Eli5: “Why do spacecraft keep exploding, when we figured out to make them work ages ago?”

Question

I know its literally rocket science and a lot of very complex systems need to work together, but shouldnt we be able to iterate on a working formular?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

When you succeed, you don’t know how much went wrong that was just barely not enough to explode the whole damned thing. Succeeding tells you nothing about how consistent or lucky your flight was.

An explosion tells you a lot more about what you should get right before putting a man in there. While rockets keep exploding, the last time someone died in a rocket was like 10 years ago. And before that it was another 10 year gap.