Re:Blue Origin first human flight
by double0jimb0 on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @11:11AM
(#27894724)
“Scale up”, a software term that has almost zero value when translated to aerospace engineering.
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Re:Blue Origin first human flight
by machiaweliczny on Tuesday July 20, 2021 @12:03PM
(#27895448)
Will see how Elon's 100 of Starships per year will affect costs of transport to space.
I suspect that as they scale up their costs will increase due to logistics and maintenance costs not necessarily scaling linearly with launches. Furthermore, I suspect that the failure rate will also increase as the launch frequency goes up and hence costs associated with launch failures also increase.
> I suspect that the failure rate will also increase as the launch frequency goes up
So you're saying that after say the initial 100 launches
Launch 100-199 would have 5 failures
Launch 200-299 would have 7 failures
Launch 300-399 would have 10 failures
Why?
Generally doing more of something reduces the cost per something. Why do you think the inverse will hold with spacex?
"Scale up" is fine once you have a working design and can just pup out copies of that design by the dozen with mass production - what SpaceX is doing with Raptors (and did with Merlins) for example.
You need the demand to make that worthwhile though.