People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. Compare the SLS to Starship. SLS has had a 100% success rate. One launch, one success. But it costs $2B per launch (and climbing) and has taken 12 years to get here. Plus, it's stealing pieces of the Space Shuttle, which was developed in the 70s over a long period of time. Starship will launch a half a dozen "failures" before they achieve…
>> People want to see 100% success in all things. But that isn't very economical. That sounds logical, but isn't really a thing in aerospace/space. Complicated high-energy systems have thousands of failure points. So to have any chance of success each failure point needs to be engineered below, by way of example, a 0.0001% chance of failure. That costs lots of money. But say one decides to accept more risk for less c…
So SLS does a LOT of analysis and manages to find and rectify failure points prior to flight. They pay a lot in analysis and inflexible design to do this.
SpaceX does some analysis, but then flies to confirm the analysis early. That way they identify actual failure points and can use sensors to see how close they got to failure.
For instance today I'm sure they learnt a lot from each failed engine, parts on the booster that stopped working, detailed telemetry on ship behavior on flight and sensors for the non-separation of booster from ship.
SpaceX builds to the same high tolerances as other rocket manufacturers, but they don't try to avoid testing through overly rigorous analysis. They also don't gold-plate their manufacturing, instead making tradeoffs to allow cheaper volume production with recovery instead.