[wahern]

Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rockets are ridiculously complex. Slow-and-steady wins the race makes sense for many individual components, depending on how well understood the problem domain is, and your ability to rigorously model things. But if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. You have to be prepared to not only break some eggs in epic fashion, but to break many as quickly as you can, so you can parallelize your problem solving and iterate faster.

[1] At least without a large multiple in time and monetary expenditure that ends up costing more than even the US (government and private capital combined) is prepared to spend.

[lunar_mycroft]

No, this would be crushing regardless. Even if Blue Origin had dozens of rockets ready to go, they can't fly without without the pad, which will take around a year to repair (based on previous examples).

[m4rtink]

This was an issue already in the Soviet times, with a couple cases of early rocket explosions destroying the pad and causing long delays, including one spectacular N1 explosion leveling its pad and needing lengthy expensive rebuild.

As a result they went to extensive lengths to avoid pad damage, including never terminating rocket thrust in the first (IIRC) 60 seconds of flight. Better let the rocket crash into something nearby than to explode at the pad.

[mrandish]

> As a result they went to extensive lengths to avoid pad damage, including never terminating rocket thrust in the first (IIRC) 60 seconds of flight.

I was pondering this very thing. Was there a way to learn the same info as this static fire that didn't risk all the pad infrastructure? I get that the tower, fueling systems, deluge, etc all have to work together in a real launch but given the immense schedule and dollar cost of losing the pad, how much less valid would bifurcated tests be? Like each sub-system is tested in-place on the pad without firing the rocket and then static firing itself is done on a more expendable test pad? Maybe even a test pad that's only designed to only survive long enough to get the necessary data before melting and losing the rocket.

Or alternatively, as you mentioned, when it's time to test full fuel load, skip the "static" part and do everything possible to get the rocket up and away ASAP.

[GMoromisato]

The alternative is you don't find out about a problem until it destroys a customer payload. That's better than losing the launch pad, but it depends on the actual probability of each event happening.

What if a static fire reduces your chance of losing a customer payload from 20% to 0.2%, but increases your chance of losing the pad from 1% to 2%?

And note: If they had skipped a static fire and gone straight for a launch, they would have lost the pad anyway, since the explosion happened at ignition.

[baq]

Yeah exactly. Blowing up the rocket is the easy part. Reliably blowing up rockets on a high cadence is hard.

[servo_sausage]

If one pad is the bottleneck, and the goal is to ramp up to be a spacex competitor, then build more than one...

Falcon has shown the playbook, and the demand for launch... The goal should be 2-4 launch sites in the medium term; with a second site very early to avoid exactly this.

[lunar_mycroft]

Until recently, SpaceX only acquired new pads because they needed a completely new launch site (SLC-4 in Vandenberg) or needed to launch a vehicle that their existing pad(s) didn't support (Falcon Heavy for LC-39A, Starship for Pad A in Boca Chica/Starbase). Currently, Blue Origin's only orbital launch vehicle is New Glenn, and their Vandenberg pad is still under construction.

[mr_toad]

Waiting until you need something and don’t have an easy replacement is how you end up with delays and bottlenecks.

[lunar_mycroft]

Launch pads are not something you just buy on a whim to keep around just in case you need them. They're very expensive pieces of infrastructure that you only acquire when you have an actual, known need. That's how every launch provider that I know of behaves, including SpaceX.

[somenameforme]

I don't disagree at all, but I'm quite curious where the cost actually comes from. Even including all the harnessing and other hardware, it doesn't seem like something that should be a bank-breaker when we're casually talking about vehicles worth tens of millions of dollars blowing up, if not being discarded after a single launch.

[NetMageSCW]

Actually SpaceX is in the process of building multiple Starship launch pads in multiple locations with only an expected theoretical need.

[servo_sausage]

Except that they are a competitor trying to catch up; it's not enough to follow what spacex did. They need to target where spacex will be when their own product is mature.

[pbrum]

I was going to say this too. And since we're at it: does anyone know how many launch pads the Chinese private space companies have, combined?

[bob1029]

> if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere.

This is exactly why ideas like test-driven development don't work well as a general approach.

Most realistic systems exhibit non-linear interactions where correctness is not compositional. Local correctness does not compose upward in any meaningful sense. Top-down design (working backward from the customer) allows for you to perform what is effectively one big global search. Bottom-up design (TDD) requires many local searches that all have to fit together perfectly at the very end. With units & composition, the consequences of component A's interactions with component B may not be considered until nearly the end of the project. If you are testing an integrated vertical, you will discover these interactions much earlier.

