The very interesting part of the liquid oxygen failure (and this was published in the investigative findings) was that the liquid oxygen that became trapped in the fibers was actually cooled and compressed into solid oxygen - you can read some details here: https://www.americaspace.com/2017/01/02/spacex-closes-amos-6...
Sounds like me during a troubleshooting call trying to think of the wildest crap possible based on current available information, even if I sound crazy, sometimes my crazy question hits the nail. Never shun someone for trying to think of any crazy thing, sometimes they hit the nail on the head.
> The “sniper” theory
> The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket.
> This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed.
- which sounds fairly close to "don't get caught dismissing our PHB's current crazy idea".
No, I wouldn't completely discard it. Nor would I limit sabotage scenarios to stealthy snipers. It could be anything from a suicidal pyromaniac with a hammer to a hacker messing with engine control software and prediction markets, to a nation-state actor.
This guy is so visionary that he sued for an event that wouldn't happen for over six years. Having the prescience of Paul Atreides explains a lot of his success.
> It turned out to be an exotic failure: liquid oxygen had gotten caught inside a buckled liner
I gotta say, suspecting "Rival company hired a sniper" before "Dealing with liquid oxygen is very fucking hard and incredibly flammable" feels very Elon
Finally contacted the manufacturer's rep, expecting to be called an idiot, only to find out that "yeah, we know about that bug. It's going to be fixed in the next revision."
why
hubris
Musk is a competent manager, amazing bser, but he is not a genius.
edit: Competent manager is not a slight. There are very few competent managers these days.
I doubt Musk originated these idea but he was the one who ultimately made the decision on them. There were a lot of other people who had the same choice and either didn't come down that way or took a lot longer to come to the same place.
Like I said, genius? I personally wouldn't use that word. He's not an idiot though. He might be the minimum viable product for technical knowledge combined with a large amount of money but that's still pretty remarkable.
EDS is so weird
Bandwagon-ers who parrot media/youtube/socialmedia.
Waiting to be told who to hate next.
The ad hominem destroys your ability to recognise how insanely good SpaceX and Elon are at this rocket ship thing.
Actual Nazis made a lot of stuff 75 years ago that you use and take advantage of on a daily basis. Nobody's judging you, dude. Appreciating and recognising a good scientist or businessman doesn't necessitate that you align with them ideologically.
I think it's apropos then to consider that this is the same guy who called someone who rescued children stuck in a cave a "pedo". This is a guy who has made some unfortunate public statements.
The only way to not be biased is to unthinkingly accept everything he says as truth
"Golden" goes perfectly in line with the current president's office decor
Rockets are ridiculously complex. Slow-and-steady wins the race makes sense for many individual components, depending on how well understood the problem domain is, and your ability to rigorously model things. But if you take that approach when testing all the thousands of components together, which is simply just too complex to exhaustively model[1], you'll never get anywhere. You have to be prepared to not only break some eggs in epic fashion, but to break many as quickly as you can, so you can parallelize your problem solving and iterate faster.
[1] At least without a large multiple in time and monetary expenditure that ends up costing more than even the US (government and private capital combined) is prepared to spend.
As a result they went to extensive lengths to avoid pad damage, including never terminating rocket thrust in the first (IIRC) 60 seconds of flight. Better let the rocket crash into something nearby than to explode at the pad.
Falcon has shown the playbook, and the demand for launch... The goal should be 2-4 launch sites in the medium term; with a second site very early to avoid exactly this.
This is exactly why ideas like test-driven development don't work well as a general approach.
Most realistic systems exhibit non-linear interactions where correctness is not compositional. Local correctness does not compose upward in any meaningful sense. Top-down design (working backward from the customer) allows for you to perform what is effectively one big global search. Bottom-up design (TDD) requires many local searches that all have to fit together perfectly at the very end. With units & composition, the consequences of component A's interactions with component B may not be considered until nearly the end of the project. If you are testing an integrated vertical, you will discover these interactions much earlier.
