I'm not the best way to frame this is "first one to a single successful launch". Reliability matters when you're dealing with high-risk scenarios, so a better measure is "probability of a given launch being successful".
I'm not asking as a 'gotcha' question, I'm acknowledging that the sample size matters. A lot of these statistics are bandied about without really elaborating on the full context of the way reliability is actually measured in industry.
Without checking for the most up-to-date numbers, I believe the F9 is slightly better than Soyuz on raw numbers (successful flights / total attempted). But Soyuz probably has around 6-7x more flights, meaning we have much more confidence that the Soyuz numbers accurately reflect reality.
Having said that I do think propulsive landing for crewed vehicles is pretty scary. F9 firsts stage landings have been pretty reliable for a while, and they now have several boosters with 10 or more flights, so we’ll see. It’s not like capsule landings are 100% safe either.
There has been over 140 crewed launches. For context, you seem to be counting both test/demo, crewed, and uncrewed F9 launches. Again, I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but there's probably ~10 crewed F9 launches, so it's an order magnitude difference using the same metric. It's gets better though, when comparing total launches.
Not that many options for landing something that size on Mars. That’s what’s really driving many of the design choices.
A new vehicle will always be unproven. But one that's flown 5 times in testing (4 of them unsuccessfully) before its first flight will have had more flight time on most of its systems than something like the SLS where you take 10 years to think about what could go wrong and then do one test launch and call it good.
Lots of falcons failed, but you don't see anybody worried about their payload or crew on Falcon 9 these days.
It's the X-origin vs Slope issue - steeper slope always wins.
The problem is maintaining that aggressive problem-seeking culture after long periods of success
As an example, they had issues with failures related to their COPVs rupturing. On the one hand, they addressed the problem by redesigning their system. On the other, they never really investigated fully why the COPVs were failing in the first place. Instead, NASA decided to fund that investigation on their own. One possible consequence is that their redesign didn't fully address the risk because they never fully investigated the root cause.
I agree with the first part, but the second half extrapolates too far IMO. One successful launch tells us very little about operational reliability.
From an outcome perspective, it's hard to ever see the lower launch rate dominating from any perspective.
You don't have economies of manufacturing scale, because your assembly rate is so low it doesn't make sense not to treat each as exquisite.
You don't have rapid iteration on manufacturing improvements, because the tyranny of safety checks on manufacturing time balloons {time from fix to flight}, after a proposed fix is identified.
And most importantly, you leave yourselves extremely vulnerable to unknown-unknowns, that you can't imagine in the design phase.
For example, if NASA had been launching the shuttle more rapidly, with the bulk of those being uncrewed launches, they probably would have picked an uncrewed launch to test expanding the temperature bounds at Cape Canaveral, and Challenger would have exploded without a crew.
As was, NASA's shuttle launches were so rare that there wasn't acceptable launch rate and weren't low-impact launch opportunities to do so. So they tested it on a crewed mission with disastrous results.
Point being: they backed themselves into a low-volume/high-risk corner of their own strategic design
SpaceX's most brilliant achievement was using Starlink to artificially boost launch demand and give them a minimally-profitable/break-even place to sink higher-risk launches.
Because they knew they had to "get it right" the first time because a bunch of buffoons(congress) would consider any crash or explosion as a failure and pull funds immediately.
That’s not the way the CCP contracting works.
>You don't have rapid iteration on manufacturing improvements, because the tyranny of safety checks on manufacturing time balloons
Rapid iterations has obvious benefits. But there are also downsides because it makes it harder to arrive at a stable, reliable design, it introduces vendor issues, etc. Tesla is also known for iterating faster compared to their major competitors but it has resulted in logistics and reliability issues.
IMO SpaceX's most brilliant achievement was leveraging govt contracts to work out the kinks of their designs, which could then be leveraged at a lower risk for Starlink. In effect, they let the public take the burden of the risk (because the govt is really the only entity capable of shouldering that size of a risk for an unproven quantity) and then transitioned to a private means of revenue in Starlink. (I'm not saying that as a slight btw, I think it's mutually beneficial).
SpaceX's strategy for the Falcon 9 worked and it's one of the most reliable rockets in the world, flying the most often.
You're focused on the wrong takeaway. You're making this about a person, I'm talking about a process. I used Tesla because it's easy to see how one culture translates to the other. Insert any company that uses rapid iteration in place of Tesla if you prefer.
The point is that there are certain circumstances where rapid iteration is useful and others less so. When reliability matters, rapid iteration may be working against you. (It's a continuum, of course, so the real question is where is that tipping point)
>SpaceX's strategy for the Falcon 9 worked
The point I'm driving at is there is a distinction to be made when finding out why certain iterations didn't work vs. just changing the design without fully understanding the failure mechanisms of the first. One leads to a greater understanding than the other. It's a difference in an engineers mindset and a scientists mindset.
You are driving at a point by pretending there's some important difference because "in this industry".
It's the same industry. Building the same type of product. By the same company.
Now go look at the history of Shuttle for the equivalent number of launches at that risk level. Would you claim they are equivalent in terms of human-rated safety?
If not, it’s only because you have the benefit of knowing the long-tail probabilities with the Shuttle.
>It's the same industry. Building the same type of product.
By extension of your logic, Starship should then already have the same launch reliability as F9. So either this is an example of a low-probability event, or your logic is flawed.
True, few of those F9 missions were crewed, but that's the point. There's no difference between a crewed and a noncrewed F9 launch vehicle, so there's no reason to think the presence of humans would change the risk. So, you get to accumulate most of that reliability data without putting people at risk doing so.
Because the nature of the two programs was fundamentally different. The Shuttle was a product contract, while CCP is a service contract. On the former, the govt has much more control, and will detail more rigorous acceptance criteria. This generally gives a much higher pedigree on quality control. On the latter, they take a much more hands off approach and have limited insight.
As an analogy, imagine you are making a big bet on acquiring a software company. One company gives you their source code, shows you all their most recent static analysis, unit test results, allows you to interview their programmers etc. The other company allows you none of that, but gives you a chance to play around on their website to see for yourself. Both systems seem to work when you try the end product, but which do you have higher confidence in?
At the end of the day, "reliability" is just a measure of how much confidence we have that a product will do what we ask of it, when we ask.
I'm not saying you can get by without thinking, but it's difficult for humans to estimate the reliability of a complicated system. Reality, though, has no problem doing it.
Plus, I think your analogy is flawed. NASA surely has a more hands-off approach on the CCP than on the Shuttle, but to say it's hands-off is misleading. They do have a lot of access.
Take the example of the F9 strut failure. They could have tested the material outside of the final test configuration and saved themselves a lot of trouble. They chose to forego that testing, and instead 'tested ' it as part of part of their launch configuration. (I put it in quotes because it's not clear to me that this was a conscious testing decision).
There’s also a difference between “we’re not completely sure of the fundamental principles, but our testing indicates it works” and “our testing indicates it works and we have a solid understanding why”. The latter allows you to know the limits of your application much more readily. The risk in the former is that you don’t know what you don’t know, so you can never be wholly sure if you’re good or lucky. And luck can be fickle. And this is also where rapid iteration can lead to issues: the more you change, the less sure you can be about whether your results are attributable to luck.
>Plus, I think your analogy is flawed. NASA surely has a more hands-off approach on the CCP than on the Shuttle, but to say it's hands-off is misleading. They do have a lot of access.
They have many engineers who want more access and are effectively told to back off because it's not their place in this type of contract. So I'm not saying they have no access, I'm saying they have very limited access by comparison. It would have been better if I made the analogy that they get the results to a small select number of tests, but not all.