lutorm

My NC30 is actually an EFI conversion project running Megasquirt. I got tired of trying to get to the carbs... ;-)

Falcon is not fully reusable, there's a hard cost floor from the need to throw away a second stage for every launch, and there's no reasonable prospect to avoid doing so. The idea is that Starship will beat Falcon on launch costs long term. SpaceX itself is chomping at the bit getting Starlink to launch on Starship instead of Falcon, because it will be cheaper.

SpaceX plows all its profits into this goal. (Its shareholders aren't getting any returns, not for a long time. The SpaceX investors are playing an extremely long game.) And if you constantly use all your profits to improve your capability, you have a huge long-term advantage over companies that exist to make a profit for their shareholders.

Also, mean free path in a particle cloud depends on number density, cross sectional area and speed. The cross sectional area is small, but relative speed is also very high, which makes collisions more likely than one would think just based on their number density.

That's not actually true -- the horizon distance at those altitudes is several thousand km, and one degree of latitude is about 100km, so the satellites are actually visible quite far to the north of there. Of course, they'll be increasingly far away and close to the horizon, so not optimal for reception.

Also, the Starlink modems need a huge amount of power compared to the Swarm network, not really a similar application.

It's good to learn from other people's mistakes, but you also can't let everything people have done before go unchallenged or no progress would ever be made from rockets that cost $2B per launch.

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.

There's something called FTS. Said fireworks were responsible for todays RUD... ;-)

You say this with seeming knowledge of the thoroughness of SpaceX's failure investigations. Care to elaborate how you can say this with such authority?

Would a "mature aerospace company" also know to not use O-rings outside the temperature range specified by its engineers? Or know to test whether foam traveling at high velocity would penetrate the TPS?

Look, this is hard stuff. It's very easy to tell when you screw up, but very difficult to tell how close you are to screwing up. You're deluding yourself if you think some entities are immune to screwing up just because they've been around.

People volunteer for the military, and I don't think anyone's under any illusion this is risk free. The important thing is not lying to people about the risk involved.

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.

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.

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.

But this is totally false. There are entirely different standards applied if you want to design an aircraft for commercial airline passenger transport vs for general aviation. There are entirely different requirements for instrumentation reliability if you're building a day-VFR aircraft vs one that is allowed to fly in instrument conditions. And there are entirely different requirements for aircraft that you sell to the public vs ones that you build yourself.

The aviation side is full of examples of exactly the sliding scale you're saying doesn't exist.

Well, that's the problem right there. An estimate is not a promise. It should not be treated as such.