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Comment by AnarchismIsCool | Hacker News Reader

Turns out there's a list on Wikipedia. Looks like they found just about everything that can go wrong. Mostly fuel system issues though.

It's pretty uncommon to be that bad at launch vehicle design. Recently Vulcan and SLS both launched and made orbit with new designs on the first try instead of the 7th, though you could probably just stack $1 bills and get to space just as fast.

Rocket lab got electron to orbit on their second try.

Relativity almost made it and they had a very weird production technique. SpaceX has been having issues but they're building a much more complicated vehicle.

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It true that Astra took 7 tries to get to orbit, but they did so in record time from founding to achieving orbit.

* Astra - 5 years

* SpaceX - 7 years

* Firefly - 8 years

* RocketLab - 12 years

* Virgin Orbit - 13 years

ABL, Relativity, Blue Origin, Stoke - never made it to orbit

Compare the cost of SLS ($4.1 billion) and Vulcan ($100-200 million) to an Astra rocket ($4 million). If you spend 100-1000x more money, is it impressive to have better performance than a $4 million rocket?

It's really not common for an organization to make it to orbit on their first try. SpaceX may make it look easy, but it took them 4 tries to finally pull it off on their first rocket.

Astra does seem to have had more than their fair share though.

Yeah but 7th time's a charm?

I think the thing that's striking is most of the failures look like lack of ground testing to me. They had lots of failures that would have presented in ground firing and a couple that would have been obvious with proper electrical integration testing.

There's a lot of process we follow in the industry that looks weird from the outside but is pretty well tuned for risk reduction, you just don't have to go full Boeing where you create tons of bonus process then circumvent it all when it becomes expensive.

They didn't launch the same rocket 7 times. Those launches are with 3 or 4 different rockets.

Startups like Astra couldn't hit the price point they wanted if they had done all those processes. So they did it a different way. In the case of Astra not successfully.

>Rocket lab got electron to orbit on their second try.

IIRC their first launch was destroyed by bad telemetry requiring manual flight termination (if in doubt terminate), the hardware itself flew perfectly on first launch.

Which is remarkably impressive.

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