201–210 of 265 posts
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On the other hand, perfection looks like nothing ever blowing up while job always getting done.
Does this ever happen?
AFAIK nobody has built something like this before. To have it fail during an early test doesn't seem unusual.
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They are, somewhat. You can theoretically make a safety factor 1.0 if you're really absolutely certain of the input criteria. Safety factor is really just a (somewhat blunt) method of managing risk. It's just admitting that we don't know the true load spectra that a design is exposed to, so we take what we believe is the max load and then slap a multiplier on it to manage how much uncertainty we expect, be it from es…
Safety factors also mitigate stupidity (your bridge is rated for load X, but someone drives 1.1 X through it because they're in a hurry) and cascade failures (a component upstream of yours fails and sends more load down your way).
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What do you mean by "not moving"? The platform sat on the surface of an ocean. It's always moving.
What he means is that the boat is moving up and down but keeps a stationary latitude/longitude. The rocket has static landing coordinates, and if the boat were to move a few meters to either side it would miss it.
But there are definitely no “static coordinates”, it would have to move a lot more than a few meters for the rocket to miss, and it would be due to trajectory and fuel constraints rather than ability to maneuver.
Oh dear! It looks like someone accidentally divided by 2 for the cylindrical hoop stresses, forgetting that they're not the same equation as for spherical stresses. :) Less facetiously, a thin-walled cylinder's stress is a function of pressure, radius and thickness with the equation: sigma = P*r/t whereas for a sphere (including the spherical end caps on a cylindrical pressure vessel), it follows the equation: sigma…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by "not moving"? The platform sat on the surface of an ocean. It's always moving.
What he means is that the boat is moving up and down but keeps a stationary latitude/longitude. The rocket has static landing coordinates, and if the boat were to move a few meters to either side it would miss it.
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I must admit that Elon has done some fairly impressive things, and I respect his hustle and innovation. With that said, the cult that surrounds his projects where people say things like "this is what success looks like" when a big metal thing blows up unexpectedly or robot car goes flying off an exit ramp is a never ending source of amusement.
I guess the parent comment was pointing out that this actually wasn't unexpected, it was one of the expected failure modes for the test and it happened. I don't see any constructive reason to look at it negatively, failure is part of testing. We don't test to find success, we test to find failures so that we can get them out of our systems.
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I must admit that Elon has done some fairly impressive things, and I respect his hustle and innovation. With that said, the cult that surrounds his projects where people say things like "this is what success looks like" when a big metal thing blows up unexpectedly or robot car goes flying off an exit ramp is a never ending source of amusement.
I guess the parent comment was pointing out that this actually wasn't unexpected, it was one of the expected failure modes for the test and it happened. I don't see any constructive reason to look at it negatively, failure is part of testing. We don't test to find success, we test to find failures so that we can get them out of our systems.
During prototype tests you don't have to target 6-sigma, obviously, but I hope we get a post-mortem without spin.
When their entire business depends on very carefully managing their PR, you're not going to get a public post-mortem without spin. If a government regulator runs the investigation, you might. I don't know if a regulator's going to get involved in this, though.
That is simply wrong. Their business depends on reliably launching rockets and delivering payloads to station. And that is what they have done.
> If a government regulator runs the investigation, you might. I don't know if a regulator's going to get involved in this, though.
They are not going to. Starship is a SpaceX project that is not financed by NASA or the DoD.
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I haven't known soda cans to be filled with anything else. And it's not like rockets are filled with air; they're filled with liquid fuels.
Depends. Falcon 9 is almost entirely filled with helium when it lands.
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SpaceX statement: https://www.spacex.com/news/2015/07/20/crs-7-investigation-u... NASA accident investigation report: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/public_... TBF the NASA report came much later than the SpaceX explanation. However it might be of interest to compare: SpaceX explanation of why looking at the right telemetry is hard vs "Technical Finding 4" from NASA. SpaceX explanation of the st…
"SpaceX chose to use an industrial grade (as opposed to aerospace grade) ... cast part" Hmm.. Isn't this a common cost-cutting strategy for Musk's companies? The touchscreen in the Model 3s was (is?) also industrial grade, if I recall correctly.
Isn't that exactly what it should be? Or would you expect aerospace grade material there? Or is there yet another grade in between called 'automotive'?