HoofandHeart

A quiet place to rest your hooves.

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bruno
@bruno

the thing that drives me insane is all the people patiently explaining that spacex rockets are "supposed to explode" because this is "rapid iteration" so they're just trying to throw shit up in the air as fast as possible to see how it breaks

like. no! you are not supposed to apply software development methodology to things that can explode. that is very much not a thing you should do. you should not 'rapidly iterate' on space rockets. software engineers should have to undergo deprogramming before being allowed to work in other fields.


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in reply to @bruno's post:

The entire reason that software uses rapid iteration is because attempts are cheap! Iteration is not an inherently superior methodology invented by big-brain-havers, it's simply an adjustment to living in a particular part of the graph of "cost to design" vs "cost to build." And that's where it should stay.

apparently the UI for the life support pods on those things run on Electron, lol

also the total carbon footprint of a single rocket is probably comparable to that of a medium sized city's monthly footprint, or something

Where are the people saying they are "supposed to explode?"

Though this test flight was going to expend the vehicles anyways, the general argument is "Despite the vehicles exploding, the test flight was still a success, because it met the milestones defined for success (make it through hot staging without vehicle failure and don't destroy the launch pad) prior to the flight".

And idk, I'd much rather iterative testing with uncrewed vehicles than putting crew on the very first flight of a new vehicle like what NASA did with Shuttle.

This is an embarrassing thing to write. You should feel bad about it. Enterprise was in testing for four fucking years before STS-1. It famously went through numerous rounds of atmospheric testing, meeting all of its own testing milestones. And, unlike Starship, those milestones included "not blowing the fuck up"! At no point did it explode and destroy the test vehicle, not did it need to!

And idk, I'd much rather iterative testing with uncrewed vehicles than putting crew on the very first flight of a new vehicle like what NASA did with Shuttle.

I can't even in good conscience say you're lying because this statement is so fucking stupid and easily debunked I feel like you couldn't possibly be doing this deliberately but I strongly, strongly encourage you to stop idolizing idiot billionaire Nazis.

Yeah, NASA did a bunch of component testing, but they still did put crew on the first fully-integrated flight of Shuttle. And where have I said anything about Musk? The man being a complete fuckwad doesn't diminish the actual achievements of SpaceX engineers.

Plus, Starship has been doing flight testing for four years now too.