An old joke that if the first human flight (Wright brothers) was to happen now, it would not have happened due to Health & Safety.
This is just nonsense with no connection to reality. The Wright brothers plane was an homebuilt UL. The exact same thing can, and is, being done today all over the world.
Manned spaceflight is another game entirely. It costs more than an entire national budget of an average country to do this. I am not talking about suborbital free fall flights.
Peter wrote:
I am not sure. The Musk vertical landing obviously has a huge number of single points of failure. You buy insurance to cover that, so if it fails, it doesn’t matter, so long as nobody gets killed.
The Falcon and Starship boosters can fly with several engines inoperable. The Falcon can’t hover at all (min thrust > mass at landing) but the Starship (orbiter) and the Starship booster should be able to. It seems to me that there will be points close to landing when an engine failure will doom them because there won’t be time to start another engine in time. However they now light more engines than they need to, then cut whichever seems the least dependable to reduce the risk. One of the early Starship failures might have been prevented if they’d implemented this sooner. They’re aiming for airliner levels of safety.
I’ll believe in full reusability when it happens, but in the meanwhile it’s exciting to watch.
