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The Space Shuttle was launched successfully to orbit in it's first try. Ditto for Artemis. I haven't checked but I think there were a couple others, too.

• xoa 4y ago
  OP maybe didn't word it perfectly, but they were talking about organizations not rocket families. Space Shuttle was not exactly NASA's first rocket, just as F9 wasn't SpaceX's first rocket. I don't know if no organization at all has ever been successful on the first try with an orbital rocket or not. The quote Eric Berger at Ars has given was a lot more specific [0]: >No private company has ever launched its first independently developed, liquid-fueled rocket and had it reach orbit on the first try. And Relativity is pushing a lot of boundaries with its methane-fueled booster. Probably the biggest test here is whether the 3D-printed structure of Terran 1 can withstand the dynamic pressure of ascent through the lower atmosphere. At the same time though it's important to acknowledge that the "works on the first try" for typical Old Space projects came at absolutely enormous expense [1], and it's reasonable for expectations to be different for a project representing billions to tens of billions of expenditure and billion(s) per rocket vs a private company doing something for tens to hundreds of millions. A properly done hardware rich test program has a lot of advantages. ---- 0: https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/relativity-space-will-try-again-for-the-third-time-to-launch-wednesday/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/relativity-space-wil... 1: Not just in money either, but in terms of baking in bad designs until it was way too late to change them, which then could and did cause ongoing challenges for as long as the rockets were used. Like yes the first Space Shuttle made it, the design was made to work through heroic efforts, but the design also meant that heroic efforts were needed every single time. Which isn't very sustainable for something used for decades. And in turn we ended up losing multiple ones with humans on board and all lives lost.
  • bigiain 4y ago
    > it's important to acknowledge that the "works on the first try" for typical Old Space projects came at absolutely enormous expense And, I suspect (as your footnote mentions), they took risks that would not be considered/permitted today. Modern "Human rated" space flights are very very different to the Gemini and Sputnik days.
    • panick21_ 4y ago
      Lets just be real, putting people on the first Shuttle flight was borderline insane.
      • throwaway5959 4y ago
        I’d argue given the two failed flights that putting people on the shuttle at all was borderline insane.
        • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
          There were 135 flights. 2 failed. Let’s leave it at that.
          • dotnet00 4y ago
            2 failed, but part of why the Shuttle was grounded as soon as its ISS construction flights were done, despite there being no other way for America to independently take people to space was that it was found to be a death trap, with it being a miracle that more losses hadn't occurred.
          • TrevorJ 4y ago
            Yes, however, one of those failures was due to a flaw that remained basically unsolved for the entirety of the shuttle program. That puts things in a different light, no?
      • MPSimmons 4y ago
        Yeah, Crippen and Young were the bravest/most insane astronauts I can think of, especially with the lack of viable abort options on that vehicle.
      • metal_am 4y ago
        For more insanity, it was initially suggested to be a return to launch site (RTLS) abort test. The mission commander shut that down in a hurry. I've always thought it was interesting that Buran could fly autonomously while the Shuttle couldn't.
  • trollerator23 4y ago
    Haha, Eric Berger does know his stuff, so he carefully qualified it with "liquid rocket" because Pegasus was a solid. RocketLab was actually quite close but had a flight termination mishap IIRC.
  • HWR_14 4y ago
    I'm not sure why organizations matter in this context. NASA was public with their lessons learned. Why is "NASA 1980" held to higher standards than "Space X 2008" or "General Relativity 2023"?
    • bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Doing something the first time is harder than doing it the second time.
• WalterBright 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure they did unpowered gliding tests first. Since the shuttle was a glider, this wasn't a trivial systems test.
• dev_tty01 4y ago
  True enough, but let's not forget that NASA blew up a lot of rockets before they ever got to orbit. Relativity did pretty darn well for a private enterprise. Good on them.
• orbital-decay 4y ago
  > The Space Shuttle was launched successfully to orbit in it's first try. And it was clear both during the development and in the retrospect, that the crewed launch was extremely presumptuous, as the STS-1 could have easily crashed due to the mistakes made during the development. It's been done to show that the modeling could replace testing (turned out it couldn't), and to cut the costs, as the Shuttle was supposed to be "economical", in the original concept anyway.
• cubefox 4y ago
  At least SLS (Artemis 1) only left the pad after several tries. Of course you could count only the successful launch as a "try".
• dsq 4y ago
  The number of nines required for manned missions is far larger, so not a good comparison.