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
The physics of things change when you scale up. Years ago my father was involved with a massive smelter project to convert the source of heat from coal to natural gas. Lead-zinc. Traditionally smelting was done with coal mixed into the ore, which then burned in the molten metal furnace. The new idea was to force natural gas into the furnace with nozzles along the sides of the new furnace.
A German company did the research and built a 1/10 scale prototype smelter. Worked well and promised a 50% reduction in costs.
But scaling up was going to require, well, scale. In particular, in the full-scale plant, the pressure required to keep the nozzles that fed the natural gas into the molten mass would have to be scaled up. And my Dad, after considering it for a bit, did a back of the envelope calculation that showed that the higher pressure would fire the natural gas into the molten mass at quite a high speed.
High enough, in fact, that his calculation showed that the natural gas would pass right through the molten mass in less time that it would take to ignite.
It wasn’t going to work. He proved it wasn’t going to work.
Unfortunately they didn’t believe him, went ahead, built the $300 million full-size plant, and when they turned it on, yes, in fact, the natural gas went right through and didn’t ignite, the molten mass solidified solid, and they had a $300 million solid hunk of steel and slag on their hands.
So yes, scale can kill you in big projects.
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