https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250185969
https://www.worldcat.org/title/loonshots-how-to-nurture-the-...
New Books Network interview: https://newbooksnetwork.com/safi-bahcall-loonshots-how-to-nu...
Elon Musk is known for rewarding for success, not punishing for failure, but instead reserving punishment for those that didn't even both trying.
Meanwhile, "not even trying" is the default mode of operation for 90% of public servants I've worked with...
Isn't this the second pressure vessel to fail on pressure testing? Doing it wrong once is OK. Doing it wrong twice means you learned nothing from your first failure.
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28pi+*+9m+*+4mm+*+118...
They’re at a “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” stage in the engineering cycle. They’re using (and abusing) processes never meant to be used for spaceflight, so in a lot of ways nobody there really knows how to do things correctly without trying and testing it. Imagine trying to learn a language like Go without being able to access any documentation on it. You would waste a ton of time and utterly fail at simple tasks too.
Elon Musk presided over a failure in static pressure testing of a steel vessel. No vibrations, no dynamic loading, no fluid flow, just simply pressurizing a steel tank. No exotic materials or difficult techniques like aluminium welding were involved, just garden-variety steel, the best-understood material of all. How do you manage to fail at constructing a piece of equipment as simple as this?
We can discuss terms here.
If you don't own any SpaceX stock and aren't planning on flying on one of their spaceships when the time comes, why do you care?
Sure, but its what, A few 10's of thousands of dollars for steel and welding for the test? If it saves a day of double or triple checking to just ""see if the damned thing blows up "" you have to weigh success odds and lessons learned vs. overhead costs. I wonder what a few days or weeks of overhead costs a company like SpaceX that would have had to be spent to make sure the test succeeded.
As a rule of thumb, calendar time is generally more expensive than equipment and man-hours - even in hard tech.
Edison failed thousands of times building an electric light bulb filament.
And yet falcon 1 failed how many times before they got falcon 9 up?
It just did, a few weeks ago: https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/nasa-engineers-....
If the James Webb telescope failed during deploy, it would be a $10-$20 billion loss -- and it would never be re-attempted.
NASA needs to re-learn from SpaceX's ability to iterate on cheap designs and flush out flaws quickly. I say re-learn, because they DID know how to do this correctly during the Gemini / Apollo eras (TONS of rockets blew up before they attempted human spaceflight).
But culturally, something went deeply wrong, perhaps when we reached the Space Shuttle era, and they lost the willingness to ever accept failure or pushing limits -- the same process we tell tell children is critical to ever learning.