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Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10
by Symmetry 2y ago
Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10 launches so lets see how they do.
The stage didn't land successfully but I'd have been very surprised if they got that on the first try.
NG's launch price is supposedly only about 50% higher than a Falcon 9 with a lot more payload weight and volume. Hopefully this will result in SpaceX cutting their price, they've got a lot of room to do so before hitting their launch costs.
- lupusreal 2y agoThe new space company is over twenty years old. For such a long development time I figured they actually had a reasonable chance of nailing the booster landing. I bet they'll do it next time.
- trothamel 2y agoIt also helps that they fairly routinely land boosters (with New Shepard), which means they've likely worked out the 'landing' part. Now to see if they can solve the reentry problem.
- bpodgursky 2y agoSounded like maybe a telemetry loss, which is hard to fully simulate. They'll abort to be conservative in these situations even if the rocket could land itself without tele-operation.
- mulmen 2y agoStage 1 is remotely operated? I find that surprising.
- nirav72 2y agoI’m not knowledgeable in the deep technical details of rocketry. But curious - how else would the first stage be operated? Should it be autonomous?
- 0xffff2 2y agoYes. The timings involved would make it impractical to land a rocket reliably via human teleoperation even with zero latency.
- mulmen 2y agoI’m not a rocket scientist but my assumption is that it would be internally guided and only take external inputs in the form of GPS and “land on the ship” or “don’t land on the ship”. Saturn V was manned and had a an internal guidance computer.
- bpodgursky 2y agoNo, but they want to be able to remotely abort.
- ajax177 2y agoOnly in the last couple years has blue had a similar headcount https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6851212663821860864/ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6851212...
- katbyte 2y ago? Isn’t the norm not crashing and succeeding? it’s only space x who normalized so many failures to “move fast”?
- ternnoburn 2y agoIMO, there are too few entrants to meaningfully draw any conclusions about "the norm" in this industry.
- myself248 2y agoExactly as OP said, launcher failures happen and then you drive down their frequency. Landing failures are still quite expected, especially on the first few tries. It's weird that they even tried on the first launch, but I don't even think of it as a try, I think of it as a "let's gather some data, and in the freakishly unlikely occurrence that everything goes perfect on the way down, we might as well load the landing software too".
- zitterbewegung 2y agoI read about spaceship on one of their launches is that they attempted everything that it could possibly do on one of their boosters because you basically have the next iteration built so why not attempt anything for the telemetry.
- sebzim4500 2y agoFirefly, Rocket Lab and Astra spring to mind as having failed to reach orbit on their first attempt.
- WWLink 2y agoAstra drifted on the launch pad before taking off lol
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoSpace shuttle had some harrowing early missions too, just didn’t explode.
- chollida1 2y ago> Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10 launches so lets see how they do. Where are you getting your stats and how many companies are you in your model?
- TheJoeMan 2y agoI grew up on the space coast, have watched many new expensive fireworks. I expect one of the next ones to either go boom, or the less exciting hear the 2nd stage separation failed.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoWhy are you disagreeing like this? It would be like asking for a source if a software developer said “most software launches encounter some issues on their initial release”.
- chollida1 2y agoReally, that was your take away? All I did was ask for the data used to come to that conclusion. I was only aware of SpaceX as a new space company. I was curious as to what other companies were included in her/his model. How did you possible take offense to someone trying to learn? And how did you possibly manage to find any ill will in the question? > Why are you disagreeing like this? I never once disagreed with the OP. Again, how did you get to this wild of a take from what i wrote?
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI read it the same way as combative or at least skeptic. If you say that was not your intent, then you might want to consider your approach. A common hostile debate tactic is to ask the other person to "bring the receipts", and then pick through them for something to object to. It is akin to saying "prove it", and puts all of the burden on the other person with minimal effort. In a world where the internet is often combative and full of bad faith actors, you may want to be more specific to distinguish yourself from them. If you have a specific question, ask it directly instead of asking them to provide more and sorting it yourself. You may also want to be clear about intent eg "what other companies are you considering".
- pokstad 2y agoCompetition here is great
- scotty79 2y ago> Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. It's only because SpaceX lowered the bar so much that if it clears the launchpad it's deemed success.