4 ms·

It's amazing what they've accomplished so far, and I hate to criticize anything this awesome from the comfort of my armchair. But it does seem rather ambitious

• mikeash 11y ago
  How so? 2017 is plenty far out to work out the bugs in Falcon 9, and this failure won't impact Dragon 2 development at all. What's ambitious is when they say they plan to complete their original 2015 launch manifest in 2015. That made me sit up and take notice.
• Sanddancer 11y ago
  If the analysis continues to point to this flawed component being the cause, then 2017 isn't overly ambitious at all. They've already planned to stop using those components, and all the telemetry shows that every other piece of the rocket continued to work fine. Notably, stage one continued to fire, and the capsule remained intact until it went over the horizon and out of radio contact. While it would have been beneficial to have better failure recovery on these cargo-only capsules, the future capsules have already been built to handle an event like this, and one of the steps in certifying it is to simulate an abort a lot like the one that happened here. So it's not really all that ambitious, once all the stuff scheduled to happen happens.