I'm unclear on the point of why having a rocket blow up when you're being slow and careful is more of a setback than having one blow up when you aren't.
If instead you try to work out everything in painstaking detail, build a small number of prototypes that your calculations assure you should work, and one blow sup, you learn that...your calculations are wrong.
Imagine developing software with no CI tests, where you only get to run one full system test every couple of months. Slow and careful means avoiding lots and lots of early learning opportunities.
This is a silly perspective. Some reports suggest SpaceX's 1-year budget is around 20 times the yearly budget of Blue Origin. Of course SpaceX can afford to blow up rocket after rocket. The radical difference is not methodologies, but how much cash is being thrown at the project.
For perspective, apparently the whole lunar lander program ran on a 1-year budget much similar to SpaceX's, and thus 20 times larger than Blue Origin's. Where they also highly risk- averse?
I don’t know the numbers but that spacex has more money moving around does not seem surprising. Launching 100s of rockets per year is not free?
Also did you do an accumulation over their existence? Blue had two orbital launches so far.
The water was on when it exploded so it had to be an event very close to ignition. Before the big explosion there was a large intense fire at the bottom but the upper stage exploded before the fire had heated that part of the rocket. Will be interesting to read about what caused it.
for those who wondered like me!
Btw, "If they're lucky, it's just a stupid mistake" is actually interesting.
If you're at that stage and spending so much money, I would consider making stupid mistakes to be catastrophic.
SpaceX was founded in 2002 and has around 660 orbital launches with a fully reusable system. They build rocket factories.
BO is absolutely the underdog, in every way, unless you want to count 38 suborbital joyrides, then they're ahead at 38 to 0.
After a long day of working on a car I would much rather have it fail to start because I forgot to connect the battery than fail to start because the starter I replaced had been returned to the store by a previous purchaser, with the wrong part in the box, which was mechanically compatible with the mount but not with the flywheel. (Hypothetically speaking…)
The Washington Post, on the other hand, he purchased as a trophy. That's the vanity project.
Is SpaceX also a vanity project? No, Musk actually wants to expand human civilization beyond one planetary sphere.
Just because they're billionaires doesn't mean they're full of shit. In fact, in both of their cases, it means they're extremely driven by... real ambitions.
So obvious.
Does he want to expand human civilization for the benefit of human civilization or does he want to be the man who made that expansion possible?
I can absolutely see real ambitions behind them, I just think these ambitions are driven by vanity (and other "vices")
SpaceX also had an architecture that added a lot of latency to their telemetry transmission (IIRC basically Ethernet bufferbloat)
Something like:
telemetry shows dramatic drop of temperature on this, that given the location of the sensor could only be caused by a specific LOX line leak, and vibration sensors show data compatible with friction as the ignition event and not a short circuit because the relevant telemetry doesn't show any electrical abnormality, so, by exclusion, given no other anomalies, give that computer simulations show it is a feasible scenario, followed by lab work with a physical model, this must be the cause of the accident.
In software development this is your average weekday.
Sometimes I'll have one that I'm stuck on for a month before finally disproving it, and it is an interesting feeling. There is some level of happiness I succeeded at my goal, but it is very bittersweet because it normally was my last working theory and now I'm simply lost until I can formulate a new one. Sometimes disappointment in myself that I might've missed some easy way to disprove it for so long, but other times the way to disprove it was sufficiently hard enough that I just accept it is what it is.
For SpaceX it would have been a success. /s
That is an incorrect but plausible hypothesis. Do you really think that people can't make such mistakes?
If you want to say that people have understanding, then define understanding in an operationalizable way first.
It doesn't mean that I would recommend a general-purpose AI model without additional training to do a fault analysis.
Where did I say that? You just pulled that out of nowhere and then refuted it - strawman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
"Hallucinate" as used in this context does not apply to humans and presupposes a qualitative difference.
Also I said "intermediate and junior" engineers - meaning INexperienced engineers, not experienced ones, so you quoted me wrong in that part too.