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> Musk was pretty clear in an interview that he does want things to blow up. I get that fanboys are excited and they see the Musk world through rose-tainted gl

> Musk was pretty clear in an interview that he does want things to blow up. I get that fanboys are excited and they see the Musk world through rose-tainted glasses. But SpaceX was planning on flying this vehicle. And it exploded. How does anyone anywhere believe in that? Obviously this outcome was not planned. If anyone wants to fly a vehicle to test other stuff, they don't want it to blow up prior to it.

missosoup 6y ago
I'll reiterate a point I made deeper down: obviously the failure wasn't planned or intended. But the overall process of being failure tolerant and having a high rate of failures, was. You can spend your resources on doing careful modelling and over-engineering and conservative testing to always stay within limits, or you can go fast and loose and discover those limits the kinetic explodey way. SpaceX chose the latter strategy. Also, not a fanboy. On a personal level the guy's a prick. But the strategy that SpaceX is employing is sound and tested. It's the same R&D strategy that was employed by Skunkworks, which is arguably the most successful aerospace R&D story in the entire history of our species.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > You can spend your resources on doing careful modelling and over-engineering and conservative testing to always stay within limits, or you can go fast and loose and discover those limits the kinetic explodey way. SpaceX chose the latter strategy. Again, this baseless assertion is just plain wrong on many levels, and flies in the face of basic engineering practices. At best, you're confusing a consciencious choice of allocating piles of resources to avoid bottlenecks and time constraints, such as losing a prototype which is a project death sentence to your general aerospace research project, with plain old incompetence. Engineering 101 teaches that when in doubt err on the safe side. Your assertion is the exact opposite because... Because what? What do you believe is the trade-off of wasting time and resources trying to fly intentionally half-baked designs that define the critical path of the project? Please spend a moment thinking about what you've said to try to see how absurd it is to waste time and resources for nothing at all.
  - gexla 6y ago
    > Engineering 101 teaches that when in doubt err on the safe side. This sounds like lecturing birds on how to fly (Nassim Taleb quote below.) They'll possibly fly people to the space station today. Maybe they have engineering 101 down? If they're breaking guidelines in a 101 level course, then maybe they're just making amendments to the rules. Maybe the textbook writers need to make a revision. The greatest problem in knowledge is the “lecturing birds how to fly” effect. -Nassim Taleb
  - huffmsa 6y ago
    And most fresh engineering graduates know nothing about real engineering. You don't intentionally half bake the design, but you do intentionally try to exceed whatever your maximum design specification is. The wing flex test, for example. 150% of the expected maximum flex the structure will experience during real operation.[1] Even with software, you can't stop at "well I think this is the maximum load this service will handle in production." You need to know what will happen if that expectation is exceeded. Maybe nothing, or maybe your initial estimate was too high to begin with. [1] https://media.wired.com/photos/59345489a88f414d9a8ca259/master/pass/index1.jpg https://media.wired.com/photos/59345489a88f414d9a8ca259/mast...
    - rumanator 6y ago
      > And most fresh engineering graduates know nothing about real engineering. And that's ok, that's why they are supervised by experienced engineers, who in turn in relevant projects with some complexity answer to senior engineers. But even then screwups might happen, and sometimes it's ok. Nevertheless, unlike the spin that is being given to this disaster, that doesn't mean accidents are desirable or sought after. Particularly when the accident consisted of exploding the prototype that was already scheduled for flight tests.
  - missosoup 6y ago
    > Engineering 101 teaches that when in doubt err on the safe side. Nonsense. You can't discover limits if you always stay within them. Commercial engineering, sure. But R&D is by definition the process of exploring an unknown parameter search space. And considering that spaceX have achieved what STS has failed to do with 1/10th of the STS budget, I'd say they're not doing terribly badly with their chosen R&D strategy. You seem to have a deeply ingrained misconception about what R&D actually entails and how it's different from both commercial engineering and designed experiments. Erring on the safe side is what they're doing with their manned missions. Cargo missions are medium risk and occasionally do dirt-cheap launches to deliberately try risky scenarios. R&D ops is deliberately high risk and low process overhead. They rather someone just try something and see what happens instead of spending 6 months writing an experiment plan and getting it validated etc. as you would see in the pharma industry for example. I'm not sure why you're struggling to comprehend this fairly simple and fairly standard strategy.
yourMadness 6y ago
You care too much about the vehicle. What they are testing isn't the vehicle, they are testing the production processes. I'm confident the vehicle design will work once they get a handle on the production. They got really good simulation tools for the vehicle flight part of the problem.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > You care too much about the vehicle. What they are testing isn't the vehicle, they are testing the production processes. No, they clearly are not. They are designing a vehicle. One of the design requirements might be a better production process, but as it is very obvious to everyone their goal is not to produce a vehicle that blows up unexpectedly. And the vehicle blew up unexpectedly, when it was scheduled for a flight test. The goal of SpaceX is not to implement the broken window fallacy.

