This article focuses on the failure and everyone is focused on the failure. I am saying that this is because many people don't understand that this is actually a success. A lot of people tend to take glee in things failing for Musk because of his views now, but this isn't really a failure, it is just a muted success.
I am woke now because I don't support allowing harassment of others? This is the first time anyone has ever called me woke.
27 of 33 engines fired. Performance was sub-nominal. When it was time for separation the vehicle did multiple clearly unplanned flips (during all of this the broadcast was talking about how great of a success this was, though the employees had quieted significantly knowing this was not going well). Add that Elon was looking pretty grim.
Making it clear of the tower seems like a remarkably low bar, so if that really was the measure of success, this thing is going to be ready for missions in about three decades. Like what an incredibly low accomplishment that would be.
And of course I feel overwhelmingly certain SpaceX doesn't consider this a success. The face-saving they put out for the sycophants to echo doesn't match the reality that this test proved extraordinarily little.
Musk has many issues, but what is the point of bringing his grudge with Trans? The rocket is a great success and in the grand scale of things is worth the ego grandstanding. The man has done nothing illegal and has accomplished a lot amazing things. Congrats to SpaceX, Elon, the Americans and Humanity.
What good is freedom of thought and speech if one cannot exercise it? I probably drank the old american koolaid and have not yet had my sip of the new one.
You can see the other currently downvoted comment.
It's like a religion that feels it needs to insert "God is great" or "in his divine wisdom" into every sentence, just to make sure nobody questions their piety.
>It's like a religion that feels it needs to insert "God is great" or "in his divine wisdom" into every sentence, just to make sure nobody questions their piety.
During the Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
PS - More proof that you are correct in describing this as a religion: The emergence of "problematic" as the woke equivalent of "blasphemous".
>It's like a religion that feels it needs to insert "God is great" or "in his divine wisdom" into every sentence, just to make sure nobody questions their piety.
During the Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
PS - More proof that you are correct in describing this as a religion: The emergence of "problematic" as the woke equivalent of "blasphemous".
>It's like a religion that feels it needs to insert "God is great" or "in his divine wisdom" into every sentence, just to make sure nobody questions their piety.
During the Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
PS - More proof that you are correct in describing this as a religion: The emergence of "problematic" as the woke equivalent of "blasphemous".
>It's like a religion that feels it needs to insert "God is great" or "in his divine wisdom" into every sentence, just to make sure nobody questions their piety.
During the Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
PS - More proof that you are correct in describing this as a religion: The emergence of "problematic" as the woke equivalent of "blasphemous".
>It's like a religion that feels it needs to insert "God is great" or "in his divine wisdom" into every sentence, just to make sure nobody questions their piety.
During the Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
PS - More proof that you are correct in describing this as a religion: The emergence of "problematic" as the woke equivalent of "blasphemous".
I think a lot of articles and tweets are focusing on the failure incorrectly. Their views are coloured by wanting to see Elon fail because they don't like his views. This was at least a muted success and not an outright failure and it is just a stepping stone.
I was trying to say, yes, Elon has pretty bad views these days, but this is still at least a semi-success, not a set back or failure.
SpaceX is successful despite of Elon Musk, not because of Elon Musk. SpaceX spends a lot of energy keeping Musks's insanity and emotional outbursts at bay. Tesla has also learned how to manage Musk, though not quite as successfully as SpaceX. Twitter is still figuring it out, but I'm sure that they too will learn how to manage Musk.
I think it's useful to compare Musk with fire. Fire is useful, if controlled. Fire can be very damaging if not controlled. You have to control Musk while giving him the semblance that he's the one in control. Kudos to those who've successfully been able to pull that off.
As I said, fire is useful. Vision is definitely one of Elon's strengths, along with enough knowledge to understand feasibility. Execution doesn't appear to be one of his strengths, but he's made good hires for people who also recognize Elon's strengths and weaknesses and can successfully manage him.
> I probably drank the old american koolaid and have not yet had my sip of the new one.
The "old american koolaid" is to let your neighbor do whatever they please as long as "it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" (Thomas Jefferson). Trans people aren't hurting anybody, and it's a travesty that one of our major political parties has made demonizing trans people into a wedge issue as part of a manufactured culture war.
The three main talking points here are (1) mtf in female sports, (2) mtf in women’s only physical spaces, and (3) children undergoing irreversible operations that they may later regret. The first two indeed involve a co flick of interest, granted not one that’s generally physically hurtful.
As the parent of two daughters I am not sure I would be super supportive of MtF in female sports at a competitive level if it actually occurred to my family. It would probably feel unfair to my daughters. But regardless, I don't support harassment of transgender people as Elon Musk now allows on Twitter. To me these are separate things.
Being permitted to 'misgender' is relevant to criticizing policies that allow males to compete in women's and girl's sports.
If you're citing one of the many examples of when this has happened, but are compelled to use 'she' rather than 'he' to refer to the male athlete, then it rather dilutes the point being made.
It depends on the point of view from which such criticism is being made.
Someone who holds a belief that trans-identifying males are women, but considers that they should be excluded from women's sports because of the long-lasting pubertal effects of testosterone, would likely have no issue with referring to one of these males as 'she'.
However, someone who doesn't believe that that such males can be women, and that this is the primary reason why they shouldn't be eligible to compete in women's sports, is more likely to use 'he' in reference to one of these males, as it reflects their underlying philosophical view on the issue.
I guess from my point of view, I do not care much if someone born a male now identifies as a women if it isn't affecting me. They have the freedom to do so. There are segments who have taken to misgendering them on purpose as a form of harassment and I think that is wrong.
I view this argument as analogous to someone is trying to justify slurring other minorities. Why slur them? Just treat them as people who are just trying to get through life and all its challenges.
Also all this focus on slurring a specific minority makes those doing the slurring seem mean, non-credible and non-compassionate to their fellow human beings. If someone starts slurring another minority, I will immediate dismiss anything they say next because they are showing they harbor hate - it isn't a rational discussion anymore, all facts are going to be distorted, things that lead to cognitive dissonance are going to be dismissed, and my motivations will be questioned. Who has time for that?
Twitter's rule against 'misgendering' didn't just apply to people who were engaging in harassment though, it applied to everyone, and led to many campaigners for women's rights being banned from the platform.
One example is Meghan Murphy, a high-profile Canadian feminist. She was discussing the case of a trans-identifying male who had sued several female beauticians - who offered their services solely to women - for refusing to do a Brazilian wax, which for this individual would have involved the handling of male genitalia. She referred to this male as 'him', and as a result was banned from Twitter for about four years (with her ban only being lifted after Musk's purchase of the company).
So on one side we have a trans-identifying male who was using the Canadian legal system to try to punish women for refusing to touch his penis and testicles. On the other side, a feminist writer who referred to this male as 'he' and 'him' while criticizing him for this. In applying their 'misgendering' rule, Twitter took the side of the former and sanctioned the latter.
By removing this rule, Twitter is allowing feminists like Murphy to speak freely about issues such as this on their platform.
I know about that case as a Canadian and it doesn’t require misgendering to discuss accurately. No one is forcing you or her to pretend she isn’t trans.
Everyone agrees that this individual is trans-identifying. The issue is that under Twitter's previous rules, they were compelling gender-critical feminists to pretend that this male is a woman, under the threat of being banned from the platform.
Not just feminists either. Most people balk at phrases like 'her penis and testicles', even if they would normally play along with the fiction of this male being a woman.
It really does highlight the absurdity and dishonesty that is inherent in the belief system of gender identity, in that people are essentially being forced to say things that they don't really believe.
> The issue is that under Twitter's previous rules, they were compelling gender-critical feminists to pretend that this male is a woman, under the threat of being banned from the platform.
No-one is denying that Yaniv is trans-identifying. What gender-critical feminists (and others) are denying are his claims of being a woman.
The question is whether social media platforms should compel their users to tell lies when discussing people such as this. Which is what anyone who holds the view that this individual is a man would be doing if they are forced to refer to him as 'she' or 'her'.
> Here is a great article that does not deadname her nor misgender her while also talking about the case accurately
Yes but the fact that some newspaper editors choose to immerse themselves, their writers and their readers in this fiction doesn't mean that everyone else should be compelled to do the same.
> What good is freedom of thought and speech if one cannot exercise it?
This is what I describe as the “worse is better” model of freedom. As if the only way we can measure freedom is by counting how many extremely awful things occur in the world and concluding that more awful things is a clear indicator that we have more freedom. Is this a uniquely American concept?
The underlying theme is that a non-optimal system that nevertheless minimizes chances of tyranny and/or violence is better than say a society ruled by philosopher kings. So it's not so much that "more awful things is a clear indicator that we have more freedom", but rather that a system that takes it upon itself to stamp out "more awful things" (per whose definition?) will ultimately diminish freedom for all, and various "awful things" are certain to follow.
It is a matter that is still subject to debate. What is your solution?
The dichotomy isn’t that we either laud the amount of bad things happening or stamp out freedom with tyrannical government. That’s precisely the ludicrous “worse is better” model I was criticizing.
And I’m fairly aware of Popper. I largely share his views, particularly those in The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Logic of Scientific Discovery. I don’t think he would point to, for instance, high murder rates as an indicator of freedom in a society or a preponderance of pseudoscientific theories as an indicator of freedom in a scientific community.
Of course not "lauding the amount of bad things". Rather we learn to live with some non-optimal outcomes as the price of preventing worst outcomes. Our system does not, and is not designed to, select the best, and sometimes very problematic individuals make a scene, but it denies the possibility of that becoming a permanent state of affairs.
He has his freedom of speech! So did the person you're replying to. That's what the old American freedom of speech meant: you can say dumb things and other people can say that what you said was dumb.
The new koolaid is "I can say dumb things and if anybody calls me on it, I'm being oppressed." That has nothing to do with freedom of speech, there's no government here.
Sounds like you've been drinking plenty of the new koolaid.
> but what is the point of bringing his grudge with Trans?
Let's not pretend like he just has a "grudge" with trans folks. It goes many orders of magnitude beyond that. Perhaps he was not, and maybe he even still is not a transphobe, but right now he's tweeting like a full-blown transphobic maniac on Twitter. [1] That's a severely negative personality trait. Discriminating against a group of people simply because of the way they were born goes against the fundamental values of the Western society, freedoms, and should be criticized harshly at any avenue. It's relevant here, not because of Musk's speech (which I firmly believe every person is entitled to), but because Musk is an influential figure who contributes so much thought, inspiration, motivation and soft/hard influence to the world that it must be noted he's actively acting like an unhinged transphobe. This can be harmful to people and too much influence from a transphobic personality can be harmful for the society, in turn. Just like, a lot of influence from good people is good for society, a lot of influence from bad people is bad for society. It's worth noting.
[1] We saw, in many instances not only Elon Musk but many other people exaggerating their personalities and beliefs on Twitter.
"Yes I know Musk is bad and I'm not bad, see I'm not bad because I mention Musk is bad, I'm not one of them. That being said it was a nice rocket launch"
The article you posted doesn't really support calling him "outright anti-trans". From the article you used as support:
Twitter’s modified policy is a step back for the platform, especially when Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube don’t even maintain the same protections for trans people that Twitter once had. Last year, GLAAD gave each of these platforms fairly low scores in regard to LGBTQ safety, privacy, and expression but noted that Twitter and TikTok were the only two platforms out of the bunch that had specific policies against deadnaming and misgendering trans users.
So now the only major platform that has this policy is TikTok...famously 'woke' (silly term these days) companies like Google don't even seem to have this policy. The policy was only in place for the past few years at Twitter, so this in fact seems like its just a reversion to the mean rather than some kind of direct attack on trans rights.
The final paragraph makes clear that he is pull back specific things that Twitter used to offer to trans people:
> Twitter hasn’t completely pulled protections for trans users, however. Its Hateful Conduct Policy still explicitly prohibits attacking others based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” but the choice to intentionally remove all mention of misgendering and deadnaming seems like a calculated jab at the trans community.
I am not an LGBT+ person, but I also do not support targeted harassment of various segments of society just because they are different.
Ignoring anti trans behavior by powerful people is default approval. I’m not saying everyone needs to include a disclaimer in every comment but you’re out of line for suggesting this is off topic and you should reflect on yourself for-why you’re so offended seeing people advocating for the rights of groups Musk is repressing.
I think that article might be a little over-the-top. As mentioned in the article, Twitter has every protection that Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube have. In addition, Twitter's "Hateful Conduct Policy still explicitly prohibits attacking others based on “sexual orientation, gender, gender identity".
I think the outrage is Twitter moving from the head of the progressive pack to inline with everyone else. Since there isn't really an alternative to Twitter for the business world, I'd rather it did it's best to be 'average', not overly conservative or liberal.
I think SpaceX fooled a lot of people (myself included) that Elon was some kind of genius of visionary. But given everything he has done and said and everything about his past that has come to light I C think it should now be clear that SpaceX is a success in spite of Elon not because of him.
Whoever is actually running the show has effectively built an insulating wall around Elon to limit his influence, especially from day-to-day operations.
A few months ago there was an unverified account of this from an alleged SpaceX intern. I can’t say it’s true but it certainly rings true.
We’ve seen from Twitter he’s not much of a businessman (the deal he got himself into was terrible) and not he’s talking about software many of us here realize just how clueless he is about Tech.
With SpaceX not many of us knew much about rocketry so you know what they say: in the valley of the blind the one eyed man is king.
I'm sorry to be pulled into commenting on a Great Culture War issue in a space thread, but this is really unfair framing.
When someone, or a group refuses to ban something, that doesn't mean they support it.
Just because the United States allows literal Nazis to speak about anything they want does not mean the United States supports Nazis, or is anti-Semitic.
The exact same principle is true of Twitter. If you allow people to post anti-trans rhetoric, that does not in any way mean you are anti-trans.
The last paragraph of the article shows how it is an outlier in terms of which groups can be targeted with harassment:
"Twitter hasn’t completely pulled protections for trans users, however. Its Hateful Conduct Policy still explicitly prohibits attacking others based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” but the choice to intentionally remove all mention of misgendering and deadnaming seems like a calculated jab at the trans community."
Yes, and that was what that line said before, too. The change removed a specific call-out for misgendering, and deadnaming. There were no specific call-outs for anything else.
Is this a targeted jab? I have no idea, but it certainly doesn't make someone outright anti-Trans, particularly when the hateful conduct policy continues to ban dehumanization based on gender identity.
Before:
> Slurs and Tropes
> We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.In some cases, such as (but not limited to) severe, repetitive usage of slurs, or racist/sexist tropes where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may require Tweet removal. In other cases, such as (but not limited to) moderate, isolated usage where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may limit Tweet visibility as further described below.
> Dehumanization
> We prohibit the dehumanization of a group of people based on their religion, caste, age, disability, serious disease, national origin, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
---
After:
> Slurs and Tropes
> We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. In some cases, such as (but not limited to) severe, repetitive usage of slurs, or racist/sexist tropes where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may require Tweet removal. In other cases, such as (but not limited to) moderate, isolated usage where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may limit Tweet visibility as further described below.
> Dehumanization
> We prohibit the dehumanization of a group of people based on their religion, caste, age, disability, serious disease, national origin, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
Referring to a male as 'he' isn't really in the same ballpark as throwing around racial slurs and so on.
When applied to a male who calls himself a woman, it's merely a philosophical disagreement over whether said male can transform himself to female simply by decree.
Failure doesn’t have to have a negative connotation, we just match it as so in our culture. The full mission plan wasn’t achieved and the rocket did in fact fail. That said, it achieved precisely what they hoped it would achieve as failure was an expected and acceptable outcome.
The usage of “failure” as a way to describe not achieving the maximally ideal outcome makes no sense to me. I’ve never read or heard it used to mean that.
It would have been a failure if the data logging failed to transmit, or if it had immediately exploded and destroyed the launch tower.
Things are, they don’t fail or succeed in a qualitative sense. You can only fail against some objective measure. If you do nothing, you still haven’t failed. But you haven’t done anything either. If you try something and you establish an objective measure to achieve and it fails, you and your efforts _have not failed_. The positive action of doing still is, and the positive action of analyzing the failed objective still is, and it opens the way to another action as an evolution of the original action.
But things just are what they are. They aren’t good or bad. Good or bad is your interpretation of the way things are. If you consider doing nothing good, then you succeed by not trying. If you consider trying good, then you succeed by simply trying.
It likely exploded because they blew it up (flight termination system). It looks like the stages failed to separate and it started to spin. In this case they don’t let an uncontrollable rocket just fly off and see where it comes down, they blow it up. The FTS is basically an explosive mounted to the rocket that can be remotely detonated exactly for situations like this.
I kinda wish they'd have let it keep going in order to get the telemetry.
The altitude and velocity when things went sideways were in MRBM territory, not ICBM territory so the only thing they would have hit would have been the Atlantic ocean.
they let it go well past the point it was clear to lay observers that it was out of control. i expect they got all the uncontrolled-descent telemetry they really had a use for.
>> It looks like the stages failed to separate and it started to spin.
Most complicated part of building any rocket by far and Starship's is a lot more complex than any previous one by far. It was always the most failure prone part but everything else looks great.
First-stage burnout speed was too low for orbit, I think. Telemetry peaked at 2,148 km/hour = 597 m/s – I don't know the nominal values but this seems non-viable to me.
SpaceX has taken 21 years to get to this point. They have not failed fast. They have seen a long series of huge successes from doing some incredible engineering. Today's test is a small part of that journey.
SpaceX is a great demonstration of an "ideal mix" of new and old. It has a lot of "classic" "measure twice; cut once" planning, but also an absolutely essential "YOLO" mindset for live testing, which can cause big failures, but also give the most valuable data.
Their manned flights have been great (except for that toilet thing...).
Even if this is true, it's going to get more and more difficult to explain away rocket explosions as succeeding the more decades we put between us and the dawn of the Space Age. If SpaceX is still blowing up rockets in 2033, it's going to become a PR problem, especially as the MSM further turns its back on Musk.
That doesn't make any sense for prototypes. It's been slightly fewer decades since we've been doing consumer software. Does anybody expect version 1 to be bug free?
As though hack journalists need actual reasons to write hit pieces about Musk. They’ll write them no matter what. The articles will generate plenty of clicks, they will have zero impact on anything that matters and they will change nobody’s mind about anything.
Public perception matters (it eventually drives whether a businessman can do business, since all business is trust-based), but Musk buying Twitter has had a lot more effect than any journalist writing about him ever could.
As others mentioned the hit pieces will come anyway. The success that SpaceX has had so far very clearly shows that aiming high and embracing failure is the best way to develop rockets.
A rocket is a structure designed to be as light as possible while containing as much energy as possible.
That combination is inherently explosive in any sort of failure.
Historically we can see that there are two modes of rocket development when it comes to failure tolerance. 1. Iterate fast and blow stuff up (e.g. mercury/redstone, spacex) or 2. Iterate slowly, at massive cost, with fewer catastrophic failures (space shuttle, Apollo, SLS).
When it comes to safety, the slow and expensive route has a dubious track record. Of course, slow and expensive is producing much more complex vehicles, until today, at least.
It would be absolutely reckless for SpaceX to not blow up rockets. How could they credibly claim to know the limits and abilities of their spacecrafts if they did not test those limits to the breaking point?
That's not being contested. What will be in conflict, I think, is engineering versus how that engineering may be perceived. Given enough time, investors and critics of government subsidies may also question whether "failure success" became an excuse.
Couldn't disagree more. The biggest innovation that SpaceX has brought to the table is the reusable nature of their platform, both reducing operation cost AND in reducing R&D costs. I believe one of the biggest contributors to the lack of space exploration and exploitation was the astronomical (pun totally intended) cost of both developing and operating the platforms to get us there. If this helps fix that, blow some stuff up!
That’s the message they choose to use externally. I would guess they had somewhat higher hopes internally, and would have been at least somewhat disappointed if it had exploded just after clearing the launch pad.
Whether they’re truly happy with this result probably will depend on their analysis of what went wrong.
If they can find the cause and it’s easy to fix, they’ll be a lot happier than when they can’t figure out what went wrong, or when they can figure it out, but preventing it requires a huge redesign.
But yes, this is the nature of rocket building. Things do get boom fairly easily.
It's a difference between "definition of success" and "the plan". They can't just say "we want to get off the pad and whatever happens afterwards, meh", they have to point it somewhere. So they plan out a whole flight to maximize useful data per additional success, but consider some subset of the plan to be an overall success.
I might go to the grocery store with a list of five things, but I only really need two things. Coming home with 3 things would be a success.
Who cares? It's a lot of arguing over semantics that doesn't end up meaning anything in the grand scheme of things. SpaceX continues making progress on the development of Starship, and the tiny little mishaps that depend mostly on chance along the way don't end up actually mattering in the grand scheme of things.
there is something about this launcher and the launch that looks exeedingly wrong to me cf a saturn v (i realise spacex is trying to launch larger masses)
If you watch the launch broadcast, the hosts set the expectation that they success meant achieving thrust-to-weight of >1 and clearing the launch facility.
Furthermore, we don't know there was a failure to separate. If I had to guess, once the vehicle was in an unstable attitude outside of the nominal flight path, they triggered the self-destruct and purposefully didn't try to separate.
> “I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won't be boring,” Musk promised at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. “I think it's got, I don't know, hopefully about a 50% chance of reaching orbit.”
That might have been the flight plan. When drawing these up you don’t typically mark down "experiences an unexpected rapid disassembly a few minutes after launch.”
They've been saying (Elon at a minimum) multiple times that they expect the first flight to end in a giant ball of flames. That there's a "if everything goes extremelly well" plan that reaches quasi-orbit and lands back nicely... doesn't make this the expected goal. It's not like they can submit a flight plan to the FAA that's "we'll launch and explode somewhere along the way". They need to draw up a nominal plan, with the full understanding (by reasonable people) that the flight really isn't expected to actually fulfill that entire plan.
It's pretty amazing that the rocket went past the launch pad, yet alone survived past max-Q to begin with!
It’s the first time this rocket has had all 33 engines attempt to light and fully throttle up.
SpaceX has no test facility capable of withstanding a full thrust booster test on the ground.
Also SpaceX has more boosters and ships complete and in various stages of assembly. A complete loss of the pad would have been much more damaging to the program.
It's a giant shaking and trembling structure built in a fail-fast iterative manner using unexpected materials (stainless steel) and processes (regular welding). Assemble all this in history's largest rocket ever, and expect everything to go perfect the first time?
I wouldn't have been surprised if the whole thing shook itself apart on the lift pad and blew up.
I don't know about you, but when I rapidly build and assemble large complex structures like a cowboy, I certainly expect a ton of failures on my first trials. When stuff goes much further than I expected, I'm in awe and disbelief.
“We consider any data received that helps inform an improved future build of starship a success. From a milestone standpoint, our main goal is to clear the pad. Every milestone beyond that is a bonus. The further we fly, the more data we can collect.”
It's a matter of expectations. No one set out with the goal of blowing up a rocket but it was very much an expected likely outcome. By clearing the launchpad, the team met their milestone. Anything beyond that is simply additional data to improve the next iteration.
I'm no fan of the SpaceX model but if it works for them and the safety of those on the ground is prioritized, it seems to work better than any other model tried here.
Well, even if your success factors are waaaay early, you have to account for the fringe event that everything keeps working out. So yeah, they filed a flight plan because theoretically the ship could get there.
This is a bit of spin by SpaceX. Blowing up the pad would be a serious failure and would be a large and costly setback. But they obviously didn't achieve the goal of the test flight here. It is a test flight, so it's not a complete failure and not entirely unexpected. But it's not a full success either, significant parts that were planned to be tested could not be tested because the rocket failed early.
Musk was saying it was a 50% chance the rocket blew up on the launchpad. Their sole hope was that it made it in the air, leaving the launchpad unscathed and quickly usable for future launches.
> “I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won't be boring,” Musk promised at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. “I think it's got, I don't know, hopefully about a 50% chance of reaching orbit.”
I stand corrected. That apparently was indeed the original context of his statement. The Internet has ways of morphing words.
I do recall he did express some level of concern about the launch pad being damaged if the rocket failed to launch though (it still looks like it was damaged to some degree from the launch.)
This test launch was never planned to actually make orbit. It was an "orbital test flight" only in the sense that it was intended to demonstrate system performance that would basically have been enough to reach orbit; the original plan was that they'd reach velocities and aerodynamic stresses similar to an actual orbital flight, test stage seperation, both stages, and part of the re-entry, then crash into the ocean, all on a sub-orbital trajectory. Something apparently went wrong at stage seperation.
That was the goal, but failures are to be expected at this stage of testing.
Clearing the tower was a primary goal since a ground level explosion would cause a lot of expensive damage.
Clearly there were multiple failures.
That was the stretch goal. They made it clear several times on the webcast and in tweets that clearing the launch pad was the primary goal and further than that to gather lots of data. The farther they got, the more data they gathered and the more successful it was. You can have varying degrees of success and still be successful.
It almost blew up on the launchpad (see the debris flying after a few seconds), then at around 30 seconds you can see some explosion at the bottom, throwing away some surface parts. Multiple failed engines. Then it went into an unsurvivable "tailspin" if there was any crew around. Cheering for failure was the topping.
This looked exactly like my problems in KSP. Rocket starts to be uncontrollable, I try to separate, previous stage is still under thrust which means I am unable to separate and then boom.
What evidence do you have it almost blew up at launchpad? That most likely was concrete chunks flying off away from the rocket and nothing with the rocket itself. You really don't seem to have a grasp what was trying to be done or how any of the previous SpaceX rocket programs functioned.
There seems to be some collective amnesia as to how SpaceX operates. The pedantry over the meaning of "failure", toward the negative, is disappointing.
What's with these orange flames about 70 and 120 seconds into the flight and with the fire at the bottom of the spacecraft that you can see in the SpaceX stream at T+2:10?
