You can’t expect everything 100%, that’s the problem. Traditional companies try to do this and exclude the additional risks, large additional margins are used to exclude as much as possible (resulting in extra time/money/lower performance). But what went wrong in the past was often “unexpected.”
What SpaceX does is push the boundaries of what works and what doesn’t in practice. Of course they also do it on the basis of technical calculations, but due to frequent developments and many other tests, they face many problems that they can include in the next iteration. The probability of something “unexpected” happening when it is really important is much lower, because they have much more knowledge about the behavior of each component in the chain.
NASA has recognized for a reason that what SpaceX is doing is innovative and can also deliver reliable products faster and cheaper (otherwise the crew missions will never be approved). SpaceX and NASA work very closely together in this area, and if development was done irresponsibly, NASA certainly wouldn’t have gotten into it.
[Reactie gewijzigd door friend op 6 mei 2022 20:16]
