4 ms·

Yea but consider the cost. Just slinging weld on a tank costs time and material. How much money was wasted by not properly manufacturing this tank. I don't unde

Yea but consider the cost. Just slinging weld on a tank costs time and material. How much money was wasted by not properly manufacturing this tank. I don't understand how he has succeeded with such rube goldberg engineering. Isn't this the second pressure vessel to fail on pressure testing? Doing it wrong once is OK. Doing it wrong twice means you learned nothing from your first failure.

nexuist 7y ago
It’s a pressurized tin can. It’s not a rocket. The entire thing could get nuked from orbit and SpaceX would still lose less money cleaning up the radiation than they would if Starship failed - potentially with people on board. They’re at a “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” stage in the engineering cycle. They’re using (and abusing) processes never meant to be used for spaceflight, so in a lot of ways nobody there really knows how to do things correctly without trying and testing it. Imagine trying to learn a language like Go without being able to access any documentation on it. You would waste a ton of time and utterly fail at simple tasks too.
- HarryHirsch 7y ago
  People have been building pressure vessels since the days of the steam engine and cryogenic pressure vessels since the early 1900s. Robert Goddard's first liquid engine ran on liquid oxygen, that was in 1926. The metallurgy and processes are well understood, an explosion shouldn't have happened, yet Musk managed to have one twice in a row. Fire engineering and management, Space X is beginning to look like Boeing!
  - mr_toad 7y ago
    Its easy when you don’t have to worry about weight. Just make it thicker and stronger. Steam engines don’t often explode, but they aren’t going to make orbit either.
    - namibj 7y ago
      Actually, German TÜV was instituted after some boilers in the steam age blew up the factories and killed many workers. Overbuilding boilers is expensive.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > Fire engineering and management, Space X is beginning to look like Boeing! If you don't own any SpaceX stock and aren't planning on flying on one of their spaceships when the time comes, why do you care?
  - tigershark 7y ago
    If I had to choose I’d rather believe someone that accomplished rocket reusability with prices ridiculously low compared to all the competitors rather than someone that has no idea about the difference between a steam engine and a rocket and probably never heard about the rocket equation.
    - HarryHirsch 7y ago
      That's is the fandom talking. There was no indication that Space X expected failure twice in a row. Elon Musk presided over a failure in static pressure testing of a steel vessel. No vibrations, no dynamic loading, no fluid flow, just simply pressurizing a steel tank. No exotic materials or difficult techniques like aluminium welding were involved, just garden-variety steel, the best-understood material of all. How do you manage to fail at constructing a piece of equipment as simple as this?
      - scarejunba 7y ago
        Care to state terms of a bet to see who will succeed first at commercial space transport for some number of humans? I'll have someone write up something and commit to the other side of the bet. We can discuss terms here.
        HarryHirsch 7y ago
        The Russians are flying commercially into space right now, and Soyuz vehicle has an excellent safety record, > 97 % success, no loss of life. With their recent track record no one should trust Boeing or Space X - Starship, Starline and Dragon all revealed what a shambles their engineering is.
thereisnospork 7y ago
>Yea but consider the cost. Just slinging weld on a tank costs time and material Sure, but its what, A few 10's of thousands of dollars for steel and welding for the test? If it saves a day of double or triple checking to just ""see if the damned thing blows up "" you have to weigh success odds and lessons learned vs. overhead costs. I wonder what a few days or weeks of overhead costs a company like SpaceX that would have had to be spent to make sure the test succeeded. As a rule of thumb, calendar time is generally more expensive than equipment and man-hours - even in hard tech.
dnautics 7y ago
> Doing it wrong twice means you learned nothing from your first failure. And yet falcon 1 failed how many times before they got falcon 9 up?
WalterBright 7y ago
> Doing it wrong twice means you learned nothing from your first failure. Edison failed thousands of times building an electric light bulb filament.
jeanvalmarc 7y ago
I think an important angle of "consider the cost" is that materials in R&D are pretty much ALWAYS cheaper than a team and time. For example here if the whole rocket was a 4mm thick 9m X 118m cylinder, the actual stainless steel would be like $700K [1]. While the rough headcount ceiling cost at SpaceX (7000 employees) is around $5M per day. And this way they get actual valuable engineering experience out of it, rather than just arguing in conference rooms like a more conservative company would have done. I think fail-fast prototypes are super valuable and are what good R&D looks like. [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28pi+*+9m+*+4mm+*+118m%29+%29+%2F+%284%27+*+8%27+*+1%22+%2F+4000+USD%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28pi+*+9m+*+4mm+*+118...
travisporter 7y ago
If your compiler throws an error twice, it doesn’t mean you are a failure, just that something else went wrong.
johnp_ 7y ago
Besides all the points other people already made, the money saved by being able to switch to deploying the Starlink constellation via SuperHeavy/Starship (very likely to be cheaper in $ per satellite-to-orbit) instead of F9 earlier makes taking risks and iterating faster even more appealing.

