6 thoughts on “Why Failure Must Be An Option”

1. What a great and hopeful article full of common sense. I hear you’ve got a book that goes with it? I want three. One for me and two as a gift for my local library.

2. Stuff happens even in space. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a billion dollar or more government satellite or a commercial one, stuff will happen. As an example, JPL is working to do a computer swap on the Curiosity rover due to memory corruption. JPL are ace spacecraft operators due to their near legendary ability to fix problems.

   Stuff will happen with SpaceX just like it happens to all the other space system operators. So far, they’ve demonstrated the ability to diagnose and fix problems so they don’t recur without breaking the bank. Should it ever become operational, will we ever be able to fly the Orion enough to work the bugs out of it? Rest assured, no matter how many billions NASA spends on Orion, there will be bugs.

3. It looks like Scientific American has joined those knocking SpaceX on the thruster issue they resolved.

   http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2013/03/06/commercial-spaceflight-industry-drifts-back-to-earth/

   Commercial Spaceflight Industry Drifts Back to Earth

   By John Matson | March 6, 2013

   [[[The question that keeps bothering me is whether the sunnily optimistic view that NASA and the general public have for newcomers such as SpaceX can weather the realities of a dangerous, failure-prone business, especially once the Dragon capsule is outfitted to carry astronauts and not just cargo to the ISS. The history of spaceflight is punctuated by rocket malfunctions, crashed probes, and—tragically—numerous deaths, both of astronauts and of workers and other civilians on the ground.

   The private spaceflight industry has already tasted tragedy. In 2007 an explosion in California killed three people at a company called Scaled Composites who were working on engines for Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. That mishap, like so many workplace accidents in the aerospace industry, has largely been forgotten. Virgin soldiers on toward its first commercial launch in the coming years, at which point public scrutiny will increase manyfold. If a mishap involves customers on a suborbital flight rather than workers on the ground, we will hear much more about the accident and its victims. And I suspect that many of the 500-plus people now lining up to fly to space will change their minds.

   When NASA lost three astronauts in the Apollo 1 launch pad fire in 1967, the U.S. pushed on. There was a space race under way, and the nation’s skyward aspirations had no outlet other than NASA. Nowadays, manned space exploration ranks much lower as a national priority (look no further than the NASA budget, which during Apollo was roughly 10 times larger as a share of the nation’s total expenditures). And the goals of the human spaceflight program, at least for the near term, are much more mundane. So I have to wonder what kinds of losses the public will tolerate when the primary benefits of NASA’s exploration include staffing an orbiting space station and stimulating private companies rather than landing on the moon and winning a space race with a geopolitical foe. Similarly, I wonder what level of risk thrill-seekers will accept when weighing a suborbital spaceflight.]]]

   Sounds like someone needs a copy of your book Rand…

   1. I’m amazed that Scientific American didn’t note that the thruster problem was due to temperature extremes and then link it to global warming.

      I had a good comment ready to go on Boyle’s piece and then hit down-cursor, blowing it away and taking me to some story about Africa. Oh well.

      My points were ones we’re all familiar with about the Shuttle program, including the fact that when you’re designing new vehicles while flying earlier models, you get to incorporate lessons-learned right into the design phase.

4. It is the nature of aerospace engineering that things will go wrong, you fix it and so the system becomes more reliable.

   My question for anybody is, how is it that SpaceX has had several flights in which they didn’t have this particular failure and yet it shows up in three thrusters simultaneously on a single mission. Does this late-appearing failure say anything concerning about new problems showing up on future flights?

   1. One possibility for the latest SpaceX issue was that the propulsion lines may have froze or perhaps were partially blocked by frozen propellant. What were the temperatures before liftoff of this mission compared to the previous Dragon flights? If it was colder than before, then perhaps that would explain why it didn’t happen previously. Simple propellant line and valve heaters would solve the problem.

      There’s always the possibility that there was some sort of blockage from manufacturing debris like what happened with the first AEHF satellite (built on a mostly existing satellite bus design). If they suspect that, they can tighten their checkout procedures to ensure it doesn’t happen again. One advantage of the Dragon is that they’re going to get the capsule back to examine for possible causes.

      Aerospace vehicles are complicated and no amount of testing can prove all the bugs are worked out, as Boeing has shown with their 787 battery troubles. SpaceX has proven up to the job of diagnosing and fixing problems as they arise. Their history shows they don’t have the same problem twice, so their fixes must be good. The more they fly Dragon, the better the vehicle will become as problems are resolved. Contrast this with the multi-billion dollar Orion capsule. Does anyone seriously believe it will be problem free? Should it ever fly, will NASA be able to fly it enough to work out the bugs?

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