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michaelt | on: SpaceX Astronauts Begin Spacewalk, Putting New Spacesuits to Test
In civil engineering terms, if falling apart with debris thrown thousands of feet doesn't count as a "technical issue" what does?

I'm no rocketry expert, but I'm old enough to remember the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster; I'm pretty sure if you've got falling chunks of steel-reinforced concrete hitting your space vehicle during launch, that's an issue.

jjk166 | parent | next
The launch pad didn't explode, the rocket on the launch pad exploded. A fully fueled falcon 9 has about as much energy as a small nuclear bomb, it's not a technical issue if your structure is unable to survive that at point blank range.
gertrunde | parent
Oh, definitely, of course it wasn't a good or desirable outcome.

But it was also a prototype being deliberately tested to destruction, so the context as compared to Columbia was quite different. (And it wasn't just the rocket itself that was a prototype, the pad and tower were at least a little as well).

And this has always been SpaceX's approach, rapidly iterating their design by building, testing, destroying, rinse/repeat - so it sometimes feels a little difficult to compare to a more NASA-style design process where a (usually) small number of items are produced with a significantly lower tolerance for failure.

(Edit: And how much better is it to learn these design lessons before the cargo is more fragile/delicate/squishy?)