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by Thorrez 949 days ago
>Im not interpreting their message as negative.

But shouldn't it be interpreted as negative? It blew up.

6 comments

It's not the most ideal possible outcome, but overall the launch was a pretty huge success for SpaceX (and for space fans by extension).

The fact they made it so much further than the first launch, seemingly having corrected all the notable things that went wrong there, is very good news - the flight test process serves to root out unknowns and today's launch shows they've done so (and now found some more to work on for the next launch).

So to answer your question, I don't think it should really be interpreted as a negative, as the primary goals were met and the controlled nature of the launch seems promising for SpaceX getting cleared to keep trying.

The FTS failed last time and it caused months of delays with the FAA. This time it worked so there should be fewer delays from regulators in the future.
If your program crashes while you are developing it, is that a failure?
Which is worse: having to send SIGKILL, or a OS bug causing your app to perform potentially dangerous undefined behaviour for 30 seconds after being sent SIGKILL?

First launch had something analogous to latter, this launch had two counts analogous to the former.

You learn more from mission failure than success, so failures are useful in the testing stage.
...and blowing things up, when nobody gets hurt, is a lot of fun.