re: #118 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷

Science, whether done by academics or private actors, is about proving or disproving a hypothesis.

Science is built on an empire of failures, which advance scientific knowledge (note to future scientists, don’t do this stupid thing I did, it will work out poorly).

Rocketry is especially notable for its spectacular failures.

But the goal here was the proof-of-concept: Launch the rocket to a sub-orbital trajectory and land in the ocean near this spot.

So in the sense SpaceX did not achieve that, they did learn something (this doesn’t work). But they hardly achieved the goal of their test: They publicly stated the goal was to hit their target in the ocean. (They did hit the ocean, but that’s more an effect of gravity than engineering.)

As a company, they have to make this look as positive as possible; they need their investors. Coca-Cola tried to do the same with New Coke.

“SpaceX intends to collect as much data as possible during flight to quantify entry dynamics and better understand what the vehicle experiences in a flight regime that is extremely difficult to accurately predict or replicate computationally,” according to a document(opens in new tab) about the test flight that SpaceX submitted to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2021.

“This data will anchor any changes in vehicle design or CONOPs [concept of operations] after the first flight and build better models for us to use in our internal simulations.”

Elon immediately before the flight:
“Success is not what should be expected.”
“Probably, tomorrow will not be successful. It’s just a very fundamentally difficult thing.”
“50/50 it makes it off the pad.”