Comment on How did we get humans on the moon in 1969 and are still struggling to get the Starship rocket to launch properly?

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Wanderer@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

If NASA is to a point healthy critique is considered cringe, then I doubt we’ll be on the moon for long.

You’re being intentionally obtuse. I’m obviously not calling NASA cringe and that’s not even remotely implied.

NASA is running the project, set the tenders and observing the suppliers. No one would expect anything else. Smartereveryday was largely on about culture at NASA from what I remember from that video. That and the lack of hypergolics. If NASA wanted hypergolics on the moon they could have put a requirement “must use hypergolics on the moon”. But they didn’t. That’s why all the relighting tests are being done. If the engines relight to the needed reliability then everything is fine, they have set the standards.

The Apollo project was tested live. They did all the lab tests but the real world tests were largely done with people in them. Apollo was risky as fuck and would never ever be allowed to happen now. I think some of the astronauts thought there was as high as a 50% of death. The fact you don’t know how risky Apollo was to the astronauts shows you don’t know much about this because you are using the safety of Apollo as a benchmark. Look I love Apollo but it wasn’t a high benchmark of safety.

With things like this. Testing to failure is pretty norm. NASA uses falcon 9 rockers for crew which was largely tested the same way. They obviously have faith in SpaceX because they out humans in their rockets.

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