As the first private company to develop and send a spacecraft to the International Space Station, Elon Musk’s SpaceX plays a major role in revolutionizing the space industry.
Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp 22 years ago in California and since then, his company has made rapid and remarkable advances in space technology and exploration. Being such a large and competent company, many scratch their heads in the face of their failed launches of prototype spacecraft Starship.
In February 2020, the first Starship prototype SN1 burst apart during a liquid nitrogen pressure test, shooting into the air, and crumpling back to the ground because its midsection buckled. A few months later, in April, its younger sibling was launched: but similarly to SN1, SN3 did not survive its tests. SN3’s tank collapsed after being unable to withstand a cryogenic pressure test. The following prototype SN4 did not get to see space either, exploding only one minute after an engine test.
Musk, however, reacted calmly to SpaceX’s repeated failures, tweeting “It’s fine, we’ll just buff it out. Where’s Flextape when you need it!?”. He even went as far as to specifically design a later model, SN7, for failure.
Contrary to space agencies, SpaceX uses a design process called iterative design. This technique focuses on producing something as quickly as possible, testing it, and finding out what went wrong. It’s faster and cheaper, and the crash data, if analyzed correctly, is immensely helpful in improving the Starship prototypes. Each of them failed, but they failed differently. Only about a year after SN1’s launch, in May 2021 (the anniversary of Alan Shephard’s launch to space), the SN15 prototype survived both launch and landing.
Iterative design, also called rapid prototyping, is a powerful tool to improve your product based on real-life feedback. The first prototype often only reflects “theoretical use”, as it has not interacted with its environment yet. Feedback data from its first test helps determine how it will behave when confronted with real-life circumstances. Further iterations and tests help gain user feedback and make sure the product meets their needs, and it also points the development team into the direction they have to go in to solve current issues. Prototypes are also quick to create, and much cheaper to improve than a design that was developed from the ground up.
Space agencies are watching SpaceX closely. They don’t see their crashes as failures, and instead recognize the benefits of the gathered data and an iterative design process. With their rocket launches, SpaceX teaches us a fundamental lesson about failure: try, fail, try again, fail better.
