Hacker News Reader

Comment by TuxerLulz | Hacker News Reader

I thought this would be about the Antares team (who worked on that rocket significantly more than 2 year).

I heard however about the story of the experiment that blew up both on Antares and CRS-7. Glad to see an article about it. Space is hard.

View on HN

Is it just me or did the whole turn to the general idea that "space is hard" feel like an odd turn for the article. It felt like, specifics, specifics, generalities that have no meaningful tie-in.

"space is hard" is a fucking lie.

We knew why the Challenger blew up, we could have prevented it, we chose not to.

We knew why Columbia disintegrated, we could have prevented it, we chose not to.

None of this shit is hard. Engineers know how to prevent this stuff.

The hard part is choosing to care whether something is reliable or not, then doing what is necessary to make sure it is reliable.

Every engineer can tell you about some management fuckhole choosing to do the wrong thing. The hard part about our civilization is how many fuckholes there are pushing people to do the wrong things for stupid reasons.

"Space is Hard" is a lie we tell ourselves so that we can ignore the real problem. The real problem is our personalities, our laziness and our stupidity. These scare us because they are truly hard and we truly have no answers for them.

This is why I always tell people: If all we had were technical problems to solve, it would be easy. People problems are much more difficult to solve. As the scale of the project increases, with more people, more personalities, more money -- so does the difficulty of the project. "Space is hard" because the scale of the projects are huge. It is hubris to believe that we are the ones that don't contribute to the problem. It is naive to think that some manager isn't looking at us and thinking, "That asshole programmer is going to sink this project for sure". If we can see the problems, why can we not fix them? Because of assholes? Or because we lack the skills to explain the issue and motive people to fix it? Or because we are wrong? All of those things come into play and if you want to be successful you need to navigate that minefield.

If only it were rocket science, it would be sooooo easy. Alas, it is not.

You are wrong. We only ever got to space thanks to our personalities, our persistence, and ingenuity.

Edit: Just to be clear, space is extremely hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com