On 12/21/2019 12:14 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:
Any time I hear someone who is not really an engineering type say "we have to get this thing right the first time", I have to physically resist
That said, this is what flight tests are for -- finding the mistakes that are hard to spot on the ground. We have to resist the idea that anything going wrong in a flight test is a sign of criminal negligence. One reason why aviation delivers better reliability than spaceflight at lower cost is that they do much more intensive flight testing, and expect (and design for, and plan for) doing some of their debugging in flight. Insisting that everything must be perfect the first time gets very expensive, and worse, it doesn't actually work very well.
Henry