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?
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In the physical world there are billions of forces acting you at all times. The majority of them can be ignored because the effect is so minimal. For instance, you don’t really worry about the gravity difference from being in the third floor of a building versus the first floor of the same building, but there is a difference.
As you make things bigger or smaller different forces become important. For instance, water skippers can use surface tension to stay a afloat but we cannot.
When building the rockets bigger they don’t know for certain which forces will be the most important and how they will affect it. They have models that show them to get close but we don’t understand the laws of physics well enough to make 100% accurate models yet, so testing is necessary.
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