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>But you shouldn't also pretend you have zero information. If you've never done something before you really have no idea if it's going to work, and in rocket l
by tsotha 12y ago
>But you shouldn't also pretend you have zero information.
If you've never done something before you really have no idea if it's going to work, and in rocket launch everything that occurs after the last failure is a complete unknown in terms of failure modes.
Now, if he'd made successful flyback stages before, or it was a relatively routine thing for the industry he might have a good enough feel to assign a ballpark number. But that's not the situation.
In the link you provided he uses computer failure as an example, where a person who is familiar with computers does have some information - I've owned my current rig for three years and it's never failed. If you told me you thought it has a 50% chance of failure next month I can pretty confidently say that's an overestimate.
But it's useless to pull numbers out of the air for something as complicated as SpaceX is trying to do.
- FeepingCreature 12y agoIf you have an expectation, you have a probability. Not a numeric one, but a probability nonetheless. Nobody has ever landed a rocket before. But we don't expect the rocket to turn into an alarm clock or suddenly develop antigravity. In fact, we have quite reasonable expectations on what behaviors the rocket will exhibit. We might, for instance, expect the rocket to crash more than we expect it to land. What else does that say rather than p(crash) > p(land)? (Of course, this may well come down to "probability as ratio" vs. "probability as anticipation", which is probably a matter of preference.)