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I had a close friend who worked on this. Everybody in our lab stopped working this afternoon to watch it launch, and to cheer our friend on. Definitely went f
by blhack 12y ago
I had a close friend who worked on this. Everybody in our lab stopped working this afternoon to watch it launch, and to cheer our friend on.
Definitely went from "YAY!" to sad really quick.
It's been said other places in this thread, but to echo it again: I really feel for all the engineers involved in this. That's got to be devastating.
To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right.
Back when I used to mountain bike a lot, it was a personal "joke" that I wasn't really riding unless I crashed at least once. That's how I knew I was pushing myself to improve.
Don't fret the failures.
- foobarqux 12y ago> Don't fret the failures. Except when it kills people (though this accident didn't).
- blhack 12y agoFair point. Although I'd say: fret the suffering of people, not the fact that something really difficult ended up being difficult.
- throwaway5752 12y agoNot to slight your friend, but his was an unmanned launch to resupply the ISS, it's relatively common, comparatively easy, and successful (1 other failure in just under 80 missions). No disrespect intended, but this is a disruption for the ISS, a loss (hopefully insured) for Planetary Resources, a real setback for Orbital... there's no point in sugar coating anything, it sucks. There's just no point in dwelling on it, either. RCA and move forward.
- gus_massa 12y agoThe failure rate in manned space missions is approximately 1/50 ("failure" as in "it explodes and everybody dies"). (For example, the Space Shuttle had 2/135 failures.) The unmanned missions have a higher failure rate, IIRC ~10%, but that number probably includes prototype and old models. So a 2/80 failures is not so bad. It sucks when it explodes, but going to space is difficult.
- shepard 12y agoThat 1/50 failure rate is debatable, and depends on your definition. For example, Soviet/Russian manned flight, "Soyuz", had 131 flights (123 Soyuz + 2 Voskhod + 6 Vostok) [1][2] and 2 accidents, resulted in death of 4 astronauts (1 + 3).[3] However, both of these accidents occurred before 1972, and both were highly experimental flights. Komarov's was the VERY FIRST flight of Soyuz, and before Soyuz 11 accident, they were descending without space suits, as the space inside the cabin was so tiny. So you can also say that there were 2 accidents in the first 10 Soyuz flights - they were still finalizing the technology - and no accidents in the remaining 113. In addition, both of these accidents occurred during the landing, so there was NO accidents during manned-space take-off in Russian/Soviet flights. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_manned_space_missions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Russian_manned_space_mi... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_manned_space_missions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_manned_space_mis... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...
- Crito 12y ago> "there was NO accidents during manned-space take-off in Russian/Soviet flights." Soyuz T-10-1 burned on the launch pad, although the launch escape system saved the lives of the cosmonauts on board. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-ST_No._16L http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_7K-ST_No._16L
- shepard 12y agoThanks - I stand corrected, I didn't know about that accident. Still, it wouldn't be a "failure" under GP's original definition: "failure" as in "it explodes and everybody dies" :)
- avmich 12y agoIt should also be noted that Komarov died in first manned Soyuz spacecraft launched - not the first Soyuz. In other words, Komarov's Soyuz-1 - and naming system isn't obvious in Russian space school - wasn't analogous to Columbia first flight as the very first flight of any STS. And in Soyuz they also had other pretty close calls. Diving into athmosphere hatch-forward because engine module didn't separate in Shatalov-Volynov-Eliseev-Khrunov group flight... Near premature separation of said engine module in the Intercosmos flight with Afghani cosmonaut... Several ballistic landings - with accelerations up to about 20 g's... Still nobody died. Perhaps in no small part because of overbuilding the ship and also changing the ship design along its long history, learning on mistakes. Soyuz spacecraft is the real workhorse.
- snarkyturtle 12y agoOr when it costs billions of dollars from NASA.
- rosser 12y agoThe mission was insured, and it didn't cost "billions".
- mkriss 12y agobut it did cost millions to insurance company
- dfan 12y agoIf the insurance company is doing its job right, this was priced into its rates.
- FranOntanaya 12y agoThen it cost millions to a lot of people.
- claystu 12y agoWhich is understood by all those people when they purchase insurance. This isn't news. Spreading the risk around is why people buy insurance in the first place.
- gohrt 12y agoThen the failure wasn't free. This customer and all other customers paid for this failure. Other customers, who may have done more and more expensive work to avoid failure, are stuck paying for this failure. Insurance thus incentivizes a race to the bottom -- using other customers to finance ones own risk.
- dragontamer 12y agoBillions, not millions.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- obviouslygreen 12y agoYou can continuously fail while acting irrationally/irresponsibly. You can also fail despite having done everything right. Platitudes like this don't help anything, they just detract from actual discussion of reality, which is vastly more complex.
- hyperbovine 12y ago> To everybody: failures suck, but big spectacular failure is directly correlated to the difficulty of what you're trying to do. If you're failing, you're doing something right. This tech-scene cliché annoys me to no end. Challenger and Columbia were both spectacular failures, and both were the result of dysfunctional corporate culture at NASA. Asiana 214, the MV Sewol, and the Costa Concordia can all be chalked up basically to incompetence. If you are failing you are doing something wrong, that is the definition of failure.
- dsjoerg 12y agoThe word "failure" is used to mean two distinct things: 1) bad outcome, 2) made the wrong choices given the available information at the time. They are not the same. Furthermore if you have no bad outcomes, you may be taking a suboptimal amount of risk, which would then be a failure in the second sense of the term.
