Why won’t Starship have an abort system? Should it?! 

“Revert to launch” is the only abort system I need. Okay, after a year, I will finally confirm that this was about KSP, but it can be about SFS as well, if you like :P

1919: "I'm not going to fly until planes are as safe as cars." ... 2019: "I'm not going to space until rockets are as safe as planes." ... 2119: "I'm not teleporting until transporters are as safe as rockets."

38:50 "so only about half a percent of flights would see any benefit from a launch escape system"... my KSP contraption, lets just round that one up to 100%

"Rapid unscheduled disassembly" ... LOL I love that term 😄

"It's like putting a Cessna inside of a 747 just in case the 747 fails." Boeing, please hire this man.

The fact that we live in a time where two youtubers can have regular engineering conversations on twitter with the head engineer and CEO of a major rocket company is just astounding to me...

I'd like to see you revisit this video now that you're going to the moon (unbelievable and congratulations!). You seem to be cool with going to the moon on a largely untested vehicle without an abort system. I'm still not convinced. My main concern is a RUD on the pad given that Raptor is a newer more complex engine, and the vehicle has so many points of failure. Please convince me that Starship is a human-ready spacecraft. I'm sure you wouldn't agree to flying on it otherwise. The illustration in the thumbnail gives the impression that the escape system in the Starship nosecone is possible. Edit - Just watched your dearMoon announcement video and I came to the realization that the only way this particular artistic mission profile could be accomplished is using Starship because of the giant window, as shown in the drawing. I suppose there are inherent risks involved. Imo, seeing you go up on a Crew Dragon would be equally exciting and it does have a viewport and a launch abort system, but would certainly not offer the same ability to grab footage in the same way as if you had the giant cabin space that Starship offers. You could probably fit your van in the Starship with plenty of room to spare! Anyway, congrats again, and godspeed. I'm happy for you. Have been watching from the beginning, and just want to see you return to Earth safely!

I'd love to see a short video going over these older videos where you address Starship questions/problems, and how they've evolved up to the last successful(ish) landing of SN10.

**Me in KSP putting an "abort abort abort system" for if my "abort abort system" fails, and at the same time thinking if I need another level of abort systems to save me from possible "abort abort abort system" failures.**

I needed an abort system for this video... Just watched the whole thing in one sitting and didn't even notice my launch window coming and going (missed my bus).

Revisited this video after SN8's flight. Essentially I still feel there is several things that can happen just in the landing sequence that can justify an abort system. Something that is obviously unique in space flight. Fuel pressure, fuel amount, wind conditions, flap control, engine thrust vectoring, engine relight (especially after a return flight from say Mars or landing on Mars). All of this happening correctly in a few seconds. So I think the nose cone section of Starship should have a push away abort system. So as to limit the size needed to pull away. Yes, starship will loose payload and personal capacity because of extra parts but people wont ride without it.

Soviets: *puts lots of engines on the N1 rocket* Elon: Write that down, write that down!

*Flies away in Cessna* "The rest of the passengers didn't like that..." --

RU-vid needs to add a love button so I can adequately show my adoration of the videos from Everyday Astronaut.

44:40 Oh this aged like fine wine

Don’t apologize for the amount of content you include in your presentation... it’s a lot of work and very thorough...I love your in-depth approach!

Need escape pods for droids and the secret plans they are carrying.

Your long form content is basically unmatched. thanks for all the effort you put into all of these videos!

Tbh I still think a launch abort would be a good idea. A 99.5% success rate would be very bad and unacceptable. If not, maybe it would be best if it had a detachable reentry module so that the people could land the good-old way. That, or the crew could transfer to a Dragon capsule (delivered by a Falcon) for reentry.

Your vids are soooo long, I need to plan time in my schedule to watch them. But they are sooo thorough and filled with knowledge its insane! Keep these vids going and I'll keep a time slot in my schedule to watch them!❤️

Hi reliability engineer here(although I work on robots). Some things to think about when looking at reliability are the difference between system and component reliability. Basically what component reliability is would be your 99.88% reliable engine but your system reliability takes into account all failures. With most systems they have components that are in series with eachother meaning if one thing fails the system fails(similar to series circuits vs parallel circuits) now you can stack components in series and in parallel. Your fuel tank would probably be a single thing so there is no redundancy but your engines are in parallel with one another so one can fail but your system will still work successfully. Now you can consider a more complex model for the engines since if you lose more than maybe 2-4 engines your rocket will stop flying up which is a failure, basically you enter that as a threshold of the failure of those redundant parts. In general anything in series can have it's reliability multiplied to the rest of the system to calculate the system reliability. Your subassembly with the parallel parts has a different equation to calculate that subassembly but then that can now be factored in like anything else in series. Also what should be considered is what you consider a failure. Like you said in the video landing the rocket is not necessary for success so failures that only impact that won't be considered when determining primary success, but you could have a system reliability that is just for landing but that would include failures up until stage separation and down to landing and ignoring failures on the second stage and beyond. Hopefully this is interesting to someone!

