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Not forgotten, intentionally excluded. Aborts/scrubs are almost certainly going to happen and, in the vast majority of cases, the ability to correctly identify
by sbuttgereit 4y ago
Not forgotten, intentionally excluded. Aborts/scrubs are almost certainly going to happen and, in the vast majority of cases, the ability to correctly identify abort/scrub a launch attempt is part of success criteria: not a failure. Failing to abort when it should have aborted ends up in one of my other categories related to failure modes.
All rockets, including those well out of their testing programs, will abort/scrub at some point. Just this past week a Falcon 9 mission out of Vandenberg AFB was automatically aborted at 3 seconds and then rescheduled a couple of times before successfully delivering its payload to orbit. I would count that a success: they didn't destroy the rocket, they didn't destroy the payload, and they got the payload to where it was suppose to go. Successful despite the abort.
The only case I can think of where an abort would indicate a failure would be if they have to pull the rocket off the OLM and do extensive modifications or redesign on something. I don't anticipate that... that kind of problem almost certainly will end in some flight anomaly rather than an on-pad abort. We could say that the SLS rollback to the VAB was this kind of failure, but it was relatively minor... they fixed some stuff that they couldn't do so at the pad, but didn't really do any significant redesign or rebuild. I don't expect that sort of scenario for Starship. Starship isn't dealing with finicky liquid hydrogen and appears to be overall much more serviceable than SLS.