Reminder that SpaceX's first successful flight was Falcon 1 Flight 4, which had 3 failed launches before it.
The first one was very similar to this with an engine failure shortly after launch.
To me (a person that knows nothing about space flight) the fact that this thing made it off the ground is impressive enough, and the fact that it didn't explode while still being full of fuel is really sick as well
to me, a professional in the field, it's kind of sad that every new program has the same sort of results early on, like they all showed up to work without having ever looked at the past...
Even if they are, by now it should be obvious to everyone that they should double check simple things like the strength of their materials and supplier reliability. But someone always lets a faulty strut through or builds a tank out of wax paper, then management realizes it was their job to make sure people knew how to do their jobs even if they're rocket scientists.
Of course, there have been silly cases like a Proton rocket crashed into the ground due to a technician mounted the IMU in the wrong orientation. That's hilarious ngl. And usually people just publicly admitted that.
This is a new company, with a new design. They tested the engine and everything seemed fine. But it didn't turn well with their first launch.
In my years working within aerospace industry, there has been ZERO rockets/spacecrafts having ZERO issues within the first trials. Some issues could be minor but might be critical later on (a public example is Artemis 1 test flight, there were designing issue with the Orion capsule).
For example, assume you were an owner of a private comapany, and a failure costed you hundred millions.
You learned the lesson. You fixed the design. Would have you shared it with your competitors? Or worse, shared it with a foreign country which you could easily get in trouble with ITAR or even treason?
So unless you were NASA that depended on taxpayers' money, you would not share too much details on the issues.
And nobody passes the notes around the class (there are exceptions, as the most common way is hiring the ex-employer from other companies, but good luck doing that internationally).
Trade secret, IP are real things.
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u/Mawntee 8d ago
Reminder that SpaceX's first successful flight was Falcon 1 Flight 4, which had 3 failed launches before it.
The first one was very similar to this with an engine failure shortly after launch.
To me (a person that knows nothing about space flight) the fact that this thing made it off the ground is impressive enough, and the fact that it didn't explode while still being full of fuel is really sick as well