Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

The SpaceX “Test Failure”

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This isn’t new — I wrote it on Saturday at Ricochet, but it’s behind the paywall, so I thought I’d repost it here:

So the big news yesterday for people in the space business was that SpaceX finally lost an experimental test vehicle in its program to make its vehicles reusable (crucial to dramatically reducing costs to the point necessary to achieve its corporate goal of opening up the solar system). Some criticized it as a “failure” of the company. This is nonsense.

People need to understand that the purpose of an engineering test is to learn something. As I said on Twitter last night, the only “failed” test is one in which you didn’t get the information you were seeking. Losing hardware in a test is not a “test failure,” per se:

For example, consider the crash testing of cars, in which a successful test results in a wrecked car, but tells you what its weak points are so that you can improve the design, and the only test “failure” you can have is if the car fails to hit the barrier. In SpaceX’s case, the goal of the test wasn’t to destroy the vehicle per se, but they were fully aware that this could be an outcome. In fact, Gwynne Shotwell, the company president, said last year that she was a little disappointed that they retired the first test vehicle, Grasshopper, because the fact that they didn’t lose it in a test meant that they weren’t pushing the envelope hard enough.

Had it failed to deliver a payload of a paying customer to its designated destination, that could have rightfully been called a “failure” and the company justly criticized for it. But when an experimental vehicle crashes during a flight test, that’s called “flight test.”

SpaceX probably knows, but it hasn’t yet been reported what the cause was. The most common cause of failure in rockets is failure of stage separation, which doesn’t apply in this case, of course, since it is a single-stage test vehicle. Also, it could be an engine failure, but they have a lot of experience with their engines and hardware in general, so that’s an unlikely cause.

For this kind of vehicle, it’s really a test of the flight-control system, which is not only the computers, and sensors, and software, but the actuators that steer it. It’s possible that they had an actuator or engine-gimbal hardware failure, but they’ve had lots of test flights and never run into that problem. My guess (and it’s only that), based on viewing the video, is that they were pushing the vehicle beyond its capabilities to do something (perhaps translate, i.e., go sideways, while also descending or changing attitude) that they’d never attempted before, and it lost control (like an aircraft in a tailspin) without ability to regain it.

Once you lose control the decision to terminate flight comes pretty quickly, because bad things can happen very quickly after that. If they hadn’t been able to do the flight termination, and if it had resulted in unexpected damage on the ground, that would have been grounds for criticism, but the vehicle was safed exactly as planned, under FAA guidance and supervision.

Other than losing the vehicle, this flight was indeed a great success by the criteria of providing the information desired. At least two people from SpaceX, including Lars Blackmore, the lead of their entry, recovery and landing team, tweeted last night that they got “lots” of data.

Presumably in this case, if my theory is correct, they now understand the limits of the flight-control system. It may be that they will be able to ground simulate the failure, and tweak the software to avoid it in the future.

Was this a setback for SpaceX? Someone on Fox referred to the test last night with “A small rung on a long ladder to Mars broke on Friday, when a rocket test in Texas ended in a midair ball of fire.”

Jeff Foust called it that in his piece at the NewSpace Journal, and Jeff is a very smart guy, but I think he’s wrong, or at least, it’s not obvious that it is. In fact, when I asked him, Lars tweeted that he didn’t necessarily consider it one:

I would consider something a setback if it actually results in a delay of a critical program milestone. I think they have another test vehicle (that they’ll be flying out of New Mexico soon to do higher-altitude testing), and if they need yet another for McGregor, given their production capacity, they could probably pull one off the line and modify it pretty quickly. They’ve found something to fix in the next test vehicle (and possibly, though not necessarily, depending on what caused it) in an operational one. Also, in a sense, they’re no longer test-flight virgins, and may even be more bold going forward.

It’s certainly not going to affect their future launches (most importantly, next week’s), since it’s a side experimental program on which none of their current customers are dependent. So no, I don’t think it was much of a setback, if any.

On the other hand, I think that Blue Origin’s loss of its test vehicle three years ago may have been a setback, because they haven’t flown anything since (as far as I know). Unlike yesterday’s event, it may have been a totally unexpected, “back to the drawing board” thing. But I have no inside knowledge.

In addition to the general point of the difference between a hardware loss in a test and failure in operations, there is another point to consider here. While you expect problems in flight test of any new vehicle, VTVL (vertical take-off, vertical landing) types are particularly susceptible, not having wings to come home on if there’s a failure (though some use chutes as backup). I don’t think there is any serious VTVL company that hasn’t lost a vehicle in flight test, from Blue Origin, to Masten, to Armadillo, to Unreasonable Rocket. As Elon Musk tweeted last night, rockets are tricky:

I’d say that losing a VTVL vehicle in flight test is inevitable, almost a rite of passage, and that SpaceX just finally joined the club.

In fact, this isn’t actually the first experimental vehicle they’ve lost attempting to land it. It’s just the first on land. In a very real sense, every previous attempt to do an ocean recovery of the first stage, after it had completed its primary mission, was a flight test, and a success in that they got great data from each one to build on the next, and “failure” only in the sense that they didn’t succeed in actually recovering them. The company plans one more of these water “recoveries” this fall. Based on history, they have low expectations of getting the vehicle back this time as well, but obviously expect to get critical data needed to start to land actual first stages on land (though the first attempt or two will be on a barge at sea before they have demonstrated the control required for the FAA and the range to allow a flight back to the launch site).

But with each test, regardless of whether they get the vehicle back, they continue on their risky quest, with their own money, to achieve a long-time dream of the space industry (though one that NASA abandoned after the Shuttle), of an end to the wasteful and costly practice of throwing vehicles away. They should be encouraged to continue in their boldness. As I note in my recent book, such boldness, not caution or timidity, is crucial in opening up the harshest frontier humanity has ever faced.

