Why do we still expect “successful failures” on rocket launches and not just scale up or scale down the same design on successful rocket ships and launch pads to make bigger or smaller ships with more stable structural material?
In: 1598
Scaling very much does not work because of the math of it. Sticking to the ELI5 level, imagine that you can pick up a bag of dog food. Cool. Now imagine that bag is twice as heavy but the same size. Okay, that is harder but you think you can do it if you are stronger.
Now imagine if that bag is twice as big, instead (so same density). That suddenly becomes a MUCH bigger problem and even body builders will have issues with it.
That said… we really should not be expecting explosive failures to the degree we saw yesterday (?). The reason that so much of the Mercury/Apollo and Soyuz era was trial and error was that we were simultaneously developing the computers and computer simulations (and sometimes even math) to model this stuff.
The reality is that there are a lot of suggested reasons for the spacex cock up and… they generally relate to cutting corners and masking it with PR. Don’t get me wrong, we have learned a LOT from this failure but… not as much as you would think.
Because, with computer aided design and simulations, it kind of IS “just scale it up… and then fix all those errors”. That isn’t to say there will be no catastrophic failures but the vast majority will be in the “this was avoidable” category.
So to go back to the dog food bag. Cool, we scaled it up and discovered that it is going to flop around uncontrollably. So we get the brightest minds in the world to figure out that you can tape a bar to the bag to make it hold its shape. And now the strong men can carry it around because it became rigid again.
Latest Answers