Falcon 9 Stage Suffered Maximum Damage During Re-entry
Most recent rocket took max damage, due to v high entry velocity. Will be our life leader for ground tests to confirm others are good.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 15, 2016
4 responses to “Falcon 9 Stage Suffered Maximum Damage During Re-entry”
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I love SpaceX’s research philosophy: controlled-aggressive! Be too careful and you will get there eventually but waste the most budget. Test too many variables at once and you waste both the budget and your sanity. Musk is following the razor’s edge very successfully.
You learn the most when you expect about 50% of your tests to fail, and you push to that point.
Musk and others have said that lack of loss of life, indicates that we are not pushing hard enough.
While some would argue that a single loss of life is wrong, I would agree with that philisophy, at least when we are going into new areas.
Let the selective beefing up and shaving down begin!
I’ll bet the first change will be the red/pink putty/paint you see on Mach 2.8+ aircraft on the areas that got too hot. You can see it on the leading edges of SS1 and as liner on the windows of the SR-71, Mig-25, and Mig-31.