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Comment by spuz | Hacker News Reader

That's an interesting point about the flight plan - if the intention of the flight was to test the vehicle at max Q, then the rest of the plan is almost a contingency.

SpaceX: We expect the vehicle to reach 40km at which point it will probably blow up.

FAA: Ok but what if it doesn't blow up?

SpaceX: Well I suppose we could separate the stages.

FAA: And then what happens?

SpaceX: Well I suppose we could try to land the first stage and launch the second stage into the ocean...

etc etc.

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You joke but that's all also import rehearsal for all the teams responsible for each stage of the flight. The compleat plan, in full detail, with the "expectation" that it will happen is essential to learning.

If you don't start practicing these details until later in the development you have missed an opportunity to fine tune them and prepare for all eventualities.

> compleat

Sorry, i've seen this spelling enough to now ask if this is a word that I don't know about or if it's just a mis-spelling of complete. Not trying to pick on you. I've had errors before, especially in space stuff (altitude & attitude).

There’s also usage of that spelling in Magic: The Gathering. One of the biggest villain factions in the Lore of the game, Phyrexians, assimilate beings against their will and brutally “perfect” them through magical and surgical means. The process is called “Compleation” - https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Compleation

The recent arc of expansions for the game have heavily features the Phyrexians, so the spelling might be more common this year. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%201-d&geo=...

One of my favorite things about life is that there is an explanation for everything

Typo+iPhone+Dyslexia

I usually edit my posts after posting (sometimes multiple times), I find going back and rereading them I always find errors. Will leave that mistake for prosperity and context. Dyslexia is both a gift and a curse, but only if you let it.

> prosperity

Just to help out: you probably mean "posterity" [0]

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/posterity

I give up ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As far as typos go, this one has been very informative :)

An internet search can be illustrative: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/compleat

> (Late Modern) Archaic spelling of complete.

I love how this comes back around and we've actually bastardized the original spelling haha.

There’s a tabletop game store in Manhattan called https://www.thecompleatstrategist.com/.

Presumably named a la The Compleat Angler (a book on fishing from 1653).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Compleat_Angler

I find this interesting because the word "English" literally means "fisherman". The "Eng" is an archaic short form for the word that today we call "angle" - referring to the hook that the fishermen used, with it's distinctive angle. At the time, the people to whom were referred to as such still lived on the northern European continent, they would migrate to the island some time later.

He was an Episcopalian and a bait fisherman.

huh - TIL: https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-com3.htm

TL;DR: Compleat and Complete were originally different spellings for the same word. In UK, compleat is still just an archaic spelling. In USA, compleat is used as an adjective to refer specifically to having all the necessary elements or skills.

I’ve never heard it in the USA outside of in old book titles. I’ll add The Compleat Enchanter by L. Sprague DeCamp as another prominent example. That’s from 1975 and probably a conscious reference to The Compleat Angler, along with a pun on a prior anthology called The Incomplete Enchanter.

Even the examples cited in the article seem like they’re out of older books deliberately invoking antiquity with the spelling. The only recent example (Bova, Mars, 1992) is from the SF/F genre where esoteric words like that get batted around more in general.

So I’m going to go with that being about as common in US English as UK—used for effect only.

>> the intention of the flight was to test the vehicle at max Q, then the rest of the plan is almost a contingency.

We don't know what the intention or internal expectation was. What we have are public statements, which are generally more conservative in order that every success be an amazing surprise, every failure an expected event. What SpaceX was internally hoping for, what they were aiming for, and the details of what actually happened will remain a mystery for a while.

I don't need to know the internal - it's pretty obvious. When you are test launching a rocket, MaxQ is the moment to test (aside from ignition, which you can test with static fire, so not really "test launching a rocket"). So SpaceX wants to test the booster launch; they have tested everything else on the ground that they realistically can at this point. That means ignition, get off the pad, MaxQ. Everything after that point is gravy.

Of course there are plenty of systems after maxq they want to test, but not to sound like a software project manager, but "is the juice worth the squeeze?" Everything past maxq may not happen if the rocket goes RUD before or at that point, so how many points do you really want to be putting into stage separation, boostback, reentry, when those engineers could be triple checking Stage 0, fueling, start sequence, and liftoff?

Was it supposed to tumble and explode? Of course not. How many weeks of delay of booster launch is "don't tumble during stage separation" worth? SpaceX says on the order of zero, save it for the next unit in the heckin rocket assembly line (that is wild to say out loud but that's what it is).

Great post. I think a huge number of points were also put into the 10 seconds directly after liftoff.

I.e, if the ship is going to fly, ensure it doesn't need termination in range of the tower. Anything to ensure the next test article in the pipe can be ready to fly in minimum time.

Apart from surviving ignition, surviving maxQ, the other tricky bits will be surviving re-entry and landing.

I think if most people had to pick the most likely failure mode it would have been either blowing up on the pad, or burning up on re-entry.

They’re also testing the GSE and let’s say the pad failed today’s test scenario

I don't think they wanted it to blow up.

I was told for something I was working on "if it works perfectly the first time, you may have spent to much time on it. "

But they designed it to fly and it did for a while. I'm fairly certain they didn't design it to tumble and explode. If it had flown better and not exploded one would have to say it was more successful.

It was a partial success and partial failure.

It's not even about the FAA requirements, it is just bare minimum engineering to ask where will this rocket go if it doesn't blow up mid-air?

It's been launched beyond the environment. Nothing's out there.

Well the problem here is that the front didn't fall off.

You mean it's been launched from one environment into another environment?

probably a reference to this classic comedy sketch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Oh definitely! As was my response above. :-)

Yes, he was quoting it.

Well, they could plan on blowing it up I guess?

That's one answer, but my point is that asking the question and forming an answer is basic development.

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