4 ms·
Better objective is just to keep testing and tweaking until the main engines do reliably light up Also, for landing the engines need to be steerable which I th
by codeulike 5y ago
Better objective is just to keep testing and tweaking until the main engines do reliably light up
Also, for landing the engines need to be steerable which I think the emergency Superdraco ones aren't.
- jiofih 5y agoWhen you’re carrying a hundred people inside on a weekend trip, what is “reliably”? 99%? five nines? Planes have a much less risky failure mode..
- codeulike 5y agoThats a good point. But I'm not sure that throwing extra engines into the scenario will help much. It takes very precise control to land a rocket. Those SuperDraco things are for going up fast, not coming down with sub-meter accuracy.
- bkanber 5y agoI had an aerodynamics / rocket science professor in grad school who used to say 'planes are as reliable as toasters', and the reason for that is the literal 40 million flights per year. Planes can explode just as easily as rockets can. The reason planes have a much less risky failure mode is because we've flown them for billions of hours, not because we've added a ton of redundancies to them. In fact many of the structural 'factors of safety' in airplanes are only 1.5, as opposed to a FOS of 8 in your car. So again, it's not about just tacking on redundant systems, it's about getting the experience required to understand all the failure modes. The only times planes crash these days is when we encounter a new failure mode. Rocketry will get there as well.