Looks like the propellant line issues from earlier flight tests - that sort of stuff is really not at all supposed to happen.
> Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad.
That's not what they said in their mission presentation though. It was supposed to launch, separate, return the booster back, then the rocket was supposed to orbit once around the Earth and then fall into the ocean.
I understand people have their feelings invested into this (for whatever reason), but objectively speaking that was not what "success was defined as".
You can gather information by just leaving the rocket on the pad. Saying, “we can’t fail no matter what,” ahead of your failure doesn’t mean anyone else has to accept you didn’t fail.
Well they need a plan in case the thing takes off. If you look at the objective:
"SpaceX intends to collect as much data as possible during flight to quantify entry dynamics
and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult
to accurately predict or replicate computationally. This data will anchor any changes in vehicle
design or CONOPs after the first flight and build better models for us to use in our internal
simulations."
@ 9:38 "We will consider any data inform and improve future builds of starship as a success. From a milestone our main goal is to clear the pad. Every milestone beyond that is a bonus."
@ 15:57 "We're focusing on the fundamental systems and operations, so that's the liftoff portion, but we are going to try and get some data on how the fins work..."
@ 35:26 "I want to remind everyone that success today is anything <interrupted by cheering> for today success is anything that helps improve the future builds of starship. If we lift off and clear the pad we're calling that a win."
The Soviet N1 moon rocket, which SpaceX shares a bit of design (30+ engines for example) failed 4 times before being scrapped.
The Soviets had the 'launch often, fail fast, learn faster' view that SpaceX employs today.
However, nobody viewed the N1 launches outside the Soviet Union as successes. I'm glad to see that 'fail fast, learn faster' is finally part of American aerospace engineering.
Very different situations. N1 was a technical blunder on many levels (and it wasn't a moon rocket - it was a hastily repurposed LEO launcher intended for in-orbit assembly, not optimal for the TLI).
Instead of adopting the proven R-7 stacking scheme which was much easier to test piece by piece, Korolyov opted to a novel design which was too wide (17m!!), and static fires required a humongous and prohibitively expensive testing facility. The lack of static fires made the development too slow and expensive, as the only way to test it was in the actual flight. Combine this with other technical mistakes (the shape led to the extra weight while the modularity wasn't required, too much drag, etc) and Mishin's poor leadership after Korolyov's death, and you have a recipe for a failed project.
Starship is much narrower (9m), today's tech is much better, so the static fires are much cheaper; and unlike N-1, it's actually designed for fast iterations from the ground up.
Why? It had pretty advanced engines, conservative fuel choices, architecture optimized for low requirements at manufacturing. And it was originally planned for Mars missions, not LEO missions.
> Korolyov opted to a novel design which was too wide (17m!!)
Why too wide? Technical decisions were made with all degrees of justifications available at the time. That it's wider than anything else till today, including Starship, doesn't make it "too wide".
> Combine this with other technical mistakes (the shape led to the extra weight while the modularity wasn't required, too much drag, etc)
Extra weight in weight-carrying construction is compensated, at least to a degree, by lesser weight of spherical tanks. Modularity was present so even N-11 was considered - two upper stages of N-1. Too much drag - comparing to what?
N-1 was quite state of the art technically when it was created. I don't see how calling it a technical blunder can be justified.
N1 got funding in 1964 and had it's first stacked test flight in 1969 (5 years). Starship was announced in 2017 (though the raptor engines in 2016) and had it's first stacked test flight today (5 years). So far development speed is the same, even with SpaceX's better technology.
Whatever technical issues N1 had, could have been resolved with enough iterations. We have no idea if Starship will work and if it does have design problems, we won't know until years from now if it fails or succeeds.
Can you share? I figure this is mostly just new system problems. When I write lots of new code my unit tests find a lot of bugs in the first pass, but you don't have that in complex dynamic mechanical systems. Simulation can only take you so far.
I had the same thought while watching! You could see the asymmetry in the lit engines as it climbed and I was wondering how long the control system could take it before losing it.
I'm not sure the N1 actually killed anyone? The second launch resulted in the rocket falling on and destroying the launch pad (one engine exploded on liftoff, the computer turned most of the other engines off), but I don't think anyone died.
Going to guess you don't actually know what the details are in the comparison betwen the N1 and Starship, because this is a incredibly uniformed comment without any arguments/evidence.
N1: 30 engines working next to each other instead of big engines. Starship: 33 engines working next to each other. There might be some details, but concept and idea are same.
The issue was stage separation, N1 never got that far.
Also, N1 had many issues, non were really shown in this flight. So I don't know what you are referring to.
Maybe you are referring to the N1 failure where to many engine shut off, N1 used pure thrust vectoring for guidance and the board computer had a overly simple guidance computer where 1 engine getting shut down was automatically leading to a engine on the other side shutting down. This lead to a cascade where all engine shut down.
N1 also suffered from pipe failures because of vibration. Again not something experienced in this flight as far as we can see.
Can you be more concrete of what you are referring to?
I remember I think it was when they first landed the booster successfully, there was a big "USA! USA! USA!" cheer from mission control. I thought that was a bit of an ugly look myself.
I get that it is a successful test based on the goals they set out, but the cheering seemed staged to me. If that was my rocket, I'd be very upset that it came so close to total success but didn't make it. Maybe everyone at SpaceX is just super emotionally mature
Why? This is just the public viewing area from where SpaceX own employees watch from. And they worked on this thing for years, seems pretty realistic that they would be exited.
If I worked on that project I would have been in tears of pride and happiness at the launch and how far it flew on the very first attempt. Assuming it is SpaceX staff being shown, I do not think the cheering is in any way staged. Lack of cheering would be strange if anything.
The thing you saw blow up was a prototype, a test vehicle and the first ever flight to boot. Do you have any idea how many prototypes get thrown in the trash when you're trying to figure out a physical product and how to manufacture it? If you loved every one of them you'd give up after a week. You have to be merciless and willing to scrap everything and start over if you want to get to production.
I like the American philosophy to see the good part of experiences even when thinks don’t go as planned, but IMHO I feel like it's drifting more and more from « there’s good in failure » to « let’s call everything a success ». May be wrong, just my European point of view through the transatlantic optic fiber.
They're required to file a flight plan with the FAA or they can't launch.
If the plan says they'll go all the way into orbit and they abort early, that's ok.
If the plan says they'll get 100m off the ground and go no further, and they instead manage to make it all the way into orbit, they'd be in a huge amount of trouble.
Given the above, what sort of flight plan would you recommend they file?
« go all the way into orbit » (and down to Hawaï) seems totally fair as a flight plan. Being ok with aborting early is SpaceX decision and I totally get it. Nevertheless, « all they hope was to clear the tower » is quite hard to believe for me but this was only an opinion.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the first part of the flight was important and considered mostly a success.
Hmm... this seems like maybe taking things in an overly literal way. It sounds like clearing the tower was their threshold for a successful test - if they didn't get that far, it would be deemed a failure.
A phrase like "all I hope for" doesn't necessarily mean "the only thing I hope for" but instead usually means "the thing I hope for most (or above all)". If someone were to say, "all I want is a good night's rest", it doesn't mean they no longer want oxygen, for example. :)
For myself, I'd feel like a test flight was a full success if it was able to test all the important bits. From that perspective not testing stage separation, second stage ignition, and reentry makes this a partial success but a partial failure as well.
EDIT: Perhaps a better way to think about it is, if it had crashed back to the stand and damaged things there that would be a setback. If it made it all the way that would be as much progress as you could get. Failing before MECO was less progress than I expected but still progress.
You're not totally wrong, there is a lot of cheerleading going on, putting a positive spin on every little bit. There are a lot of uncritical fans here. I hope that internally at SpaceX the engineers are a lot more serious. Based on the results they've achieved with other rockets, my guess is they are.
Some Tesla events have been shown to have artificially-inserted cheers to show more enthusiasm than the crowd actually had. I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing that for SpaceX, too, but I also wouldn't be surprised if SpaceX launches had a lot of enthusiastic people in whatever crowd watched them. It was pretty telling that we didn't hear the roar of the engines on the "cheering" track, which would have happened for pretty much every recording of people actually watching the launch.
Hell, listening to the commentator describe the rocket's ascent like a giddy sports commentator really reminded me that this is just another corporate event with people paid to shape narratives of what you see. I really miss NASA launches in this respect. Less hyped, but you had the solemn sense that something special was happening without anyone yammering in your ear with nonsense patter.
Launch coverage was started and supported internally by SpaceX engineers and all the commentators are engineers who work on the rockets themselves. But I guess they are all paid corporate shills, not people who have spend many years working hard on a project and are exited about it.
> I really miss NASA launches
Those still exists ...
Not everything has to be the same. Each company has its own spin on its launch coverage and its own company culture.
As somebody who's never become good at KSP, I've debated whether or not to get KSP2. Does it have better training so that you have clues how to get some of the initial things done so you can build up in career mode better?
I think you should look into it in two years. Right now it’s early access, and in this case early seems to mean “first successful merge to main that builds”
Pretty much, I'm sure most of us have at least once had a tumble at or above max-Q.
I'm intrigued as per cause. Lots of Engine failures and spewed parts. It had a real slide on liftoff. An engine violently flashed and went pop about +25s.
I do have to say, the thing requiring FTS after a violent flip well above supersonic speaks orders about structural work.
Is there a technical name for the "tumbling" phenomenon? When your first stage is almost out of fuel mass, so the CoG is not where it was when you launched and it's like you're pushing a bowling ball with a fishing pole instead of a giant steel beam, so you tip over.
(Low Quality Comment Here) I, for one, have never had a tumble in KSP. Nope, every single launch, exactly as planned, all the way to orbit, and even the Mun. I have never once strapped a bazzilion first-stage engines in a row just to see what happens. Never once stacked them as high as I can. Nope - totally responsible game player over here.
Note: Trying to fly Jeb directly into the Sun was a real lesson in Angular Momentum.
My guess is that losing too many engines meant that they were too low, in too thick atmosphere for the speed they were reaching and with the reduced control authority form a missing gimbaling engine they couldn't maintain stability with those fins in the front. But we'll learn more later.
Yup, if they hadn't terminated it, surely they'd have just waited until they entered a less dense part of the atmosphere, stabilized, and continued the flight. Just with some delta-v lost. And if that wouldn't have worked, they could have just throttled the engine up when pointy end up, and down when pointy end down, waited until exiting the atmosphere, and then time warp to stabilize.
I was so surprised it held for so long! Every time something similar happened in KSP I got a little angry at the game for obviously wrong simulation: no way the rocket would hold together under such stresses. And then I see real-life rocket of biggest proportions do just that. I owe KSP an apology I guess
KSP is so realistic unless you run into the kraken.
I made rockets that would do the same thing (flipping) when the fins where on the top due to aerodynamics... going to be interesting to see how SpaceX is going to solve that.
People always joke that a success like this will be blasted by the media as a failure, but it's the most predictable thing ever. Massive success today for SpaceX but the story is massive failure. So silly.
I'm as anti-Musk as the next, but it's also weird to see so many people gleeful that Musk must be so embarrassed at this 'massive failure'. Like, how uninformed do you have to be to think that Elon would be humiliated by such a resounding success? Oy.
Not just misinformed. How petty and I dunno, plain _evil_ do you have to be?
This is a step into making humanity reaching the stars. Is seeing a guy you hate fail really all that matters?
Thanks for saying this. Can people chill the fuck out and appreciate the world around them anymore? This was the largest rocket launch _ever_ from an American _private_ company using a novel launch configuration in the first fully integrated test _ever_ and people are complaining !?!?!?
This makes me proud to be American, proud to be an engineer, and just stoked to be human. Let's show some humility and graciousness, people!
> but it's also weird to see so many people gleeful that Musk must be so embarrassed
These people are pretty easy to ignore if you don't venture into certain parts of Twitter and Reddit. Who cares what they're social media-brained minds think. It's just another hot take.
Also notable is that unlike most heavy lift rockets in history they have a functional assembly line that can rapidly churn these things out. We should only have to wait a couple months for the next test flight.
I was thinking this as well... It spiraled seemingly forever without failing, while they hoovered telemetry off of it, until pressing the big red button. Massive fault tolerance at play. SpaceX is awesome in so many ways. Thanks Elon.
I think HN understands the difference between a charismatic leader who is good at laying out a vision and generating a tremendous amount of hype around it (like Steve Jobs) and someone who is an expert at actually realizing a vision (Steve Wozniak, Tim Cook).
They may both be necessary for success, but if you are praising the rocket's engineering, you're praising the person who works tirelessly to manifest the vision.
Shotwell is also awesome, that is certain. They all are. I personally think the first man down the ladder on mars should be a woman, and it would be great if it were her. However, Elon founded that company (and personally hired Shotwell) and has been a continual source of engineering inspiration, for several decades. His direction has pretty much forced the global automotive industry to go electric. People may not like some of the things he tweets, but at the end of the day, he is not going to be a historical footnote.
> I personally think the first man down the ladder on mars should be a woman
Shouldn't it just be the commander of the mission?
The way you speak is so condescending to women, as though they wouldn't have the ability to earn their place and it has to be handed to them. I can't speak to your intentions but it's not equality if you thought it was.
You're making the meritocracy argument and it is disingenuous. You don't have a monopoly on understanding "equality" and it is certainly not as simple in our society as you assume.
"seems fair to me" is hardly enough basis for a claim either. I did go on to state how it is impossible in our society today - do you actually disagree with that?
Theres nothing disingenuous about thinking the person that earned the honor should be the one to do it. Your claim that I think I have a monopoly is disingenuous. GP stating it should be a woman, just for being a woman, is being disingenuous.
Most women I know appreciate the "perks" of being a woman, but none of them are under any delusion about it. They would be insulted if they lost on equal footing, and were rewarded for it anyway. I've never met anyone who was happy knowing someone let them win.
If you want to make an argument that men and women are never on equal footing, I could understand that but I'm not even sure what you are proposing instead.
What I'm saying is that "earned the honor" - or rather that there is a single "best person" - is already a flawed assumption. Meritocracy is thoroughly debunked so anyone asserting it is either way out of touch or being disingenuous.
The reason is because of historical oppression and entrenched systems of oppression still in place today. In that context, meritocracy only serves to reinforce the status quo.
I'm sure NASA can come very close to a true meritocracy - but that doesn't change the fact that there are benefits to having women in visible positions of power, accomplishment, etc. There will be multiple qualified people for any job, and it is 100% acceptable to choose someone because they come from a historically underrepresented group, solely to increase visibility and enfranchisement of that group.
> but that doesn't change the fact that there are benefits to having women in visible positions of power, accomplishment, etc
So you're making the same proposal. You want to hire a woman because she's a woman. This is a massive disservice to female empowerment.
> There will be multiple qualified people for any job, and it is 100% acceptable to choose someone because they come from a historically underrepresented group, solely to increase visibility and enfranchisement of that group.
This is an absurd line of thinking. If two people truly are equally qualified, some immutable trait like race, sex, etc. should not be the determining factor. If you are ok with someone being hired for a job because they are a native american or a woman, then you should also be ok with someone choosing to only hire white men and asian men. Both of these scenarios are racist/sexist.
Nah. It could imply that there are many equally qualified people for the job, and having a woman do it is beneficial in its own right. Y'know, to show that it is possible in the first place, contrary to our entire history so far??
I think HN likes to minimize the individual effort and success of great leaders because it plays against their personal beliefs. And I say this as someone who doesn’t like Musk very much.
The idea that "great leaders" exists is in itself a personal belief, isn't it? In my opinion "great leaders" are jobs that need to be done, not specific people. If Musk's personal characteristics make him viable to be a "great leader", there's at least a million other people that could have taken his place.
Sometimes leaders get too much credit for what their team accomplishes, but I think it would be silly to deny that there are people who make unique contributions. Apple wouldn't have been Apple without Steve Jobs. SpaceX wouldn't be SpaceX without Elon Musk.
Funny then that almost no other space company comes close in terms of success. That many other rocket startups before SpaceX have totally failed even those with more finances then SpaceX. Europe makes a vastly inferior rocket for 3x the price.
Maybe there are a million such people around, but apparently its very hard to find them.
Life is not a zero sum game. Clearly Elon and Gwynne work very well together and Gwynne is a very talented operator. Both talents are essential but I do believe Elon’s talent would be harder to replace.
This post quotes top SpaceX engineers like Tom Mueller, Kevin Watson, Garrett Reisman, Josh Boehm, and others like John Carmack about Musk's involvement in engineering:
Ah HN, where you can denigrate the hell out of anyone as long as you say it politely and sufficiently passive aggressively While clearly following obediently with the new "Elon Musk bad now" doctrine. Being blunt and direct is more virtuous through sheer honesty.
I’m have no doubts that she’s doing an incredible job but by all accounts Musk is intimately involved with the engineering in addition to being the head of the company.
Based on the feed there was either some gas or debris flying around in the section between the two stages. At that altitude I don't think it could've been air.
It was great to see that they seemed unconcerned about 3 engines not lighting on launch. That's the sort of redundancy Starship is going to need to succeed in the way SpaceX are aiming for.
For roughly 10 seconds the telemetry reported 5 failed engines, then the last engine to fail re-ignited. But from the photos it looks like a total of 6 engines were off for longer period of time, 5 at the outer rim and 1 of the inner 3.
Thats 6 of 33 engines out, or 18.18%. Incredible it was still accelerating upwards
No, it was a sub-nominal flight, but a successful test. (assuming they got the data they needed in order to learn from it, which is a pretty safe assumption)
Sort of, the rocket has "engine out" capability. I don't think the number/configuration is known, but it is intended to perform as desired with more than one engine disabled.
I strongly suspect the range safety officer pulled the trigger. It did a bunch of unexpected tumbles, so I think if it were flight termination system, that would have popped it earlier. I don't think it came apart of its own account, the RUD was quite rapid.
The Flight Termination System is controlled by the Range Safety Officer. And yes, it was pretty clear from the way the two stages exploded that it was the RSO activating the FTS.
By "Flight Termination System" I meant some automatic process, if such a system exists. It might just be a big red button at this point (since the goal is data collection). or maybe it's a very generous flight envelope, but the tumble took it far enough off course that it tripped.
That would be an Autonomous Flight Termination System, which does exist (and is used on many newer rockets including Falcon 9) but I'd bet that a human pushed the button in this case.
I think SpaceX rockets don't have a traditional range safety officer anymore. That function was replaced by software. I suspect the software has certain conditions that will cause destruction.
They might or might not be permitted by the FAA to do some unconventional manning of that role when they fly out of BFE, Texas. (but to what end?) I'm sure they do things traditionally when their rockets fly from NASA or Space Force facilities.
Äh sorry but you are simply wrong. SpaceX was the first company to get certification to not have 'guy with button' anymore and have certified hardware on board that this job. This was vital part of how they decreased labor cost and increases launch rate.
As far as I know SpaceX has not launched in the traditional way since Falcon 1 and I am sure that they would never launch Starship that way.
From the video it looks like the stages failed to separate and the rocket started tumbling. I'd expect the range safety officer to trigger the self-destruct at that point which would make the explosion newly scheduled rather than unscheduled.
People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. Compare the SLS to Starship.
SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time.
Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve success, but they will have a bigger, better launch system that's fully reusable and costs orders of magnitude less per launch.
You touch upon an interesting advantage that private space engineering has that, depending on one's attitude on the topic, may or may not be fair.
NASA has to do everything in the public eye and their process reflects this. Private enterprise is allowed to hide information, which implies they are allowed to massage information.
(... this probably says unfortunate things about the nature of governance by public sentiment that it's best not to think about over-much if one is super-fond of democracies as engines of progress...)
> NASA has to do everything in the public eye and their process reflects this. Private enterprise is allowed to hide information, which implies they are allowed to massage information.
That would be a good point if we were talking about NASA vs Blue Origin. But SpaceX is arguably building more in the open than NASA.
> How would you argue that? I mean, please step me though this argument.
The person I replied to was making the case that NASA can't take risks because they develop in the open whereas private companies can develop in hiding, so they can take more risks.
But a quick glance on reddit, nasaspaceflight, and youtube tells me that SpaceX is very much developing in the open, and to a greater extent than NASA.
Which means that there is some other reason why SpaceX feels more free to take risks than NASA.
In contrast, Blue Origin is famous for not disclosing almost any information to the public. For a long time Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA, was the one providing the most public information on Blue Origin's BE-4 engines.
If you cared to, you could download the entire US federal budget, NASA's budget, NASA's contracts with SSL, Boeing, SpaceX, etc. and all the ancillary data regarding milestones and results. You could, if you wanted, download more information that you might ever want about Blue Origin's contracts w/ the federal government. And SpaceX's contracts with the federal government.
Not everything is there, but enough to get a very decent picture of what's going on. Sometimes relevant information takes YEARS to be published.
But it's not easy to find. I've had to directly email people sometimes. Sometimes stuff is classified for no good reason other than someone thought at one point that a particular program was dual-use (commercial/military). Sometimes you DO have to file FOIA agreements.
I'm completely not coming down on anyone for not spending their time doing this. It takes a fair amount of time to piece things together from spreadsheets and contract addenda.
But it is possible.
What SpaceX does is they make it easy to see what they're doing. They upload videos to YouTube and Shotwell speaks at events and conferences from time to time. But you are getting their side of the story. Every now and again Casey Dreier over at the Planetary Society will dig up some previously difficult to find nugget of information about how various programs are being funded and exactly what they're being funded for. But Dreier's job is to focus more on planetary exploration missions rather than aerospace development, so I don't think he's focusing on SpaceX, SLS and Blue Origin.
The SLS has spent 23.8 billion in nominal dollars so far. SpaceX has received about 9.8 Billion total investment, which puts an upper limit on operating losses.
$9.8 billion legally-obligated-disclosable total investment. The disclosure requirements for NASA are stricter than for private industry (and there may also be an apples-to-oranges question on auditing and accounting: if NASA grants a company $500 million to do R&D, and that company turns around and pays its staff and fabrication costs with that money, is that a billion of expenditure on the SLS project or $500 million?).
I agree there are some Apples to oranges comparisons issues. For example, you would want to add pure R&D grants to the SpaceX total.
I don't follow your NASA example though. We know the NASA/government spend amount for the SLS (23.8 billion). We don't need to speculate on if there is double counting of government spend and contractor spend.
True. On the other hand, we do know that SpaceX has taken about $10 billion in funding since its inception.
With that, they developed Falcon 1, Merlin engines, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, first full-flow staged combustion engine in the methalox Raptor engine, Starship, Starship Heavy, Dragon, Crew Dragon, Re-usability, Starlink satellite manufacturing and 4,000 satellites launched to orbit, and quite a bit more.
You can only massage information so far though. The costs do actually matter and you can't turn a profit if all of your launches are horrendously expensive (above what you're charging for them), and you just keep it a secret.
What's the value add on your comment? Of course costs matter for IBM and Amazon! They're publicly traded companies, and they need to make a profit or else!
The problem is that the public and Congresspeople don't tend to see it that way. They aren't generally of the opinion that spending a couple billion to blow something up on the pad or shortly after launch is an acceptable resource expenditure (especially not at the Congressional level).
Rocket specialists know this is part for the course, but most of the public isn't rocket specialists.
I believe you underestimate the modal American congress-person and rate-payer.
In congress, maybe about 25% of them can't be bothered to remember what state they're from. They don't really matter as they'll pretty much vote however the last person to talk to them wants them to vote. This is why congressional legislative directors try to schedule appointments immediately before their congress-person votes.
About 10% of congress-people are SUPER sharp and will understand this whole "you have to break eggs to make an omelet" concept. 50% more could be educated. The remainder will act randomly depending on what the internal polling says.
SSL and Boeing and the old school guys know a critical part of their job is to lobby congress-persons and staffers. They're not paying them off, they're just making campaign contributions to ensure they get access to pitch their side of the story.
As for the modal American voter? They don't care about space. They care about whether they're getting a raise next year, the mortgage is paid and inflation doesn't price them out of a good meal every now and again. When they get economic security, THEN they start caring about other things like who goes in what bathroom, why they can't buy TANG or light-bulbs at the grocery store anymore or whether they're getting value for money in their national space program.
My gut feeling after doing polling for a few years is the numbers are about the same: 25% of American voters can't tie their shoe-laces, 10% will understand you sometimes fail when you try to do something innovative and the remainder will need some convincing.
The good news is (effectively) no-one in the US looks at national budgets. Heck, most congressional staffers never read the whole thing, just the bits they're interested in. Many (most?) voters (and congress-persons) look to membership organizations for direction. If someone is a member of the Planetary Society, and they happen to be chatting w/ their elected representative, you can be pretty sure they'll mention how important the space program is. If someone is a member of Drunk Middle-Aged Regressive Science Haters of America, you can probably guess what they think about anything with the pong of science about it. Fortunately, this latter class of Americans usually doesn't know who their congress-person is or that they have a congressional representative.
So... to make an already long post short... I don't think you have to convince EVERYBODY, just the people that matter. The message that "it's okay to fail from time to time as long as you're making substantial forward progress" is something at least half of the people who affect US budget priorities can get their brainstems around.
[And as an aside... having worked with US congress-people in the past, I can report they're frequently much smarter than you give them credit for. And you don't get to be a Legislative Director in a congressional staff without being reasonably sharp. But they do worry about how large donors will respond to their votes. We're entering a phase of debt-ceiling debates. The GOP controls congress at the moment and we'll see a lot of wheeling and/or dealing. It's quite telling to see what each party thinks is important. Biden seems to have invested a small portion of personal reputation in the SLS, probably because of it's history over the Obama administration. Despite it's actual benefits, various GOP members may use that to rail against it (SLS) as a proxy for railing against Biden. (I'm trying to avoid being partisan here, some Dems railed against the Constellation program during the Bush years, so I'm not saying it's ONLY something the GOP does. It's just the typical railing against the other party to try and fire up your base so you don't have to explain why you didn't follow-through on your campaign promises.) ...
