6 ms·
Plenty of American rockets failed, especially early on! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8
by elmomle 6y ago
Plenty of American rockets failed, especially early on! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8
- DennisP 6y agoAnd SpaceX has blown up ten Falcons on landing attempts.
- CydeWeys 6y agoAfter accomplishing their primary mission, which is a key distinction. If you blow up on landing that just means you lose your reuse discount on a future flight.
- AstralStorm 6y agoThat's no good for Starship, which is meant to land with passengers and hardware on board.
- CydeWeys 6y agoYeah, which is why they're making Starship better than the Falcon 9 in being able to land safely even when things go wrong (i.e. Starship can throttle down enough to hover). They're still in the early prototyping stages. You can't judge potential long-term reliability based solely on what we've seen so far.
- Alupis 6y ago*While building the first space rockets in the world, literally making it up as they went. That's not quite the same situation SpaceX is in right now.
- DennisP 6y agoActually it is the same situation. The launch was fine. What blew it up is something nobody has attempted before.
- unanswered 6y agoIt's totally different because only the government is allowed second chances! Everyone else has to get it right the first time. Especially if they're competing with <insert defense/aerospace contractors here>!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- HarryHirsch 6y agoNever attempted what? Relight an engine? Engines are routinely re-lit, especially on upper stages, yet Space-X gets it wrong with regularity. The Russians and Arianespace do it just fine.
- twicetwice 6y agoI'm sorry, what? SpaceX are the undisputed champions of re-lighting engines. They've landed orbital rockets 73+ times, each of which involves multiple engine re-lights while falling through the atmosphere. Let alone gets it wrong "with regularity" — the Falcon 9 Block 5 is a remarkably reliable rocket. Anyway, landing Starship involves a bunch of things never before attempted: landing a fully-reusable second stage, landing a vehicle of this size, relighting and running engines during the belly-flop-and-flip maneuver, and flying and relighting full-flow staged-combustion engines. Probably some other firsts too.
- HarryHirsch 6y agoToday's crash was due to failure of one engine to restart. Briz and Fregat Russian upper stages are routinely restarted, with ~ 98 % success, same with Ariane EPS and Chinese Yuanzheng. It's doable, just not for Space-X.
- minikites 6y agoWhy is SpaceX making the same mistakes 70 years later?
- naikrovek 6y agoI don't recall NASA ever doing a rocket landing so I'm not sure which mistakes you are seeing repeated.
- bacon_waffle 6y agoI was surprised to learn recently that NASA did do some rocket landings in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X
- naikrovek 6y agoOk, so which mistakes is SpaceX making that NASA also made?
- sudosysgen 6y agoNASA and the USSR did many powered rocket landings, actually. NASA even had a program for reusable first stages via powered landings that was scrapped because automatic guidance wasn't feasible yet.
- naikrovek 6y agoOk, so which mistakes is SpaceX making that NASA also made?
- sudosysgen 6y agoFailing to restart an engine in a retrograde trajectory. A difficult task that both the Soviets and NASA (and Arianespace and the Chinese) had issues with, but worked out. It's very difficult because of the turbulent airflow in an engine bell pointed against the airspeed vector. Despite this, many rocket engines can do it reliably.