Anonymous Sources: Starship Needs a Major Rebuild After Two Consecutive Failures (behindtheblack.com) 185
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Behind The Black: According to information at this tweet from anonymous sources, parts of Starship will likely require a major redesign due to the spacecraft's break-up shortly after stage separation on its last two test flights. These are the key take-aways, most of which focus on the redesign of the first version of Starship (V1) to create the V2 that flew unsuccessfully on those flights:
- Hot separation also aggravates the situation in the compartment.
- Not related to the flames from the Super Heavy during the booster turn.
- This is a fundamental miscalculation in the design of the Starship V2 and the engine section.
- The fuel lines, wiring for the engines and the power unit will be urgently redone.
- The fate of S35 and S36 is still unclear. Either revision or scrap.
- For the next ships, some processes may be paused in production until a decision on the design is made.
- The team was rushed with fixes for S34, hence the nervous start. There was no need to rush.
- The fixes will take much longer than 4-6 weeks.
- Comprehensive ground testing with long-term fire tests is needed. [emphasis mine]
It must be emphasized that this information comes from leaks from anonymous sources, and could be significantly incorrect. It does however fit the circumstances, and suggests that the next test flight will not occur in April but will be delayed for an unknown period beyond.
- Hot separation also aggravates the situation in the compartment.
- Not related to the flames from the Super Heavy during the booster turn.
- This is a fundamental miscalculation in the design of the Starship V2 and the engine section.
- The fuel lines, wiring for the engines and the power unit will be urgently redone.
- The fate of S35 and S36 is still unclear. Either revision or scrap.
- For the next ships, some processes may be paused in production until a decision on the design is made.
- The team was rushed with fixes for S34, hence the nervous start. There was no need to rush.
- The fixes will take much longer than 4-6 weeks.
- Comprehensive ground testing with long-term fire tests is needed. [emphasis mine]
It must be emphasized that this information comes from leaks from anonymous sources, and could be significantly incorrect. It does however fit the circumstances, and suggests that the next test flight will not occur in April but will be delayed for an unknown period beyond.
Musk'll Fix It! (Score:4, Funny)
Rocket Man aka Real Tony Stark (tm) will build it out impreg...er, impervious nanotech once he rids America of DEI
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Musk is too busy making up imaginary savings of money cancelling contracts which have already been disbursed... that's more than a full time job. He has no time to run hid companies, nor any apparent inclination to do so - he's already got his billions.
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:5, Informative)
Musk is too busy making up imaginary savings of money cancelling contracts which have already been disbursed... that's more than a full time job. He has no time to run hid companies, nor any apparent inclination to do so - he's already got his billions.
I think the more important factor may be Musk's obvious grandiosity. His clear mental illness and its fallout may have been quietly infecting SpaceX and its culture over a period of years.
I find it hard to believe that the guy who has made such a disastrous and destructive foray into politics, and who in three months has caused a 50% drop in Tesla's share price, hasn't also damaged SpaceX along the way to where he finds himself now. Just yesterday he said "As a function of the great policies of President Trump and his administration, and as an act of faith in America, Tesla is going to double vehicle output in the United States within the next two years".
Say what? The US is almost certainly headed for a serious recession - one in which Musk will have played a clear role. People and governments the world over have boycotted Tesla. They're even protesting at and outright trashing Tesla dealerships and charging stations [arstechnica.com]. And the company is desperate enough to have engaged in full-scale fraud against the Canadian government [driving.ca]. Yet he's going to double Tesla production? WTF?
I think Musk is suffering from mental illness and is clearly disconnected from reality - even if I don't take his chainsaw-waving and his cute-but-deadly DOGE shenanigans into account. With leadership like this, what are the chances that Elon's madness hasn't had a serious negative effect on SpaceX?
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Elmo found a government he could own rather than a company. Just yesterday he got the Bunko Artist in Cheap to promote Tesla's tat on the White House lawn, as if the swoon in the stock price had anything to do with not enough advertising.
And Elmo paid with that bit of advert by promising to spend $100 million on la Presidenta's PACs. la Presidenta accepted money from Beelzebub long ago in return for his soul. It turns out Beelz drives a hard bargain and that la Presidenta's soul wasn't worth as much as he t
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Do we still have a SEC, or have they destroyed that? Because his claim that he's going to build twice as many vehicles while they have vehicles stacking up unsold is probably legally actionable... if legal action is still possible.