nexuist 7y ago

It’s a pressurized tin can. It’s not a rocket. The entire thing could get nuked from orbit and SpaceX would still lose less money cleaning up the radiation than they would if Starship failed - potentially with people on board. They’re at a “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” stage in the engineering cycle. They’re using (and abusing) processes never meant to be used for spaceflight, so in a lot of ways nobody there really knows how to do things correctly without trying and testing it. Imagine trying to learn a language like Go without being able to access any documentation on it. You would waste a ton of time and utterly fail at simple tasks too.

HarryHirsch 7y ago
People have been building pressure vessels since the days of the steam engine and cryogenic pressure vessels since the early 1900s. Robert Goddard's first liquid engine ran on liquid oxygen, that was in 1926. The metallurgy and processes are well understood, an explosion shouldn't have happened, yet Musk managed to have one twice in a row. Fire engineering and management, Space X is beginning to look like Boeing!
- mr_toad 7y ago
  Its easy when you don’t have to worry about weight. Just make it thicker and stronger. Steam engines don’t often explode, but they aren’t going to make orbit either.
  - namibj 7y ago
    Actually, German TÜV was instituted after some boilers in the steam age blew up the factories and killed many workers. Overbuilding boilers is expensive.
- pdonis 7y ago
  > Fire engineering and management, Space X is beginning to look like Boeing! If you don't own any SpaceX stock and aren't planning on flying on one of their spaceships when the time comes, why do you care?
- tigershark 7y ago
  If I had to choose I’d rather believe someone that accomplished rocket reusability with prices ridiculously low compared to all the competitors rather than someone that has no idea about the difference between a steam engine and a rocket and probably never heard about the rocket equation.
  - HarryHirsch 7y ago
    That's is the fandom talking. There was no indication that Space X expected failure twice in a row. Elon Musk presided over a failure in static pressure testing of a steel vessel. No vibrations, no dynamic loading, no fluid flow, just simply pressurizing a steel tank. No exotic materials or difficult techniques like aluminium welding were involved, just garden-variety steel, the best-understood material of all. How do you manage to fail at constructing a piece of equipment as simple as this?
    - scarejunba 7y ago
      Care to state terms of a bet to see who will succeed first at commercial space transport for some number of humans? I'll have someone write up something and commit to the other side of the bet. We can discuss terms here.
      - HarryHirsch 7y ago
        The Russians are flying commercially into space right now, and Soyuz vehicle has an excellent safety record, > 97 % success, no loss of life. With their recent track record no one should trust Boeing or Space X - Starship, Starline and Dragon all revealed what a shambles their engineering is.

thereisnospork 7y ago

>Yea but consider the cost. Just slinging weld on a tank costs time and material Sure, but its what, A few 10's of thousands of dollars for steel and welding for the test? If it saves a day of double or triple checking to just ""see if the damned thing blows up "" you have to weigh success odds and lessons learned vs. overhead costs. I wonder what a few days or weeks of overhead costs a company like SpaceX that would have had to be spent to make sure the test succeeded. As a rule of thumb, calendar time is generally more expensive than equipment and man-hours - even in hard tech.

dnautics 7y ago

> Doing it wrong twice means you learned nothing from your first failure. And yet falcon 1 failed how many times before they got falcon 9 up?

WalterBright 7y ago

> Doing it wrong twice means you learned nothing from your first failure. Edison failed thousands of times building an electric light bulb filament.

jeanvalmarc 7y ago

I think an important angle of "consider the cost" is that materials in R&D are pretty much ALWAYS cheaper than a team and time. For example here if the whole rocket was a 4mm thick 9m X 118m cylinder, the actual stainless steel would be like $700K [1]. While the rough headcount ceiling cost at SpaceX (7000 employees) is around $5M per day. And this way they get actual valuable engineering experience out of it, rather than just arguing in conference rooms like a more conservative company would have done. I think fail-fast prototypes are super valuable and are what good R&D looks like. [1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28pi+*+9m+*+4mm+*+118m%29+%29+%2F+%284%27+*+8%27+*+1%22+%2F+4000+USD%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28pi+*+9m+*+4mm+*+118...

travisporter 7y ago

If your compiler throws an error twice, it doesn’t mean you are a failure, just that something else went wrong.

johnp_ 7y ago

Besides all the points other people already made, the money saved by being able to switch to deploying the Starlink constellation via SuperHeavy/Starship (very likely to be cheaper in $ per satellite-to-orbit) instead of F9 earlier makes taking risks and iterating faster even more appealing.