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Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad. Suggesting that this test “failed” is at best a mischaracterisation.
by simondotau 4y ago
Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad. Suggesting that this test “failed” is at best a mischaracterisation.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoFailure doesn’t have to have a negative connotation, we just match it as so in our culture. The full mission plan wasn’t achieved and the rocket did in fact fail. That said, it achieved precisely what they hoped it would achieve as failure was an expected and acceptable outcome.
- simondotau 4y agoThe usage of “failure” as a way to describe not achieving the maximally ideal outcome makes no sense to me. I’ve never read or heard it used to mean that. It would have been a failure if the data logging failed to transmit, or if it had immediately exploded and destroyed the launch tower.
- corobo 4y agoAbsolutely! Applies to everything too, including the project you bought a domain for and didn't do anything with! You there, reading this comment, go and fail or go and turn autorenew off :P Failure > inaction. You can learn from failure.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThings are, they don’t fail or succeed in a qualitative sense. You can only fail against some objective measure. If you do nothing, you still haven’t failed. But you haven’t done anything either. If you try something and you establish an objective measure to achieve and it fails, you and your efforts _have not failed_. The positive action of doing still is, and the positive action of analyzing the failed objective still is, and it opens the way to another action as an evolution of the original action. But things just are what they are. They aren’t good or bad. Good or bad is your interpretation of the way things are. If you consider doing nothing good, then you succeed by not trying. If you consider trying good, then you succeed by simply trying.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y agoSure, but, nevertheless, I’d like to know why it exploded before declaring this a success!
- Aaargh20318 4y agoIt likely exploded because they blew it up (flight termination system). It looks like the stages failed to separate and it started to spin. In this case they don’t let an uncontrollable rocket just fly off and see where it comes down, they blow it up. The FTS is basically an explosive mounted to the rocket that can be remotely detonated exactly for situations like this.
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoI kinda wish they'd have let it keep going in order to get the telemetry. The altitude and velocity when things went sideways were in MRBM territory, not ICBM territory so the only thing they would have hit would have been the Atlantic ocean.
- sigstoat 4y agothey let it go well past the point it was clear to lay observers that it was out of control. i expect they got all the uncontrolled-descent telemetry they really had a use for.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cpleppert 4y ago>> It looks like the stages failed to separate and it started to spin. Most complicated part of building any rocket by far and Starship's is a lot more complex than any previous one by far. It was always the most failure prone part but everything else looks great.
- badcppdev 4y agoThis story/thread gets my upvote because it is by far the least click-bait headline I saw in a quick scan of /new. I will disagree with you though and say that the rocket stage separation failed to work. And this occurred a few minutes after launching. What would your headline be?
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 4y agoThe Times summary is solid: > SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Explodes After Launch > The most powerful rocket ever built got off the launchpad in South Texas, but did not achieve its most ambitious goals on Thursday.
- sheepybloke 4y agoStarship achieves liftoff, but fails to stick the landing.
- Spacemanidol 4y agoIt did some pretty sick acrobatics.
- baja_blast 4y agoIf the separation did not fail it probably would have made it to orbit.
- perihelions 4y agoFirst-stage burnout speed was too low for orbit, I think. Telemetry peaked at 2,148 km/hour = 597 m/s – I don't know the nominal values but this seems non-viable to me. (?)
- soco 4y agoThe irony is that we're all "fail fast" until something actually fails fast.
- onion2k 4y agoSpaceX has taken 21 years to get to this point. They have not failed fast. They have seen a long series of huge successes from doing some incredible engineering. Today's test is a small part of that journey.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoI'm surprised this statement was downvoted. It's absolutely correct. SpaceX is a great demonstration of an "ideal mix" of new and old. It has a lot of "classic" "measure twice; cut once" planning, but also an absolutely essential "YOLO" mindset for live testing, which can cause big failures, but also give the most valuable data. Their manned flights have been great (except for that toilet thing...).
- version_five 4y agoThe people who say that are usually talking about designing a landing page that doesn't get enough signups or something. You can really tell if a company has a culture of embracing failure if they're cool with you blowing up a spaceship.
- zitterbewegung 4y agoActually its more like your project is ahead of schedule and is meeting budget targets.
