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Was it a complete failure?
by pertymcpert 6y ago
Was it a complete failure?
- nikolay 6y agoWell, nothing is a complete failure ever from your point then - you always learn from mistakes.
- sirk390 6y agoYes, but if it explodes during launch you learn only a little(you don't have any data for flight and landing) Here it went almost perfect because they have the data for everything to be able to fix issues
- mlyle 6y agoWe have launch, controlled flight through the desired test regime, and a botched landing. And as others have said, it's either complete success-or-explosion that's expected in this area.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pertymcpert 6y agoWhat point was that? I just asked you a question.
- ChrisFoster 6y agoNo, I'd say it was an almost-complete success. The point of this was to test several things which they've never tested before and gather data to drive design improvements. They successfully tested: ascent under three engines, flap-controlled aerodynamic descent to the landing site, the landing flip maneuver - including drawing propellant from the header tanks - and final landing burn. They didn't stick the landing, but it looks like they got test data from all the planned test activities. The explosion will prevent gathering some data from post-flight inspection, but other than that I doubt it has much affect on future development. To look back on SN5/SN6 testing, they stuck the landings with those prototypes, but the prototypes themselves are now obsoleted by the new prototypes in production (up to SN16?!)
- sq_ 6y agoIt sounds like they've got SN9 just about ready to go, too, so they should be able to put the data that they gathered to good use quite soon. Seems to be a great benefit of this method that SpaceX is following with Starship: if you build hardware fast and cheap enough, you can afford some partial failures since you just put the lessons learned into the next flight in a few weeks.