They're still designing it, and learning to build it (building the "machine that builds the machine"). They've already scrapped booster 4 / ship 20 without even a test flight.
Today's rocket was a byproduct of what they're actually working on, so it's hard to pin a price on it. I'd guess a few million dollars in engines, and a few hundred thousand in steel? This is all stuff they would've needed to find a way to dispose of anyway; the next booster in line (B9) already has hundreds of improvements. Among these are improvements to thrust vector control and engine shielding, both of which were involved in the issues with today's flight.
Well... the US tax-payer spent $2.9B for a starship or two. Or to be more accurate, there's a contract between NASA and SpaceX to deliver a Lunar Lander Starship variant (NextSTEP-2, Appendix H, Option A.) Last year it was upgraded to Option B which (I think) calls for a beefed-up Starship that can perform multiple lunar missions.
I'm sure they're not just dumping 2.9B in Elon's bank account (I mean... if they did he would just buy back all the Tesla stock) but there are a series of milestones that need to be met for the government to release the next chunk of funds. I don't know if NASA published the exact milestones, but maybe "not exploding on the launch-pad" was enough to release the next block of funds.
By comparison, Falcon Heavy costs about $62M per launch, but Gwynne Shotwell predicted they can shave 40% off that price tag when they start re-using heavies.
But Elon has supposedly said the TDC (total development cost) of the Starship is projected to be 2-10 billion. [I found this at the Daily Mail website, so take it with as large a grain of salt as you wish.]
If it costs $10B to build one and $10M per launch and you get 10 launches per vehicle, that's $1.1B per launch if you amortize the development costs. But if it takes $2B to build one and $2M per launch and you get 10 launches, then it's only $220M per launch. But if you build five operational starships that each have 10 launches each, things start to get downright affordable.
So if the question is how much has SpaceX spent on the Starship to date? I don't know that's public info. If the question is how much will they spend on development, the answer is $2B-$10B (though that's from the Daily Mail.) If the question is how much will each launch cost (including amortizing development costs)? It could be as cheap as $42M. Or depending on how much of the $2.9B from NASA they're able to apply to previous development costs... who knows!? They could make $1.6M per launch as long as the GSA doesn't audit them too closely.
There's a myth in US government purchasing that competition drives costs down, and that's probably true for commodities. But Starship class super-heavy-launch vehicles aren't commodities. There's a TREMENDOUS amount of cost (both opportunity cost and dollars) associated with fiscal oversight of large projects. The hope has always been that when Blue Origin built something to compete, it would bring total costs down. I am skeptical.
They literally have another booster/starship ready to go. The project cost may be 2-10B but the individual launch vehicles will cost less than 200M$ each.
The way I'm hearing it was not a failure but an unbelievable smashing success. No one expected the rocket to get to the launchpad, much less off of it. The second stage was not expected to be reached at all, it's cool that they even tried. Greatest test launch of all time. From what I've read this morning if the test flight had worked all the way it would be like man on moon levels of good.
Eh, if SpaceX had genuinely not expected the rocket to get off the launch pad, they would not have launched it.
I expect their math was something like:
95% chance of enough engines lighting to launch
90% chance of clearing launch pad
60% chance of making 60 seconds of flight
30% chance of 2nd stage separation
15% chance of re-entry
Well said. On the other hand, the SLS — having a launch escape system and not requiring sophisticated acrobatics in order to reach land safely — is totally the ship I'd rather be on.
I suspect SpaceX will have to add something resembling an escape system before the thing gets "man-rated". That system could also be used to protect the passengers in case of a failed landing. It will add weight and thus lower the carrying capacity but they seem to have enough margin to allow for such an addition. They already have the header tanks in the top of Starship, adding a number of escape engines and some explosive bolts to separate the nose cone from the rest of the ship should be doable. Add some parachutes to make the thing land at a survivable speed and you're done - beer coaster calculation style that is.
> Unusually, the ejection system was tested with live bears and chimpanzees; it was qualified for use during 1963 and a bear became the first living being to survive a supersonic ejection.
I was thinking more in terms of the B-1 crew escape capsule [1] consisting of the whole cockpit equipped with rocket engines and parachutes to push it away from the plane and allowing it to land in one piece. The same could be done with the top of Starship, the part above the fuel tanks.
If you're counting the capsule itself, Starship qualifies too.
If you're talking about the launch escape tower, that's for during launch. It's gone by the time you reach orbit, leaving you in the same scenario of Lunar Starship in the event of a failure; in space, but no way to get down.
They want to carry 100 people. An escape system for those many people is the same scale of a commercial airliner escape system, which is designed to be operated on a stationary plane, on land or water. Astronauts will be well trained to use it but I think that there must be a lot of openings to let 100 people get out quickly in mid air. Maybe they'll agree that Starship is its own escape system.
Before the "Ejection escape systems" there are a few paragraphs about "inflight crew escape system"
> The vehicle was put in a stable glide on autopilot, the hatch was blown, and the crew slid out a pole to clear the orbiter's left wing. They would then parachute to earth or the sea
But 100 people is a different matter IMHO.
Ejections seats and capsule were not pursued, the Wikipedia page explains the reasons.
We also went by "Human Interference Task Force" and "Angus MacHammer and the Ukrainian Glowplugs," renown in North Texas for our musical mediocrity. We were once introduced as "DJ Control Rat and MC 1000 Inch Buddha," which was interesting 'cause we were completely unrelated to MC 1000 Foot Jesus and played bluegrass.
The big problem with the Space Shuttle was that the orbiter was located next to the fuel tank and between the solid boosters instead of on top of it. This made it impossible to perform the normal "accelerate away from the big boom" manoeuvre which normal rocket escape systems use. On Starship the passengers will be situated above the explosives instead of next to them/between them. As to whether it is possible to add escape engines of sufficient power to pull away the nose cone, push it up into a parabolic trajectory of sufficient height to give parachutes the chance to deploy I don't know but at least it could be done in theory where the design of the Space Shuttle and its "close cousin" Buran made this impossible.
Fun, little known fact: The Shuttle program's only successful post-launch abort was performed by Challenger in STS-51-F (not to be confused with Challenger's STS-51-L, which ended... suboptimally)
SLS will never reach land, you'll be splashing down in the middle of the ocean, stuck inside a tin can getting battered by waves until NASA can scramble their limited resources to get you.
The booster presumably like you will have been thrown into the ocean. Very wasteful system.
This is pretty hyperbolic. In the shuttle era, these contingencies were thought of and planned for. The amount of preparation NASA would do before shuttle launches was incredible, including flying medical and rescue teams to the chosen launch abort sites.
"Preparations of TAL sites took four to five days and began one week before launch, with the majority of personnel from NASA, the Department of Defense and contractors arriving 48 hours before launch. Additionally, two C-130 aircraft from the space flight support office from the adjacent Patrick Space Force Base (then known as Patrick Air Force Base) would deliver eight crew members, nine pararescuers, two flight surgeons, a nurse and medical technician, and 2,500 pounds (1,100 kg) of medical equipment to Zaragoza, Istres, or both. One or more C-21S or C-12S aircraft would also be deployed to provide weather reconnaissance in the event of an abort with a TALCOM, or astronaut flight controller aboard for communications with the shuttle pilot and commander."
Do you think that is fundamentally different with, say, Boeing or SpaceX?
If you look through all the failures and close calls in aerospace they are often rooted in human psychological errors. The pressures that lead to them may change with different organizations, but they don't go away.
This almost sounds like the start of a joke.... 'so an engineer, a politician, and an accountant walk into a bar.' One's the head of SpaceX, one's the head of NASA, ones the head of Boeing. So yeah, I do think there's a fundamental difference there.
So how would you characterize that difference, both in terms of strengths and weaknesses? I have a few thoughts but would be curious to hear yours first.
While this is an interesting question I'm not going to give an especially interesting answer. I see things as you might imagine. And while it might seem unfair I'd also appeal to reality. It's now been more than half a century since a human left low earth orbit. NASA and Boeing (et al) had all this time to succeed. They failed, and there's no real excuse for their failures besides themselves, and their own motivations.
Keeping it brief SpaceX/engineer is genuinely trying to get people to Mars, largely driven by ideological reasons with extensive technical creativity/competence backing them up. Accountant/Boeing wants to make more money. Outsource our software development to guys in India bidding $9/hour? Awesome! That's another 0.037% profit, what could go wrong!? Something doesn't work? Who cares!? We're on a cost+ contract baby, what you call "failure to deliver", I call delivering value to my shareholders!
And then there's the politician. In this particular case, he's not only a life long politician but also 80 years old on top. The only 'bright side' is that, due to his political influence, he's gone to space before. On the other hand Charles Bolden was a genuine astronaut and absolutely everything one would think they would want from a NASA head, yet he was a miserable failure. It may simply be that political style leadership (even when not a politician) isn't really conducive to meaningful progress in modern times.
>They failed, and there's no real excuse for their failures besides themselves, and their own motivations.
I'd argue the incentive wasn't there until CCP. That was the fundamental difference in the last 20 years. Without CCP, I don't think SpaceX would be successful, either. But I will say they've done much more than the Boeing at executing on that incentive.
I do think you may be overly cynical in your characterization, though. It wasn't too many years ago that Boeing was listed as the most desirable company to work for by college students. The reason isn't that they thought it was because they couldn't wait to gouge the public coffers, it was because aerospace has always been considered a sexy engineering discipline. You'll almost never find a civil engineering firm on those lists because "roads and commodes" just aren't considered cool.
Back to the question, I'll weigh in with my perspective. They are all responding to incentives, albeit different ones. But we have to acknowledge the downsides of each. SpaceX is awesome, but they aren't without their own psychological pressures and biases. I've brought it up elsewhere in this thread, but they have wanted to rapidly iterate rather than fundamentally understand some of their design issues. I suspect this is partly cultural (where operational tempo matters more than scientific rigor...i.e., "we don't need to know why it works, as long as it works") and some of it is business (i.e., they have specific contractual deadlines to consider). Those are also some of the issues that lead to mishaps dating back to Apollo and Shuttle.
Considering you seem to think the legacy downsides are due to the business/shareholder side, do you see the same issues encroaching on SpaceX if they go public?
Absolutely, I do believe that SpaceX going public will largely be the death of that company. And, depending on when this happens, it could even herald the second death of space in America. The one thing that's good here is that Elon has stated that he will not be taking SpaceX public until transit between Earth and Mars is well established.
The point I'd make is that leadership really matters. Boeing, at its peak, almost certainly had orders of magnitude more talent than SpaceX did in its early years - in no small part because of what you mentioned. And they absolutely had many orders of magnitude more money and access to funding. But their leadership was just absolutely abysmal, and consequently the potential of that talent was left completely untapped.
But on the other hand, like you mentioned there are incentive problems. Even though Boeing failed to tap into their potential, their stock price has been constantly and steadily going up for decades. Even their planes literally falling out of the skies was but a brief stumble, the damage there largely repaired owing to the start of a profitable new war. So in this regard I doubt their leadership is particularly disappointed with their results. They achieved what they set out to do after all. And that's pretty disappointing.
>The point I'd make is that leadership really matters.
I wholeheartedly agree. You're probably aware, but there have been a number of good write-ups detailing an overall erosion of engineering leadership at Boeing [1].
>Elon has stated that he will not be taking SpaceX public until transit between Earth and Mars is well established.
I think maybe the difference between you and me is that I take many of Musk's promises with a boulder of salt. If I was a gambler, I'd bet that we see some wordsmithing about what the definition of a "well established Mars transit" when it comes time for an IPO.
A decade ago, the word was that SpaceX would go public "when we are reliably launching F9." Then Tesla went public and Elon decided he didn't want anything more to do with public companies. If anything, I think that statement should only be interpreted as it absolutely not happening before that condition is fulfilled, not that it will happen once it is.
... they have wanted to rapidly iterate rather than fundamentally understand some of their design issues.
You say this with seeming knowledge of the thoroughness of SpaceX's failure investigations. Care to elaborate how you can say this with such authority?
I disagree. SLS is hard-limited to a small total number of launches. Starship is going to get into the hundreds soon enough. By that point Starship will legitimately be safer and more reliable than SLS will ever be able to accomplish, so I'd pick it.
SpaceX approach when it comes to safety is to make sure everything that can go wrong goes wrong during testing and lesser value launches, so that when it is time to put people onboard, the issues will have been fixed.
NASA is about making doing right the first time though careful design.
For SpaceX approach to work, they need to test a lot, with a lot of explosions, so they need to make a lot of rockets, they also need repeatability. That's why they are using assembly lines and mass production techniques.
Which approach is the best, I don't know. The traditionally designed Delta IV never failed, but on the other hand, we lost two Space Shuttles and their crews. As for the Falcon 9, it had a couple of failed missions, but it has proven very reliable over time.
> On the other hand, the SLS — having a launch escape system and not requiring sophisticated acrobatics
> in order to reach land safely — is totally the ship I'd rather be on.
Have you ever flown on a Boeing 747, without a launch escape system?
That said, I do agree about the flip maneuver. I am very interested to see how that evolves.
Maybe someone can explain to me why SpaceX lands their boosters?
I would think weight of fuel required to land booster + legs + steering fins would be much greater than a parachute or two and a water landing. That weight savings would be a cost savings as well as more payload that could be lifted (also a cost savings).
Would the booster be destroyed landing in the ocean by parachute?
Salt water is bad … evil stuff … they already try to avoid siting on the pad as much as possible to reduce salt spray corrosion from the sea air… even the barge trip back to land is less than ideal… salt water is the enemy of any complicated metal objects… so they are doing everything possible to avoid hitting the salt water and to keep the rocket as far away from it as practicable.
The test was a massive success. So happy to see starship clear the towers. The largest rocket ever built, larger than the Saturn V. Are you kidding me?
If you are planning on several y and z anyways, absolutely. On the most recent SmarterEveryDay video on encasing a Prince Rupert's drop in glass, sculptor Cal Breed talks about the moment when a process fails. He could stop there and restart, saving some time, but instead all the pressure is off, and he "makes as many mistakes as possible" for the rest of the build.
Quote is towards the end, but the whole vid is worth a watch.
Adjacent to this discussion is the "All Up Testing" concept from the Saturn era. The conservative testing strategy was to test each component individually, then put them together and test them as a system. All up eschewed this conservative approach, testing everything that was ready. It's only marginally germane to this discussion, but a great historical note since other commenters are comparing the Starship with the Saturn V.
As you point out, "success" depends entirely on your goals for the task.
SpaceX said their goal was to get off the launch pad going into this, which indeed may have been setting a low bar for success. However, there is no other alternative definition.
If you are tasked with recording X, and anything else beyond is bonus, doing X is success.
Maybe if you were only planning on doing something once. They've already nearly completed the next rocket. The whole point of this launch was a test. There was nothing on it. The next iteration will also be a test, and likely the next few after that. They'll even fly their own satellites up on test vehicles until they've worked out more of the kinks. Then before you know it, it'll be as reliable as falcon 9 and launching 100 times a year.
Look at all the Martian rovers. That is a notoriously hard environment to operate in, so success has often been defined as "the rover functions for at least 30 days". And then some rovers ended up working for over a decade. That doesn't mean that every rover that didn't last an entire decade was a failure though! It just means that, regardless of whether you hit your main goal, if you still have something working left over at that point, of course you keep using it.
The main goal here was to clear the pad and get some atmospheric experience with the entire stack. Goal met. But of course they had contingency plans to get as much more experience with it as possible, if things continued to function nominally (as they have with some rovers, or indeed some previous first SpaceX test flights, like the Falcon Heavy).
If the rocket had exploded on the pad, that would’ve been an unsuccessful test. The launch pad and tower are way more expensive than the rockets and take much more time to replace. They call it “stage 0.”
Btw this isn’t moving the goalposts. Clearing the launch tower was always the success criterion; the rest is gravy.
yeah I think many people saw the launch as the launch of the finished Starship+booster when what was really happening was a test of maybe v0.0.2 if not pre-alpha. It's not done yet, there's a long ways to go before the expectation becomes 100% success.
Elon was setting expectations a couple days ago when he said "Let's just not explode on the launch pad" or somesuch. In that sense, mission definitely accomplished. "Massive" success? Not sure I would go that far, but success of a massive project? Absolutely. It would have been nice to see the mission hit all it's objectives, but I'm sure they got quite a bit of data and operational experience.
What would be a failure is if the next one has the same problem.
The viability of the Starlink constellation depends on getting large numbers of satellites on orbit quickly. And the newest generation of Starlink birds are too large to fit in the Falcon 9 fairing.
Until now, every kg we launch has been horrendously expensive. So all things in orbit and sent to other planets have lots of expensive design features to reduce weight or to reduce size in the fairing.
StarShip is so huge and the reuse will be so cheap that it's going to be 100x or more cheaper. We could send heavy equipment into space and on to other planets that just didn't make sense before.
Once Starship can land 100 tons on the moon, the question isn't "what can we fit" but "how do we fill all this capacity usefully?!" So the science objectives we can achieve grow enormously.
The technological developments in the 60s/70s in aerospace never cease to amaze me. The SR-71, X-15, Saturn 5 rocket all developed when computers were less powerful than the NES yet they achieved things that no one else has been able to accomplish since (although I am sure there these have been surpassed via classified Skunk Works).
> they achieved things that no one else has been able to accomplish since
These sorts of statements are infuriating. You're dropping all of the context of past achievements (budget, political will, design goals, need, etc) and then castigating modern engineers.
The SR-71, X-15, and Saturn V achieved their design goals. There's no modern need to go back and re-achieve those goals.
The SR-71 is an amazing plane. When it was originally built there was a need for a reconnaissance plane that could fly high enough and fast enough to evade Soviet high altitude air defense systems. In the intervening years reconnaissance satellites have obviated that need. Outside of a few other tasks there's not much need for a Mach 3+ manned aircraft. Even for the tasks where one is useful the SR-71 still exists. That's not to say a replacement couldn't be built today. In fact many believe one exists in the form of the rumored Aurora.
It's just ridiculous to make assertions about "no one" being able to accomplish those projects today. If NASA or the DOD put out an RFP and had a budget for a modern X-15 it could definitely be built.
Interesting thought: Starship just expended more engines on a *test* (39?) than I believe the entire SLS program has budgeted through the end of the 2020's (16 from shuttle + 18 new = 34?).
edit: Never mind, it's slightly less – see the comment below correcting me. The SLS program has 40, not 34, RS-25's.
Raptor2 also is being upgraded with things like electric gimbaling vs hydraulics. I think that was a hydraulic unit at the bottom of super heavy that exploded a few sec after lift off. So... electric gimbaling it is then. ;)
i'm a big fan of spacex and poked fun at SLS with all their delays and stuck valves etc. Well now it's the SLS fans turn to do a little ribbing. I still think starship will win out in the end but I'll tip my hat to SLS.. occasionally.
>> People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical.
That sounds logical, but isn't really a thing in aerospace/space. Complicated high-energy systems have thousands of failure points. So to have any chance of success each failure point needs to be engineered below, by way of example, a 0.0001% chance of failure. That costs lots of money. But say one decides to accept more risk for less cost. Ok. So you switch from 0.0001 to 0.001 failure rates. You risk is now 10-fold higher at each failure point, but with thousands of failure points adding up you are now essentially doomed. And you haven't saved anything. The cost of 0.001 components isn't fundamentally different than the 0.0001 components were. SpaceX can save money though different business practices, by trimming people/money/contracts/compliance and such, but if you look at their rockets they are not fundamentally any less-perfect than anyone else's. They cannot afford to be. This is why rocket failures, like aircraft failures, are taken so seriously. There is an extremely fine line between "works ever time" and "never worked twice" with very little money to be saved between the two.
Across many areas, risk-v-cost math never really happens. It is either go or no go. Take CPU production. Intel spends billions at each of hundreds of fabrication step to push down miniscule error rates because any of a million errors can destroy a chip. There is no money to be saved by allowing any one process to become less than as perfect as it can possibly be. A detected slip from 0.0001 to 0.001 at any step would result in an entire fab being shut down in order to diagnose the problem. The marginal savings of a less-than-perfect process isn't worth the exponential increase in the risk of total system failure.
I'm not proposing something, I'm describing it. This is what SpaceX is doing, and it's quite successful.
And you can look all the way back to their little hopper version of the Falcon 9 and see that this strategy has been the key to them undercutting the launch market significantly.
My prediction: SpaceX will have a 5th 100% successful launch of Starship before the SLS has a 5th successful launch. They'll just have ten not-100%-success launches before then.
>My prediction: SpaceX will have a 5th 100% successful launch of Starship before the SLS has a 5th successful launch. They'll just have ten not-100%-success launches before then.
I'm not the best way to frame this is "first one to a single successful launch". Reliability matters when you're dealing with high-risk scenarios, so a better measure is "probability of a given launch being successful".
But the apples to oranges here is >1 launches (SpaceX, some successful and some unsuccessful) vs 1 successful launch (traditional modern aerospace).
From an outcome perspective, it's hard to ever see the lower launch rate dominating from any perspective.
You don't have economies of manufacturing scale, because your assembly rate is so low it doesn't make sense not to treat each as exquisite.
You don't have rapid iteration on manufacturing improvements, because the tyranny of safety checks on manufacturing time balloons {time from fix to flight}, after a proposed fix is identified.
And most importantly, you leave yourselves extremely vulnerable to unknown-unknowns, that you can't imagine in the design phase.
For example, if NASA had been launching the shuttle more rapidly, with the bulk of those being uncrewed launches, they probably would have picked an uncrewed launch to test expanding the temperature bounds at Cape Canaveral, and Challenger would have exploded without a crew.
As was, NASA's shuttle launches were so rare that there wasn't acceptable launch rate and weren't low-impact launch opportunities to do so. So they tested it on a crewed mission with disastrous results.
Point being: they backed themselves into a low-volume/high-risk corner of their own strategic design
SpaceX's most brilliant achievement was using Starlink to artificially boost launch demand and give them a minimally-profitable/break-even place to sink higher-risk launches.
I agree with many of your points, but it comes across as slightly biased because you don't acknowledge a single downside to any of them.
>You don't have rapid iteration on manufacturing improvements, because the tyranny of safety checks on manufacturing time balloons
Rapid iterations has obvious benefits. But there are also downsides because it makes it harder to arrive at a stable, reliable design, it introduces vendor issues, etc. Tesla is also known for iterating faster compared to their major competitors but it has resulted in logistics and reliability issues.
IMO SpaceX's most brilliant achievement was leveraging govt contracts to work out the kinks of their designs, which could then be leveraged at a lower risk for Starlink. In effect, they let the public take the burden of the risk (because the govt is really the only entity capable of shouldering that size of a risk for an unproven quantity) and then transitioned to a private means of revenue in Starlink. (I'm not saying that as a slight btw, I think it's mutually beneficial).
Frankly comparing Tesla and SpaceX is getting to be a tiresome argument. They're owned by one "eccentric" billionaire, but he's not an engineer, they don't share staff, facilities or manufacturing outside of "hey this alloy is pretty good".
SpaceX's strategy for the Falcon 9 worked and it's one of the most reliable rockets in the world, flying the most often.
>Frankly comparing Tesla and SpaceX is getting to be a tiresome argument.
You're focused on the wrong takeaway. You're making this about a person, I'm talking about a process. I used Tesla because it's easy to see how one culture translates to the other. Insert any company that uses rapid iteration in place of Tesla if you prefer.
The point is that there are certain circumstances where rapid iteration is useful and others less so. When reliability matters, rapid iteration may be working against you. (It's a continuum, of course, so the real question is where is that tipping point)
>SpaceX's strategy for the Falcon 9 worked
The point I'm driving at is there is a distinction to be made when finding out why certain iterations didn't work vs. just changing the design without fully understanding the failure mechanisms of the first. One leads to a greater understanding than the other. It's a difference in an engineers mindset and a scientists mindset.
No. I am not saying it’s the “industry” as much as the context of risk. That's why it doesn't matter if the analogy is Tesla or some other safety-critical manufacturer. To be clearer: how many F9 launches have carried humans?
Now go look at the history of Shuttle for the equivalent number of launches at that risk level. Would you claim they are equivalent in terms of human-rated safety?
If not, it’s only because you have the benefit of knowing the long-tail probabilities with the Shuttle.
>It's the same industry. Building the same type of product.
By extension of your logic, Starship should then already have the same launch reliability as F9. So either this is an example of a low-probability event, or your logic is flawed.
There were 135 space shuttle launches, of which 2 failed. There have been 162 launches of the F9 block 5 with 0 failures. Why do you think we have more knowledge of the long-tail probability of the Shuttle than F9?
True, few of those F9 missions were crewed, but that's the point. There's no difference between a crewed and a noncrewed F9 launch vehicle, so there's no reason to think the presence of humans would change the risk. So, you get to accumulate most of that reliability data without putting people at risk doing so.
>Why do you think we have more knowledge of the long-tail probability of the Shuttle than F9?
Because the nature of the two programs was fundamentally different. The Shuttle was a product contract, while CCP is a service contract. On the former, the govt has much more control, and will detail more rigorous acceptance criteria. This generally gives a much higher pedigree on quality control. On the latter, they take a much more hands off approach and have limited insight.
As an analogy, imagine you are making a big bet on acquiring a software company. One company gives you their source code, shows you all their most recent static analysis, unit test results, allows you to interview their programmers etc. The other company allows you none of that, but gives you a chance to play around on their website to see for yourself. Both systems seem to work when you try the end product, but which do you have higher confidence in?
At the end of the day, "reliability" is just a measure of how much confidence we have that a product will do what we ask of it, when we ask.
