Quote from: Robotbeat on 04/29/2023 05:18 pmI do think it’s a good point that a highly engineered flame trench would’ve allowed more static fires, BUT the overall dismissive tone in this article is really off-putting. I think he’s trying to distance himself from E, but geez.Maybe the overall dismissive tone is bitterness for time spent "in the trenches" earlier in his career...Or perhaps there's a relationship of his bitter and condescending tone to interacting with executives that can't bother to get engineering calculations correct or even do them (note: probably not just one example, if in the industry for very long.)Or maybe just really does fundamentally dislike one previous boss.
I do think it’s a good point that a highly engineered flame trench would’ve allowed more static fires, BUT the overall dismissive tone in this article is really off-putting. I think he’s trying to distance himself from E, but geez.
The really (S)crappy work will be if starship to Mars is successful, then the whole business of building a permanent presence on Mars will commence.Talk about monster engineering problem...
I also agree with the concern of the OLM next to Pad 39A following the Starship IFT. That pad is a historic relic, not just a simple launch pad.
I also think the hate on Pythom was a little much.
Quote from: Robotbeat on 04/28/2023 03:29 pmStarship may be the last chance for SpaceX engineers to make big mistakes that look really dumb. None of this stuff would be allowed on the Falcon 9 side of things.Starship is the last hurrah for crappy or even scrappy at SpaceX. When Starship is operationally mature, I wouldn't be surprised if they start another (s)crappy program. It helps retain talent, attracts new employees and generally drives the company forward and all that stuff. I don't have a specific project in mind. I'm not convinced they need to pursue an even bigger lift vehicle. There is a wealth of things that need to be done towards their multi planetary ambitions though.
Starship may be the last chance for SpaceX engineers to make big mistakes that look really dumb. None of this stuff would be allowed on the Falcon 9 side of things.Starship is the last hurrah for crappy or even scrappy at SpaceX.
I feel this essay is somewhat confirmatory that SpaceX keeps re-inventing the wheel, unnecessarily. One would think Starbase would have strong connectivity to the history of Falcon, and institutional knowledge of Shuttle, Saturn, Atlas....all that came before. All that history is available. But I watch the Boca Chica progress videos over the years, and for all the milestones wtih a new vehicle, it has always seemed to me a little like a bunch of boys trying something for the first time. For example, the OLM seems to have been designed, and redesigned, on the fly. Iterative testing is fine when doing something truly new, but how much was really new? ... the need for some kind of flame diverter, water deluge / sound suppression seems obvious to me (never mind the specifics, I'm not suggesting we are all engineers. But they are.) If you need rainbirds at 39A and 40, why wouldn't a much larger vehicle not need something? Now, because so much happens behind the scenes, I tended to give the benefit of the doubt. New vehicle, new launch site, etc. But it does seem now that so much rocket engineering has been ignored or forgotten. "We thought the Fondag would be enough." Really?
I feel this essay is somewhat confirmatory that SpaceX keeps re-inventing the wheel, unnecessarily. ... But it does seem now that so much rocket engineering has been ignored or forgotten. "We thought the Fondag would be enough." Really?
The one critique that I would make of Starship is that SpaceX did really well with Falcon 9 in part because they went absolutely nuts with ground testing. They tested the absolute s*** out of the engines, the rocket, the stage separation mechanism, etc. the only thing they didn’t do was test the upper stage in vacuum, which would’ve costed like $400 million or something (so they were like Just Send It, cheaper to test in flight for $40 million). I think if SpaceX had done more work on Starship booster GSE earlier on, they could’ve probably made progress sooner.However, that’s traveling like a year or two back in time. If we talk about a couple weeks back in time, I’m not sure their decisionmaking was actually bad. They would’ve had to wait 3 months for the flame diverter to be installed. That’s STILL potentially longer than it’ll take to get a booster back on the pad now.
Interesting read. Thanks for posting it!Something he doesn't talk about is the fact that B7 was already obsolete. So on the one hand, they didn't have a lot to lose by flying it (except for losing the launch pad!), but on the other hand, I'm not sure how much they stood to learn from it either. Is it possible that the whole exercise was pointless? I hope not, but I'm not sure.The one thing they clearly did learn from this was that you can't cut corners with the launch pad. Should they have really known that already? Maybe, but there's lots of stuff they "should have known" (e.g. you can't return a first stage propulsively, and even if you did, you couldn't reuse it cost-effectively) that turned out to be false. Would it have saved a lot of time and money if el cheapo launch pads worked? If so, was the experiment worth the gamble, or could they have learned this a lot more cheaply? Those are good questions, but I'm not sure anyone outside of SpaceX can really answer them with any authority.
I feel this essay is somewhat confirmatory that SpaceX keeps re-inventing the wheel, unnecessarily. One would think Starbase would have strong connectivity to the history of Falcon, and institutional knowledge of Shuttle, Saturn, Atlas....all that came before.
All that history is available.
But I watch the Boca Chica progress videos over the years, and for all the milestones wtih a new vehicle, it has always seemed to me a little like a bunch of boys trying something for the first time.
For example, the OLM seems to have been designed, and redesigned, on the fly. Iterative testing is fine when doing something truly new, but how much was really new?
It's really easy to criticize from a recliner...