News Changes to the SpaceX BFR rocket.

[RisingFury]

This iterative design approach doesn't seem to be yielding any significant results.

 

[jedidia]

This iterative design approach doesn't seem to be yielding any significant results.

I wouldn't quite say that. It worked well enough for the Falcon.
I think the problem is that this beast is just simply too big and too complex. I believe with current tech it might be impossible to put such machine under that much stress and expect it to reliably work a second time...

 

[dennis.krenz]

I wouldn't quite say that. It worked well enough for the Falcon.
I think the problem is that this beast is just simply too big and too complex. I believe with current tech it might be impossible to put such machine under that much stress and expect it to reliably work a second time...

I don't think that this is really the reason for the slow progress or better: Going back three steps for every step sideways, forcing you to repeat steps already gone forwards.

I think the problem is the lack of a working baseline to build on. They never really finished one "increment" and froze it, because they never had reached a goal that you can freeze with hardware involved. The test program design is IMHO to blame, because they don't make the necessary big steps, when they are needed, risking annoying failures already on small steps with costly hardware.

Especially with complex challenges, you can't just try solving them in small steps alone, because you might approach a locally optimal partial solution, from where the global optimal solution is unreachable.

 

[RisingFury]

I wouldn't quite say that. It worked well enough for the Falcon.
I think the problem is that this beast is just simply too big and too complex. I believe with current tech it might be impossible to put such machine under that much stress and expect it to reliably work a second time...

With every Falcon 1 & 9 launch, they were reasonably sure they'll make it to orbit and orbit was the goal from the start.
With landing boosters, they had quite a few failures, but they made their own work harder by having it land on the drone ship instead of RTLS. The priority was clearly the primary mission.

With Starship they're like "Oh, let's just launch this thing and see when it blows up" "... but we made the engines different and did what others told us should have been done from the start."

 

[GLS]

https://twitter.com/x/status/2059391182094880785

 

[Frilock]

SpaceX's Starship rockets are grounded pending investigation after test flight

SpaceX Starship launches are on hold pending an investigation into last week's test flight. The Federal Aviation Administration announced Wednesday that the spaceflight resulted in a mishap.

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