pavelsevecek

Starship explosion

Added 2025-01-19 00:11:29 +0000 UTC

As you probably heard, the flight of Starship 7 didn't go exactly according to the plan. The spacecraft exploded, creating numerous fragments and providing a spectacular visual show for the inhabitants of the Turks and Caicos islands.

While this isn't very good news for SpaceX, it gave me an idea for a new simulation. SpaceSim can already simulate a break-up of rigid objects using its cohesion model, and the 'meteor' effect added in version 0.6 can be used to add trails behind individual fragments. The only thing missing was an option for the (massless) trail particles to cool down over time, and after tweaking the visuals a bit, it resulted in this video.

This simulation will be included as a preset in version 0.8.