To expand on the point, while he didn’t include it, I told Leonard in email:
The other issue is not launch reliability, but schedule reliability. SpaceX has aborted launches of the Falcon 9 when one or more of the engines was indicating performance issues on ignition. Three times as many engines means a lot higher probability of having an issue with one of them. For example, while I don’t know what the ignition reliability of a Merlin D is, suppose it’s 99% (that is, there’s a one in a hundred chance of failure to perform up to spec on ignition). For nine engines, that means the probability of a Falcon 9 aborting on the pad due to an engine issue would be one minus 0.99 to the ninth power, or about 8% per flight, or about once every dozen flights (which doesn’t seem that far off from their record). I don’t know what their flight rules will be for the Heavy, but if they have the same rule that they can’t take off with an underperforming engine, the reliability for twenty-seven engines will be one minus 0.99 to the 27th power, or 24%. That is, if they’re only 0.99 reliable per engine, and require all engines operating properly to take off, they have about a one in four chance of aborting a Falcon Heavy every single flight. That says to me that either they think Merlin reliability is greater than that (which it could well be) or that they’ll relax the rules to allow engine out from liftoff, or perhaps both.
Regardless, here’s hoping for a successful flight in less than three months.
Hearing the usual idiocy on how the government is going to crack down on it. What I wrote after Katrina still applies after Harvey. Three cheers for “price gougers.”
And it’s bad news for bad people around the world.
[Update a few minutes later]
Mexico’s largest shale field is now open for business. In theory, this should help the economy down there as well, and perhaps relieve the pressure to emigrate. But the place is still pretty corrupt.
Still installing stuff on my new phone, but very carefully. I just started installing a voice recorder, but it insisted on having access to my pictures, the Internet, my location. Why? Nope.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems sort of related: A statistics professor was banned from Google. It is looking more and more like the old libertarian argument that we have less to concern with private companies than government is getting a little threadbare when it comes to concentrations of power like this.
“It’s just frustrating to be constantly reacting to his sh*t,” a GOP Senate aide explained.
And growing discord between the White House and Capitol Hill won’t prove helpful when lawmakers return in September with a lengthy to-do list.
“The president has torched whatever political capital or moral authority he ever had,” a GOP aide told IJR. “He is uniquely incapable of political leadership. If we get tax reform done, it won’t be with his help. It’ll be in spite of him and his vortex of incompetence and destruction.”
“The more distracted [Trump] is tweeting about Mika [Brzezinski] or his historic victory or the 4 million illegal votes, the better the odds are that we get tax reform. If he gets interested in tax reform, it will probably die just like everything else he touches,” he added.
When it comes to legislation, like Obama, he has the reverse Midas touch.