He gave the reasoning for why New Glen has more than three legs (I think 6)
He said that the more legs you have, the smaller each leg has to reach out to give the same probability of tipping over. So there’s a formula to pick the best number of legs given their weight etc.
Interestingly he said they picked their number not just for that but also because it went well with the engine distribution.
Think about who controls the media (answer: old money and friends of old money)
It is very easy to see why they want everyone to think spacex and Tesla are collapsing
These minor blips only stand out in the context of SpaceX’s unprecedented consistency, which surpasses anyone else. But, if they have another snafu soon, maybe it could hint at a slight decline in their normal technical excellence?
Edit : OTOH, this was launch 23 of that booster, as mentioned by @gregoriol, so I for one might see that as a successful test discovery of the reuse limits of the structure. And also, the F9 that didn’t reach orbit probably wouldn’t have threatened the lives of a human crew, although it would have scrubbed their mission.
Even with a disposable booster you want it to follow a certain flight path and be discarded at a given area.
If you promised that it will land and it doesn't, even if it is inconsequential to the rest of the mission, well...
It followed the promised flight path all the way to the drone ship and then tipped over.
I would understand the consternation if it left the keep out zone and landed in an entirely different area of the sea. But it sounds like that was not the case.
> even if it is inconsequential to the rest of the mission, well...
Could you finish your sentence please? The job of the FAA is to keep everyone safe. There is no indication that something unsafe happened here. What happened here is the reason why the recovery people are standing-by outside a declared safe zone and not chilling on the drone ship. (In other words this is the reason why the droneship is a drone ship.)
So if Scott Manley was right and it was a landing leg strut failure, SpaceX could quickly report that and close the investigation. A landing leg strut failure would never threaten human lives so that's all the FCC cares about.
OTOH, if it was an engine failure leading to the rocket coming in hot (like others have speculated), it's possible that the same problem at a different point in the flight path could threaten lives. But SpaceX has redundancy in basically all systems for the "going up" portion of the flight so it could just say "yup, if that had happened at a different time the redundant systems would have had to take over".
During landing the center engine is a single point of failure. Going up they have 8 other engines and can get to space on just 8.
The same thing happened with the last explosion and the Falcon 9 was eventually allowed to fly again once it was determined there was no public safety issue: https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/spacexs-falcon-9-cl...
They were even allowed to fly again before SpaceX finished their investigation as soon as the safety question was answered.
This isn't a punishment.
There are failures which only cost the company money and there are failures which risks lives.
By all indications this is the first kind. It would be entirely different situation if the rocket thumbled out of control and hit the sea in the wrong spot. Then a grounding would be warranted. Here by all accounts they flown to the right spot but did not stick the landing.
> This is what we expect from every plane crash too, or did I imagine the existence and purpose of the NTSB?
We would not ground the whole fleet of an aircraft model if something adverse but expected happened to one of them.
Penalizing SpaceX for being the most successful company seems silly. Are they grounding other companies whose rockets cannot land at all?
Yes but you don't need to delay other missions because of this specific failure
