On 2016-09-02 10:03, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Thu, 1 Sep 2016, David Weinshenker wrote:
But yes, this is a class of accident that is pretty much obsolete,
How many rockets had NASA & Co. (wasn't the Atlas more of an "Air Force project" than a NASA one at that point) fired by the time they had their last such event? How many has SpaceX done so far? I 'spect they'll be climbing the learning-curve a bit faster.
Possibly, but the question is whether it was part of the curve that
they should have climbed already. :-) To some extent, that early
experience was as much "learning to handle sizable rockets" as it was
"learning to handle Atlas", and the former part should be
transferrable to other rockets. And in fact has been...
Bear in mind that almost certainly, nobody who saw the Atlas
explosions of 1959 was still active for the commissioning of Atlas V
-- which has essentially nothing in common with a 1959 Atlas, despite
the name -- and nevertheless there has been a marked lack of similar
events for Atlas V. Nor do the organizations that did Atlas V really
have much in common with those that did 1959 Atlas, despite some other
similarities of name; the extent to which expertise rests in an
organization, as opposed to its people, is much exaggerated. (In
fact, such "we're the organization that did Apollo" mythology can lead
to overconfidence and complacency.)
