First flight facts

The Space Review ^ | 05/08/06 | Wayne Eleazer

[KevinDavis]

The first launch—and failure—of the SpaceX Falcon 1 booster has generated a couple of interesting articles in The Space Review relative to early flight failures of vehicles (see “Our rockets always blow up”, March 27, 2006; and “First flight success isn’t the whole story”, April 3, 2006). While both of the articles had their good points, some analysts might profit from a more rigorous examination of early flight failures.

To begin with, while it is interesting to go back and look at the first flights of vehicles at the dawn of the Space Age, applying that data to more modern vehicles presents some problems. In the beginning, essentially no one knew how to build a successful space booster. This is in contrast to today, in which merely the vast majority of people don’t have clue how to do so. Judging the Probability of Failure (Pf) of new vehicles of today based on the history of the earliest orbital launch attempts is not reasonable; after all, we should have learned something since then.

[KevinDavis]

[larryjohnson]

I knew Wayne.See my bio.