SpaceX blew up another Starship.
Like… Mercury, Gemini and Apollo didn’t blow up four or five times. The shuttle program killed two shuttles’ worth of astronauts, but that was over 100 missions. And it still wasn’t acceptable.
Is this on purpose/sort of by design, like the Muskheads keep claiming? What the hell is going on?
Different design methods, SpaceX is backed by someone who can afford to do design by trial and error.
“Move fast and explode things.”
Here are 1300 posts on Starship development history & the SpaceX way of doing things.
The short version is SpaceX is far more willing to screw up in public & learn quickly and cheaply.
Whether they have the balance at the optimal point is certainly debateable.
That they are aiming for a learning curve utterly incomparable to NASA is fact; uncontroversial fact.
You (OP) have also made a false comparison between NASA manned systems and SpaceX unmanned systems.
So far SpaceX manned systems are outperforming NASA manned systems as to reliability. From an admittedly small baseline.
And SpaceX’s unmanned success rate dwarfs NASA’s over the decades. Not so much in the last decade, but NASA is now mostly flying 50yo mature unmanned designs. You’d hope by then they’d have nade them reliable.
Musk is a software developer. The mindset of software developers is to “put in a bit of effort and see how it goes” - it takes many, many iterations of this before you get something that is acceptable.
True Engineers, however, have a different approach, since building several bridges that fall down before you get one that stands up is not realistic.
“Move fast and break things”; a mentality that works fine with non-critical commercial software, not so much with hardware and mission-critical systems. Thus far, SpaceX has been fortunate that none of the uncommanded destructs has near or on inhabited land or struck a vehicle in transit but they’ve gotten far closer than traditional range safety requirements would permit. It is also the case that many of these failures are a result of poor design or should have been caught in testing, and while analysis and ground testing can’t present all of the in-flight conditions, a focused test program can provide more insight into flaws and failures and actually save time and effort over the “fly-break-fly” approach.
Although Musk did write code for Zip2 very early in his career, it was by all accounts pretty bad code. He has more recently demonstrated apparently little to no understanding of modern software architecture and engineering given his statements regarding Twitter. As for software development approaches, there are different strategies for doing so depending on what kind of system is being developed. The “code a little, break a little” is fine with making apps or within small teams but large software development efforts break under the strain of defective code and shifting requirements, which is why Agile has gotten a really bad rap (even though for certain types of development it can be very flexible). If you were writing mission critical software for, say, managing a nuclear power plant or flying an aircraft, it is important to define good requirements and rigorously test the system dynamically in simulation (“software in the loop” or in cases where physical interactions and latencies pose a challenge “hardware in the loop”) to catch errors that would not be caught in static analysis and individual unit testing.
As you note, this approach doesn’t apply well to hardware systems where ‘failure’ of a bridge (or launch vehicle) is catastrophic and the root cause may not be well understood if the physical evidence is not available for inspection and data is sparse.
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Fortunate, or careful enough to avoid such accidents (even if not as careful as NASA would be)?
Interesting claim. Only one question: How come none of the other space companies that use the mentality you describe manage to hold a candle to SpaceX?
They plan for these problems and the rockets have the ability to self destruct if things go wrong.
Fair comparison. There’s plenty of testing to the failure point in hard engineering as well, but it’s not necessary to have an entire bridge fail to find a problem… usually that is… we all know about the Tacoma Narrows but that problem was not well understood before then. Rocket ships are bit more difficult to test in real conditions though.
In fact, SpaceX took this approach with development of the Falcon 9 and Heavy (because they wanted EELV later NSSL certifications as well as NASA certification for Commercial Resupply and crewed missions), and developed some fairly innovative ways of doing ground testing (despite Musk ranting and raving about how this was “slowing them down”); as a result, they got a lot of information about failure modes that were corrected before flight. SpaceX has not done this for ‘Starship’ thus far because they are launching from a private range with purely FAA AST approvals and under internal funding, and you can see how well this is going for them with 5 out of 9 launches either completely failing (despite the desire to characterize them as successful) and one partial failure. Many of these failures have been for pretty dumb reasons starting from F.light 1 where (per Musk’s direction) they did not use any kind of acoustic suppression or reinforcement on the flame duct, resulting chunks of concrete being kicked back up into the engine bad and damaging multiple engines as many experienced people in the rocket launch industry warned would happen. Failures, especially early in the life of a new design vehicle will happen, but you generally don’t want to lose a vehicle to a stupidly easy cause that could be prevented by taking basic precautions and using good design practices.
I am very familiar with flight termination systems, and even when they work as intended (of which SpaceX has had multiple failures with their AFTS system on Starship) they don’t make the vehicle magically disappear. FTS systems work by terminating active propulsion, venting propellants, or for solid motors cutting the case open to snuff out combustion of the propellant grain, dropping the vehicle into (hopefully) broad ocean area (BOA) within a defined safety corridor and sinking so as to not pose a hazard to shipping. When a vehicle breaks up into a large debris pattern which spreads over a wide area as Flight 7 did, exploding and coming down near Turks and Caicos Islands, closing flight lanes for over an hour and posing a hazard to marine vessels in the area.
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