Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mizza | Hacker News Reader

This is cool! It'd be cool to have a .json version of this page as well to see what other people could do with it! Stats are better with context - if you could do the same thing with NASA/ULA/China/India/ESA/etc it'd be even more illustrative.

Also, +1 for getting rid of the scroll-assist. Kind of annoying.

Slightly off topic: does anybody know if they're going to try controlled recovery of today's launch vehicle?

View on HN

Dev here. Will remove scroll assist in next release :). API, allowing you to pull raw data planned.

No landing today, too heavy and going too far.

When you report stats you normally also report losses, not just wins, that may be something to add.

And what losses have SpaceX had with Falcon 9 exactly?

Secondary payload, the orbcomm satellite.

[I'm not the dev] That's an incredibly small nit to pick, I don't really think SpaceXStats needs to go so far into the details there. Specifically, and especially because the decision to cut off OG2 was NASA's decision, not SpaceX's. While the initial SpaceX Falcon 9 engine failure led to the decision being made, the F9 could technically have delivered the payload to the desired orbit for Orbcomm.

I think it's more fair to call that a bureaucracy failure than a SpaceX failure.

Edit: Woah, okay, maybe I'm wrong. [Unable to reply below (no button)]

I don't agree with that at all. If you're providing statistics you should show both the good and the bad. What the reason for the failure was is ultimately technical, the decision to call it off was a bureaucratic one but spelled out quite explicitly prior to launch. If the rocket had worked flawlessly the loss would have been prevented.

I'm very much a fan of SpaceX but I dislike ignoring failure to paint a more positive picture than reality. The site has sections on 'number of people on Mars'. Stats are stats, both good ones and bad ones. SpaceX has an incredible record to date including that one loss so why be afraid to show it?

Anyway, it appears this is not really a stats site but more of a tribute, the 'countless hours' section shows that pretty clearly so feel free to ignore my comments.

> does anybody know if they're going to try controlled recovery of today's launch vehicle?

Not today but on June 18th.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com