33 ms·

SpaceX issue still unknown after several thousand engineering-hours of review

18 points by bontoJR 11y ago

juliangregorian 11y ago
I've been wanting to hear HN's opinion on this ever since I heard about it, yet the whole topic is strangely missing from the front page. Kinda reminds me of the video, as soon as it blows up they just cut the audio feed.
- bontoJR 11y ago
  Same here, that's why I posted the link. Anyway, I think SpaceX's engineers are extremely under pressure right now. These missions are extremely risky, everybody knows how difficult is this field and I personally believe that the amount of pressure the team is facing, it's consistently increasing the potential risk of a failure. SpaceX is a private company and, like all the other private companies in the earth, it has the goal to make money and make investors happy. Every single failure of the company is a big hit on the brand and a loss of millions and millions of dollars, this put the team under an excessive amount of pressure.
  - secfirstmd 11y ago
    It's strange to explain the postive feelings that I and I'm sure many others have here about SpaceX. I mean people have been saying how great it is for a private company to do this but at the end of the day nearly every NASA launch has been built by a private company. Yet somehow SpaceX and in particular, Elon Musk, has managed to do a great job of capturing the public excitement. When I started noticing a lot of my non-tech friends are talking about space and science (thank you Brian Cox, CERN etc!) again it gives me hope for the future. Perhaps its a generation thing, many of us in our 20s never really had those electrifying moments like a moon landing. Something just makes makes people really really want to see SpaceX succeed. Though let's hope this eventually translates into real investment at government levels once again.
- Arnt 11y ago
  Just before the point where Elon says "gosh darn"?
- simik 11y ago
  There you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9793555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9793555
- halviti 11y ago
  Personally, I like to think the culture here is above jumping to conclusions and armchair speculation.
mhandley 11y ago
This is why you want reusable rockets. If you recover the rocket, you get to see if any components are suffering damage, cracking or wear beyond limits, and then redesign systems to prevent future potential failures. This is much harder to do if you don't get the rocket back. According to the press conference, SpaceX do get over 3000 channels of data from Falcon in flight, but that's still no substitute for examining a structure that's already flown for damage. Of course this looks like a second stage failure and SpaceX aren't currently trying to recover that, but there are a lot of common parts between the stages on Falcon, so once they start to recover the first stage successfully, I'd still expect a lot of reliability lessons to be learned.
vikram360 11y ago
This is probably irrelevant, but how are the number of 'engineering-hours' calculated?
- tarpherder 11y ago
  Number of people working on the issue times the hours they worked since it happened? Most places have hours administration right?
- joe563323 11y ago
  This is really great question. Love to see the calculation done to arrive at the numbers.
huslage 11y ago
From knowing about how these things work (and the culture of SpaceX), it seems to me that everyone is acting quickly and professionally to identify the cause of the issue. I doubt that anyone is under undue pressure to perform or that there is an expectation that someone give an answer before it is due. Please don't jump to any conclusions here as these are extremely complicated systems with myriad failure modes. The money has nothing to do with it.
joe563323 11y ago
Is there a standard method called "fault tree analysis" ?

18 points by bontoJR 11y ago

I've been wanting to hear HN's opinion on this ever since I heard about it, yet the whole topic is strangely missing from the front page. Kinda reminds me of the video, as soon as it blows up they just cut the audio feed.

bontoJR 11y ago
Same here, that's why I posted the link. Anyway, I think SpaceX's engineers are extremely under pressure right now. These missions are extremely risky, everybody knows how difficult is this field and I personally believe that the amount of pressure the team is facing, it's consistently increasing the potential risk of a failure. SpaceX is a private company and, like all the other private companies in the earth, it has the goal to make money and make investors happy. Every single failure of the company is a big hit on the brand and a loss of millions and millions of dollars, this put the team under an excessive amount of pressure.
- secfirstmd 11y ago
  It's strange to explain the postive feelings that I and I'm sure many others have here about SpaceX. I mean people have been saying how great it is for a private company to do this but at the end of the day nearly every NASA launch has been built by a private company. Yet somehow SpaceX and in particular, Elon Musk, has managed to do a great job of capturing the public excitement. When I started noticing a lot of my non-tech friends are talking about space and science (thank you Brian Cox, CERN etc!) again it gives me hope for the future. Perhaps its a generation thing, many of us in our 20s never really had those electrifying moments like a moon landing. Something just makes makes people really really want to see SpaceX succeed. Though let's hope this eventually translates into real investment at government levels once again.
Arnt 11y ago
Just before the point where Elon says "gosh darn"?
simik 11y ago
There you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9793555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9793555
halviti 11y ago
Personally, I like to think the culture here is above jumping to conclusions and armchair speculation.

mhandley 11y ago

This is why you want reusable rockets. If you recover the rocket, you get to see if any components are suffering damage, cracking or wear beyond limits, and then redesign systems to prevent future potential failures. This is much harder to do if you don't get the rocket back. According to the press conference, SpaceX do get over 3000 channels of data from Falcon in flight, but that's still no substitute for examining a structure that's already flown for damage. Of course this looks like a second stage failure and SpaceX aren't currently trying to recover that, but there are a lot of common parts between the stages on Falcon, so once they start to recover the first stage successfully, I'd still expect a lot of reliability lessons to be learned.

vikram360 11y ago

This is probably irrelevant, but how are the number of 'engineering-hours' calculated?

tarpherder 11y ago
Number of people working on the issue times the hours they worked since it happened? Most places have hours administration right?
joe563323 11y ago
This is really great question. Love to see the calculation done to arrive at the numbers.

huslage 11y ago

From knowing about how these things work (and the culture of SpaceX), it seems to me that everyone is acting quickly and professionally to identify the cause of the issue. I doubt that anyone is under undue pressure to perform or that there is an expectation that someone give an answer before it is due. Please don't jump to any conclusions here as these are extremely complicated systems with myriad failure modes. The money has nothing to do with it.

joe563323 11y ago

Is there a standard method called "fault tree analysis" ?