- ravenstine 4y agoEven if this is true, it's going to get more and more difficult to explain away rocket explosions as succeeding the more decades we put between us and the dawn of the Space Age. If SpaceX is still blowing up rockets in 2033, it's going to become a PR problem, especially as the MSM further turns its back on Musk.
- shadowgovt 4y agoThat doesn't make any sense for prototypes. It's been slightly fewer decades since we've been doing consumer software. Does anybody expect version 1 to be bug free?
- ravenstine 4y agoYou're thinking about this like an engineer rather than a PR consultant or a journalist looking to write a hit piece on Musk. Even now, it's not hard to ask the somewhat specious question of how we can be 70+ years into aerospace tech and we still need our rockets to blow up.
- simondotau 4y agoAs though hack journalists need actual reasons to write hit pieces about Musk. They’ll write them no matter what. The articles will generate plenty of clicks, they will have zero impact on anything that matters and they will change nobody’s mind about anything.
- shadowgovt 4y agoPublic perception matters (it eventually drives whether a businessman can do business, since all business is trust-based), but Musk buying Twitter has had a lot more effect than any journalist writing about him ever could.
- throw-7462637 4y agoAs others mentioned the hit pieces will come anyway. The success that SpaceX has had so far very clearly shows that aiming high and embracing failure is the best way to develop rockets.
- okdood64 4y agoCause space billionaire man: bad. But seriously what a terrible title. This was a huge accomplishment in engineering, getting it this far up.
- op00to 4y agoNo, because normal people see a huge explosion and think "well, that didn't go to plan." It has nothing to do with space billionaire man: bad.
- Someone 4y agoThat’s the message they choose to use externally. I would guess they had somewhat higher hopes internally, and would have been at least somewhat disappointed if it had exploded just after clearing the launch pad. Whether they’re truly happy with this result probably will depend on their analysis of what went wrong. If they can find the cause and it’s easy to fix, they’ll be a lot happier than when they can’t figure out what went wrong, or when they can figure it out, but preventing it requires a huge redesign. But yes, this is the nature of rocket building. Things do get boom fairly easily.
- 93po 4y agoEveryone who works at SpaceX would tell you they're happy. Could they be happier? Sure. But they aren't unhappy with this.
- mcculley 4y ago> "Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad." I am confused. Everything I read before the launch said that it was intended to reach orbital altitude and make it around the Earth.
- swarnie 4y agoThe Chief Twit said "anything other than blowing up the launch pad is a success."
- mcculley 4y agoSounds like he moved the goalpost.
- mwint 4y agoHe's been saying this for literally years. That the pad is stage 0 and if they don't blow up the pad, they're happy. I think he said the exact same thing about the first Falcon Heavy launch.
- mcculley 4y agoI am not disputing that this is progress. It is an admirable effort. I am happy for them. I interpreted literally the words they used about the plan for today's launch.
- mwint 4y agoIt's a difference between "definition of success" and "the plan". They can't just say "we want to get off the pad and whatever happens afterwards, meh", they have to point it somewhere. So they plan out a whole flight to maximize useful data per additional success, but consider some subset of the plan to be an overall success. I might go to the grocery store with a list of five things, but I only really need two things. Coming home with 3 things would be a success.
- bitL 4y agoIt almost blew up on the launchpad (see the debris flying after a few seconds), then at around 30 seconds you can see some explosion at the bottom, throwing away some surface parts. Multiple failed engines. Then it went into an unsurvivable "tailspin" if there was any crew around. Cheering for failure was the topping.
- baq 4y agoGo play some KSP, you’ll learn to appreciate not blowing up on the pad.
- saberdancer 4y agoThis looked exactly like my problems in KSP. Rocket starts to be uncontrollable, I try to separate, previous stage is still under thrust which means I am unable to separate and then boom. It even spun like a KSP rocket.
- 93po 4y ago> It almost blew up on the launchpad (see the debris flying after a few seconds) you have literally no idea what you're talking about
- bitL 4y agoHow about the explosion at around T+30? Is that success?
- destitude 4y agoWhat evidence do you have it almost blew up at launchpad? That most likely was concrete chunks flying off away from the rocket and nothing with the rocket itself. You really don't seem to have a grasp what was trying to be done or how any of the previous SpaceX rocket programs functioned.