Are you asserting that we gain better insight into the reliability of a system by thinking about it deeply rather than by observing it perform its function? Because I don't believe that for a minute.
I'm not saying you can get by without thinking, but it's difficult for humans to estimate the reliability of a complicated system. Reality, though, has no problem doing it.
Plus, I think your analogy is flawed. NASA surely has a more hands-off approach on the CCP than on the Shuttle, but to say it's hands-off is misleading. They do have a lot of access.
No, I'm not saying by "thinking about it" (although that has its place). Everything I listed is a form of testing. But there's a distinction between iterative testing at a lower level, and end-to-end testing. Again, both have their place.
Take the example of the F9 strut failure. They could have tested the material outside of the final test configuration and saved themselves a lot of trouble. They chose to forego that testing, and instead 'tested ' it as part of part of their launch configuration. (I put it in quotes because it's not clear to me that this was a conscious testing decision).
There’s also a difference between “we’re not completely sure of the fundamental principles, but our testing indicates it works” and “our testing indicates it works and we have a solid understanding why”. The latter allows you to know the limits of your application much more readily. The risk in the former is that you don’t know what you don’t know, so you can never be wholly sure if you’re good or lucky. And luck can be fickle. And this is also where rapid iteration can lead to issues: the more you change, the less sure you can be about whether your results are attributable to luck.
>Plus, I think your analogy is flawed. NASA surely has a more hands-off approach on the CCP than on the Shuttle, but to say it's hands-off is misleading. They do have a lot of access.
They have many engineers who want more access and are effectively told to back off because it's not their place in this type of contract. So I'm not saying they have no access, I'm saying they have very limited access by comparison. It would have been better if I made the analogy that they get the results to a small select number of tests, but not all.
Considering his vast wealth of knowledge and expertise in the field he might as well be called an engineer. In fact probably more so than many real engineers.
> Point being: they backed themselves into a low-volume/high-risk corner of their own strategic design
Because they knew they had to "get it right" the first time because a bunch of buffoons(congress) would consider any crash or explosion as a failure and pull funds immediately.
>Because they knew they had to "get it right" the first time because a bunch of buffoons(congress) would consider any crash or explosion as a failure and pull funds immediately.
As long as the organization has and maintain a culture that is aggressively seeking out problems large and small, and proactively fixing aprox. all of them, you will end up with a program with a high rate of operational success.
It's the X-origin vs Slope issue - steeper slope always wins.
The problem is maintaining that aggressive problem-seeking culture after long periods of success
This is part of the culture distinction. On one hand SpaceX is attacking problems, but IMO they often don't go towards attacking the root causal understanding. That means there's a possibility of unknown latent risk.
As an example, they had issues with failures related to their COPVs rupturing. On the one hand, they addressed the problem by redesigning their system. On the other, they never really investigated fully why the COPVs were failing in the first place. Instead, NASA decided to fund that investigation on their own. One possible consequence is that their redesign didn't fully address the risk because they never fully investigated the root cause.
That only matters after you’ve gone operational though. The difference here isn’t risk appetite for operational launches, it’s risk appetite for test launches. SpaceX expects to do many, many more test launches than SLS, in fact counting Starship upper stage launches they’re already well ahead.
I'm not asking as a 'gotcha' question, I'm acknowledging that the sample size matters. A lot of these statistics are bandied about without really elaborating on the full context of the way reliability is actually measured in industry.
Without checking for the most up-to-date numbers, I believe the F9 is slightly better than Soyuz on raw numbers (successful flights / total attempted). But Soyuz probably has around 6-7x more flights, meaning we have much more confidence that the Soyuz numbers accurately reflect reality.
This is true -- there is a lot of small number statistics in estimating the reliability of launch vehicles. And there are a lot of small risks you never see until you accumulate a lot of lunches. But that question is completely incidental to the design methodology.
A new vehicle will always be unproven. But one that's flown 5 times in testing (4 of them unsuccessfully) before its first flight will have had more flight time on most of its systems than something like the SLS where you take 10 years to think about what could go wrong and then do one test launch and call it good.
Soyuz has only had 140 flights, and had some non lethal mission failures in recent decades. It’s a manned mission vehicle only though. Overall I don’t think you can really say one is more reliable than the other, they’re both very reliable. I’m just saying the suggestion that SpaceX approach is inherently less safe is very much contrary to the evidence.
Having said that I do think propulsive landing for crewed vehicles is pretty scary. F9 firsts stage landings have been pretty reliable for a while, and they now have several boosters with 10 or more flights, so we’ll see. It’s not like capsule landings are 100% safe either.
There has been over 140 crewed launches. For context, you seem to be counting both test/demo, crewed, and uncrewed F9 launches. Again, I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but there's probably ~10 crewed F9 launches, so it's an order magnitude difference using the same metric. It's gets better though, when comparing total launches.
My point would be that while SpaceX does save lots of money, it doesn't do so by producing cheap or less reliable rockets. It would never accept a failure rate any different than anyone else because, in aerospace, that isn't really a thing. SpaceX can certainly blast forwards with different business practices and different tolerance for developmental risks, but the final product will not be fundamentally different than anyone else: near-perfect machines resulting in near-perfect performance. There will never be a "cheap" version of a commercial rocket with an accepted less-than-perfect failure rate. Spaceflight is an all-or-nothing game.
> My point would be that while SpaceX does save lots of money, it doesn't do so by producing cheap or less reliable rockets.
It does though. During the development process. SpaceX will do five launches with lower reliability vehicles before the big launch providers will even do a single launch, and those five will have be cheaper in total. Of course, they aren't putting essential cargo (or god forbid people) on these higher risk test flights. By the time they're doing that they have developed certainty in the design.
And statistically many more people would have died without AP. But you're correct in that Tesla is using the same playbook on FSD as SpaceX, launch HW (and SW) early and iterate often, and I'd bet they'll save way more lives trying to get to autonomy like SpaceX rather than like NASA (the Waymo approach).
> But you're correct in that Tesla is using the same playbook on FSD as SpaceX
Except Tesla, unlike SpaceX, is willing to put passengers in its test vehicles. The SpaceX approach would be to let a bunch of FSD Teslas crash into things and each other before giving them payloads.
I “unwillingly” have to share the road with people who murder 40,000 people a year with their vehicles. Thankfully we are developing the technology to get these reckless maniacs out of the driver’s seat.
Putting someone in an experimental rocket is quite different from being essentially a safety driver required to pay attention and take over at any time. If you have an accident on FSD is is probably (though not always) your fault for not paying attention.
> And statistically many more people would have died without AP.
Citation needed. Not Tesla's "stats" that if the people compiling them completed anything more than high school statistics are intensely misleading.
Comparing a subset of miles driven on the simplest and easiest roads (because the systems can't be used and are turned off) and comparing to accident stats across ALL roads is disingenuous to the extreme, and Tesla continues to tout it.
Short of pulling over, humans don't have the opportunity to say "let's disengage, because it's a bit challenging", and then not have to worry about "counting" any accidents from there forward.
Agreed. It’s like if I unit tested 0.01 percent of my code but ran the unit test 10 million times, with no failures, and claimed it was therefore “statistically” better than code that had been 100% manually tested.
A number of Tesla related non-deaths can be attributed to Autopilot safety features working as promised. Tesla will argue that the number is higher, based on number of crashes per mile statistics. I'm not sure if that's true, but assuming for everyone who died due to an Autopilot failure, someone else survived a human error crash that didn't happen, would that be a good thing? What about if it was, for example, 10 people saved for every 1 killed?
> There will never be a "cheap" version of a commercial rocket with an accepted less-than-perfect failure rate. Spaceflight is an all-or-nothing game.
Why? If you're launching people I see why you want near-perfect, but if you're launching something with a low replacement cost (ex: getting fuel to orbit to support other projects) it seems to me that as volumes get large enough eventually "use lower quality and accept a slightly higher probability of failure" starts to be cost effective.
Because there is no way of building a cheaper rocket with a less reliability. Take aircraft. Does anyone deliberately build cargo aircraft with less reliability than passenger aircraft? Does anyone build a smaller airliner with less reliability than the big airliners because fewer lives are at risk in the smaller aircraft? No. All aircraft are designed and built to amazingly high standards because, in such as complex high-energy environment, there is no money to be saved by building less-than-perfect machines.
I'm with you on spaceflight but people definitely have built small cargo carrying UAVs to a lower standard than passenger aircraft. Such a thing is conceivable anyway.
Ya but smaller UAVs aren't operating in the same energy environment. They are small enough that them randomly dropping on people's houses doesn't matter much. Aerospace is about things large/fast/high enough that all failures put lives at risk.
Okay, so you're not saying it has to be expensive, but almost the opposite? Perfect and slapdash have similar production cost, so properly designed rockets will all be just about perfect?
Most cargo planes are expected to run out of civilian airports where a failure could result in debris launching themselves into populated vehicles or buildings. In contrast a crop duster launching off a dirt runway and expected to go no more faster than highway speeds actually can be built fairly loose, and often are. For example, this duster here [1] won a award in the 70s for innovations like a "pressurized cockpit" and "air conditioning".
Listen, we don’t need to speculate. Read the History of Falcon9 development.
Your comments in this thread all go against the development approach of that rocket— Falcon9 is a stable platform now as it is used in production. In the development phase there were tons of explosions. This all happened in the past.
No. All aircraft are designed and built to amazingly high standards because, in such as complex high-energy environment, there is no money to be saved by building less-than-perfect machines.
But this is totally false. There are entirely different standards applied if you want to design an aircraft for commercial airline passenger transport vs for general aviation. There are entirely different requirements for instrumentation reliability if you're building a day-VFR aircraft vs one that is allowed to fly in instrument conditions. And there are entirely different requirements for aircraft that you sell to the public vs ones that you build yourself.
The aviation side is full of examples of exactly the sliding scale you're saying doesn't exist.
> there is no way of building a cheaper rocket with a less reliability
Of course there is. The famous example is radiation hardening. SpaceX opted for redundancy instead. Not only cheaper, but more modern, too.
> in such as complex high-energy environment, there is no money to be saved by building less-than-perfect machines
SpaceX has launched zero humans. (EDIT: Totally wrong!) It aims to, so target reliability is high. (I would argue their track record in production is a product of their willingness to push the envelope in tests.) But there is a large market for cheap, if unreliable, launches. Because there is an emerging market of cheap satellite makers.
SpaceX does not have a difference in intended reliability, or a difference in design reliability. (At least for the rocket as a whole. One could argue that 33 engines allows lower engine reliability through redundancy)
What they DO have is a significant difference in prototype reliability for live launch. This is clear when you look at their launch history.
Or one could say that SpaceX has basically the same tolerance for failure as the traditional rocket companies had back in the 50s and 60s when they too were first learning to build rockets. That pre-launch "tolerance" is basically zero, with every post-launch failure being investigated as a mistake to be corrected rather than an acceptable cost of doing business.
I don't think that is accurate. There is a difference between 9%, 99%, and 99.999% confidence of success going into a launch.
You can almost always delay builds and launces to run more simulations, tests, and studies and increase confidence.
A simple example is SpaceX could have chosen to wait until they had a booster test with 100% engine ignition before moving on a full launch. Instead they choose move forward anyways without more stationary booster testing.
Sounds exactly the same. There are no cheap aircraft. Everything that flies is subject to innumerable laws and regulations to ensure that it is built to exceedingly high standards. There is no such thing as a discount aircraft with lesser reliability. Some are cheaper than others but none are deliberately less-reliable, not in any fundamental way. Even ultralights have to abide many regulations.
> My point would be that while SpaceX does save lots of money, it doesn't do so by producing cheap or less reliable rockets
Indeed, if we assume that the each launch is an IID binomial coin flip (which isn’t really the right way to evaluate right-censored data), and observe (by reading Wikipedia) that SpaceX has had at least 450 successful Falcon 9 launches since the last in-flight failure, then they have at least five nines of reliability:
0.999995^450 ~= 449/450.
Which appears to be an industry-leading stat.
For context (excluding the Columbia re-entry failure), the space shuttle only had 4 nines:
I'm going to challenge those numbers: Using a posterior probability density function for a binomial distribution, the lower bound in Falcon 9 reliability is .9934 with 95% confidence (assuming 450/450 successful trials). The reliability of F9 could be much lower than five 9s and still reasonably give you 450/450 successful trials. There's only a 0.44% chance that F9 reliability is at least five 9's given the data.
Completely agree. I've worked in "old space" and the fundamental problem is that they can't afford to experiment. SpaceX has the option to physically test an idea that's holding them up before investing in fully bringing it up to production quality, only to have to redo all that work next iteration. That's why they can make new things and do it cheaper and faster.
Except SpaceX’s failure rates are similar with every other successful launch system. Rather than looking at failure as a constant rate you need to consider these numbers change with every flight. Initially major design flaws are identified and workers become more skilled at a process, eventually new errors creep in etc etc.
They have greatly benefited from being able to use modern tools and seen where other systems failed. Many rocket companies have failed when trying to go fast and break things because it isn’t an easy shortcut. Instead SpaceX has used the normal approach used by other successful organizations and simply executed it well.
This isn't a production flight so why are you treating it at one? What if I told you that you can't compile your code until you deploy it for the first time and you don't get to change it much after that? I'll leave you to contemplate that thought experiment yourself.
I am not treating this as anything but a test flight. Several government test flights have similarly achieved core objectives while failing to achieve every objective.
I guess I'm not sure what point you're making. If you consider a test flight failure to be part of the overall failure rate, then you're treating it the same as a "real" flight. The government is constrained to less experimentation on every level from a daily basis up through test flights. Overall they do less useful engineering and more unnecessary work.
> Except SpaceX’s failure rates are similar with every other successful launch system
Really? I make is 189 successful F9 launches since the last issue in 2018 (there's a couple of landing failures, but given that everyone else apart from the space shuttle has a 100% loss...)
If you look at the "finished product" of block 5 that makes 162 launches and zero failures.
That's reliability far beyond any other launch system, including the space shuttle and Ariane 5 which are the only ones to come close in numbers of launches. Ariane 5 is certainly a reliable system as far as spaceflight goes, but it flies 3 times a year, Falcon 9 flies 3 times a month
Sure, ignoring past failures can always make someone on a winning streak look invincible. But calculating the underlying odds to hit even a 200 long winning streak with the observed failure rates on other systems wouldn’t be particularly unlikely.
These systems all are quite good, and they have tended to get better over time.
Hardly, landing on launch pad had a lower success rate and requires significant fuel so many otherwise perfectly reusable boosters were sacrificed for a higher launch payload.
They got great publicity from it, but landing vertically is a major compromise.
> Except SpaceX’s failure rates are similar with every other successful launch system.
Falcon 9 has the record for most consecutive successful orbital launches. Their last failure was AMOS-6 in September of 2016. Since then they've had 189 successful launches in a row.[1] In that same time Soyuz has had 113 launches with 3 failures. Soyuz's longest success streak was 100 launches from 1983 to 1986.[2] The US's Delta II had 100 consecutive successes from 1997 to 2018, though it has since been retired. A total of 155 Delta IIs were launched with 2 failures.
Falcon 9's current successful landing streak of 110 missions exceeds the competition's best launch streak. By any metric one can measure, SpaceX has the most reliable rocket.
You can always slice and dice data to make one side look better.
The actual number of successes vs partial successes vs launch failures vs fatalities are the best data we have. Throwing away any of that data because it makes you look worse isn’t a good idea.
Similarly we needs to understand that there’s a huge difference between risk and what actually happens. People get lucky in Vegas every day, what matters to most of us is the accuracy of the estimate of underlying odds not just the exact outcomes out to seven decimal places.
> actual number of successes vs partial successes vs launch failures vs fatalities are the best data we have
Current vehicles are vastly different from the originals. What we’re trying to do is predict the probability of the next launch failing. Equally weighting far historicals and recents is bogus statistics.
> What we’re trying to do is predict the probability of the next launch failing.
I thought we were comparing methods. Unless the next payload is yours then the odds of the next launch failing is meaningless to most of us, but we can learn something from the methods used.
But sure, if you have a bet in Vegas or something then feel free try and calculate things as closely as possible. Just understand that several of Soyuz failures didn’t kill the crew so there’s other metrics people might care about.
What does this mean? The question most of us care about is which method resulted in a more reliable rocket. And SpaceX’s track record shines uniquely in that respect. The frequency, moreover, makes the results robust. Legacy rockets like Ariane will never reach that confidence because the likelihood of fluke successes won’t have been minimised when the rocket is retired.
As to why their methodology is important this isn’t the Falcon 9 this is a new launch system which is likely going to have multiple failures before it’s own streak can begin.
So sure, we can reasonably assume that Starship will get to a state of reliability similar to current Falcon rocket, eventually. We can’t assume the first few commercial Starship launches are going to even approach that level of reliability. And in fact the best point of comparison may be the early days of Falcon 9.
Speaking of methodology, it's incorrect to relate a development test result to reliability or risk. Source is my personal experience doing reliability calculations for a NASA rocket component and working with the statisticians incorporate my numbers into their risk model.
You have it mixed up. I've worked with the stats at NASA. Mission success and failure counts. Test quantity and quality count, test freedom counts, how they learn from test counts, but the test result does not count. This isn't a mission.
This was a partially successful test nothing more and nothing less. I get people really really think SpaceX had done an excellent job and I don’t disagree but people who are comparing the end result of a long process Aka the current state of falcon 9 with a new system like Starship are going to be disappointed.
Starship is extremely likely to fail repeatedly before achieving anything close to the same streak as the Falcon 9 has. That’s not an issue with SpaceX that’s an inherent aspect of doing something really difficult.
I don't think you realize this, but when you said that we can't exclude the test failure from the risk/reliability assessment, that's exactly what you're saying. I didn't realize until just now that you're actually defending the test failure as being acceptable.
Ironically, "old old space" = Soviet space was so damn good at innovating it probably would have made SpaceX look old-fashioned. Really I don't think there's a fundamental reason why we can't have two SpaceX's (Spaces X?) so why is there no other?
Haha I had a feeling someone would bring this up. To me, old space isn't farther back in time in the golden age of space, but rather what the space industry eventually calcified into. New space is like a Renaissance.
There are other new space companies, but they're just not as good.
To me, this comment implies that SpaceX is better/smarter than NASA, Northrop, Boeing, et. al. That may be true, but it's worth remembering that the goals are very different. Because of congressional oversight, SLS is largely a jobs/pork program. Spaceflight is incidental.
> To me, this comment implies that SpaceX is better/smarter than NASA, Northrop, Boeing, et. al.
I don’t think SpaceX has smarter engineers. I don’t think they even have smarter managers, since many of their executives used to work for NASA and/or traditional aerospace firms (e.g. President+COO Gwynne Shotwell started out in aerospace at a private non-profit research centre doing contract engineering work for the NASA Space Shuttle and the US military space program)
One big difference is Elon Musk at the founding of SpaceX told his executives to take big risks (as in “if this fails we go bankrupt”). I think Tory Bruno at ULA is a great CEO, but no way is Boeing or Lockheed-Martin ever saying to him “we want you to take such big risks that we might go bankrupt if they fail”. He, and all the people under him, are only allowed to take small-to-medium sized risks. But that puts a definite limit on what they can achieve compared to SpaceX whose executives and engineers have the freedom to make much riskier decisions
SpaceX is doing the classic statistic thing[0], making spacecraft stronger where they explode until they don't. It's more like a hyperparameter search and less like QA for individual parts.
SpaceX is just doing what the Soviets did. The Soviets preferred to launch and learn just like SpaceX does today. Soviets also ran on a much smaller budget than NASA and preferred simplicity over complexity and constant tweaking.
The Soviets proved that methodology works and SpaceX continues it to this day. I have a feeling most that follow SpaceX think they are trying a new revolutionary approach here.
I'm no rocket expert, but the Wikipedia article you linked seems to have an idea about that:
>Adverse characteristics of the large cluster of thirty engines and its complex fuel and oxidizer feeder systems were not revealed earlier in development because static test firings had not been conducted.[9]
The N1 didn't really fit the testing driven development approach, they couldn't static fire the flight engines, they ended up relying on test firing extra engines from the same batch and assuming all in a batch were the same.
Time and money. Powers at be decided to stop funding the project. If SpaceX goes bankrupt next year, they could fail too and it won't have anything to do with the technology.
Strategically, they were caught with their pants down when the US demonstrated they were serious about going to the Moon. The soviet space program was great at sending cosmonauts to LEO, but they had no ability, and no desire to spend the time and effort to develop the ability, to go to the Moon.
They planned and expensed the N1 as if it was another LEO Soyuz variant.
The N1 was always doomed to fail because the USSR spies had been found and were given misleading information and plans for the US space program. The US intelligence community snuck bugs into the N1 design by sneaking them into the designs their spies thought they were stealing.
That doesn't really apply here. The dynamics of stage separation on Starship are orders of magnitude more complex than anything used on any previous rocket. If you want to look at what failure looks like for a super large rocket compare it to the failed Soviet N1. This flight demonstrated better performance in a single test flight than every N1 test flight over years. The N1 suffered catastrophic failure after catastrophic failure. Starship was pushed way past its design tolerance and showed its design is technically sound. Failure is unavoidable, the Saturn V almost failed its first test flight way earlier than Starship did here.
I feel like the N1 is unfairly demonized. They didn't have the benefit of modern closed loop computer flight controls that we have now. Detailed fluid dynamics simulations. Modern manufacturing techniques and production accuracy.
You're talking about failure rates per rocket, but we're talking about the overall development program. Falcon 9 certainly has very low failure rates on its individual components now (below your suggested 0.0001 number). But the way they got there was via a higher risk iterative development process, same as what we're seeing with Starship. The Falcon is the most reliable rocket on the planet at this point, so clearly it's working!
Your intel example doesn't fully hold water. Chip design has taken a binning approach for decades at this point. The silicon is designed for failure in such a way that yield is maximized assuming there will be a variance in quality. Launch and iterate happens for silicon just like anything else. During the initial product launch, there is a lot of waste, but as processes are improved, microcode updated, rework procedures defined, and value engineering efforts completed, yields go up and costs go down.
It depends on what you count as a chip. Modern "chips" are actually a great many things all one one slab of silicon. Failure then knock out single components, resulting in the final chip going into one bin or another. And each of those components can be as complex as an entire "chip" from a few years ago. That is really creating reliability through numbers. Within every component any slight error will still brick that component. The binning process is really a edge case where the fab is playing at the margins. Any slight increase in error rate would quickly see every chip going into a "bad" bin, with the entire processing becoming uneconomical. Intel, and everyone else building chips, strives for perfection with a zero tolerance mantra.
But binning is largely binning against performance curves: "we doped this side of the wafer just a little too much and it's a little slow, but this one from the other side is just right" - while checking for faults (full chip scan and other manufacturing tests) result in dies being thrown out.
Evaluating the reliability of every component is extremely expensive. If you had perfect knowledge of the reliability of every component, then sure. It would be cheaper to build a perfect rocket first, then launch it. The cost saving comes because it’s cheaper to launch the rocket and see where it fails than it is to exhaustively evaluate the reliability of every component.
But you still need to do it for something like a rocket that is supposed to carry people in the future. In to long term, it's better to evaluate reliability of every component at the beginning, than do it after if fails.
You actually don’t. With a high launch cadence you can make statistical inferences about the reliability of the system as a whole. This isn’t the 80s where you launch one disposable rocket every 6 months. Starship is fully reusable and will likely fly multiple times a week carrying non human payloads.
Have you heard of instances where airplanes failed due to something as basic as a nut or a screw not meeting the required specifications? It's difficult to trust the reliability of a rocket, which is largely based on statistics, when you're putting hundreds of people on it. How can we be certain that NASA/FAA and other organizations will permit such a risk?
You can’t verify the reliability of an aircraft by flying it 1000 times because you’d be putting the life of the pilots at risk. Autonomous rockets have no such constraint. You could launch starship an unlimited number of times without putting a single person at risk.
It's not even about putting the life of the pilots at risk - it's about cost.
It's starting to look like the lack of flame diverter was a huge mistake that will cost a lot of money and time, how do you think this will affect the whole project? What if after they fix the launchpad, it gets destroyed again, simply because some other preventable failure? How many more of these "tests" can they have without going bankrupt?
Pouring new concrete is cheap, they’ve already done it multiple times from damage due to test fires. Each time they reformulate the concrete and it needs less repair.
After they get to orbit they can start putting payloads on board, and the tests will pay for themselves. I’d say the risk of bankruptcy is very low.
Edit:
Just saw photos of the crater under stage zero. Looks like they do need a flame diverter lol.
Once they realized they needed a flame diverter, I think they traded off the cost and delay of putting one in vs the cost of just filling the hole each time.
It's totally feasible for them to keep testing and keep refilling that hole while in parallel they build a perfect launch pad with a flame diverter somewhere else. That way they don't have a gap in testing cadence.
The crash of Partnair Flight 394 in 1989 resulted from the installation of counterfeit aircraft parts. Counterfeit bolts, attaching the vertical stabilizer of a Convair CV-580 to the fuselage, wore down excessively, allowing the tail to vibrate to the extent that it eventually broke off.
This happens to aircraft, and the only way to ensure it doesn't happen to rockets is to have extreme control of your supply chain.
Maybe you're trying to make the point that for very complicated systems with many failure points, the reliability of a single component is less impactful than redundancy and there is some truth to that but I must point out that risk vs cost calculations are definitely happening in both industries you mention.
Triple redundancy is not a thing in general aviation while, for some systems, it is in commercial. That's a risk vs cost calculation.
Semiconductor manufacturers do risk vs cost calculations through the entire development and manufacturing process. Source: I've worked in semiconductor, doing those calculations.
