[Starlink] some post Starship launch thoughts

[Sauli Kiviranta]

Somehow this ended up in spam by gmail.

What you explained makes it even more remarkable, I would not indeed
call it being overlooked. That is just plain failure of scaling
whatever they learned from those iterations. It is definitely not
obvious, just remarkable.

Thanks for sharing these details!

Best regards,
Sauli

On 4/26/23, David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Apr 2023, Sauli Kiviranta via Starlink wrote:
>
>> It was interesting to see that such a "basic" thing as the launch pad
>> structure was overlooked as a rather large problem vector. Even if it
>> was recognized as an issue, that it turned out to be a majestic
>> borderline catastrophic issue was surprise to me. Easy to overlook
>> everything when scaling up. There is a great book on the topic of
>> systems and their scaling parts when sizes change "Scale: The
>> Universal Laws of Growth" by Geoffrey West, highly recommended.
>
> It wasn't overlooked, they did a 7 engine static fire, it damaged the pad,
> so
> they improved it, they did a 14 engine static fire and it damaged it again,
> so
> they improved it again, they did a 31 engine 50% power static fire with
> minimal
> pad damage and had other blocks of material mounted in the engine exhaust at
>
> McGreggor. They just failed to catch some inflection point between the 50%
> power
> test and the full power test. They expected some damage to the pad, but not
>
> nearly as much as what happened.
>
> David Lang
>