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Comment by wilg | Hacker News Reader

It's honestly not even worth engaging on this topic anymore. People who understand the space industry know exactly what's going on, everyone else just woke up to headlines about an explosion and mouthed off based on how annoyed they are about the various idiot things Elon's been tweeting.

None of the Twitter drama matters, they'll go back to work on the rocket and it will work or it won't. (It probably will.)

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tbh the journalists have been juicing this one highlighting the explosion.

Easiest newsday in ages :

-Billionaire entrepreneur news? Check.

-Biggest rocket ever news? Check.

-Explosion that makes Michael Bay seem like an amateur? Check.

-Environmental disaster news? Check.

The list could probably go on for a while.

Musk and hype, sure to get clicks. Increased 10 fold for impressive explosions. And it was an impressive explosion.

I just wonder how the public perception, explicitly including on HN, would have been if SLS had blown up. I remember some people calling them out for delaying the initial launch.

Right now, I love seeing two options. Even if NASA cost a gazillion more dollars, we have two mechanics at work : cathedral building (NASA) and Bazaar building (Iterate quick, learn of mistakes)

Personally I think the budget of NASA is inconsequential to say the defense budget. Not sure what the general HN vibe is, but probably mostly leaning towards “waste of my tax dollars / inefficient”

Problem with SLS is politics changed design decisions. There shouldn't be solid fuel boosters on it at all, but NASA was ordered to put them in.

Why?

I don't know exactly in this case, but congressmen have always been making NASA rockets more expensive. They often made it so that at least a part of the rockets were built in their respective states, making things more expensive than needed.

Now extend that to every topic …

I am more of an aero than a space guy, so there is that. While everybody sees the risk of loosing prototypes during testing as almost likely, and non-desastrous as long as there is no loss of life (which was far more accepted until, say, the 60s), nobody would call a failed flight test resulting in a complete hull loss a sucess. The testing until failure happens on component and system level before anything flies the first time.

Maybe actual space rockets arw different, after all those used to be expandable anyway, but still launch failures, and failing to get out of the atmosphere is a failure, shouldn't be seen as sucess of any kind.

As a co worker of mine once out it: Everything flies if you apply enough thrust to it. Doing so in a controlled in safe manner is the trick.

Well, it did successfully lift off the pad. I honestly didn't think it would make it that far.

"The ... Failure happens ... Before anything flies the first time" I'm no aerospace engineer, but I doubt this was the case in the early days of jet engines(if that is the case, then I stand corrected). The new raptor engines are full flow staged combustion, only the second of their kind. Having this many light right next to each other and burn for that long at high altitude is a huge milestone.

I am curious what milestone contracts SpaceX may have had sitting around waiting for a Starship flight to pay out actually.

If this was a sales pitch "the rocket destroyed the launchpad, and got damaged in the process - once we fix that it'll work" is a much better pitch then "we need another 2 years minimum of permitting in order to build the flame diverter to launch it" (though I'm content to put this one on Musk: once Starship started being delayed, building the flame diverter should've just been a time cost they ate immediately).

The stupider takes on this are the people doing the "this is so incompetent! This company can't be trusted" spiel as though the Falcon 9 hasn't been quietly throwing things into orbit and landing this entire time.

The first jet engines were used on actual aircraft during WW2, for obvious reasons speed trumped safety across the board. Heck, back then people thought installing liquid fuel rocket engines in wooden glider aircaft was such a good idea, they actually built and used them in combat. I'm too lazy to read up on the actual development history of the first jet powered fighter jets so.

And yes, depending on aircraft, a lot of components are tested until failure before they are installed in actually flying aircraft.

It sounds like they knew this older version was more likely to fail, so they just launched it to clear out the backlog. Sure they got data, but they might just confirm suspected problems. See launch pad damage for an example of a known weakness.

All that tumbling? The flight was lost so why wait? I think they really really wanted stage separation to happen and "kept trying".

The approach you describe has been NASA's approach with SLS, and it's been very slow and expensive. Being willing to blow things up and learn from failures is not only way cheaper and faster but it results in very reliable rockets. SpaceX proved that already with Falcon.

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