I think its premature to blame this on Raptor. At least, I couldn't see anything suggesting the static fire was imminent, so my money would be on "anything but the engines" over "the engines". At least with what we know so far.
But SpaceX's brand of rocket development is certainly exciting
That's what it seems like to me too. From the slo-mo video, it looks like one of the propellant tanks (likely the methane tank on the top) burst open, spilled a lot of the propellant and then caught fire. Engines are unlikely to be the culprit here. Interestingly, there seems to be a crack or a gap already on the surface, along which the tank bursts open when the accident occurs.
So that's 3 issues in the last 2 flights and one static fire, all different, all with different root causes, all catastrophic. Block 3 will be a different vehicle, should they just skip Block 2 (scrap however many they already built) and move on to Block 3?
In the spacex subreddit there are comments claiming that key engineers have left the company because of differences with leadership/culture. Not sure how credible those are, but spacex has had suspiciously many failures recently.
It’s not even just a binary state of an engineer being there or not. The morale and general attitude of the environment can cause engineers still there to just not have their hearts in it.
I think about the countless engineering success stories I’ve read where you can tell the people involved were just living and breathing the problem.
It's hard to tell whether key engineers were the differences between success and failure but Comparably lists SpaceX’s Retention Score as an A– grade, placing it in the top 15% of similarly sized companies based on employee feedback. Additionally, SpaceX boasts an Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) of +25, placing it in the top 25% among peer companies
comparably.com.
Sounds impressive, sure. Question is how much weight do you put into survey stats like those given Musk's extensive history of things like buying the influence he wants, putting his thumbs on the scales of his truth-bot, getting generous valuations based on hype and stories, knowing about "those vote counting computers" (Trump's own words), ruthlessly firing anyone who disagrees with him, etc etc etc.
Then again, they are launching tons of rockets, and any cult leader has his followers, so what do I know...
Not to say that Musk's been particularly endearing lately - but what would the normal turnover in an engineering-centric company the size of SpaceX be?
Especially with how hot the field is these days. I suspect "key" SpaceX engineers do not lack for lucrative offers.
I don't necessary think its a problem with the engine as such. The problem seems much more to get the fuel to the right place in the right pressure at all parts of flight.
If an engine blows up, because its pulling in bubbles, its not the engines fault.
I think Raptor 2 has a few issues still but as we can see on the booster, the can perform fine for what most rocket engines have to do.
We haven't really seen any problems with the engines themselves, so much as the plumbing that has try to keep them fed through radical changes in the rocket's orientation.
That seems like a poor example given how many failed attempts to land something on Mars that took place before they got to designs that would get it right in the first go.
The Viking landers were the first attempt by the US to land on Mars. The Soviets actually soft-landed first on their second try but the lander failed after transmitting one corrupted image. There were certainly many failed Mars missions by various countries, but the Vikings at least got it right on the first go.
Yeah, this is a remarkably good score - for comparison Europe is at 0 out of 2. :P
The first one [1] actually landed but failed to send back any data (kinda like the soviet example) due to deployment failure.
But the second one will at least have an impact on future generations, with people being confused why there are two Shiaparelli[2] craters on Mars. ;-)
We knew from the Soviet that it was going to be really hard but after the successful flights I thought they had it in the bag.
We might be touching on the limits of SpaceX constant tweaking fail fast approach.