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Spacex team’s Starship partially melts during renterty of test flight 4, makes soft splash down anyway. (youtu.be)

submitted 5 months ago by sonori@beehaw.org to c/space@beehaw.org

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Evidently the joints on the flaps still need a little work into not letting gases through, but it seemed to still have enough actuation to keep the spacecraft stable until the engines took over for the landing burn.

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[–] echodot@feddit.uk 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Congress would definitely have shut down NASA if they'd have that many failures which is why they never did it like this but that doesn't necessarily mean that doing it like this is a bad way of doing it.

NASA did do some testing but they never did integrated testing. Who knows, if they done integrated testing then perhaps Apollo 1 would have just been a test and no one would have died. Had they filled the crew capsule with the air mixture and had some device simulating human movement maybe they would have realized that static electricity was a problem. You can't simulate absolutely everything and if you do go with simulations at some point you have to test your assumptions in the real world.

NASA didn't do this for political reasons, not engineering ones.