An excess of confidence?

[unixronin]

Elon Musk's enthusiasm for and confidence in his private space-launch venture seems to exceed the technical mastery of the engineers working on his Falcon 1 launcher.  Musk described the third launch of Falcon 1, carrying three NASA and DoD satellites, as "picture perfect".

That would be "picture perfect" except for the part where the first and second stages failed to separate, with the resulting loss of the entire vehicle and payload.

This puts the Falcon at 0 for 3.  If I were in Musk's position, I think I might seriously consider doing my test launches with dummy payloads until I'd had at least one successful launch, thus avoiding building up an unenviable reputation for destroying my customers' payloads.  Let's face it, just about anyone can throw together a booster that doesn't work.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It couldn't hurt to let someone else experienced give it the hairy eyeball under NDA, true.

It's not like the big players don't have their failures too — Arianespace had some major problems, for one — but they usually don't start selling payload capacity until they know the booster flies. On the other hand, Musk can probably only afford to test-launch just so many empty boosters.

The gripping hand is, he can probably only afford to have just so many paid launches fail before people stop buying payload space from him. And then, it may not matter whether it ever flies successfully.

I don't remember what SpaceX is using for an engine. I remember Rotary Rocket's engine was very innovative, but it got killed when the investors developed cold feet and forced a switch to a conventional engine which couldn't meet the performance-for-weight requirements, and the entire project predictably died shortly after.

[hrrunka]

Arianespace had some major problems, for one

Yeah. The Cluster fireworks display came to mind...