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I recommend Schmidle’s recent book “Test Gods” if you are interested in Virgin Galactic and test piloting. Schmidle is not an engineer and I would have enjoyed

I recommend Schmidle’s recent book “Test Gods” if you are interested in Virgin Galactic and test piloting. Schmidle is not an engineer and I would have enjoyed a deeper dive into Virgin Galactic’s design choices, but it is a great book about (among other things) the tensions that emerge when a complex technical project is overseen from a distance by utterly nontechnical, PR-oriented upper management. The company’s communications and business strategies make a lot more sense knowing that the people calling the shots do not comprehend in the slightest how their product works. For many reasons (some alluded to in this article, many more in the book), SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. Engineering leadership has done what they can to make the vehicle safer (at the cost of performance), but the intractable issue is that any one mistake by a pilot is likely to be fatal (and already has been, in the 2014 accident). Voices like Stucky and Ericson who wanted to acknowledge the inherent danger of the vehicle (which doesn’t mean grounding it) have been ignored and ultimately removed. The company’s business requires the vehicle to be understood to be safe by the public. The chickens will come home to roost.

IggleSniggle 5y ago
> SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. This comment reminded me of another story from a previous aerospace era (blimp cruise liners aka airships), the summary of which is: > A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world – and so he had two rival design teams battle it out to win the juicy government contract. Competition is supposed to bring the best out of people, but run in the wrong way it can cause people (and the things they make) to fall apart in the most horrifying ways. https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-deadly-airship-race/ https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-dea...
- monocasa 5y ago
  Hmm, that certainly colors a rumor I've heard about Apple. That they'll have two or three teams compete on a new product... but they won't tell the teams that they have competition until final demo day.
  - hughw 5y ago
    "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!" -- Dr. Strangelove
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    I know that was effectively true at Nokia in the 2000s, but that was more a sign of corporate dysfunction than a deliberate "battle to the death". (I worked at Nokia in 2010, and the last project I was on turned out to be one that was literally being worked on by four other people across the world, as it turned out.) I don't think I've ever heard that about Apple, though, at least as standard (even unofficial) operating procedure. There's sometimes competing internal concepts -- the iPhone's operating system probably being the most famous example, with Scott Forstall's team basing theirs on OS X and Tony Fadell's team basing theirs on Pixo OS -- but I don't think they were being kept secret from one another.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - Kliment 5y ago
    I cannot reveal the source or the company but a major household-name automotive company would have several teams working on projects, with one pre-selected as the "real" one and the others not told their work would be discarded. The idea being that this way you can multiply the size of each engineering team and starve the competition of competent engineers. The fact this system exists was not disclosed to the engineers in order to prevent them from quitting. I know this from an engineer who quit after accidentally meeting a member of another team within the company working on the exact same project.
    - 5y ago
- cannabis_sam 5y ago
  Something similar apparently happened with the Soviet space program of all things: > Unlike its American competitor in the Space Race, which had NASA as a single coordinating agency, the USSR's program was split among several competing design bureaus led by Sergei Korolev, Kerim Kerimov, Mikhail Yangel, Valentin Glushko, Vladimir Chelomey, Viktor Makeyev, Mikhail Reshetnev, etc. https://www.groundzerobooksltd.com/pages/books/80639/union-of-soviet-socialist-republics/postal-stationery-russia-airmail-envelope-with-depiction-of-the-earth-being-orbited-and-four-gold https://www.groundzerobooksltd.com/pages/books/80639/union-o...
pinewurst 5y ago
SpaceShipTwo (and SpaceShipOne) are fascinating to me because they're so _not_ general purpose vehicles, yet are sold and in most cases perceived as such. SS1 was conceived by one of the most creative designers in aviation as a point solution for the X-Prize contest - the minimal design/implementation to precisely solve that problem in the most cost effective way possible (as detailed in "Test Gods"). This cobbled together, even borderline, solution was reimplemented as a revenue producing, passenger joyride vehicle, without a lot of (apparent) deep understanding of the real problem and the quirks of their existing "solution". Pretty much, SS2 is Branson and droogs saying, "SS1 is great, just blow it up and start printing money".
- labster 5y ago
  SS2 is going to be a real horrorshow idea, one way or another.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    trivia tidbit: the "nadsat" language invented for a clockwork orange incorporates russian. the intention was for "horrorshow" to be an english version of хорошо / khorosho, translated as good or OK.
    - max-ibel 5y ago
      TIL; fascinating - thanks for the tip. Is there a good link to read more ?
      - malingo 5y ago
        https://a-clockwork-orange.fandom.com/wiki/Nadsat https://a-clockwork-orange.fandom.com/wiki/Nadsat
    - makeset 5y ago
      Ha! Grandparent comment's "droog" is also A Clockwork Orange coinage, and also from Russian: друг /drug/ "friend".
ashtonkem 5y ago
Honestly, Virgin Galactic should be shut down until they can take safety seriously. Space flight is risky, but they’re taking unnecessary risks above and beyond a reasonable minimum. That they’ve already killed 1 pilot out of so few launches indicates that something is seriously wrong there.
mmaunder 5y ago
Agreed about the chickens and it will have a broader negative impact than the $SPCE stock price. Fundamentally I think it’s a culture problem. Collaborative engineering that identifies problems, views them as opportunities, doesn’t finger-point, and works each problem. Versus a sales and marketing organization with hard deadlines and a 100% focus on perception and revenue targets. We don’t need an Apollo 1 in the private space industry. But if it happens, there will be a hard reset in terms of regulatory oversight and safety protocols which will cost us several years. Perhaps it’s needed.
- lupire 5y ago
  Did Challenger and Columbia cause a hard reset at NASA? I guess Columbia taught NASA to stop trying and instead yo outsource human spaceflight risk to private sector.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Sadly these rules tend to get written in blood.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
    And if not enough blood has been spilled, the rules can't get written. Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in.
    - bumby 5y ago
      >Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in. I think I may disagree with this. Safety regulations can be written in bloodless terms like probability but, due to all sorts of cognitive biases, people tend to not take them seriously until there is actual physical consequences for ignoring them. E.g., reliability engineers can use real data to show the probability of something failing but often people will push past the point where its statistically "due" because they've yet to see it happen in their career. I don't know if this was the case, but imagine a distribution of possible foam shedding from the Shuttle. Some points are going to occur during a portion of the flight profile where they become dangerous. But because few (if any) engineers personally experienced that because the vast majority of shedding occurs in less risky moments, the shedding isn't actually viewed as a risk.
rkagerer 5y ago
This may be a smidgen off-topic, but any good books to recommend about either the Apollo program or SpaceX that do delve a little deeper into engineering challenges and design choices?
- zlsa 5y ago
  Liftoff[0] by Eric Berger is a great book about the early days of SpaceX that I can highly recommend. [0]: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/liftoff-eric-berger?variant=32126620205090 https://www.harpercollins.com/products/liftoff-eric-berger?v...
- thatcherc 5y ago
  _Angle of Attack_ by Mike Gray is a good one about Apollo, specifically about North American Aviation and how they built one of the Apollo stages (and a bunch of other neat flying things!). Lots of information but definitely a fun read.
- jsrcout 5y ago
  Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4206/sp4206.htm https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4206/sp4206.htm
- rwmj 5y ago
  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apollo-Springer-Praxis-Books-Exploration/dp/0387716750/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apollo-Springer-Praxis-Books-Explor... "How Apollo Flew to the Moon" is a very detailed look at the technical aspects of Apollo.
- AndrewOMartin 5y ago
  This is a thread about book recommendations on rocketry. I feel obliged to mention Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (Rutgers University Press, 1972) now back in print. The author worked on said propellants between 1949 and 1970 (according to Wikipedia) so there's no SpaceX, but might be some Apollo. Anyway, the book is legendary.