Re: (Score:3)
Do we still have a SEC
Don't you live in Saskatchewan, Canada? There has never been a SEC there...
Re: (Score:2)
Do we still have a SEC
Don't you live in Saskatchewan, Canada?
Where did you get that idea?
Re: (Score:2)
You posted about living in Humboldt a few days ago and I know the place. I couldn't find any Humboldt in the USA but now I see there is a Humboldt County, in California, my mistake I guess.
Re: (Score:2)
I couldn't find any Humboldt in the USA but now I see there is a Humboldt County, in California, my mistake I guess.
Yes, that's the one I live in. There are also Humboldt counties in Iowa and Nevada.
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. That Musk is mentally ill has been clear for quite a while. But what we have seen in the last few years is him getting a lot worse and obviously going for a complete breakdown with total detachment from reality, megalomania, paranoia, murderous/fascist tendencies and probably increased drug use.
Well, ChatGPT says the long-term effects of Ketamine use does include bad decision making and paranoia:
"Cognitive dysfunction: Chronic use may impair overall cognitive functions like attention, executive functioning (decision-making, planning), and processing speed."
"Hallucinations and dissociation: Prolonged use can increase the frequency and intensity of hallucinations, dissociative experiences, and paranoia."
That seems to fit well for Musk.
Re: (Score:2)
I find it hard to believe that the guy who has made such a disastrous and destructive foray into politics, and who in three months has caused a 50% drop in Tesla's share price, hasn't also damaged SpaceX along the way to where he finds himself now.
What I don't understand is why he even cares about politics. Is he that annoyed about agency oversight, regulations and the occasional investigation into operations and products at X, SpaceX, Tesla, NeuraLink, etc... to blow $300M+ on Trump and then more on other Republicans when compliance and corrections would have been cheaper, and not used his own money? Is he that annoyed at his transgender daughter -- who has criticized him for not accepting her -- to go after these people and DEI? Noting that he
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
But Musk went completely off the rails after he was stupid enough to say he'd buy Twitter for twice what it was worth in a legally-binding matter and was forced to go through with it. That was apparently when he ended up seeking approval on it... and he got it from the Incel losers, MRAs, Nazis and other similar creatures that inhabit that dark shithole corner of t
Re: (Score:2)
Say what? The US is almost certainly headed for a serious recession [...] Yet he's going to double Tesla production? WTF?
I think Musk's plan is a big government bailout (or the equivalent payout via large no-bid government contracts); that could be the reward for financing the Trump campaign. If he's hoping for big money from taxpayers, he doesn't really care about buyer sentiment or recessions.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If he totally destroys NASA than people will buy his rockets whether they explode or not!
NASA is SpaceX's biggest customer, after Starlink, numbskull!
Re: Musk'll Fix It! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
But he has no time! All his great and superior skills are focused on dismantling, ah, I mean "improving" the US administration at this time! Obviously he has to finish the great job he is doing there first!
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:4, Insightful)
What is this DEI that you're talking about?
Donald, Erik and Ivanka grafting from pop's presidency?
It is, indeed, a huge problem, but which "leftie" is "pretending" it isn't?
Re: (Score:3)
DEI is just Jim Crow turned around so that the perpetrator switches place with the victim.
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference is we have ample evidence that global warming is a problem. Do you have ample evidence of DEI being a problem? I mean something other than "bad thing happened while a black person was in charge"?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Bad things happen when your hiring decisions are done according to box ticking, rather than competence.
Bad things happen, when you force companies to hire from "special groups" to reach certain quotas from a biased pool (e.g. engineers), destroying the achievements of those that are part of that special group and got there because they are *good*, rather than *special*.
Bad things happen when you take a mckinsey report and read it backwards. Successful companies are more diverse because successful companies
Re: (Score:2)
An interesting thesis.
Care to substantiate it with something concrete, starting with definite evidence that hiring decisions are indeed influenced by "box ticking" instead of competence in a major way?
Be specific.
Thanks.
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure why are you complaining, miss munehiro.
