land 1,000 times a year. Sounds unbelievable? Well, that’s what SpaceX is working on- The Starship. Its lifting capacity of 100,000 kilograms is more than any rocket currently in operation, and the whole system is designed to be reusable for frequent trips to space. It will launch atop a large booster called Super Heavy. Super Heavy will be the backbone of getting Starship and its crew on a journey to another world. The ultimate goal of starship is to launch up to 100 people at a time per flight.
Before Sn10, its predecessors SN 8 failed to stick to the landing but they give valuable data to the company to make amends in the future which the company did. Before discussing what happened to the Starship SN10, we will first discuss the major design changes that SpaceX implemented in this starship. By this time, you might have known how SpaceX works. They basically keep testing these prototypes and during each and every test they gather a huge amount of valuable data. They can then analyse the data and make necessary hardware and software changes in the future prototypes. So naturally SN10 is kind of an evolved version of Sn8 and SN9. SN8 was expected to have 33% probability of completing all the mission objectives but Sn8 did far better from that. Sn9 also suffered a major landing failure. But what's important here is that both of these landing failures were unique and failure is the most expected outcome in these test flights. Though SN8 and Sn9 didn’t land they did show us two different scenarios of what might go wrong while landing in the future. These failures contribute a lot to the program's success, for example, because of the failure of starship Sn8 SpaceX realised the problem of maintaining adequate pressure in the header tanks and so they made some design changes made added a helium header tank in Sn9, but this time Sn9 had a completely different cause of landing failure. They realised that relighting two raptor engines can also lead to failure as raptors are not fully matured yet and are still in the development phase. SpaceX realised that they can eliminate this by reigniting all the three raptor engines during the starship flip maneuver. So, SpaceX performed a mid-air static fire, giving the rocket flight computer a few seconds to analyse the performance of the raptor engines and down slip to the two of the healthiest raptors. Starship Sn10 was the first high-altitude prototype to perform 3 raptor engine flip burn.
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Credits: Ron Miller
Credits: Nasa/Shutterstock/Storyblocks/Elon Musk/SpaceX/ESA/ESO
Credits: Flickr

Video Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:14 Elon Musk
02:12 Super Heavy
04:29 Flight Termination System
08:18 Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly

#insanecuriosity #sn10 #spacex

[InsaneCuriosity]

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[dennisdiede]

Musk is the smartest person in my lifetime. Thanks to Insane Curiosity for bringing us intelligent videos.

[Goiri]

I watched it the last day. It's successful because they have learnt a lot. Still they have to probe a lot of prototypes.. luckily in few years we will watch the starship finished

[VIJER]

Those weren't SN10 launch videos.

[adude]

Narrirator: as you can see there was a propellant leak
Image: water dripping from pipe
:/

[johngraham]

I believe the legs or feet in this case are designed to crush when landing. Sn 11 will have the same setup. Probably won't see legs until they roll out BN 1.

[johnnyj]

Your graphics don't lineup with the story line.

[MG-erdm]

S/N:10 was a big roller coaster of emotions and what a ride it was! 🤩

[Darth_Revan]

Looking forward for what's to come!

[MG-erdm]

What do they say, "go big or go home"? Well S/N:10 most certainly did, and how!!! Gotta luv SpaceX. 😍

[FactTalkOfficial]

Anyone who sees this comment is a genius as you have interest in facts and information about the cosmos as the content maker is!!

[theadventuresofbrockinthai]

OF COURSE IT WAS A SUCCESS. THEY GOT TONS OF DATA THAT WILL BE USED FOR THE NEXT ROCKET AND ANY AFTER THAT ONE.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FAILURE, THEY ARE ALL SUCCESSFUL BECAUSE OF THE DATA THEY COLLECT.

[MrBendybruce]

These are test flights, so I think it is very wrong to say they succeeded or failed based only on whether or not they stick the landing. While a clean landing is clearly the goal, it is the very act of making mistakes that allows them to learn and improve on future launches. Lets keep it in mind that by the time we have humans on board, we want to be confident that a clean and safe landing has about the same probability as a normal commercial aircraft, so in that respect, finding all the different ways that things can go wrong now, is the name of the game.

[homeless_man]

ya know spacex wont copyrightclaim you if you use their footage

[gilbertorivera]

I see this as a success, not a complete success but they are moving forward and that in itself is great news for future space missions. With each mishaps a process of learning and how to prevent them, it is best those accidents happen now while no one is aboard.

[nicosmind]

6 months of 100 people farting on their trip to Mars. Thats bound to add some fuel for landing

[eric]

Successful landings don't explode.

[jadefinchscene]

you seem to be using a lot of outdated information. FAA requires all "rocket" launches to have some sort of FTS. SN10 was not the first to have it. if it left the launch pad intentionally it had an FTS. SN5, 6, 8, 9 all had them. also, i am pretty sure the name "super heavy" is no longer being used. I could be wrong, but this is my understanding.

[FuriousImp]

"As the saying goes, “the third times is the charm”, and..." Uhm, no... look closely.

[alexoblak]

Don't you have any real footage of Starship??? Weird video 🤔