8 ms·
Explosions are great, actually
- whatshisface 4y agoI am getting tired of hearing and reading the constant attempts to put a spin on this event. A partly failed test run has an obvious interpretation, nobody is concerned about investors pulling out of SpaceX, and they will have the new one stacked before long. Why dress it up? One might say that the rocked had enough spin already.
- areoform 4y agoI'm the author. It's not spin. It's about preserving and bringing back the early spirit of what made rockets progress so quickly. Yuri Gagarin's launch on Vostok 1 and the launch of Apollo 11 are 8 years 3 months 4 days apart. Or, 3,017 days. For reference, it took 11 years between SLS' announcement and an uncrewed launch. It'll be around twice the time difference between Vostok 1 and Apollo 11 before the SLS delivers humans to the moon. Humanity progressed so quickly during Project Apollo because they were accepting of "failure" and willing to embrace the associated risk. Post-Apollo and post-Challenger, this willingness and risk appetite completely disappeared leading to paralysis. When we call something as awesome (in the traditional sense of the word) as yesterday's test a "failure," we are implicitly rejecting the Apollo paradigm and embracing the SLS one. I think it's harmful for humanity, in the long run, to do so. We should build and launch more rockets. Some of them will explode. Such is life.
- Haga 4y ago[dead]
- kragen 4y ago[flagged]
- hikawaii 4y agoAbsolutely bless. People are mad about whatever dumb thing Elon did with Twitter this week. Even when applied to Twitter, the question presents itself: Are you really happy with what it was before? The only path from "then" to "better" is through "doing lots of stuff, some of it stupid".
- robotresearcher 4y agoApollo cost a nontrivial fraction of GDP. It was risky indeed, but we shouldn’t forget that the project had spectacular resources available, far more than SLS. IIRC Apollo cost around a quarter trillion dollars in today’s money.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- DennisP 4y agoOn the other hand, Starship is costing less to develop than SLS, but with a bigger rocket, groundbreaking* new engines and full reusability while SLS is a disposable with warmed-over Shuttle technology. * (Admittedly a little too groundbreaking.)
- guenthert 4y agoThat wasn't some college guys blowing up a lab, this was a pretty costly failure. Surely the reliability of the engines could have been tested without the spaceship part of the stack. Someone took shortcuts and paid for it.
- the_mungler 4y agoNot really. How would you test a rocket engine at low atmospheric pressure? You can't exactly stick a rocket engine in a vacuum chamber and light it. Then once you're launching something into space, you may as well have a first stage to go along with it. Are you saying they should have launched the booster stage by itself? Why? What would they learn from that? Would you ever expect them to launch a booster on it's own in practice?
- amoss 4y agoAn interpretation that is obvious can be easy to arrive at - but that does not make it correct, only low effort. If the test had not failed then it was not ambitious enough. If they had not pushed the rocket to its current breaking point then they would not have learned as much about it, or its current modes of failure. Sometimes it is worth looking past the obvious interpretation. I thought the article was a good read, kudos to the author.
- kashkhan 4y ago"if you are not failing you are not trying hard enough."
- HopenHeyHi 4y agoWhy? The world is filled with unwarranted hype and spin and yet this particular instance stands out especially to exasperbate you so? Do you go around whenever a new album is about to drop and tell people the single is meh and they should in fact not be excited? What is your actual motivation here to take the wind out of peoples sails? If the spin is unwarranted gravity, as we saw, will take care of it without your input. If the hype is unwarranted it will evaporate on its own even without your input. So what are you contributing here? How does your attitude benefit anyone/thing? Pessimism is perfectly fine don't get me wrong - but if you are so pessimistic why even bother to make this sort of remark..
