@tvdv no, but basically the energy has to go somewhere and if it just goes straight into the ground it will just go straight up again, thus you want a flame trench which diverts it sideways and away from the rocket
@calotriton@tvdv Not necessarily, because gravity is much lower you only need a small fraction of the energy to go into orbit (and way less fuel which makes the whole thing much lighter as well).
Smaller rockets on Earth don’t need a flame trench either.
@goatsarah@thomasfuchs the launch facility that SpaceX uses in Florida was built to handle a less powerful rocket than Starship and has features that are completely missing from the Boca Chica pad
And all of those features are so well documented that interested laypeople are familiar with them, let alone professional rocket engineers
They thought they could get away with cutting corners on the launchpad, and the cut corners turned around and smacked them hard.
If that facility isn't outright shut down, it won't be seeing any launches for a couple of years
@goatsarah@thomasfuchs landing rockets was hard, but even there it had been previously tested out in the DC-X program.
Just nobody cared enough to try to scale it up before SpaceX.
Launchpad design had been done wrong before, and the lessons learned were incorporated into heavy launch facilities in the US, Europe, and even Russia.
SpaceX got overconfident and built a pad that wasn't fit for purpose and that they should have known wasn't fit for purpose.
Period.
That wasn't "oooh, let's try something new!" It was "let's cheap out on stuff while the regulators have their backs turned"
@goatsarah@thomasfuchs and maybe, just maybe, their recent successes have left them overconfident and inclined to cut corners
Because building a Saturn V quality launch pad would have slowed them down, a *lot*, it isn't something that you just bang together over a couple of months.
Sometimes "move fast and break things" actually, you know, *breaks things*
@pattykimura@max Yeah that doesn't make any sense, gravity is much less, which means you need less rocket (& lots less fuel which you don't have to launch) and thus much less thrust.
@max@thomasfuchs lol. But, uh, the launch took place on earth, where our gravity is, well, earth gravity, and not ideal conditions to test conditions of launch in Mars gravity, like on Mars. But, PR is everything to The Musk Mars Taxi Cab Company.
@thomasfuchs I've seen some people claim that Musk wanted to do without that infrastructure because it wouldn't be available on Mars (at least initially), but do you know if he ever actually expressed that?