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Comment by m4rtink | Hacker News Reader

There are definitely some parallels, but it is not the same in many regards. For example the N1 was severely hampered by engine availability - Glushko wanted to push his hypergolic rockets and engines and refused to build an engine like he did for the R7. So they had to pick something else & ended up with far too many (for that time) not very reliable NK-15 engines.

Also compared to Super Heavy & Starship, they had more stages (4 vs 2) and most importantly, were not able to test the stages separately - which was possible for the Saturn V & IIRC all its stages exploded on the test stand at least once.

Both Super Heavy and Starship can be tested separately & Starship exploded during such testing, without taking the rest of the rocket with it, like N1 regularly did - including demolishing the super expensive launch pad during at least one occasion.

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Starship seems to explode much more taking everything with it - not just parts on a launch stand

The Soviet program had plenty of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe

I know. I thought we (the USA) were supposed to be better than them. We were with the Apollo program

We did accidentally torch the Apollo 1 crew in their capsule.

My fav Apollo-era fuckup is when they tested the launch abort system. The test went bad, but was 100% successful in demonstrating it worked. Heh. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DpdKxv9WINY

Getting to Apollo involved a lot of big booms, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13qeX98tAS8

My point is once we launched that was never a failure. Yes, there were deaths, which is horrible.

But we learned and improved fast.

Now that we have decades of rocket knowledge, we shouldn't be wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on giant explosions

"Explode until you figure it out" served Falcon 9 well.

I'm inclined to see Constellation/SLS/Orion/etc. as at least as wasteful as the explosions, at least so far. Which one wins out will depend on the end results.

I'd also note Apollo 13 was definitely a failure.

While "explode until you figure it out" worked well on the Falcon 9, it was a lot of taxpayer money to develop a rocket system primarily used to launch their own product at this point - not delivering on price-points they claimed

I might be a little bitter that NASA doesn't get that money instead.

NASA paid to get cargo and people up. Every other provider discarded the first stage.

NASA also got much cheaper launches out of it. They’re just fine.

This is the kind of logic that led the HE to outsource its manufacturing base to China because “Americans got cheaper shit”.

It’s a very reasonable argument for little tchotchkes you sell to tourists but much less so when talking about critical technologies.

Over on the nuclear side there was SL1, which AFAICT is probably the answer to the question "why doesn't the US Army have its own nuclear systems?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOt7xDKxmCM .

"Nuclear water hammer" is definitely cringe-inducing.

> So they had to pick something else & ended up with far too many (for that time) not very reliable NK-15 engines.

I mean, I would note that the first stage of this has 33 engines (N1 had 30, Saturn V had 5).

Sure, even with Falcon 9 many found it iffy to have so many engines - but it turned out fine. Hopefully modern control hardware and QA can handle also 30+. :)

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