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The chaos monkey school of rocket development continues. They will be finding problems in this thing until the day it's taken out of service.

• Diederich 3y ago
  > They will be finding problems in this thing until the day it's taken out of service. Is this similar to how they developed the Falcon 9 platform?
  • gpm 3y ago
    No. The falcon 9 succeeded on it's first launch. It has only* failed once, on its nineteenth flight. * It did suffer engine failures on flights 4, 83, and 108, but compensated flawlessly with the other 8 as designed. They also blew one up on the test stand (which would have been flight 29). Additionally the satellite on flight 47 was supposedly lost due to an issue with the payload adapter (not built by SpaceX), but pretty much all information about the launch is classified.
    • kortilla 3y ago
      Merlin had many flight proofs before Falcon 9 though so it’s not a great comparison to starship.
    • justinclift 3y ago
      Wasn't the Falcon 9 developed through a long process including earlier models, which did fail (a lot) in the early development phase?
      • gpm 3y ago
        The falcon 1 immediately preceded the falcon 9 and was the only prior orbital spacex rocket, it had 3 failures and then 2 successes... The falcon 1 was much smaller than the falcon 9 (literally 1/9th the engines on the first stage), and they intended the very first falcon 1 launch to work. I'm not sure that those failures really support the claim that falcon 9 had a similar development model to starship where they are intentionally blowing up starships to develop starship (edit:) and they have already blown up more than 3 starship prototypes.
    • justrealist 3y ago
      The landings failed repeatedly before they perfected that process.
    • MadnessASAP 3y ago
      F9 was a much more conventional rocket. It's first party trick, the Merlin engine was iterated on heavily and destructively independent of the rocket. It's second and main party trick, the landing and reuse of a booster was definitely iterated on destructively many times before they got consistent performance out of it. They're plan is to mass produce Starship and work towards operating them continuously like a 737 to space. Blowing up the first few generates great data for identifying problems and helps get that production line rolling.
    • MPSimmons 3y ago
      And yet, problems were constantly found and fixed and improved. No two falcons were ever built exactly the same until Block 5 or so (and honestly, I'd be surprised if there weren't changes between rockets coming off the line now, but the changes are much smaller and more iterative, I would guess). It's basically the software development process, just with hardware. Falcon 9 is a mature product at this point, so most of what's happening are maintenance changes.
• brandonagr2 3y ago
  The question is how many thousands of tons it will lift into orbit before being taken out of service.
• yinser 3y ago
  The scoreboard of successful tons in orbit per year says the chaos monkey is doing just fine.
  • jiggawatts 3y ago
    “Sure they’re winning, but they’re not winning properly!”
  • nurettin 3y ago
    I'm not a rocket scientist, but it just feels like they are throwing money into something that will never work at that scale because they have to spend investor and government money to ensure funding continues next year. It's just a musk thing to do.
    • panick21_ 3y ago
      That just total nonsense. If you are clearly not a rocket scientist and seemingly not really interested in the topic how do you know it 'will never work'. Literally based on what are you making this claim. SpaceX is by far the most advanced rocket company in the world, its not even close. They 100% believe this vehicle can work. They have presented this to NASA, and NASA selected it and in their evaluation gave it the highest technical readiness level. NASA is involved and is monitoring and nobody from NASA has come out and said that anything they do is impossible. Also you don't seem to understand how government funding works for this vehicle. These are FIXED PRICE CONTRACTS BASED ON MILESTONES. SpaceX will receive NO MONEY unless they ACTUALLY COMPETE MILESTONES. So the idea that they just do theater to get more government money just doesn't make sense, its not how it works at all. There is just no to way about it, arguable the two most experienced space organization on the planet believe this can work but somehow you know better?
      • nurettin 3y ago
        You make it sound like a successful launch of spaceship is the initial government contract milestone that SpaceX will get paid for, and they get nothing on failure during launch. Is this the case?
• panick21_ 3y ago
  I always love how people who have never built anything 1/1000s as complex want to tell SpaceX, the most advanced aerospace company in the world of how to do their job.