Plan to refuel in orbit, make it minutes before the rocket brakes. Fire the FTS, it fails, the rocket blows up a minute later und declare it a successful test of the FTS.

Argue to NASA that you are not the limiting factor to the moon mission planed for the end of the year, despite delivering none of the milestones.

FTS = flight termination system

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

That's called R&D, Research and Development. As long as you learn from a failure, it is progress towards success.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

An improvement.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

Getting to space. Fuck Musk, but SpaceX is doing great work.

[–] SatouKazuma 4 points 4 months ago

This is the Kerbal methodology.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Sounds a bit like the S&M methodology. SpaceX & Musk

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

Tbh it actually sounds a lot more like Boeing these days. F9/F9H is bulletproof reliable these days, and starship is making HUGE developmental strides, while Boeing is still failing to discover and iron out system integration bugs and hardware faults years after they had “completed the project”.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

It's a feature, not a bug

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I take it you missed the recent fourth integrated flight test, in which the ship soft landed on the ocean near Australia as planned and the booster soft landed on the ocean near the launch site as planned

Their failure in that flight was expected. They hoped thermal tiles sealing the hinge for the aerodynamic surfaces would seal those against plasma during reentry. They didn't. Had they, it would have been much cheaper than sealing those more thoroughly. The ship landed regardless of that failure

Disliking Musk is fair, but SpaceX is doing good stuff

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I call that following the same successful recipe that got us the Falcon 9.

The mindset that considers those tests failures is the same one that would still be in bureaucracy hell determining what 40 year old technology we should repurpose to get a future over budget, late, and under performing solution designed and built.