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With the Falcon 1 they also needed a several attempts before they started getting it right. The Falcon 9 went through a similar set of launches and also it took

With the Falcon 1 they also needed a several attempts before they started getting it right. The Falcon 9 went through a similar set of launches and also it took a while from successful launch to successful landing. The ambition level is really high with Starship but if there's any company that can get it done it's spacex. Basically what they are doing is a form of agile development where instead of speccing out the whole thing years in advance, they basically iterate and redesign what needs redesigning. Even if the project ultimately fails, there are multiple things coming out of the project that are at this point valuable. Like the merlin engines. Or their welding innovations. The notion of launching a steel contraption this size to orbit is ludicrous. Yet, they almost pulled it off last time. Worst case they have learned a lot to do a better falcon rocket. Best case, this thing actually starts working.

inglor_cz 3y ago
Even here on HN plenty of people seem to misunderstood the fundamentals of "hardware-rich development" and assume that it must be fantastically expensive and/or reckless. It is not exactly cheap to do it like SpaceX does, but the savings in time and increases in robustness may very well offset the cost of all the prototypes that undergo a RUD.
- evilduck 3y ago
  Even SpaceX's methods of fail fast (and often explosively) is relatively cheap. SLS is doing it the hard and expensive way.
  - bumby 3y ago
    The downside is that rapid iteration doesn't always give the same insight in terms of scientific understanding. E.g., Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first time, it's much harder to understand if those failure modes are fully mitigated. Personally, I think the ideal approach is to have SpaceX continue the rapid enginneering iterations, but give NASA (or some other entity) the resources to research the rest.
    - hotstickyballs 3y ago
      You can understand why design A failed. Just don’t need design B to be blocked on that with agile because the last iteration was working.
      - bumby 3y ago
        Sure, you can if you dedicate the resources to understanding the failure. What I saw personally is that is not always the case with SpaceX. In my experience, they changed a design and seemingly used that as an excuse to not further investigate the original design. (This was related to COPV failures. The general consensus seemed to be “we don’t need to understand why it failed because we’ve moved on to a different design.”)
    - Teever 3y ago
      What's stopping them from choosing to revise design A over chosing design B?
      - bumby 3y ago
        Nothing, other than it may just be easier to change the design to avoid the effort of a deeper investigation.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      That's just your assumption. SpaceX is actually doing all that. They invested early in good simulation tools and they are developing their own. They have great material science teams and engineering teams. They do invest a lot in actually understanding the fundamentals and they make good use of the data from things that failed. Take for example the work on the failure of Amos 6. They went really deep into that one and its a pretty interesting result from a scientific perspective. On the other hand, there is no point in doing endless science on why the pad blew up during the first orbital flight test. They solution was already in development anyway and its pretty clear that the solution would migrate the problem. It might introduce new problems but the old one wasn't happening again. So there is a limited need to the exact detail of underground steam explosion or whatever exactly happened there.
- gibolt 3y ago
  The focus on making lots of prototypes reduces cost. They streamline the largest and most expensive manufacturing bottlenecks. Each Starship has 30+ engines required per flight and tons of precision welding. All of it can now be made in a month. That means massive cost savings going forward, the faster each can be made
  - Geisterde 3y ago
    Hmmm, from a manufacturing prespective this is probably the safest way too, because you have already scaled production, you arent suddenly trying out all these new manufacturing processes when starship enters production. All your processes have been continuously validated already.
  - jillesvangurp 3y ago
    Failing fast also reduces cost. It cuts down on the time wasted on things that aren't going to work. With traditional design it can take years to find out if something will work or not. And when they don't, it leads to lengthy and expensive redesigns. You avoid all of that by iterating rapidly and building on and perfecting what works and scrapping/replacing what doesn't work before you sink a lot of time and resources in these things
  - hoseja 3y ago
    We could have had dozens of James Webb Space Telescopes for the cost of, like, five.
    - gibolt 3y ago
      Even better, since larger payloads can fit, the design can be far less complex due to weight and folding limitations. Rather than spend 10 years designing and building one telescope, they could spend 2-3 years and keep refining the hardware, with multiple types on the same platform
BryanLegend 3y ago
Falcon 9 reached orbit on it's first attempt, so it didn't have failed experimental flights unless you count Falcon 1 as being it's experiments.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  You are right. It was essentially a bigger Falcon 1 and not a complete redesign. So, the risk was not as high. It was an incremental upgrade. Not a small one but still.