IggleSniggle 5y ago

> SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this. This comment reminded me of another story from a previous aerospace era (blimp cruise liners aka airships), the summary of which is: > A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world – and so he had two rival design teams battle it out to win the juicy government contract. Competition is supposed to bring the best out of people, but run in the wrong way it can cause people (and the things they make) to fall apart in the most horrifying ways. https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-deadly-airship-race/ https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-dea...

monocasa 5y ago
Hmm, that certainly colors a rumor I've heard about Apple. That they'll have two or three teams compete on a new product... but they won't tell the teams that they have competition until final demo day.
- hughw 5y ago
  "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!" -- Dr. Strangelove
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  I know that was effectively true at Nokia in the 2000s, but that was more a sign of corporate dysfunction than a deliberate "battle to the death". (I worked at Nokia in 2010, and the last project I was on turned out to be one that was literally being worked on by four other people across the world, as it turned out.) I don't think I've ever heard that about Apple, though, at least as standard (even unofficial) operating procedure. There's sometimes competing internal concepts -- the iPhone's operating system probably being the most famous example, with Scott Forstall's team basing theirs on OS X and Tony Fadell's team basing theirs on Pixo OS -- but I don't think they were being kept secret from one another.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Kliment 5y ago
  I cannot reveal the source or the company but a major household-name automotive company would have several teams working on projects, with one pre-selected as the "real" one and the others not told their work would be discarded. The idea being that this way you can multiply the size of each engineering team and starve the competition of competent engineers. The fact this system exists was not disclosed to the engineers in order to prevent them from quitting. I know this from an engineer who quit after accidentally meeting a member of another team within the company working on the exact same project.
  - 5y ago
cannabis_sam 5y ago
Something similar apparently happened with the Soviet space program of all things: > Unlike its American competitor in the Space Race, which had NASA as a single coordinating agency, the USSR's program was split among several competing design bureaus led by Sergei Korolev, Kerim Kerimov, Mikhail Yangel, Valentin Glushko, Vladimir Chelomey, Viktor Makeyev, Mikhail Reshetnev, etc. https://www.groundzerobooksltd.com/pages/books/80639/union-of-soviet-socialist-republics/postal-stationery-russia-airmail-envelope-with-depiction-of-the-earth-being-orbited-and-four-gold https://www.groundzerobooksltd.com/pages/books/80639/union-o...

