SpaceX follow iterative development, there is no fixed baseline. They do extensive testing to work out if a change was good/bad and feed that into the next iteration.

The downsides of this approach is you have to have lots of hardware and expect stuff to go boom.

Blue Origin are traditional aerospace, they spent a great deal of money designing a final product. They perform “qualification testing”, this checks the result works as per their design/models.

The design/model heavy approach means you should have worked everything out in advance and it should just work.

The problem with this approach is its a really long time before you test, if there is an issue it could because of a decision made early on and be a nightmare to resolve (might be quicker to start again).

Rocket Lab seem to sit somewhere between these extremes.

This means we should expect Raptor engines to melt alot early on and gradually improve in reliability as they move towards a viable product.

The BE-4 should work perfectly during qualification testing as its the final design, so explosions at this point are a cause for concern

#space #be4