Comment by atmavatar
9 hours ago
> Does anyone else find it surprising that rockets are a century old[1] and yet still seem to fail spectacularly with amazing regularity, often due to some small flaw?
Not really. Rocketry is hard.
You deal with extremes in temperature (both high and low), extremes in speed and acceleration, and you're doing it all atop massive amounts of extremely explosive fuel. And, if you feel really crazy, you do it all while attempting to protect one or more fragile bags of meat and water as you travel into an environment that wants to kill them all.
Even when you think you've accounted for everything, something like a piece of foam insulation falling from an external tank is all it takes to produce a catastrophic failure later on during re-entry.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
This feels like more a matter of scale than anything else? We’re able as a species to do some absolutely insane wizard shit elsewhere (chip fab?), we just haven’t launched enough rockets yet to get there.
Less than perfect chips are printed every day but the consequences of a less than optimal chip is ending up in a cheaper laptop vs. causing a big boom. I think we are doing wizard shit in rocketry, mistakes are just very loud.
Definitely unexpected from BO, knowing that everyone is okay, I feel for their engineers right now.
A significant part of stuff like chip fabs is a controlled environment.
Which is tough with rockets.
Flagship chip yields are generally less than 50%. Over half the chips coming out are dead on arrival, and never leave the fab. Imagine if rockets had that sort of failure rate.
the differences is rocket failure is blow up while chip design is salvageable