Uncrewed rocket explosions ‘part of progress in fast-moving modern space industry’

It sounds like a counter-intuitive idea – uncrewed rockets exploding shortly after launch somehow being a positive sign.

Yet for some companies working in the fast-moving modern space industry, rocket failures are an inevitable part of the business model and can actually be an important step in their progress, according to Jake Caufield, industry strategic specialist at digital manufacturing firm Protolabs.

Speaking this morning (29 November) during “The next frontier: space and digital manufacturing” at the Aerospace and Defence webinar series, Caufield stressed the importance of moving quickly in the modern industry.

“Whoever is moving the fastest is going to… define what the future is, so really it’s those people who are going to decide what the next big advancements are. You can only be there first if you’re the fastest,” he said.

Government agencies such as NASA could not afford to work that way at the start of the space age. Without previous data to draw on, they had to work slowly and methodically to bring the level of risk down to an acceptable level before any launch. If a mission did ever end in tragedy, such as with the Challenger and Columbia disasters, they learned from those events and adjusted.

Modern space companies such as SpaceX do not have all of those problems, however. They can draw on a huge mass of data, can spend private finance rather than tax money, and their rockets often do not have people onboard. This means they can take a much more iterative approach.

“All the top companies in the world, the bleeding edge, the disruptive companies, those are the companies that are doing things differently,” Caufield said.

Many of those firms work with Protolabs, he added: “They realise that speed is really important for what the industry terms as the iterative approach, it’s the future of development in my opinion… In the leading space, aerospace development companies, the best ones are doing kind of a ‘Let’s throw something together, throw it in the sky and learn from it.’”

In a way, he said, some companies are “expecting” some of those launches to fail. “They’re throwing them up in the sky so they can get the data from the explosion, and they would iterate from there. So instead of spending all this time researching and trying to make it so you don’t make a mistake, they just instead fail them as much and fast as possible, and they learn from it.”

The webinar, which included Christoph Erhardt, director of additive manufacturing, and Steve Lewis-Brammer, northern Europe sales director, also covered topics including considerations for manufacturing parts for space, the importance of quality assurance, the opportunities of additive manufacturing, and much more. It is available to watch on-demand here.