>So to have any chance of success each failure point needs to be engineered below, by way of example, a 0.0001% chance of failure. That costs lots of money. But say one decides to accept more risk for less cost. Ok. So you switch from 0.0001 to 0.001 failure rates. You risk is now 10-fold higher at each failure point,
It seems like a strawman to suggest that you would let failure probability increase by a factor of ten as the first step.
>but with thousands of failure points adding up you are now essentially doomed.
And it was an easy one to tear down.
>And you haven't saved anything. The cost of 0.001 components isn't fundamentally different than the 0.0001 components were.
There is no reason to believe that at all. Invert the question: if a system is 99.999% reliable, does that mean it should be free to make it more reliable? And why?
>It is either go or no go. Take CPU production. Intel spends billions at each of hundreds of fabrication step to push down miniscule error rates because any of a million errors can destroy a chip. There is no money to be saved by allowing any one process to become less than as perfect as it can possibly be.
This is completely wrong. Chip factories do produce chips with defects; those chips are sold for cheaper, since they still work, but not as fast. IIRC most of TSMC's modern processes are designed to sell the good chips at a high price and the bad ones cheaper.
Only if the failure points are arranged in series - A AND B AND C must happen to have a successful outcome.
If the failure points are arranged in parallel - X OR Y OR Z must happen to have a successful outcome, with multiple redundant paths to success, your total failure rate is the chance that ALL of X, Y, and Z fail. This is a much lower number than when they are in series.
To use concrete math - say that Starship has 33 raptor engines with a failure rate of 0.01%, 3 grid fins with a failure rate of 0.05%, and a fuel tank with a failure rate of 0.001%. If it's engineered so that all 33 raptor engines, all 3 grid fins, and the fuel tank all need to work for a successful launch, the success rate of the whole system = 0.9999^33 * 0.9995^3 * 0.99999 = 0.9952 = ~0.5% chance of failure. If it's engineered so that it can get to orbit on 28 out of the 33 raptor engines, 2 out of the 3 grid fins, and there is a double-hull to the fuel tank with a failure rate of 0.005%, then the chance of failure for each subsystem is 0.0001^5 = 10^-20, 0.0005^2 = 2.5 * 10^-7, and 0.00001 * 0.00005 = 5 * 10^-10, and when you multiply out those subsystem failure rates you get 1 - (1 - 10^-20) * (1 - 2.510^-7) * (1 - 510^-10) = 0.9999997495 = ~0.000025% chance of failure.
Moreover, lets look what happens if you take the multiply-redundant design above and then increase the chance of failure of each component 100x. Raptor engines are now 99% reliable, grid fins are now 95% reliable, and fuel tanks are now 99.9% reliable. The overall failure rate for each subsystem becomes 0.01^5 = 10^-10, 0.05^2 = 2.5 * 10^-3 and 0.001 * 0.005 = 0.000005. When you multiply out those subsystem failure rates you get 1 - (1 - 10^-10) * (1 - 2.510^-3) * (1 - 510^-6) = 0.00250498759 = ~0.2% chance of failure. The multiply-redundant system, even with component failure rates 100x higher, still has better reliability than the perfectly-engineered system where every component must perform exactly to spec.
This principle is used all the time in practical engineering. It's why Google builds server farms out of thousands of commodity PCs, hooked up in primary/replica clusters with replication and transparent failover. It's why ships have watertight compartments and double-hulls. It's why passenger jets have multiple engines, multiple hydraulic control systems, and multiple flight computers. Any engineer worth their salt is going to avoid SPOFs and assume that components will fail, then build redundancies into the design so that a partial failure does not endanger overall mission success.
> risk is now 10-fold higher at each failure point, but with thousands of failure points adding up you are now essentially doomed. And you haven't saved anything. The cost of 0.001 components isn't fundamentally different than the 0.0001 components were.
exactly. optimizing for an acceptable risk for space launches, esp space travel, seems still to be leading to $2B launches. at which point, what's the difference?
> you switch from 0.0001 to 0.001 failure rates. You risk is now 10-fold higher at each failure point, but with thousands of failure points adding up you are now essentially doomed
Our ex ante ability to estimate these probabilities is lacking. Especially when they’re coupled. And redundancy, instead of tighter tolerances, is often cheaper than the classic approach. These are proven lessons from SpaceX.
Before the anti-Musk cats get too wet, Elon Musk has said, and I quote, "If we get far enough away from launch pad before something goes wrong, then I think I would consider that to be a success. Just don't blow up the pad.": https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/16/world/starship-spacex-lau...
Right. The criteria for this test was "Failure = CATO (catastrophic at takeoff)". It took off, it didn't CATO, it even hit max Q, therefore success. That's not "partial success". That's 100% success, you won the game show, but you didn't get all the points in the sudden death bonus round.
but like, SpaceX's whole thing has been blowing up test rockets over and over as they experiment, iterating quickly. once they've nailed the design down, the result is pretty reliable, but look at how many booster recovery fails they had before they got successful. your logic works more for defect rates on parts than on the design itself.
What you've missed here is that failure points can only be guessed or simulated prior to testing. That analysis is often more expensive than the cost of a test and test article.
So SLS does a LOT of analysis and manages to find and rectify failure points prior to flight. They pay a lot in analysis and inflexible design to do this.
SpaceX does some analysis, but then flies to confirm the analysis early. That way they identify actual failure points and can use sensors to see how close they got to failure.
For instance today I'm sure they learnt a lot from each failed engine, parts on the booster that stopped working, detailed telemetry on ship behavior on flight and sensors for the non-separation of booster from ship.
SpaceX builds to the same high tolerances as other rocket manufacturers, but they don't try to avoid testing through overly rigorous analysis. They also don't gold-plate their manufacturing, instead making tradeoffs to allow cheaper volume production with recovery instead.
Yes, but let's not take the analogy too far. For people who work in safety-critical design (including software), it takes a different mindset than what is often prevalent in silicon valley. When the stakes are high, you don't really want to "move fast and break things".
You can actually see this in SpaceX. In development when stakes are relatively low (e.g., no payload or passengers), the risk threshold is high. But they start taking a more measured approach when that risk starts to ratchet up. The danger being, advocates of one approach don't always know when/how to transition to the other.
I think it's a matter of failing in a safe environment. Clearly that's what space x is doing. They fail spectularly, but they do so within the confines of a safe environment.
For the real launch they've already mapped out the failure modes and are able to prevent them when it really matters.
I've worked in aerospace. The organizations (both public and private) would all claim to fail "within the confines of a safe environment".
One small BS detector is when there's some unplanned/unmitigated test outcome that gets characterized as a "test anomaly" rather than being transparent about the details.
>they've already mapped out the failure modes and are able to prevent them when it really matters
This remains to be seen. The shuttle also had all their failure modes mapped out. As did CST-100. Yet massive failures still occurred.
Well in the case of the Shuttle both accidents that killed people were due to previously identified failure modes. At the end of the day, risk will always be a number greater than 0%. At some point someone is going to have to make a judgement call that the risk is low enough to proceed, and sometimes that call is going to be wrong.
The failure modes may have been known but the effects were not. A FMEA needs both to work.
Regarding the foam, they had a difficult time even recreating it after the fact. It was apparently only on a lark that they decided to turn the gun up to 11 and, viola, now the foam had the physical properties capable of damaging the tile catastrophically. So, yes, they knew the mechanism of foam shedding but did not realize the effect properly.
With the o-rings, they similarly just didn’t have the test data for this conditions. They incorrectly extrapolated on the test data they did have.
I agree with everything in your comment. One thing I've wondered about re space exploration though is how we reconcile what I think is pretty much universal acknowledgement that we have to do everything possible to avoid loss of life with the inherent danger of space travel, and the "drag" that a zero-tolerance safety focus can have on culture.
Put another way, what would global exploration have looked like if sailors refused to accept the risks of early ocean crossings?
That is a real issue. I think part of it involves creating a culture where it's acceptable to make failures as long as those failures were the result of a sound decision process.
What you don't want is a culture that is either a) afraid to take any risk because they are afraid of career consequences or b) willing to roll the dice with bad decision processes due to biases and bad incentives.
Example for a): bureaucrats who are unwilling to push the envelope because a bad outcome would effectively end their career
Example for b): making high-risk decisions due cost/schedule pressure, like competition for a contract
Early modern sailors were uneducated manual labourers with few economic prospects in a world where simply living as a lower class individual was more dangerous than nearly any job that exists in the developed world today. Sailing often paid better than jobs on land which made up for the risk, and it offered the potential of massive reward to the high class leadership of the vessel.
There is no consummate economic incentive for being an astronaut. The incentive is the experience and making some impact on science, and while that motivates many people the probability of attracting the best and the brightest goes down as the probability of exploding goes up.
I'd say there's unlikely to be enough of an economic incentive to justify riskier manned space travel until the earth becomes a whole lot less habitable.
If what you're saying is true, how come astronaut programs have many more applicants than they can take? People have other goals in life beyond economic incentives.
People volunteer for the military, and I don't think anyone's under any illusion this is risk free. The important thing is not lying to people about the risk involved.
>People have other goals in life beyond economic incentives.
They acknowledged this point, though:
>The incentive is the experience and making some impact on science
I think you might be interpreting their last point differently than me. I took it to mean that the "Mars or bust" is an inspiring, but impractical, narrative.
My expectation is that as soon as someone gets something going beyond Earth orbit and beyond the need to obtain launch licenses from the FAA, the zero-tolerance safety culture will be reduced. The Martians will build nuclear power plants.
I don't know what you're talking about. The Space Shuttle blew up twice, killed too many people out of sheer incompetence. And it flew again both times. Both times because NASA needed the vehicle to deliver on its promises. The Space Shuttle should never have flown after Columbia was lost. But it did, because NASA decided to live with the risks.
> You can actually see this in SpaceX. In development when stakes are relatively low (e.g., no payload or passengers), the risk threshold is high. But they start taking a more measured approach when that risk starts to ratchet up. The danger being, advocates of one approach don't always know when/how to transition to the other.
This corroborates "fail fast". They achieve reliability and safety by launching far more than traditional space companies and seeing failure in those launches. They prove it out before adding the risk of human lives or expensive cargo. Meanwhile traditional companies will develop their rocket for 15 years till it's "perfect". SpaceX figured out that achieving perfection is best done through actual attempts, not laboratory experiments.
See the last comment of my OP. The risk I'm poking at is a cultural one, where "failing fast" becomes an acceptable mode of operating, regardless of the context.
Nothing contradicts that. SpaceX does do this contextually. Once they nailed down the Falcon 9 rocket, the boosters and the Merlin engine, they mostly stopped messing with it and focused on operational excellence. But to get to that point they failed fast, because it's the most effective way to get reliability.
Let's look back at Star Hopper. SpaceX literally hired a company that builds water towers to build a prototype tank for Starship - and flew it! They were primarily trying to figure out how to build it, move it, etc. Obviously the risk tolerance was high. That's really the difference between them and say Boeing. SpaceX starts with higher risk tolerance just to figure out the lay of the land, but they start reducing that tolerance as development progresses. Boeing aims for perfection out of the gate (apparently).
Alternative take: SpaceX is so new they don't know what they don't know.
Take their example of a failed F9 strut, where the material supplied by a vendor didn't come close to meeting the necessary specs. A mature aersopace company would have processes in place to check the material for these specs before use. SpaceX has since levied these new process checks, but prior to that failure lots people may have pointed to them as being more efficient because of their 'streamlined' process.
Or, you can take a risk-informed approach, and understand what risks are prevalent (e.g., the risk of a bad vendor) and put the appropriate checks in place to mitigate that risk. "Learning" doesn't always mean taking the highest risk option and just rolling the dice.
I think the distinction I'm making is that the "form" of learning you take should be proportional to the risk and that all forms are not equal in value.
Indeed, and one way to verify you meet the spec is to test it, which they did and found it to be deficient. Having done so, they decided to improve their process. This is the definition of learning from your mistakes
This is an really optimistic outlook. One way to test the rocket is also to see if it fails when humans are aboard. But it may not be the best way to balance risk and what you learn.
It would have been much more economical to test a coupon of the material upon receipt, like what is considered standard practice throughout aerospace companies. Or, like you said, you can blow up a rocket and launch pad instead. Same result, different risk profiles.
I don't think anyone would argue it would have been better had they known better and done things right the first.
The question is how you transition from the state of not knowing to knowing.
If you have poor processes and a lack of knoledge, how do you get better?
In this specific instance, the root cause analysis and remediation are vastly more complicated that presented in this thread. It is not like SpaceX wasnt doing testing on incoming materials at all or ignorant of the concept.
You’re right. Like most failures of this type, it’s rarely simple and these forums are super conducive to long-form discussion. They did checks, but they were inadequate.
Regarding knowing if you have a poor process or not, it depends on the uniqueness of your problem. For proteins that are relatively common, like material checks, you can shorten your learning process by looking at other organizations that have been through it for decades. For more exotic non-standard problems, you might have to learn the hard way.
A mature aersopace company would have processes in place to check the material for these specs before use.
Would a "mature aerospace company" also know to not use O-rings outside the temperature range specified by its engineers? Or know to test whether foam traveling at high velocity would penetrate the TPS?
Look, this is hard stuff. It's very easy to tell when you screw up, but very difficult to tell how close you are to screwing up. You're deluding yourself if you think some entities are immune to screwing up just because they've been around.
Whataboutism aside, I’m not delusional; I’m quite upfront that these types of biases exist at every organization that is staffed by human beings.
The difference is I don’t allow “gosh, space is hard!” as a rationale for thinking one organization is immune to those shortcomings. So instead of taking a look and asking something like, “Hmmm. Every other organization seems to have a supplier vetting process for safety critical stuff, I wonder if we should too?” We can instead just pretend we’re smart and different and be forced to learn already solved problems the hard way. The supplier thing is very standard quality control process stuff that transcends industry. Knowing if foam can penetrate tile or o-rings operate out of spec are not, precisely because they were non-standard conditions. That’s not to say that the decisions weren’t flawed, but I don’t think it’s as good of an analogy as you may think. Besides, the investigations largely pointed to broken cultures so I don’t know if that’s the type of company you want SpaceX associated with.
What’s the saying? “A fool learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from somebody else’s”
That's fair, my point was just that you made it sound like "mature aerospace companies" were some special beings that didn't make mistakes.
It's good to learn from other people's mistakes, but you also can't let everything people have done before go unchallenged or no progress would ever be made from rockets that cost $2B per launch.
Yeah, I realize now that probably wasn't worded as well as it could have been. To say it differently, I would expect well-run companies (whether 'mature' or not) to have the processes in place to better control the well-known problems. When it comes to those 'unknown unknowns' sometimes you can't learn except by trial-and-error.
I previously worked in medical image processing/transcoding and you are correct, but most people probably don't know precisely how or why.
The knee jerk mindset that most people have in safety-critical design, is being ultra conservative.
In the fields of medical and space (and likely others), you have an asymmetrical risk-reward profile. Think about it this way, if an engineer takes a risk on refactoring some software logic, and it speeds the system up 3%, what is their reward? A raise? A promotion? Fat chance. If that refactor instead breaks 3% of the time; engines blow up, people die, customers yell at them, they get fired, perhaps in some situations they even get sued.
The engineers then converge to a local maxima by the means of: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", and various other ultra conservative leanings. This mindset also will often get selected for in hiring, and rewarded.
Now take the limit of this as time goes to infinity, you have bloated, legacy software that is full of spaghetti code and can't take new features easily (if at all). In the case of NASA's space shuttle program, it was extremely expensive, and the cost wasn't falling significantly over time either.
One might view ultra conservatism as the problem, but the real issue is the asymmetrical risk-reward profile. Solving that takes a head-on approach with great leadership, deploying capital, state of the art testing/QA, great deployment pipelines, and more. Shield people from the risk, and intentionally reward people when they push the envelope.
Imagine if you had a software testing process and product specification that was 99.9999% effective (and no, yours is not even close to that), you could then move at a silicon valley "fail fast" pace and advance the technology and architecture rapidly.
Zero, given that the launch corridor doesn't pass over land, and all rockets are equipped with a Flight Termination System that blows up the rocket if it deviates from that corridor.
100% success matters when you need to hit a launch window for interplanetary transit. or when you have spacecraft that are integrating sensors from dozens of commercial and academic partners. 100% success matters when rockets are actually launching payloads. what is the evidence that this fail fast method is superior to the already tried and tested method? everyone just assumes that. the differences between spx starship and SLS go far beyond just that method anyway so you cannot possibly compare
Your comment was dead when I got to it - I disagree with your words but vouched because I think being skeptical is valuable (terms and conditions may apply, etc).
I can't personally attest to this but another commenter mentioned that this was what the soviets did as part of a space race with a smaller budget.
You should note that success rate is crucial once you are in production and ready to go - judging overall success against that bar while developing and testing is nonsense.
Finally - I think everyone learns faster by trying more things and making more mistakes? I wouldnt blame you for wanting to see that studied - kind of a neat question after all - but it seems like you are assuming one method or another was picked because it was superior as opposed to a reality of material constraints.
I feel like if NASA had budget for blowing up more rockets to prove/disprove points that they would be doing so. Actually now that I say it out loud I can't imagine anyone choosing 'not rocket'.
Which is rightly, awesome... They just launched an 11 million pound firecracker....
It would be AWESOME if elon included actual fireworks which would go off in the event of a RUD to add some fabulousness to such events.
In fact, all the devices that are stripped out for these test launches should be replaced with their equivalent weights in fireworks. Detonate them when possible during a RUD to allow for more spectacle!
This is a fantastic idea, I'm sure the FAA will be thrilled when SpaceX asks them for permission to turn their rocket into a disneyland night-time spectacular orbital missile!
All Americian launches have a Flight Termination System (FTS) which is a bomb attached to ensure the off-course vehicle explodes before returning to earth. There are personnel in the control room who can activate the FTS when something goes wrong and there is a danger to people on the ground.
That is what detonated the StarShip today.
You'll find it was notably absent in Soviet rocket tests, for instance with the N1 which veered off course, returned to the ground intact and exploded there instead.
In large engineering organizations, it is not uncommon for highly specialized engineers to not be aware of the status of the overall project. Plus, you hear A LOT of different stories, rumors and expectations as projects progress. I'm SURE they started with "Oh Yeah! This Baby is Going into ORBIT!" but as time went on they were like "Well.. we don't have time to build these 18 components to spec, so we loosened the tolerance so we think it'll launch but might explode 10 seconds later." And the nameless drone in sector 47 only heard the first projection.
I would be very surprised if Shotwell didn't have an all-hands to set the whole team's expectations beforehand.
SpaceX is well known to have a very "flat" management structure. They expect all their scientists and engineers to learn, understand, and contribute across-the-board.
I've have my own version of this more times than I can count.
For me, I run a trading firm and when I started it was "if we can survive the day without losing a ton of money, its a win." I was happy if the positions even made it to the exchange the way we wanted, haha.
[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
I was just poking that the parable ignores that the iterative side also requires an additional element - a target state to converge to over time, whatever that may be - repetition isn’t sufficient.
The counterpoint to it is the probably apocryphal Soviet nail factory (but with more verifiable examples nearby):
Once upon a time, there was a factory in the Soviet Union that made nails. Unfortunately, Moscow set quotas on their nail production, and they began working to meet the quotas as described, rather than doing anything useful. When they set quotas by quantity, they churned out hundreds of thousands of tiny, useless nails. When Moscow realized this was not useful and set a quota by weight instead, they started building big, heavy railroad spike-type nails that weighed a pound each.
They have two more ships built and two under construction. I think the iteration time could be driven by the (1) condition of the launch pad (2) the cause of S24 destruction.
I'm not sure why people need to be reminded of this. This isn't a reply to anyone making complaining about the lack of success. It comes off as fanboyism.
>> Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time.
That is not always a bad thing. I mean you typed this on a computer running an ISA that started in the 70's or 80's. Maybe 90's if you are on PowerPC ;)
NASA did so many studies where they tried to put together Space Shuttle parts to make ‘low cost’ rockets (saving development expenses) but whatever they came up with was terribly expensive since those parts were expensive and that didn’t matter if it was a rocket with a cluster of 4 SSMEs or a rocket that strapped on 3 of the solid rocker booster.
You’d think NASA would have read their own studies and given up rather than proceed on the predictable Artemis boondoggle.
If you watch the this launch video, It looks like there are projectiles coming up from the pad around 18s. I wonder if the launch pad or engines were damaged by explosion.
There was another view at the pad that had sizable bits of what looked like rock or concrete flying past it, camera went off line when the vehicle had barely left the ground. See the bottom right panel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg
I'm nothing resembling a rocket scientist, but the lack of flame diverters like you see for every other rocket launch has been a mystery to me. Every starship launch or static fire ends in concrete flying everywhere. That can't be good.
Indeed, it is not ideal. What you see as a result from a decision to solve that problem in parallel instead of before launches. SpaceX is actively working on their launch stand, just not delaying lunches until they have it worked out. There will be many iterations of it before it is final, just as there will be many iterations of the Starship with increasing capability
One of the new graphics that showed up on the dashboard was that of the engines lit. There were at least 2 on the outer ring that were fed from TO, and a few more winked out during the flight.
I’m curious how many off engines the system tolerates. How many do they anticipate regularly? I’ve never noticed if Falcon 9s periodically run as a Falcon 8 or 7?
All and all, ‘‘twas an awesome sight. Kudos to all those cheering excited people.
The envelop is designed with safety in mind. If it leaves the envelop it has a certified self destruct system on board that will trigger and destroy the rocket.
How many engines can be of depends heavily on when the go off. Even 10s of flight can make a huge difference.
Generally Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 are incredibly reliable. In over 200 flights there were only a couple of engine failures. Some worked nominally on accent but had some failure during landing.
> How many do they anticipate regularly?
The vast majority flights should never have an engine out. This is something that should generally never happen. I think SpaceX would hope that far less then 1% of flights have an engine out issue. Anything else I don't think they would consider acceptable.
SpaceX will redesign the Raptor engine as often as they have to to get the reliability to Merlin levels.
I recall a few Falcon 9 launches that ended up with 8 engines. It is definitely designed to handle that (although maybe not for the extreme performance cases? Not sure)
At least once they lost the booster when they were planning on recovering it because they had to run the ascent phase on only 8 engines and burned enough extra fuel the booster didn't have enough fuel to complete the boost back and landing.
Looking at the aerial footage before the launch, I was wondering why there is so much infrastructure so close to the pad. Clearly much of needs to be nearby, but perhaps those tanks should be 800 - 1000 feet from the pad and not ~200. After seeing the damage to some of that infrastructure caused by the launch, I am still wondering.
They would much rather not have all that infrastructure close to the pad. This is a sub-optimal situation that they, more than anyone else, are acutely aware of. Sadly this is what they could get.
They actually did scale it down from the original plans in ~2015.
I'm not sure if it's worth scaling down substantially from where it is. There is a certain scale that's necessary for the economics (payload vs dry-weight vs fuel) to work out, and ultimately they want to be able to put very significant amounts in orbit. They're currently targeting 150 tons, would it be worth targeting 50 tons? Probably not.
One interesting observation here is how long it took the ship to get off the pad from the T-0 mark. This is undoubtedly because some of the raptors on it apparently failed to ignite. I thought they were about to make a mess on the launch pad!
I'm also curious about what technically finally got it off the ground - was there a sufficient, but low, level of acceleration, was it a matter of reducing the rocket's mass (by burning through fuel), was it a matter of some of the engines reaching some peak level of performance. Or, probably most likely, maybe just a combination of everything.
More likely, holddowns on the pad until everything was stabilized. Probably takes a few seconds to vector/throttle the other engines to compensate for the lost ones.
Clamps were released at T-10min. IIRC compensating for engines are pretty fast. But they hold the engines at just below lift/weight to run some more checks before fully powering up.
I was amazed at how resilient Starship was despite how many engines had failed, right up until the point they needed to yaw for stage separation and lost control. They've gotta improve the reliability of those engines (which I'm sure they will), but it's a testament to the quality of their control software how far they got despite having those malfunctioning engines.
Commodity parts are going to run the future. Soon we'll have commodity rocket engines and it's going to be plug and play with software accomodating X% failure per launch.
The Soviets only dreamed of such when they came up with the disaster that is the N1.
i.e not only do they make rocket engines they make the worlds most advanced and complicated rocket engines and they make so many of them you could consider them mass produced. (as far as rocket engines go that is)
These engines require a very delicate dance of chamber pressure, temperature, fuel/oxidiser mix, turbo pump speeds, etc to get started but it's all worth it in the end for their insane efficiency and thrust/weight.
Yes, SpaceX makes all their own engine, even inventing their own materials. They are building these very vertically integrated. SpaceX is pretty much the undisputed best rocket engine company in the world. They build more engines then anybody in the world and its not even close. And the Raptor is the most advanced engine in the world.
Rocket engines have different challenges then airplane engines. They are as hard in some ways but easier in others.
Rocket engine operate in a far more extreme environment, peak stressed are far larger, failures and issues far more violent. But the big advantage is that they only have to operate for a few minutes at the time (at least on the first stage). Jet engines need to operate for 1000s of hours.
SpaceX has upped the level significantly, interdicting higher efficiency full flow stage combustion and making them reusable and being able to launch quickly and reliably. So they complexity of Raptor is much higher then your typical first stage rocket engine.
I would say the complexity of a modern jet engine might still be higher, but its hard to estimate these things. Not sure how you would do that scientifically.
I believe this is intentional. They engines start with less thrust than is needed to launch the rocket and only throttle up fully after the system checks pass.
The startup sequence is indeed longer than with most other rockets, but I don’t think that’s the reason.
5-6 engines were gone since very early in the flight, and for most of those I suspect that’s because they were damaged by debris from the pad. Everyday Astronaut’s live stream had a different camera angle on the rocket, and you could see it actually slide sideways away from the tower a bit in the first few seconds. Uneven thrust would explain that.
