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
Aaaaand. There’s the story of the Ariane 501 rocket. In that example they did exactly what you suggest here they should have done: they took the Ariane 401, which had flown successfully hundreds of times, and just scaled everything up.
In particular they didn’t look too hard at the guidance system.
So what happened when they launched it was the new rocket took off nicely, and flew 20% faster than the old one.
Unfortunately this meant that the thing was travelling at a speed whose number was beyond the space available in the computer slot allocated to keep track of it. It was going faster than the maximum on the speedometer, in effect (technically, the computer register was 8 bits, and the speed number exceed the maximum for an 8 bit number).
So the navigation system couldn’t read how fast the thing was going, and triggered a billion dollar self-destruct.
Because they thought scaling it up would be fine.
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