Comment by katbyte
2 days ago
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Isn’t the norm not crashing and succeeding? it’s only space x who normalized so many failures to “move fast”?
2 days ago
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Isn’t the norm not crashing and succeeding? it’s only space x who normalized so many failures to “move fast”?
ULA is pretty remarkable for it's run of new rockets not blowing up. Looking at ESA, JAXA, RosCosmos, ISRO, etc too is how I'm setting the par. A history like the Ariane 5 is pretty typical where flights 1 and 14 failed.
Wouldn't really consider that NewSpace. These are as old as space industry gets...
Yeah, 2 failures is par for OldSpace. NewSpace usually does much worse, though SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab's Electron managed to get the traditional par.
China's various new rockets are another example.
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Exactly 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".
I 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.
Firefly, Rocket Lab and Astra spring to mind as having failed to reach orbit on their first attempt.
Astra drifted on the launch pad before taking off lol
IMO, there are too few entrants to meaningfully draw any conclusions about "the norm" in this industry.
Space shuttle had some harrowing early missions too, just didn’t explode.
Shuttle got very lucky. On the first flight, STS-1, an overpressure caused by the ignition of the SRBs forced the orbiter's body flap into an extreme angle which could have destroyed the hydraulic system controlling it. Had John Young know this had happened, he and Robert Crippen would have ejected, which would have destroyed the orbiter on its first flight.
You could eject from the Space Shuttle? At what speed and altitude? What was the mechanism?
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Norm is something like 3 rescheduling within a week from launch, 3 auto-aborts or equipment NoGo, 2 wayward boats, and 0.15-0.3 kaboom per launch. The fact that SpaceX haven't been letting wayward boats/planes for a while is remarkable by itself.
My perception is that SpaceX do in fact move fast, curious why you feel the need to put that in inverted commas?