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by wahern12 hours ago |
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upvoteby lunar_mycroft11 hours ago|
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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).
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upvoteby m4rtink9 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby bradyd3 hours ago|
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[dead]
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upvoteby baq11 hours ago|
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Yeah exactly. Blowing up the rocket is the easy part. Reliably blowing up rockets on a high cadence is hard.
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upvoteby servo_sausage9 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby lunar_mycroft3 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby mr_toad1 hours ago|
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Waiting until you need something and don’t have an easy replacement is how you end up with delays and bottlenecks.
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upvoteby lunar_mycroft1 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby somenameforme1 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby pbrum4 hours ago|
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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?
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upvoteby bob10298 hours ago|
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> 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.

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upvoteby mrsmrtss7 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby SAI_Peregrinus3 hours ago|
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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.
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upvoteby 4 hours ago|
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upvoteby dboreham6 hours ago|
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It is however how most software testing is done.
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upvoteby junon4 hours ago|
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"Most" is a gross exaggeration.
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upvoteby brookst4 hours ago|
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Risk aversion is very risky.
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upvoteby jeffrallen12 hours ago|
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Failure is not only an option, but is required. The more smaller failures you have, the more big successes you can have.
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upvoteby card_zero11 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby MarkusQ3 hours ago|
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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.

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upvoteby pfdietz4 hours ago|
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Necessary and sufficient are different concepts.
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upvoteby j1mc1 hours ago|
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ah, yes ... there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all.
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upvoteby locknitpicker12 hours ago|
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> 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?

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upvoteby LunicLynx10 hours ago|
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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.

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