Re: (Score:2)
Setting aside your irrelevant comment, my point is that my employer has no right to force me to do activism according to their internal policy. I am being paid to deliver medicines, not be a political army for someone. If I want to be an activist for a cause, it's my choice, and it should not affect my employment evaluation either positively or negatively. But I won't certainly accept that my employer has a saying in what I should do that goes beyond my duties to the company's missions, either inside or out
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:5, Insightful)
Far worse things happen when you hire based on nepotism and whatever the hell criteria Musk used to staff DOGE.
Re: (Score:3)
Far worse things happen when you hire based on nepotism and whatever the hell criteria Musk used to staff DOGE.
He's got all the finest teenagers that racism can buy. He couldn't find adults with little enough context to do what he says.
Re: (Score:2)
Far worse things happen when you hire based on nepotism and whatever the hell criteria Musk used to staff DOGE.
Maybe the 19-year-old college dropout and fired cybersecurity intern in DOGE who goes by the name "Big Balls" and is (apparently) the grandson of an executed KGB agent, and now works for Musk at the State Department and DHS perusing classified information can tell us...
Elon Musk’s protege ‘Big Balls’ is grandson of executed KGB agent, report says [independent.co.uk]
Edward Coristine, a protege of Elon Musk’s at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who has already gained notoriety for his checkered early tech career and for glorying in the nickname “Big Balls”, is the grandson of a KGB spy, according to a new report.
Coristine, 19, dropped out of Northeastern University to find work in Silicon Valley, only to be fired from a cybersecurity internship last year for allegedly leaking insider information to a rival company and accused of frequenting Telegram and Discord communities linked to cybercrime.
He nevertheless finds himself serving under the world’s richest man as a “senior adviser” to Donald Trump’s State Department and Department of Homeland Security, with access to highly sensitive information about working American diplomats and those involved in national security and counterterrorism operations.
Now, according to research by freelance journalist Jacob Silverman, it emerges that Coristine is also the grandson of KGB officer Valery Fedorovich Martynov, who was executed in the U.S.S.R. as a double agent in 1987.
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems to be a common misunderstanding about DEI. It's not supposed to be hiring people because of their skin colour, it's looking at how more qualified candidates from those groups can be attracted to the job, and what barriers they face that others do not.
Employers are typically not hiring based solely on ability anyway. They will have a budget that limits the maximum they can pay, and for many jobs they just need someone qualified and able to do the work, not someone hugely over-qualified or some kind of savant. There are exceptions but even there it's reasonable to hire someone with a view to training them, especially if the work is quite specialist or requires a lot of company specific knowledge. So while ability is an important factor, it's rarely the only or the primary one.
And even where ability is key, the way that it is measured often introduces bias, leading to rejection of candidates who could actually do a good job.
Re: (Score:2)
The stated goal of DEI is to increase profits. For cost-conscious employers, DEI is implemented by hiring workers from vastly different backgrounds and life experiences. This diminishes commonality and makes it much tougher to unionize. This is also why Amazon often tries to encourage workers to not talk amongst themselves, and discourages social events. This makes for a dysfunctional workplace, low wages, and high staff turnover.
Costs can be further reduced by not experienced workers, and not valuing
Re: (Score:2)
I have a different opinion. I think that DEI policies and ESG scores were introduced to disqualify chinese companies from investment. This follows a pre-established pattern of american action, where the north banned slavery not because it was morally right (they just took the chance of course), but as a way to cripple the south economy, that was almost fully based on cheap labor available.
Chinese companies were always going to be low in ESG scores, and after the entrance onto the world economy, american inv
Re: (Score:2)
What if the companies and their hiring people are the problem?
As for boxes... Well, looking at how some minorities are treated, and how different it is to other groups, I think clearly there is a need to group people based on the common factors.
Re: (Score:2)
Remind me again how RFK Jr. is qualified to run the health department? Or how the CEO of a wrestling company is now in charge of the department of education?(which the administration currently wants to dissolve)
Those people are by your definition DEI hires. They are unqualified for the position.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You will never change the mind of the DEI morons. They believe that discriminating in return is the best cure for past discrimination.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, all you have to do is look at how successful Musk's anti-DEI companies are doing now!
Re: (Score:2)
Musk is an idiot, but both can be wrong. People should really stop thinking like an american "If you don't agree with A, then you are B". People and issues are more nuanced than that. Americans should really get the "Jesus mentality" out of their system. But they will never do so, because they are uneducated overactive children, and it shows.