[Sunday-morning update]

OK, not exactly a “setback,” but SpaceX has announced that they will delay Tuesday’s planned AsiaSat 6 satellite launch one day, to Wednesday, to allow them time to review the test results to ensure that the vehicle loss wasn’t caused by something that could affect the flight. “Mission assurance above all.”

[Wednesday-morning update]

They announced yesterday that they’re delaying the launch for several days now, but it’s unclear if it’s related to the vehicle loss on Friday.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The 50-50 Argument

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It’s not logical to state that most warming since 1950 has been caused by man (or Mann):

The glaring flaw in their logic is this. If you are trying to attribute warming over a short period, e.g. since 1980, detection requires that you explicitly consider the phasing of multidecadal natural internal variability during that period (e.g. AMO, PDO), not just the spectra over a long time period. Attribution arguments of late 20th century warming have failed to pass the detection threshold which requires accounting for the phasing of the AMO and PDO. It is typically argued that these oscillations go up and down, in net they are a wash. Maybe, but they are NOT a wash when you are considering a period of the order, or shorter than, the multidecadal time scales associated with these oscillations.

Further, in the presence of multidecadal oscillations with a nominal 60-80 yr time scale, convincing attribution requires that you can attribute the variability for more than one 60-80 yr period, preferably back to the mid 19th century. Not being able to address the attribution of change in the early 20th century to my mind precludes any highly confident attribution of change in the late 20th century.

In other words, we shouldn’t and can’t have as much confidence as many would like to push their policy agenda.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A New Obama Talent

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His ability to make “liberals” look even more foolish and incoherent than usual.

Actually what Kazin’s lament makes clear is that the usual liberal cant about pragmatism is utterly insincere. It is a way for liberals to deny they are being ideological. (Jonah Goldberg beats down on this trope masterfully in The Tyranny of Cliches.) So what Kazin is really saying is that Obama is incompetent at the liberal straddle: he’s no good as an ideologue, and he’s lousy at pragmatism. His golf handicap is his only handicap that is improving in office.

Ouch.

General

North Bay Quake

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Sounds like they had a pretty good shake up in Napa. apparently the biggest one in the Bay Area since Loma Prieta, a quarter of a century ago. Have an in-law in Vallejo, but she’s currently in Missouri, so we’re more likely to have felt it here in LA than she was. Of course, I’ll get calls from relatives who don’t know how California is, wondering if we’re all right.

Business, Space, Technology and Society

More SpaceX Coverage

18 Comments

Over at NBC, where Yours Truly is quoted.

[Sunday-morning update]

Here’s Tariq Malik’s story. Note this (for some in comments):

“With research and development projects, detecting vehicle anomalies during the testing is the purpose of the program,” SpaceX representatives wrote. “Today’s test was particularly complex, pushing the limits of the vehicle further than any previous test.”

Makes sense to me.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Victims Of Communism

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Commemorating, though not celebrating, the 75th anniversary of the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact:

On this 75th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, we recognize the morally reprehensible nature of the totalitarian ideas of Nazism and Stalinism, of fascism and communism. We also recall the historical fact that regimes dedicated to these deadly ideologies worked together to start World War II, and aided each other in murdering millions of innocent men, women, and children. We remember those victims on this Black Ribbon Day.

A few years back, the Left squealed like stuck pigs when Jonah reminded them that the Nazis were of them, not of “the Right.” They desperately grasped at thin straws to point out the niggling differences between the Nazis and the Stalinists. But the point was, and remains, that the similarities were much greater than the differences. Both are totalitarian, collectivist, anti-individualist ideologies, and the distinction was pretty much transparent to the unwilling user.

[Afternoon update]


More thoughts from Ilya Somin.

[Late evening update]

This isn’t exactly the same thing, but it is related. The American historians who are new friends of Hamas:

The demands they make upon Israel, Herf argues, without corresponding demands made on Hamas, is in essence repeating Hamas’ demands as their own. The petition writers do not even mention that the fighting in Gaza began with Hamas’ aggression. This is, Herf continues, a major change in the Left’s position taken over many years. Once a movement that always claimed to be “anti-fascist” above all, it is now supporting and praising the equivalent of the Islamic fascists.

Herf makes a sound analogy between their position and that taken by the old Communists in the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact from Aug. 1939 to June 1941. Just as the Communists ignored fascism — the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov famously said that “fascism is a matter of taste,” the historians now justify many of the Islamists’ actions as a cultural difference that Westerners should respect. Recall that historian Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton a few years ago refused to condemn Tariq Ramadan’s failure to oppose the stoning of women to death in Muslim nations. Stoning, she said at a forum, was an aspect of their culture that we had to understand.

What explains these historians’ actions? Do they really want to be known as supporters of Hamas? Have they bothered to read the Hamas Charter? If not, how can they purport to be scholars and historians? Either they have read it and ignore it; or are so negligent as to not have bothered to learn what Hamas’s beliefs and aims are. It is especially shameful that these senior scholars, many of whom are historians of Germany no less and are proud of their anti-fascism, totally ignore the nature of Israel’s enemy.

There is an answer to why these historians are all anti-Israel, and it is the same answer I gave in my column last week at PJ Media. The American Left, following the long standing stance of its British comrades, favors an alliance with the West’s greatest enemies.

Again, the similarities (opposed to liberty and individualism) are much more important than the (literally, in this case) academic differences.

And then there’s this:

Shame on these supposed intellectuals, historians all, who have abandoned the most basic tenants of the historical method to propagandize for the Islamists, whom the late Christopher Hitchens aptly referred to as “Islamofascists.”

That’s a much better word than “Nazis,” which O’Reilly foolishly proposed as an improvement on “terrorists.”

Emphasis mine.

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