Yeah, for SpaceX, experimental hardware is expendable. Yeah, it is not very typical in space industry. But it is a tried-and-tested approach, which gave them the Falcon 9, the most reliable and technologically advanced launcher of today.
The falcon 9 succeed on it's first launch, it was not a test flight heavy program.
The falcon 1, SpaceX's only orbital rocket prior to the falcon 9, did fail on it's first three flights, however it was never intended to and that nearly bankrupt the company. They destroyed third party payloads on flights 1 and 3, because these were intended to work, not be test flights.
Long after it was in production the falcon 9 did begin a "test-flight" heavy program, but that was for developing the ability to recover boosters after they had successfully delivered a customer payload in an operational flight, not for developing the rocket itself.
The series of failures when attempting to land for the first time was spectacular.
Suppose that the eventual production vehicle has a fairly different design, a different name, and it succeeds on its first flight. Would it then have used the same methodology that resulted in Falcon 9?
I'm only asking rhetorically. The Ship of Theseus is an interesting philosophical question, but the way you define "methodology" shouldn't depend on your answer.
I've been seeing parallels to this growing at an odd rate. Where context is removed and HN only cares about results at TRL ~7.5+. Its often quite baffling to see systems/models designed in academic spaces with minimal compute resources to systems/models with billions of parameters and millions of dollars in funding. Or to see TRL 2/3 projects be dismissed because they are not >TRL 6. I wonder how people that make these types of responses think research and development happens if you must catapult one's self from a theory to usable product in a realistic environment before it becomes of any interest. It seems rather anti-scientific tbh. Not what I'd really expect from a crowd dominated by developers, engineers, researchers, and scientists.
As for rockets, well... exploding rockets are expected during testing phases. Obviously you want to reduce this, but catastrophic failures, or any failure, serve as great learning opportunities due to the inability to formulate a complete model (combustion instability is a notoriously difficult problem).
I think also many are interested in the subject and so do watch videos and read other sources but that these are at high level discussions and often not getting into the low level nuance that is actually necessary for solving these types of problems. But that as humans we often conflate excitement and time with a subject with expertise in that subject (all time is not equal). Personally I wonder if this is an accurate and general phenomena and exacerbated by our growing information age combined with the large number of armchair science communicators. I think all nerds, including myself, have been guilty of asserting things as facts (or with stronger confidence than they should be), often in an effort to help inform others or simply wishing to participate.
On a side note: anyone feel like it's a bit weird how low (aerospace) engineers are paid in comparison to us in software? Like not bad wages overall but there is a large gap (not looking to get my pay decreased, but the other way around)
Blue Origin: 85k/119k/162k (bottom 10%/Median/Top 10%)(https://spacecrew.com/salaries/blue-origin-salary)
SpaceX: 69k/112k/178k (https://spacecrew.com/salaries/spacex-salary)
Software produces gobs of money, the likes of which the world has never seen. Aerospace as an industry may not ever be profitable. It's as easy as that.
I definitely agree that software is more profitable, but the gap is a bit surprising, especially considering the high skills and training required.
But while writing this I decided to check instead of making what I thought was a reasonable assumption. Apparently the net worth of the CEOs of Boeing, Lockheed, and Raytheon are under $100m? That's a bit surprising if the numbers I googled are accurate. That would make the net worth of the two primary shareholders of BMW 1000x their counterparts. Each! I scrolled through Forbes billionaires and I didn't find aerospace anywhere but I did find pig breeding, shipping, and Chick-fil-A, candy, soy sauce, videogames, legos, in-n-out, dental implants, "Star Wars", "Billboards", and even "drones". Especially considering that there's a lot of shipping on there and a drone billionaire.
Really makes me think some of the other things are over priced tbh. Especially with how many crypto-bros are on that list.
Edit: Wait! "762 Charles Edelstenne" is listed as "aviation" but he cofounded Dassault...
Edit 2: "868 Neal Blue & family" is listed as "Defense" for General Atomics and "871 Eren Ozmen" as "Aerospace" for Sierra Nevada. "916 Fatih Ozmen" also for Sierra Nevada. So okay, maybe some are on this list but my intuition suggested defense and aerospace would have at least someone in the top 100. Surprised not even the top 500.
All of them under $4bn btw
Having to compete with the likes of Airbus and ULA for workers, SpaceX doesn't need to inflate the salaries that much to get top talents.
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/somd/space-communications-...
Looking at the Western space industry history, Starship development is only comparable to the Apollo or the Space Shuttle program - both of which would be insanely expensive in 2023 dollars, certainly exceeding 100 billion USD each, perhaps 300 billion USD in case of Apollo.