Design via test. That might work for something that stays on the ground. You can look at things and maybe have a clue as to what happened. But, I would think it rather difficult to determine what is going wrong when all you have left to analyze is flight telemetry data and a billion pieces scattered all over parts of the earth.
I think you have discovered the flaw in the plan.
There is a legitimate argument to be made between how much effort you put in to ground analysis and test, VS flight test, *as long as you take maximum advantage of the flight test, and as you say, you instrument it sufficiently to be able to diagnose it*. I am no insider for SpaceX but it has been my take-away that they are just cranking them out, and maybe *not* actually feeding back their results to the next launch - in fact that they are flying so quickly that the feedback only applies to 3-4 back in the line, because there are always 1-2 "completed" and ready to prep/launch. So the next few are likely to have the same defect that killed the current one, maybe it is marginal or 50/50 to make it, that's legitimate. But maybe it is 75% likely failure and that is very likely to fail again on the next two flights. Launching them and having a repeated failure makes nearly no sense.
Realistically they are under zero flight pressure, there is no pressing schedule since there are no customers and there is no national security programs involved*.
I don't work there, I don't know for sure, I could easily be wrong, maybe the failures are from different causes, and they are fixing them one at a time. But the last two look like exact replicas of each other.
Brett
*several times, I have been around or involved in missions where there was a failure of some sort, and there actually was a pressing national security requirement, so they took their chances. The most notable was after first the Challenger failure, followed a month later by a Titan 34D failure. In that case there was a Vandenburg shuttle launch in a few months, and it had a national security payload. So there was a plan (that got pretty far along) to go ahead and launch it with a minimal crew in case it failed again. In the event, it obviously didn't happen, Reagan told them no more launches unless they figured it out.
An example that did work out was Apollo 4 and 6. These were test flights for the Saturn V. 4 worked very well, textbook. 6 had multiple failures in the second and third stages, and not in the same subsystem, and had 2 engine shut down on the second stage. But they had enough telemetry and did enough analysis and ground test that they were confident enough for the next launch to put 3 guys in it and send it around the moo. That one worked perfectly. In that care there was *enormous* schedule pressure and nearly unlimited funds and resources available to pay for very extensive analysis and ground test.
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