3 ms·

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

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.
  - rumanator 6y ago
    > But R&D is by definition the process of exploring That's vacuous bullshit. You explore the limits you've set to explore. If your goal is to check how far you can drive a vehicle before it blows up then you plan a destructive test, which involves specific steps to collect the data you need such as peppering the system with sensors thought with your experiment in mind. That's engineering 101, and aerospace engineering isn't Jackass. Getting a flat tire is not engineering nor research.
    - risyachka 6y ago
      In R&D things blow all the time. You just usually don't see it. In labs when they are looking for new drug or vaccine - thousands of variants fail. And it's ok. When you are developing anything new - you do thousands of try and fail. IF you don't - then you will even ever invent anything new. The best you can do is a little bit upgraded iteration. And here a few fails and it is disappointing? Nope. Its the only way to discover something new.
      - 6y ago

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.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > But R&D is by definition the process of exploring That's vacuous bullshit. You explore the limits you've set to explore. If your goal is to check how far you can drive a vehicle before it blows up then you plan a destructive test, which involves specific steps to collect the data you need such as peppering the system with sensors thought with your experiment in mind. That's engineering 101, and aerospace engineering isn't Jackass. Getting a flat tire is not engineering nor research.
  - risyachka 6y ago
    In R&D things blow all the time. You just usually don't see it. In labs when they are looking for new drug or vaccine - thousands of variants fail. And it's ok. When you are developing anything new - you do thousands of try and fail. IF you don't - then you will even ever invent anything new. The best you can do is a little bit upgraded iteration. And here a few fails and it is disappointing? Nope. Its the only way to discover something new.
    - 6y ago