Clark Lindsey is doing a little fund raising. Go help him out if you can afford it — he performs a vital service for the space community.

She’s just been named president of SpaceX. Interestingly, they didn’t have a president before (and the page hasn’t been updated yet). Well, they do now.

I think that she’ll do a good job. When I first met her, years ago, she was Gwynne Gurevich, and an engineer at Microcosm. She’s come a long way. And with all due respect to the competition, she’s got to be the hottest space company president ever. She may have to wear her skirts a little lower now, though.

John Carmack has a new post up describing what he thinks is the reason for the Pixel failure a few weeks ago at the LLC.

Our systems run the propellant valves through a set of relays controlled by a watchdog microcontroller, which drives the valves closed if the main computer doesn’t continuously toggle a keep-alive signal bit. We found that with the valves on the bench, we could get interruptions to the current when we tapped on the relays in the electronics box. We believe that acoustic vibrations from the operating rocket engine could cause the contacts on the relay to intermittently lose contact.

A couple points. First, this demonstrates the need to test components in their operating environment. But more importantly, these are the kinds of things that you learn only with a lot of experience and testing, something that NASA can’t afford to do with their vehicles because a) they throw them away after each flight and b) they’re as expensive as hell. That’s why reusable vehicles, and approaches like Armadillo’s and XCOR’s hold the key to both low cost, and reliability, goals that NASA will never achieve with their current approach.