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?

Question

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

Answer 1

The mathematics of physics changes as you make things bigger. An easy example to demonstrate this is that we know that small things like insects and spiders can cling to the ceiling without much trouble – they make it look effortless. When was the last time you saw something larger than a mouse crawling on your ceiling?

Different scales have different problems. This is because different physical properties scale at different rates. If you double how long a cube is, you increase its surface area by 4 times and its volume by 8 times. The weight of the object scales with the volume while the strength of the object does not.

This is why the largest animal species (blue whales) are aquatic because the water helps support their large size.