DEI is not Affirmative Action (Score:4, Interesting)
This is just another right-wing strawman like child-indoctrinating drag shows, cat-eating Haitians, post-birth abortions, and lib's coming for your guns. It's all boogeyman BS used to scare people into action.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Our hiring decisions work like this.
1. Out of these candidates which ones are not assholes?
2. Out of that group, can any do the job?
3. Out of that group, which ones can we afford?
4. Out of that group, which one brings new perspectives to the team?
So yea, if there is a midwestern white guy and an woman immigrant who both apply and they both passed step 4, we are probably going with the woman because that perspective would add to our team and the white guy would just be another midwestern white guy. Sadly, in
Re: DEI is not Affirmative Action (Score:2)
Re:DEI is not Affirmative Action (Score:4, Informative)
Despite what Fox News, Trump, and his Swallowers are telling you, DEI is not affirmative action. Your personal experience may be different, but very few companies are using box-ticking when making hiring decisions.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. In the last few companies I've been at people were rated on how many boxes got ticked in the hiring process, and we could not hire at all without interviewing box-ticking candidates for the role. This stuff would get reported to shareholders too. Look we increased box-ticking hires by 10% this year! And besides hiring, there was endless mind-numbing training and incentives to demonstrate what a good ally you were via flags, badges, placards, whatever. All of this feeds into performance ratings, compensation, and promotions.
Re: (Score:3)
I confirm the exact same. I am in UK. Same stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed, and if colour of skin became a box tick that was countable rather than present as a minimum your company would have both affirmative action as well as a potentially fucking huge legal liability on their hands.
You didn't disagree with the parent, you just didn't understand what he said.
Re: (Score:2)
Good thing all people have to do now is continually show lavish, unwavering love and support for Trump to get and keep their jobs, contracts, etc... by his largess.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, but I've seen it first hand during my employment. I don't have a clue what affirmative action is. I am not american. Nor do I care. What I do care is that I don't accept that someone takes a position of responsibility I worked hard for, just because she has a vagina and I don't.
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:4, Insightful)
Bad things happen when your hiring decisions are done according to box ticking, rather than competence.
There's quite a lot of implicit assumptions to unpack there.
You're presupposing that the opposite of DEI is hiring by competence. This is not true. The opposite of DEI is hiring people who look and sound like those making the hiring decisions.
DEI is about hiring the most competent people not the other way around. This means finding talent from a broader pool than just your mates. This means having interview processes which select for talent not just people who had a specific undergraduate course, or have infinite time to put into leetcode practice.
If you're not doing DEI, then you're hiring worse engineers, because you are (likely unintentionally) restricting the pool that you are hiring from.
Success leads to diversity in the workforce. Not the other way around.
Nope.
Re: (Score:2)
Your idea of DEI is not the idea of DEI that is being implemented. All I've seen is not "expanding the range". All I've seen is companies that need to meet KPI and hire complete morons to hit those KPIs to ensure that their ESG scores are high.
And it doesn't take much to see that china, one of the least diverse countries in the world, is literally *destroying* America and Europe on all aspects. It doesn't take much to see that all the entertainment industry, from games to movies, is being destroyed by DEI i
Re: (Score:2)
Your idea of DEI is not the idea of DEI that is being implemented
Yeah it is.
We must be able to hire on merit, and merit alone.
And that is why we need DEI.
Re: (Score:2)
Bad things happen when your hiring decisions are done according to box ticking, rather than competence.
Who said "rather than"? Box ticking is a required part of any hiring process. But can you show us evidence where competence was ignored in favour of box ticking? e.g. Does competence not play a role simply because the box says a woman needs to be present as a candidate?
Virtually all DEI policies exists exclusively to give other candidates a chance, at no point do DEI policies override competence requirements. No one is giving the janitor an engineering position because he's a Mexican minority. DEI is about
Re: (Score:2)
it always boils down to "white guys" vs "black guys/women/gays" to you. You guys truly are broken toys.
You know that by perpetrating this constant distinction, all you are doing is remind every new generation that these distinctions exist, right?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have ample evidence of DEI being a problem? I mean something other than "bad thing happened while a black person was in charge"?
Apparently, the bad things are that white guys aren't in charge - of everything, everywhere, all the time - regardless of *their* qualifications. /s
Re: (Score:2)
It's called logic.
(Idiot.)
