3 ms·
There is a lot of innovation in Falcon 9 compared to other crewed rockets - pneumatic separation systems, subcooled propelants, propelant loading with crew on b
by m4rtink 6y ago
There is a lot of innovation in Falcon 9 compared to other crewed rockets - pneumatic separation systems, subcooled propelants, propelant loading with crew on board, liquid abort engines on Dragon and of course the stage 1 recovery systems.
As for human rating Starship - I think the best bet is to launch them as many times as possible unmanned to demonstrate it is safe, kinda like the thousands of flight hours needed to certify a new airliner. This should be perfectly doable on the fully reusable Starship + Super Heavy combo.
- bronco21016 6y agoThanks for pointing out the other aspects. I was aware of the propellant loading with crew onboard and liquid abort engines but just forgot about them. You’re right. There are a substantial number of other innovative aspects.
- m4rtink 6y agoYep - also the computers. AFAIK they are both much more powerful (which is actually needed for the first stage to compute the best landing trajectory) as well as using relatively commodity hardware and and normal (IIRC C++) programming languages. I'm not saying rad hardened aerospace computers and specialized programming languages (ADA and co) are bad - there was a time where they were absolutely the best (any only) choice, but thankfully today there are often better options. IIRC for the Dragon computers I remember an article that mentioned that if they went with aerospace computers, even just a devkit would have cost >150 thousand dollars, severely limiting available resources for developers and the flight hardware would have lead time in years. So they went with redundant (IIRC 5 times) x86 with Linux on top & each engineer working on the code can have effectively flight hardware on their desk for use during development.