Failing Their Way to Mars

Bill Whittle Network

News

4.9 • 720 Ratings

🗓️ 25 November 2023

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The blinkered souls who saw the SpaceX second Starship test as a failure -- and there are more than a few of them -- are to dim to realize one of the fundamental laws of science and engineering. Failure is your friend, and the only true sin is making the same mistake twice. Join our crack team of elite anti-elitists by becoming a member or making a one-time donation right here: https://billwhittle.com/register/

Transcript

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0:00.0	Well, just a few days ago, we saw the second in the row of Elon Musk's spectacular failures with the starship.
0:06.2	It accomplished none of its objectives of getting into orbit, bringing the booster back, like the first mission.
0:11.4	It ended with the explosion of the booster and the second stage starship not getting into orbit.
0:16.5	And if we have any more failures like this, we'll be on our way to Mars in about four years.
0:22.0	Hi, everybody. I'm Bill Little here with Steve Green and Scott Ott, and this episode is not so much
0:26.1	about the fact that Starship went further than the previous one. It's not even so much about the
0:31.4	fact that the mission is undoubtedly a success. If for no other reason, then it didn't make the same
0:37.0	mistakes that the first one did.
0:38.7	They didn't end up blowing up their own launch pad because they created too much power and
0:42.8	bouncing debris back in the engines. They got past Max Q. The main reason that the second mission
0:48.6	was a successful failure was because none of the mistakes on the first mission were repeated,
0:56.0	and we got to learn some new ones.
1:03.5	When I did the Apollo 11, what we saw series guys back in 2019, I realized that the reason that so many people don't believe the moon landing occurred is because it's presented as if the moon landing just
1:08.5	parachuted out of the sky. That we just simply
1:11.1	got a rocket and went to the moon and that's it. That Apollo 11 was the first man's spaceflight
1:15.7	ever, and that's why they don't believe it. But the thing I tried to do in that series was
1:21.6	show that incrementalism is the way to success. Apollo 11 didn't do anything drastically
1:26.0	more difficult than Apollo 10. Apollo 10 didn't do anything drastically more difficult than Apollo 10. Apollo 10 didn't
1:28.5	do anything drastically more difficult than Apollo 9 or 8 or 7 or Gemini missions or the Mercury
1:33.1	missions or the B2 or bottle rockets. It's all just a spectrum. So I think this life lesson is so
1:40.6	important. I just want to come to it again. Steve, failure is how we learn things.
1:45.9	There are in any new technology like the Starship, there are any numbers of bugs that are built
	...

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