3 ms·

I think it's fairest to categorize most of it as stretch goals. They knew the odds of accomplishing all of them on only the second flight ever (and first with t

I think it's fairest to categorize most of it as stretch goals. They knew the odds of accomplishing all of them on only the second flight ever (and first with this staging design) were quite slim, but might as well be optimistic and have a plan for the small chance that by some miracle everything does actually work out perfectly. The first Falcon Heavy flight is a good example of what it looks like on the rare occasion when it all goes perfectly. More broadly, SpaceX prioritizes low total cost and speed of development over everything else. That means they'll have more test flights than NASA and not all of them will be totally successful, and that's fine. The overall program will be.

demondemidi 3y ago
To be fair, nasa has had more than half a century to accumulate ‘splosions. It’s part of the job. I’m certain spacex will have a catastrophe at some point because literally every nation with a space program has had them, and they are far more safety conscious then the VC move fast and break things curse that has taken over modern tech.
- oskarkk 3y ago
  SpaceX's Falcon 9 had two (full) failures (in 2015 and 2016), but the crazy high cadence since then made it the safest vehicle in the history of spaceflight. The next vehicle with comparable safety was the Soyuz rocket (which had various versions of the same design from the 60's, and has been launched a total of almost 2000 times!), one version of which had a streak of 112 consecutive successful launches in the 90's, but sadly Russian space program has declined since (they have more and more reliability problems). The last (major) version of Falcon 9 has 100% success rate with 225 successes out of 225 launches. NASA never before used a vehicle as reliable as Falcon 9, so... You can't compare crazy ambitious development program to established vehicles, and as Falcon 9 shows, given enough time, SpaceX can achieve something close to perfection.
  - demondemidi 3y ago
    > SpaceX can achieve something close to perfection. Question: How did SpaceX acquire all the knowledge that brought it to the Falcon 9? Answer: 70 years of NASA research as their starting point (which was built on the V2 program's learnings thanks to Von Braun). Being born on third base isn't the same as hitting a home run.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Finding publicly available information on how to get to third base might be as valuable as hitting a triple, though. (It's not as hard, but it might be as valuable, in that it still puts you on third base.)
      - demondemidi 3y ago
        That's where I was going. There's a bias in these discussions that overlooks a century of contributions (previous poster referred to them as perfection). SpaceX didn't invent space travel from square one, they are optimizing the last 10%: larger size, and better re-usability. Elevating them to gods pisses in the face of the century of previous experts who learned the hard way because there was no NASA before them.
        CydeWeys 3y ago
        I don't think anyone is elevating them to gods, and also, it's true that no one was seriously working on cheap reusability until SpaceX did it. Yeah sure SpaceX didn't invent orbital rockets (no one claimed they did!), but they did in fact invent commercially viable reusable rockets, and that's a big deal.
    - Tommstein 3y ago
      I especially like how people act like SpaceX invented reusable rockets. These people simultaneously know about SpaceX and yet somehow don't know about the Space Shuttle, whose design started over 50 years ago.
      - 3y ago

demondemidi 3y ago

To be fair, nasa has had more than half a century to accumulate ‘splosions. It’s part of the job. I’m certain spacex will have a catastrophe at some point because literally every nation with a space program has had them, and they are far more safety conscious then the VC move fast and break things curse that has taken over modern tech.

oskarkk 3y ago
SpaceX's Falcon 9 had two (full) failures (in 2015 and 2016), but the crazy high cadence since then made it the safest vehicle in the history of spaceflight. The next vehicle with comparable safety was the Soyuz rocket (which had various versions of the same design from the 60's, and has been launched a total of almost 2000 times!), one version of which had a streak of 112 consecutive successful launches in the 90's, but sadly Russian space program has declined since (they have more and more reliability problems). The last (major) version of Falcon 9 has 100% success rate with 225 successes out of 225 launches. NASA never before used a vehicle as reliable as Falcon 9, so... You can't compare crazy ambitious development program to established vehicles, and as Falcon 9 shows, given enough time, SpaceX can achieve something close to perfection.
- demondemidi 3y ago
  > SpaceX can achieve something close to perfection. Question: How did SpaceX acquire all the knowledge that brought it to the Falcon 9? Answer: 70 years of NASA research as their starting point (which was built on the V2 program's learnings thanks to Von Braun). Being born on third base isn't the same as hitting a home run.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Finding publicly available information on how to get to third base might be as valuable as hitting a triple, though. (It's not as hard, but it might be as valuable, in that it still puts you on third base.)
    - demondemidi 3y ago
      That's where I was going. There's a bias in these discussions that overlooks a century of contributions (previous poster referred to them as perfection). SpaceX didn't invent space travel from square one, they are optimizing the last 10%: larger size, and better re-usability. Elevating them to gods pisses in the face of the century of previous experts who learned the hard way because there was no NASA before them.
      - CydeWeys 3y ago
        I don't think anyone is elevating them to gods, and also, it's true that no one was seriously working on cheap reusability until SpaceX did it. Yeah sure SpaceX didn't invent orbital rockets (no one claimed they did!), but they did in fact invent commercially viable reusable rockets, and that's a big deal.
  - Tommstein 3y ago
    I especially like how people act like SpaceX invented reusable rockets. These people simultaneously know about SpaceX and yet somehow don't know about the Space Shuttle, whose design started over 50 years ago.
    - 3y ago