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On the other hand, perfection looks like nothing ever blowing up while job always getting done.
by conjectures 7y ago
On the other hand, perfection looks like nothing ever blowing up while job always getting done.
- tomp 7y agoUnfortunately, for NASA and most other space companies before SpaceX came along, perfection looks more like almost nothing ever blowing up while almost nothing getting done...
- _ph_ 7y agoAnd later on still blowing up far to many things.
- fsloth 7y agoDoes this ever happen?
- phkahler 7y agoNo. See X15 accidents, crew capsule fire, 2 shuttle accidents. Those all involved loss of life. There are other accidents in the US and plenty in other countries too. AFAIK nobody has built something like this before. To have it fail during an early test doesn't seem unusual.
- rusticpenn 7y agoThat creates a very conservative mindset, unsuitable for innovation.
- conjectures 7y agoSo if this prototype had not blown up you would now be complaining that SpaceX is not sufficiently innovative?
- bdamm 7y agoPersonally, I feel no need to complain about SpaceX, whether they blow up rockets or not. They're powering a new golden age of rockets. There's no room in my worldview for complaining about SpaceX. You are free to waste your time asking people why they aren't complaining, of course.
- conjectures 7y agoWho is complaining about SpaceX? The point is challenging a particular confusion which seems prevalent round here. Suppose SpaceX had used a very similar prototype, but some process or engineer had caught the fault. Few here would be taking the lack of an explosion as evidence that SpaceX are not innovative. Instead, if anything, they would be praising the superb processes in addition to the cool prototype. So, there is always room to improve. The reaction to this essentially anodyne point here has been really interesting.
- madaxe_again 7y agoYou never get the job done without blowing things up, in any field where you’re treading untrodden ground. See also: Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Challenger, Columbia, Apollo 1 - and that’s purely spacecraft which have killed people, never mind the vast list of experimental aviation deaths. Much better to blow up some prototypes than some humans.
- ashes-of-sol 7y agoApollo 1 was afaik an unexpected engineering lesson. Challenger, and to a lesser extent Columbia, were failures of management not listening to engineers raising the alarm
- phkahler 7y agoThere is no such perfection in space. Never has been.
- lowbloodsugar 7y agoCan't have perfection without ever blowing up. If you can launch 1000kg with a design, could it launch 1100kg by reducing the mass of the rocket? How about 1200kg? But reducing the mass of the rocket leads to explosions. If you never exploded, then you never found out how light it could be. It could be lighter. If it could be lighter, it's not perfect.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ravar 7y agoRockets always blow up, the question is just how quickly.