Re: SpaceX armchair quarterbacking

Damon Hill wrote:
http://kwajrockets.blogspot.com/

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon/f1/060325leak.html

The cause of the failure was apparently a fuel leak, resulting
in a fire and burnthrough of a pressurization line, followed
by an automatic engine cutoff. All other systems and performance
were normal up to that point. The loose insulation apparently
had no effect on the flight.

Nevertheless the loose insulation did not behave the way they wanted it
to. Stuff falling off in chunks of unpredictable size in flight is
certainly not a desirable situation, even if it is not a fragile
vehicle like the shuttle.

[snip]
It's just tough that this particular problem apparently didn't
manifest until flight, but rocketry is unforgiving like that.
Spacex has made far more progress than most startups; they're
flying real hardware and learning lessons, the hard way.

Agreed. There is not a single organization, government or private
company that managed to build an orbital launcher without blowing up
flight hardware in the process.

But the point still remains that this problem would have manifested
itself during a suborbital flight of just the first stage without full
propellant load. This would have been cheaper, faster and less
embarassing for them.

I think they will be able to fix the bugs the traditional way, but I
would love to see them move to a more incremental flight testing
approach in the future.

.

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