Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10 launches so lets see how they do.
The stage didn't land successfully but I'd have been very surprised if they got that on the first try.
NG's launch price is supposedly only about 50% higher than a Falcon 9 with a lot more payload weight and volume. Hopefully this will result in SpaceX cutting their price, they've got a lot of room to do so before hitting their launch costs.
The new space company is over twenty years old. For such a long development time I figured they actually had a reasonable chance of nailing the booster landing. I bet they'll do it next time.
Sounded like maybe a telemetry loss, which is hard to fully simulate. They'll abort to be conservative in these situations even if the rocket could land itself without tele-operation.
I’m not a rocket scientist but my assumption is that it would be internally guided and only take external inputs in the form of GPS and “land on the ship” or “don’t land on the ship”. Saturn V was manned and had a an internal guidance computer.
ULA is pretty remarkable for it's run of new rockets not blowing up. Looking at ESA, JAXA, RosCosmos, ISRO, etc too is how I'm setting the par. A history like the Ariane 5 is pretty typical where flights 1 and 14 failed.
Yeah, 2 failures is par for OldSpace. NewSpace usually does much worse, though SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Rocket Lab's Electron managed to get the traditional par.
TBF: that wasn't an unsuccessful launch attempt, but a failure to not launch. Which affirms parent in that they seem to have work out all the kinks out during development.
Exactly as OP said, launcher failures happen and then you drive down their frequency.
Landing failures are still quite expected, especially on the first few tries. It's weird that they even tried on the first launch, but I don't even think of it as a try, I think of it as a "let's gather some data, and in the freakishly unlikely occurrence that everything goes perfect on the way down, we might as well load the landing software too".
I read about spaceship on one of their launches is that they attempted everything that it could possibly do on one of their boosters because you basically have the next iteration built so why not attempt anything for the telemetry.
Shuttle got very lucky. On the first flight, STS-1, an overpressure caused by the ignition of the SRBs forced the orbiter's body flap into an extreme angle which could have destroyed the hydraulic system controlling it. Had John Young know this had happened, he and Robert Crippen would have ejected, which would have destroyed the orbiter on its first flight.
There were only 2 ejection seats, enough for the crew of test flights but not the larger crew of operational flights.
The seats were only installed in Enterprise (the prototype, used only for suborbital tests) and Columbia (only enabled for STS-1 through STS-4 test flights, disabled for STS-5 the first operational flight)
The seats would only work at low altitude and speed (I've seen differing numbers cited). For the Challenger disaster they would've theoretically been useful (ignoring all the other factors), but they would've been useless for Columbia due to speed.
And it's not clear ejection would have actually been successful with the SRBs still active and right there.
As o11c mentioned, they only existed for the first few flights, the ones that only had two crew. It wasn't possible to have the election seats with the full shuttle crew so they were removed.
The ejection seats were essentially the same as those used in the SR-71, so they were survivable at shockingly high speeds and altitudes.
Norm is something like 3 rescheduling within a week from launch, 3 auto-aborts or equipment NoGo, 2 wayward boats, and 0.15-0.3 kaboom per launch. The fact that SpaceX haven't been letting wayward boats/planes for a while is remarkable by itself.
> Pretty unusual for a new space company to make orbit on their first launch. Generally par for the course in established companies is 2 failures in the first 10 launches so lets see how they do.
Where are you getting your stats and how many companies are you in your model?
Not all of the rockets blow up on the pad or dance around near the launch pad [0], but lots certainly do not make it to orbit in the first try. Space is pretty hard.
I grew up on the space coast, have watched many new expensive fireworks. I expect one of the next ones to either go boom, or the less exciting hear the 2nd stage separation failed.
Why are you disagreeing like this? It would be like asking for a source if a software developer said “most software launches encounter some issues on their initial release”.
All I did was ask for the data used to come to that conclusion. I was only aware of SpaceX as a new space company. I was curious as to what other companies were included in her/his model.
How did you possible take offense to someone trying to learn?
And how did you possibly manage to find any ill will in the question?
> Why are you disagreeing like this?
I never once disagreed with the OP. Again, how did you get to this wild of a take from what i wrote?
I read it the same way as combative or at least skeptic.
If you say that was not your intent, then you might want to consider your approach.
A common hostile debate tactic is to ask the other person to "bring the receipts", and then pick through them for something to object to. It is akin to saying "prove it", and puts all of the burden on the other person with minimal effort.
In a world where the internet is often combative and full of bad faith actors, you may want to be more specific to distinguish yourself from them. If you have a specific question, ask it directly instead of asking them to provide more and sorting it yourself. You may also want to be clear about intent eg "what other companies are you considering".
The stage didn't land successfully but I'd have been very surprised if they got that on the first try.
NG's launch price is supposedly only about 50% higher than a Falcon 9 with a lot more payload weight and volume. Hopefully this will result in SpaceX cutting their price, they've got a lot of room to do so before hitting their launch costs.