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posted by CoolHand on Friday September 15 2017, @02:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the things-that-go-boom! dept.

Over at Ars Technica is a story, SpaceX proves it's not afraid to fail by releasing a landing blooper reel:

SpaceX is famously not afraid to fail. "There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA," company founder Elon Musk has said in the past. "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."

In recent years, others in the aerospace industry have come to see the sense of this ethos, as SpaceX has tinkered with its Falcon 9 rocket to make it a mostly reusable booster, finally achieving reuse of the rocket's first stage earlier this year. To go further in space, at a lower cost, new things must be tried.

Even Gene Kranz, who famously said that failure was not an option as a NASA flight director during the Apollo lunar missions, has recently enthused about SpaceX, saying, "Space involves risk, and I think that's the one thing about Elon Musk and all the various space entrepreneurs: they're willing to risk their future in order to accomplish the objective that they have decided on. I think we as a nation have to learn that, as an important part of this, to step forward and accept risk."

To that end, SpaceX has put its failure on display in a new video showing the company's (often explosive) attempts to first return the Falcon 9 first stage to the ocean, then to an ocean-based drone ship, and more. Along they way the engineers have clearly learned a lot about rockets, propellants, and the pitfalls of trying to return a very large rocket from space.

Note: the apocryphal saying was not from the actual Apollo 13 mission. It was a line from the movie based on the mission. See this section on the Wikipedia entry for Gene Kranz.

With that out of the way, I find it absolutely amazing that just a few short years ago, the concept of a rocket that could land upright was science fiction. Now, it happens so routinely for SpaceX that they feel comfortable releasing a "blooper reel"!

(I'm curious, though, how many millions of dollars does that video show going up in flames?)


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @03:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 15 2017, @03:38PM (#568495)

    NASA is run by (limited amounts) tax payers money. Launching rockets should be routine work, they have enough spots for failure when the actual mission starts and learn things from the mission. They are not in to it to learn on how many ways a rocket launch can fail.

    I think you missed the point. NASA is run by tax dollars. These in turn depend on law makers. These in turn depend on voters. Voters don't like things to fail especially when it comes to "heroes" and we have been elevating astronauts as heroes for some time. This is why failure is not an option - heroes can't die. Billions are spent so individuals are not dead and risk has been reduced (both to jobs and astronauts) so much that innovation is getting killed.

    On the other hand, regular people are dead all the time and no one cares. As long as their circumstances are "acceptable" (like 1,000,000 a year in car crashes across the world), then that's OK.

    With SpaceX, they are not answerable to clueless voters. So maybe failure again becomes a learning experience rather than something to avoid at all costs.

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