Yes. SpaceX has done bad things and deserves to be criticized for them. But (and I think this is analogous to a lot of issues) the problem here isn’t that SpaceX isn’t NASA; it’s that NASA doesn’t have the political room to experiment and inevitably sometimes fail that SpaceX does. This is too complex an issue to fit all the layers and nuance into one honk, but “SpaceX is bad because their rockets explode” is not a good analysis. https://chaos.social/@russss/110249195107310284
@vruba agreed, the rocket took off. they got a ton of telemetric data they can use to iterate. I'm not a rocket scientist so can't comment on how many boosters failing how quickly counts as an out-and-out failure. but seems more damning how badly they damaged the launchpad and the environmental destruction they're wreaking on the nearby wetlands. those seem like more predictable consequences but they seem to not care?
@dantheclamman Yeah: the explosion wasn’t the concerning part here.
@asmallteapot @vruba @dantheclamman it appears they did! But the flight termination system took a while to actually terminate the flight. Which seems...bad.
@russss @vruba @dantheclamman Ahh, well, that’s a whole other kettle of fish 😑
@asmallteapot @russss @vruba @dantheclamman
on the contrary, it very likely worked as intended: you want it to activate when (1) the rocket disintegrates (because after that it might no longer function) and (2) when the rockets impact point moves outside of the defined hazard area.
Blowing up the rocket too soon just spreads debris over a larger area.
@vruba @dantheclamman From watching the videos, one of my big questions is why the range safety officer didn’t deliberately end the flight before it inadvertently exploded.