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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
by 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 agoPeople 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 agoIts 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 agoActually, 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 agoIf 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 agoThat'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 agoCare 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 agoThe 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.