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Comment by pinewurst | 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".

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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.

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".

> 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.

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