Of course that raises the specter of NASA sort of maybe slightly hoping that the thing WILL fail, and while certainly not withholding data or anything like that, possibly wiring their jaws shut and looking at each other with wide eyes and comical expressions when they see the GSE/launch pad/whatever. I don't think that's likely to be the case, but you can't help but wonder. Like no one from NASA said "hey guys, when you launch the really big ones, there's stuff you need to do that isn't necessary with a Falcon (or a Redstone, or even an Atlas)"?
I really don’t think this is the case for a couple reasons:
1. Dragon is the most successful of the commercial crew contenders, Orion is pretty purpose-built for Artemis, and Starliner has had so many recent problems - NASA’s current choices for getting astronauts to and from the ISS are SpaceX and Russia.
2. SpaceX won the Artemis lunar lander contract in 2021 with a variant of
Starship, so NASA has a vested interest in the Starship program development to ensure we can safely land astronauts on the moon again.
3. This is my favorite. NASA is actually an incredibly transparent agency. They create an enormous mountain of technical reports and then make it all freely available. They can be a seemingly frustrating, bloated and slow bureaucratic agency, but they have forgotten more than many new-ish engineers will ever know, myself included.
A lot of this technical data is free for the commercial sector to just hijack and use, and this long term impact to quality of life on earth is a nice byproduct of the fact that our tax money funds the NASA budget. An often cited example is the tempur pedic memory foam starting it’s life in the Apollo program, but there are tons of other examples.
The search engine for NASA technical reports is the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS). This database is an awesome resource:
ntrs.nasa.gov
I had a hunch that if I went and looked there would be documentation ad-nauseam about flame diverters, and I was not disappointed. My personal favorite so far is the “NASA Standard for Flame Deflector Design”, which is literally a plug and play short and to the point design manual that tells you all the equations to use to design and analyze a KSC-worthy flame deflector:
The nice thing about Elon is that he’s surprisingly transparent too (good and bad), and the fact that people could go back two years and find his musings about whether or not cheaping out on a flame deflector at Boca Chica will be a mistake is kind of awesome. He’s the chief engineer and the buck stops with him on all the major engineering decisions and what to spend resources on. It’s evident to me from that tweet that SpaceX engineering opinion was probably split and it was up to him to make a judgement call and take a calculated risk. This particular risk doesn’t feel like it was all that calculated - especially given the technical lessons learned that are already out there and readily accessible even by the layperson. So my advice / constructive criticism for the future would be, you can’t know everything - surround yourself with trustworthy smart people and defer to their experience where appropriate. I’m sure he has been to have made it this far, but I wonder if he needs more civil engineers and GSE subject matter experts at the table to make sure that the stuff the rocket is attached to doesn’t make the rocket blow up next time.