- lttlrck 4y agoThere seems to be some collective amnesia as to how SpaceX operates. The pedantry over the meaning of "failure", toward the negative, is disappointing.
- AviationAtom 4y agoI hate when major outlets sink to using clickbait headlines that mischaracterize an account of events
- mempko 4y agoThe Soviet N1 moon rocket, which SpaceX shares a bit of design (30+ engines for example) failed 4 times before being scrapped. The Soviets had the 'launch often, fail fast, learn faster' view that SpaceX employs today. However, nobody viewed the N1 launches outside the Soviet Union as successes. I'm glad to see that 'fail fast, learn faster' is finally part of American aerospace engineering.
- orbital-decay 4y agoVery different situations. N1 was a technical blunder on many levels (and it wasn't a moon rocket - it was a hastily repurposed LEO launcher intended for in-orbit assembly, not optimal for the TLI). Instead of adopting the proven R-7 stacking scheme which was much easier to test piece by piece, Korolyov opted to a novel design which was too wide (17m!!), and static fires required a humongous and prohibitively expensive testing facility. The lack of static fires made the development too slow and expensive, as the only way to test it was in the actual flight. Combine this with other technical mistakes (the shape led to the extra weight while the modularity wasn't required, too much drag, etc) and Mishin's poor leadership after Korolyov's death, and you have a recipe for a failed project. Starship is much narrower (9m), today's tech is much better, so the static fires are much cheaper; and unlike N-1, it's actually designed for fast iterations from the ground up.
- avmich 4y ago> N1 was a technical blunder on many levels Why? It had pretty advanced engines, conservative fuel choices, architecture optimized for low requirements at manufacturing. And it was originally planned for Mars missions, not LEO missions. > Korolyov opted to a novel design which was too wide (17m!!) Why too wide? Technical decisions were made with all degrees of justifications available at the time. That it's wider than anything else till today, including Starship, doesn't make it "too wide". > Combine this with other technical mistakes (the shape led to the extra weight while the modularity wasn't required, too much drag, etc) Extra weight in weight-carrying construction is compensated, at least to a degree, by lesser weight of spherical tanks. Modularity was present so even N-11 was considered - two upper stages of N-1. Too much drag - comparing to what? N-1 was quite state of the art technically when it was created. I don't see how calling it a technical blunder can be justified.
- s1k3s 4y ago> Success was defined as the rocket leaving the launchpad. That's not what they said in their mission presentation though. It was supposed to launch, separate, return the booster back, then the rocket was supposed to orbit once around the Earth and then fall into the ocean. I understand people have their feelings invested into this (for whatever reason), but objectively speaking that was not what "success was defined as".
- 93po 4y agoThey defined success up front as being able to gather information. They did that.
- edgyquant 4y agoYou can gather information by just leaving the rocket on the pad. Saying, “we can’t fail no matter what,” ahead of your failure doesn’t mean anyone else has to accept you didn’t fail.
- JeremyNT 4y agoIsn't this such a low bar that almost anything could clear it (e.g. Goodhart's law)? To me, more interesting than how the company itself defines success would be how domain experts outside the company perceive it.
- ctoth 4y agoThe same domain experts who have been failing to build big rockets for the last 50 years?
- greedo 4y agoThere was no plan to return the booster back.
- mgfist 4y agoWell they need a plan in case the thing takes off. If you look at the objective: "SpaceX intends to collect as much data as possible during flight to quantify entry dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally. This data will anchor any changes in vehicle design or CONOPs after the first flight and build better models for us to use in our internal simulations." From https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481 https://apps.fcc.gov/els/GetAtt.html?id=273481 It doesn't say the objective is "fly across earth".
- Kapura 4y agoSo you're suggesting intent was to detonate the rocket in the air, despite that not having been stated anywhere? "I may have crashed the car into the neighbour's house and broken my arm, but I did get the milk from the store!"
- corbulo 4y ago[flagged]
- physicles 4y agoList of things that were crystal clear before launch: - SpaceX will be sad if the rocket blows up on the pad. - They’ll be very happy if the rocket clears the tower. - They’ll be ecstatic if the rocket makes it around the world. - They’ll use the flight termination system, which all rockets carry, if it veers off course. Did you see the employees cheering during the webcast?