4 ms·
You measure how much stress is applied to critical components, which uses up some of their finite lives. From experiment and theory, we know how much "damage" i
by nether 10y ago
You measure how much stress is applied to critical components, which uses up some of their finite lives. From experiment and theory, we know how much "damage" is done to a part subjected to a given stress. Similarly we know how much stress on components is generated in each launch. Therefore we can take the total life of each critical part (determined thru experiment and analysis), and divide it by the reduction in life (= damage) for each launch, to get the number of remaining launches. The part with the lowest remaining life determines the life of the system.
- tempestn 10y agoI wonder if, once they get a rocket to the max calculated safe launches, which will obviously have some margin built-in, it would be sufficiently worthwhile to keep launching it with low-value payloads (or none at all) and actually test it to failure. My intuition leans toward no, obviously because launches are very expensive in terms of fuel and other stages, but also because there's no guarantee the test rocket would be representative, so for it to be really meaningful they would have to repeat the experiment several times. Still doesn't seem inconceivable though.