Starship safety concerns after delayed self-destruct

[Jan]

SpaceX battled to blow up Starship rocket, raising safety concerns

During SpaceX's inaugural Starship test flight, the company struggled to get the rocket to self-destruct immediately, raising safety concerns, the New York Times reports.

Launch providers like SpaceX are required to demonstrate the ability to quickly destroy their rockets to protect populated areas. It took Starship 40 seconds to respond to the self-destruct command.

 

[CommonSense]

Did they tweet the self destruct command to the vehicle? That would explain a lot...

 

[Gordon_R]

Most of these fear and doom articles are rubbish! Scott Manley just did a good video on flight termination systems, and why the Starship version partially failed, but was still within safety margins:

 

[garyc]

SpaceX use linear shaped charges to rupture the fuel tanks for the self-destruct, as is typical with rockets. They look a bit like this:



Here are couple installed on the Starship part of the rocket (under those boxy things). There are two since everything on the self-destruct system has to be doubly redundant. Seems that they did rupture the tanks early on, but it took a long time for the whole thing to blow up.

 

[Gordon_R]

Scott actually posted this explanation two weeks ago, but most media preferred to over-dramatise it:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1649786752939487238