[ExI] spacex landing on boat

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Fri, Jan 1, 2021 at 12:38 AM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> > On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
> Subject: Re: [ExI] spacex landing on boat
> >…With space technology, it seems, most people assume a thing is impossible until it is done, no matter how theoretically easy it should be.
>
> >…It seems that even a new type of nut and bolt won't be trusted to work in space until it has been demonstrated in space, even if there are literally zero applicable space-specific factors that might call into question the relevance of a ground demonstration.  (A nut and bolt doesn't care about zero gravity, radiation, or vacuum.)
>
> That landing feet first on a boat business is all done in a 1 g environment, but ja I know what you mean.

A lot of stuff goes wrong or can go wrong before getting to space or
when returning from it. Without looking, I'm going to guess a good
chunk of failed missions are the thing never makes it to orbit. At
least, looking back on many early spaceflight missions, that seemed to
be the case. More recent failures have been the thing blowing up on
the pad or just off. And, yeah, a few, with SpaceX, are the thing
lands and flops over or misses the platform. All stuff happening close
to the ground.

And the landing system has to travel up into space and return, no? So
it has to survive and partly operate in a region far from the ground.

> Space is a crazy unforgiving environment: you can’t get to stuff to fix it.  So
> your reliability of everything has to be in the ridiculous zone.  Any one goof
> anywhere can wreck your whole mish.

It's obvious that some of the critical systems involved -- especially
anything to do with propulsion and guidance and anything coming into
contact with the air at high velocity or temperature -- can fail in a
quite catastrophic manner taking down the whole vehicle often enough.
And this can make for a nice fireworks show -- adding to the
availability bias for the general public, investors, and the like. But
I wonder about a lot of systems that aren't mission critical. If
sometimes the standards are wee too strict. For instance, yeah, if an
electronics component is mission critical, test the crap out of it and
delay implementation for many years to be sure. But why not allow
non-critical electronics up there -- for instance, to the ISS --
before it's been fully certified? In some cases, yeah, the thing might
fail or do weird shit, but then that's data that can be fed into
faster development cycles, no?

Regards,

Dan