Honestly I think we’re kinda talking in circles here and we’re pretty far off topic anyway.
I think all sides made good points, we agree to disagree, and we can leave it at that.
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Some interesting points:
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More engines failed than publicly acknowledged
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the failure is solely do to Elon overruling the engineers recommendations
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It’s a huge setback for planned missions
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that report @anon87143080 posted above goes into a lot of what y’all (eta: @Brainspore, @Otherbrother , @VeronicaConnor ) are discussing: what was the original goal of the space shuttle system, how did it get to be the way it was, and why did it never really met the definition of “operational”.
and that’s only in the first few pages 
( my take: it did good science that nasa might have achieved in a different way had they known where they were going to end up. many of the choices were ultimately political, because that’s the nature of funding science in america. )
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Sounds like Challenger and Endeavor, again.
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Elon has a lot to answer for.
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From TFA:
- The no-clamps slow throttle-up meant Starship stayed on the pad for a long time, throwing up concrete, rock, and sand all directions, damaging the pad, nearby facilities, and Starship itself.
- By the time it left the pad, that debris had already destroyed three of Starship’s engines and likely damaged valves and systems that would lead to additional engine failures as well as an incorrect fuel mixture.
- Starship was slow to reach every point in the flight plan, suggesting that other engines were not able to throttle up to compensate for the lost engines.
- At what should have been stage separation, either software errors or more smashed hardware kept the main booster firing long after it should have shut down.
- The result was an uncontrolled spin that required Starship to be destroyed.
There’s something like four engineering failures going on here that had already been solved by tested designs, and that’s not counting the giant dust plume caused (or exacerbated) by the lack of a water suppression system. I can’t shake the sense that Elmo insisted on some of these for no reason other than to be different from other designs (“move fast and break things” indeed, as others have pointed out).
To be sure, it’s certainly possible to make a heterodox rocket design where these changes aren’t liabilities, but for all the SpaceX buzz I haven’t heard a whole lot to indicate that these design decisions were tested sufficiently in isolation (or at all). Hell, even the one full-scale static test of the rocket system wasn’t able to get all the engines to fire. And it only lasted 10 seconds, so it’s unclear if that was enough to learn anything meaningful about the launch platform’s durability.
(Also, dude came this close to blowing up his tank farm.)
(Disclaimer, IANARS)
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That’s okay. Neither is Elbow.
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We’ve been launching rockets for 70 years. We know how to do it, and everything currently done (like, say, fucking launch clamps) is for a reason. I’m all for innovation, but you also can’t throw the baby out with the bath water. It’s such hubris to do everything differently because you think everyone who came before you was stupid.
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Yes! Hubris. It’s exactly this. It’s the currency of the narcissistic megalomaniac.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that changing up a proven design could work. But you’d better have a damn good reason for thinking an alternative is the way to go, and you’d better test the hell out of it. People paid in blood for many of the failures that led to the current paradigm.
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I know that they never did have a completely successful static-fire test with every engine ignighting, but I’m unclear on how they managed to do one at all without using launch clamps. Or maybe their clamps just can’t actively release the rocket when under load?
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Sounds like you aren’t quite ready for private sector innovation then. Because you can see it all here…bold new technology; moving fast and breaking things; radically changing designs just because the boss picked up some kind of less-is-more slogan at a trade show or something; having your prototype catch fire since he had already scheduled the demo and now your job was to make it work as well as possible. This is the future so many had been hoping for!
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The sooner that tech companies figure out that you can’t treat everything like software, the better off we’ll all be.
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Your gifs have both impeccable comedic timing and exquisite tone precision. Thanks for making my evening just a little bit better.
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musk probably chose boca chica for the texas tax breaks ( and the gop’s general white supremacist friendliness. ) once that decision was made, spacex couldn’t do a normal debris and flame diversion setup because the water table is too low.
if they’d built it up the land - the main other option, apparently - they’d need new epa approvals. approvals which were already questionable.
what to do? ignore it all, and pretend like it’s a plan
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That is Musk’s approach to everything.
My specific problems are that Hyperloop a) made up the cost projections, b) has awful passenger comfort, c) has very little capacity, and d) lies about energy consumption of conventional HSR. All of these come from Musk’s complex in which he must reinvent everything and ignore prior work done in the field; these also raise doubts about the systems safety that he claims is impeccable.
In reality, The Boring Company offers nothing of this sort. It is in the awkward position of being both wrong and unoriginal: unoriginal because its mission of reducing construction costs from American levels has already been achieved, and wrong because its own ideas of how to do so range from trivial to counterproductive. It has good marketing, buoyed by the tech world’s desire to believe that its internal methods and culture can solve every problem, but it has no product to speak of. What it’s selling is not just wrong, but boringly so, without any potential for salvaging its ideas for something more useful.
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Well said! That’s what bugs me so much about this tech bro attitude that they can do everything better- it’s disrespectful to everyone who came before them. 400,000* engineers worked on Apollo. To say you know better than all of them is mind boggling. Doubly so when you’re not even an aerospace engineer. Just some emerald mining nepo-baby who wrecks everything he touches.
The current field I work in is an activity over 100 years old, and I’m constantly having to tell the newcomers that you have to learn the old ways first, and learn why things are done that way. Then you can start changing things if you like, but only once you understand why we currently do things this way. Learn the rules, then you’re qualified to decide when to break them.
*Yes, really 400,000. That’s the number quoted by NASA. To be fair, it’s a guess they made on the 50th anniversary and it’s not actually well-sourced, but the number is from them. Presumably that’s including all the subcontractors all the way down the line at all of the thousands of little companies that made parts and such
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I can believe 400k. For one, it was a significant slice of the federal budget pie. For another, there’s the pork barrel aspect - most states wanted some slice of the construction budget. Consider how many components needed making, the whole supply chain, to satisfy a majority of House and Senate.
Some of this will go all the way down to steel manufacturing, but even that needs space-age tolerances, and some engineers to work out those tolerances.
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It was a significant piece of the entire economy in fact. Apollo consumed an estimated 2.5% of the entire US GDP every year for the ten years of the program.
The scale and cost of it was absolutely astonishing. Hard to imagine any country doing anything like that ever again. I don’t think most people realize how big it was.
Edit: for context, in today’s US economy, that’s about 580 billion spent per year, every year for ten years.
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The very depressing thing is that they bid for a moon base and were told it was too expensive. Then they spent more than that in dollars and lives in Vietnam.
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At its peak (1966) it was never more than 4.5% of US spending. Sauce.
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