On Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:39:25 -0400, in a place far, far away, "Jeff
Findley" made the phosphor on my monitor
glow in such a way as to indicate that:


"Rand Simberg" wrote in message
...
But as others have pointed out, it doesn't bode well for the K-1. RpK
can't afford to have these kinds of failures on their vehicle, which
doesn't seem to be capable of incremental testing. Same problem as
Shuttle.

A reusable vehicle that you can't incrementally test isn't a good thing. It
certainly looks like the K-1 couldn't survive early shut downs of its
engines due to the type of recovery system used.

With the K-1, since you've got two stages, any failure in the first stage
could potentially mean you're going to lose the second stage as well. That
is, unless you've designed the 2nd stage to survive an abort caused by 1st
stage failure. I think it's possible that in some situations the 2nd stage
could abort by firing its engine, burning its fuel, and attempting to land.
The devil is in the details.

I would hope that they could at least test the first stage (and
recover it) initially with an inert second stage to avoid that
problem.