- bottlepalm 4y agoMan that test yesterday was great, here's a list of successes: * Did you see them hold and restart the countdown in the last minute, just the ability to do that at all is amazing * The full startup sequence which is super complicated for 33 engines worked * The six second hold down and release system worked - holding down a rocket with twice the thrust of Saturn V * They found out the limits of the pad, and we know now they were already working on a cover for the pad with water cooled steel that wasn't ready in time * Stage 0 worked, launched the rocket, and the flight computers on the rocket worked as well * The rocket was able to maintain stable flight with many engine outs * The launch tower was cleared, that is a huge milestone to get past. Blowing up the launch tower really sets you back, it's also like too much damage to collect really good data from, as well as it probably would of blown up the propellent farm as well which sets you back with regulatory agencies. * The engines survived what looks like multiple failures without taking out the rest of the vehicle * There is tons of data from build and test to correlate all the engines that worked vs the ones that didn't and find all kinds of correlations. Lots of engines, lots of test data. * It made it past max Q, another big milestone * The tanks held their pressure the whole way up * It made it all the way to stage separation, this is where many rockets flown for the first time have their failure so this is par for the course * FTS (flight termination system) worked, no better way to test it than actually setting it off * They probably flew with tons risks and unknowns that we'll never know about, but now they have the data to resolve. Similar to Falcon Heavy, they are cheering because holy crap this thing is actually working
- CamperBob2 4y agowould have blown up the propellent farm as well which sets you back with regulatory agencies. This is Texas. You get a tax break for causing accidental explosions, based on the kilotonnage achieved.
- the_mungler 4y agoThis is still in the USA. They still had to get approval from the EPA to set up all of this stuff. I realize this comment is satire, but the reason this location was chosen has to do with orbital mechanics. A launch pad close to the equator can send payloads to a larger range of orbital inclinations.
- wilg 4y agoIt's honestly not even worth engaging on this topic anymore. People who understand the space industry know exactly what's going on, everyone else just woke up to headlines about an explosion and mouthed off based on how annoyed they are about the various idiot things Elon's been tweeting. None of the Twitter drama matters, they'll go back to work on the rocket and it will work or it won't. (It probably will.)
- mejutoco 4y agotbh the journalists have been juicing this one highlighting the explosion.
- prox 4y agoEasiest newsday in ages : -Billionaire entrepreneur news? Check. -Biggest rocket ever news? Check. -Explosion that makes Michael Bay seem like an amateur? Check. -Environmental disaster news? Check. The list could probably go on for a while.
- hef19898 4y agoMusk and hype, sure to get clicks. Increased 10 fold for impressive explosions. And it was an impressive explosion. I just wonder how the public perception, explicitly including on HN, would have been if SLS had blown up. I remember some people calling them out for delaying the initial launch.
- prox 4y agoRight now, I love seeing two options. Even if NASA cost a gazillion more dollars, we have two mechanics at work : cathedral building (NASA) and Bazaar building (Iterate quick, learn of mistakes) Personally I think the budget of NASA is inconsequential to say the defense budget. Not sure what the general HN vibe is, but probably mostly leaning towards “waste of my tax dollars / inefficient”
- 4y ago
- Nevermark 4y ago> Of course, with acceptance of risk comes risk. > There is a sharp difference between those who play status games, and those who are interested in creation and exploration. That difference can be measured in explosions. I found the article enjoyable and quotable. Throwaway designs should be considered a serious option in any formal engineering thought process. Especially ambitious high-risk high-impact projects. So many compounding benefits.
- somewhereoutth 4y agoA space program brought to you by the TikTok generation, powered by company t-shirts and likes. Next up - food production and electricity!
- VoodooJuJu 4y ago[flagged]
- lom 4y agoGreat piece, I’ve never thought about space flight management that way. It seems obvious now why SpaceX is able to build better interplanetary rockets than NASA for faster, better and cheaper.
- dudeinjapan 4y agoSuppose for X million dollars we can either: A) Launch one rocket with a 90% chance of success B) Launch two rockets each with a 70% chance of success We should do (B) because it has a 91% chance that at least one of the rockets succeeds, and a 49% chance two rockets succeed--an outcome that is impossible under scenario (A). With the right telemetry, the 51% chance that at least one fails will give us valuable knowledge that helps us improve our rockets the next launch. Of course, the calculus changes if we let failure-averse marketing people run our rocket company.
- 93po 4y agoThe calculus also changes dramatically based on the cost of the payload. If it's the JWTT you'd definitely want to double the launch cost to increase probability 20%.