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I must admit that Elon has done some fairly impressive things, and I respect his hustle and innovation. With that said, the cult that surrounds his projects wh
by CPLX 7y ago
I must admit that Elon has done some fairly impressive things, and I respect his hustle and innovation.
With that said, the cult that surrounds his projects where people say things like "this is what success looks like" when a big metal thing blows up unexpectedly or robot car goes flying off an exit ramp is a never ending source of amusement.
- ehnto 7y agoI guess the parent comment was pointing out that this actually wasn't unexpected, it was one of the expected failure modes for the test and it happened. I don't see any constructive reason to look at it negatively, failure is part of testing. We don't test to find success, we test to find failures so that we can get them out of our systems.
- aedron 7y agoFine, so don't call it "success!". It's a step on the way to (possible) success, but the hypersensitivity isn't helping anyone.
- ehnto 7y agoNegatively responding to failure during a test is like negatively responding to someone asking a question. I am sure the circlejerk gets annoying, but it's at least got a constructive outcome. It's obviously not going to affect professionals and companies, but if you apply your view to students or people trying to work out new problems you could dissuade them from being inquisitive.
- Ari_Ugwu 7y agoThe semantics these days. Trade "success" for "progress"....but then also replace "accident" with "test result". Works both ways, so does the hyper-sensitivity. We are silly animals. Links I can't help but click on....comments I can't help to respond to. The algorithms are winning.
- dwild 7y agoYou sound like the one hypersensitive here...
- ksec 7y agoIf my test were designed for failures, my test results expect it to fail, and it did, then I call it a success. Science is about testing what we think we know, measuring it and confirming it. In a Chemistry Lab, I put two elements together to show off a little explosion to my students, if it did. It was a successful demonstration, if it didn't go according to plan, it was a failure. And we will be wondering why this didn't work. The OP said it from his perspective of pathfinder. And I assume these results were expected. And if it didn't blew up and they did not understand why it didn't, it create more uncertainty and variables during real launch. And I am sure everyone would want to minimise of that happening. I am not sure how hard this is to see thing from his perspective, I would agree if Elon calling it a success would be hyperbole, but the OP stated he is a pathfinder, and finding out failure is exactly his job.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- danielbln 7y agoThe cult is funny indeed, but do mind that the giant SpaceX booster rockets exploded in giant balls of fire a LOT before they eventually (and reliably) landed like in a sci-fi movie, on land and on a moving boat. SpaceX has earned some benefit of the doubt.
- dvdbloc 7y agoFWIW the “boat” is not moving. This is in contrast to Blue Origin’s reusable booster which will literally be landing on a moving boat.
- michaelscott 7y agoWhat do you mean by "not moving"? The platform sat on the surface of an ocean. It's always moving.
- kolinko 7y agoWhat he means is that the boat is moving up and down but keeps a stationary latitude/longitude. The rocket has static landing coordinates, and if the boat were to move a few meters to either side it would miss it.
- jiofih 7y agoIt’s nearly impossible to stay put in the sea where waves and swell are meters high. The boat actually does try to stand still, for which they developed their own positioning / thrust system, but the tolerance is something like 3m-6m with the rocket adjusting its path on the fly. But there are definitely no “static coordinates”, it would have to move a lot more than a few meters for the rocket to miss, and it would be due to trajectory and fuel constraints rather than ability to maneuver.
- celticninja 7y agoI would suggest the boat is always moving to be able to stay in the same place
- celticninja 7y agoThis is good for bitcoin.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoWay to misquote GP to confirm your preexisting bias. I think the quote you're looking for is: "So as manufacturing pathfinder, this is what success often looks like. " If blowing up a prototype enables changes to the manufacturing process that prevent the same thing happening later with a live crew on board, then it's considered a success. It doesn't matter who the CEO of the company happens to be.
- conjectures 7y agoOn the other hand, perfection looks like nothing ever blowing up while job always getting done.
- tomp 7y agoUnfortunately, for NASA and most other space companies before SpaceX came along, perfection looks more like almost nothing ever blowing up while almost nothing getting done...
- _ph_ 7y agoAnd later on still blowing up far to many things.
- fsloth 7y agoDoes this ever happen?
- phkahler 7y agoNo. See X15 accidents, crew capsule fire, 2 shuttle accidents. Those all involved loss of life. There are other accidents in the US and plenty in other countries too. AFAIK nobody has built something like this before. To have it fail during an early test doesn't seem unusual.
- rusticpenn 7y agoThat creates a very conservative mindset, unsuitable for innovation.
- taneq 7y agoYou're saying this to a community with the mantra, "move fast and break things."
- nxpnsv 7y agoI prefer breakfast, move things.
- tomhoward 7y agoIf that ever was a dominant mantra on HN, it's certainly not these days. For better or worse, this place is not dominated by "disruptive" startup founders anymore. Nor does the community skew supportive of Facebook/Zuckerberg or their ethos.
- ryanmercer 7y ago>With that said, the cult that surrounds his projects where people say things like "this is what success looks like" Experimental rocket/spacecraft (that's a fairly rapid prototype as far as rockets are concerned), made out of non-traditional material for rockets, fails one way yielding tons of data to do it better on the next version. That's some modicum of success no matter how you slice it. Go plug 'rocket launch fail' or 'rocket explosion' or some such into YouTube and watch various rockets failing spectacularly on the launchpad both during development and carrying actual payloads and compare it to this failure at this stage of development. I mean, look at stuff like Apollo 1. An electrical fire killed all of the crew during a test less roughly a month before launch. Starship is a very early prototype that probably yielded more actionable data than the Apollo 1 accident did.
- marktangotango 7y agoCult not withstanding, Elon has expressed on a few occasions how he's expected some rockets to blow up, and a few have. I've had the idea the past few years that he's felt he hasn't been pushing the envelope hard enough. Progress on Starship has been at an astonishing rate by anyone's measure. I find it fascinating that we get to observe this all playing out in real time. You might agree.
- double0jimb0 7y agoOr that Elon Musk and SpaceX are doing real engineering work and other engineers recognize it and try to explain it to those who don't recognize engineering methods and processes?