| masraum |
04-20-2023 08:19 AM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by porschedude996
(Post 11978612)
I have a little different spin on the launch. I grew up by Vandenberg Air Force Base, now Vandenberg Space Force Base, and spent most of my life well informed about early missile launches. My father was employed by Lockheed at the base as a propellant engineer beginning in 1957-1958 and at some point a Site Manager with four launch pads. I entered into the biz working space shuttle after 8 years working aircraft manufacturing and flight test and field engineering before I worked space shuttle. After that went away on the west coast, I worked NRO Payloads as a design engineer. So since the first attempts to get to into space, from 1957 to 2014, i’ve been very familiar with space launch and development.
I can tell you that you just don’t get a perfect mission and one needs to learn to crawl before you walk, and then walk well before you run. It cannot be compared to any other mode of transportation development and the huge risks at any event. I see nothing at fault or going off track of a new flight vehicle. The three representatives were a bit over the top with their development failure commentary, but in this goofy social networking age, the uninformed information written by people that can’t find their gluts, need to bow out. No offense to those here on the forum.
My son works for SpaceX at VSFB on the Falon vehicles, so he’s a third generation missile enthusiast.
So other than the comments, the joyful exuberance, and the Rapid Disassembly comment, everything thing is normal during this development phase.
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You've obviously got far more inside/first hand knowledge than I do. You should start a thread as I'm sure you have lots of super fascinating info.
My assessment of this launch based on what I've seen/read is that this new rocket was built that was larger and more powerful than the Saturn V (which is impressive from the start) AND reusable! You've got to crawl, walk, run, but when they build something like this, they say "Let's see if it'll crawl, and assuming the crawl is successful, lets see if it can walk and then run afterwards." So, the launch was a success, why not see how far it could get afterwards. It seems to me that it walked a bit after it's crawl, so you could consider it as having exceeded expectations by quite a margin which is cause for celebration.
It looked like a huge accomplishment to me.
For folks poo-pooing it as a failure, how many times did SpaceX have to try to land their reusable rockets before that was a consistent success? (still one of the coolest things that I've ever seen)
It'll be great/interesting to follow the development of this new larger reusable rocket.
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