Elon said in the past that the rocket will leap off the pad (thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.5 or 1.6 iirc). But if you’re missing 20% of your engines, that ratio is ~1.2, or less than half the expected acceleration. A slow start indeed.
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 449 ms ] threadI am woke now because I don't support allowing harassment of others? This is the first time anyone has ever called me woke.
Making it clear of the tower seems like a remarkably low bar, so if that really was the measure of success, this thing is going to be ready for missions in about three decades. Like what an incredibly low accomplishment that would be.
And of course I feel overwhelmingly certain SpaceX doesn't consider this a success. The face-saving they put out for the sycophants to echo doesn't match the reality that this test proved extraordinarily little.
What good is freedom of thought and speech if one cannot exercise it? I probably drank the old american koolaid and have not yet had my sip of the new one.
It's like a religion that feels it needs to insert "God is great" or "in his divine wisdom" into every sentence, just to make sure nobody questions their piety.
During the Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
PS - More proof that you are correct in describing this as a religion: The emergence of "problematic" as the woke equivalent of "blasphemous".
During the Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
PS - More proof that you are correct in describing this as a religion: The emergence of "problematic" as the woke equivalent of "blasphemous".
During the Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
PS - More proof that you are correct in describing this as a religion: The emergence of "problematic" as the woke equivalent of "blasphemous".
During the Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
PS - More proof that you are correct in describing this as a religion: The emergence of "problematic" as the woke equivalent of "blasphemous".
During the Trump years I thought at times about creating /r/ihatetrumpbut, a collection of articles/posts/comments in which the author felt the need to declaim "I hate Trump, but [something Trump/US government did may not necessarily be 100% fascist/evil/a bad idea]". Hey, maybe I'll get more motivation to pull the trigger in November 2024!
PS - More proof that you are correct in describing this as a religion: The emergence of "problematic" as the woke equivalent of "blasphemous".
I was trying to say, yes, Elon has pretty bad views these days, but this is still at least a semi-success, not a set back or failure.
I think it's useful to compare Musk with fire. Fire is useful, if controlled. Fire can be very damaging if not controlled. You have to control Musk while giving him the semblance that he's the one in control. Kudos to those who've successfully been able to pull that off.
Says the person questioning why other people are utilizing their freedom of thought and speech.
The "old american koolaid" is to let your neighbor do whatever they please as long as "it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" (Thomas Jefferson). Trans people aren't hurting anybody, and it's a travesty that one of our major political parties has made demonizing trans people into a wedge issue as part of a manufactured culture war.
If you're citing one of the many examples of when this has happened, but are compelled to use 'she' rather than 'he' to refer to the male athlete, then it rather dilutes the point being made.
Someone who holds a belief that trans-identifying males are women, but considers that they should be excluded from women's sports because of the long-lasting pubertal effects of testosterone, would likely have no issue with referring to one of these males as 'she'.
However, someone who doesn't believe that that such males can be women, and that this is the primary reason why they shouldn't be eligible to compete in women's sports, is more likely to use 'he' in reference to one of these males, as it reflects their underlying philosophical view on the issue.
I view this argument as analogous to someone is trying to justify slurring other minorities. Why slur them? Just treat them as people who are just trying to get through life and all its challenges.
Also all this focus on slurring a specific minority makes those doing the slurring seem mean, non-credible and non-compassionate to their fellow human beings. If someone starts slurring another minority, I will immediate dismiss anything they say next because they are showing they harbor hate - it isn't a rational discussion anymore, all facts are going to be distorted, things that lead to cognitive dissonance are going to be dismissed, and my motivations will be questioned. Who has time for that?
One example is Meghan Murphy, a high-profile Canadian feminist. She was discussing the case of a trans-identifying male who had sued several female beauticians - who offered their services solely to women - for refusing to do a Brazilian wax, which for this individual would have involved the handling of male genitalia. She referred to this male as 'him', and as a result was banned from Twitter for about four years (with her ban only being lifted after Musk's purchase of the company).
So on one side we have a trans-identifying male who was using the Canadian legal system to try to punish women for refusing to touch his penis and testicles. On the other side, a feminist writer who referred to this male as 'he' and 'him' while criticizing him for this. In applying their 'misgendering' rule, Twitter took the side of the former and sanctioned the latter.
By removing this rule, Twitter is allowing feminists like Murphy to speak freely about issues such as this on their platform.
Not just feminists either. Most people balk at phrases like 'her penis and testicles', even if they would normally play along with the fiction of this male being a woman.
It really does highlight the absurdity and dishonesty that is inherent in the belief system of gender identity, in that people are essentially being forced to say things that they don't really believe.
No one has to deny that she was trans. And everyone was free to criticize her behavior. Here is a great article that does not deadname her nor misgender her while also talking about the case accurately: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/trans-activist-files-another-human-rig... and this one as well is accurate: https://www.cranbrooktownsman.com/home2/b-c-trans-activists-...
I have to move on to other things and this conversation is going in circles.
No-one is denying that Yaniv is trans-identifying. What gender-critical feminists (and others) are denying are his claims of being a woman.
The question is whether social media platforms should compel their users to tell lies when discussing people such as this. Which is what anyone who holds the view that this individual is a man would be doing if they are forced to refer to him as 'she' or 'her'.
> Here is a great article that does not deadname her nor misgender her while also talking about the case accurately
Yes but the fact that some newspaper editors choose to immerse themselves, their writers and their readers in this fiction doesn't mean that everyone else should be compelled to do the same.
I'm pretty sure that calling out a celebrity billionaire's transphobia is exercising one's freedom of speech.
This is what I describe as the “worse is better” model of freedom. As if the only way we can measure freedom is by counting how many extremely awful things occur in the world and concluding that more awful things is a clear indicator that we have more freedom. Is this a uniquely American concept?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemi...
The underlying theme is that a non-optimal system that nevertheless minimizes chances of tyranny and/or violence is better than say a society ruled by philosopher kings. So it's not so much that "more awful things is a clear indicator that we have more freedom", but rather that a system that takes it upon itself to stamp out "more awful things" (per whose definition?) will ultimately diminish freedom for all, and various "awful things" are certain to follow.
It is a matter that is still subject to debate. What is your solution?
And I’m fairly aware of Popper. I largely share his views, particularly those in The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Logic of Scientific Discovery. I don’t think he would point to, for instance, high murder rates as an indicator of freedom in a society or a preponderance of pseudoscientific theories as an indicator of freedom in a scientific community.
The new koolaid is "I can say dumb things and if anybody calls me on it, I'm being oppressed." That has nothing to do with freedom of speech, there's no government here.
Sounds like you've been drinking plenty of the new koolaid.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/elon-musks-2018-tweet-tesla-un...
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-new-racial-bias-trial/
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2018-219
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-twitter-shareholder-l...
https://www.space.com/spacex-technician-coma-rocket-test-acc...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/13/world/tesla-elon-musk-cor...
https://aa.law/blog/tesla-received-triple-the-amount-of-osha...
Full respect to all the workers who designed and built the rocket. But Elon Musk has absolutely done a bunch of crime.
Let's not pretend like he just has a "grudge" with trans folks. It goes many orders of magnitude beyond that. Perhaps he was not, and maybe he even still is not a transphobe, but right now he's tweeting like a full-blown transphobic maniac on Twitter. [1] That's a severely negative personality trait. Discriminating against a group of people simply because of the way they were born goes against the fundamental values of the Western society, freedoms, and should be criticized harshly at any avenue. It's relevant here, not because of Musk's speech (which I firmly believe every person is entitled to), but because Musk is an influential figure who contributes so much thought, inspiration, motivation and soft/hard influence to the world that it must be noted he's actively acting like an unhinged transphobe. This can be harmful to people and too much influence from a transphobic personality can be harmful for the society, in turn. Just like, a lot of influence from good people is good for society, a lot of influence from bad people is bad for society. It's worth noting.
[1] We saw, in many instances not only Elon Musk but many other people exaggerating their personalities and beliefs on Twitter.
Are you sure? Seems he's mostly been tweeting about SpaceX and Twitter: https://twitter.com/search?q=from:elonmusk&src=typed_query&f...
I can't see any recent tweets that match what you describe.
"Yes I know Musk is bad and I'm not bad, see I'm not bad because I mention Musk is bad, I'm not one of them. That being said it was a nice rocket launch"
Are you doing this on all topics related to Musk?
My 10 year history on hacker news is there for all to see... why ask a rhetorical question, when you can just look.
Twitter’s modified policy is a step back for the platform, especially when Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube don’t even maintain the same protections for trans people that Twitter once had. Last year, GLAAD gave each of these platforms fairly low scores in regard to LGBTQ safety, privacy, and expression but noted that Twitter and TikTok were the only two platforms out of the bunch that had specific policies against deadnaming and misgendering trans users.
So now the only major platform that has this policy is TikTok...famously 'woke' (silly term these days) companies like Google don't even seem to have this policy. The policy was only in place for the past few years at Twitter, so this in fact seems like its just a reversion to the mean rather than some kind of direct attack on trans rights.
> Twitter hasn’t completely pulled protections for trans users, however. Its Hateful Conduct Policy still explicitly prohibits attacking others based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” but the choice to intentionally remove all mention of misgendering and deadnaming seems like a calculated jab at the trans community.
I am not an LGBT+ person, but I also do not support targeted harassment of various segments of society just because they are different.
I think the outrage is Twitter moving from the head of the progressive pack to inline with everyone else. Since there isn't really an alternative to Twitter for the business world, I'd rather it did it's best to be 'average', not overly conservative or liberal.
Whoever is actually running the show has effectively built an insulating wall around Elon to limit his influence, especially from day-to-day operations.
A few months ago there was an unverified account of this from an alleged SpaceX intern. I can’t say it’s true but it certainly rings true.
We’ve seen from Twitter he’s not much of a businessman (the deal he got himself into was terrible) and not he’s talking about software many of us here realize just how clueless he is about Tech.
With SpaceX not many of us knew much about rocketry so you know what they say: in the valley of the blind the one eyed man is king.
When someone, or a group refuses to ban something, that doesn't mean they support it.
Just because the United States allows literal Nazis to speak about anything they want does not mean the United States supports Nazis, or is anti-Semitic.
The exact same principle is true of Twitter. If you allow people to post anti-trans rhetoric, that does not in any way mean you are anti-trans.
"Twitter hasn’t completely pulled protections for trans users, however. Its Hateful Conduct Policy still explicitly prohibits attacking others based on “race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease,” but the choice to intentionally remove all mention of misgendering and deadnaming seems like a calculated jab at the trans community."
Is this a targeted jab? I have no idea, but it certainly doesn't make someone outright anti-Trans, particularly when the hateful conduct policy continues to ban dehumanization based on gender identity.
Before:
> Slurs and Tropes
> We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.In some cases, such as (but not limited to) severe, repetitive usage of slurs, or racist/sexist tropes where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may require Tweet removal. In other cases, such as (but not limited to) moderate, isolated usage where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may limit Tweet visibility as further described below.
> Dehumanization
> We prohibit the dehumanization of a group of people based on their religion, caste, age, disability, serious disease, national origin, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
---
After:
> Slurs and Tropes
> We prohibit targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category. In some cases, such as (but not limited to) severe, repetitive usage of slurs, or racist/sexist tropes where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may require Tweet removal. In other cases, such as (but not limited to) moderate, isolated usage where the context is to harass or intimidate others, we may limit Tweet visibility as further described below.
> Dehumanization
> We prohibit the dehumanization of a group of people based on their religion, caste, age, disability, serious disease, national origin, race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
When applied to a male who calls himself a woman, it's merely a philosophical disagreement over whether said male can transform himself to female simply by decree.
It would have been a failure if the data logging failed to transmit, or if it had immediately exploded and destroyed the launch tower.
You there, reading this comment, go and fail or go and turn autorenew off :P
Failure > inaction. You can learn from failure.
But things just are what they are. They aren’t good or bad. Good or bad is your interpretation of the way things are. If you consider doing nothing good, then you succeed by not trying. If you consider trying good, then you succeed by simply trying.
The altitude and velocity when things went sideways were in MRBM territory, not ICBM territory so the only thing they would have hit would have been the Atlantic ocean.
Most complicated part of building any rocket by far and Starship's is a lot more complex than any previous one by far. It was always the most failure prone part but everything else looks great.
I will disagree with you though and say that the rocket stage separation failed to work. And this occurred a few minutes after launching.
What would your headline be?
> SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Explodes After Launch
> The most powerful rocket ever built got off the launchpad in South Texas, but did not achieve its most ambitious goals on Thursday.
(?)
It's absolutely correct.
SpaceX is a great demonstration of an "ideal mix" of new and old. It has a lot of "classic" "measure twice; cut once" planning, but also an absolutely essential "YOLO" mindset for live testing, which can cause big failures, but also give the most valuable data.
Their manned flights have been great (except for that toilet thing...).
You can really tell if a company has a culture of embracing failure if they're cool with you blowing up a spaceship.
Even now, it's not hard to ask the somewhat specious question of how we can be 70+ years into aerospace tech and we still need our rockets to blow up.
That combination is inherently explosive in any sort of failure.
Historically we can see that there are two modes of rocket development when it comes to failure tolerance. 1. Iterate fast and blow stuff up (e.g. mercury/redstone, spacex) or 2. Iterate slowly, at massive cost, with fewer catastrophic failures (space shuttle, Apollo, SLS).
When it comes to safety, the slow and expensive route has a dubious track record. Of course, slow and expensive is producing much more complex vehicles, until today, at least.
It is obvious that every new rocket that was built from ground up will fail a few times before it is released.
This is not a "production build". And you don't need to explain anything when your "test build" fails, it is obvious some will.
But seriously what a terrible title. This was a huge accomplishment in engineering, getting it this far up.
Whether they’re truly happy with this result probably will depend on their analysis of what went wrong.
If they can find the cause and it’s easy to fix, they’ll be a lot happier than when they can’t figure out what went wrong, or when they can figure it out, but preventing it requires a huge redesign.
But yes, this is the nature of rocket building. Things do get boom fairly easily.
I am confused. Everything I read before the launch said that it was intended to reach orbital altitude and make it around the Earth.
I think he said the exact same thing about the first Falcon Heavy launch.
I interpreted literally the words they used about the plan for today's launch.
I might go to the grocery store with a list of five things, but I only really need two things. Coming home with 3 things would be a success.
On one end of the spectrum, Starship detonates on the pad and they have learned very little and have a year of work to do rebuilding the pad.
On the other end of the spectrum, everything works flawlessly and Starship survives re-entry and smacks into the ocean off of Hawaii.
They achieved a result in the middle. Neither total failure nor total success, and well within their stated expectations for this attempt.
there is something about this launcher and the launch that looks exeedingly wrong to me cf a saturn v (i realise spacex is trying to launch larger masses)
Thanks for the laugh.
Furthermore, we don't know there was a failure to separate. If I had to guess, once the vehicle was in an unstable attitude outside of the nominal flight path, they triggered the self-destruct and purposefully didn't try to separate.
This is progress, and admirable, but not a success according to their previous statements.
It's pretty amazing that the rocket went past the launch pad, yet alone survived past max-Q to begin with!
SpaceX has no test facility capable of withstanding a full thrust booster test on the ground.
Also SpaceX has more boosters and ships complete and in various stages of assembly. A complete loss of the pad would have been much more damaging to the program.
I wouldn't have been surprised if the whole thing shook itself apart on the lift pad and blew up.
I don't know about you, but when I rapidly build and assemble large complex structures like a cowboy, I certainly expect a ton of failures on my first trials. When stuff goes much further than I expected, I'm in awe and disbelief.
“We consider any data received that helps inform an improved future build of starship a success. From a milestone standpoint, our main goal is to clear the pad. Every milestone beyond that is a bonus. The further we fly, the more data we can collect.”
I'm no fan of the SpaceX model but if it works for them and the safety of those on the ground is prioritized, it seems to work better than any other model tried here.
I don't think "planned" is the right word - the right word is "hoped".
> “I'm not saying it will get to orbit, but I am guaranteeing excitement. It won't be boring,” Musk promised at a Morgan Stanley conference last month. “I think it's got, I don't know, hopefully about a 50% chance of reaching orbit.”
I do recall he did express some level of concern about the launch pad being damaged if the rocket failed to launch though (it still looks like it was damaged to some degree from the launch.)
Very, very technically true, but not really. Their target trajectory was only a few tens of m/s short of orbit.
> aerodynamic stresses similar
Right, within one percent.
It even spun like a KSP rocket.
you have literally no idea what you're talking about
Looks like the propellant line issues from earlier flight tests - that sort of stuff is really not at all supposed to happen.
That's not what they said in their mission presentation though. It was supposed to launch, separate, return the booster back, then the rocket was supposed to orbit once around the Earth and then fall into the ocean.
I understand people have their feelings invested into this (for whatever reason), but objectively speaking that was not what "success was defined as".
To me, more interesting than how the company itself defines success would be how domain experts outside the company perceive it.
"SpaceX intends to collect as much data as possible during flight to quantify entry dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally. This data will anchor any changes in vehicle design or CONOPs after the first flight and build better models for us to use in our internal simulations."
From https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481
It doesn't say the objective is "fly across earth".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1wcilQ58hI
@ 9:38 "We will consider any data inform and improve future builds of starship as a success. From a milestone our main goal is to clear the pad. Every milestone beyond that is a bonus."
@ 15:57 "We're focusing on the fundamental systems and operations, so that's the liftoff portion, but we are going to try and get some data on how the fins work..."
@ 35:26 "I want to remind everyone that success today is anything <interrupted by cheering> for today success is anything that helps improve the future builds of starship. If we lift off and clear the pad we're calling that a win."
The Soviets had the 'launch often, fail fast, learn faster' view that SpaceX employs today.
However, nobody viewed the N1 launches outside the Soviet Union as successes. I'm glad to see that 'fail fast, learn faster' is finally part of American aerospace engineering.
Instead of adopting the proven R-7 stacking scheme which was much easier to test piece by piece, Korolyov opted to a novel design which was too wide (17m!!), and static fires required a humongous and prohibitively expensive testing facility. The lack of static fires made the development too slow and expensive, as the only way to test it was in the actual flight. Combine this with other technical mistakes (the shape led to the extra weight while the modularity wasn't required, too much drag, etc) and Mishin's poor leadership after Korolyov's death, and you have a recipe for a failed project.
Starship is much narrower (9m), today's tech is much better, so the static fires are much cheaper; and unlike N-1, it's actually designed for fast iterations from the ground up.
Why? It had pretty advanced engines, conservative fuel choices, architecture optimized for low requirements at manufacturing. And it was originally planned for Mars missions, not LEO missions.
> Korolyov opted to a novel design which was too wide (17m!!)
Why too wide? Technical decisions were made with all degrees of justifications available at the time. That it's wider than anything else till today, including Starship, doesn't make it "too wide".
> Combine this with other technical mistakes (the shape led to the extra weight while the modularity wasn't required, too much drag, etc)
Extra weight in weight-carrying construction is compensated, at least to a degree, by lesser weight of spherical tanks. Modularity was present so even N-11 was considered - two upper stages of N-1. Too much drag - comparing to what?
N-1 was quite state of the art technically when it was created. I don't see how calling it a technical blunder can be justified.
Whatever technical issues N1 had, could have been resolved with enough iterations. We have no idea if Starship will work and if it does have design problems, we won't know until years from now if it fails or succeeds.
This comment is 20 Years too late, SpaceX was founded in 2002.
"I may have crashed the car into the neighbour's house and broken my arm, but I did get the milk from the store!"
- SpaceX will be sad if the rocket blows up on the pad.
- They’ll be very happy if the rocket clears the tower.
- They’ll be ecstatic if the rocket makes it around the world.
- They’ll use the flight termination system, which all rockets carry, if it veers off course.
Did you see the employees cheering during the webcast?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZ5Ep06TTk
It demonstrates a profound ignorance of the improvements made in technology and engineering in over 50 years.
N1 was only rocket attempting this setup before Starship. And failed miserably.
Also, N1 had many issues, non were really shown in this flight. So I don't know what you are referring to.
Maybe you are referring to the N1 failure where to many engine shut off, N1 used pure thrust vectoring for guidance and the board computer had a overly simple guidance computer where 1 engine getting shut down was automatically leading to a engine on the other side shutting down. This lead to a cascade where all engine shut down.
N1 also suffered from pipe failures because of vibration. Again not something experienced in this flight as far as we can see.
Can you be more concrete of what you are referring to?
(the cheering is actually really funny cause the launch was already a success)
Why? This is just the public viewing area from where SpaceX own employees watch from. And they worked on this thing for years, seems pretty realistic that they would be exited.
All, really ? What about the flight plan ?
I like the American philosophy to see the good part of experiences even when thinks don’t go as planned, but IMHO I feel like it's drifting more and more from « there’s good in failure » to « let’s call everything a success ». May be wrong, just my European point of view through the transatlantic optic fiber.
If the plan says they'll go all the way into orbit and they abort early, that's ok.
If the plan says they'll get 100m off the ground and go no further, and they instead manage to make it all the way into orbit, they'd be in a huge amount of trouble.
Given the above, what sort of flight plan would you recommend they file?
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the first part of the flight was important and considered mostly a success.
A phrase like "all I hope for" doesn't necessarily mean "the only thing I hope for" but instead usually means "the thing I hope for most (or above all)". If someone were to say, "all I want is a good night's rest", it doesn't mean they no longer want oxygen, for example. :)
EDIT: Perhaps a better way to think about it is, if it had crashed back to the stand and damaged things there that would be a setback. If it made it all the way that would be as much progress as you could get. Failing before MECO was less progress than I expected but still progress.
> I really miss NASA launches
Those still exists ...
Not everything has to be the same. Each company has its own spin on its launch coverage and its own company culture.
I'm intrigued as per cause. Lots of Engine failures and spewed parts. It had a real slide on liftoff. An engine violently flashed and went pop about +25s.
I do have to say, the thing requiring FTS after a violent flip well above supersonic speaks orders about structural work.
Note: Trying to fly Jeb directly into the Sun was a real lesson in Angular Momentum.
I made rockets that would do the same thing (flipping) when the fins where on the top due to aerodynamics... going to be interesting to see how SpaceX is going to solve that.
Only 120 meters tall
I'm as anti-Musk as the next, but it's also weird to see so many people gleeful that Musk must be so embarrassed at this 'massive failure'. Like, how uninformed do you have to be to think that Elon would be humiliated by such a resounding success? Oy.
This makes me proud to be American, proud to be an engineer, and just stoked to be human. Let's show some humility and graciousness, people!
These people are pretty easy to ignore if you don't venture into certain parts of Twitter and Reddit. Who cares what they're social media-brained minds think. It's just another hot take.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell
I think HN understands the difference between a charismatic leader who is good at laying out a vision and generating a tremendous amount of hype around it (like Steve Jobs) and someone who is an expert at actually realizing a vision (Steve Wozniak, Tim Cook).
They may both be necessary for success, but if you are praising the rocket's engineering, you're praising the person who works tirelessly to manifest the vision.
Shouldn't it just be the commander of the mission?
The way you speak is so condescending to women, as though they wouldn't have the ability to earn their place and it has to be handed to them. I can't speak to your intentions but it's not equality if you thought it was.
You’d need to prove intent for that claim. Merit based seems fair to me.
Most women I know appreciate the "perks" of being a woman, but none of them are under any delusion about it. They would be insulted if they lost on equal footing, and were rewarded for it anyway. I've never met anyone who was happy knowing someone let them win.
If you want to make an argument that men and women are never on equal footing, I could understand that but I'm not even sure what you are proposing instead.
The reason is because of historical oppression and entrenched systems of oppression still in place today. In that context, meritocracy only serves to reinforce the status quo.
I'm sure NASA can come very close to a true meritocracy - but that doesn't change the fact that there are benefits to having women in visible positions of power, accomplishment, etc. There will be multiple qualified people for any job, and it is 100% acceptable to choose someone because they come from a historically underrepresented group, solely to increase visibility and enfranchisement of that group.
So you're making the same proposal. You want to hire a woman because she's a woman. This is a massive disservice to female empowerment.
> There will be multiple qualified people for any job, and it is 100% acceptable to choose someone because they come from a historically underrepresented group, solely to increase visibility and enfranchisement of that group.
This is an absurd line of thinking. If two people truly are equally qualified, some immutable trait like race, sex, etc. should not be the determining factor. If you are ok with someone being hired for a job because they are a native american or a woman, then you should also be ok with someone choosing to only hire white men and asian men. Both of these scenarios are racist/sexist.
Probably not your intent, but this sounds incredibly patronizing.
Maybe there are a million such people around, but apparently its very hard to find them.
His title at the company is Founder and _Chief Engineer_
https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
And the many many many other people actually conceiving the engines/rockets/&c.
What does this mean?
Thats 6 of 33 engines out, or 18.18%. Incredible it was still accelerating upwards
Starship is unique in that it has so many engines, which add redundancy. They can (re)start engines mid-flight.
With the loss of 5 engines, this demo flight would have been fine. Though they will have some work to do on reliability.
video with timestamp
But it might also have been manual intervention.
As far as I know SpaceX has not launched in the traditional way since Falcon 1 and I am sure that they would never launch Starship that way.
So much success, the fact that it got off the ground and is providing tonnes of data to ground control.
Agile rocket building ftw.
Waterfall of propellant-falling
The double speak is funny though:
> SpaceX call this a rapid unscheduled disassembly
What would a regularly-paced scheduled disassembly look like?
From the video it looks like the stages failed to separate and the rocket started tumbling. I'd expect the range safety officer to trigger the self-destruct at that point which would make the explosion newly scheduled rather than unscheduled.
SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time.
Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve success, but they will have a bigger, better launch system that's fully reusable and costs orders of magnitude less per launch.