- differentView 12y ago>if you have no bad outcomes, you may be taking a suboptimal amount of risk That is not the same as what blhack wrote, "If you're failing, you're doing something right." you: zero failures = doing something wrong blhack: any failure = doing something right blhack's statement is clearly ridiculous.
- blhack 12y agoYour understanding of what I said is also clearly ridiculous. In context, what I am saying is pretty obviously meant to be taken as: Failure is part of taking risk. Risk is part of doing things that are difficult. Doing things that are difficult is part of progress. Progress is something that I consider "right". And then put further into context, with regards to spectacular failures like the one today: Don't beat yourself up [engineers who worked on orbital] because the very difficult thing that you were doing failed. That is what makes that very difficult thing noteworthy.
- dang 12y ago
- GrinningFool 12y ago"If you're failing, you're doing something right." I didn't think people said this and meant it. If you succeed, it means you've done the critical things right. If you're failing, it means that you didn't do something right. Or several somethings. Yeah, you can learn from it and do better, and that's great - but that doesn't mean it's a success. It's a failure and - in some cases - a chance to do better the next time. Trying to portray it as a good thing because your goal was a hard one only lessens the value you can receive from it.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- blhack 12y agoI'm going to get up from my chair and go to the water cooler to fill up my water bottle. I bet I will succeed at it. How is this different to you than launching rockets? It's different to me because launching rockets is much more difficult. There are many more things that can cause you to fail catastrophically. To me, failure is to be expected when you're doing something that is difficult. That is the definition of doing something difficult.
- eitally 12y agoBut in this case, as well as several others (like surgery, for example), that's not at all true. We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" for a reason: those are fields in which mistakes are not acceptable and the cost of producing as well as the cost of insuring are incredible. There is really nothing comparable between a code jockey who weaves js frameworks and SaaS services together to build apps and the engineers who wrote the assembly 30, 40, 50 years ago to power and control our space craft... or the ones who do the same thing now using more modern hardware & tools at companies like Orbital Sciences or SpaceX.
- rbanffy 12y ago> We make jokes about how nearly nothing is "rocket science" or "brain surgery" Fun note: a very long time ago I dated a woman who happened to be a brain surgeon. She used to joke her work was actually easy because nobody realy expecting her patients to survive.
- golgappi 12y ago| If you're failing, you're doing something right. Wrong. This only goes on to emphasize the stigma associated with failures. This sentence is a cover up for the fact that someone did something wrong, or at the very least, things did not go as planned. Failures are bad and heartbreaking, and we should accept it in its entirety. | Don't fret the failures. Right. Instead of focusing on getting stressed and fretting, the right thing to do is fix whatever it was that resulted in failure. And when you redo it and its a success, that means you did something right.
- lutorm 12y agoA failure means you took risk, which is something you should do if you want to push the boundaries. So you did do something right. No one would suggest you did everything right. Conversely, absence of failure may mean you took a calculated amount of risk and it paid off. But it could also mean you were overly conservative, didn't push the boundaries, and took a minimum of risk. There's no way to tell the difference purely from the absence of failure. The worst outcome is when a failure happens and you though you were very conservative but actually had no idea what the real risks were. That's the Challenger situation.
- Dylan16807 12y agoTaking a minimum of risk and getting the job done is also getting something right, a good deal of somethings.
- SAI_Peregrinus 12y agoTaking risks is good in testing/design, but not a great idea for a production rocket. You want to find all the failure points during the design phase instead of blowing up expensive payloads.
- WalterBright 12y agoSince this is an unmanned operation, the calculation is fairly straightforward, balancing: 1. the cost of failure 2. the probability of failure 3. the cost of reducing the probability of failure If these can be accurately calculated, then a certain failure rate can be quite acceptable. Of course, it's still worthwhile to determine the cause of any failures, and hence the cost of eliminating that cause and a reevaluation of points 1..3.
- zura 12y agoGlad to hear it was unmanned!
- cjdulberger 12y agoMakes me think of the Michael Jordan quote: "I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
- smegel 12y ago> If you're failing, you're doing something right. That seems to be a little bit of a stretch. I prefer Steve Jobs take - if you're failing, at least someone is making decisions!
- dinwal 12y agoFailures are inevitable. I am sure the team has learnt more from it than it would if it had worked. When you have failed once you don't leave any stone unturned and in the process improve on tens of more things.
- nikanj 12y agoA lot of people are trying to build mechanical perpetual motion engines, and have failed for thousands of years. Failure doesn't always signal you're doing something right.
- easytiger 12y agoThese guys, whom i believe to be an investment scam, are the most recent: http://www.steorn.com/ http://www.steorn.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steorn They've erased some of the history from their website and interest hasn't been high enough for full exposure of their nonsense. Yet a decade of failure hasn't shut them down. I feel sorry for the people who poured €11 million into them. Never seeing that back.
- swatkat 12y agoI had followed Steorn Orbo pretty closely back then, and eagerly awaited for their demo at Kinetica Museum, UK. As expected, they chickened out at the last moment :) This website has chronicled the whole Steorn Orbo saga: http://dispatchesfromthefuture.com/ http://dispatchesfromthefuture.com/
- easytiger 12y agoAhh somehow i missed that blog over the years. Its the kind of things Jon Ronson should do a piece on. I found his public facebook feed recently. Whole thing is madness. People/friends/family seem to think he really is some kind of big shot. He posts pictures of T-shirts with CEO written on them etc. To me it is and always has been an investment scam.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- gohrt 12y agohttp://www.cyclingforums.com/t/402918/another-quadriplegic-created-by-mountain-biking http://www.cyclingforums.com/t/402918/another-quadriplegic-c...