Hacker News Reader

SpaceShipTwo (and SpaceShipOne) are fascinating to me because they're so _not_ general purpose vehicles, yet are sold and in most cases perceived as such.

SS1 was conceived by one of the most creative designers in aviation as a point solution for the X-Prize contest - the minimal design/implementation to precisely solve that problem in the most cost effective way possible (as detailed in "Test Gods").

This cobbled together, even borderline, solution was reimplemented as a revenue producing, passenger joyride vehicle, without a lot of (apparent) deep understanding of the real problem and the quirks of their existing "solution".

Pretty much, SS2 is Branson and droogs saying, "SS1 is great, just blow it up and start printing money".

SS2 is going to be a real horrorshow idea, one way or another.

trivia tidbit: the "nadsat" language invented for a clockwork orange incorporates russian. the intention was for "horrorshow" to be an english version of хорошо / khorosho, translated as good or OK.

TIL; fascinating - thanks for the tip. Is there a good link to read more ?

https://a-clockwork-orange.fandom.com/wiki/Nadsat

Ha! Grandparent comment's "droog" is also A Clockwork Orange coinage, and also from Russian: друг /drug/ "friend".

One learns quickly in software development not to trust people who say "let's just put this hack in to get the demo out of the way; we'll clean it up later". Later never comes; today's prototype is tomorrow's production.

I'd have thought people would be more cautious with actual physical engineering when lives are at risk, but I guess the incentives are the same everywhere.

> SpaceShipTwo (and SpaceShipOne) are fascinating to me because they're so _not_ general purpose vehicles, yet are sold and in most cases perceived as such.

I agree. I think much of the value attributed to Virgin Galactic is on the basis of _either_ SS2 being a relatively general purpose vehicle, or the _process_ of building new vehicles having been figured out by them.

The problem is that it's obvious that neither of those are true. Specific use-case vehicles are fine if you have a process that can make you new specific vehicles, but Virgin Galactic took a decade to make SS2 and had a lot of problems along the way.

> SpaceShipTwo is an inherently risky experimental test craft—with death always waiting on each side of a narrow envelope—and it always will be. Management is willfully ignorant of this.

This comment reminded me of another story from a previous aerospace era (blimp cruise liners aka airships), the summary of which is:

> A British Lord wanted to build the best airship in the world – and so he had two rival design teams battle it out to win the juicy government contract. Competition is supposed to bring the best out of people, but run in the wrong way it can cause people (and the things they make) to fall apart in the most horrifying ways.

https://timharford.com/2019/11/cautionary-tales-ep-4-the-dea...

Hmm, that certainly colors a rumor I've heard about Apple. That they'll have two or three teams compete on a new product... but they won't tell the teams that they have competition until final demo day.

"Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!" -- Dr. Strangelove

I know that was effectively true at Nokia in the 2000s, but that was more a sign of corporate dysfunction than a deliberate "battle to the death". (I worked at Nokia in 2010, and the last project I was on turned out to be one that was literally being worked on by four other people across the world, as it turned out.)

I don't think I've ever heard that about Apple, though, at least as standard (even unofficial) operating procedure. There's sometimes competing internal concepts -- the iPhone's operating system probably being the most famous example, with Scott Forstall's team basing theirs on OS X and Tony Fadell's team basing theirs on Pixo OS -- but I don't think they were being kept secret from one another.

I cannot reveal the source or the company but a major household-name automotive company would have several teams working on projects, with one pre-selected as the "real" one and the others not told their work would be discarded. The idea being that this way you can multiply the size of each engineering team and starve the competition of competent engineers. The fact this system exists was not disclosed to the engineers in order to prevent them from quitting. I know this from an engineer who quit after accidentally meeting a member of another team within the company working on the exact same project.

It sounds like a more realistic motivation for that would be to reduce the risk of failure- if the primary team flubbed the project, the secondary team would still be an option. (Such a system would also give you an opportunity to judge how effective either team was.)

Awful thing to do to engineers, but you can understand why management would do it and why they wouldn't want to demoralize the secondary team by telling them.

No, the work of all teams except the pre-selected real one was discarded and never passed on for evaluation. If you wanted to do it for real you would do it up front and ask them all to try different approaches and have rendevous points to compare and evaluate and exchange findings. I suspect that would be much better morale for all teams involved, but would require management to give up on their "chosen" team, and put some real effort into this, which they were not willing to do (and before you ask, yes, the "backup" team suggested this and got rejected, and then got the fuck out)

You’ll need to provide a source for this.

