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by 51Cards 2625 days ago
Article subtitle: "The failure of the landing highlighted the risks of a fast and cheap approach to space exploration."

I would say the opposite. Not specifically just in reference to this mission but in general. They now have a lot of experience and data to use going forward for "not much" expense. A lot of extremely expensive missions were lost because they didn't have the opportunity to iterate.

3 comments

The history of rocketry really took off during WW-II, and was further refined by the military (generic, but pretty much the nations that have successfully landed on the moon), further developing and releasing to civilian government, and eventually private interests.

If I were to make a guess extrapolation to air-flight we're probably still roughly in the 1940s. Private space flight is making things more standard and long-run production instead of one-offs; but we aren't there yet and haven't found workhorse designs that are both reliable and cheap. Experiments like this will hopefully help us get there.

30s, but OK.

Aircraft production was fully industrial going into the 40s.

the US had a tremendous number of rockets lost early on in the space program. Each was a learning opportunity.

hats off to SpaceIL! I look forward to following their next go at it.

yeah that's kind of a ridiculous statement. Big and expensive approaches to space exploration fail just the same.