Item — HN Reader

> clearing the tower was all we hoped

All, really ? What about the flight plan ?

I like the American philosophy to see the good part of experiences even when thinks don’t go as planned, but IMHO I feel like it's drifting more and more from « there’s good in failure » to « let’s call everything a success ». May be wrong, just my European point of view through the transatlantic optic fiber.

4 comments

They're required to file a flight plan with the FAA or they can't launch.

If the plan says they'll go all the way into orbit and they abort early, that's ok.

If the plan says they'll get 100m off the ground and go no further, and they instead manage to make it all the way into orbit, they'd be in a huge amount of trouble.

Given the above, what sort of flight plan would you recommend they file?

« go all the way into orbit » (and down to Hawaï) seems totally fair as a flight plan. Being ok with aborting early is SpaceX decision and I totally get it. Nevertheless, « all they hope was to clear the tower » is quite hard to believe for me but this was only an opinion.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the first part of the flight was important and considered mostly a success.

Hmm... this seems like maybe taking things in an overly literal way. It sounds like clearing the tower was their threshold for a successful test - if they didn't get that far, it would be deemed a failure.

A phrase like "all I hope for" doesn't necessarily mean "the only thing I hope for" but instead usually means "the thing I hope for most (or above all)". If someone were to say, "all I want is a good night's rest", it doesn't mean they no longer want oxygen, for example. :)

You're not totally wrong, there is a lot of cheerleading going on, putting a positive spin on every little bit. There are a lot of uncritical fans here. I hope that internally at SpaceX the engineers are a lot more serious. Based on the results they've achieved with other rockets, my guess is they are.

The flight plan was the best case scenario.

For myself, I'd feel like a test flight was a full success if it was able to test all the important bits. From that perspective not testing stage separation, second stage ignition, and reentry makes this a partial success but a partial failure as well.

EDIT: Perhaps a better way to think about it is, if it had crashed back to the stand and damaged things there that would be a setback. If it made it all the way that would be as much progress as you could get. Failing before MECO was less progress than I expected but still progress.