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Comment by whynotkeithberg | Hacker News Reader

Everyone but Elon knew what was going to happen with the launchpad... And instead of having a proper one installed that could handle the blast he launched and sent debris & particulate everywhere as well as lighting a fire on protected lands. The protected lands were there well before Elon showed up and he's continuously broken the agreements he made for keeping the area safe.

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The EA and EIS included the possibility of the rocket blowing up on the launchpad. That scenario would have thrown a lot more debris and would have started a lot more fires.

There's always the possibility of a rocket blowing up during launch, which is why self-destruct devices are installed on all of them, so that range safety can prevent destruction to populated areas.

But with the launchpad being in the state that it was in, disaster was a certainty.

Why was it a certainty? There was only minor erosion during the 30 engine static fire, and the launch was only about 30% more energetic than the static fire.

It's rocket science - rocketry is a mature engineering discipline. NASA found out in the 1960's that you need a flame trench + water deluge system to manage the exhaust plume, especially the vibrations.

What happened to the idea of baking in a generous safety margin. Fred Brooks had a whole chapter on Brooklyn Bridge, at some point projects are so large that you cannot run them by pantseat.

And SpaceX has a culture of not overbuilding. "The best part is no part", "If you're not adding back 10% of the parts you deleted, you're not deleting enough parts".

That culture is a good part of the reason they are completely wiping the floor of the competition.

The Falcon9 v1.2 is the only rocket that has flown more than 5 times and has never failed a mission so it's hard to question the SpaceX safety culture.

Self-destruct devices are for the "rocket off course, headed toward vulnerable areas..." failure modes. If the rocket has already blown itself up...well, the burning wreckage will only respond to commands from gravity and air resistance.

(Yes, I know about the SRB's during the Challenger disaster. They certainly had not "blown up", and certainly were headed in unpredictable directions.)

There was some small chance of the rocket blowing up on the launchpad that was accounted for. There was a near 100% chance of the launchpad not being able to handle the launch, sending chunks of it and the dirt underneath everywhere, just to hit a launch date of 4/20 that was not accounted for.

He says he can clear out the existing launchpad and install the working one in a matter of weeks. Then the question is why he didn't do that prior to this launch. We can only speculate that if it hadn't caused a mess, he'd be making 4/20 jokes, and that is why.

> There was a near 100% chance of the launchpad not being able to handle the launch, sending chunks of it and the dirt underneath everywhere

It was expected to erode slightly, just as it did with the 30 engine fire, not to fail destructively.

> just to hit a launch date of 4/20 that was not accounted for.

The first launch attempt was 4/17, and it takes >48 hours to depress and refill. 4/20 was a coincidence.

> He says he can clear out the existing launchpad and install the working one in a matter of weeks. Then the question is why he didn't do that prior to this launch.

SpaceX is estimated to be spending $2M per day on Starship development. A 2 month delay is a big deal.

And if a 2 month delay would have resulted in a successful test then the Flight Termination System problem wouldn't have been discovered.

Pre-launch, I'd bet that the best-experts probability of a RUD on or near the pad was >5%. And the probability of massive pad damage starting a few fires was <95%.

If you recall Probability 101, and do the Chance_of_X * Severity_of_X calculations - then the vast majority of the expected* fire damage, which the FAA effectively signed off on, was from the near-pad explosion scenario.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

They scrubbed a launch on 4/17, so either the launch was delayed for a dumb joke, they ran a false flag launch attempt to hide that the real launch was scheduled based on a dumb joke in case of disaster, or they don't actually make decisions like that based on dumb jokes.

Musk said he had secured funding to take Tesla private at $420 per share, and he bought Twitter at $54.20 per share. He has a habit of doing stupid things just so he can hit that number. The 4/17 launch date wasn't set until he got approval for launch just a few days prior. I wouldn't put it past him to have intended for a 4/20 launch when he applied for approval.

If lighting a fire on protected lands is the worse you got than big deal.

I am sure the swamp grasses will grow back even more robust.

What was actually harmed here?

Do you have dead animal carcasses? Piping plovers acting differently?

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