Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff • Hacker News Board

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#261

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 1:34 AM UTC

travelhead wrote: post #153

GrinningFool wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Failure is nearly always bad. It destroys company morale, drains financial resources, and creates a culture of failure. I agree that failure does often happen on the way to success, but there's absolutely nothing good about it besides giving more knowledge to a problem. The culture that failure is good is stupid.

Failure during production is bad. Failure in design/testing is fine, that's when you can correct it most readily. Not all failures are equal.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#262

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 1:41 AM UTC

lutorm wrote: post #116

golgappi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| 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, th…

A 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 p…

Taking 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.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#263

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 1:49 AM UTC

xb95 wrote: post #93

mixmax wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actually the correct technical term to use here would be CATO - Catastrophe At Take Off

Only slightly less euphemistic than flying's CFIT - Controlled Flight Into Terrain. AKA "whoops, the ground".

Also known as lithobraking.

Re: Orbital Sciences Antares rocket explodes after liftoff

#264

Post by gear54rus » Thu, Oct 30, 2014, 3:00 PM UTC

aragot wrote: post #208

gear54rus wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wondering the same thing. In addition to incidents like this, every once in a while, a story pops up that describes how programming error was the cause of rocket crash that happened TWENTY years ago... How? Just how can people be sure that it was programming error? It's not like you can debug a burnt piece of a microcontroller, can you? Guess we've come a long way from a magnifying glass investigations :)

I entered an engineering school 5 years after Ariane V. Each single professor explained us why their subject was the reason for Ariane V to explode. The physics one went about how the imperial/metric discrepancy was the cause, the mechanics one went about how error margin management wad the cause, the CS one about integer overflow... Each of them made it clear that their course was the center of the world, but altoge…

Seems like choosing between alternative timelines in some RPG :)