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Comment by conjectures | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, perfection looks like nothing ever blowing up while job always getting done.

Unfortunately, for NASA and most other space companies before SpaceX came along, perfection looks more like almost nothing ever blowing up while almost nothing getting done...

And later on still blowing up far to many things.

You never get the job done without blowing things up, in any field where you’re treading untrodden ground.

See also: Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Challenger, Columbia, Apollo 1 - and that’s purely spacecraft which have killed people, never mind the vast list of experimental aviation deaths.

Much better to blow up some prototypes than some humans.

Can't have perfection without ever blowing up. If you can launch 1000kg with a design, could it launch 1100kg by reducing the mass of the rocket? How about 1200kg? But reducing the mass of the rocket leads to explosions. If you never exploded, then you never found out how light it could be. It could be lighter. If it could be lighter, it's not perfect.

That creates a very conservative mindset, unsuitable for innovation.

So if this prototype had not blown up you would now be complaining that SpaceX is not sufficiently innovative?

Personally, I feel no need to complain about SpaceX, whether they blow up rockets or not. They're powering a new golden age of rockets. There's no room in my worldview for complaining about SpaceX. You are free to waste your time asking people why they aren't complaining, of course.

Who is complaining about SpaceX? The point is challenging a particular confusion which seems prevalent round here.

Suppose SpaceX had used a very similar prototype, but some process or engineer had caught the fault. Few here would be taking the lack of an explosion as evidence that SpaceX are not innovative. Instead, if anything, they would be praising the superb processes in addition to the cool prototype.

So, there is always room to improve. The reaction to this essentially anodyne point here has been really interesting.

Rockets always blow up, the question is just how quickly.

There is no such perfection in space. Never has been.

Does this ever happen?

No. See X15 accidents, crew capsule fire, 2 shuttle accidents. Those all involved loss of life. There are other accidents in the US and plenty in other countries too.

AFAIK nobody has built something like this before. To have it fail during an early test doesn't seem unusual.

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