You learn how to do a thing when you run out of ways not do do a thing. If SpaceX was repeating their mistakes, there would be a problem. But that’s only true in a superficial sense (“the upper stage keeps failing”). Basically all the things that have gone wrong are things that are both new to them and to the industry as a whole (except, I guess, for the COPV thing, which seems like poor QA).
I doubt they’re very far from landing the upper stages, in any case. Your prediction is probably only 6-12 months off.
I do laugh every time I type that out. And yet that is the name for the propellant transfer tube. Though, to be honest, is “nosecone” any less ridiculous? For some reason that doesn’t bother anyone.
For some reason even knowing what the word is supposed to be, it still looks like “no sec one” at first glance. I guess I subconsciously expect the aerospace term to be two words as in “nose cone”.
@Lumpy: I had never seen that mistaken breakdown until @Dr.Strangelove mentioned that’s it’s an odd word and I asked myself “how so?”. Then you come along and reinforce that.
That’s a nice optimistic view. But potentially there are an infinite number of ways not to do a thing, and only a finite number of ways to get it right.
At a certain point one has to take a step back and go back to the conceptual drawing board. I really hope that’s not true for Starship, but the next test will be rather critical, I think?
I sometimes seriously think that Faster-than-light travel can only be accomplished by basically altering the past so you’re already at your destination.
It’s not odd so much as it’s amusingly literal. It’s a cone… on the nose of the vehicle. I imagine that the inventor of the nosecone couldn’t be bothered to spend more than 10 seconds on naming it. It’s especially amusing in contrast to all the fancy French words in aerospace like aileron, fuselage, empennage, etc. Or the literal-but-with-polysyllabic-words like vertical stabilizer.
Agree. By that token, why is a “payload fairing” not called a “windshield”?
I suspect the real answer is the simple names for simple things came from the Goddard era: talented amateur tinkerers or academics starting small and simple. Not the NACA / NASA era of large bureaucracies, large aerospace firms, and everyone involved is a degreed engineer or degreed business weenie.
But when I asked myself “how so?”, that’s when I suddenly saw “no sec one” and can’t now unsee it.
Only if the failures appeared to be related to the high-level design. So far that hasn’t been the case. The large number of engines hasn’t been a problem, or the large size of the vehicle, or the stainless steel, or the methane-oxygen propellant, or the full-flow staged combustion, or the heat shield tiles, etc.
If there were ongoing major structural problems or continued Raptor reliability issues I might say otherwise. But currently it just looks like they’re fighting their way through a bunch of tricky subsystems and that eventually they’ll fix all of them.
My only major concern is that some aspects of the design might prove to be too fragile for manned (Mars) use. It needs to be much more reliable than the Falcon 9, which is already exceptionally reliable. But it has a bunch of extra stuff that may be difficult to perfect. They need to keep things as simple as possible but it may be impossible to avoid some types of complexity.
Not really. They can keep going like this for a long time. Sure, failures are demoralizing for the workers and we’ll see continued floods of negative reporting, but I don’t think they’re anywhere close to calling it quits. Plus a recent executive order should streamline some of the regulatory issues:
Sure, I’d like to see the next flight nail all the current problems, but if they don’t… there will be plenty more chances to go.
Don’t forget that while Falcon 9 has been very reliable, their reusability development program had many failures:
With Starship, the reusable aspects are built in from the beginning, as opposed to being bolted on to an already working rocket. So we’re seeing all the failures from this complexity (and much more) from the very first flights. If they’d just made an expendable version first without bothering with any reusable subsystems, they’d have been flying payloads long ago.
How many more failures would put Starship behind Falcon’s development history? Remember we have to count the upper stage tests that led to the complete replacement of the first generation of engines.
They’re just too different to compare directly. Do we count the three Falcon 1 failures? The first flight failed due to the Merlin engine. And when they upgraded to regenerative cooling on flight 3, that one failed to unanticipated residual thrust from the cooling system. Those lessons led into Falcon 9.
I think it’s clear that they’re also optimizing for a different risk tolerance than Falcon 9. F9 really was make or break for the company, and with NASA being the primary customer, they had to get it right. There was a lot of crazy stuff happening in the background, but they were still far more careful then than the current launches.
As someone who’s been a fan of space exploration, and a model rocketeer, for much of my life, “nosecone” never stood out to me as an odd word. But, now, I’m looking at it, and parsing its pronunciation as pseudo-Italian: “noss-ehh-KOH-nay.” "What style of pasta would you like? Rigatoni, macaroni, nosecone?’
