There’s others that are trying, Blue Origin has their New Shepherd rocket that is able to land, but it’s a suborbital tourism vehicle that’s basically just a toy. They’re working on a partly-reusable orbital launcher that’s like a souped up Falcon 9 but it’s still in development. Several other smaller startups are working on smaller Falcon-9-like launchers with expendable second stages, and China is building a straight up carbon-copy of the Falcon 9 and Starship. But SpaceX is the leader in this field and currently the only one who’s actually successful. Everyone is following in their wake at the moment.
This is *literally *the first one. There’s only been a single Starship explosion in the upper atmosphere.
And no, that leads to spending decades of time going down paths and intricately designing and simulating every possible detail of a system, only to build them, have something unexpected happen, and then realize that the team never considered X effect in Y, Z, etc conditions, and then have to spend years redesigning everything.
Design it, build it, test it, and get it immediate feedback on, and then redesign it. One way or another, it almost always has to go through that cycle, and it’s a lot cheaper to do it upfront.
Another one.
I mean I am not against rocket research, but isn’t there another way without destroying several millions worth if equipment?
This was last year during the first IFT.
There is. The SLS. That is much more economical, right?
Indeed. And Boeing is the main contractor for it so you can be sure it won’t suffer any mishaps.
I mean to be fair I think they are probably the first (and maybe still the only?) company that tries to build rockets that can landback and be reused.
There’s others that are trying, Blue Origin has their New Shepherd rocket that is able to land, but it’s a suborbital tourism vehicle that’s basically just a toy. They’re working on a partly-reusable orbital launcher that’s like a souped up Falcon 9 but it’s still in development. Several other smaller startups are working on smaller Falcon-9-like launchers with expendable second stages, and China is building a straight up carbon-copy of the Falcon 9 and Starship. But SpaceX is the leader in this field and currently the only one who’s actually successful. Everyone is following in their wake at the moment.
This is *literally *the first one. There’s only been a single Starship explosion in the upper atmosphere.
And no, that leads to spending decades of time going down paths and intricately designing and simulating every possible detail of a system, only to build them, have something unexpected happen, and then realize that the team never considered X effect in Y, Z, etc conditions, and then have to spend years redesigning everything.
Design it, build it, test it, and get it immediate feedback on, and then redesign it. One way or another, it almost always has to go through that cycle, and it’s a lot cheaper to do it upfront.