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Starship Flight 7

(www.spacex.com)
649 points chinathrow | 3 comments | 16 Jan 25 21:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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EncomLab ◴[17 Jan 25 11:33 UTC] No.42736458[source]▶
First Shuttle orbited astronauts and successfully recovered all intended components. Every Saturn 5 was successful, the 3rd flight sent a crew to lunar orbit, and the 6th put a crew on the moon.

To date a Starship has yet to be recovered after flight - and those launched are effectively boilerplate as they have carried no cargo (other than a banana) and have none of the systems in place to support a crew.

Some people are really fetishizing iterative failure - but just because you are wandering in the desert does not mean there is a promised land.

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bboygravity ◴[17 Jan 25 11:40 UTC] No.42736510[source]▶
So what does a rocket company need to do to be imrpessive in your eyes?
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tsimionescu ◴[17 Jan 25 11:49 UTC] No.42736587[source]▶
Maybe match some achievements from 60 years ago, like having a rocket that can put someone on the moon, back when the largest supercomputer in the space program had less FLOPS than my watch.
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jve ◴[17 Jan 25 11:54 UTC] No.42736611[source]▶
Decreasing price of a launch by multiple orders of magnitude and increased cadence is also an achievement that hasn't been achieved previously.
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tsimionescu ◴[17 Jan 25 12:03 UTC] No.42736667[source]▶
Increased launch cadence is an operational achievement, not an engineering one.

And I'm not so sure that they actually decreased price to launch all that much. First of all, it's definitely not "several orders of magnitude", the best numbers quoted are maybe half price or so for a Falcon 9 compared to another contemporary rocket. And by my understanding, the US government at least is paying about as much for Falcon 9 as it was for a Soyuz to bring an astronaut to the ISS, at least.

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1. specialist ◴[17 Jan 25 14:48 UTC] No.42738040{5}[source]▶
> ...operational achievement, not an engineering one.

How would I distinquish between the two, esp wrt rocketry?

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2. tsimionescu ◴[17 Jan 25 15:07 UTC] No.42738274[source]▶
An operational achievement means excellence in building the same vehicle over and over, to the right tolerances, and operating it the same way every time, without fing anything up.

An engineering achievement means excellence in designing a new vehicle, or updating an existing one, or inventing a new procedure, and finding the right tolerances that allow that to be replicated over and over without excess cost.

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3. specialist ◴[17 Jan 25 23:26 UTC] No.42744322[source]▶
Aha.

So using some wholly new process, like the continuous innovation involved in casting large parts, how would I separate ops and engr?

Forgive my ignorance. I'm just wondering how Ford's quality circles, or the Toyota Production System would work if ops and engr were treated aa separate silos.

Since we're kibitzing about rockets, I suppose the example above could have been ramping up production of Raptor engines to 1 per day (IIRC), while improving performance and reducing costs. If I wanted to emulate that process, using your methodology, where would I start?