@sarahjeong.bsky.social Yes, we were

In the sixties even

@sarahjeong.bsky.social different methods on doing things.

lots of time doing theoretical stuff vs getting things out the door, testing it and collecting data to improve the next trial.

both have its pros and cons

@sarahjeong.bsky.social Its not insane. These were solved problems. Billionaires just want to re-invent shit, make it worse, and claim it makes them a visionary to make something that barely works I wouldn't want to be caught dead in.

Doesn't matter if its a car or a shuttle, they cut too many corners and expect to be lauded for it, not realizing the safeties for whatever it is they're enshittifying were written in blood in the first place.

@sarahjeong.bsky.social yes and no. There have always been failures, mostly in tests of new or updated rockets; the number and percentage of successful launches has increased, so we’re succeeding at not blowing up rockets like never before - largely by favoring relatively small changes and extensive testing of components and designs.

What’s different with SpaceX Starship is that the design is a bigger change, and they’re doing much more of the testing with complete actual vehicles

@sarahjeong.bsky.social

Yeeaaa... it's a different approach.

(Don't read this as a defence of Musk, he's a turd, but SpaceX has competent technical people below their chimpanzee-on-a-string PR person)

NASA's traditional approach was to basically achieve perfection of design and manufacturing before trying to launch anything. Look at every possible failure mode of every component, down to the tiniest screw or wire or bit of plastic. Keep redesigning parts until you eliminate all failure modes that you don't have triply-redundant backups for. Test the living snot out of everything on the ground, in the lab. Have massive technical and safety reviews to ensure nothing was missed, anywhere.

It worked about as well as anything could, but it was extremely slow, bureaucratic, and above all incredibly expensive. Tons of rework when issues were found meant having to go back 3 steps to change something, and then redo the massive amount of work that had been done since then to make sure no new failure modes were possible, etc.

SpaceX is doing things differently - #iterative design. You design, build, #integrate, and #test-to-failure as often as possible to learn where the weak spots are -- you then rapidly iterate when you find the problems. "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" is an expected part of the process - it's how you learn the limits of what you've built, where the problems are.

Neither one is "the right way". They both work.

#IterativeDevelopment

@sarahjeong.bsky.social yes, at that time, no marketing, no AI, no bullshit, avoid unneeded costs, just pocket calculator's computing power, a no failure and long term /build to last for years engineering culture.

Today, a tons of money going into flames and ton of water evaporized and CO2 produced daily focused on the 0,1% instead of serving common good.

Disgusting.

@sarahjeong.bsky.social

To be fair, there was Apollo 13, and the space shuttle Challenger and Columbia disasters.

I don't doubt that many of these start-ups are reinventing to some extent, but they still have to do a lot of experimentation.

Space is hard.

@sarahjeong.bsky.social

We could not do sophisticated modelling (like liquid/gas flows) so we used belts and buckles and slide rulers.

Now we can use modelling, but for the models to work we need lots of data. So the blowing up is a data feed.

I was big time into SpaceX before I realised that Felon Muscovite is an actual fascist grifter. Now I hope each one of his rockets blows up on the pad.

Bear in mind that he is extremely successful with orbital launches with his Delta vehicles. He does about 140 per year. By comparison, NASA did under 10-20 and that was before he white-anted it.
Boeing did...1? And it cost something like 2-3 Billion for a single use spaceship.

The Starship vehicle is able to lift TWO 18 wheelers with cargo into orbit (when it actually makes it up there) so it's going to be a HUGE leap forward.

The Raptor engine he is using is a design he bought from the best US engine designer. The stainless steel skin is a NASA design from the 1960s. He did introduce some innovation, mainly by 3D printing shit and using his "move fast and break things"... But at some stage, you need to stop breaking things and have a minimum operational product.

TL;DR: Felon Muscovite is a fascist grifter, data thief and belongs in jail.

#space #spacex #fascism

@sarahjeong.bsky.social
The major difference just being time on paper. NASA would spend half a decade or more before they ever built the rocket just designing components, in some cases only to have them still fail in flight (albeit much less common).

All that time and resource comes from tax payers, which gives them a lot of motivation to minimize failure.

Modern companies tend to promote "good enough" because they're beholden to investors who want to be seen as industry leaders, and flight time with media coverage is more important than time spent in engineering vehicles that are always going to be high risk.

@sarahjeong.bsky.social What I'm saying is, you're reflecting a kind of awareness bias: You didn't USED to know about experimental rocket failures, but now you do, so from your perspective it's a new thing, even though it's very much not.

This is also why so many people believe that gender diversity is a new thing, too, when it's probably more like a quarter million years old.