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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

I like the semi-gibberish official explanation:

The orbiters "perform risk reduction, experimentation and concept-of-operations development for reusable space vehicle technologies," the Air Force has said without providing details. The cost of the program is also classified.

How, pray tell, does anything "perform risk reduction"? Does that phrase have any meaning in English, or any other terrestrial language?

"The cost of the program is also classified." - naturally! As someone much, much smarter than me noted, there's very few real state secrets, but there's tons of career-ending blunders, accounting mistakes, ridiculous overcharging and independent validation and verification companies that just happen to be owned by a distant relative. Those categories are not mutually exclusive.

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Risk reduction is a completely normal term in R&D. It just means experiment to raise confidence in a particular proposed approach, before going full scale production. It is meant to raise the TRL[1] of a technology, to gain experience with it.

In my software day job, we write throw away code to test out an idea, and we call it proof of concept. It is used to find out early if the schedule for a feature is too optimistic by demonstrating that the approach doesn't work.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level

i feel like it should be "reduce risk" instead of "perform risk reduction", but I guess I can see that these (now?) mean slightly different things.

Just to add some details to the above well-informed comment:

Sometimes people who are not used to management of large-scale projects are surprised by the development of tools and specialized vocabulary in project cost/schedule/risk assessment. The following is a pretty good summary of some common tools that integrate cost, schedule, and risk analysis: http://www.iceaaonline.com/ready/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/...

See in particular the first couple of slides on motivation, the "risk cube" on pages 19-20, the scatter plots of cost/schedule on pages ~30, and the example "risk lists" on page 57. Project management can be viewed as an assault on the remaining top items of the relevant risk list.

All these concepts are standard practice for large aerospace projects. There will be risk analysts with stats or operations research PhDs running simulations and developing tailored methods just to assess risk of large projects. (Example: https://viterbi.usc.edu/sae/faculty/part-time-lecturers/jair...)

I work for a gov contractor. "Risk Reduction Tests" are a common thing. What they mean is a test done partway through a program, to validate that the base assumptions for the program are correct and there haven't been any glaring oversights in terms of the feasibility of the project.

Basically, when contractors (Boeing, in this case) win a job from a bid, they don't then just go off for the duration of the contract, and return to the government at the end of the contract and hand over a delivery. There are generally a series of incremental deliverables and tests during the contract to validate that the contractor is actually working on the contract. Risk reduction tests are one of the mid-program deliverables.

My assumption is that "perform risk reduction" means "try things out to make sure they will work when we use them later". For instance, now they have more confidence that they can leave the spaceship orbiting for two years without something breaking. Kind of like Apollo 8 (fly around the moon without landing) was risk reduction for Apollo 11 (land on the moon).

Risk reduction can be thought of finding a cheaper / faster / easier way to test a hypothesis than performing a full experiment. Think of it like surveying a sample instead of a population.

Risk reduction - pretty well explained above. Experimentation - Standard definition. Trying out stuff. Concept-of-operations development - take the experiments and turn them into instructions and procedures for normal operations. Think of it as production compared to experimentation being dev. (concept of operations is a standard document describing the 'how' of something, typically in a tech-agnostic way)

Basically they are using this vehicle to figure out how to do this stuff with future vehicles in a scaled-up way.

> How, pray tell, does anything "perform risk reduction"? Does that phrase have any meaning in English, or any other terrestrial language?

This may not be what you meant, but suppose that my sister Alice is an alcoholic, and drinks during the day at her job (they're very tolerant). I am concerned that she will cause a traffic accident, so I encourage her to enroll at Alcoholics Anonymous, or I offer to pay her taxi fares or buy her a bus pass. Ta-da, risk reduced!

In this instance, I think they're either referring to the risk of crashing the plane or something conveniently censored by government classification.

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