this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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Blowing up rockets until it works is a far better approach than trying to get everything to work on the first try and ending up with a hugely overpriced white elephant.
Sure, if it was cheaper than just doing it correctly the first time which it's not
How do you do something "correctly" when nobody knows what that is? If your main priority is to do it "correctly" you will never develop anything fundamentally new.
Okay so say your testing a brand new rocket engine idea. It uses a fuel nobody has tried to use before. So what you do is you figure out how much energy this fuel has and do some math to figure out how much you'll need to take with you for the typical rocket. You design an engine for this spec or better and thoroughly test it to make sure it's behaving like expected. You eventually mount it to a rocket and make sure in practice it behaves as you expect. Next you put a payload in the rocket and test it again. If at any point things don't behave as expected you have to fix your whole model.
SpaceX struggles to go a launch without their engines destroying themselves. Perhaps they should go back a few steps?