I thought the inclusion of a photo of the Challenger disaster as an example of "blow it up" is in very poor taste. People died.
Looking at the list here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_ac... I'm guessing Soyuz 33, STS-1 and a few others would have worked, but any of those would have brought back similar images, whether the space shuttle image was of a complete one or from the challenger explosion, a failure in rocket science reminds you of any of those you have seen; car crashes and airplane crashes are likely the same.
Then again, it's possible the whole slide is in bad taste. I wanted to convey what the 'let it crash' stuff felt to me the first time I heard it, and Challenger's disaster felt both higher profile and more distant in our collective memory than any random disasters I could have used.
I could probably have avoided discussing the topic entirely, but I hoped that the context around it where I think it would obviously be a bad idea to have 'blow it up' as a rocket science motto would save it. It possibly failed.
This was a good choice.
> ...I hoped that the context around it where I think it would obviously be a bad idea to have 'blow it up' as a rocket science motto would save it.
Given enough people, someone will inevitably take offense to anything you write. If someone is insufficiently capable of considering the context in which a reminder of a thirty-year-old high-profile disaster [0] is presented, they're gonna be unreasonably kerfluffled.
[0] A disaster that was caused by a serious failure to remember and stay within the safety margins of a very complex and hazardous system... which makes the choice of this particular disaster even more apt.
I'm glad that you're signalling that you didn't carefully read the prose. From TFA, right below the offending photo:
"In some ways it would be as funny to use 'Let it Crash' for Erlang as it would be to use 'Blow it up' for rocket science. 'Blow it up' is probably the last thing you want in rocket science — the Challenger disaster is a stark reminder of that. Then again, if you look at it differently, rockets and their whole propulsion mechanism is about handling dangerous combustibles that can and will explode (and that's the risky bit), but doing it in such a controlled manner that they can be used to power space travel, or to send payloads in orbit.
The point here is really about control; you can try and see rocket science as a way to properly harness explosions — or at least their force — to do what we want with them. Let it crash can therefore be seen under the same light: it's all about fault tolerance. The idea is not to have uncontrolled failures everywhere, it's to instead transform failures, exceptions, and crashes into tools we can use."
It's from the Orbital Sciences Antares explosion.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/29/opinion/chiao-failed-space-lau...