Yes, and based on how actual DEI policies are implemented logic dictates that the people employed are still 100% competent for their roles. But I'm sure some Fox Friend told you some other story about how DEI magically puts people who aren't qualified into positions.
Also why do you sign off your posts?
Re: (Score:2)
There's a difference between a competent applicant and the best applicant. In some case, it's a huge difference.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyway, have we seen any sign of the Democrats finally rejecting DEI, or are they hoping Trump continues being awful enough that people will vote Democrat even if they don't reject it ?
Re: Musk'll Fix It! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score:5, Insightful)
Lefties pretending DEI isn't a problem == Righties pretending global warming isn't a problem.
Even if you cast DEI as deadly - and I can see arguments on both sides - there's no fucking way it represents an existential threat to our civilization. Global warming DOES represent such a threat.
Positing any kind of equivalency between global warming and DEI is either dishonest or stupid, and possibly both.
Re: (Score:2)
> there's no fucking way it represents an existential threat to our civilization
Did you miss Harris's comments on nuclear war?
Re: (Score:2)
Are you trying to say Harris was a "DEI" candidate? Does "DEI" just mean minority to you?
Re: (Score:2)
Imagine if the solution to climate change was as simple as one side admitting it was wrong.
There are a bunch of partial solutions that require little more than that and we can't even implement those because of all the dipshits who don't think one side was wrong. I call 'em dipshits because even 1800s science says they don't know shit.
Re: (Score:2)
The difference is in the magnitude of the problem and how easy it is to fix...
Hence apples - oranges. But what else is new...
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
> DEI is about going to places most people have historically ignored and finding ways to measure that talent that others are ignorant of.
That idea is fine but as soon as you add quotas you assume you are guaranteed to find what you go looking for and pretend like supply and demand is not real.
Re: (Score:2)
And that was before he descended into being a 4chan incel, a Nazi and a ketamine addict.
Normal engineering problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Happens to the best of us, no biggy.
I do wonder why they didn't see this harmonic problem ( or whatever it actually is ) in the longer static fires or in their simulations?
Re: (Score:2)
Yup. It'll be interesting to see how long it takes them to iterate until they arrive at an acceptable design that's safe enough for transportation of humans to space and back.
Best,
Re: (Score:2)
SpaceX has been rapidly and successfully solving such problems for over 20 years now. They'll deal with this in a few months and it will work great. That's the whole point of these tests.
Re: (Score:2)
You overlook that their owner went bonkers over the last few years. Now would be about the time that shows in the end-product, as such things come with quite a few years of latency. If that happens to be the root-cause, then they may not be able to fix this at all. Depends on who Elonia fired or insulted or marginalized and how much engineering skill and experience was lost that way.
Obviously, it may be that they get all the problems fixed in a reasonable time, but I do not think so.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Normal engineering problems (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Quite possibly, yes.
Does anybody know how many critical engineering people Elonia has sacked, marginalized or deeply insulted at SpaceX recently?
Re: (Score:2)
Although he has launched a few missions with token vaginas on board, I think that was for DEI-infested customers such as NASA rather than his own choice.
Re: (Score:2)
Not necessarily. If they rushed on orders from their great leader, then the problem may be a lot fundamental. And that list in the article seems to say they rushed a lot more than just one fix.
Re: (Score:3)
My very first job in the year 1968 of the common era was running simulations in mainframe Fortran of a re-entry test vehicle being developed in the California aerospace industry. This was the great-great-grandparent of the modes of development that SpaceX is engaged in now. I feel privileged to live in a time that in those days I Neve could have imagined.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's one way to do it. Whether it works or doesn't depends on the definition of "works".
The same as everything else, really.
Re: (Score:2)
They will still fix this faster than any of the traditional NASA cost-plus contractors. They would take years to fix this. SpaceX will have their next iteration within 6 months.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course they do, there is very little innovation there to "fix". What NASA is (and has been) doing is cutting edge. What the African Nazi immigrant is doing is commercializing what's already been developed by someone else - that is, trying to figure out which corners to cut with the minimum collateral damage.
It is a difference of orders of magnitude.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure how you got that from a post explaining how you can't really test certain things without actually flying.