missosoup 6y ago

I'll reiterate a point I made deeper down: obviously the failure wasn't planned or intended. But the overall process of being failure tolerant and having a high rate of failures, was. You can spend your resources on doing careful modelling and over-engineering and conservative testing to always stay within limits, or you can go fast and loose and discover those limits the kinetic explodey way. SpaceX chose the latter strategy. Also, not a fanboy. On a personal level the guy's a prick. But the strategy that SpaceX is employing is sound and tested. It's the same R&D strategy that was employed by Skunkworks, which is arguably the most successful aerospace R&D story in the entire history of our species.

rumanator 6y ago
> You can spend your resources on doing careful modelling and over-engineering and conservative testing to always stay within limits, or you can go fast and loose and discover those limits the kinetic explodey way. SpaceX chose the latter strategy. Again, this baseless assertion is just plain wrong on many levels, and flies in the face of basic engineering practices. At best, you're confusing a consciencious choice of allocating piles of resources to avoid bottlenecks and time constraints, such as losing a prototype which is a project death sentence to your general aerospace research project, with plain old incompetence. Engineering 101 teaches that when in doubt err on the safe side. Your assertion is the exact opposite because... Because what? What do you believe is the trade-off of wasting time and resources trying to fly intentionally half-baked designs that define the critical path of the project? Please spend a moment thinking about what you've said to try to see how absurd it is to waste time and resources for nothing at all.
- gexla 6y ago
  > Engineering 101 teaches that when in doubt err on the safe side. This sounds like lecturing birds on how to fly (Nassim Taleb quote below.) They'll possibly fly people to the space station today. Maybe they have engineering 101 down? If they're breaking guidelines in a 101 level course, then maybe they're just making amendments to the rules. Maybe the textbook writers need to make a revision. The greatest problem in knowledge is the “lecturing birds how to fly” effect. -Nassim Taleb
- huffmsa 6y ago
  And most fresh engineering graduates know nothing about real engineering. You don't intentionally half bake the design, but you do intentionally try to exceed whatever your maximum design specification is. The wing flex test, for example. 150% of the expected maximum flex the structure will experience during real operation.[1] Even with software, you can't stop at "well I think this is the maximum load this service will handle in production." You need to know what will happen if that expectation is exceeded. Maybe nothing, or maybe your initial estimate was too high to begin with. [1] https://media.wired.com/photos/59345489a88f414d9a8ca259/master/pass/index1.jpg https://media.wired.com/photos/59345489a88f414d9a8ca259/mast...
  - rumanator 6y ago
    > And most fresh engineering graduates know nothing about real engineering. And that's ok, that's why they are supervised by experienced engineers, who in turn in relevant projects with some complexity answer to senior engineers. But even then screwups might happen, and sometimes it's ok. Nevertheless, unlike the spin that is being given to this disaster, that doesn't mean accidents are desirable or sought after. Particularly when the accident consisted of exploding the prototype that was already scheduled for flight tests.
- missosoup 6y ago
  > Engineering 101 teaches that when in doubt err on the safe side. Nonsense. You can't discover limits if you always stay within them. Commercial engineering, sure. But R&D is by definition the process of exploring an unknown parameter search space. And considering that spaceX have achieved what STS has failed to do with 1/10th of the STS budget, I'd say they're not doing terribly badly with their chosen R&D strategy. You seem to have a deeply ingrained misconception about what R&D actually entails and how it's different from both commercial engineering and designed experiments. Erring on the safe side is what they're doing with their manned missions. Cargo missions are medium risk and occasionally do dirt-cheap launches to deliberately try risky scenarios. R&D ops is deliberately high risk and low process overhead. They rather someone just try something and see what happens instead of spending 6 months writing an experiment plan and getting it validated etc. as you would see in the pharma industry for example. I'm not sure why you're struggling to comprehend this fairly simple and fairly standard strategy.

yourMadness 6y ago

You care too much about the vehicle. What they are testing isn't the vehicle, they are testing the production processes. I'm confident the vehicle design will work once they get a handle on the production. They got really good simulation tools for the vehicle flight part of the problem.

rumanator 6y ago
> You care too much about the vehicle. What they are testing isn't the vehicle, they are testing the production processes. No, they clearly are not. They are designing a vehicle. One of the design requirements might be a better production process, but as it is very obvious to everyone their goal is not to produce a vehicle that blows up unexpectedly. And the vehicle blew up unexpectedly, when it was scheduled for a flight test. The goal of SpaceX is not to implement the broken window fallacy.