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I'm not proposing something, I'm describing it. This is what SpaceX is doing, and it's quite successful. And you can look all the way back to their little hopp

• bumby 3y ago
  >My prediction: SpaceX will have a 5th 100% successful launch of Starship before the SLS has a 5th successful launch. They'll just have ten not-100%-success launches before then. I'm not the best way to frame this is "first one to a single successful launch". Reliability matters when you're dealing with high-risk scenarios, so a better measure is "probability of a given launch being successful".
  • ralusek 3y ago
    They meant "will have worked out enough of the kinks by their 5th successful launch so as to be operating at a high success rate." Lots of falcons failed, but you don't see anybody worried about their payload or crew on Falcon 9 these days.
    • bumby 3y ago
      >will have worked out enough of the kinks by their 5th successful launch so as to be operating at a high success rate." I agree with the first part, but the second half extrapolates too far IMO. One successful launch tells us very little about operational reliability.
      • frumper 3y ago
        And SLS is that much further behind
        • bumby 3y ago
          No doubt, but operational tempo is a different issue than system reliability.
      • ethbr0 3y ago
        But the apples to oranges here is >1 launches (SpaceX, some successful and some unsuccessful) vs 1 successful launch (traditional modern aerospace). From an outcome perspective, it's hard to ever see the lower launch rate dominating from any perspective. You don't have economies of manufacturing scale, because your assembly rate is so low it doesn't make sense not to treat each as exquisite. You don't have rapid iteration on manufacturing improvements, because the tyranny of safety checks on manufacturing time balloons {time from fix to flight}, after a proposed fix is identified. And most importantly, you leave yourselves extremely vulnerable to unknown-unknowns, that you can't imagine in the design phase. For example, if NASA had been launching the shuttle more rapidly, with the bulk of those being uncrewed launches, they probably would have picked an uncrewed launch to test expanding the temperature bounds at Cape Canaveral, and Challenger would have exploded without a crew. As was, NASA's shuttle launches were so rare that there wasn't acceptable launch rate and weren't low-impact launch opportunities to do so. So they tested it on a crewed mission with disastrous results. Point being: they backed themselves into a low-volume/high-risk corner of their own strategic design SpaceX's most brilliant achievement was using Starlink to artificially boost launch demand and give them a minimally-profitable/break-even place to sink higher-risk launches.
        • bumby 3y ago
          I agree with many of your points, but it comes across as slightly biased because you don't acknowledge a single downside to any of them. >You don't have rapid iteration on manufacturing improvements, because the tyranny of safety checks on manufacturing time balloons Rapid iterations has obvious benefits. But there are also downsides because it makes it harder to arrive at a stable, reliable design, it introduces vendor issues, etc. Tesla is also known for iterating faster compared to their major competitors but it has resulted in logistics and reliability issues. IMO SpaceX's most brilliant achievement was leveraging govt contracts to work out the kinks of their designs, which could then be leveraged at a lower risk for Starlink. In effect, they let the public take the burden of the risk (because the govt is really the only entity capable of shouldering that size of a risk for an unproven quantity) and then transitioned to a private means of revenue in Starlink. (I'm not saying that as a slight btw, I think it's mutually beneficial).
    • toss1 3y ago
      As long as the organization has and maintain a culture that is aggressively seeking out problems large and small, and proactively fixing aprox. all of them, you will end up with a program with a high rate of operational success. It's the X-origin vs Slope issue - steeper slope always wins. The problem is maintaining that aggressive problem-seeking culture after long periods of success
      • bumby 3y ago
        This is part of the culture distinction. On one hand SpaceX is attacking problems, but IMO they often don't go towards attacking the root causal understanding. That means there's a possibility of unknown latent risk. As an example, they had issues with failures related to their COPVs rupturing. On the one hand, they addressed the problem by redesigning their system. On the other, they never really investigated fully why the COPVs were failing in the first place. Instead, NASA decided to fund that investigation on their own. One possible consequence is that their redesign didn't fully address the risk because they never fully investigated the root cause.
  • simonh 3y ago
    That only matters after you’ve gone operational though. The difference here isn’t risk appetite for operational launches, it’s risk appetite for test launches. SpaceX expects to do many, many more test launches than SLS, in fact counting Starship upper stage launches they’re already well ahead.
    • bumby 3y ago
      Fair enough point. But the finish line isn't getting through a test, the finish line is having a reliably operational system.
      • HarHarVeryFunny 3y ago
        Sure - but the way to get a reliable system is to test it, learn from your failures, and iterate.
      • simonh 3y ago
        And Falcon 9 is now the world's most launched system, with the record for the longest run without failures. So their approach seems to be working.
        • bumby 3y ago
          At what confidence interval? I'm not asking as a 'gotcha' question, I'm acknowledging that the sample size matters. A lot of these statistics are bandied about without really elaborating on the full context of the way reliability is actually measured in industry. Without checking for the most up-to-date numbers, I believe the F9 is slightly better than Soyuz on raw numbers (successful flights / total attempted). But Soyuz probably has around 6-7x more flights, meaning we have much more confidence that the Soyuz numbers accurately reflect reality.