inglor_cz 3y ago

Even here on HN plenty of people seem to misunderstood the fundamentals of "hardware-rich development" and assume that it must be fantastically expensive and/or reckless. It is not exactly cheap to do it like SpaceX does, but the savings in time and increases in robustness may very well offset the cost of all the prototypes that undergo a RUD.

evilduck 3y ago
Even SpaceX's methods of fail fast (and often explosively) is relatively cheap. SLS is doing it the hard and expensive way.
- bumby 3y ago
  The downside is that rapid iteration doesn't always give the same insight in terms of scientific understanding. E.g., Design_A fails. We quickly pivot to Design_B, which works. However, we don't spend the time ultimately understanding why Design_A failed. This can be operationally great, but it can also risk conflating being lucky with being good. If you don't fundamentally understand why the thing failed the first time, it's much harder to understand if those failure modes are fully mitigated. Personally, I think the ideal approach is to have SpaceX continue the rapid enginneering iterations, but give NASA (or some other entity) the resources to research the rest.
  - hotstickyballs 3y ago
    You can understand why design A failed. Just don’t need design B to be blocked on that with agile because the last iteration was working.
    - bumby 3y ago
      Sure, you can if you dedicate the resources to understanding the failure. What I saw personally is that is not always the case with SpaceX. In my experience, they changed a design and seemingly used that as an excuse to not further investigate the original design. (This was related to COPV failures. The general consensus seemed to be “we don’t need to understand why it failed because we’ve moved on to a different design.”)
  - Teever 3y ago
    What's stopping them from choosing to revise design A over chosing design B?
    - bumby 3y ago
      Nothing, other than it may just be easier to change the design to avoid the effort of a deeper investigation.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    That's just your assumption. SpaceX is actually doing all that. They invested early in good simulation tools and they are developing their own. They have great material science teams and engineering teams. They do invest a lot in actually understanding the fundamentals and they make good use of the data from things that failed. Take for example the work on the failure of Amos 6. They went really deep into that one and its a pretty interesting result from a scientific perspective. On the other hand, there is no point in doing endless science on why the pad blew up during the first orbital flight test. They solution was already in development anyway and its pretty clear that the solution would migrate the problem. It might introduce new problems but the old one wasn't happening again. So there is a limited need to the exact detail of underground steam explosion or whatever exactly happened there.
gibolt 3y ago
The focus on making lots of prototypes reduces cost. They streamline the largest and most expensive manufacturing bottlenecks. Each Starship has 30+ engines required per flight and tons of precision welding. All of it can now be made in a month. That means massive cost savings going forward, the faster each can be made
- Geisterde 3y ago
  Hmmm, from a manufacturing prespective this is probably the safest way too, because you have already scaled production, you arent suddenly trying out all these new manufacturing processes when starship enters production. All your processes have been continuously validated already.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Failing fast also reduces cost. It cuts down on the time wasted on things that aren't going to work. With traditional design it can take years to find out if something will work or not. And when they don't, it leads to lengthy and expensive redesigns. You avoid all of that by iterating rapidly and building on and perfecting what works and scrapping/replacing what doesn't work before you sink a lot of time and resources in these things
- hoseja 3y ago
  We could have had dozens of James Webb Space Telescopes for the cost of, like, five.
  - gibolt 3y ago
    Even better, since larger payloads can fit, the design can be far less complex due to weight and folding limitations. Rather than spend 10 years designing and building one telescope, they could spend 2-3 years and keep refining the hardware, with multiple types on the same platform

BryanLegend 3y ago

Falcon 9 reached orbit on it's first attempt, so it didn't have failed experimental flights unless you count Falcon 1 as being it's experiments.

jillesvangurp 3y ago
You are right. It was essentially a bigger Falcon 1 and not a complete redesign. So, the risk was not as high. It was an incremental upgrade. Not a small one but still.