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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: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday September 15 2017, @04:09PM (2 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday September 15 2017, @04:09PM (#568507)

    Failure was common at NASA too: does anyone really think they didn't test out rockets and delivery vehicles before sticking humans in them? That's just what SpaceX is doing. There's not much risk in trying to land a spent first-stage rocket: it's already done its primary job of boosting the vehicle so the 2nd stage can take over, so now you try to land it. If it fails, oh well; it's not like there's people in the thing. Just try not to hit anything on the way down, and keep humans well away from the site. By the time SpaceX is actually carrying people with their rockets, all this stuff will be very well tested out and debugged.

    And as TFS says, that line was about the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, and was a line from a movie, though the general concept was something they lived by when things went horribly wrong. That kind of attitude is exactly what you want when a manned mission *does* go bad (as opposed to just giving up), like Apollo 13 did: people are already up there, and you need to figure out how to get them back to Earth safely. That's exactly what they did with the Apollo 13 mission. That circumstance has little to do with how you do engineering and testing with unmanned and R&D systems.

    This whole article is just ridiculous; it's exploiting the inexactness of the English language, by focusing on the vague word "failure" as used in two entirely different contexts.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Friday September 15 2017, @08:21PM (1 child)

    by Thexalon (636) on Friday September 15 2017, @08:21PM (#568682)

    Failure was common at NASA too: does anyone really think they didn't test out rockets and delivery vehicles before sticking humans in them?

    And of course they tested vehicles with humans in them too. For example, this crash with Neil Armstrong inside [youtube.com]. To give an idea of how absolutely amazing Armstrong was, after landing he calmly walked into his office and filled out the after-mission paperwork.

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
    • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday September 15 2017, @09:49PM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday September 15 2017, @09:49PM (#568718)

      1) Yes, but I'm sure they did that after testing components without humans around (i.e., they tested what they could before sticking a human in there), and
      2) This was in the 60s, when safety protocols weren't quite as good, and technologies (for things like remote-control and autonomous piloting) just weren't where they are now.