Hacker News Reader

Comment by szoszon | Hacker News Reader

Have you heard of instances where airplanes failed due to something as basic as a nut or a screw not meeting the required specifications? It's difficult to trust the reliability of a rocket, which is largely based on statistics, when you're putting hundreds of people on it. How can we be certain that NASA/FAA and other organizations will permit such a risk?

View on HN

Have you heard of instances where airplanes failed due to something as basic as a nut or a screw not meeting the required specifications?

Oh yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unapproved_aircraft_part

For example:

The crash of Partnair Flight 394 in 1989 resulted from the installation of counterfeit aircraft parts. Counterfeit bolts, attaching the vertical stabilizer of a Convair CV-580 to the fuselage, wore down excessively, allowing the tail to vibrate to the extent that it eventually broke off.

This happens to aircraft, and the only way to ensure it doesn't happen to rockets is to have extreme control of your supply chain.

You can’t verify the reliability of an aircraft by flying it 1000 times because you’d be putting the life of the pilots at risk. Autonomous rockets have no such constraint. You could launch starship an unlimited number of times without putting a single person at risk.

It's not even about putting the life of the pilots at risk - it's about cost. It's starting to look like the lack of flame diverter was a huge mistake that will cost a lot of money and time, how do you think this will affect the whole project? What if after they fix the launchpad, it gets destroyed again, simply because some other preventable failure? How many more of these "tests" can they have without going bankrupt?

Pouring new concrete is cheap, they’ve already done it multiple times from damage due to test fires. Each time they reformulate the concrete and it needs less repair.

After they get to orbit they can start putting payloads on board, and the tests will pay for themselves. I’d say the risk of bankruptcy is very low.

Edit: Just saw photos of the crater under stage zero. Looks like they do need a flame diverter lol.

Once they realized they needed a flame diverter, I think they traded off the cost and delay of putting one in vs the cost of just filling the hole each time.

It's totally feasible for them to keep testing and keep refilling that hole while in parallel they build a perfect launch pad with a flame diverter somewhere else. That way they don't have a gap in testing cadence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com