3rd times the charm (Score:5, Interesting)
The important thing to remember with Starship is that the last two flights incorporated an entirely new design.with multiple experiments. These were fundamentally new rockets largely unlike their largely successful prior versions. Rather than a tweak of a nearly successful version to fix a few things we saw major changes one or two of which unfortunately is causing some catastrophic problems. They never got this far, but even just the tile system included probably a hundred different experiments.
Unfortunately since they didn't get that far it is also possible some of those tile experiments will cause catastrophic failure on re-entry if they try them all again. The thing about experiments is you need to to survive long enough to get to them. Hopefully some of those experiments were more about manufacturing rather than survivability so they can down select the most promising alternatives next ship in production. Regardless, we are still seeing a lot of changes each flight and those changes have the potential to not work.
Um (Score:2)
Thanks for the ... er, random anonymous tweet?
(I guess there needs to be some pretext for the two-minute hate today?)
Re: (Score:2)
You look at is, then you check plausibility. Here it is high. I guess you did not do the second step.
A Poll Twenty Years Ago (Score:3, Insightful)
If twenty years ago someone posted a poll on /., a site where actual nerds and engineers used to populate, that in two decades you can have a choice of -
A) a billionaire throw his own money at reusable rockets and ships to get to Mars and back, and do it the right way of failing and re-engineering quicker and not spending three years to re-launch the next try like bloated NASA does
B) same-old NASA with billions of taxpayer dollars going into slow and incremental progress
C) CoyboyNeal
95% would have picked A and 5% CowboyNeal. Instead we have SpaceX repeatedly catching super-heavy boosters, landing smaller boosters almost daily, and the next generation of /. users complains the billionaire said he'd do it earlier so it was a failure. Do you even read yourselves?
Re: (Score:2)
Elon Musk would be the lord and savior of every slashdotter, if he was a liberal. Literally the only thing he could do that would please this crowd would be to self immolate.
Re: (Score:2)
Project Mockingbird is highly successful.
Re: (Score:2)
I read this as:
NASA is painfully slow at doing anything, but is broadly speaking successful when they eventually get around to doing it.
SpaceX is super quick at making rapid changes and improvements, but has recently failed pretty badly.
SpaceX may be finding that going a bit slower is actually more successful than going fast. Instead of making (say) 100 changes, make 10 and get the data from the full flight before you make 10 more. It costs more that way, but maybe it needs to cost more?
As much as I'm enjoy
Nazi sympathizers with Modpoints (Score:2)
I will never not oppose Nazis, or Nazi sympathizers.
Musk threw a Nazi salute on purpose, and willfully denying it makes you a participant in the ongoing Nazification of America.
It was always basically Nazi shit, what with the Manifest Destiny and all. That was always genocide in the name of white supremacy. We were making some headway against that, now we've backslid massively, and we cannot allow that to continue. History shows us where that leads.
If only Musk would have stayed in his lane. (Score:2, Insightful)
Musk is making himself a future target of any administration to follow with his current moves in government. The calls to redesign Starship ground-up were there from the first launch thar resulted in rapid unscheduled disassembly, and will continue to come. But the more Musk acts like a spoiled brat within the federal government, the more credence those calls will get, and the "move fast and break things" space company will get clamped down on and told to do things "the right way," meaning, the way things h
Re: (Score:2)
I am not so sure. "Move fast and break things" only works if you still get it, say, 80% right. For the last 20%, where uncertainty is high, data collection and experiments can help a lot and can accelerate things by a lot. But this sounds more like they are now getting 50% right (or less) and then that approach stops working.
Shame on you, Slashdot (Score:3, Informative)
Classic - designed by managers. (Score:3)
This is what happens when management, for whatever reasons stops listening to engineers.
We now have a sample of two, at least. (Score:2)
When the boss's fortunes are down, and he wants a thing to boast about, whether it's President Ronnie Raygun or CEO Dilbert Stark telling you to launch, the correct answer is NO!
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. If I could hide AC comments completely, I would. Over the years, I have gotten maybe 3 or 4 good comments from ACs. Most are just spewing crap because they think that being anonymous absolves one from having to be a decent person. These days I rarely even look at what they write and I basically never answer.
Hence I think /. should remove AC comment ability completely. It has negative worth.
Re: (Score:2)
I am sure he did mess with it by imposing time pressure and and risk taking. What can go wrong with this? It's not rocket science, eh?
Re: (Score:2)
Yep, probably. At least the stated problems sound a lot like "cheaper and faster engineering than possible".