4 ms·

Cherry picking the MANNED Saturn V missions conveniently leaves out the unmanned Apollo 6 test where pogo vibrations borked two of the second stage engines and

• avmich 11y ago
  We're a bit offtopic here :) but let me respectfully disagree. The whole point of doing testing with rockets is to find what you don't know, validate your assumptions... What you usually don't know is when a thing will fail - and you don't want to learn that in a real mission, so you push the test article to extreme. Another reason to do tests is something which should work - and shouldn't fail - but you can't test that without actually doing a flight test. So, in my opinion, cherry picking test flights - where things fail routinely, otherwise why testing? - doesn't show you the designed - and updated, with test data - reliability of the system. Regarding whole stack - I meant the whole thing which lifted off and the part of which reached low Earth orbit. That stack had the pulling safety tractor rocket. But frankly, if I'd consider Apollo-13 flight, I'd assume we have the case of mission abort in a later stage of flight, after which the existing measures were taken to bring back the craft safely. So mission was aborted - just as it would be if, say, Saturn-V grossly misbehaved on 30th second of flight - and the systems worked on safe return.