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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

"The initial tests completed successfully but the final test resulted in an anomaly on the test stand."

I'm not saying this is spin, but it sounds like how you'd spin something like this. Basically, the tests worked until they didn't. And that one therefore became the final test.

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It is how you talk about failure when it is another part of your engineering characteristics and not something that causes fear or shame.

Another reminder is why you run tests. They don't scare away failure by existing, they are there to catch failure, doing their jobs exactly as intended.

It will probably result in a delay of any human spaceflight by SpaceX until the source of the source of the problem is removed. (not the particular issue that caused the anomaly but the systematic issue which didn't find it before it happened on the pad)

> It is how you talk about failure when it is another part of your engineering characteristics and not something that causes fear or shame.

That depends on whether this was supposed to be the final test. If it's a post-hoc "final", then that's an obfuscation done out of shame. If it was always supposed to be the final test, then the statement is fine.

It really doesn't matter if it's the final test or not.

Your QA (or dev, or whatever) group has a number of test cases to verify. They verify the ones that they can, and record failures against the ones that they couldn't not. Sometimes in hardware testing, a failed test results in destruction of the hardware and/or peripheral damage to the test environment.

BTDT.

I'd expect riskier tests to go later, so the implications are worse the earlier in the sequence it breaks.

IME, riskier tests are run later, because you want as much test feedback as possible so the tests that aren't likely to break something are run first. However, you can't really draw any conclusions from that unless you know what the test plan was.

When did an "unscheduled disassembly" become an "anomaly"??

It could also be that the last test they planned to execute resulted in the 'anomaly'.. Not every public communication is subterfuge even though the armchair detectives in the HN comment section always seems to think it is.

"Anomaly" implies this is not the case.

No, anomaly means there was an outcome which was not expected. It says nothing about how many tests they were going to execute (if any), what the unexpected outcome was, or what the lead test engineer ate for breakfast that morning.

That's the dictionary definition of "anomaly". But that's not the interesting part, what's tickling us armchair detectives is how it got into the press release: "anomaly" is a bit of an anomaly itself, most people would never use that term unless specifically to play something down. That surely is no proof, enough to inspire speculation.

Speaking of speculation, there could be quite a few speculators in this thread that are invested in SpaceX. The downplaying of the actual event could be their own way to shape the stock price.

Isn’t SpaceX private?

It is not a publicly traded stock.

Right. It means exactly what it means. Actual test did not match expectation. Thus, there is an anomaly. Sometimes that means "boom" and sometimes that means bad sensor and sometimes it means the result was outside the margin and they need to do a thorough analysis before retest.

It sounds like a good thing: 'we passed so many tests successfully!'

But it also sounds like kind of a bad thing that it's the last test: 'holy cow - that was close - thank god we had the last test in there.'

Without knowing the specifics of what they were testing every time that might be irrelevant, but if it was multiple test fires of the same engine and only the last one caught the problem, that's scary.

'Anomaly' is a polite way to say 'failure', no matter how fine the semantic wrapper. Failures are to be expected and OK and it's good that they happen during testing rather than operation, but there's no value in euphemism here.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but referring to issues in such non specific terms is not useful.

It’s very similar to a cloud provider saying “increased error rates” meaning total outage or 0.001% of users experiencing off-nominal behavior.

Is there nomenclature that’s better?

One refers to the event as a statistic, the other captures the immediate aftermath and potential for danger relating to the event.

> Is there nomenclature that’s better?

I prefer "rapid unplanned disassembly".

It seems nothing was disassembled here.

You must not have seen the video. Something turned the capsule into aluminum dust.

The orange cloud suggests the hydrazine was not released. I would expect a different color of the capsule was blown to pieces.

What video are you referring to?

I think this one: https://twitter.com/Astronut099/status/1119825093742530560?s...

Yes. That's way too fast and too bright for comfort... I had only seen the orange oxidizer cloud when I made the comment.

This looks like a very fast disassembly indeed. I hope they find the cause soon.

Sounds like the name of a Culture ship

It is useful as long as they do not know what happened. NASA once had the problem that the initially suspected problem turned out to be wrong but the news was already out there and it took years to spread the correct one. That's why it these problems are now referred to as anomaly until the real cause is clear.

"Anomaly" or anominal is the antonym (ie opposite) of "nominal". When things are going right, then everything is "nominal".

An anomaly is where things aren't going according to their expected behavior. Anomalies can have differing levels of severity, depending on the impact of the anomaly on the mission plans.

You can have anomalies at any time, that's different to a "defect" or a "failure". Failure implies anomalies so severe that the mission can not complete.

So it's not a euphemism, it's a distinct term of the art in engineering of this sort.

"it's a distinct term of the art in engineering of this sort" - I think the problem might be for people who don't work in that field, that the word anomaly in ordinary English means something that is slightly unusual. In other fields, including software, we would say that something failed even if it is only in initial development. If the term in common use for space craft is anomaly, then everyone in that field knows what it means so it is a good term because they are the only people that matter in dealing with it.

If they have a series of tests to perform, I'd expect them to order the tests so that the ones with the highest chances of anomalies that will make them abort testing come later in the series. It doesn't seem all that unreasonable given that for them to really have the spectacular failure occur on the last scheduled test of the series.

The use of such a vague and overloaded term as "anomaly" is deceptive.

The purpose of communication is to inform the audience, and rather than clarify what happened, this statement obscures the truth to the public.

The test capsule exploded. It means both SpaceX and Boeing have had test failures in the launch abort system for their respective human launch capsules. It will set back the timeline for the US to regain the ability to launch humans into space without paying for seats on the Soyuz.

Instead of discussing the event and its implications, the longest thread is now dedicated to excessive pedantry and incorrecting each other over textbook definitions of the word "anomaly".

It's a vague term because they don't know what exactly happened yet and anomaly is a technical term that those in the industry know.

Explosion has a technical meaning too, and many things that look like an explosion aren't. AMOS-6 for instance was not an explosion, even though it really looked like one to a bystander.

This isn't excessive pedantry, it's jargon meant for an audience that will understand it and not take more away from a statement than they intend to say. Better to use the word that means "something bad happened" rather than a word which means something specific only to have to follow that up with "sorry, we were wrong, it wasn't that, it was..."

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