43:00 "Put more rockets on it" This is a very VERY Kerbal answer to the problem.

"The best part is no part. The best process is no process." -Elon

A dragon capsule at the top of star ship could be used for small crew

Agree or disagree SpaceX should name a Droneship "Flamey end down"

Kids you always have to remember that this video was just a "bridging", cause the other video he is working on was to complex to finish in time. Shows you how much effort and love that man puts into his videos.

In all actuality, with all concerns in perspective, Starship is the abort system. I would like to think that once an anomaly is detected in the booster, the clamps for SN would release and lift to a height that would safely bring the crew back to the ground. I hope you watch this video again and again after signing up for Dear Moon".. These are all topics that were all discussed even prior to the development of the ship. CONTINGENCY is the #1 rule in aerospace. SpaceX has it, and is already applied. Great video Tim. Please keep up the great work! - NOM

I look forward to watching your updates. You have great information and an obvious enthusiasm for space travel.

Kerbal Solution: rely on the exploding booster to blow the crew capsule part clear...

It’s crazy how he makes consistently good almost hour long videos.

Hello Tim, Not sure if you’ll see this but I’d like to congratulate you on producing such an amazing post. Excellent research, clear explanations and confident presentation. You rock, man!

"ONLY" 1/2% launches needed an abort? My guy....that's a huge number when you are talking about engineering failures. If 1/2% of airplanes flying out of Houston needed to abort, that would be 3 aborts every single day.

43:00 - "You're solving the problem of rockets by sticking more rockets on them": Well, we all know that's the way to go. Kerbal engineering FTW :)

36:59 cosmonauts : blyat we could've died Rescue crew : relax comrade , take this vodka

I think if spaceX really wanted to make an abort system for starship they should go the blue origin route where there is an SRB on the bottom of the crew capsule that looks like a stylish table from the inside (also they would have to add some emergency parachutes to the capsule).

Tim, you are a star! I have learnt SO much about rockets. Thank you for dedicating your time to educate us

There was a person who said: “An engineer knows that he has achieved perfection, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

"That would be like putting a Cessna prop plane inside of a 747 in case the 747 fails you can fly away on the Cessna." In the early 1900's the consensus was that life rafts on the Titanic was a waste of space and that they were better off just making the Titanic itself safer.

27:15 The Apollo missions didn't rely on propulsively landing on the moon. There was an abort option. They could abort the landing at any time, fire the ascent engine, dock with the command module, return to earth and land there -- non-propulsively. Starship won't have that option. It absolutely *has to* land propulsively, and it must work on the first try, no abort possible.

I remember one astronaut from shuttle program mentioned that there was a guy with a button that would just self destruct the shuttle inflight if it leans off the proper trajectory so it will not fall on the city. What an interesting job that guy had

Tim, I love you for making these long, in-depth videos. I absolutely agree with you about diving deep into a topic to really understand it, and nowadays there's a lot more content on youtube that only gives a 5 minute overview for beginners and is mostly just paraphrasing wikipedia.

"My car engine died 4 seconds before I got to my house, but I was close enough to walk the rest of the way. I call that a success!" - RD-180 engineers, apparently

I can easily imagine them sending people up to Starship exclusively in Dragon capsules

"Imagines 10g's" *ribs begin cracking*

This reminds me of the electricity backup system in my former employer's building. It was one of the kind where you'd have to route the whole power through that backup system in order for it to be able to uninterruptedly take over power supply in case of a grid failure. The problem was that the probability of a failure inside the backup system itself was higher than the chances for a grid outage are in Germany. So by including the backup system into the power supply system, that would've actually increased the likelihood of a power outage in the building. That's why they decoupled the system and detached the backup system from power supply completely.

Dear Tim, since nearly two years I am watching your videos. Those are awesome and i like your style. Fresh music, nice pictures. But the best thing is how you present facts about a simple question without prematurely judging or presenting something unilaterally and then weighting the facts, re-evaluating them and giving a properly thought-out answer. Just like in this video, at first I thought "Launch Escape System .. stupid question ... of course everytime." But after 48:43 the world was different again. Smarter. That is true science. To your question: Would I am going on a rocket without a launch escape system? Since I am a father ... No. But Yes. But ... NASA would laugh at me if I wanted to be an astronaut :). So please do more videos and keep your style. Now I have to sign up at patreons ... Geatings from germany.

After the launch of starship, I firmly believe that starship needs an in-flight abort system. I honestly believe a launchpad abort plan may be unrealistic possibility seeing that the entire launch complex turned into a massive firey ballistic nightmare. That looked worse than anything ive ever seen in combat, including moab bomb. Even there ballistic berms were rendered useless, in fact, became source for ballistic materials.

