Over a hundred drop tests to qualify Dragon's parachutes
From Football Field Size Solar Arrays That Fold Into a Rocket on Deeptech Decoded, with Pele Collins.
Transcript
Mm. how you are testing your prototypes and then I understand that you have this physics engine you also have this optimizations and simulations going on it's also quite interesting approach that you tackle it like a robotics inspired way
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Like not fully fully robotics, but in a way that it's like you're taking the best of everything that could get in the simplest form ever. But it's one thing to run it on simulations and leveraging digital twins and everything. And it's another thing to really push the limits. And you can only push the limits if you put it out there in life. Like how do you make sure that you're, I think you also use Monte Carlo simulation too, right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep. ⁓ Yeah, well, this is my call to see you.
Yeah, this also has its limitations too. Dojo has its own limitations too on its own. Like, what makes, what keeps you awake at night? Like, what is the thing if you had a magic band and say, this is the first engineering problem I would like to solve for good.
Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah. And I think this is where like my background with the parachutes is helpful because parachutes were a similar problem at SpaceX where number one, it's very hard to test. It's, it's yeah. Yeah. If it fails, people die. That kept me up at night a lot. But
It's more critical, it's humanly like it's even more critical
It's one of those things where it's not a strut, like a strut you can test by like putting on a machine, pushing it and seeing if it breaks. Parachutes, these parachutes are hundreds of feet in diameter. And so to test them, you have to test them at full scale. You have to test them in realistic conditions. So we had to get very creative with how we ran our whole parachute testing campaign. We had to get planes, we had to get helicopters, we had to get giant balloons. We did over a hundred drop tests at SpaceX to qualify these parachutes in all corners of the box. And then took that, fed that into a model, ran the Monte Carlo and then said, Hey, even in like the three sigma case, this thing still works. ⁓