Something similar apparently happened with the Soviet space program of all things:

> Unlike its American competitor in the Space Race, which had NASA as a single coordinating agency, the USSR's program was split among several competing design bureaus led by Sergei Korolev, Kerim Kerimov, Mikhail Yangel, Valentin Glushko, Vladimir Chelomey, Viktor Makeyev, Mikhail Reshetnev, etc.

https://www.groundzerobooksltd.com/pages/books/80639/union-o...

Agreed about the chickens and it will have a broader negative impact than the $SPCE stock price.

Fundamentally I think it’s a culture problem. Collaborative engineering that identifies problems, views them as opportunities, doesn’t finger-point, and works each problem. Versus a sales and marketing organization with hard deadlines and a 100% focus on perception and revenue targets.

We don’t need an Apollo 1 in the private space industry. But if it happens, there will be a hard reset in terms of regulatory oversight and safety protocols which will cost us several years. Perhaps it’s needed.

Sadly these rules tend to get written in blood.

And if not enough blood has been spilled, the rules can't get written. Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in.

>Safety regulations aren't just written in blood, that's all they effectively can be written in.

I think I may disagree with this. Safety regulations can be written in bloodless terms like probability but, due to all sorts of cognitive biases, people tend to not take them seriously until there is actual physical consequences for ignoring them.

E.g., reliability engineers can use real data to show the probability of something failing but often people will push past the point where its statistically "due" because they've yet to see it happen in their career. I don't know if this was the case, but imagine a distribution of possible foam shedding from the Shuttle. Some points are going to occur during a portion of the flight profile where they become dangerous. But because few (if any) engineers personally experienced that because the vast majority of shedding occurs in less risky moments, the shedding isn't actually viewed as a risk.

Foam strikes happen all the time and we've never lost a craft, please stop making hyperbolic worst-case assessments about a non-issue, it won't help your career path (or mine).

>we've never lost a craft

Can you explain? My comment was in the context of Columbia.

“An investigation board determined that a large piece of foam fell from the shuttle's external tank and breached the spacecraft wing.”[1]

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt with your definition of “we”. But your tone seems to point directly to the types of biases I referred to. It’s worthwhile to research the history of the industry as an whole.[2] Prior to the disaster, do you know NASAs response? “Foam shedding happens all the time…it’s ‘in family’ and not a problem.” It was still out of spec for a good reason. The term from the investigation report is “normalization of deviance”.

It seems even as technology progresses, we’ll still be anchored by faults in human psychology.

[1] https://www.space.com/amp/19436-columbia-disaster.html

[2]https://www.nasa.gov/columbia/home/CAIB_Vol1.html

I think it was an attempt to illustrate the biases that play in and cause safety regulation to be written in blood. Either an attempt at a quote from within NASA, or actually one (I am insufficiently familiar with the entire background of the broken tile to say).

Ah, ok. That makes complete sense and I just misinterpreted because of the lack of quotes. Thanks for clarifying

Yes that was a hypothetical quote from a NASA manager to an engineer prior to the disaster.

Honestly, Virgin Galactic should be shut down until they can take safety seriously. Space flight is risky, but they’re taking unnecessary risks above and beyond a reasonable minimum. That they’ve already killed 1 pilot out of so few launches indicates that something is seriously wrong there.

This may be a smidgen off-topic, but any good books to recommend about either the Apollo program or SpaceX that do delve a little deeper into engineering challenges and design choices?

Liftoff[0] by Eric Berger is a great book about the early days of SpaceX that I can highly recommend.

[0]: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/liftoff-eric-berger?v...

_Angle of Attack_ by Mike Gray is a good one about Apollo, specifically about North American Aviation and how they built one of the Apollo stages (and a bunch of other neat flying things!). Lots of information but definitely a fun read.

Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles

https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4206/sp4206.htm

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Apollo-Springer-Praxis-Books-Explor... "How Apollo Flew to the Moon" is a very detailed look at the technical aspects of Apollo.

This is a thread about book recommendations on rocketry. I feel obliged to mention Ignition! An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (Rutgers University Press, 1972) now back in print.

The author worked on said propellants between 1949 and 1970 (according to Wikipedia) so there's no SpaceX, but might be some Apollo.

Anyway, the book is legendary.