I am 2:44 in and I am liking and subbing because the production value you just showed me already is amazing sir.

21:44 Two comments here: 1) The in-flight RS-25 failure resulted in mission success, so if the standard is mission as you propose here, then... 2) It should be pointed out that the failure of the RS-25 here was caused by a short in either a sensor or the engine controller (I don't remember which). Either way, the engine shutdown was erroneous -- and, in fact, mission control recognized this and order the crew to disable the automatic system for the other two engines, which turned out to be the right call (within seconds of cutting out the automatic shutdown system the same problem requested a second engine shutdown).

Dang, 50 minutes... Dang, It’s over already!?!

A guy my dad used to work for worked on the team that designed the engines for the shuttle; including the Challenger. He said that even after the shuttle exploded, those systems were still working to regain control of the craft and were performing at some 600% of their maximum designed capability.

Your videos have become so high quality, its amazing. I mean not that they've been low quality before but this is a whole new level.

FAA regulations are written in blood, and aircraft have become much safer because of those regulations. Rockets are going to have go through the same thing to be as safe.

Everyday Astronaut is one of the only youtubers I’ll block out an hour for.

"rapid unscheduled disassembly" is probably the best expression for something blowing up :'D

Brilliant job. Well done as always Tim.

"Hello, I am Everyday Astronaut, and this is my masterclass"

I love these videos. Everytime I have a ques...oh wait, he just answered it. And then anoth....hold up, he just answered that one too. Good journalism is a dying (if not already dead) thing, If I could nominate Tim for a Pulitzer Prize, I would. My understanding of rockets and spaceflight is 3 orders of magnitude greater than it was 3 years ago, because he actually takes TIME to explain things in detail. I never thought anyone could challenge Scott Manley's abilities to explain this to the common man, but he does.

I think just having the abort system is good, redundancies are always typically a good thing and for (almost) any launch pad mishaps ie the one soviet mission where it saved lives. I understand the complexity argument but i feel the redundancy outweighs the simplification

Great video. Regarding the closed captions: items get put through the "wringer", not "ringer".

I would choose a Scott Manley instead of an abort system: Fly save! I meant "safe":-)

27:55 Minor mistake: Airliners are actualy able to deploy it's landing gear even without any hidraulic power using only gravity to do the work.

Great job! very good video!. We are all going to miss the space scape-pods all stars ships have in the sci-fy movies, though.

Rewatched! It's always great to review facts! Thanks, Tim!

Space X employee: hey Elon I took out the engine so there is no failure Elon Musk: good job Edit: man, why did this get soooo many likes. It doesn’t even sound correct XD

Can you really say the F-1 is more reliable than Merlin? Sure, it's at 100% success vs Merlin's 99.88%... but it's only flown 65 times vs Merlin's over 800. Not really a fair comparison

coming back to this just after starship has landed without deconstructing itself

An abort/escape system provides an option that is decoupled from many potential failures of the main vehicle. There are tons of failure modes every rocket must have in principle, and that also concerns Starship. These scenarios include loss of steering/control, propellant tank rupture, fuel leaks into the engineering spaces, and most importantly: systemic failure scenarios that we don't yet know about. If Starship itself has an abort mode which performs on an automated, powered landing, that's good - but this, too, relies on Starship itself being intact and under controlled flight. About the Komarov incident: it is not strictly true that an abort system would not have saved his life. Had there been an option to eject from the vehicle with a parachute, he would at least have had a chance. Compared to the Columbia crew, his re-entry was not inherently unsurvivable after the vehicle failed. The question of whether abort systems are necessary is more about the value one puts on a human life vs the cost and complexity involved. There is absolutely no question that abort systems save lifes. With the renaissance of manned spaceflight hopefully well underway for the upcoming 20ies and 30ies, the number of incidents where lives would be saved will go up dramatically. We are right now making the conscious decision not to save those lives. And considering the enormous capacity of Starship, these would be staggering numbers of deaths, potentially enough to put a halt to human exploration of the solar system due to a sudden public backlash. Would I risk a ride on Starship even if it had a 50/50 chance of blowing up on the pad, as long as it enabled me to be one of the first colonists on the Moon or Mars? Hell, yes. Would I want someone I love to do the same thing? Absolutely not.

41:20 Unfortunately the paper airplane safety record still lies well short of 50%

"Designing a rocket to be as reliable as an airliner is the goal" *Boeing 737 Max has left the chat*

Good stuff, I really enjoy your show, thank you so much for your hard work

The two catastrophic failures of the STS were not directly caused by design flaws or even technical failures, they were the failure of management and the result of (at best) bad judgement and misplaced priorities. Challenger was entirely preventable, and had they not chosen to simply whistle past the graveyard and immediately investigated the damage to Columbia (and left the shuttle in orbit) some form of repair or rescue could have been attempted. In the case of the "old NASA" that sort of thing was captured in the slogan "Failure is not an option", and showcased with the safe return of the Apollo 13 crew. Somehow, by the time we got into the shuttle program that attitude had changed into "Failure is not a problem." and we lost two crews as a result.