pinewurst 5y ago

SpaceShipTwo (and SpaceShipOne) are fascinating to me because they're so _not_ general purpose vehicles, yet are sold and in most cases perceived as such. SS1 was conceived by one of the most creative designers in aviation as a point solution for the X-Prize contest - the minimal design/implementation to precisely solve that problem in the most cost effective way possible (as detailed in "Test Gods"). This cobbled together, even borderline, solution was reimplemented as a revenue producing, passenger joyride vehicle, without a lot of (apparent) deep understanding of the real problem and the quirks of their existing "solution". Pretty much, SS2 is Branson and droogs saying, "SS1 is great, just blow it up and start printing money".

labster 5y ago
SS2 is going to be a real horrorshow idea, one way or another.
- walrus01 5y ago
  trivia tidbit: the "nadsat" language invented for a clockwork orange incorporates russian. the intention was for "horrorshow" to be an english version of хорошо / khorosho, translated as good or OK.
  - max-ibel 5y ago
    TIL; fascinating - thanks for the tip. Is there a good link to read more ?
    - malingo 5y ago
      https://a-clockwork-orange.fandom.com/wiki/Nadsat https://a-clockwork-orange.fandom.com/wiki/Nadsat
  - makeset 5y ago
    Ha! Grandparent comment's "droog" is also A Clockwork Orange coinage, and also from Russian: друг /drug/ "friend".

ashtonkem 5y ago

Honestly, Virgin Galactic should be shut down until they can take safety seriously. Space flight is risky, but they’re taking unnecessary risks above and beyond a reasonable minimum. That they’ve already killed 1 pilot out of so few launches indicates that something is seriously wrong there.

mmaunder 5y ago

Agreed about the chickens and it will have a broader negative impact than the $SPCE stock price. Fundamentally I think it’s a culture problem. Collaborative engineering that identifies problems, views them as opportunities, doesn’t finger-point, and works each problem. Versus a sales and marketing organization with hard deadlines and a 100% focus on perception and revenue targets. We don’t need an Apollo 1 in the private space industry. But if it happens, there will be a hard reset in terms of regulatory oversight and safety protocols which will cost us several years. Perhaps it’s needed.

lupire 5y ago
Did Challenger and Columbia cause a hard reset at NASA? I guess Columbia taught NASA to stop trying and instead yo outsource human spaceflight risk to private sector.
jamiek88 5y ago
Sadly these rules tend to get written in blood.
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y ago
  And if not enough blood has been spilled, the rules can't get written. Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in.
  - bumby 5y ago
    >Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in. I think I may disagree with this. Safety regulations can be written in bloodless terms like probability but, due to all sorts of cognitive biases, people tend to not take them seriously until there is actual physical consequences for ignoring them. E.g., reliability engineers can use real data to show the probability of something failing but often people will push past the point where its statistically "due" because they've yet to see it happen in their career. I don't know if this was the case, but imagine a distribution of possible foam shedding from the Shuttle. Some points are going to occur during a portion of the flight profile where they become dangerous. But because few (if any) engineers personally experienced that because the vast majority of shedding occurs in less risky moments, the shedding isn't actually viewed as a risk.

rkagerer 5y ago

This may be a smidgen off-topic, but any good books to recommend about either the Apollo program or SpaceX that do delve a little deeper into engineering challenges and design choices?

zlsa 5y ago
Liftoff[0] by Eric Berger is a great book about the early days of SpaceX that I can highly recommend. [0]: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/liftoff-eric-berger?variant=32126620205090 https://www.harpercollins.com/products/liftoff-eric-berger?v...
thatcherc 5y ago
_Angle of Attack_ by Mike Gray is a good one about Apollo, specifically about North American Aviation and how they built one of the Apollo stages (and a bunch of other neat flying things!). Lots of information but definitely a fun read.
jsrcout 5y ago
Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4206/sp4206.htm https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4206/sp4206.htm
rwmj 5y ago
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apollo-Springer-Praxis-Books-Exploration/dp/0387716750/ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apollo-Springer-Praxis-Books-Explor... "How Apollo Flew to the Moon" is a very detailed look at the technical aspects of Apollo.
AndrewOMartin 5y ago
This is a thread about book recommendations on rocketry. I feel obliged to mention Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (Rutgers University Press, 1972) now back in print. The author worked on said propellants between 1949 and 1970 (according to Wikipedia) so there's no SpaceX, but might be some Apollo. Anyway, the book is legendary.