by AgentR11 » Thu 02 Jul 2015, 11:07:51
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', 'O')verall -- it's a darn shame it happened. Even if they do get back on track "within 32 weeks" -- that's still a massive setback. They had launches booked for years on out.
The company will survive, though. They've go the nasa contracts, they just got USAF approval before this thing happened. Google put in a billion dollars. They can't have more failures though, that's for sure..
You still don't get it.
They *WILL* have more failures. Russia will have more failures. NASA will have more failures. ULA will have more failures. EU,China, India, Japan; all are going to blow up more rockets and wreck more landers and screw up more satellites and probes....
Space flight is *hard*. Failure goes with the territory. You have to learn from each failure, and improve based upon that knowledge, just to stay in the game.
There's a reason all that data is recorded; its because they know some of those rockets will go boom, and they'd like to know why.
Maybe after another 10,000 launches of heavy lift rockets we'll know enough to make them about as safe as custom race cars. At a rate of at best 150 per year, I'd say we get to that level of safety a bit before the end of the century, if we're lucky and smart.
SpaceX losing this rocket, at this particular time is inconvenient for NASA and kinda bad for them as a company; but its something that is expected, and you have to be ready to deal with it and move forward.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')hey've had a lot of successful launches and deliveries back and forth.. air force does need these rocket engines.. can't just be dependent on Putin, better to figure out the problem, put the money in, fix it.
You always say "money". Its *TIME* that is the critical component; it takes a long time to design a new engine, test it, adapt it to its mission. You don't just walk down the street and say, "Hey, I needs me 500 guys and gals to come help build a rocket engine." If money could solve it, SpaceX would have been launching years ago.
Its a living ecosystem of technology; you have to grow and evolve it to a design, know that each engine you make is unique, each rocket you assemble is unique, and you've eliminated or accounted for as many of the variations between versions as you can. It takes years to grow, money's important, but the US Congress can't write a check big enough to cause a new engine to come into existence by the end of the year, or even next year really.
So yeah, both the US and the Russians have discovered that our cultural distaste for each other simply exceeds what we can be comfortable with. Thus, we'll go our separate ways; be largely independent of each other's capabilities; and with any luck, China will keep the waste and duplication from being just over the top stupid. With any luck, this sort of disharmony will also yield a certain degree of durability in technological capability. We'll get less in the long term, but the whole prospect of space exploration won't be so fragile.