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“This raises serious questions about the reliability of the SpaceX launch vehicle,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, which rec
by manicdee 10y ago
“This raises serious questions about the reliability of the SpaceX launch vehicle,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, which receives money from Boeing Co., a SpaceX competitor. “They are taking this technology to the limits.”
Key quote on which the rest of the article appears to be constructed.
SpaceX is pushing the technology to the limits on purpose. This is not because they are doing "too much" but because they are doing everything they can to completely change the way rocketry is done.
When a Formula 1 car catches fire in the pits, do we call a halt to pressurised fuelling, or find ways to improve the safety of fuelling?
When a NASCAR crashes and burns, do we call a halt to car racing, or do we find ways to improve the safety and reliability of racing cars?
The simple answer to the "too much too fast" question is "no". Too much, too fast would be where SpaceX is unable to maintain their progress and makes mistakes they can not learn from.
Right now the focus of SpaceX is getting to the point where they can launch, land, relaunch. They will find more ways that quickly fuelling a rocket with supercooled fuel doesn't work.
Their competitors might simply say, "supercooled propellants are too hard," and stick to existing performance figures and trusted designs. SpaceX is choosing to do the hard thing because doing the hard thing is how you advance the state of the art.
"We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." — President John F Kennedy, Rice University address.
Did NASA try doing too much, too fast? They went from the "four inch flight" of Mercury-Redstone 1 in 1960 to the disaster of Apollo 1 (crew killed in a cabin fire due to high oxygen atmosphere) in February 1967 to success with Apollo 11 in July 1969, with many lessons being learned in the meantime.
- kiba 10y ago“This raises serious questions about the reliability of the SpaceX launch vehicle,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, which receives money from Boeing Co., a SpaceX competitor. “They are taking this technology to the limits.” Loren Thompson is a shill. Do not trust his name or what he said.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- thelambentonion 10y agoI disagree strongly. SpaceX has always felt, especially to those in the industry, to have a blatant disregard for even basic elements of safety in their design and operation. They _did_ supercool their propellants, and pushing that envelope was indeed worthwhile to see what they could gain from it. Unfortunately they _also_ decided to stage the payload to shave a day off of integration time. SpaceX is a very interesting company, and I wish them the best because there are a lot of smart people working there on difficult problems. But I personally can't stand seeing them take unnecessary risks and treating it as a necessary cost of business. It terrifies me that they want to strap three of these Falcon 9 cores together, or that they want to put people on top of this thing.
- toomuchtodo 10y agoAs an amateur space and SpaceX follower, could you go into detail as to what elements of safety in design and operations you believe they have disregarded?
- thelambentonion 10y agoIn operation, there were two events I was told in confidence by current and former employees that I would rather not disclose publicly. Without going into specifics, they both related to operational deficiencies in launch systems (hardware in one instance, software in another) that were not disclosed to NASA prior to launch. This hits me particularly hard as this is not an industry where you ask forgiveness rather than permission. I was involved in situations with a separate contractor where we diagnosed technical problems days before a launch that in all likelihood would not have affected any other systems. We still went to NASA, admitted our faults, and provided an analysis of the situation and mitigating steps we would take in order to get their blessing. They worked with us and we didn't disrupt the launch schedule, but we were fully prepared to if that was what it took. For the design aspects, I admit it isn't my forte and I'm taking the word of other engineers who may have their own biases. In short, the use of many small engines used together (e.g. Falcon Heavy using 27 Merlin-1Ds and MCT using 9 Raptors) makes a lot of people who have been doing this for much longer than I very uncomfortable. This is especially true given that they are planning on launching Falcon Heavy missions so soon without having tested the cores operating together extensively (to my knowledge, at least). I'm sorry if this comes off as overly aggressive or biased. I do really think that reusability, automation, and low cost are important goals to work towards. I also even think that SpaceX is making some of the greatest strides in the industry. But I'm very uncomfortable with the company that seems (at least to me) to be disregarding established knowledge that was gained through the hardships of an earlier era.
- beachstartup 10y ago> When a Formula 1 car catches fire in the pits, do we call a halt to pressurised fuelling, or find ways to improve the safety of fuelling? this isn't a really good example because, yes, after a bunch of terrible fires, they did call a halt to fueling during races. you can't remove fuel, either. https://www.formula1.com/en/championship/inside-f1/rules-regs/Fuel_Fuel_system_fuel_usage_and_refuelling.html https://www.formula1.com/en/championship/inside-f1/rules-reg...
- manicdee 10y agoI guess I shouldn't pull examples from subjects I don't really know about :D