"Fail fast" applies to more than just software.
NASA has to do everything in the public eye and their process reflects this. Private enterprise is allowed to hide information, which implies they are allowed to massage information.
(... this probably says unfortunate things about the nature of governance by public sentiment that it's best not to think about over-much if one is super-fond of democracies as engines of progress...)
That would be a good point if we were talking about NASA vs Blue Origin. But SpaceX is arguably building more in the open than NASA.
The person I replied to was making the case that NASA can't take risks because they develop in the open whereas private companies can develop in hiding, so they can take more risks.
But a quick glance on reddit, nasaspaceflight, and youtube tells me that SpaceX is very much developing in the open, and to a greater extent than NASA.
Which means that there is some other reason why SpaceX feels more free to take risks than NASA.
In contrast, Blue Origin is famous for not disclosing almost any information to the public. For a long time Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA, was the one providing the most public information on Blue Origin's BE-4 engines.
Not everything is there, but enough to get a very decent picture of what's going on. Sometimes relevant information takes YEARS to be published.
But it's not easy to find. I've had to directly email people sometimes. Sometimes stuff is classified for no good reason other than someone thought at one point that a particular program was dual-use (commercial/military). Sometimes you DO have to file FOIA agreements.
I'm completely not coming down on anyone for not spending their time doing this. It takes a fair amount of time to piece things together from spreadsheets and contract addenda.
But it is possible.
What SpaceX does is they make it easy to see what they're doing. They upload videos to YouTube and Shotwell speaks at events and conferences from time to time. But you are getting their side of the story. Every now and again Casey Dreier over at the Planetary Society will dig up some previously difficult to find nugget of information about how various programs are being funded and exactly what they're being funded for. But Dreier's job is to focus more on planetary exploration missions rather than aerospace development, so I don't think he's focusing on SpaceX, SLS and Blue Origin.
The SLS has spent 23.8 billion in nominal dollars so far. SpaceX has received about 9.8 Billion total investment, which puts an upper limit on operating losses.
I don't follow your NASA example though. We know the NASA/government spend amount for the SLS (23.8 billion). We don't need to speculate on if there is double counting of government spend and contractor spend.
With that, they developed Falcon 1, Merlin engines, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, first full-flow staged combustion engine in the methalox Raptor engine, Starship, Starship Heavy, Dragon, Crew Dragon, Re-usability, Starlink satellite manufacturing and 4,000 satellites launched to orbit, and quite a bit more.
Rocket specialists know this is part for the course, but most of the public isn't rocket specialists.
In congress, maybe about 25% of them can't be bothered to remember what state they're from. They don't really matter as they'll pretty much vote however the last person to talk to them wants them to vote. This is why congressional legislative directors try to schedule appointments immediately before their congress-person votes.
About 10% of congress-people are SUPER sharp and will understand this whole "you have to break eggs to make an omelet" concept. 50% more could be educated. The remainder will act randomly depending on what the internal polling says.
SSL and Boeing and the old school guys know a critical part of their job is to lobby congress-persons and staffers. They're not paying them off, they're just making campaign contributions to ensure they get access to pitch their side of the story.
As for the modal American voter? They don't care about space. They care about whether they're getting a raise next year, the mortgage is paid and inflation doesn't price them out of a good meal every now and again. When they get economic security, THEN they start caring about other things like who goes in what bathroom, why they can't buy TANG or light-bulbs at the grocery store anymore or whether they're getting value for money in their national space program.
My gut feeling after doing polling for a few years is the numbers are about the same: 25% of American voters can't tie their shoe-laces, 10% will understand you sometimes fail when you try to do something innovative and the remainder will need some convincing.
The good news is (effectively) no-one in the US looks at national budgets. Heck, most congressional staffers never read the whole thing, just the bits they're interested in. Many (most?) voters (and congress-persons) look to membership organizations for direction. If someone is a member of the Planetary Society, and they happen to be chatting w/ their elected representative, you can be pretty sure they'll mention how important the space program is. If someone is a member of Drunk Middle-Aged Regressive Science Haters of America, you can probably guess what they think about anything with the pong of science about it. Fortunately, this latter class of Americans usually doesn't know who their congress-person is or that they have a congressional representative.
So... to make an already long post short... I don't think you have to convince EVERYBODY, just the people that matter. The message that "it's okay to fail from time to time as long as you're making substantial forward progress" is something at least half of the people who affect US budget priorities can get their brainstems around.
[And as an aside... having worked with US congress-people in the past, I can report they're frequently much smarter than you give them credit for. And you don't get to be a Legislative Director in a congressional staff without being reasonably sharp. But they do worry about how large donors will respond to their votes. We're entering a phase of debt-ceiling debates. The GOP controls congress at the moment and we'll see a lot of wheeling and/or dealing. It's quite telling to see what each party thinks is important. Biden seems to have invested a small portion of personal reputation in the SLS, probably because of it's history over the Obama administration. Despite it's actual benefits, various GOP members may use that to rail against it (SLS) as a proxy for railing against Biden. (I'm trying to avoid being partisan here, some Dems railed against the Constellation program during the Bush years, so I'm not saying it's ONLY something the GOP does. It's just the typical railing against the other party to try and fire up your base so you don't have to explain why you didn't follow-through on your campaign promises.) ...
Today's rocket was a byproduct of what they're actually working on, so it's hard to pin a price on it. I'd guess a few million dollars in engines, and a few hundred thousand in steel? This is all stuff they would've needed to find a way to dispose of anyway; the next booster in line (B9) already has hundreds of improvements. Among these are improvements to thrust vector control and engine shielding, both of which were involved in the issues with today's flight.
I'm sure they're not just dumping 2.9B in Elon's bank account (I mean... if they did he would just buy back all the Tesla stock) but there are a series of milestones that need to be met for the government to release the next chunk of funds. I don't know if NASA published the exact milestones, but maybe "not exploding on the launch-pad" was enough to release the next block of funds.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-starship-ro...
By comparison, Falcon Heavy costs about $62M per launch, but Gwynne Shotwell predicted they can shave 40% off that price tag when they start re-using heavies.
https://spacedotbiz.substack.com/p/is-starship-really-going-...
But Elon has supposedly said the TDC (total development cost) of the Starship is projected to be 2-10 billion. [I found this at the Daily Mail website, so take it with as large a grain of salt as you wish.]
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11994755/Wha...
If it costs $10B to build one and $10M per launch and you get 10 launches per vehicle, that's $1.1B per launch if you amortize the development costs. But if it takes $2B to build one and $2M per launch and you get 10 launches, then it's only $220M per launch. But if you build five operational starships that each have 10 launches each, things start to get downright affordable.
So if the question is how much has SpaceX spent on the Starship to date? I don't know that's public info. If the question is how much will they spend on development, the answer is $2B-$10B (though that's from the Daily Mail.) If the question is how much will each launch cost (including amortizing development costs)? It could be as cheap as $42M. Or depending on how much of the $2.9B from NASA they're able to apply to previous development costs... who knows!? They could make $1.6M per launch as long as the GSA doesn't audit them too closely.
There's a myth in US government purchasing that competition drives costs down, and that's probably true for commodities. But Starship class super-heavy-launch vehicles aren't commodities. There's a TREMENDOUS amount of cost (both opportunity cost and dollars) associated with fiscal oversight of large projects. The hope has always been that when Blue Origin built something to compete, it would bring total costs down. I am skeptical.
The design targets 10$/kg to orbit.
If you hang the entire R&D plus materials cost for Starship on this one launch, it's a huge amount.
If you consider this as R&D that will be amortized over decades of launches, not that much.
It's the same math that gets you the military buying $5000 hammers: it all depends how you allocate fixed costs across units.
I expect their math was something like:
95% chance of enough engines lighting to launch 90% chance of clearing launch pad 60% chance of making 60 seconds of flight 30% chance of 2nd stage separation 15% chance of re-entry
> Unusually, the ejection system was tested with live bears and chimpanzees; it was qualified for use during 1963 and a bear became the first living being to survive a supersonic ejection.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0TVr0_m34s
If you're talking about the launch escape tower, that's for during launch. It's gone by the time you reach orbit, leaving you in the same scenario of Lunar Starship in the event of a failure; in space, but no way to get down.
There is a section about Space Shuttle's crew bailout at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes
Before the "Ejection escape systems" there are a few paragraphs about "inflight crew escape system"
> The vehicle was put in a stable glide on autopilot, the hatch was blown, and the crew slid out a pole to clear the orbiter's left wing. They would then parachute to earth or the sea
But 100 people is a different matter IMHO.
Ejections seats and capsule were not pursued, the Wikipedia page explains the reasons.
Airliners don't have an in-flight escape system, anyways.
Right now we don’t even have that many astronauts.
The booster presumably like you will have been thrown into the ocean. Very wasteful system.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes#Tran...
"Preparations of TAL sites took four to five days and began one week before launch, with the majority of personnel from NASA, the Department of Defense and contractors arriving 48 hours before launch. Additionally, two C-130 aircraft from the space flight support office from the adjacent Patrick Space Force Base (then known as Patrick Air Force Base) would deliver eight crew members, nine pararescuers, two flight surgeons, a nurse and medical technician, and 2,500 pounds (1,100 kg) of medical equipment to Zaragoza, Istres, or both. One or more C-21S or C-12S aircraft would also be deployed to provide weather reconnaissance in the event of an abort with a TALCOM, or astronaut flight controller aboard for communications with the shuttle pilot and commander."
If you look through all the failures and close calls in aerospace they are often rooted in human psychological errors. The pressures that lead to them may change with different organizations, but they don't go away.
Keeping it brief SpaceX/engineer is genuinely trying to get people to Mars, largely driven by ideological reasons with extensive technical creativity/competence backing them up. Accountant/Boeing wants to make more money. Outsource our software development to guys in India bidding $9/hour? Awesome! That's another 0.037% profit, what could go wrong!? Something doesn't work? Who cares!? We're on a cost+ contract baby, what you call "failure to deliver", I call delivering value to my shareholders!
And then there's the politician. In this particular case, he's not only a life long politician but also 80 years old on top. The only 'bright side' is that, due to his political influence, he's gone to space before. On the other hand Charles Bolden was a genuine astronaut and absolutely everything one would think they would want from a NASA head, yet he was a miserable failure. It may simply be that political style leadership (even when not a politician) isn't really conducive to meaningful progress in modern times.
I'd argue the incentive wasn't there until CCP. That was the fundamental difference in the last 20 years. Without CCP, I don't think SpaceX would be successful, either. But I will say they've done much more than the Boeing at executing on that incentive.
I do think you may be overly cynical in your characterization, though. It wasn't too many years ago that Boeing was listed as the most desirable company to work for by college students. The reason isn't that they thought it was because they couldn't wait to gouge the public coffers, it was because aerospace has always been considered a sexy engineering discipline. You'll almost never find a civil engineering firm on those lists because "roads and commodes" just aren't considered cool.
Back to the question, I'll weigh in with my perspective. They are all responding to incentives, albeit different ones. But we have to acknowledge the downsides of each. SpaceX is awesome, but they aren't without their own psychological pressures and biases. I've brought it up elsewhere in this thread, but they have wanted to rapidly iterate rather than fundamentally understand some of their design issues. I suspect this is partly cultural (where operational tempo matters more than scientific rigor...i.e., "we don't need to know why it works, as long as it works") and some of it is business (i.e., they have specific contractual deadlines to consider). Those are also some of the issues that lead to mishaps dating back to Apollo and Shuttle.
Considering you seem to think the legacy downsides are due to the business/shareholder side, do you see the same issues encroaching on SpaceX if they go public?
The point I'd make is that leadership really matters. Boeing, at its peak, almost certainly had orders of magnitude more talent than SpaceX did in its early years - in no small part because of what you mentioned. And they absolutely had many orders of magnitude more money and access to funding. But their leadership was just absolutely abysmal, and consequently the potential of that talent was left completely untapped.
But on the other hand, like you mentioned there are incentive problems. Even though Boeing failed to tap into their potential, their stock price has been constantly and steadily going up for decades. Even their planes literally falling out of the skies was but a brief stumble, the damage there largely repaired owing to the start of a profitable new war. So in this regard I doubt their leadership is particularly disappointed with their results. They achieved what they set out to do after all. And that's pretty disappointing.
I wholeheartedly agree. You're probably aware, but there have been a number of good write-ups detailing an overall erosion of engineering leadership at Boeing [1].
>Elon has stated that he will not be taking SpaceX public until transit between Earth and Mars is well established.
I think maybe the difference between you and me is that I take many of Musk's promises with a boulder of salt. If I was a gambler, I'd bet that we see some wordsmithing about what the definition of a "well established Mars transit" when it comes time for an IPO.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/how-boeing...
You say this with seeming knowledge of the thoroughness of SpaceX's failure investigations. Care to elaborate how you can say this with such authority?
NASA is about making doing right the first time though careful design.
For SpaceX approach to work, they need to test a lot, with a lot of explosions, so they need to make a lot of rockets, they also need repeatability. That's why they are using assembly lines and mass production techniques.
Which approach is the best, I don't know. The traditionally designed Delta IV never failed, but on the other hand, we lost two Space Shuttles and their crews. As for the Falcon 9, it had a couple of failed missions, but it has proven very reliable over time.
That said, I do agree about the flip maneuver. I am very interested to see how that evolves.
I would think weight of fuel required to land booster + legs + steering fins would be much greater than a parachute or two and a water landing. That weight savings would be a cost savings as well as more payload that could be lifted (also a cost savings).
Would the booster be destroyed landing in the ocean by parachute?
Edit: What would an unsuccessful test look like then?
Quote is towards the end, but the whole vid is worth a watch.
https://youtu.be/C1KT8PS6Zs4
https://www.calbreed.com/
http://heroicrelics.org/info/all-up/all-up-flight-testing.ht...
I think this could have been more successful
sidibe: “I think this could have been more successful”
:)
SpaceX said their goal was to get off the launch pad going into this, which indeed may have been setting a low bar for success. However, there is no other alternative definition.
If you are tasked with recording X, and anything else beyond is bonus, doing X is success.
The main goal here was to clear the pad and get some atmospheric experience with the entire stack. Goal met. But of course they had contingency plans to get as much more experience with it as possible, if things continued to function nominally (as they have with some rovers, or indeed some previous first SpaceX test flights, like the Falcon Heavy).
Btw this isn’t moving the goalposts. Clearing the launch tower was always the success criterion; the rest is gravy.
What would be a failure is if the next one has the same problem.
That seems like such a low bar? One wonders if the engineers/management at SpaceX cringed when he said that.
StarShip is so huge and the reuse will be so cheap that it's going to be 100x or more cheaper. We could send heavy equipment into space and on to other planets that just didn't make sense before.
Once Starship can land 100 tons on the moon, the question isn't "what can we fit" but "how do we fill all this capacity usefully?!" So the science objectives we can achieve grow enormously.
Also, yes: larger space telescopes. And eventually,manned missions to Mars.
These sorts of statements are infuriating. You're dropping all of the context of past achievements (budget, political will, design goals, need, etc) and then castigating modern engineers.
The SR-71, X-15, and Saturn V achieved their design goals. There's no modern need to go back and re-achieve those goals.
The SR-71 is an amazing plane. When it was originally built there was a need for a reconnaissance plane that could fly high enough and fast enough to evade Soviet high altitude air defense systems. In the intervening years reconnaissance satellites have obviated that need. Outside of a few other tasks there's not much need for a Mach 3+ manned aircraft. Even for the tasks where one is useful the SR-71 still exists. That's not to say a replacement couldn't be built today. In fact many believe one exists in the form of the rumored Aurora.
It's just ridiculous to make assertions about "no one" being able to accomplish those projects today. If NASA or the DOD put out an RFP and had a budget for a modern X-15 it could definitely be built.
edit: Never mind, it's slightly less – see the comment below correcting me. The SLS program has 40, not 34, RS-25's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25#Space_Shuttle_program ("contract extension to manufacture 18 additional RS-25 engines, with associated services, for $1.79 billion")
And that doesn't count the 2nd stage which, for 10 flights, should be 3 * 1 + 7 * 4 = 31 RL-10s.
But yeah - a very different architecture.
That sounds logical, but isn't really a thing in aerospace/space. Complicated high-energy systems have thousands of failure points. So to have any chance of success each failure point needs to be engineered below, by way of example, a 0.0001% chance of failure. That costs lots of money. But say one decides to accept more risk for less cost. Ok. So you switch from 0.0001 to 0.001 failure rates. You risk is now 10-fold higher at each failure point, but with thousands of failure points adding up you are now essentially doomed. And you haven't saved anything. The cost of 0.001 components isn't fundamentally different than the 0.0001 components were. SpaceX can save money though different business practices, by trimming people/money/contracts/compliance and such, but if you look at their rockets they are not fundamentally any less-perfect than anyone else's. They cannot afford to be. This is why rocket failures, like aircraft failures, are taken so seriously. There is an extremely fine line between "works ever time" and "never worked twice" with very little money to be saved between the two.
Across many areas, risk-v-cost math never really happens. It is either go or no go. Take CPU production. Intel spends billions at each of hundreds of fabrication step to push down miniscule error rates because any of a million errors can destroy a chip. There is no money to be saved by allowing any one process to become less than as perfect as it can possibly be. A detected slip from 0.0001 to 0.001 at any step would result in an entire fab being shut down in order to diagnose the problem. The marginal savings of a less-than-perfect process isn't worth the exponential increase in the risk of total system failure.
And you can look all the way back to their little hopper version of the Falcon 9 and see that this strategy has been the key to them undercutting the launch market significantly.
My prediction: SpaceX will have a 5th 100% successful launch of Starship before the SLS has a 5th successful launch. They'll just have ten not-100%-success launches before then.
I'm not the best way to frame this is "first one to a single successful launch". Reliability matters when you're dealing with high-risk scenarios, so a better measure is "probability of a given launch being successful".
Lots of falcons failed, but you don't see anybody worried about their payload or crew on Falcon 9 these days.
I agree with the first part, but the second half extrapolates too far IMO. One successful launch tells us very little about operational reliability.
From an outcome perspective, it's hard to ever see the lower launch rate dominating from any perspective.
You don't have economies of manufacturing scale, because your assembly rate is so low it doesn't make sense not to treat each as exquisite.
You don't have rapid iteration on manufacturing improvements, because the tyranny of safety checks on manufacturing time balloons {time from fix to flight}, after a proposed fix is identified.
And most importantly, you leave yourselves extremely vulnerable to unknown-unknowns, that you can't imagine in the design phase.
For example, if NASA had been launching the shuttle more rapidly, with the bulk of those being uncrewed launches, they probably would have picked an uncrewed launch to test expanding the temperature bounds at Cape Canaveral, and Challenger would have exploded without a crew.
As was, NASA's shuttle launches were so rare that there wasn't acceptable launch rate and weren't low-impact launch opportunities to do so. So they tested it on a crewed mission with disastrous results.
Point being: they backed themselves into a low-volume/high-risk corner of their own strategic design
SpaceX's most brilliant achievement was using Starlink to artificially boost launch demand and give them a minimally-profitable/break-even place to sink higher-risk launches.
>You don't have rapid iteration on manufacturing improvements, because the tyranny of safety checks on manufacturing time balloons
Rapid iterations has obvious benefits. But there are also downsides because it makes it harder to arrive at a stable, reliable design, it introduces vendor issues, etc. Tesla is also known for iterating faster compared to their major competitors but it has resulted in logistics and reliability issues.
IMO SpaceX's most brilliant achievement was leveraging govt contracts to work out the kinks of their designs, which could then be leveraged at a lower risk for Starlink. In effect, they let the public take the burden of the risk (because the govt is really the only entity capable of shouldering that size of a risk for an unproven quantity) and then transitioned to a private means of revenue in Starlink. (I'm not saying that as a slight btw, I think it's mutually beneficial).
SpaceX's strategy for the Falcon 9 worked and it's one of the most reliable rockets in the world, flying the most often.
You're focused on the wrong takeaway. You're making this about a person, I'm talking about a process. I used Tesla because it's easy to see how one culture translates to the other. Insert any company that uses rapid iteration in place of Tesla if you prefer.
The point is that there are certain circumstances where rapid iteration is useful and others less so. When reliability matters, rapid iteration may be working against you. (It's a continuum, of course, so the real question is where is that tipping point)
>SpaceX's strategy for the Falcon 9 worked
The point I'm driving at is there is a distinction to be made when finding out why certain iterations didn't work vs. just changing the design without fully understanding the failure mechanisms of the first. One leads to a greater understanding than the other. It's a difference in an engineers mindset and a scientists mindset.
You are driving at a point by pretending there's some important difference because "in this industry".
It's the same industry. Building the same type of product. By the same company.
Now go look at the history of Shuttle for the equivalent number of launches at that risk level. Would you claim they are equivalent in terms of human-rated safety?
If not, it’s only because you have the benefit of knowing the long-tail probabilities with the Shuttle.
>It's the same industry. Building the same type of product.
By extension of your logic, Starship should then already have the same launch reliability as F9. So either this is an example of a low-probability event, or your logic is flawed.
True, few of those F9 missions were crewed, but that's the point. There's no difference between a crewed and a noncrewed F9 launch vehicle, so there's no reason to think the presence of humans would change the risk. So, you get to accumulate most of that reliability data without putting people at risk doing so.
Because the nature of the two programs was fundamentally different. The Shuttle was a product contract, while CCP is a service contract. On the former, the govt has much more control, and will detail more rigorous acceptance criteria. This generally gives a much higher pedigree on quality control. On the latter, they take a much more hands off approach and have limited insight.
As an analogy, imagine you are making a big bet on acquiring a software company. One company gives you their source code, shows you all their most recent static analysis, unit test results, allows you to interview their programmers etc. The other company allows you none of that, but gives you a chance to play around on their website to see for yourself. Both systems seem to work when you try the end product, but which do you have higher confidence in?
At the end of the day, "reliability" is just a measure of how much confidence we have that a product will do what we ask of it, when we ask.
I'm not saying you can get by without thinking, but it's difficult for humans to estimate the reliability of a complicated system. Reality, though, has no problem doing it.
Plus, I think your analogy is flawed. NASA surely has a more hands-off approach on the CCP than on the Shuttle, but to say it's hands-off is misleading. They do have a lot of access.
Take the example of the F9 strut failure. They could have tested the material outside of the final test configuration and saved themselves a lot of trouble. They chose to forego that testing, and instead 'tested ' it as part of part of their launch configuration. (I put it in quotes because it's not clear to me that this was a conscious testing decision).
There’s also a difference between “we’re not completely sure of the fundamental principles, but our testing indicates it works” and “our testing indicates it works and we have a solid understanding why”. The latter allows you to know the limits of your application much more readily. The risk in the former is that you don’t know what you don’t know, so you can never be wholly sure if you’re good or lucky. And luck can be fickle. And this is also where rapid iteration can lead to issues: the more you change, the less sure you can be about whether your results are attributable to luck.
>Plus, I think your analogy is flawed. NASA surely has a more hands-off approach on the CCP than on the Shuttle, but to say it's hands-off is misleading. They do have a lot of access.
They have many engineers who want more access and are effectively told to back off because it's not their place in this type of contract. So I'm not saying they have no access, I'm saying they have very limited access by comparison. It would have been better if I made the analogy that they get the results to a small select number of tests, but not all.
Because they knew they had to "get it right" the first time because a bunch of buffoons(congress) would consider any crash or explosion as a failure and pull funds immediately.
That’s not the way the CCP contracting works.
It's the X-origin vs Slope issue - steeper slope always wins.
The problem is maintaining that aggressive problem-seeking culture after long periods of success
As an example, they had issues with failures related to their COPVs rupturing. On the one hand, they addressed the problem by redesigning their system. On the other, they never really investigated fully why the COPVs were failing in the first place. Instead, NASA decided to fund that investigation on their own. One possible consequence is that their redesign didn't fully address the risk because they never fully investigated the root cause.
I'm not asking as a 'gotcha' question, I'm acknowledging that the sample size matters. A lot of these statistics are bandied about without really elaborating on the full context of the way reliability is actually measured in industry.
Without checking for the most up-to-date numbers, I believe the F9 is slightly better than Soyuz on raw numbers (successful flights / total attempted). But Soyuz probably has around 6-7x more flights, meaning we have much more confidence that the Soyuz numbers accurately reflect reality.
A new vehicle will always be unproven. But one that's flown 5 times in testing (4 of them unsuccessfully) before its first flight will have had more flight time on most of its systems than something like the SLS where you take 10 years to think about what could go wrong and then do one test launch and call it good.
Having said that I do think propulsive landing for crewed vehicles is pretty scary. F9 firsts stage landings have been pretty reliable for a while, and they now have several boosters with 10 or more flights, so we’ll see. It’s not like capsule landings are 100% safe either.
There has been over 140 crewed launches. For context, you seem to be counting both test/demo, crewed, and uncrewed F9 launches. Again, I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but there's probably ~10 crewed F9 launches, so it's an order magnitude difference using the same metric. It's gets better though, when comparing total launches.
Not that many options for landing something that size on Mars. That’s what’s really driving many of the design choices.
It does though. During the development process. SpaceX will do five launches with lower reliability vehicles before the big launch providers will even do a single launch, and those five will have be cheaper in total. Of course, they aren't putting essential cargo (or god forbid people) on these higher risk test flights. By the time they're doing that they have developed certainty in the design.
A number of Tesla-related deaths can be attributed to Autopilot malfunction. Real people - really dead.
Except Tesla, unlike SpaceX, is willing to put passengers in its test vehicles. The SpaceX approach would be to let a bunch of FSD Teslas crash into things and each other before giving them payloads.
Citation needed. Not Tesla's "stats" that if the people compiling them completed anything more than high school statistics are intensely misleading.
