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
To make getting large, heavy things to orbit faster and cheaper we need to push the boundaries of engineering. The harder and faster you push them the faster you make progress, but you also have more catastrophic failures among the way.
SpaceX takes this push hard, fail hard approach to rapidly iterate their designs. By contrast, NASA and ~~big~~ established contractors like ULA prefer to spend long development cycles to avoid failures. Both approaches are valid, SpaceX’s is more materially expensive and faster and has more high profile failures, but the failures are expected in their case.
They also have “solved” rockets they use too like falcon 9 which is the most reliable launch vehicle we’ve ever had if you start counting at the human rated version (you can go back further but that’s a good goalpost).
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