mikegarrison

It's a good question. Obviously leaking rocket propellants is dangerous. But leak before burst is not primarily about tolerating leaking. It's about failure happening on a controlled scale that maybe gives you a chance of catching and fixing it.

... Which might be because of the material, or because of the construction, or both.

The US is very far behind Europe for train safety. A few places here have the train speeds automatically limited, but most places still rely only on the train's driver to control the train speed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Washington_train_derailment The accident in the article I just linked to happened because the driver was driving the route for the first time (it was actually the first time for passenger service on that route). The driver did not see the sign warning that he had to slow the train down for the curve over the highway bridge. This accident happened near to where I live. (The only reason such a dangerous curve was on the route at all is because they did not want to pay the money to rebuild an existing bridge.) The three people killed in the crash were train enthusiasts who had booked passage on this trip precisely because it was the first passenger service on this route. The official findings did not blame the train driver, but rather the inadequacy of his training and also the lack of automatic speed controls.

Maybe they rescheduled the static fire for after the mission instead of before it.

In the US, the people that operate the train engines are called "engineers". They are sometimes called "operating engineers" to distinguish them from "professional engineers" who typically design things rather than drive trains. ("Operating engineers" does not necessarily mean trains, either. It means anyone whose job it is to operate engines. Unlike professional engineers, these people are usually trained at trade schools or by apprenticeships rather than universities.) The name actually goes back to Roman times. As wikipedia says: The term engineering is derived from the Latin ingenium, meaning "cleverness" and ingeniare, meaning "to contrive, devise".

Reducing part count and adding simplicity is absolutely standard engineering common wisdom. But I really hope you guys are wrong about thinking that whatever Elon says is what goes, particularly about safety processes. That's just not a good idea. Not because it's Musk, but because it's just not good practice to have anybody with other priorities (and you know he has other priorities) to have the ability to set aside safety processes at a whim. Now I'm not saying this static fire thing is necessary. Many other companies don't seem to think it is. Maybe SpaceX carefully evaluated their data and decided they no longer need it. Or that it doesn't add value in certain circumstances. Or whatever. It's just that the attitude I'm seeing here is surprisingly complacent. I know we're all a bunch of space gamers rather than actual SpaceX employees, so I'm assuming complacency here is meaningless. But wow, I've seen so many people be hyper critical about safety issues outside of SpaceX, but suddenly people are totally cool with the idea that any whim of Elon must be OK.

I'm just sayin': For anybody in this forum who ever complained that NASA took unacceptable risks with the shuttle program because of schedule; well, SpaceX (or any other corporation) is not immune to schedule pressure. I don't know whether or how much this has to do with that at all. But it's not out of the realm of possibility.

No static fire raises some questions. Do they think they have learned that the static fire is not beneficial? Is this a sign that schedule/cadence is being given a higher priority than safety or reliability? Could be either way. Or both.

This theory does not say it does not exist. It just says it was never a planet.

I think if I had a chance to be off the Earth right now, it would be a good time to say "yes".

The current situation really doesn't warrant a huge amount of regulatory oversight because there just isn't enough of it going on. Nobody had to certify the Wright Flyer for airworthiness. But if the commercial space advocates actually do what they want to to, that will change. One-offs and development work will probably still be treated like experimental vehicles (as flight test airplanes are today), but a fleet of rockets? I expect design certification and manufacturing certification and modification certification and all that.

I'm still not sure you see what I'm getting at. I'm talking airworthiness (spaceworthiness?). The designs and the manufacturing process will have to be certified. The parts used will have to be certified. Design changes will have to be tracked and approved. Environmental laws will have to be considered. All kinds of stuff like that. NASA doesn't do this -- it's not their job. But the FAA? That is their job. And not just for crewed rockets. The FAA regulates drone airplanes too.

I'm actually making the bigger point that commercial space is going to be regulated if it gets big enough. In the US, likely by the FAA. Not just for interactions with airspace, but because regulating things that fly is their business (or at least, what they perceive their business to be).

The FAA might. If there are enough launches, *somebody* is going to be the regulator for them.

They expect there is water there because it can be permanently shaded. But it has to be right on the pole to have a chance of that.

Lots of things are conceivable. At this stage of the design process for the shuttle, it was conceivable that the shuttle could have that rate of operations too. What about "header tanks"? Maybe SpaceX is busy designing solutions to this problem. I hope they are. But if they are, they aren't showing it to us yet.

What is the basis for your belief? Hmm. Perhaps an F-111-style escape pod system?

You think? It's hard for me to figure out what backups and redundancies might be possible. I'm sure they are working on the issue, but it seems like a crewed Starship is going to have even fewer escape/abort/redundant modes than the Space Shuttle, and I've heard for years in this forum about how concerned people here were with the Space Shuttle in that respect. (It did end up killing two crews, so I'm not denying there were reasons for the concerns.)

Do Falcon 9 landings seem mundane to you? (Also, I have to admit that no matter how many times I have flown, when an airplane that I'm in lands, it never quite feels "mundane".)

In my area, some public health officials came out and defended the protests, saying that it was one public health issue versus another one.

It is possible to clean things.... That being said, I used to deliberately not clean the rubber marks and road grime from my track car. I liked showing off that it was well-used.

Yeah, pre-loading. It's a standard construction technique. A cheap and effective way to stabilize the soil.

I guess I don't know what you are talking about. Piles of dirt? Were they preloading the soil?

I guess they better hope sea levels don't rise too quickly.