this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Rockets exploding during testing seems par for the course. Is there a reason this explosion more impactful than your average test rocket explosion?
SpaceX follow iterative development, there is no fixed baseline. They do extensive testing to work out if a change was good/bad and feed that into the next iteration.
The downsides of this approach is you have to have lots of hardware and expect stuff to go boom.
Blue Origin are traditional aerospace, they spent a great deal of money designing a final product. They perform "qualification testing", this checks the result works as per their design/models.
The problem with this approach is its a really long time before you test, if there is an issue it could because of a decision made early on and be a nightmare to resolve (might be quicker to start again).
Rocket Lab seem to sit somewhere between these extremes.
This means we should expect Raptor engines to occasionally melt and this is ok. The BE-4 should work perfectly and explodey ones suggest a serious issue.
#space #be4
Thanks for the explanation!
Apparently this particular engine had components which failed early testing, they thought they fixed the issue and clearly hadn't.
To be honest that reason just makes me think how they are approaching testing is wrong.
Aka "waterfall" (Blue Origin) vs. "Agile" (SpaceX) 😉