[mrsmrtss]

That's not how TDD works. You test the whole chain and all the components with tests and you can move from top to bottom with TDD, it's actually how you should do it.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

There's a disconnect between TDD using all sorts of tests (unit, integration, hardware-in-the-loop, in-field, etc.) and TDD using unit tests only. Unit tests provide the least value/line of test code of all types of tests. They're important, since they can catch bugs earlier than other sorts of tests that can't be caught by a type system, but not sufficient to catch most bugs.

[dboreham]

It is however how most software testing is done.

[junon]

"Most" is a gross exaggeration.

[deepsun]

Not true. In early rocket days, soviets tried to use "move fast and break things" approach. They even put artillery generals in charge, who very much liked the approach.

The problem became apparent with several failed launches of moon lander, when rockets blew up or failed to deploy payload. So engineers spent month of assembling a lander that just got burnt. And when it reached its destination, it failed to perform, because they didn't test it separately extensively.

Then they realized it is faster to spend a lot of time testing each part on the ground instead of launching it all together when any bug would prevent even testing the rest.

[jeffrallen]

Failure is not only an option, but is required. The more smaller failures you have, the more big successes you can have.

[card_zero]

Well, they just had a failure, so that spells great success, right?

I'm unclear on the point of why having a rocket blow up when you're being slow and careful is more of a setback than having one blow up when you aren't.

[MarkusQ]

Information theory. If you are doing lots of small, incremental tests, burning through a lot of hardware doing all sorts of characterization and qualifying tests, learning a little bit from each one, you can make steady progress, finding your mistakes as you go.

If instead you try to work out everything in painstaking detail, build a small number of prototypes that your calculations assure you should work, and one blow sup, you learn that...your calculations are wrong.

Imagine developing software with no CI tests, where you only get to run one full system test every couple of months. Slow and careful means avoiding lots and lots of early learning opportunities.

[pfdietz]

Necessary and sufficient are different concepts.

[j1mc]

ah, yes ... there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all.

[brookst]

Risk aversion is very risky.

[locknitpicker]

> Crushing only because their cadence is so slow compared to SpaceX. Their process seems much closer to the highly risk averse methodology of traditional incumbents than to SpaceX's style. Failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is a silly perspective. Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin. Of course SpaceX can afford to blow up rocket after rocket. The radical difference is not methodologies, but how much cash is being thrown at the project.

For perspective, apparently the whole lunar lander program ran on a 1-year budget much similar to SpaceX's, and thus 20 times larger than Blue Origin's. Where they also highly risk- averse?

[LunicLynx]

Is this a broken down budget you are talking about?

I don’t know the numbers but that spacex has more money moving around does not seem surprising. Launching 100s of rockets per year is not free?

Also did you do an accumulation over their existence? Blue had two orbital launches so far.

[panick21_]

> Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin.

I have been following the Space industry for 1-2 decades and I would love to know what you base this number on.

In terms of what we know, is that we know that at times in the 2010s BlueOrigin had almost the same amount of people while launching much less often, having many many fewer projects (like no human capsule, no Starlink). It is well known that Bezos spend more then 1 billion a year on BlueOrigin, people estimate 2-3 billion $. And that was in a period where their overwhelming spend was on New Glenn.

The idea that SpaceX spent 20x that even on Starship is insane and not credible.

In fact, every piece of evidence shows the exact opposite. SpaceX developed Falcon 9 at a incredibly small budget, like literally vanishingly small compared to what New Glenn in spending. And then SpaceX iterated on the design while generating revenue.

New Glenn cost many, many billions before revenue and has a budget that is not that different from Starship will being more comparable to Falcon Heavy.

We also have other evidence. Lunar lander document from NASA suggested as much. NASA estimate that SpaceX would assume 50% of the cost, Blue bid was much higher and they were less willing to self finance (at least initially). Those numbers suggested that SpaceX and BlueOrigin lander cost were not that different, except of course the SpaceX lander had much higher capability.

And pretty much everything we know about Blue is that they spend a huge amount of money and are nowhere near as thrifty as SpaceX, specially compared to the same stage of development. SpaceX had to do that because they simply didn't have the finances. They couldn't just use the 1-3 billion $ of free money flowing into the company.

I open to being proven wrong here with some actual numbers. But I have been following this space in detail and try to look at the best numbers we know publicly and follow some companies that estimate these things. For example, for early SpaceX NASA did a study on cost and how SpaceX could do it at these costs. So we have some good knowledge on that period. We can also look at when SpaceX raised money and do some estimates of their budget and so on. If there are reliable numbers out-there that exist I don't know about, I would love know what you are talking about.