I happened to witness the Soyuz MS-10 launch and abort last year in Kazakhstan. Just glad to see that Nick and Aleksey survived that incident.

25:00 perfect examples of why this is so hard. All those failures had simple fixes, but those fixes were not specifically anticipated. And that's where Murphy's law comes in. There is always something you didn't think of. No matter how good your FMECA is there is always something you missed.

Amazing content! RU-vid needs more of this!

As usual a highly professional approach to the subject. Your reflections are really enjoyable. Even in the pioneer days of passenger flights, there were no abort systems. It was not feasible to have 50 passengers jump out with a parachute :) Some passenger trains are really really fast. If they fail, people dies. There is no abort system. With new technology for passenger travel, we will have to accept, the only way to ensure safety, is failure. Or said in a different way,- that people dies for future safety.

The timestamps are very much appreciated

"Hopefully the pointy end is up, and the flamey end is down" That made me laugh harder than it should have....

Watched the whole video, keep up the good work!

Little did Tim know when he did this particular video that he too would be a astronaut one day riding on that rocket!

A bomb with a nozzle -EverydayAstronaut 2019

Like just for the amount of work that was put into this! Good job, Tim!

my daily driver is a '73 VW Beetle specifically because its simplicity makes it reliable. there is no radiator to leak and cause overheating, there is no computer to break down, no O2 sensors to clog, and it's small enough that I can push it up a modest hill by myself if I need to, and the manual transmission means I can easily and precisely control it down a hill without the engine, or start the engine with a dead battery or dead starter. and this is all apart from maintenance, which I can do myself all the way down to pulling and rebuilding the engine and transmission by myself without any special tools. the best part truly is no part, because it weighs nothing and breaks never.

I would love a video about space refueling (which starship has to perform) How would they transfer fluids in zero g? Do they need to create micro gravity for the procedure? Thank you for the in depth video.

“A rapid unscheduled disassembly” 😂😂

I feel like you maybe missed one thing. When there are more people on the spaceship the abort system has to become much larger. It wouldn't even be like putting a Cessna on in 747 (can't fit all the passengers of the 747 on the cessna), but it would become closer like putting a 747 in a 747. Try creating an abort system for three large passenger cabins in ksp and you just end up designing the entire space shuttle, with a slightly higher thrust to weight then necessary.

just came across this video, thanks very much super interesting. One thing that came to mind about air travel safety, is in light aircraft at least how abort systems AKA ballistic parachutes are being fitted more and more in the design of small aircraft. Personally you couldn't pay me enough to get on a helicopter, those things fall out of the sky way to often for my liking. I've been up in a Cesena a couple times when I was much younger and didn't realise how often these things and other light aircraft fail.

This is impressive work, great job.

I think comparing it to airplanes is quite accurate. Airplanes don't have parachutes for all passengers because their reliability is great. I would consider parachutes on airplanes to be the equivalent of abort systems on rockets.

I like Everyday Astronaut videos so much that I was watching something else and I came here right away when I got the notification

Great video, interesting factual and enthralling. Thank you.

Something you spoke about Tim, indirectly-without stating what should be the rule-is: a non jettisoned exterior-situate re-entry module crew compartment should never be situated below a leading edge which disintegrates at launch.

When it comes to flying into space and back with rockets, solid or liquid fueled, I believe abort systems are a must. The real problem Is having the right abort system.

Idk why, but I’m pretty sure the reason for having an abort system, aside from the whole “It’ll save you life” thing, is that it makes the crew feel safer. You said your self, you wouldn’t want to go on a rocket not knowing how safe it is. Even with all the stats, you still get stressed by thinking about the fact that if one thing goes wrong, it all goes wrong. A stressed crew is *never* a good crew.

@Everyday Astronaut, your analysis of the 'why' behind SpaceX's rocket systems is pretty thorough and well structured. To me that shows hpw good you are at understanding a problem. I am a sucker for understanding better ways of problem-solving. Would you comment on your method (s) in solving problems?

I like your criticality section at ~7min, I was able to work on a program as an Intern at NASA doing just this on a control system for a hybrid propulsion engine.

I'm those people who would fly early in the program with little testing.

This man knows his stuff, he is committed to stars.

This is basically why you do a "money at the risk" calculation. It normalizes away the sample size, assuming your faults are uncorrelated, and gives out an easily actionable number.

I'm new to your channel. Excellent content. Thank you.