Comparing a subset of miles driven on the simplest and easiest roads (because the systems can't be used and are turned off) and comparing to accident stats across ALL roads is disingenuous to the extreme, and Tesla continues to tout it.
Short of pulling over, humans don't have the opportunity to say "let's disengage, because it's a bit challenging", and then not have to worry about "counting" any accidents from there forward.
Why? If you're launching people I see why you want near-perfect, but if you're launching something with a low replacement cost (ex: getting fuel to orbit to support other projects) it seems to me that as volumes get large enough eventually "use lower quality and accept a slightly higher probability of failure" starts to be cost effective.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_Ag_Cat
Your comments in this thread all go against the development approach of that rocket— Falcon9 is a stable platform now as it is used in production. In the development phase there were tons of explosions. This all happened in the past.
Is unarguably cheaper to forgo the additional testing and cost required for human flight.
But this is totally false. There are entirely different standards applied if you want to design an aircraft for commercial airline passenger transport vs for general aviation. There are entirely different requirements for instrumentation reliability if you're building a day-VFR aircraft vs one that is allowed to fly in instrument conditions. And there are entirely different requirements for aircraft that you sell to the public vs ones that you build yourself.
The aviation side is full of examples of exactly the sliding scale you're saying doesn't exist.
Of course there is. The famous example is radiation hardening. SpaceX opted for redundancy instead. Not only cheaper, but more modern, too.
> in such as complex high-energy environment, there is no money to be saved by building less-than-perfect machines
SpaceX has launched zero humans. (EDIT: Totally wrong!) It aims to, so target reliability is high. (I would argue their track record in production is a product of their willingness to push the envelope in tests.) But there is a large market for cheap, if unreliable, launches. Because there is an emerging market of cheap satellite makers.
It is the only US entity with the capability to do so.
Sorry, had a brain fart, no idea how I typed that out.
SpaceX does not have a difference in intended reliability, or a difference in design reliability. (At least for the rocket as a whole. One could argue that 33 engines allows lower engine reliability through redundancy)
What they DO have is a significant difference in prototype reliability for live launch. This is clear when you look at their launch history.
I don't think that is accurate. There is a difference between 9%, 99%, and 99.999% confidence of success going into a launch.
You can almost always delay builds and launces to run more simulations, tests, and studies and increase confidence.
A simple example is SpaceX could have chosen to wait until they had a booster test with 100% engine ignition before moving on a full launch. Instead they choose move forward anyways without more stationary booster testing.
substitute rocket and spaceflight with airplane and flight and see how that sounds
Yes ultralights have some regulations, but even general aviation has less regulations resulting in cheaper aircraft, to say nothing of ultralights.
I saw in another comment that each SLS launch costs $2B. Do you think SpaceX spent $2B on this launch? I find it hard to believe.
Indeed, if we assume that the each launch is an IID binomial coin flip (which isn’t really the right way to evaluate right-censored data), and observe (by reading Wikipedia) that SpaceX has had at least 450 successful Falcon 9 launches since the last in-flight failure, then they have at least five nines of reliability:
0.999995^450 ~= 449/450.
Which appears to be an industry-leading stat.
For context (excluding the Columbia re-entry failure), the space shuttle only had 4 nines:
0.99994^125 ~= 124/125
They have greatly benefited from being able to use modern tools and seen where other systems failed. Many rocket companies have failed when trying to go fast and break things because it isn’t an easy shortcut. Instead SpaceX has used the normal approach used by other successful organizations and simply executed it well.
Really? I make is 189 successful F9 launches since the last issue in 2018 (there's a couple of landing failures, but given that everyone else apart from the space shuttle has a 100% loss...)
If you look at the "finished product" of block 5 that makes 162 launches and zero failures.
That's reliability far beyond any other launch system, including the space shuttle and Ariane 5 which are the only ones to come close in numbers of launches. Ariane 5 is certainly a reliable system as far as spaceflight goes, but it flies 3 times a year, Falcon 9 flies 3 times a month
These systems all are quite good, and they have tended to get better over time.
Landing the shuttle is like landing the Dragon Crew capsule. SpaceX landed the booster, where shuttles ditch theirs into the ocean.
So even shuttles have a pretty high loss rate :)
They got great publicity from it, but landing vertically is a major compromise.
Falcon 9 has the record for most consecutive successful orbital launches. Their last failure was AMOS-6 in September of 2016. Since then they've had 189 successful launches in a row.[1] In that same time Soyuz has had 113 launches with 3 failures. Soyuz's longest success streak was 100 launches from 1983 to 1986.[2] The US's Delta II had 100 consecutive successes from 1997 to 2018, though it has since been retired. A total of 155 Delta IIs were launched with 2 failures.
Falcon 9's current successful landing streak of 110 missions exceeds the competition's best launch streak. By any metric one can measure, SpaceX has the most reliable rocket.
1. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He... for the list of launches and outcomes.
2. https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/spacexs-falcon-9-roc...
The actual number of successes vs partial successes vs launch failures vs fatalities are the best data we have. Throwing away any of that data because it makes you look worse isn’t a good idea.
Similarly we needs to understand that there’s a huge difference between risk and what actually happens. People get lucky in Vegas every day, what matters to most of us is the accuracy of the estimate of underlying odds not just the exact outcomes out to seven decimal places.
Current vehicles are vastly different from the originals. What we’re trying to do is predict the probability of the next launch failing. Equally weighting far historicals and recents is bogus statistics.
I thought we were comparing methods. Unless the next payload is yours then the odds of the next launch failing is meaningless to most of us, but we can learn something from the methods used.
But sure, if you have a bet in Vegas or something then feel free try and calculate things as closely as possible. Just understand that several of Soyuz failures didn’t kill the crew so there’s other metrics people might care about.
What does this mean? The question most of us care about is which method resulted in a more reliable rocket. And SpaceX’s track record shines uniquely in that respect. The frequency, moreover, makes the results robust. Legacy rockets like Ariane will never reach that confidence because the likelihood of fluke successes won’t have been minimised when the rocket is retired.
So sure, we can reasonably assume that Starship will get to a state of reliability similar to current Falcon rocket, eventually. We can’t assume the first few commercial Starship launches are going to even approach that level of reliability. And in fact the best point of comparison may be the early days of Falcon 9.
This was a partially successful test nothing more and nothing less. I get people really really think SpaceX had done an excellent job and I don’t disagree but people who are comparing the end result of a long process Aka the current state of falcon 9 with a new system like Starship are going to be disappointed.
Starship is extremely likely to fail repeatedly before achieving anything close to the same streak as the Falcon 9 has. That’s not an issue with SpaceX that’s an inherent aspect of doing something really difficult.
There are other new space companies, but they're just not as good.
I don’t think SpaceX has smarter engineers. I don’t think they even have smarter managers, since many of their executives used to work for NASA and/or traditional aerospace firms (e.g. President+COO Gwynne Shotwell started out in aerospace at a private non-profit research centre doing contract engineering work for the NASA Space Shuttle and the US military space program)
One big difference is Elon Musk at the founding of SpaceX told his executives to take big risks (as in “if this fails we go bankrupt”). I think Tory Bruno at ULA is a great CEO, but no way is Boeing or Lockheed-Martin ever saying to him “we want you to take such big risks that we might go bankrupt if they fail”. He, and all the people under him, are only allowed to take small-to-medium sized risks. But that puts a definite limit on what they can achieve compared to SpaceX whose executives and engineers have the freedom to make much riskier decisions
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Survivor... :)
The Soviets proved that methodology works and SpaceX continues it to this day. I have a feeling most that follow SpaceX think they are trying a new revolutionary approach here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)
They were working with 1960s material science.
They were working with 1960s understanding of rocketry.
Korolev died.
We've come a long way in the last 50+ years, and sometimes you can use materials with substantially higher limits to paper over design risks.
>Adverse characteristics of the large cluster of thirty engines and its complex fuel and oxidizer feeder systems were not revealed earlier in development because static test firings had not been conducted.[9]
They planned and expensed the N1 as if it was another LEO Soyuz variant.
N1 might have simply been before its time.
After they get to orbit they can start putting payloads on board, and the tests will pay for themselves. I’d say the risk of bankruptcy is very low.
Edit: Just saw photos of the crater under stage zero. Looks like they do need a flame diverter lol.
It's totally feasible for them to keep testing and keep refilling that hole while in parallel they build a perfect launch pad with a flame diverter somewhere else. That way they don't have a gap in testing cadence.
Oh yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unapproved_aircraft_part
For example:
The crash of Partnair Flight 394 in 1989 resulted from the installation of counterfeit aircraft parts. Counterfeit bolts, attaching the vertical stabilizer of a Convair CV-580 to the fuselage, wore down excessively, allowing the tail to vibrate to the extent that it eventually broke off.
This happens to aircraft, and the only way to ensure it doesn't happen to rockets is to have extreme control of your supply chain.
Sometimes in aerospace you need to collect data, and sometimes that means explosions.
[0] https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-first-space-launch#:~:....
Triple redundancy is not a thing in general aviation while, for some systems, it is in commercial. That's a risk vs cost calculation.
Semiconductor manufacturers do risk vs cost calculations through the entire development and manufacturing process. Source: I've worked in semiconductor, doing those calculations.
Your authoritative tone doesn't make any sense when Falcon 9 exists and has been actively dominating the entire industry for half a decade.
It seems like a strawman to suggest that you would let failure probability increase by a factor of ten as the first step.
>but with thousands of failure points adding up you are now essentially doomed.
And it was an easy one to tear down.
>And you haven't saved anything. The cost of 0.001 components isn't fundamentally different than the 0.0001 components were.
There is no reason to believe that at all. Invert the question: if a system is 99.999% reliable, does that mean it should be free to make it more reliable? And why?
>It is either go or no go. Take CPU production. Intel spends billions at each of hundreds of fabrication step to push down miniscule error rates because any of a million errors can destroy a chip. There is no money to be saved by allowing any one process to become less than as perfect as it can possibly be.
This is completely wrong. Chip factories do produce chips with defects; those chips are sold for cheaper, since they still work, but not as fast. IIRC most of TSMC's modern processes are designed to sell the good chips at a high price and the bad ones cheaper.
If the failure points are arranged in parallel - X OR Y OR Z must happen to have a successful outcome, with multiple redundant paths to success, your total failure rate is the chance that ALL of X, Y, and Z fail. This is a much lower number than when they are in series.
To use concrete math - say that Starship has 33 raptor engines with a failure rate of 0.01%, 3 grid fins with a failure rate of 0.05%, and a fuel tank with a failure rate of 0.001%. If it's engineered so that all 33 raptor engines, all 3 grid fins, and the fuel tank all need to work for a successful launch, the success rate of the whole system = 0.9999^33 * 0.9995^3 * 0.99999 = 0.9952 = ~0.5% chance of failure. If it's engineered so that it can get to orbit on 28 out of the 33 raptor engines, 2 out of the 3 grid fins, and there is a double-hull to the fuel tank with a failure rate of 0.005%, then the chance of failure for each subsystem is 0.0001^5 = 10^-20, 0.0005^2 = 2.5 * 10^-7, and 0.00001 * 0.00005 = 5 * 10^-10, and when you multiply out those subsystem failure rates you get 1 - (1 - 10^-20) * (1 - 2.510^-7) * (1 - 510^-10) = 0.9999997495 = ~0.000025% chance of failure.
Moreover, lets look what happens if you take the multiply-redundant design above and then increase the chance of failure of each component 100x. Raptor engines are now 99% reliable, grid fins are now 95% reliable, and fuel tanks are now 99.9% reliable. The overall failure rate for each subsystem becomes 0.01^5 = 10^-10, 0.05^2 = 2.5 * 10^-3 and 0.001 * 0.005 = 0.000005. When you multiply out those subsystem failure rates you get 1 - (1 - 10^-10) * (1 - 2.510^-3) * (1 - 510^-6) = 0.00250498759 = ~0.2% chance of failure. The multiply-redundant system, even with component failure rates 100x higher, still has better reliability than the perfectly-engineered system where every component must perform exactly to spec.
This principle is used all the time in practical engineering. It's why Google builds server farms out of thousands of commodity PCs, hooked up in primary/replica clusters with replication and transparent failover. It's why ships have watertight compartments and double-hulls. It's why passenger jets have multiple engines, multiple hydraulic control systems, and multiple flight computers. Any engineer worth their salt is going to avoid SPOFs and assume that components will fail, then build redundancies into the design so that a partial failure does not endanger overall mission success.
exactly. optimizing for an acceptable risk for space launches, esp space travel, seems still to be leading to $2B launches. at which point, what's the difference?
Our ex ante ability to estimate these probabilities is lacking. Especially when they’re coupled. And redundancy, instead of tighter tolerances, is often cheaper than the classic approach. These are proven lessons from SpaceX.
So SLS does a LOT of analysis and manages to find and rectify failure points prior to flight. They pay a lot in analysis and inflexible design to do this.
SpaceX does some analysis, but then flies to confirm the analysis early. That way they identify actual failure points and can use sensors to see how close they got to failure.
For instance today I'm sure they learnt a lot from each failed engine, parts on the booster that stopped working, detailed telemetry on ship behavior on flight and sensors for the non-separation of booster from ship.
SpaceX builds to the same high tolerances as other rocket manufacturers, but they don't try to avoid testing through overly rigorous analysis. They also don't gold-plate their manufacturing, instead making tradeoffs to allow cheaper volume production with recovery instead.
Yes, but let's not take the analogy too far. For people who work in safety-critical design (including software), it takes a different mindset than what is often prevalent in silicon valley. When the stakes are high, you don't really want to "move fast and break things".
You can actually see this in SpaceX. In development when stakes are relatively low (e.g., no payload or passengers), the risk threshold is high. But they start taking a more measured approach when that risk starts to ratchet up. The danger being, advocates of one approach don't always know when/how to transition to the other.
For the real launch they've already mapped out the failure modes and are able to prevent them when it really matters.
One small BS detector is when there's some unplanned/unmitigated test outcome that gets characterized as a "test anomaly" rather than being transparent about the details.
>they've already mapped out the failure modes and are able to prevent them when it really matters
This remains to be seen. The shuttle also had all their failure modes mapped out. As did CST-100. Yet massive failures still occurred.
Mercury and Gemini both had good track records. Apollo and Shuttle, not so much.
Put differently, how much would you be willing to bet that their FMEA has caught literally every failure mode possible?
Regarding the foam, they had a difficult time even recreating it after the fact. It was apparently only on a lark that they decided to turn the gun up to 11 and, viola, now the foam had the physical properties capable of damaging the tile catastrophically. So, yes, they knew the mechanism of foam shedding but did not realize the effect properly.
With the o-rings, they similarly just didn’t have the test data for this conditions. They incorrectly extrapolated on the test data they did have.
Put another way, what would global exploration have looked like if sailors refused to accept the risks of early ocean crossings?
What you don't want is a culture that is either a) afraid to take any risk because they are afraid of career consequences or b) willing to roll the dice with bad decision processes due to biases and bad incentives.
Example for a): bureaucrats who are unwilling to push the envelope because a bad outcome would effectively end their career
Example for b): making high-risk decisions due cost/schedule pressure, like competition for a contract
There is no consummate economic incentive for being an astronaut. The incentive is the experience and making some impact on science, and while that motivates many people the probability of attracting the best and the brightest goes down as the probability of exploding goes up.
I'd say there's unlikely to be enough of an economic incentive to justify riskier manned space travel until the earth becomes a whole lot less habitable.
People volunteer for the military, and I don't think anyone's under any illusion this is risk free. The important thing is not lying to people about the risk involved.
They acknowledged this point, though:
>The incentive is the experience and making some impact on science
I think you might be interpreting their last point differently than me. I took it to mean that the "Mars or bust" is an inspiring, but impractical, narrative.
This corroborates "fail fast". They achieve reliability and safety by launching far more than traditional space companies and seeing failure in those launches. They prove it out before adding the risk of human lives or expensive cargo. Meanwhile traditional companies will develop their rocket for 15 years till it's "perfect". SpaceX figured out that achieving perfection is best done through actual attempts, not laboratory experiments.
But it also shows "fail slow" later. My point is that "fail fast" is not some hard rule to abide by, but contextually dependent on the risk at stake.
Take their example of a failed F9 strut, where the material supplied by a vendor didn't come close to meeting the necessary specs. A mature aersopace company would have processes in place to check the material for these specs before use. SpaceX has since levied these new process checks, but prior to that failure lots people may have pointed to them as being more efficient because of their 'streamlined' process.
If you don't know what you don't know, you must find out.
Framed this way, I'm not surprised younger Elon's company missed it.
It would have been much more economical to test a coupon of the material upon receipt, like what is considered standard practice throughout aerospace companies. Or, like you said, you can blow up a rocket and launch pad instead. Same result, different risk profiles.
The question is how you transition from the state of not knowing to knowing.
If you have poor processes and a lack of knoledge, how do you get better?
In this specific instance, the root cause analysis and remediation are vastly more complicated that presented in this thread. It is not like SpaceX wasnt doing testing on incoming materials at all or ignorant of the concept.
Regarding knowing if you have a poor process or not, it depends on the uniqueness of your problem. For proteins that are relatively common, like material checks, you can shorten your learning process by looking at other organizations that have been through it for decades. For more exotic non-standard problems, you might have to learn the hard way.
Would a "mature aerospace company" also know to not use O-rings outside the temperature range specified by its engineers? Or know to test whether foam traveling at high velocity would penetrate the TPS?
Look, this is hard stuff. It's very easy to tell when you screw up, but very difficult to tell how close you are to screwing up. You're deluding yourself if you think some entities are immune to screwing up just because they've been around.
The difference is I don’t allow “gosh, space is hard!” as a rationale for thinking one organization is immune to those shortcomings. So instead of taking a look and asking something like, “Hmmm. Every other organization seems to have a supplier vetting process for safety critical stuff, I wonder if we should too?” We can instead just pretend we’re smart and different and be forced to learn already solved problems the hard way. The supplier thing is very standard quality control process stuff that transcends industry. Knowing if foam can penetrate tile or o-rings operate out of spec are not, precisely because they were non-standard conditions. That’s not to say that the decisions weren’t flawed, but I don’t think it’s as good of an analogy as you may think. Besides, the investigations largely pointed to broken cultures so I don’t know if that’s the type of company you want SpaceX associated with.
What’s the saying? “A fool learns from his own mistakes. A wise man learns from somebody else’s”
It's good to learn from other people's mistakes, but you also can't let everything people have done before go unchallenged or no progress would ever be made from rockets that cost $2B per launch.
The knee jerk mindset that most people have in safety-critical design, is being ultra conservative.
In the fields of medical and space (and likely others), you have an asymmetrical risk-reward profile. Think about it this way, if an engineer takes a risk on refactoring some software logic, and it speeds the system up 3%, what is their reward? A raise? A promotion? Fat chance. If that refactor instead breaks 3% of the time; engines blow up, people die, customers yell at them, they get fired, perhaps in some situations they even get sued.
The engineers then converge to a local maxima by the means of: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", and various other ultra conservative leanings. This mindset also will often get selected for in hiring, and rewarded.
Now take the limit of this as time goes to infinity, you have bloated, legacy software that is full of spaghetti code and can't take new features easily (if at all). In the case of NASA's space shuttle program, it was extremely expensive, and the cost wasn't falling significantly over time either.
One might view ultra conservatism as the problem, but the real issue is the asymmetrical risk-reward profile. Solving that takes a head-on approach with great leadership, deploying capital, state of the art testing/QA, great deployment pipelines, and more. Shield people from the risk, and intentionally reward people when they push the envelope.
Imagine if you had a software testing process and product specification that was 99.9999% effective (and no, yours is not even close to that), you could then move at a silicon valley "fail fast" pace and advance the technology and architecture rapidly.
I can't personally attest to this but another commenter mentioned that this was what the soviets did as part of a space race with a smaller budget.
You should note that success rate is crucial once you are in production and ready to go - judging overall success against that bar while developing and testing is nonsense.
Finally - I think everyone learns faster by trying more things and making more mistakes? I wouldnt blame you for wanting to see that studied - kind of a neat question after all - but it seems like you are assuming one method or another was picked because it was superior as opposed to a reality of material constraints.
I feel like if NASA had budget for blowing up more rockets to prove/disprove points that they would be doing so. Actually now that I say it out loud I can't imagine anyone choosing 'not rocket'.
Iteration is key here. Nobody is talking about putting a human on Starship until it's quite reliable.
Where in the past, people would be like "OH NO!!" -- but the crew knew how much data they got out of that launch.
I wonder how stripped down the starship was though in an effort to save costs in the event such as this RUD.
I would love a piece of the shrapnel from the exploded device though...
Hopefully they get those pieces and auction them off.
It would be AWESOME if elon included actual fireworks which would go off in the event of a RUD to add some fabulousness to such events.
In fact, all the devices that are stripped out for these test launches should be replaced with their equivalent weights in fireworks. Detonate them when possible during a RUD to allow for more spectacle!
There's something called FTS. Said fireworks were responsible for todays RUD... ;-)
That is what detonated the StarShip today.
You'll find it was notably absent in Soviet rocket tests, for instance with the N1 which veered off course, returned to the ground intact and exploded there instead.
I would be very surprised if Shotwell didn't have an all-hands to set the whole team's expectations beforehand.
Otherwise you get Boeing.
I've have my own version of this more times than I can count.
For me, I run a trading firm and when I started it was "if we can survive the day without losing a ton of money, its a win." I was happy if the positions even made it to the exchange the way we wanted, haha.
https://austinkleon.com/2020/12/10/quantity-leads-to-quality...
[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
McD's never tried to build the best burger, they built one of the best supply chains in the world.
SpaceX doesn't have to build the best rocket, in whatever that means, it just needs not to blow up and allow its cargo to reach space.
If you build lots or burgers or lots of rockets its highly likely you'll reach and pass 'good enough'.
The counterpoint to it is the probably apocryphal Soviet nail factory (but with more verifiable examples nearby):
Once upon a time, there was a factory in the Soviet Union that made nails. Unfortunately, Moscow set quotas on their nail production, and they began working to meet the quotas as described, rather than doing anything useful. When they set quotas by quantity, they churned out hundreds of thousands of tiny, useless nails. When Moscow realized this was not useful and set a quota by weight instead, they started building big, heavy railroad spike-type nails that weighed a pound each.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22375/did-a-sov...
> Musk has said the entire program will cost anywhere from $3 billion to $10 billion.
These can't both be true.
The initial launches are gone be more like 5 billion. Its pure fantasy that it will go to $2 billion anytime soon.
That is not always a bad thing. I mean you typed this on a computer running an ISA that started in the 70's or 80's. Maybe 90's if you are on PowerPC ;)
You’d think NASA would have read their own studies and given up rather than proceed on the predictable Artemis boondoggle.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1649043715686793218
I’m curious how many off engines the system tolerates. How many do they anticipate regularly? I’ve never noticed if Falcon 9s periodically run as a Falcon 8 or 7?
All and all, ‘‘twas an awesome sight. Kudos to all those cheering excited people.
Generally Merlin engines on the Falcon 9 are incredibly reliable. In over 200 flights there were only a couple of engine failures. Some worked nominally on accent but had some failure during landing.
> How many do they anticipate regularly?
The vast majority flights should never have an engine out. This is something that should generally never happen. I think SpaceX would hope that far less then 1% of flights have an engine out issue. Anything else I don't think they would consider acceptable.
SpaceX will redesign the Raptor engine as often as they have to to get the reliability to Merlin levels.
At least once they lost the booster when they were planning on recovering it because they had to run the ascent phase on only 8 engines and burned enough extra fuel the booster didn't have enough fuel to complete the boost back and landing.
It is also worth noting that liquid methane is not explosive by itself.
I wonder if spaceX has considered a scaled down, like half the capacity, which would still be huge
I'm not sure if it's worth scaling down substantially from where it is. There is a certain scale that's necessary for the economics (payload vs dry-weight vs fuel) to work out, and ultimately they want to be able to put very significant amounts in orbit. They're currently targeting 150 tons, would it be worth targeting 50 tons? Probably not.
I'm also curious about what technically finally got it off the ground - was there a sufficient, but low, level of acceleration, was it a matter of reducing the rocket's mass (by burning through fuel), was it a matter of some of the engines reaching some peak level of performance. Or, probably most likely, maybe just a combination of everything.
E: convery's reply below makes much more sense.
That's why on the live stream you see T0 and then T+0:06 you see "liftoff". The hover was planned.
The Soviets only dreamed of such when they came up with the disaster that is the N1.
These engines require a very delicate dance of chamber pressure, temperature, fuel/oxidiser mix, turbo pump speeds, etc to get started but it's all worth it in the end for their insane efficiency and thrust/weight.
Rocket engines have different challenges then airplane engines. They are as hard in some ways but easier in others.
Rocket engine operate in a far more extreme environment, peak stressed are far larger, failures and issues far more violent. But the big advantage is that they only have to operate for a few minutes at the time (at least on the first stage). Jet engines need to operate for 1000s of hours.
SpaceX has upped the level significantly, interdicting higher efficiency full flow stage combustion and making them reusable and being able to launch quickly and reliably. So they complexity of Raptor is much higher then your typical first stage rocket engine.
I would say the complexity of a modern jet engine might still be higher, but its hard to estimate these things. Not sure how you would do that scientifically.
5-6 engines were gone since very early in the flight, and for most of those I suspect that’s because they were damaged by debris from the pad. Everyday Astronaut’s live stream had a different camera angle on the rocket, and you could see it actually slide sideways away from the tower a bit in the first few seconds. Uneven thrust would explain that.
Elon said in the past that the rocket will leap off the pad (thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.5 or 1.6 iirc). But if you’re missing 20% of your engines, that ratio is ~1.2, or less than half the expected acceleration. A slow start indeed.