          • lutorm 3y ago
            This is true -- there is a lot of small number statistics in estimating the reliability of launch vehicles. And there are a lot of small risks you never see until you accumulate a lot of lunches. But that question is completely incidental to the design methodology. A new vehicle will always be unproven. But one that's flown 5 times in testing (4 of them unsuccessfully) before its first flight will have had more flight time on most of its systems than something like the SLS where you take 10 years to think about what could go wrong and then do one test launch and call it good.
• sandworm101 3y ago
  My point would be that while SpaceX does save lots of money, it doesn't do so by producing cheap or less reliable rockets. It would never accept a failure rate any different than anyone else because, in aerospace, that isn't really a thing. SpaceX can certainly blast forwards with different business practices and different tolerance for developmental risks, but the final product will not be fundamentally different than anyone else: near-perfect machines resulting in near-perfect performance. There will never be a "cheap" version of a commercial rocket with an accepted less-than-perfect failure rate. Spaceflight is an all-or-nothing game.
  • CydeWeys 3y ago
    > My point would be that while SpaceX does save lots of money, it doesn't do so by producing cheap or less reliable rockets. It does though. During the development process. SpaceX will do five launches with lower reliability vehicles before the big launch providers will even do a single launch, and those five will have be cheaper in total. Of course, they aren't putting essential cargo (or god forbid people) on these higher risk test flights. By the time they're doing that they have developed certainty in the design.
    • LeonB 3y ago
      > Of course, they aren't putting essential cargo (or god forbid people) on these higher risk test flights. A number of Tesla-related deaths can be attributed to Autopilot malfunction. Real people - really dead.
      • amanaplanacanal 3y ago
        Different company. This is about SpaceX.
      • martindbp 3y ago
        And statistically many more people would have died without AP. But you're correct in that Tesla is using the same playbook on FSD as SpaceX, launch HW (and SW) early and iterate often, and I'd bet they'll save way more lives trying to get to autonomy like SpaceX rather than like NASA (the Waymo approach).
• nunuvit 3y ago
  Completely agree. I've worked in "old space" and the fundamental problem is that they can't afford to experiment. SpaceX has the option to physically test an idea that's holding them up before investing in fully bringing it up to production quality, only to have to redo all that work next iteration. That's why they can make new things and do it cheaper and faster.
  • Retric 3y ago
    Except SpaceX’s failure rates are similar with every other successful launch system. Rather than looking at failure as a constant rate you need to consider these numbers change with every flight. Initially major design flaws are identified and workers become more skilled at a process, eventually new errors creep in etc etc. They have greatly benefited from being able to use modern tools and seen where other systems failed. Many rocket companies have failed when trying to go fast and break things because it isn’t an easy shortcut. Instead SpaceX has used the normal approach used by other successful organizations and simply executed it well.
    • nunuvit 3y ago
      This isn't a production flight so why are you treating it at one? What if I told you that you can't compile your code until you deploy it for the first time and you don't get to change it much after that? I'll leave you to contemplate that thought experiment yourself.
      • Retric 3y ago
        I am not treating this as anything but a test flight. Several government test flights have similarly achieved core objectives while failing to achieve every objective.
        • nunuvit 3y ago
          I guess I'm not sure what point you're making. If you consider a test flight failure to be part of the overall failure rate, then you're treating it the same as a "real" flight. The government is constrained to less experimentation on every level from a daily basis up through test flights. Overall they do less useful engineering and more unnecessary work.
• xnx 3y ago
  To me, this comment implies that SpaceX is better/smarter than NASA, Northrop, Boeing, et. al. That may be true, but it's worth remembering that the goals are very different. Because of congressional oversight, SLS is largely a jobs/pork program. Spaceflight is incidental.
  • skissane 3y ago
    > To me, this comment implies that SpaceX is better/smarter than NASA, Northrop, Boeing, et. al. I don’t think SpaceX has smarter engineers. I don’t think they even have smarter managers, since many of their executives used to work for NASA and/or traditional aerospace firms (e.g. President+COO Gwynne Shotwell started out in aerospace at a private non-profit research centre doing contract engineering work for the NASA Space Shuttle and the US military space program) One big difference is Elon Musk at the founding of SpaceX told his executives to take big risks (as in “if this fails we go bankrupt”). I think Tory Bruno at ULA is a great CEO, but no way is Boeing or Lockheed-Martin ever saying to him “we want you to take such big risks that we might go bankrupt if they fail”. He, and all the people under him, are only allowed to take small-to-medium sized risks. But that puts a definite limit on what they can achieve compared to SpaceX whose executives and engineers have the freedom to make much riskier decisions
• PaulHoule 3y ago
  50th launch of Starship may be more like it…. If SpaceX finds a market for that many launches.